Writing!

One of the assignments for my writing class is to write in a journal for a half hour every day six days a week. Right now the instructor (Dan Barden) doesn't care what we write about, the idea is just to get in the habit. I have done pretty well sticking to this except for Sunday, when I wrote for 15 minutes and then allowed myself to get dragged off into gaming.As part of this writing, I did some thinking and rethinking of some of my character names, spelling, etc. for my novel. A birch Dryad formerly known as "Etha" (which I wanted to change because it is too simliar to the main character "Elma") Will probably now be known as "Bethris" or "Bethrys."I also divided the novel into six "books" and am thinking that once I finish this round of edits, I may send it to my readers in six pieces with a little time in between, so I can take a couple weeks to review the next section before sending it out.Most of the other writing I have done is pretty random, though I am finding it useful because I manage to write down ideas or thoughts that I might otherwise forget. I hope that I can start channelling this daily writing into something more useful, but for now, at least I am getting in the habit.I have kept writing journals sporadically since high school, but sometimes go months without writing in them, and other times jot thoughts or ideas, or write whole multi-page rants about something.I would like to update this journal more often and also to read others' journals and comment, because I would like to make contact with more writers out there. It is completely my fault that I haven't because I have not devoted much time or energy to this. The trouble is, with eight hour days of teaching, commuting, and then getting home and still having emails to answer, editing, journal writing for my class, writing letters of recommendation for students, etc., I am finding myself low on time.I think that I can help this by writing things in my journal for class sometimes that can be transcribed here, to save having to reinvent my thoughts.