Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Trust Your Stuff

Mets won. Yankees lost. All is right with the world.

I just broke the 28K mark on the New Novel. Felt as if I was turning the corner on the first quarter of the thing in terms of plot. So, that's good.

There's a great piece of pitching advice which is also pretty good writing advice: pitch, don't aim. If you try too carefully to throw the ball to the exact spot you want - lower inside corner, say - you'll lose all your natural motion and throw the ball in a straight line, incredibly easy to predict and thus to hit. A better approach is to trust your stuff. You know what you're doing, you've been practicing forever. Let it fly. That's how to throw that curve ball high over the strike zone that suddenly surprises everyone by breaking at the last second and dropping into the zone for strike three.




Time-suck of the day. Star formation game. Create massive stars that supernova and create shock waves, to corral stellar material together and form smaller, more stable stars. I made 19!

If you do nothing at work today because of this, blame Bad Astronomy.

2 comments:

Eric Shonkwiler said...

You're trucking right along, Mr. Wizard. Very impressive. Keep it up.

Clowncar said...

Word count is not in and of itself impressive, but this one seems much tighter than the First Novel. I think the main difference between the two is that I go into every day of writing with a plan now. As opposed to just wading in and seeing what happens.