You Won't Remember

 What madness is this?  Russ is posting two times this week?  Insanity!

Anyhoo...

Like most writers, I think about my stories quite a bit.  Some of what I think turns out to be terrible, but, on occasion, I have a burst of inspiration.  Dialogue, action, a bit of subtle character development - it sometimes comes forth in an angelic song that readers will lap up like a cat lapping up milk(which cats really shouldn't have).

The problem isn't these bits of brilliance, but capturing them at the right time.  You see, brilliance rarely occurs as I sit at my computer happily typing away on my latest novel.  Sure, that happens from time to time, but that's even more rare than the brilliance I speak of.  What usually happens is that it happens as I'm walking my dog...or stuck in traffic...or in the shower...

So what to do?  Something that I am not often good at - I need to write it down at the first available opportunity.  Yeah, I always tell myself I'll remember, but I don't.  Even if my memory was as sharp as it was when I was 20, I wouldn't be able to hold onto that level of detail, or even the ideas.  Smart writers put their brilliance down somewhere as soon as they can.  Maybe it's in a journal, an iPhone, or even just a scrap of paper you can hang onto for later, but you need to write it down.  You will not remember.  I promise.  I cannot tell you the number of times I've sat staring at a blank screen trying in vain to remember what I came up with just a day or two before.

Don't trust your memory.  Your memory is shit.  Write it down.  Always.

Don't Forget To Save!

I'm going to start to get this blog moving again, although I don't know if I can maintain the three days a week pace I had.  Life is crazy, and although I love writing, I have to eat and put a roof over my family's head.  If y'all would buy more of my books, then that wouldn't be an issue and I could write full time.  😉

I learned a hard lesson yesterday, one I thought I'd learned previously.  Unfortunately, pain is a great teacher, and maybe this one will be painful enough for me to remember this time.

As mentioned before, I've started back up on my sci-fi/fantasy mashup novel, and it's getting exciting.  The spacefarers from Earth are starting to encounter the fantasy creatures of the new world(Expandarit to our Earth people, Progenitos to those already living there), and there has even been a small battle!

Or rather...there once was a small battle.

We had an ice storm here in Tennessee recently, and it cut my power.  I'd been keeping my new novel open on my computer so I could write on it when I got a small break, but I lost the document when the power got cut.  Now I know what you're all saying - Hey, don't you know you can recover the document?  I sure do...when it had enough there.  However, although the battle had a whole new page, the recovery document didn't get that part as it was really new and not very long(like I said, about a page).  So now I get to go back and rewrite that scene.

It's not all bad - I remember most of it, and it'll likely only contain a few variances, but I hate rewriting stuff I've already done(one of the reasons I get so emotional when forced to rewrite whole sections that no longer work).  Still, it reminded me to save at the end of each page and at the end of the day rather than just leaving it open.  You'd think I'd have gotten that down by now.