My Actifit Report Card: April 16 2021

Today was generally unproductive. I spent a lot of time doing planning for Aspects of Sand and did some more work on the short story I started yesterday. But I still have a lot of further stuff to do on both, and I just didn’t get as much done as I’d hope.

To be fair, some of it was me being in a mood today. It was a creative time, but also one where I wasn’t able to focus on things and kept getting images. That’s the wrong way of describing it, since I’m not a visual thinker, but I definitely got the right stuff to help me finish that short story through figuring out what needs to happen throughout the story.

I’ve noticed that I think in craft terms a lot more than I used to, and I’m now thinking about my own writing in the same way that I would have thought about the writing of the authors I taught kids about. That’s a good place to be, especially when I can be sufficiently detached from the characters and events to assess them from the perspective of an average reader.

One part of this is thinking about the significance of how the characters act. For instance, in the short story the protagonist accidentally kills someone and doesn’t bat an eye at it.

What does that mean?

Well, it’s part of a complex web, and it interacts with everything else the reader knows about the character. He’s already admitted to having a background that should have kept him out from the space station where the events are taking place.

But we also know that he loves a woman, or at least professes to do so. He’s not purely malicious, yet he’s a force of destruction.

As the story unfolds, he undergoes a sort of apotheosis, becoming a destructive force that may not need a malevolent nature in order to change the world for the worse. He frees his lover, but is so heavily transformed by his experiences that he cannot be free himself.

The twist is that he may have already been transformed at the opening of the story. Perhaps he was not so much corrupted as already gone?

I also got my first COVID shot today. My arm’s a tad sore, but I haven’t noticed anything else outside the ordinary. We’ll see how it feels tomorrow and after that.

This report was published via Actifit app (Android | iOS). Check out the original version here on actifit.io

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