Joseph Hunt's Blog, page 16

Creative Writing Portfolios!

Part of my university course is Creative Writing and for that part I have to create a portfolio, and inside that portfolio I need 3,000 words of creative writing, 1,000 words of critical analysis and 1,200 words of drafts.



It shouldn't be that hard, no, it really shouldn't...but I'm making it harder than it seems. I always like to do things at the last minute and that's not a way to live or do anything by. *someone slap me*



I need to create two portfolios, one is on influences, which I've got an idea for and I think I know how I can get the most marks on this one because it's just about saying what/who influenced you and how that's reflected in your work. The second portfolio is a little bit more difficult, in the second it's about 'Reading for Writing', I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to find inspiration in other people's writing or whether I'm supposed to write in their style or something. It's confusing, and I'm very confused.



Now, normal people would ask their teachers to differentiate between the two....no, not me, I like to drag the whole confusion out until the point of getting angry and mad at myself. I love the idea of just being able to settle down and do work, but I can't, and I really envy those people who can and those people who do. The only time that I am able to do that is when I'm really into writing a story and that can take a while.




Anyone else have these problems before?


The deadline is the end of April....that give me a month and a bit. Now, I'm thinking that if I post this, you guys will comment and give me little supportive tips *hint hint* and then I can try and get this all finished before the deadline. I hate deadlines, and I think I wrote a post on that a while back.



-Joseph




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Your Grammar is Attractive

It's one of those special Sunday posts, now I can say that I've blogged 7 days this week! Wooo!



So lately I've been really attracted to guys who can spell properly, who know the difference between you're and your, even their/they're/there...is that weird? I hope not. I mean, there are some guys who are attractive like so (referring to the picture of Daniel Radcliffe) and then there are those who I see spelling properly and they go up in my books, although I don't doubt for a second that Mr. Radcliffe has perfect grammar.



Is it too much to ask for? Why can't everyone just learn these things? Maybe that's why I find people more attractive when they use grammar correctly, because when I see "your good" or "your welcome" IT MAKES ME ANGRY and sad, and I get really upset for no reason.



So yeah, just learn guys. Just learn. I think there should be a "teach your friend" day where we each post on our statuses the difference between each. Like so...



YOUR -- "your" as the possessive form of you, referring to something that a person has, something that belongs to the person in question, or the person you are talking to.
YOU'RE (You are) --"you're" is a contraction of "you are".

THERE -- Use there when referring to a place, whether concrete ("over there by the building") or more abstract ("it must be difficult to live there")
THEIR -- Use their to indicate possession. It is a possessive adjective and indicates that a particular noun belongs to them.
THEY'RE (They are) -- Remember that they're is a contraction of the words they and are.


I can't believe they're leaving their children there, alone!




(Above Examples courtesy of Wikipedia)


They are the main culprits, and if you have more then please add them on in the comments.



I don't hate you if you are getting these wrong, I just want you to learn them so that I don't have to hate you, but as soon as you know them they'll stick with you forever. And then I can love you. TIP: When writing Facebook statuses and tweets, please just look over it...perhaps read it aloud, if you do spell something incorrectly then your credibility goes down. It really does!




Do any of you guys know how I feel?


-Joseph




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Romeo & Julian: Adaptation

If you haven't heard yet, I am writing an LGBT adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, calling it Romeo and Julian, and if you've not yet read the scene I posted on Thursday.




So I'm adapting a play script into a novel, although it's not going to be a word-by-word or scene-by-scene kind of adaptation, that might be pushing it a bit too far for me in terms of creative freedom.




It was fairly easy to plan, considering all I needed to do was flesh it out with my characters, places, events etc. I have kept in quite a few of the scenes but at the same time I'm trying to make this adaptation quite modern so there's not going to be the Romeo killing Tybalt. Also, with characters, there isn't going to be a nurse, instead Julian will have a female confidant who he tells everything to, even the fact that he's gay. There will be no Count Paris, instead there is a girl who is engaged to marry Julian, and because of the girl's family having traditional views on marriage they are not allowed to have sex etc. one of the reasons why she doesn't know that he's gay, and nobody else besides his friend does.




I hope that I'm not straying too far from the whole play. There is still the families and their feud, there is also going to be complications with being gay and coming out and running away, or the want to run away. I've also mixed the whole exile thing up. If you haven't read the excerpt, it's the clickable link in that first paragraph. In the excerpt you learn that Romeo was shipped off to France to an art school and you also learn that it's because he's gay. So Romeo has already been exiled from his family and now there are complications in his relationship with his family because they're homophobic.




If you haven't read or heard of Romeo and Juliet then you've probably been living under a rock...however I presume that EVERYONE has. And because you all know what happens, you know that they marry in hopes of eloping and are both tragically caught in a double suicide. Yeah, well I'm not sure if I want to kill them because gay teen suicide is such a sore area and I don't want to be crying for weeks because I wrote the death of two teens---and at the same time I want to kill them because I know that it will have so much power and force behind the emotion that I know you guys will be sobbing into your copies of the book.




What are your thoughts on writing adaptations?

To kill them, or not to kill them?




-Thomas Jay

(Joseph)




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Greek Myths: King Oedipus

Greeks have had so much influence on the world we see around us and the stories that are told within its mythology have had influenced great minds like Sigmund Freud. I'll start with the story and then go on about how it influenced.



To summarise: Oedipus was a mythical Greek king of Thebes. He fulfilled a prophecy that said he would kill his father and marry his mother, and thus brought disaster on his city and family.




The Story/Myth

Oedipus was the son of Laius and Jocasta, the king and queen of Thebes.



Laius consulted the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, and she prophesied that any son born of Laius' would kill him. If someone told you that your child would grow up to kill you, would you give them up? So in an attempt to prevent this prophecy, when Jocasta did give birth to a son, Laius pinned his son's ankles together so that he couldn't crawl. Jocasta then gave her son to a servant who was then to abandon him on a mountain, but that didn't happen and the servant gave the baby to a shepherd, who in turn gave it to another shepherd.



Eventually, Oedipus ended up at the house of Polybus, king Corinth and his queen, Merope, who adopted him because they didn't have children of their own. They gave him the name Oedipus because of the swelling from the injuries in his feet and ankles.

Many years later, after Oedipus has been brought up as the son of the king and queen of Corinth, he is told by a drunk that he was in fact adopted. Oedipus confronts his parents and they deny everything, so Oedipus goes to the Oracle in Delphi, the same Oracle that his birth parents consulted. She doesn't tell him if the king and queen of Corinth are his real parents, she only tells him his fate---that he will kill his father and marry his mother. I think it's one of those things where you're told something is going to happen, so you try and avoid it at all costs, only bringing it upon yourself. So it's best not to know, that why you don't live your life in constant worry. And in an attempt to avoid the fate predicted by the Oracle, Oedipus decides not to go back home, but instead travel all the way to Thebes.



As Oedipus traveled, he came to Davlia, where three roads crossed each other. Here he encountered a chariot driven by his birth-father, King Laius. They fought over who had the right to go first and Oedipus killed Laius in self defense, unwittingly fulfilling part of the prophecy. The only witness of the King's death was a slave who fled from a caravan of slaves also traveling on the road at the time.

Continuing his journey to Thebes, Oedipus encountered a Sphinx, who would stop all travelers to Thebes and ask them a riddle. If the travelers were unable to answer her correctly, they would be killed and eaten; if they were successful, they would be free to continue on their journey. The riddle was: "What walks on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night?". Oedipus answered: "Man: as an infant, he crawls on all fours; as an adult, he walks on two legs and; in old age, he uses a 'walking' stick". Oedipus was the first to answer the riddle correctly and, having heard Oedipus' answer, the Sphinx was astounded and inexplicably killed herself by throwing herself into the sea, freeing Thebes from her harsh rule.

The people of Thebes gratefully appointed Oedipus as their king and gave him the recently widowed Queen Jocasta's hand in marriage. The marriage of Oedipus to Jocasta fulfilled the rest of the prophecy.

Many years after the marriage of Oedipus and Jocasta, a plague of infertility struck the city of Thebes; crops no longer grew on the fields and women did not bear children. Oedipus, in his hubris, asserted that he would end the pestilence. He sent Creon, Jocasta's brother, to the Oracle at Delphi, seeking guidance. When Creon returned, Oedipus heard that the murderer of the former King Laius must be found and either be killed or exiled. Creon also suggested that they try to find the blind prophet, Tiresias. In a search for the identity of the killer, Oedipus followed Creon's suggestion and sent for Tiresias, who warned him not to seek Laius' killer. In a heated exchange, Tiresias was provoked into exposing Oedipus himself as the killer, and the fact that Oedipus was living in shame because he did not know who his true parents were. Oedipus angrily blamed Creon for the false accusations, and the two proceeded to argue fervently. Jocasta entered and tried to calm Oedipus by telling him the story of her first-born son and his supposed death. Oedipus became nervous as he realized that he may have murdered Laius and so brought about the plague. Suddenly, a messenger arrived from Corinth with the news that King Polybus had died. Oedipus was relieved concerning the prophecy for it could no longer be fulfilled if Polybus, whom he considered his birth father, was now dead.

Still, he knew that his mother was still alive and refused to attend the funeral at Corinth. To ease the tension, the messenger then said that Oedipus was, in fact, adopted. Jocasta, finally realizing that he was her son, begged him to stop his search for Laius' murderer. Oedipus misunderstood the motivation of her pleas, thinking that she was ashamed of him because he might have been born of a slave. Jocasta then went into the palace where she hanged herself. Oedipus sought verification of the messenger's story from the very same herdsman who was supposed to have left Oedipus to die as a baby. From the herdsman, Oedipus learned that the infant raised as the adopted son of Polybus and Merope was the son of Laius and Jocasta. Thus, Oedipus finally realized in great agony that so many years ago, at the place where the three roads met, he had killed his own father, King Laius, and subsequently married his mother, Jocasta.

(Credit to Wikipedia: the Hub of Knowledge)


Now the Theory





The term Oedipus complex, coined by Sigmund Freud, denotes the emotions and ideas that the mind keeps in the unconscious. It concentrates on a boy's desire to sexually possess his mother, and kill his father, but all of these feelings are repressed into the child's subconscious. Now you can see how Freud was inspired.




Freud proposed that girls resolved their complexes differently to boys. Girls are said to have penis envy and hate their mothers because they are supposed to have taken their penis away from them. That bit always makes me cringe, Freud believed that everyone wanted to be male and have a penis, because we are living in a patriarchal society after all. h If women or men are fixated in the Electra or Oedipal stages of their psychosexual development, they might be considered "father-fixated" or "mother-fixated", this is shown in their choice of partner, and they usually resemble the father or the mother.



Will I receive a backlash of criticism if I tell you all that I do believe in this theory? Because I do. As you know, I'm gay, and this theory wasn't tested on gays and their isn't really a theory to show that but I do believe it--and it says that if you don't complete it then it leads it neurosis, paedophilia, and homosexuality--anything unnatural basically. I see it happening too much, that's where the phrases "mummy's boy" and "daddy's girl" come from, yes it's very messed up, and yes, it does make me slightly nauseous thinking about it.




What do you make of this theory?

What did you think of the story?




I know that I always find these stories so intriguing, I also find theories that are half-"ooo that sounds like it could be right", but you're always unsure of how to play it, just in case people think you're as crazy as the theorist themselves.




-Joseph




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Follow Friday 3.16

Click to go to the Alison Can Read: Feature & Follow post...and you might even want to join in! I think you should go and join in. It's a great way of meeting new bloggers and gaining new followers.

Q: What is the best book you've read in the last month? What is the worst book you've read in the last month?

The best book that I've read this past month has to be Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games---and I know that this book might be somewhat chosen because of its popularity etc. but it really was a really great book.









And for the worst book that I've read all month. Well, I don't really read books if they're rubbish because I'll read about 10 - 20 pages and then give up, so I'm sorry guys, but I haven't read any rubbish books in the past month, but The Hunger Games is most definitely my favourite book from the month and I'm not onto Catching Fire.




What are your thoughts on The Hunger Games?

Are you going to be watching the film?




And if you guys are wanting a little snippet to read, I am writing the gay Romeo & Juliet, calling it Romeo & Julian. So if you want to see some of that then click here: Romeo & Julian ♥




-Joseph




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My Fiction Thursday - Romeo & Julian ♥

I'm really enthusiastic about my latest project and although I won't be writing it under the name 'Joseph Eastwood', you're all going to know that it's me, I'm just writing it under my romance/gay fiction pseudonym Thomas Jay, which if you don't know is my middle name Thomas, and Jay is taken from James, also part of my middle name. So yeah, it's still me.



I'm really not worried about people stealing my ideas...in fact I know that I share too much. I don't fear people being inspired by my writing because it's mine, and they'll have their own style, their own way with words etc. so I'm not worried, and anyway, Romeo and Juliet is public domain so I can do what the hell I want to, and so can you.



AND if you've not "liked" my Facebook page, then you won't know that I am in fact writing the gay version, and calling it Romeo & Julian. I like it, it has a, a ring to it. Don't you think?



So far I've just been planning it...but I have also been drafting out some scenes and writing them and I have this scene. The scene where they first meet.




Romeo & Julian


Julian combed a hand through his black curly hair; he stood for a moment and admired his last poster, the last of the 300 A3 sheets, coloured in deep reds with a black border and the name 'Cordello' at the top written in cursive. It was the only thing he was good at, being able to drive custom to the family restaurant.



"Nice poster," a voice said, brushing passed Julian.



"Huh?" he turned around to see a familiar face, one he'd not seen in years. A boy he once knew, now a man, olive skin with intense brown eyes and a cute trail of freckles running across his nose.



"You remember me?" he asked.



"R—R—" Julian began.



"Romeo," he said, smiling out of the side of his mouth. He locked glances with Julian as a look of confusion crossed his face. "Machiella. Machiella's restaurant."



"Yeah. I know who you are," Julian grinned. "You were shipped off to France, weren't you?"



Romeo's smile faded as he nodded. "It was my choice, I wanted to go there, to the best music academy money could buy."



"Oh, I thought it was because you were—" Julian froze as Romeo lifted an eyebrow.



"What? I was what?"



"Nothing, just rumours."



"That I'm gay," Romeo said, stepping closer to Julian.



He couldn't reply. Julian's tongue had swollen against his teeth to stop them from chatting away.



"Because it's true you know," Romeo continued, pursing his lips at the end.



Julian gulped as Romeo stepped closer, their noses nearly touching. "Um. Er. I have to go," he said, grabbing the small pot of glue from the floor and hurrying off.



"Hey, Julian," Romeo shouted after him, "I'll meet you for coffee tomorrow, here at noon."



Julian didn't stop, he carried on down the street, wiping the palms of his hands on his pants and taking deep breaths to control the swell in his lungs. When he knew that he was out of Romeo's line of sight he stopped and lent against a wall.



"Romeo Machiella," he whispered to himself, "long time no see."







If you want to know more about this pseudonym I have created a Facebook page for him! He'll be live very soon! But here he is -- Thomas Jay! I hope you'll all go there and give the page a big ol' "like" ♥



Remember: it's a draft, and it's definitely not the final of anything.




Did you like it?


-Joseph




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We are the Deities of our own Destiny!

So I found this picture while going through my Tumblr dashboard and I stared at it for quite some time. (I think if you click it you can read the articles, but I'm only going to be talking about the picture).



It got me thinking, which is what I do best these day, anyway, it got me thinking about us, as human beings, we're nothing to the universe, in fact Earth is probably considered an ant...or maybe even the sun is considered an ant. I don't know, but that must mean we are very small and we don't really matter to the universe. The only person that we truly matter to, is ourselves.



Okay, so the picture is showing how similar both a brain cell and the universe look, and that's what got my brain cells all fired up. As usual I relayed all of this back to myself several times before I tried to word how it felt or what I was trying to tell myself. In the end I figured that we have miniature universes inside of our heads, it's the only explanation! Ha.



But seriously, if this doesn't Feed Your Muse ;) hehe then you're not looking at it in the same way I am. I'm looking at this as a representation of our imagination and the fact that there is no limit to imagination, we have a universe inside of us, yes, that's right, a bloody universe, but no ordinary universe, this is YOUR universe, full of whoever you want and whatever you want; planets that are like Earth, and people that are like you and me.



You might be wondering, so why the title "We are the Deities of our own Destiny!"? Well, because you are, you control what you do and if you're not doing it good enough then you're not going to succeed.



I hope that I've inspired you...please tell me if I have. I know that I've inspired myself (hope that doesn't sound big headed, but I don't care).




You are in control...now go and do something about it! 


-Joseph




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Feed Your Muse!

Last week I ended my post, My Muse has Made Me! with "They [muses] can make or break you as a writer. You just need to feed them!" and so this week I'm going to tell you about my lifestyle and what I feed my muse.



I consider myself a really creative person---I draw, I write, I'm very jealous of people who can sing or play a musical instrument, and I have a broad imagination.



By 'feeding' your muse you must first acknowledge that you have a muse. My friend told me that she didn't have a muse---this left me a little despondent, I wasn't sure how to react, she had to have an inner muse, that something living inside of her, that creative spirit. Whatever you want to call it, muse, creative spirit, inspiration etc.



Whatever you're calling it, it's supposed to leave you with a feeling, or a perspective that only you may see, or something that resonates inside. You'll know the feeling.



It's all about the senses and being open for inspiration! In fact, this quote sums up what a muse does---it allows you to think of everything in creative terms, depending on how open you are.



"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." - Sylvia Plath






SIGHTS: I'll start with sights. Here are two very different pictures, different in many ways, one is the colour, the other is the content in the emotions that they might give.






[image error]
A



B




Picture A might affect me more because I grew up on a council estate, which is where Google images told me this was from, and it's quite an accurate portrayal to be honest, everyone is always up to mischief. And if you go back to images of where you grew up you will always find inspiration, even if it's in the smallest detail.






SOUND: Now onto music! This is what my muse is being fed lately---it's a range of music--but here it is, and this is not everything, just some of my faves at the moment.



Neon Hitch - F**k U Betta

Azealia Banks - 212

Marina & the Diamonds - Primadonna

Click the links for Youtube.

I think you should always give your muse a selection of music, maybe something that you wouldn't normally listen to because  there could be a word or a phrase or a beat that gets you thinking. And it doesn't do you any harm.




FOOD: I'm going to go out on a limb here...but I'm sure that there are a few of you who feed your muses food...well, pictures of food. I know that I do!




  



Now I'm really hungry! Looking at all of those pictures of food and not having any. Another reason why I picked food is because even the things that you're so used to like ice cream and coffee, they always have other points to talk about. Look at the rainbow colour of the ice cream, do you reckon it tastes like vanilla or of different fruits. And that coffee, what are those red sprinkles? Do they have a taste to them? etc. it just gets you thinking and you can speculate on it---there are no right or wrong answers, after all, it is fiction.




BEAUTY: Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I think of something as being beautiful if it is aesthetically pleasing, other people can see the beauty in disorder and chaos etc. but below are two pictures, one of Francisco Lachowski -ahhh- and the other is a picture. As soon as I saw the picture I was drawn into it, it's just beautiful.






 



I hope that's enough to get your started, and I hope your muse is hungry! Go treat it! Take it to Tumblr and scroll through endless pages of *ahem* procrastination. If you treat your muse, it will treat you!




And if you'd like to see more scantly clad men then go to my Tumblr, there are also a lot of guys kissing, so if that makes you uncomfortable don't click the link. Haha.




Are you going to treat your muse?





-Joseph





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Guest Post by Chrystalla Thoma: Writing LGBT characters in YA fiction!

  


Let me start by saying I didn't set out to write gay characters in my novels. But some of them informed me in no uncertain terms that they were and I'd better take note. Just like in real life.


When I wrote the first draft of my dystopian YA sci-fi novel "Rex Rising" some years back, it wrote it from my protagonist's point of view. The protagonist is Elei, a boy, and he told me from the start he like girls. End of story.

However, when I revised the novel a year ago and decided to add another point of view, something else happened: that character (Hera, a girl who was already in the first draft) insisted she also liked girls that way.

I was surprised. I thought I knew my characters, but I hadn't known this detail. Hera is strong, beautiful, clever, dynamic, and attracted to girls. Period.

The focus in this first book is not on romance. We only get hints of her sexual orientation – like here, in the second chapter of Rex Rising:

"As Hera crossed to the helicopters, she nodded a greeting to the hangar officer, a tall, lithe woman with ash blond hair in a braid. While climbing into the first helicopter in the row and powering up the system, she gazed at the woman.

Curvier than most, filling out her gray uniform well, the young officer turned to stare back at Hera, fine features locked in a scowl.


Hera winked, blew a kiss and raised her forefinger and thumb, flashing the woman an "all well" sign."

Hera's orientation comes more into play in the second book of the series, "Rex Cresting" which was released this month. I don't want to say more in case you want to read it and see for yourselves.

Of course, having gay characters in YA fiction is nothing new or unusual, well, not anymore. There are plenty of YA novels out there with gay protagonists and main characters. For instance, "Outtakes of a Living Mistake" by Anthony Paull is told from the point of view of a teenage gay boy, and Cassandra Clare, in her Mortal Instruments series, has a gay couple who are very cool, Alec and Magnus Bane.

I seem to think there are more stories about gay boys than girls – but that could be biased due to my personal preference for boys. :D

As I was saying, gay characters in YA literature are not something new (although there has been some bruhaha about agents and editors trying to remove gay characters from YA fiction. I don't think they can, thank all the gods and goddesses). But it was new to me, new to my stories.

YA stories with gay characters often focus on the problems gay teens face because of the rigidity of society and people's prejudices, having to hide who they really are to avoid bullying and shunning. Which is so sad.

I am glad novels talk openly about such things. It helps sensitize and educate people.

But I immediately realized that Hera's case was very different. Hera belongs to a race of all-women who reproduce asexually (by cloning themselves) – a condition brought on by a very special parasite, called Regina. The only thing needed for reproduction is sexual stimulation. Not needing men, the women of this race are attracted to women only.

What this means is that, in Hera's world, being gay is the norm. She doesn't have to hide her sexual preference, doesn't suffer from it. On the contrary, she finds the idea of attraction to another gender sort of odd.

Now, I could have made her life hard by having her new friends – who don't belong to her race and who happen to be heterosexual – make fun of her, tease her, even bully her about her preference.

Yet they don't. Partly because Hera is a respected character, accepted from the start, and let us not forget her temper is fearsome. Nobody would like to cross her.

But I also wanted a world where sexual orientation isn't so important. Where there are bigger concerns in life and more important things – like trustworthiness and self-sacrifice and real friendship – than whether you like boys or girls or both or neither.

A good world, a world as it should be.

Yeah. :)

A little bit about our guest poster! Chrystalla lives in Cyprus with her husband and her hoards of wild books. She writes fantasy and science fiction and is now starting a non-fiction book about the dragons of the world. She is interested in parasites, ecology, Indian recipes, love in all forms and medieval music, not necessarily in that order. She is currently writing Book 3 of the dystopian sci-fi YA series "Elei's Chronicles" and a gay sci-fi novel with androids and lots of mayhem.

Mayhem, in fact, is her middle name. You've been warned.

Find Chrystalla! She's around her somewhere!

Check her BLOG out! Go to her Facebook page! Visit her Amazon profile! Send her a tweet on TWITTER! Or even go see her on Smashwords! ♥

Also, to keep updated on the sequels and other satellite books, make sure to check this page on her blog:  http://chrystallathoma.wordpress.com/rex-rising Or ask to join the Rex Rising group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/282489681801529/ ♥

If you want to buy her eBooks the pictures above are clickable, or you can use these: Rex Rising, Rex Cresting, Hera ♥

I really liked the post! It fit in with last months LGBT and the continuance of LGBT themed posts that I said we'd be getting! I hope you agreed with what Chrystalla was talking about, I know I sure did! And it's true, I never realised that one of my characters was gay until  I'd finished it---but I'm saying who because I don't want him to be defined by that.





-Joseph





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Write like You're Going to Die!

via Google Images


I know that there is a quote similar to the title of this post but I couldn't find it.Oh, and yeah, welcome to a Sunday blog post! Whoooo!




I was talking to a few friends the other day and asking them how long they thought it would take me to write the list of books that I posted on Thursday. Recap: there were 19 novels and 4 novellas. Let's say a novel is 70,000 words and a novella is 30,000 now if we add all of those up....




1,450,000 words




Well that's a lot of words. It gave me butterflies just calculating it. I'm going to take a moment to soak that in, whoa. Just, whoa. That's a lot of words. That's a lot of books.




How long do you think it will take me to write them?




Like I was saying, I was talking to my friends about this, one of them said that it would take me a decade and another said 8 years. I was quite shocked at both answers because I can write a 70,000 word manuscript in just under 25 days---when it's the only thing that I'm writing.




Lumen took me 24 days and I didn't plan a page of that...well it was rough, the kind of planning you do as you're doing it. I absolutely hated that method, in fact I really don't know how I finished it, and that's probably why it's taking me so long to get it edited.




I'm going to set some reasonable goals now.




I have to write 1,000 words before I'm allowed on the internet. And then I have to break and write another 1,000 words.




I want to get 2,000/3,000 words in a day.




If you read yesterday's blog post then you'll know how much free time I have. Yes, I have a lot! So reaching this shouldn't be so hard, it's the internet's fault! It's created a monster in me, but without the internet I would never have met you guys, my wonderful readers!




Do you have writing goals/daily targets?




If you do have targets then I hope you reach them! And if you don't, come back here and I'll try and inspire you.



-Joseph



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