If it’s not one thing, it’s three others.  Now that my wife is finally starting to emerge from her bout with pneumonia, I seem to be battling it (or some close cousin, perhaps bad bronchitis).  I just pray my daughter doesn’t get it.  This clearly seems contagious.

Needless to say, I have gotten no writing done.  None.  It’s been a month and a half (I think) since significant words were added to one of my stories.  It’s just really tough to focus when I’m trying not to drown in my own phlegm.  (Too much?)

I have decided, however, that I should try to resurrect an older story in time for the WotF Q1 deadline.  “Thinking Out Loud” was a promising old story that I didn’t write from the correct POV.  I have since rewritten it (at least parts) from every character’s POV.  That’s right, all eight characters from the original story (there was a ninth, but pure cardboard set-dressing).  The idea was to rotate through all eight POVs when they were most important to the story.  That proved a touch exhausting (though still a cool idea, just not for these characters).  The next idea was to cycle through the four original antagonists.  Better, but I found I was only really interested in one of them.

So now I plan to rewrite the story just from this interesting character’s largely unsympathetic POV, changing a few plot points (more monkey wrenches in the works) and tweaking some characters (make some more exaggerated), all in about a month that includes Christmas and my daughter’s third birthday.  After that, I plan to pull a rabbit out of my…

In an effort to make this blog more educational and less personal, I hope to highlight some of my story wrestling here.  For instance, I have gotten away from outlines almost completely.  Soon I will explore the possibility that this is a causal factor of my current block (that and phlegm).  A no-brainer, but a boy has to sort out his issues somewhere.

Eventually.

-Oso