Getting a real late start on the book this evening. Not too surprised by that though given how late I was up and how much I had to sleep in because of that. Of course my schedule isn’t particularly an issue seeing as I am not currently traditionally employed. I consider my writing to be my job and my career now, but it is certainly not paying the bills yet. I believe I’ve sold a whopping 10 copies of my first book so far. I’d had the vague hope that my first book would be some kind of amazing breakthrough. Vague because I didn’t hold much stock in that particular dream. I am very willing to put in the hard work and time it will take to start supporting myself with my writing.
Of course, I’ll be much happier when I’m done with the first chapter of this book. It feels like it’s been dragging on forever. I’m sure that fact that I’ve only been working on it in very small chunks until yesterday has seriously contributed to that feeling. I guess it’s time to get down to business. 🙂
A couple of hours later and I’ve made my 1k word minimum for the second Shroud novel. I took a break, intending to write a little more later but that’s not happening tonight. I went back to my main computer to finish converting and uploading the old stuff I wrote back in my high school and (first) college days that I plan on including in my Bits and Pieces book. When I went through the actual old archive folder I found a few more files that hadn’t made it into my current writing folder. They were in the old Corel WordPerfect format but thankfully Microsoft Office doesn’t have any trouble reading them. Unless they are password protected. It turns out two of the files I hadn’t copied were protected. (Likely why I never moved them over.) So a download of the trial version of WordPerfect and 30 minutes of password guessing later I managed to open both files. Thankfully my passwords back then were pathetically easy. One of the files was all of three sentences and a waste of time. The other though is an actual journal of mine that I started in the summer of 1997.
It was incredibly interesting reading what was going through my mind back then. It definitely brought a lot of old memories back to the forefront. Most of it was pretty sad and depressing, not to mention embarrassing. Then again, journals aren’t meant to be read by anyone. I probably will still include it anyway as I can contrast how I’m doing now with how bad things seemed then quite nicely. I’ll just have to change a few names and fix some of the more glaring spelling and grammar issues. I’m also going to try and find as much of the hand-written stuff as I can. The really old writing is probably lost at this point unfortunately. Though I do still have two “love” letters from a girl I had a crush on in elementary school. Maybe I should try and contact her to see if she has the letters I wrote her? That would be a weird email/call to get.
Now that I think of it, there was another girl I used to write letters to. This was back in high school though so their contents would be far more interesting. I guess I’ll have to do some digging and see what I can turn up. It’s actually pretty exciting and a whole lot of fun to go back to all of this crap I’ve done over the years. I wonder if any of the stuff I wrote for my old website is still around? Definitely time to go through my giant pile of old CD-R’s!
Writing Log – Day 2, Month 1
Transformation (Second Shroud Novel) – 6,749 words to date (1,021 today)
Other Fiction – 0 (Converted the last of the files in the current archive folder)
Blog Entries – 679
Emails – 0
Total Fiction This Month: 7,843
Total Words This Month: 9,161