I can't believe my last post on here was over six months ago. I don't think even I've looked at this blog in six months. However, there is a very good reason for that:
As those of you who are actively involved with my life and what I do in my spare time know by now, I have spent the last year and a half working on what is evolving into a truly epic story. I completed a rough draft of that story over a year ago, but decided after doing so that it was not nearly complete, and that the ending was not at all what I wanted it to be, so I decided to start over and just write down everything that came into my head about the characters that I had come up with, their pasts, and what had brought them together, in hopes that something would come together out of it. Whenever I would reach a standstill in one character's story, I would move on to another character and see if I could take them further along the story's timeline than the first. The result is that image above: fourteen journals, all handwritten, detailing the backstories of the five main characters of said unfinished novel. So why am I posting about this now, when the novel is nowhere close to done, much less readable? Partly, it's so I can update and inform everyone about the story's status because I am currently putting it on hiatus in order to work on a new story (see the next blog post for information about that). But mostly, it's so I can brag, because the other day I accomplished something big.
Back in January, when I finally ran out of characters to write about and realized I still had no idea how the story was going to end, I also realized that I now had too much reference material to reasonably carry around with me if I wanted to do my writing anywhere besides my desk at home. I insist on doing all first drafts by hand - I write substantially slower than I type, so it gives me a chance to think through what I am trying to say, makes it easy to glance back over what I've written, and keeps me from getting overly verbose - and I need access to all that information to continue the story, so I decided to transcribe it all into the computer. I have a little netbook that is the perfect size to carry around with me, so I took on the lengthy task of transcribing all of my current work, with minimal edits, into that computer. I finished this project just a few days ago. And the total number of pages I have written, when typed out in ten-point Verdana font, was...467.
467
That's over the course of approximately one year, and the story contained in those pages covers only about a third of the whole story that I want to tell once the book is finished. So now you see why my blogging has been sporadic. Even I was blown away when I realized that that's more than one page of typed text per day. And that was when I realized that this writing thing has become a pretty serious hobby of mine. This story isn't just going to fade away, even though I'm not currently working on it. Ideas will come back to me, and in the meantime new ideas for other stories have come to me, which I have already started working on and plan to share with you here on this blog, starting in my very next post. And, insofar as this hobby has become this important to me, I ask you this: Is it okay for me to call myself a writer now? I always felt that I wouldn't deserve that title until I had something to show others for it, but I think I am more of a writer now than I am a gamer, or a programmer, or an animator, or any of the other titles I have given myself over the years that pertain to my hobbies. And I do have something to show for it. It may not be a manuscript that I am ready for others to read, but that shelf full of notebooks is proof of my dedication to my work, and to finishing what I have started nonetheless. So, I think that I can say now that I'm a writer, which I think is pretty cool.
As a footnote, here is the breakdown of the five separate manuscripts by images of the journals they are in and the number of pages each one was when typed.
Four journals = 109 pages typed
Four journals = 154 pages typed
One journal = 46 pages typed
Three journals = 112 pages typed
Two journals = 46 pages typed
Oh yeah, and one final note to put all this in perspective. The original story I mentioned, the one that started all this? From start to finish, it was only 119 pages long.
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