We are now well into August, and my hand is starting to laugh at me with it's crazy veins... Um, yeah... that started out funnier in my head... The point is that I've been writing write a bit over the last few nights (some 8-10 pages, and close to 2,000 words), and at this point I have brought the length of the current project to over 11,000 words. But it has been writing. Like, with a pen being dragged across the surface of a notepad; the ink forming strange characters - called letters, which form things called words - behind in its wake.
It's a strange thing that I seem to have realized, in doing this. In the past, I've usually been one to attempt typing everthing out directly - first, back in middle school on an old typewriter that used to be my mother's. Once I was in college, I would peck away on the short stories. I still do that, to an extent, but it doesn't work for me with longer works. I've started and stopped a couple of NaNo projects for the simple fact that staring at a computer screen didn't seen to do anything for me. There's no sense of accomplishment - from a visual trigger, like "see how many pages I've written?" Sure, there's the automatic feature that provides a word count, but that can be just as daunting as it is useful if things aren't flowing.
I've come to realize that some of my methods may depend on the project. For shorter works, I may still hammer out on a keyboard on the way to a first draft, but longer works, like the one I'm working on, just seem to flow better from a pen. Editing, though... thank heavens for the computers. Having to retype entire pages just because I wanted to change a few words? I'm thankful that's an experience I got to miss...
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