Monday, 03 November 2003

A good writing day. I tossed out my first two scenes and replaced them with three paragraphs of scene setting before jumping into the action of what had been my third scene. I revised the existing text of that scene and started the next. That leaves me with about 1700 words, slightly less than I'd had before, but much more satisfactory.

I've got gold coins, official documents, swords, and fast trains so far. The first airship is coming right up.

I also had an idea for how to fix one of my oldest stories. It's a great story of betrayal, revenge, honor, deceit, bravery, great crimes and terrible suffering, but I've never come up with a draft that worked. I've been daunted up to now I thought by my own limitations in showing my character's emotions. Now I realize that at least one big problem was that nearly all the strong emotion was in the backstory. My idea is simply to tell that portion as a series of flashbacks.

I usually resist the idea of flashbacks, especially several of them. I think, though, it will work here. The flashback tells a great story of its own, and each half makes the reader reevaluate the other.

I'm excited about it, but I won't let it distract me from the zeppelin story.

I lifted weights yesterday, and tried to go for a run, but ended up cutting the run short. I'd meant to go 4 or 5 miles, but after a mile or so my left hamstring started hurting and by 2 miles I had to quit. I'm not sure what the problem was. Maybe I over-stretched it after lifting weights. In any case, I ended up having to walk--or rather, limp--home.

I was feeling a bit under the weather last night. (I skipped dinner, despite Jackie having cooked one of my favorites--kufta bi tomatum!) Then, I woke up achy this morning. I still can't guess if it's a bug of some sort or not. The achiness I could explain away as the result of my two miles of limping yesterday, but not the queaziness.

In any case, I feel better now.

My plan for tomorrow is more writing, and a flu shot.