07.08.07
HALF/Jack
Hey, folks. Part of this week’s run through the Dedication Effect has resulted in the completion of a little bit more of Metal Rogue, so how about we do up an update?
Metal Rogue Progress Update: Chapter Two is complete, after a long stretch of distraction and disaster. I also managed to get more of the world internally consistent and more whole. Current word count is (cue meme) OVER NINE THOUSAND!!. Setup is over, now it’s time for the action to begin; so naturally I’m shifting back to the Senate scenes in the next chapter.
I’m also working on a short story (unrelated to MR) for a contest; I’ve no idea as to whether or not the tale will be any good, as I’m only about halfway through it right now, but I’m already far more confident about it than I was when I first wrote it back in 1999. It was seriously bad then. I’m talking awful, heartless, soulless, written-around-a-Billy-Joel-song bad here. I managed to strip out the lifted lyrics from the original version; what was left was about six sentences long and completely incoherent. Actually, what I’ve been rewriting now is pretty damn incoherent, too. But in an artsy kind of way. Sort of an “Uh?”-Nouveau approach to the tale. All right, yeah, that sucks too, but that’s what the drafts are for.
A lot of writing is about recognizing bad past work for what it is and having the courage to re-do it. I’ve literally thrown away older work just because it wasn’t good, and regretted it six months or even six years later because I found I had a couple good lines in there. I now know better than to discard anything, anything at all. I’ve been backing up my scrap files, I’ve been burning DVDs of the work… Every idea I have gets stored for later or for retooling, or even just so I can say “hey, I already thought of that”. 90% of the writing I’ve done has just been half-baked ideas without any real commitment to them, but they get saved just as much as a novel I’m pushing through.
Anyway, that’s that. I’ll probably slack off for another month before the next MR chapter gets finished, but meh.
Oh, incidentally, I did finish watching Ouran Host Club this weekend, and I have a bit to say about it… but later.
Ismail Saeed said,
07.08.07 at 7:53 am
Were you watching on Youtube, or did you actually have the episodes?
If the former, it’s been my experience that the red text inserts the show likes lose too much quality to be legible anymore - which is the only reason I was wondering.