Overview

  • resumed work on short story Corporeal Acquisitions
  • started and completed flash fiction piece These Are Not My Memories
  • started flash fiction adaptation of short film script GREAT
  • completed two new blog posts
  • installed and started using taskwarrior and timewarrior
  • created template repository for new writing projects
  • wrote xq tool for extracting questions from files

Corporeal Acquisitions

In 2023 I was looking for a writing outlet and considering revisiting prose. I started working on building out a cosmic horror short story at the time. I had put around a week’s worth of effort into figuring out what story I was telling and building some basic structure.

I’ve resumed work on this project and have a much stronger sense of the story. I’m still organizing and outlining with the intention of starting into a draft this week. I have a loose expectation of when I’ll have a reasonable draft completed, but largely using this to get a sense for how long a project of this length will take me to write.

These Are Not My Memories

The switch from screenwriting to prose means there are a lot of skills to build up. Many of these skills haven’t been exercised since I was a kid. I’m going to need consistent work on those. In that spirit, I’m working to write a flash fiction piece every week. The goal is reps, not polished pieces for release.

The first is These Are Not My Memories.

Like the majority of my writing, there’s an undercurrent of horror. It’s a piece about tech, identity, and capitalism as an uploaded consciousness in a bot with no back ups.

GREAT

Another flash fiction piece that’s just been started. It was initially written as a short horror film about right wing indoctrination. It was originally written to be a low budget, three minute short.

Given the amount of film scripts I’ve written over the years, it seemed like a good idea to see how I feel about the adapting process while continuing my goal of writing a flash fiction piece each week. This is largely a test to see if I’ll adapt more pieces in the future.

Two New Blog Posts

The Time is Now documents where I’m currently at in my writing and the rationale behind switching from screenwriting to narrative prose.

Writing for Flow talks about some of the processes and structures I’ve put in place to ensure minimal disruptions in the writing process.

taskwarrior and timewarrior

I predominantly write at a Linux terminal. This is part of my attempt to minimize disruptions in the writing process. I also like minimal systems to keep track of what I’m doing and how much time I’ve spent on each task.

taskwarrior is a highly functional task list application. I’m using it largely as a source of truth for the projects I’m currently working on. At any point I can bring up my task list and see at a glance what needs to be worked on.

timewarrior is time tracking software. This ties into taskwarrior and can be configured to automatically start tracking time whenever a taskwarrior task is started. I like time tracking as it’s a measurement to see how I’ve performed in the past and to extrapolate how long something new might take me in the future.

Template Repository

I’ve taken a lot of tools from my life as a software developer into writing. Version control using git and source code hosting sites are major ones that I’ll elaborate on my usage more in the future.

I have a consistent, basic structure for my writing projects that includes Makefile tasks and pre-commit tasks for automatic clean up and formatting.

Since I tend to follow the same basic requirements and structure for each project, I’ve created a template of that structure and saved it as part of a repository that can be reused and updated as necessary.

It saves me the repetition of setting things up from scratch or copying and pasting for each new project.

Created xq Tool

As I discuss in the Writing for Flow blog post, one of my tools for minimizing the disruption of writing is to drop questions or ideas separate from the current line of thought inline, using the Markdown checkbox (- [ ]). This ensures that questions and notes are captured without breaking my writing flow or requiring large context switches.

xq is a small command line application written in Go that extracts these questions out of a document for me. The default behaviour is that it will extract the questions from a specified input file and append them to a file called open_questions.md in the same directory.

It supports custom input and output files, as well as a flag to keep the questions in the original file while marking them completed (- [x]).

It is a minimal tool created to handle a specific problem.