Toes in the Water (ROW80 Check-In)

This pic of my sister at the surf's edge last Saturday is a
good depiction of my current stance toward my writing goals
one week after returning from a 2 month hiatus.

I made significant progress since last week when I finally broke my posting hiatus and jumped back into ROW80.  My round 3 goals as stated last Wednesday were:

• Define my intent for round 4 and work to recover the story dream for Blow Me a Candy Kiss so I can return to the structural rewrite that was interrupted by my furbaby's final illness in late May.

I'm still fiddling around with defining Round 4 Goals.  Going slow on purpose.  Do not want to overdo them again.  So I'm taking mental notes as I observe the experiment I'm conducting as I add tasks back into the mix.

Progress has been in the second part--recovering the story dream for Candy Kiss and returning to the structural rewrite.  Since last Wednesday I've made a point of giving undivided attention to the story dream--essentially daydreaming it and jotting notes occasionally.  Until Monday this was done randomly at whatever time of day I could fit it in.

Then last week I began re-reading Robert Olen Butler 's From Where You Dream as it is the one that taught me how to daydream the story before starting to write scenes and why it was crucial to do so if you aspire to literary fiction. He also advised never to miss two days in a row of focused work on the story until the first draft is finished.  

He also stressed how important it was to begin work on your story each day first thing--before encountering or using language in any other capacity.  This takes advantage of having just been submerged in the unconscious where the story evolves and prevents being sucked out of the dream by the predominately abstract nature of mundane language usage.

This reminder, that seguing directly from sleep-dreaming to story-dreaming was in the best interests of the story, immediately quashed the dithering about whether to return to the early bird schedule. I had myself more than half convinced that I was a natural night owl and should stop fighting it. Yet I knew that at least for the duration of my stay here at Mom's the early morning hours are the most likely to be free of interruption.  Hence the dithering.  

There's now no wiggle-room for dithering. So I began moving my wake-up back from noonish to 9ish as a first step and making my first activity a 30 to 50 minute Candy Kiss daydream.  This morning, Wednesday, that was followed by two hours of research for the next scene followed by an hour or two of rewriting that scene in the Scrivener rewrite file garnering me several rewritten paragraphs and three completely new ones.

Altogether quite a successful week for writing.  And that doesn't even count keeping the daily post going with no more than a 24 hour lag on a few.  Besides which, I got several of the hiatus backlog posted--all of the Sunday Serenity and Chin Grin, the story of my bad fall on August 12.

I guess you could say I have my toes in the water.