Anne's Writing Dare Page

Yes, it's me. It really is.

I've decided to eschew any and all impossible (for me) dares. My new (and hopefully workable) dare shall be known as the Any-Daily-Output-Is-Good-Enough Dare. I know, I know -- it's a wuss's goal, but at least it's a goal. Anyone want to join me? Let me know.

The Any-Daily-Output-Is-Good-Enough Dare participants so far:

(no other WebRats at the moment...)

Current Writing Dare Project:

Mind Diver
A "time travel" romance -- estimated length should be at least 100k words. As of the beginning this current Dare, I have 27,848 words in the cropper.

My Own Goals
(which I can hopefully live with):

Okay. Here's where I'm going hang myself: I'm going to try to produce some amount of wordage per day. (Ha! We'll see about that.) I don't always compose on my computer -- often preferring to scribble on actual lined, yellow foolscap notepads. This simply means that I may not be posting my progress on a daily basis -- but will try to do a recap of the days I've produced word count, but didn't note said word count in this log. I will post my progress, frustrations, and giddy jubilations here, apart from my regular journal. If I fall behind, please feel free to remind me.

Mind Diver's Weekly Stats:

Total word count:
28, 692

Running total since 2/5/01:
838

Sunday
5/6/01

Can I just say that I've been working on Mind Diver in my head? I know -- that just doesn't "cut it." But I have been thinking about it -- I almost always stall when I'm beginning a new chapter. I think another problem is that I just can't seem to reconcile the "rough draft" issue. For some reason I just feel that that the novel has to be perfect on the first try. You know well what this bodes. It means that I'll edit, edit, edit along the way -- all the while knawing and chipping at the prose mercilessly, wasting time. What I need to do is just spew the whole thing out, then fix it later. If only, if only I could take my own advice! Stay tuned.

Sunday
3/18/01

Man. Half of March is gone and I'm just now updating my writing log. (I think I see a pattern developing.) Oh well. So. The Masochism Dare was an effort in gradiose delusion in my case. I'm pleased that the other Rat participants did very well -- perhaps they did not all achieve their ultimate goals, but they all made stellar progress. (Even Mel with her new job, settling into a new city, getting a car, being deprived of Lyndon's company etc etc -- still managed to rack up some serious wordage.) And here I sit, quite humbled by my fellow WebRats. Sigh.

So, the new Dare. I think it's a Dare best suited to me: it gives me a little slack -- and guilt for not producing. Hey, whatever works. I often like to write the old-fashioned way with pen and notepad (plus, it effectively eliminates any possibility of my playing with Photoshop 6.0 -- btw, PS 6.0 rocks!).

A shameless plug for an ill-fated fantasy novel which has only just visited its last publisher and, alas, will now live its days on the Web. Please humor us by reading the novel and leaving a caveat or kvetch in the guestbook. It's not such a painful, terrible thing. Uh...if you'd like to display this pathetic banner on your own Website, you can find out here. Hey, it only takes up 18k of bandwidth...