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Prototyping

It is officially Spring break, mid-semester break, whatever you want to call it. I will not call it Easter break, as the school officially does, because I find that officially dunderheaded. Ugh.

Anyway, for the next three weeks, I get to do nothing (well, not much more than) but write and work on my PhD stuff. My plan is to increase my writing sessions to 4 per day, 3 for my short story (that is nearly done) and 1 for the novel that's been languishing in the bowels of my computer for the last 6 months. It has a way better chance of winning the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award than my current one does, at least IMO.

Once the rough draft of the story is completed, I can spend a little more time exploring the digital adaptation side of it. I have to admit, part of my procrastination process today has been to start this exploration already, by looking into wiki-building programs. More on that later.

I've already found that without the pressures on my time, it's hard for me to get working. When I know I have only 20 minutes total to write, it takes me 20 minutes to write. When I know I have all day...it takes me all day. Sigh.

Hopefully it's just vacation fever, and I'll get into a decent working rhythm here in the next 20 days. Otherwise, I'll be even farther behind in this project than I already am.

It is helping me to know that I am presenting this story and its digital WIP adaptation at the Great Writing Conference in June. I can't get up there in front of my extended writing community and offer crap. I'd really like to have something that shows off the project, how useful it will be, how creative.

When I describe the project to people in the field, they keep saying how innovative and unique it is. I had no idea about this when I first proposed it. To me, it just seemed logical and exciting. But people keep acting like I'm Newton theorizing on gravity or something. I'm still having a hard time believing that tons of other writers and researchers aren't out there doing this same thing: writing an original piece to co-exist in parallel platforms (print and digital).

I won't knock it, though. The fact that everyone thinks it's so impressive will hopefully get me some funding, maybe some contacts, and maybe eventually I'll be able to sell myself as a consultant or (ha!) a writer.

For the moment, I'll just focus on hitting my milestones: finished rough draft by the end of this week, and a plan for the digital adaptation by the end of the break.

Update (40 min later):
So it turns out all my procrastination was incredibly silly. One 25 minute writing session was all it took to finish the rough draft. Now it gets to sit until the end of the break, getting not-fresh for its rewrites, as I explore adaptation angles. Yay!
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