Writing Hoky Poky

You put the right foot in you put the right foot out you put the right foot in and you shake it all about. You do the hoky poky and you turn yourself around. That's what it's all about... (History: Written By: Roland Lawrence LaPrise, concocted the song along with two fellow musicians in the late 1940s for the ski crowd in Sun Valley, Idaho. The group, the Ram Trio (with Charles Macak and Tafit Baker), recorded the song in 1949, and they were awarded U.S. copyright in 1950, Acuff-Rose Music Inc.) I used to love to do the hoky poky...on roller skates. I shook my booty to this song all the time. Of course, I lived at the roller skating rink and they finished every session with the hoky poky. As much as I loved doing the hoky poky on skates, I don't like doing it with my writing. My alpha smart cable's been acting up again..bad alpha smart cable! Bad bad cable. Again I had a lot of information trapped in my alpha smart trying to figure out how to get it untrapped for the past few days. I'm an impatient type and I hate to stop writing and fall behind, so I tried to bravely forget ahead with my wip. Now of course, I didn't have a couple sections of the story downloaded to my laptop where the rest of the story is, and so I couldn't read back in a linear progression...so I ended up rewriting parts in different ways without realizing it. I'm getting confused which parts I wrote, which parts I only thought about writing. Last night, after buying a new USB port for the cable, it still wasn't working, so hubby squeezed the other part of the cable (I don't know if he did it originally on purpose or by accident) but it worked to finally we were able to upload the data from the alpha smart to the computer. Hooray! But... As happy as I am to have the rest of the story, now I have to cut and paste and figure out where the parts go since I went ahead. It feels like I'm doing some jumbled version of the hoky poky and it's worse than falling on my bum on roller skates. I hate it when I get myself mixed up like this. It's not the first time and I'm sure it won't be the last. It's not always because of alpha smart problems. I'm sure at least one person out there is thinking, why do I keep bothering with my alpha smart after all this? It's still a very handy dandy helper when working properly. I carry it with me to the daughter's ball games so I can work those 2 or 3 hours while she plays and not lose that time. I don't have to retype the story when I get home (that's if I write by hand). My laptop won't hold a charge for even half an hour anymore so there's no point in carrying that anywhere without electricity. I also write a lot at the bookstores, but some days I can't get a chair near the power outlet so I also take my alpha smart just in case so I can write from any chair. I just can't edit that way, but fresh writing works. I segued. So getting back to my original premise, I got all mixed up again (yeah yeah, for those of you who know me well, that's no big surprise) and now I'm trying to untangle the mess. If you happened to notice my wip progress widget in my blog sidebar, it's not moved in several days. I actually ended up losing word count after all this. I think I have better word count now, but I'm moving backwards not forwards even though I wrote at least twice the word count that widget shows. I usually plow right on ahead and then go back and edit, but I had no choice this time but to rigorously cut at this point as I'd repeated two scenes. [Well, as usual I'm writing this post in advance (it's the only way I can keep up with this and ensure a daily post) so I hope by the time this post airs, I'll have a lot more than 2,000 words out of the 15,000 I need. We'll see.] Ugh! I hate hate hate when this happens! Then again, this business isn't about who gets the most word count. It's about the best story so I have to be ruthless slice to the heart of the story. Right? All the reader cares about in the end is a great story. But I thought some readers might be interested to know a behind the story, story. And I wonder how many other writers ever have the same thing happen. You'll also want to see what Amarinda Jones, Anika Hamilton, Anny Cook, Barbara Huffert, Brynn Paulin, Bronwyn Green, Dakota Rebel, Kelly Kirch, Molly Daniels, Sandra Cox, Regina Carlysle, and Cindy Spencer Pape are up to, so make sure to visit them also. :)