Friday, August 22, 2008

Get the Fountain Flowing

I'm tellin' ya, it's been a frustrating few weeks.  As you can see, I posted nothing on this blog between August 8 and August 22.  What you might not know is that I wrote just about nothing during that time frame.  No blog posts.  No short stories.  No comic book plotting.  I haven't even written a grocery list, but that's usually Mary Ann's domain anyway.

My life was full of work (15-20 hours/week), class (10-12.5 hours/week), church work (a couple o' three hours/week), and family (all the rest of the hours/week).  Add to this the fact that Mary Ann uses the laptop for her job and that reduced the hours even further.  The thing is, I want to be a writer.  I'm planning on pursuing an MFA after seminary.  I'm going to go out on a limb and say that means I need to have some decent stuff written before I apply.  I would do all these things all day and then after the kids went to bed I could barely stay awake, much less sit in front of a laptop and write.  Classes ended last week, but then I had gotten so far out of the writing 'groove' that for the first few days all I could do was stare at the screen, give up, and play Text Twirl on Facebook.  Not good.

I am pleased to report, however, that as of last night I'm back on the right track.  I took a baby step with some writing on The Familiar Game (nee The Brown Sisters) and today I continued on that story as well as doing some more detailed plotting for the first issue of My Zombie Wife Wants Me Dead.  Not only that, but I had yet another concept for a comic.  Right now I'm calling it The Seven Functions of Robot M, but that title could change.  It's fun because I never thought I'd write a book, comic or otherwise, which involved robots.  And this book has a LOT of robots.  I'll tell you more about that later.

So the fountain is flowing once again at the Duncan house.  The Fall semester starts next Thursday, so hopefully I can get some solid hours in before the time comes for me to focus more on academics.  Time is ticking away, and I've got a lot of writing to do!

1 comment:

S.D. Smith said...

Hey Josh, I'm having fun rediscovering your blog and am encouraged to see some one in a similar circumstance.

Hey, just food for thought. I went to Orson Scott Card's writer's workshop (didn't make the bootcamp, but would love to) one year and he really spoke against MFA's and the like. He said that almost no writing programs teach you anything that CAN be taught (eg: character and viewpoint issues) and almost all try to teach what CANNOT be taught (eg: style).

Anyway, that was his 2 cents. For further reading I would refer you to his very helpful cache of writerly tips etc at www.hatrack.com. Also see his excellent book "Character and Viewpoint."

Just an FYI. If you want to be a professor, I can see the MFA, but if you want to be a writer, then may be worth rethinking? I don't know.

Brother. May the work of your imagination bear fruit to glory of God and the increasing wonder for we who will read it. May God give you wisdom to know how to divide your time between your various duties and passions.