I’ve been putting a lot of hours into the big “secret” project lately, and it’s been interesting — I’m wearing a lot of hats right now, and I am not sure which of them count as ‘writing.’ I’m a (hopefully not the sole) webdesigner on various project sites, including a fair amount of hacking at WordPress; I’m going to have to teach myself WordPress Template tags to properly design the “tourist bureau” website. I’m working as a people wrangler, trying to gently nudge all the (so far) unpaid contributors to our project in the direction of contributing. I’m networking with musicians, artists, writers, and other new potential contributors. I’m creating blog posts and twitter tweets by people that don’t exist, and planning for future story arcs using both these media plus more conventional ones.
In the past my personal definition of writing would slip a little depending on my activity levels. Of course it’s all writing, but if I’m writing personal blog entries every single day and never working on my fiction it doesn’t really further my writing career. On the other hand, if I’ve been really blocked for weeks and I manage to cough up a personal entry in the midst of a writing drought then I am sure to pat myself on the back for doing good writing.
With this project, it’s all new and experimental for me, and for all of us involved. It all has to count because we’re not sure which bit of writing will grab that key fan, which improvisational twitter writing will spawn the next story arc, or which viral marketing will suddenly spread like wildfire. With that said, I need to make time for my non-project writing soon, including that overdue reread of Honeycutt Tales and a bunch of other smaller personal writing projects.
