Hello. I have found another book about my craft: Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. It is from 1934, as near as I can tell, and it is not about how to write with good technique. She wrote it to help her students banish writer’s block. The book describes common problems and situations she has come across while teaching, and proceeds to describe some exercises to teach oneself to write anywhere, at will.

I’m still on the first one; to write anything, steadily, until you run out of words, and to do this first thing in the morning before you have read or spoken or listened to words or even fully awakened. Who knew something so simple could be so hard? I get woken by someone speaking, or interrupted, or forget to start until I’ve already nullified the conditions.

During this pause between major writing projects, I thought about poetry. When I stumble across some, I enjoy it very much, yet I rarely seek it out. Despite having read little, and studied it far less, I wrote some. A few were laughable. Anything with more substance I did not finish. Nor could I remember all I had come up with. Why must the shower be so conducive to creative thinking? Neither paper nor electronic methods of recording ideas should be anywhere near that much water.

Next month brings NaNoWriMo’s second event of the year, Camp July. I shall edit my science fiction draft as my official project for it. This story still feels like the first one I will publish. What will be the second? I should know. I don’t want to batch-process this; efficiency lies in continuous flow. Process engineering, acrobatics, chess – so many varied disciplines agree that you have to think a few steps ahead of where you are.

After Camp, should my draft go to a friend? Or should I work on it and improve it as much as I can before inviting extra eyes and ideas? Which wastes the least time? To share with a second reader while I intend major changes wastes their time and input, and still takes the first time they can read it. To polish it until it is nearly ready for publishing before inviting that fresh perspective wastes the time I spend working on parts I’ll later learn I need to change. Where is the happy medium?

These are questions for August first.