by Chris McGinty (According To Whim .com)
Well, I’ve accomplished another goal.
As you may have read about earlier this year; in 2010, I completed the goal of writing a poem a day for the whole year. One of my goals this year was to complete a book, which branched off into two fields, completing a novel and completing a non-fiction book. If you’ve been keeping up with our serial on Saturday, that’s yet another field, but is more closely related to the goal Nathan and I are trying to accomplish, which is a blog post every day this year.
So let’s discuss what I accomplished, rather than what’s still being accomplished.
Two years ago, I started working on a novel that was based on a pretty thin story idea that I had come up with back in June 2006. Nathan was reading on some horror movie news website about a guy who shot a horror movie in ten days, and so Nathan proclaimed, “We should do that!” And so I proclaimed, “Ok, I’ll come up with the plot at work tonight, and we can start shooting tomorrow.”
Nathan took a little convincing that it didn’t count to say let’s do everything in ten days if we then spent the next three months preparing. He agreed. I came up with a very thin plot to base the movie around, one that involved being in a dream, so that we didn’t have to worry about pesky things like continuity.
I went to Nathan’s the next day. We talked a bit about how we were going to handle it. Since it was Saturday, we would have two weekends to do much of the major work, and the week to get everything else done. We shot some “surreal” footage, and the next day Nathan said he wasn’t going to have time, because he didn’t want to have to come home from work and spend the whole night editing what I shot.
In April of 2009, I was going through my storage and found the page worth of notes I made, and decided to write it as a novel in ten days. I took the same stance that I took before which was that I had to get started immediately. By the end of the ten days, I wrote 113 pages of a novel that I decided to call “Dream”, and had a lot of footage that if it was actually edited down would have come out to about hardly anything. It was a strange ten days to say the least.
The irony of all this mess was that we set out to do Season Two in six days about a week later. We had similar results in that we did get a lot done, but it just wasn’t enough.
By June of 2009, I had 150 pages of the novel done, and by August 2009, I had 185 pages of the novel done. Then I just stopped working on it.
A week and a half ago I was thinking that I needed to get my writing for the year caught up. I have a goal for how many pages (stated in how many words as well) to write by the end of the year. And I’m behind. I thought about when I was working on “Dream” and how I managed to knock out 113 pages in ten days by just writing at every moment I had. I used my phone to text to my email. I wrote in notebooks. I wrote on a laptop at my guard post. I wondered if I could get somewhat caught up if I started to just write like crazy for the next ten days. My work schedule being what it’s been, I figured I would have a lot of time. Then I thought, why not try to finish “Dream” during that time. As it turned out, the day I had started writing “Dream” was April 4, 2009. Ten days from that moment was April 3, 2011. How could I ignore that?
So I got started immediately, and aside from a small scene that I have to finish when I get to work, it was finished at 5:30 am today. I’m proclaiming it as done, because in a couple of weeks, I will need to go through and edit it. Even if I didn’t completely finish the scene in question, it would be finished in rewrite. Still, I’m going to finish it just to be clear.