Activity

Hey, @eden-anderson. Thanks for tagging me.

What I Wrote:

Mostly chronologically,

1) The beginning of a short story for a writing class. Something like 2k-3k?

2) A blog post for my application to be a Story Embers intern. Didn’t get the job. But that’s okay.

3) The first two parts of a six part short story. Working title: Game. Gave it up for now. I need to do some serious developments on the theme before picking it up again.

4) Rewrote Good or Evil. Y’all can read the rewrite on the thread of the same name in Accountability & Achievements. If you’re interested. I’m most proud of this one.

I didn’t write a whole lot this year. I think this may be the first year that I actually put serious work into writing.

What I Read:

The highlights, in no particular order:

 – Steelheart, by Brandon Sanderson. Very good.

 – The Great Divorce, by C. S. Lewis. Also good.

– Hamlet, by Shakespeare. The story wasn’t all that great, but the words he uses to tell the story make it worth it. Seriously, to the point where I can ignore the story. He is truly a master of wordplay. I’ll have to read more Shakespeare this next year.

– Arrival (the shooting script). Highly recommended, especially if you haven’t seen the movie or read the short story it was based on. Link goes to the pdf. Found it here: The Script Savant.

– Wreck-It Ralph screenplay. Very good.

 – The Usual Suspects screenplay. Good intellectual story, but has a lot of language, and no moral compass. This is the kind of story I want to learn how to tell, but with those differences of course. I won’t link to this one, but you can find it on the site linked above, if you want to read it.

Also, all the Christopher Nolan shooting scripts. I’m not sure if I read all those this year, though.

I wish there were more clean intellectual stories. If you guys know of any, let me know.

What I Learned:

– I can get more done in a day than I think.

– I am wounded. I used to think that I wasn’t. Or if I was, it wasn’t very bad. Which is true, to some extent, but I was in denial. Thank God for revealing the truth to me. Still working out the actual wounds.

 – Man of Steel arrangement for solo piano, by my favorite arranger, Patrik Pietschmann. I highly recommend looking at his videos if you haven’t already. I also learned his arrangement of The Dark Knight. It’s really not as hard as it looks. Mostly a lot of repetitive patterns.

– How much I like prose. And puns. And wordplay in general. I would like to learn how to utilize it more in my writing.

– I’m beginning to see what I’m good at writing. It has a bit to do with the prose, but more so with the innocence and wonder we talked about on the theme discussions a while back.

I’m sure I’ll think of other things after I post this.

My Writing Goals for 2019:

– Complete at least two stories/screenplays.

– Rewrite/redraft at least two stories/screenplays.

– Start a blog. Planning on doing that really soon. I’ll post somewhere on here for you guys when I get it up.

– Read more. I haven’t done enough reading recently.

And it’s not really a writing goal, but I would like to finish learning Clare de Lune. It shouldn’t be too hard, I’m already almost half-way through. I would also like to re-learn Theme from Sabrina, by John Williams. I would link to these songs, but it’s not letting me.