THIS Rhett Butler Will Never Die

well, i was really trying to stay separate from emotions related to being celebratory about finishing nanowrimo this year, and for the most part all i’m feeling are tiny blips on my heart-monitor. my energy has really switched into a mellower gear though. two days now with no new writing. not going to let this go on more than another day or so. going to the gym tonight for a steam and soak and then seeing the chiropractor in the morning. those things should help revive my body a little bit from all the tension i’ve accumulated in my back over the last 30 days. i do have a new photo shoot scheduled for this coming Sunday, which i’m actually pretty excited about. two sisters that approached me from modelmayhem; Just Manders and Damara Lynn . this will be a refreshing treat. i do have a lot of new ideas and ambitions for this new novel and think that perchance, the 50,000+ words i just wrote may only be one/third of what else i have in my mind to write for this story. although, after i...

it took a little bit of time and no alcohol or tobacco to figure out how to deal with this unexpected juncture that i faced yesterday. i think what is really wrong is that i'm just being flooded with the emotions of physical, mental and emotional exhaustion from pushing out this story so rapidly, and now with the project deadline approaching the normal tendencies to "finish it up quick before the bell rings" are infringing upon me. fighting these urges is taking some work because really, i've written so much now, over 47,000 words, it would be easy to just slope off in the detailed style i've been entrenched in and give you a short and easy closing. i really want to keep up the style i've started with though and take the story to it's rightful end. which will probably need another 10-15,000 words to do properly. i am not a normal nanowrimo-er though. i don't socialize with any nanowrimo-ers. i don't plan on going to the TGIO (thank god it's o...

the unexpected has happened. and maybe it’s all because i did i took yesterday off from writing. i am such a freaking creature of habit, to a fault really. i was ready to go out last night to McDonald’s of all places, to have a cup of coffee and work for an hour on the novel. but it being Thanksgiving, not even McDonald’s was open in my town. i am ahead in my word count so taking one day off from writing would not put me behind schedule. that was not the worry. so today, here i am at the library. about 40 hours since i last wrote on Wednesday evening. i pretty much knew where i was going to go with the writing today, and i did. wrote 500 words in about 20 minutes, and was quite pleased with how it sounded. up until i wrote the last paragraph. the last paragraph. oh god. something slipped. my tension that had been built up, the schedule i had been maintaining, the tunnel i was traveling through with pinpoint vision… i knew exactly where i was going. i knew all month long where i was g...

i’ve been sleeping so heavily lately. not falling asleep until 3am, finally getting out of bed at noon. i spend the hours between 4-8pm working on my nanowrimo novel. not doing any work on my backlog of photo editing because i’ve shifted so far into this verbal creative mode, i can’t see the colors properly on my screen and when i try to edit an image i feel dissatisfied. rather than put out something half-assed, i put out nothing instead. i’m just that way with my photography. thus why i stopped with the Mairead edits. the first few days after her shoot i was buzzed, and also my eyes were crisp with the vision of having just been out there with her, so i was able to excitedly burn through some samples from the shoot. there are so many more images of her yet to show you though. in due time, i hope. and this is the curse of all my shoots now. when i shoot 1,000-3,000 images of one model in an afternoon’s session there are so, so many that i never get to show anyone. i have a list of mod...

it’s late in november, that much i’m sure of. oh, and what a fantastic november she is. she’s cold, wet and howling like a banshee outside but i’ve got a roaring fire lit inside of me and we dance together like forgotten lovers. i just wanted to take a few moments away from my nanowrimo to switch up my mind a little bit, and say a little bit about how it’s going. one thing i like about writing is it’s unpredictable nature. many, many days this month i have sat down at the beginning of my daily writing time with a fair idea of where i was going with the storyline, but by the time my few hours of tapping into it’s veins is completed, i discover new elements and directions that i previously knew nothing, or very little about beforehand. this, to me, is quite rewarding and is part of what gives me impetus to continue writing and creating. it can be combinations of either finding new depth in my characters, or new directions in the storyline. but the best reward is when i am surprised by ...

this is a cool little chart that is new at nanowrimo.org. i’m doing well, but not as well as i should be. i’m still managing to keep ahead of the daily minimum word requirement, but this is only day 10 and there are still 20 days to go. i forgot what a freaking marathon this task is. the content i’ve been pouring out the past two days has been really uninspired, memory work. i surprise myself by the things i’ll go into ridiculous detail about when there are other elements that could be of more interest to the reader that i’ll just breeze over. and i’m appalled on a daily basis at how poor my ability to describe a visual scene is. i am so far away from being the real writer that i want to be. i have got to start to carry this desire to write over and beyond the extent of this annual folly that is nanowrimo and start to put some serious hours into improving my word craft. i’ve been starving for visual stimulation and have been spending hours and hours surfing through tumblr for recre...

so far nanowrimo has been going excellently for me this year. it’s only day 5 and i’ve written over 10,000 words. that’s 2,000 words a day average, which exceeds the 1,667 minimum daily requirement to make 50,000 words by the end of the month. the thing that feels so good right now is it’s like a tap has been opened and words are flowing like water. certainly, i have enough story inside of me and a strong enough desire to put it down on paper to be able to accomplish this feat. what saddens me is that i do not have this enthusiasm for writing every single day of the year. what i’m getting an insight into is the lifestyle of accomplished writers that talk about going to their offices and writing for 4-6 hours a day, every day. for what i’m working on writing right now, it would take that sort of commitment to turn this into a professional piece of literature. i am just in blow-torch mode right now, blazing these words out in story fashion rather recklessly because of the regulations of ...