Musings & Thoughts for Saturday, April 29, 2023: Weekend Update, Part the First

Hi, Dear Reader. I hope you are doing well on this last weekend of April 2023.

Today’s post will be short and sweet, partly because I spent all morning revising and editing the part of The New Story that I wrote yesterday and now I’m tired, but mostly because I don’t have any good topics – beyond my writing, which I’m sure isn’t all that interesting to many followers of this blog – to write about. I don’t feel like writing about politics; it’s too contentious and depressing a topic, and even though I have lots of items I can write reviews about, I don’t feel inspired to rant or rave about any of them. And, aside from my new writing project, I don’t have anything to say about my daily life.

Anyway….

I usually don’t work on my fiction writing on weekends, but yesterday’s output was…not that great, to be honest. The concept of the scene I wrote on Friday was sound, but – as I reported yesterday – my mind was foggy due to sleep deprivation; I must have fallen asleep unusually early on Thursday night and woke up thinking it was 5 AM – only to see it was only just past 1 AM. I wrote about that yesterday, so I won’t bore you by repeating the entire story here. All you need to know about that is that even though I wasn’t at my best, I still put in a day’s work into my story so I can finish it within a three-month window.

As I said, the basic idea of the scene – and thankfully it was only a scene, and not a chapter – was good. The execution? Not so much. There was too much dialogue, not enough description, for one thing. And even though much of that dialogue was salvageable, it just seemed to sit there and not move the story forward.

“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

That’s why I decided to spend all my morning (starting around 8, if memory serves) tinkering with the story. It wasn’t easy; some of the stuff I deleted wasn’t too bad; it had some nice bits of dialogue that would have been good in a Preston Sturges comedy back in the 1930s. But they were not necessary for the purpose of getting my two main characters from Point A to Point B, and, as I said before, I wrote them when I was sleepy and mostly on autopilot.

I don’t plan to do any more writing this weekend beyond my daily blog posts here on A Certain Point of View, Too. It’s Saturday, and I have plenty of books to read and Blu-rays and DVDs to watch. And we all need to get some R&R to function.

So, on that note, ciao for now.