Back when I used Livejournal for anything significant, I had a feature called the "Daily Dose of Dave". It was a means by which I made myself write daily, even if it was just a few words about absolutely nothing. Sometimes my posts were even about the act of posting itself, or why I was almost about to not post.
Though I keep a writing journal, and like a proper writer I do write every day, I figure it's time again to be a whore and show people what I come up with, random thoughts though they may be.
You'll notice that there's a post here from months ago, when this son of a bitch was new. I had originally intended to post my process narrative for TGSR here, but as I updated it, I decided I liked more and more the idea that it'd be a "special feature" for any potential published version of TGSR. If that's what people want, then okay.
What is a process narrative, you ask? Well, I'm glad you did. A "process narrative" is a tool I was taught to use as a writer growing up in the mean streets of Los Angeleez. (Okay, I learned about it during my short stint in Northridge, but that is completely nonsequitary.) The short explanation for it is, "it's the story of the story." It's something like a progress report and something like a mission journal, talking about everything that went into creating a thing, and what was going on that affected its creation. The first one I ever wrote was for a short story that I created for a narrative writing class, incidentally the class whose teacher told me about the concept of the process narrative. Said narrative ended up being roughly as long as the story itself.
I made an interesting discovery there -- that it seems like I'm writing process narratives more than I write finished works. Like, there's that thing that I've more or less been working on since high school, the core continuity of which I have revamped more often than DC Comics has used the word "Crisis". I'm often writing character profiles and stray thoughts about the thing, including the drastic changes I've made since the project's inception. But only now and then do I write any of it out. Sure, here and there I have a fairly complete idea for a scene and I go about scripting it, but overall it feels like once I start writing in earnest, I will not be allowed to stop. So I don't begin until I feel I have the time and freedom to write it in earnest -- which I don't, or don't feel I do.
It feels instead like architecture; like I need to draw all the blueprints and test all the physics and clear with all the contractors and get every last tiny detail out of the way before I can lay a single brick. And that's only partially due to "launch anxiety". The rest of it has to do with how drastically the project as a whole has changed over the years. Yes, it changes to be light-years better than it was previously, but the fact is that it changes. I might start something and get a thousand pages into it, then decide I have a whole new idea about the entire thing and scrap it all. It is an irksome thought.
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