New draft "Moving Day" is about 4200 words, all produced last night

My goal last night was to write a new draft that would glue all the pieces together neatly and reduce the wordcount. I got there, but I was up pretty late.

I had the evening planned out: I had a crockpot meal ready when I got home, and I would sit down and write 1000 words, then do a chore or juggle or read a little bit. I had to take breaks because I've spent so much time at the keyboard in the last four days that my back is on the verge of a breakdown.

I'm pretty happy with last night's progress. I'm sure I'll hate it when I'm editing it tonight, but hey, I've got a coherant draft. A little editing and tomorrow's deadline is a shoe-in.

On this and other recent projects, I've been starting new drafts in empty files. Frankly, I've hardly ever done that before. Usually when I talk about a new draft, I mean a heavily edited version of a prior one, or one with lots of new chunks. But I'm finding that starting over, even if I end up retyping a lot of the same sentences, is a great technique:

• It's very satisfying. You produce words fast.
• It's easy to get into the flow of the piece in a writing session when you have something to start with. I get the same effect by starting a new scene in a notebook in an odd moment, and then using that to start my day's session at the computer. Just retyping what I wrote is a great way to get started.
• It's a great way to unify the story and fix/catch logic errors. You can't ignore stuff when you have to retype it. I now see that a lot of problems I encounter come from reusing old text.

This is hardly a new idea, but I think it's worth highlighting for anyone who grew up with word processors from the get-go. I don't think I'd have become a writer if word processors weren't available to make the typesetting feasible. But I see a crutch in my process now, and this simple technique of redrafting from scratch is proving valuable.

Online text utilities page

This page provides for some handy text conversions through a text field. So if you're on a box that doesn't have your favorite utilities installed, this might come in handy. Case conversion, hashing, URI encoding.

Free wargame rules website

This site has a ton of free downloadable wargame rules, sorted by categories like SciFi, Fantasy, Ancient.

3000 word story ballooned to 7k when the limit is 5k

So I was putting together various pieces that I'd written for this story "Moving Day", and it added up to 7500 words or so, which was kind of a shock. The wordcount limit for it is 5000 words, for the Armadillocon workshop.

I hadn't realized I'd collected that much material. I'd decided to write a decent conclusion for the thing, in a new file, and the conclusion was as long as the rest of the story. The story was only about 3500 words on Friday. Okay, I guess if I wrote 3000 words yesterday and 500 words this morning, then that adds up, doesn't it?

But it was kind of a false alarm: there was a lot of cruft in the draft when I put all the pieces together, including two versions of one scene, so when I threw out a bunch of notes and duplications and some pieces that were no longer relevant, I was down to 5500 words pretty fast. I think I can deal with that in the next draft without much trouble.

Still kind of funny, though. The whole reason I switched to this project, over the other one I was working on, was I was sure this one could be done in about 3000 words.

Something to be said for deadlines

I wrote about 3000 words yesterday. That's the good news. I'm still not done with my Armadillocon entry, so that's the bad news. I got a lot of good work done though.

I basically didn't go anywhere yesterday. I biked around a little, went to a garage sale, but I decided to focus on the writing .

I worked on one thing that has been bothering me: fixing the gas tank on my mower. It has a leak. I think I've got it licked, but I have to wait for the JB Weld to dry and then test it.

Free miniatures rules (Battlefleet Gothic)

Games Workshop put all the rules for Battlefleet Gothic up on their website as PDFs. They changed the links a while ago, here's the current page.

More miniatures companies should do this. If people can download the rules, read them, and get interested, they'll buy the miniatures that will make you the real money.

Or am I just miffed that GW's Warhammer 40k main book costs $50? No, miffed would be belittling my emotions there. I'm curmudgeonly on the issue. I bought one, too. Sheesh, $50.

Of course I've actually played some Warhammer, unlike a lot of games I spend time thinking about. ;)

Some cyclopean beasts for Lily's birthday

I made Lily some creatures for her birthday (and because I wanted to make some creatures, let's face it). Look hard. They may not survive for very long.

Stone golem sculpture, with work-in-progress pics

This fellow has been building an amazing sculpt of a golem, the kind of golem that appears in China Mieville's Iron Council: a golem made of bits of masonry brought to life. The model includes moss and grass. It's an amazing piece. He's using sculpey as his material and has lots of in-progress pics you can get tips from.

UPDATE 9/11/09: I never mentioned the fellow's handle in this original post, which made it hard to find it later. He calls himself "Fichtenfoo".

Concept space ships blog

I like to check up on this blog now and then; it posts spaceship designs, and related vehicles....some of the designs are atmospheric jets or fanciful grav vehicles. Let's not be picky. If you like sci fi vehicles, you'll get a kick out of it.