Rough Draft - Blog Posts

Last night, after work I ran downstairs with my 8ft of strung beads, 7 silver rings, medium weight cord and a box of safety pins to try and figure out the proportions of the 7th house lung necklace.

And I created a monstrosities that would have turned off any shabari enthusiast and horrified any punk.

But after an hour of fiddling, I created this.

Which allowed me to create this

The first colum is the label for each strand so I don't get confused. The second colum is the number of beads in each stand. As measured by a single strand of size 11 seed beads. And the third colum is that length in centimeters. It turned out that there are 20 size 11 sead beads in 5 centimeters so the math was easy.

I also created the strand with a 5, 10, and 20 could pattern so they would be easy to count.

Anyways, I did some math the sum of one side of lung is 259.75cm so the whole thing will be 519.5cm or a little over 5 meters....

I'm very excited!

ROUGH DRAFT chronic illness and insomnia

You can't sleep lying on a nail bed. The spikes digging into you. If you lay properly, it distributes all your weight. One wrong move and you're in agonizing pain. You roll around all night, trying to get one minute of rest.

You wake up after trying to sleep for hours. They ask you why you're so tired. No one sees the spiked bed, only you.

ROUGH DRAFTS

Rough drafts of art I hope to make into stickers and prints. The insparation is beams of light, chronic pain, love, and hope. I want a contrasting primary colors of midnight blue, blinding white, bright red, and shining yellow

Top drawing: representation of my heart palpitations

Bottom left: migraines so bad you feel like an egg being cracked open

Bottom right: my girlfriend is a beam of light in the life of chronic pain and illness

WHAT TO DO AFTER FINISHING A FIRST DRAFT.

Revise a different draft.

Write a new piece.

Read a craft article. (LitReactor.com is pretty good!)

Read a short story or book.

WHAT YOU SHOULDN’T DO AFTER FINISHING A FIRST DRAFT.

Revise it.

WHY NOT?

You have to be as detached from a draft as you possibly can when you polish it. You have to be able to trim the fat from your baby and take out all those words, sentences and fragments that are stopping it from being a great story. I’m sure those words you used are beautiful and they sound amazing, but if they’re stalling the plot they have to go.

HOW DO I KNOW WHAT TO KEEP AND WHAT TO THROW AWAY?

Read! The best way to know what a perfectly paced story is like is to read one. There’s no black-and-white, two-plus-two way to answer this, but this is what works for me:

Avoid adverbs, those words that tend to end in -ly.

Keep descriptions to a minimum. People are interested in your story. If they want to see what a place or person is like they go to Google images. If they come to you it’s because they want to be entertained.

Change passive voice sentences to subject-verb-complement sentences. You will get the same idea across in less words.

FINAL TIP

Try not to make changes on your first pass! If your word processor has a comment function use that to write the changes you need to make. If you read and edit at the same time you’ll be doing two things at once and you’ll get tired much quicker.

FINAL FINAL TIP

Enjoy yourself! You’re an artist. Write and revise for yourself. Love it.