Trunking It

The fabulous Bluestocking has a post up today about her decision to trunk a story.

She writes,

This was a tough decision for me. I’m not one to give up easily. I do think any idea can be salvaged. But that still doesn’t mean something is publishable, or a least publishable in the way I want it to be. Or that the time spent fixing the story isn’t better spent on writing new ones.

The entirety of her post - which has amazing advice in it about why you might consider the trunk and how to know when it's time - had me cringing and nodding in sympathy. I just retired the first story of 2012, which was also one of the first stories I wrote a few years ago when I decided to take a serious stab at writing.

The first time I wrote it, it was a flash piece (based on a dream, I might add). It always bugged me that I couldn't place it. It bugged me even more that there was something about it that just didn't feel right.

This year, short on ideas for Write 1, Sub 1, I decided to take a stab at rewriting it, from scratch. This second effort was much longer. It had more developed characters. I introduced an amazing grandmother character. I cooked up a central romance that was sweet and endangered. The main villain got a fair shot at redemption. The tentacles were writhing. I sent it out a couple of places, but gee if I didn't still think - sorry, know - that there was something essentially wrong with the whole thing. Probably that same thing was wrong when it was a flash piece.

I'm not sorry I tried to rewrite it. It was a good lesson. I didn't have a clear idea of any changes I wanted to make to the original story. "More detail" was how I approached the rewrite, but I laid that detail out on the same skeleton as the original piece.

The bottom line for me is that I don't want to fool myself into sending something out when it's got my Spidey Sense tingling. If it doesn't feel right, I might not be able to put my finger on it, but I would rather put my efforts behind a piece I believe in. Other shorts I've written this year have come together in a much more felicitous fashion. I couldn't necessarily put my finger on why they work and this other piece doesn't. I don't think a writer always knows, either. There are plenty of pieces that I am not sure about that I send out anyway. Sometimes that works out, and the story becomes brilliant in my mind in retrospect. (Yes, because someone else liked it. I am sometimes shallow.)

It's just that when there is that feeling that something is missing or lacking, that there is something about a piece that gives me the hinks, I would rather put it aside.

Broken Realities and Other Delights

Source: Want to go halfsies or third-sies on this apartment?

My imagination likes to linger in certain places. This past month I've been returning to certain themes in much the same way that a tongue returns to the empty socket of a tooth that's been pulled.

In more than one story I've included tentacles, realities that bleed into each other, demented mentors, primal religious impulses, gleeful hedonists, and practical jokes.

In the coming month I'm anticipating stories about alien encounters and underprepared persecutors.

What's punching its way out of your brain these days?

Research Heaven at the Internet Archive

Writers and readers of breadth and depth, do you know about the Internet Archive? 

I discovered the archive a while back when I was looking for online copies of obscure Renaissance plays. The archive is, in my opinion, exactly what the internet should be: an endless stream of videos of baby animals a place where libraries can store their stuff so everyone has access to it. The Archive is multi-media: you can find films and audio there as well as books. Through it I found Nina Paley's amazing animated film Sita Sings the Blues, which she has since made available on YouTube. Even the tiniest poke around the Archive's music collection produces incredible gems like this 1920 recording of Lucille Hegamin.

If you like ephemeral films, like those old chestnuts made in the 1950s and 60s about the right way to do just about anything, and the horrors that will happen, say, for example, if a twelve-year-old becomes president if you don't think manners are important, you will find boundless fodder for your entertainment.

And then there are the books.

Many libraries have donated copies of books that are copyright free. That means there is an enormous collection of books from centuries past. In my experience, one of the best ways to get a fresh perspective on the past or to get out of a present-day mindset is to read something written by someone not of today. Example: this week I was playing around with the idea of alien visitation in past eras. I thought about the witch craze of the new world in the late 17th century, and needed a perspective from that period. Voila: Cotton Mather's diary.

You can read original scans of Archive books on your computer in a handy flip book format, but there are also digitized versions for ebooks. The usual problems with ye olde typefaces and OCR software apply (long "s" scans as "f", some letters squished together because of old typesetting practices scan as weird letters). In other words, the digitized versions are not error-free, but they are all open access.

Enjoy, and mind your manners!

How I Wrote 100k in 30 Days Despite Knowing I Couldn't

There's been a lot of chit chat in the writeosphere recently about increasing output and speed. If you haven't read it already, Rachel Aaron's post on going from 2000 to 10 000 words per day is well worth checking out.

Why is speed good? Jay Ridler has some thoughts on how speed is productive when it comes to writing fiction, although not necessarily when it comes to other types of writing. As he experimented with writing a story a week and other challenges, he notes, "'Fast writing' turned my enthusiasm into work, and over time, I got better and sold more as I got more and more stories out and into publication and, hopefully, improved my game." On the topic of shooting for a 10,000 word day, Zoe Winters writes, "I want to be prolific. Not because I want to produce shit, but because I want to stop wasting my work time and actually work during my work time." Amen, sister. (p.s. the next day she totally did it.)

In today's market, speed is advantageous because we are in many ways entering a new pulp era. Okay, there is less actual pulp, and more digitization, but books and magazines have never been so ubiquitous and cheap and often awesome. Getting your name out there has to be as much about the sheer volume of work you have in circulation as it is about that one great story or novel that you wrote last year, or about pimping the work you do have out.

For these reasons and more, I've been interested in boosting my speed for quite some time. In November I had what I can only describe as a massive creative breakthrough, which was accompanied by a massive speed breakthrough. Here is what happened. I hope you can take something from it that's useful for you.

THE SET-UP
I wrote a novel in November. Not half of a novel, not a novella: a novel. 100,489 words. I finished the story arc, I fleshed out the main characters, I know what the story is about, and the plot makes sense: not bad for a first draft. These were the tools and preconditions that went into making that happen.

NaNoWriMo. I like big challenges. I am an extrovert, so it helps me to know that I'm virtually and literally surrounded by writers all moving toward a common creative goal. My NaNoWriMo regional chapter is full of amazing writers. As always, the social element of November helped keep me motivated.

Planning, but not too much planning. I used Lani Diane Rich's schematic, the Seven Anchor Scenes, to plan the first three major turning points of my story before November began. Once I knew where I needed to be, writing became a matter of leapfrogging to the next major turning point. At the beginning of November I knew how my novel would end, but only a little bit about what would go on in the middle or how the climax would shake down. I figured that out as I went.

Training. I spent most of 2011 writing short stories. I didn't quite make the Write1, Sub1 weekly challenge - okay, not by a long shot - but I did write a whole bunch of new stories. I know a few novel writers who eschew writing short stories, but for me, practicing the structure of beginning, middle, and end over and over really helped me when it came to writing a longer narrative. Simply put, I got better at connecting cause and effect in a logical way. That skill helped me immensely in November.

Stickers. You read that right. This tool is 100% about appealing to my inner kid. Most of the time, I get a sticker on my calendar for every day that I accomplish two goals: I have to read some fiction by someone else, and I have to write, edit, and/or submit something. During November, I suspended the "reading" rule and promised myself a big sticker on every day that I contributed to my word count.

NOVEMBER
I didn't tell anyone that I was attempting the 100k challenge. I downloaded lovely NaNo word count wallpapers from Kiriska's Deviantart files and put the 100k version up on my computer, but that was the only outward sign of my secret challenge.

I didn't make myself any promises. I thought, let's try this out. I knew I could write 3334 words in a day. I didn't believe that I could do that every single day for 30 days: in fact, I would have said that I knew it was impossible for me.

I didn't think about possibilities or my capabilities. I thought about my story and I thought about the scene or scenes I planned to write that first day. I did allow myself to fantasize, just a little bit, about writing a complete story arc in one month.

I started strong. Day one, I wrote 3714 words. By the end of day two, I had 7604 words. Day three, 11,957. Day four, 13,599. At that point, I had something going on: I had a sticker chain. Four stickers, a stick man saying "Nice Work," a couple of planets, and a stick girl saying "Super!" Day five, I put up a cute dog sticker and had 16,725 words. Something magical happened: I was loathe to break the sticker chain. There was no way I was not writing from that point on. The momentum was rolling, and I went with it.

I wrote fairly consistently, though not to a punitive degree. Some days my schedule was more conducive to writing than others. On the 12th of November I wrote a mere 545 words. On many days, I balanced lower word counts by writing 4k or more. In the end, I averaged 3350 words per day.

I shirked responsibilities and commitments. I shuffled my schedule and I deprived myself of sleep. Anything I could put off, I did. "I can do that in December" became my mantra. When I absolutely needed sleep, I took it in naps in the afternoon, traditionally my least productive time of day.

I did most of my writing between the hours of 9pm and 2am. I found that producing massive word count really depended for me on knowing there would be no interruption, and that however long it took, I would not be disturbed.

I should add here that I work part-time and most of my work is in the evening and on weekends. I am also a night owl. I do not think that I could have written quite this much if I had full-time work to attend, but who knows? There are ways to carve out more time than I did. I did not personally resort to using paper plates or eating takeout exclusively, but it could be done.

I passed the 50k mark sometime in the wee hours of the 16th of November. Hitting half of my goal at the halfway point of the month was a huge boost. I won't lie: I was tired. I felt and looked like twenty miles of bad road. But I was doing so much! I knew I could keep going.

The further I went, the fewer things I did other than write. In the latter half of the month, housework, any outside responsibilities that I could pass off onto someone else, and socializing went right out the window. Beyond basic self care and walking the dog, I was dead to the world. I was tired, but it was awesome. It felt amazing to make writing the centre of my life.

It took a good solid five days into December before I started to feel human again. But boy oh boy, did hitting that 100k mark ever feel good, as did writing the final scene of the novel. I still get a charge out of looking at my calendar page for the month:

In the end, I think basically I hypnotized myself through a combination of stickers and getting a strong start. After years of playing with different types of outline, I happened upon a minimal structure that encouraged maximum output without strangling my muse. I didn't limit myself by thinking about the challenge or how hard it was. I just carried on forward. I should probably add that I liked my idea, I was playing in a research area that I know backwards and forwards, and I have some substantial emotional investment in telling the kind of story I was writing. If any of those tricks works for you, I would be delighted to know.

WHAT'S THE FREQUENCY, KENNETH?
Yes, Sally? I see you've got your hand up. What's that? Lots of writers say that the faster you go the crappier your writing will be?

Well, Sally, I've got a hypothesis for you: that's just wrong. Before you get all up in arms, allow me to demonstrate. Writing 10 or 20 words a day would not be productive or quality-inducing for most people. Unless you have superhuman powers of concentration in between writing sessions, 50 words a day would just result in choppy prose with compromised continuity. Writing 100 words a day, ditto, unless you're writing all Drabbles, all the time.

It is simply untrue that writing more slowly is more productive or more conducive to excellence. What people mean when they make this claim is that writing a certain number of words per day - whatever that number is for them - is conducive to excellence for them. No one can say what your optimal writing frequency is, except you.

For me, the NaNoWriMo standard of 1667 wpd was not enough. I lost traction on my previous NaNoWriMo efforts because I wasn't writing enough stuff in the course of a day. Pushing the speed on a long project was the key to producing a higher quality, coherent first draft. Each day I wrote, I knew I was going to be hitting a scene where something major happened. When I was going for 1667 wpd, that wasn't always the case. Those major events helped focus my daily writing. In terms of the big picture, writing full tilt for a month allowed me to keep the whole thing in my head. Even now, two weeks after the end of November, I have a clear picture of how I will need to add to, subtract from, and tweak what I've got to make it work in second draft.

The key is finding your frequency. What is your magic number, the raw word count value that will maximize your enthusiasm for your story? As it turns out, mine is a lot higher than I thought. I would like to propose that you will never find out your own magic number unless you try for a run of larger numbers than you usually write.

It may be that your ideal frequency is on the low side. Sarah Van Den Bosch, after learning that Graham Greene wrote The End of the Affair in 500-word daily chunks, restricted her writing to 500 words a day precisely. She concluded,

Forcing yourself to stop before you feel you’re finished keeps you thinking about the story and when you’re thinking about your story, you can’t help but to keep pushing it forward even if it is only in your mind. Not only that, but I found myself scrutinizing more over word choice. What would be the best fit for that sentence? Is that really what I want to say?

The key here is to find the number of words that helps you continue to think about the story in between your writing sessions. It could be that for you, like Sarah Van Den Bosch, 500 words per day is enough to keep the story alive in your mind. For me, the number is higher.

History and Story

If you squint really hard, you can see Gozer standing at the top.
(Source)

I've been thinking about the relationship between history and fiction this week, especially thanks to a post by Eileen Wiedbrauk over at Speak Coffee to Me.

As a former literary scholar, I have a strange relationship with history. I've played in archives. I've held 400 year old manuscripts in my hands (and been dismayed as tiny bits crumbled off the edges, but shhh...no one was supposed to know about that). But any research I did into history was always performed not in order to discover facts or truths about the past, but to help me understand literature better. Why did people write what they wrote? That was what I was seeking to understand. When you study literature, it's always in service of interpretation, rather than cold hard facts.

So when Eileen complained about the intrusion into a perfectly decent witch / vampire / time travel novel she was reading of "passages where it feels like the author stopped writing a novel, and started writing a paper," it really got me thinking. What is the ideal relationship between history and fiction?

Here's my tentative theory. Only a history buff is going to care if you get the little picky details right, or which version of "the facts" you decide to use in your story. As a reader, I am much more interested in how you use history to engage me in your story. To that end, it matters way less to me that the history is accurate or even remotely true than how that history plays out in the novel.

The last two novels I've read have been ghost stories. One was The White Devil by Justin Evans and the other (which I'm in the middle of, and totally in love with) is Audrey's Door by Sarah Langan. Both feature main characters who perform historical research in their efforts to figure out why they are being haunted. I recommend both, but my point here is that these books have complex relationships with history.

In The White Devil, Evans draws on a couple of different interludes in the biography of Byron - yes, the poet - to create a quite creepy ghost. He confirms that Yes, All that Stuff about Byron Is Really True in an article on his website, but qualifies that immediately: "Or most of it." I'm trying to avoid spoilers here, but Evans makes it quite clear that he has mashed historical figures together with his school experiences in England in service of his story. In other words, he's painting with history rather than sticking pedantically to the "truth."

Sarah Langan takes the use of history a step further in Audrey's Door, a book that features a building that seems designed to hold disturbing energies. As far as I can tell, she pretty much made up a style of architecture for the novel (a satanic style, no less). Like Evans's website, the site for Audrey's Door offers up some historical backdrop. Chaotic Naturalism sounds like a valid name for a style of architecture, doesn't it? The article I've linked to there even appears researchy, and goes so far as to offer a small bibliography. Some of the links are real; but the relationship between these slices of history and the history constructed in the novel is ephemeral at best. There are hints of intersections with reality. On another page, Langan mentions "Medium and Occultist Helena Blavsky," a clear riff on the name of Helena Blavatsky, co-founder of the spiritualist group The Theosophical Society. This is not history: it's a super-clever riff on history.

(The links to Ivan Reitman's and Harold Ramis's IMDB pages, contained in the bibliographies, are clever - who ya gonna call? I see what you did there, Sarah.)

In the book itself, Langan has constructed an impressive array of faux-historical documents as background to the story. Each one of them builds tension. Each one could have been taken from the pages of an academic journal or a newspaper. If some of them were real, I wouldn't be surprised at all.

Do you see how brilliant this is? By nestling her novel's history in real world history, Langan has freedom to create story elements that suit her needs, but still feel real. She's obviously done her research, but she's used it  for inspiration rather than staying wedded to it.

Genius!

Short Stories for Your Edification and Entertainment

We all know that reading is one of the cornerstones of good writing, right? And we all want to suck less, right? And we all know that writing short stories is a great way to get a lot of practice with all the stages of writing in a compressed manner, right? Obviously, reading short stories is key. Plus it's way, way less depressing than reading the news these days.

Here are some of the stories I've been looking at recently. This post is also a sly way for me to point a couple of new / new to me short fiction markets I've discovered.

Fellow Crusader Eileen Wiedbrauk of Speak Coffee to Me recently published her Rumpelstiltskin-themed story, "Garbage-to-Gold Spindle -- On Sale Now!" in Enchanted Conversation. It's funny, a little bit sad and mostly epistolary - really great stuff. Go read it immediately! I am slowly working my way through the other stories and poems in this issue of EC. I think this magazine is filling a very important niche in the fantasy market. They are doing good stuff. They've got a Rapunzel-themed contest starting April 1, so if you've written or would like to write a juicy maiden-in-the-tower story, now is your time!

"Don't Move a Muscle, Mr. Liberty" by Jordan Ellinger and "Aliens, Eh?" by Laura Lee McArdle (props for the ultra-Canadian title, Laura Lee!) are two pieces in the fairly new online magazine AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review. Ellinger's piece is still turning in my mind hours after I first read it - it's one of those that stays with you as you contemplate its possibilities. Neither are what I would call hard science fiction at all. The submission guidelines state, "We publish exclusively science fiction, though our interpretation of the genre can be quite inclusive." I'd say they're as good as their word on that. I'm excited about this magazine, especially since I'm Canadian. They do publish authors from elsewhere, but their mandate is to support Canadian writers, so if you're a fellow Canuck, this is good news.

Developing Likable Characters: How Weird Can They Be?

Meet Mark Moffett:

Looks like a nice enough fellow, doesn't he? In fact, based on what I've gathered from his YouTube video, Mark Moffett is a lovely man. He's got a variety of traits that you might include if you wanted to build a likable fictional character. He's intelligent - in fact he's got a PhD. He's interested in communicating his experiences to a larger audience, so you could say he's generous. He's got a sense of adventure: He has travelled widely and studied abroad. He has a community of friends and colleagues willing to cheer him on through his achievements. He's an ecologist by profession - so he's trying to save the earth! And he cares about animals. You could say he really cares about animals.

Ever since I listened to this interview with screenwriting and video game consultant David Freeman, I've been thinking about the importance of building likable characters in my fiction. Freeman has created a system called "Emotioneering," designed to allow a film audience or a video game player to become immersed in the story through an emotional bond formed with the main or point-of-view character. In that interview, Freeman discusses some of the traits of bond-worthy characters: loyalty, independence and longing are a few. He's written a book that includes many more techniques.

I struggle with this concept, frankly. I like writing characters who are difficult, and not in a cute way. I like thinking about people who think differently, who are outside the pale of what's commonly considered "normal." In one short story that I vetted with an online group, my main character was a gay man who had been mercilessly bullied through his high school years. He still bore the scars and resentment from that time. He was a wounded guy, and not a nice guy, but he was no villain - in itself a miracle of sorts, and a testament to his strength. The story was about how he got a chance to see exactly where the habit of bullying took his high school enemy (not a nice place).

To my way of thinking, the story was about cycles of abuse and taking on the pain that others inflict on you. It was also about the infectious nature of prejudice and hatred, and the insidious qualities of anger - most especially hard-won, righteous anger.

Most of the people who critiqued that story found my MC too bitter, too weird, too alienating. To me, he was a hero.

But back to Dr. Mark Moffett. There are a few things about him that I failed to mention, that to my way of thinking would make him an excellent MC, but some people might find alienating. It has to do with entomology. Specifically, a botfly. (Read only the intro on that wikipedia page and do not scroll down if you are easily grossed out. For the sake of those of you who are new here, I have put the details below the fold. For those who like being grossed out, carry on.

What Write 1 Sub 1 Is Doing for Me

Yippee! Skippee!

I joined the Write 1, Sub 1 Challenge sometime in mid-January, let's say sometime in the middle of week 3. It's now the end of week 6, and I wanted to share some thoughts about how doing the challenge has helped me.

Goal-setting is relatively ineffective for me. I tend to reach somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of any writing goal I set for myself. But joining a challenge and having some kind of external-to-me group to whom I can report? Much better. For example, this week I had a couple of different short story ideas, but both of them required research and were probably going to be longer pieces. I didn't do any writing on either of them, but I got some novel writing done while I was procrastinating, and I did think about them a whole lot. In an effort to get something submitted this week, I went back and edited a short story that's been sitting on my hard drive since October. And this afternoon, I decided I just couldn't let a week go by without at least making an attempt to produce a new short story. I drafted half of one today.

It was a productive week, in other words. Even if I didn't meet the challenge this week, I'll have a couple of pieces that will probably be ready to go for a first round of submissions by the end of next week.

And this is my main point: Write 1 Sub 1 has gotten my creaky submission process in gear. I will sometimes go through jags of submitting stuff, only to drift away from it later. But the idea of having to get a story in fighting shape, super fast, is helping me to see that doing so doesn't have to be a laborious, painstaking process. It can be a fun, roller coaster, extra super fast laborious and painstaking process.

For the first time in a while, I'm engaging a skill I learned in grad school: researching, composing and editing a piece of writing at high speed and with an eye to high quality. I know I can do this. And hey, there will be time for any further necessary revisions after the rejections roll in, right?

A bit of theory here: in The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron uses the metaphor of "filling the well" to argue that what we really need as artists is a source of images, experiences, or encounters with art in order to stimulate our process. Otherwise, we risk becoming drained or "empty."

Right now, I'm feeling like a different metaphor is appropriate. I'm finding that as I work to "empty the well" by using ideas and engaging in writing, editing, polishing and submitting, I'm giving room for more fresh inspiration to flow in. Instead of stale, stagnant waters, I've got fresh, spring-fed, bubbling coolness. There might even be the odd mysterious sea creature down there.

I'm looking forward to finding out.

Multi-Tasking

About a year ago, I took a community course for writers, which was basically a learn-to-critique-others course - a handy skill, indeed. The slightly unfortunate part of the course was that it took place in Burlington, which is a much less interesting, much wealthier, and much more WASP-ish town than the Hammer. I struggled a little bit with the sensibilities of some of the other course participants. (Okay, I struggled a whole heck of a lot with them. Basically, we're talking about people who for the most part seemed transported directly from the more conservative environs of Mad Men.) Even more than that, I struggled with the way a lot of them were approaching the act of writing.

Not the best choice of role models, but feel free to dress this well.

A lot of these good men and women had been labouring for some time on just one big project. For a couple of them, the twelve-week course I was a part of was their third time around with the same project. This was true for the woman writing the conceptually and stylistically impressive literary novel about the woman who had travelled to Northern Ontario to bury the body of her mother. It was also true of the woman writing the not-so-great novel about a woman finding love/potential rapists (I was never sure which it was) in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. And of the woman who was putting together a short story collection the theme of which was Christmas. They'd spent twenty-four weeks of workshop already on these things, and they weren't writing anything else.

Me, on the other hand: I was workshopping my not-quite-vampire WiP, while producing short story after short story and planning another novel. I wrote during the course, fresh stuff on the WiP. I polished (and published) a flash fiction piece sometime in the first week or two.

I knew from the beginning of the course that my writing was different. None of the other participants were doing genre stuff (unless you count YA, which I don't unless it's speculative YA), a fact that eventually caused me to ditch the course. It took me a few weeks in, however, to realize that I was approaching the entire task of writing differently. They were using slender razors to carve increasingly intricate patterns on the same piece of paper. I was using a shotgun to blow massive, unpredictable holes in the sides of any number of plywood shacks from week to week. My work was focused in all kinds of different directions. And there was no telling what beasts would come flying out when the walls finally fell apart.

The penny dropped when I brought part of a new short story to the group. "I'm amazed that you can work on more than one thing at a time," said a Serious Novelist. "I don't know how you do that."

I don't know that I've ever considered working only on one big thing at a time. In grad school, you can't. Even when you're writing your thesis, you're also teaching a class, grading papers, heading off to conferences, and trying to get published. While the topic areas on all these different projects might vaguely resemble each other,  you have to learn how to task switch to survive. As a freelancer, I'm aware that one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to put all of your eggs in one basket. To diversify across clients is to have a better chance of surviving if a client goes down.

In creative writing, I know I am still learning. I hope I never stop learning. And if I work exclusively on one big project, I'll miss out on the valuable experimentation and excitement of actually finishing something that I get from writing short stories. And if there's only one big project going on at a time, well, what am I going to work on if I get stuck?

Then again, I find that working on so many things at the same time can end up making me feel a little cuckoo. At least a couple of times a day, I wake up to the sudden realization that I've totally forgotten to work on a WiP.

I'm all like, "Gah! I haven't written a new novel chapter in a week! How am I going to get back into my plot?"

Or I'll check out the calendar and it will be "Yikes! I'd planned to submit a story somewhere by last Thursday! But I haven't decided which one yet!"

(I live this way too. Every day it's "Crap! It's 5:00 and I was supposed to pick up Dave at 5:00. Why didn't I leave the house yet?" This is an unfortunate side effect of multitasking.)

But I'm not alone in these habits. Eileen Wiedbrauk of Speak Coffee to Me writes,

I'm always working on ten projects.  I think that's a conservative yet realistic number for what I'm doing.  I have four novel projects on the "this year" list. Ha. Other novel projects are chillin in the bread box.  I'm writing one academic paper, editing another.  I'm actively editing two short stories, and I've got another few who are patiently waiting their turn.  And then there's the teaching projects.  So ten seems about right.

The end result is that it seems like nothing gets done.  I work bit by bit, accomplishing a little bit more on each task daily.  But then I get frustrated for not finishing--much like I get frustrated when I over task my computer and slow it down.

She suggests a solution:

I'm beginning to think I need to streamline my process more.  Multi-task less.  Produce more finished items rather than switching projects.

Amen to that. I always, always wish that I could see the end of some of my projects a whole heck of a lot faster. It seems that the ones I do finish always happen with a whiz-bang. No coincidence that I've finished more flash pieces than anything else in recent months. The light at the end of the tunnel is just that much closer when your word count limit is under 1k.

I guess I don't see changing my multi-tasking tendencies anytime soon, but I do think that for me, the key is patience. I'm hoping it will also help that I'm scheduling some time to finish pieces of writing on a more frequent basis - if only so I can remember how. 

For some writers and other work-at-home types, scheduling is key. Charity Bradford at My Writing Journey recently posted about working out a daily schedule as a way to make sure her needs as a writer and her family's needs get met. What I like about Charity's schedule is that she's partitioning time for social networking as well as raw word count. In other words, she's making sure that she stays in touch with her support group of online writers. She's also got exercise scheduled in there. That's genius, Charity. Because I teach tai chi and attend classes so I can stay on top of my game, I have exercise enmeshed in most of my days, but I find that I do need to pay attention if I'm going to get time to play outside - meaning hikes in the woods or at the local park with the dog. (You all are getting regular exercise, right?)

On the other end of the spectrum, Loralie Hall at Apathy’s Hero talks about the demoralizing effects of setting a schedule and realizing that it just isn't for you. Of course, if you're like Loralie and setting a blogging schedule means you actually end up rereading and editing a novel project, you basically win.

So I realize that "schedule" isn't quite the name for what I do. What I do is more like "make a vague plan and emotional commitment involving as many people as possible and potential public shame, then cram it in somewhere when you finally settle down to work." This style of scheduling works best when it's combined with a little bit of a relaxed sense of obligation to the outside world, a sense of space in the course of a day, a sense that I don't have to rush. Even if I'm doing a lot and I will, in fact, have to rush at some point, if I can achieve that relaxed state of mind, then writing is much more likely to happen.

Ultimately, I think managing my life as a writer is more about the inner game of writing than the external, time-slotting game. I want to be like Trisha Leaver, who seems to be some kind of task-switching prodigy:

Yesterday I was asked how I do it . . . how I can switch from one set of characters to another multiple times a day. My answer: Mental White Board.

I am insanely organized. I don’t have a date book or a wall calendar posted anywhere in my house, nor do I use my computers handy post-it reminder system.  What I do have is this huge white board in my head, one that not only keeps tracks of appointments and coffee-dates, but has character maps, plot lines, and red-line editing projects clearly drawn out. It is so vivid I can actually smell my imaginary sharpie marker.

When I move from one project to the next throughout the day, I simply shuffle whiteboards. . . toss one to the back while bringing another forward.

Brilliant!

I guess the bottom line is that you should do whatever keeps your hand moving, right? The thrill and promise of raw word count is great, as is the elbow grease required to get a manuscript from first draft to finished. And submitting I find weirdly satisfying. Although it is a struggle to get a story to the point where it's ready to go, it's worth it. As Misa Buckley, writing about the importance of audience, says:

unless my writing is read, then it's just words on a page. It doesn't live And I remain a writer.

So this is my belief. That writing doesn't matter, nor editing, nor subbing. Not even being published. It's not until someone picks up my book and reads it that I become an author.

Happy plotting, writing, subbing, and getting read, everyone.

Show Me Yours Blogfest: Excerpt from The Gift

My contribution to the Show Me Yours Blogfest is an excerpt from my 2010 NaNoNovel, The Gift (working title). 


A brief bit of background: Alex and Emma work at Outlaw Books. Together they talk pop culture, philosophy, and play a game called “it’s your turn,” as they dare each other to deal with the weirder customers the store always seems to attract. When Emma mocks a customer whom she and Alex have dubbed Johnny Brittle, she triggers an ancient curse that makes her a target for all things evil.


Emma isn’t alone in her new role as monster magnet. Alex is attacked in a park near Emma’s house by a man with tentacles for a face. Although Alex survives, he becomes physically ill after the attack. He asks Emma to help him get home, and to stay in his apartment overnight to make sure he’s okay. After she falls asleep on the couch, he wakes up to discover he isn’t okay after all. This scene takes place after he manages to stumble into the bathroom and turn on the shower.


“The school” is Alex’s name for his five pet fish.


Thanks for reading!


In the mirror, his face looked grey. His lips were white and dry. He stuck his tongue out. It was covered in a sticky white coat. He cleared his throat. Something was in his mouth. He reached in with his fingers and pulled out long cords of sticky mucus, dropping them into the sink.

He looked again at the elbow. The sharp edge of panic rose up in him. Was that something black, there in the centre of the wound? Congealed blood? Something else?

The steam from the shower was starting to fog the mirror. He stripped off his shirt and pants, and climbed into the shower.

The water on his face, all over his skin, felt better than it ever had. He opened his mouth to the stream. Hot water gushed in. He swallowed mouthful after mouthful as thirst hit him like a hammer. He reached around the shower curtain and grabbed the glass that sat on the edge of the sink. Filling it with hot water from the shower, he drank, then filled and drank again.

He felt his elbow. There was no wound at all there now. Had he hallucinated it? He scrubbed his face hard with both hands.

He picked up the bar of plain white soap and sniffed it. He needed to wash, but he felt reluctant to use the soap, almost repelled by it. He lathered it anyway and rubbed it under his armpits.

He stifled a scream as his hands, underarms and sides began to burn as if he’d applied acid to them. He rinsed off the soap, but the damage was done. All down both sides and on each hand, thick red welts appeared.

Despite the pain, he felt better than he had since before last night’s attack. Maybe a shower was all he’d really needed. He turned off the water and reached for a towel.

After gingerly patting himself dry, he used the towel to wipe the steam off the mirror. He was still pale, but there was a pink, well-scrubbed look to his face. The welts were already starting to go down. He wrapped the towel around himself and headed back to the bedroom to find some clothes.

In the living room, he paused. The gurgling sounds of the aquarium filter seemed too loud. He realized he hadn’t fed the school in a couple of days. He felt sure that he could cross the thick brown carpet of the living room and drop some fish flakes into the tank without waking up Emma. He held the towel for extra insurance and stepped carefully across the room. After he fed them, he watched the fish, the four orange ones and the black one, as they ate.

He loved that black fish, with its googly eyes and shiny dark scales. It always seemed so mellow compared to its faster orange buddies. Its plumed tail floated behind it as it swam up to the top, took a piece of food, and then returned for more.

Emma’s voice came from the couch. “Alex? What are you doing?”

He looked down at his hand. The black fish lay curled in his palm, flexing its small, muscular body, its round mouth trying to suck oxygen from the air. The lid of the tank was lying on the floor by the balcony door, five feet away.

He knew without a doubt what he’d been about to do: put the fish in his mouth and swallow it. He was so hungry. Only the tiniest part of him felt sorry about it.

Aiming High, Shooting for the Middle: New Year's Writing Resolutions

I hope everyone's doing well. If you're like my cat Ben and already tired of playing with your Christmas toys, well, it's time to face the new year.

Ben is not amused

                                                

Since 2010 was the first year in which I set - and actually attempted to meet - serious writing goals, it's interesting for me to look back and see how I did.

Some might say not great. I met not a single goal. But what do you care? I mean, my whole point was to write more, read more, and learn more about writing well. And that I did.

The way I figure it, if I met my goals, then that would be a clear sign that I didn't set them high enough.

Here's the good: I wrote consistently over the course of the year (meaning not every day, not even every week, but most weeks). I didn't do like I usually do and end up trying to cram a year's worth of writing in while I moan and cry and miss Christmas and make everyone around me miserable, most especially myself.

I abandoned projects that I thought were precious and great at the beginning of 2010. This, I think, is a by-product of writing more and editing more and striving to get some stories out there. When you see giant improvements in what you're writing, it's easy to let go of stuff you thought was great six months ago.

I also learned that I still need vacations from creative writing, despite the fact that I love it. I took a couple of weeks in September, and a couple more over Christmas - much-needed breaks from writing, the computer, and life stuff. I'd like to plan to do that in 2011, with less guilt and more glee.

But anyway, here are the stats on my goals and how it all shook out - images squicked from my 2010 Goals page at the Stringing Words forums.

I'm proud to note that this raw word count does not include blog posts, online articles, documents I wrote for clients, or any writing that was not creative in nature. That 205k figure includes the 64,211 words of novel draft (my NaNo novel). It also includes 71,254 words from a non-fiction project. I'm on the downhill slope on both of these! There were a bunch of short stories in there, too. A small extra effort in 2011 should put me over the 225k mark, but this goal is low enough that I can afford to slack here and there. Tally ho!

I'm least happy with my story submissions track record. I was going strong(er) at the beginning of the year, but totally petered out in early September. I know why.

Partway through the year, I suddenly figured out how to be a lot more objective about my own work. This led to a "my God, it's full of errors" near spiritual experience, which in turn led to procrastination. I could see how I could make some of my short stories a whole heap of a lot better, but I also felt overwhelmed by how much work I had to do on them.

On the plus side, two of those submissions, "Voop" and "The Bell," saw publication.

More submissions in 2011! My current stable of submissible stories is not super huge, maybe five or six stories. But 20 just seems like a sad number. I'm aiming for 52 again.

Oh, Revenant Army. This was a book I drafted 90 percent of in late 2009, in a frenzy of gotta-get-stuff-written, just before my mood crashed out and I downspiraled into an existential crisis of sorts, fueled by the realization that I needed a career change. Yikes. But the book had amazing stuff in it (I think!), including Victor Frankenstein, sasquatch (anyone know the plural of sasquatch? Sasquatches? Sasquaii?), and reanimated creatures galore! I still want to work on it.

I'm going to rewrite it in 2011.

Cosy Sexy Vampire was the working name of my 2009 NaNo novel. I had a great time writing it, and I do think there was good stuff in there. Now that I'm looking at this, I'm recalling that a good portion of my 2010 word count went toward drafting new material for this book. (This makes more sense - I didn't think I wrote 70k worth of  short stories in 2010!) It looks like I had just about a complete draft, in terms of sheer volume of words, but the book was a mess, and the characters ended up in some nasty places that I didn't think were all that sympathetic.

Sometime in January / February, a writing coach dude told me that vampires aren't marketable. At the time, I was sore about it, but in retrospect, I realized that, along with the rest of the world, I'm pretty sickened by the state of the vampire sub-genre today. I decided to let this one go.

I recycled the best characters and themes from this book in my 2010 NaNo. Or, in the words of Chris Kelworth, I allowed my "chimera-like creature to pick at the dead bodies" of my former works.

(Why did this image turn out so tiny?)

Sometimes people ask me if I've ever used the work I did on my PhD thesis to write fiction. The Medlar Tree was my attempt to do that, but honestly, my fiction writing skills were pretty shaky in 2008, plus I'd been thinking for so long about how to turn my research - on syphilis, plague, and early theatre - into a novel, well, by the time I finally got around to writing it, it all felt like too much pressure. Like way too eagerly anticipated sex, the execution was ultimately messy and disappointing. I might rewrite it someday, preferably long after vampires are no longer so trendy. Strictly speaking, this wasn't a vampire narrative. Non-strictly speaking, it was.

It's shelved until I can figure out how to do it right.

I'm pretty close to finishing this, a non-fiction book project based on some spiritual stuff I've been working on for a while. I've got a chapter or two left to go. I anticipate a second draft and an introduction coming in 2011. Productivity!

Done, and done!  I'll be putting this on the list again this year.

I read more than 26 books this year (pinky swear!), but I got unexcited about updating my progress. I'm pretty sure I didn't make it to 52, though. Probably I hit somewhere closer to 35 or 40. Which is dismal, really. I don't know. I've read some great books this year. Do I really need to track my reading?

Eileen at Speak Coffee to Me, who suggested the 52 book year in the first place, has produced an amazing series of posts on her year in reading. I am in awe. I want to go to there. It's on the list for 2011.

Bwahahahaha. I hear it's a good idea to have a completed book manuscript before you do this.

At least now I know that I don't really know how long it's going to take me to scrub a novel manuscript into decent shape. I plan to learn that in 2011. I'm hoping in the name of all that's holy that it doesn't take as long, proportionally speaking, as it takes to edit and polish a short story, because those take me forever. I suspect it's probably even more complex than editing a short story. I'm not thinking too hard about that, though, lest I slip into the Slough of Despond.

2011 Writing Goals:
Raw word count: 225 000
Story submissions: 52
Books read: 52
Finish (30 000 new words), edit, polish Tree Talk 
Finish (36 000 new words), edit, polish The Gift (working title, NaNo 2010)
Rewrite Revenant Army
Start a new novel, NaNo 2011

Whether you're setting writing goals or planning to wing it, I wish all of you writers a wonderful and productive 2011 that's filled with magic, revelation and gleeful pissant mischief. Oh, and laser eyes. Who doesn't want those?

Demonic possession, happiness - what's the diff?

The Fussy Writer's Guide to Making Time to Write, part 2

This is part 2 of a 3-part series. Part 1 is here. Part 3 is here.

So, let's say you're a fussy writer like me. You want to write a lot of the time, while having some time left over for other life pursuit type stuff, but you also have bills to pay.

Two words: marry rich.

Just kidding. (I am not totally kidding. If you find someone to love who can support you in your vocation/s, take them up on it.)

But okay, let's say that marrying rich is not an option. Here's the first thing you need to do:

Pare down your expenses to the lowest possible amount.

I'm talking about really looking at where your money is going. Shave your budget right down. Decide what you need and what you don't need. Second car? Get rid of it. You won't need to go anywhere: you'll be writing. New shoes? Buy them later. Clothes? Value Village, Goodwill, or some other discount store. Or, consider this: that old sweater you already own is perfect writing gear. No one is going to see you in the workout pants that have a hole in the knee.

Obviously, how you do this is up to you. Some expenditures will have obvious solutions. I traded my book purchasing habits for trips to the library: easy peasy. I planned major expenditures - car repairs, vet visits, dentist trips - such that they spread out over time, rather than clumping up in one month where their effects would be disastrous.

The big thing for me was groceries. In our household, my partner covers rent and utilities, and I deal with groceries, car insurance, basic car maintenance, and internet. Groceries were the biggest item on my list. They still are, since I'm not too willing to compromise on eating healthfully. But I did cut back on our bills by shopping almost exclusively from the perimeter of the grocery store - the dairy, bread, meat and produce sections - focusing on healthy, unprocessed food rather than prepared stuff. I had been doing this already, but I amped it up pretty extremely.

My point is that it's vital to cut back on all expenses if you want to live like a fussy writer.

Why?

Fussy writing is not about taking 15 minutes a day to try to squeeze in your writing dream. It's about great gouts of time that you can roll around in and play with and dream in.

If you want more time, the easiest way to get it is to cut back on the hours you work. Negotiate a day off. Move to part time. Move to a lower responsibility job. The bottom line here is, you need to make a change. Time is money, people. Less money earned equals more time.

Being frugal - as extremely as you possibly can - will allow you the freedom to write.

Maybe you're entertaining fantasies of J.K. Rowling-like success. That's totally fine. Entertain those fantasies all you want. The fantasies won't pay the bills. That novel you're writing, well, it might not either. But it definitely won't get written if you don't take the time.

Here's what I've learned in the last couple of years of actually writing: dreams of success don't even come close to the happiness you feel when you know you're making yourself into a better writer. Finishing a short story and submitting it is a great accomplishment. Drafting a novel, realizing it's horrible, and drafting another one is good, hard work. Learning new tricks and understanding more and more about how to make your writing better - that is where it's at. All of these things are so, so sweet, and all of them are only possible if you spend great gouts of time on your writing.

I have to admit I'm at an advantage here, although it probably won't sound like one. When I decided I was done with higher education, it was at the crest of the economic crisis (which, admittedly, seems to have continued cresting). I was not super employable, and there were no jobs, anyway. I learned to budget on no income to speak of, and I learned exactly how little I could get by on. I realized that a full-time job isn't necessary for me right now. I would imagine that many of my decisions would seem totally absurd to someone with a good job (or at least a job), but coming from the totally unemployed side, working part time looked great and not scary at all.

Since I've started to cobble together a living, I've found that it is totally possible to fit work into my life, not the other way around.

More on that in part 3.

The Fussy Writer's Guide to Making Time to Write, part 1

I am a fussy writer. I am also a fussy cook, a fussy walker-in-the-woods-avec-chien, a fussy meditator, and a fussy tai chi practitioner.

What I mean by "fussy" is that when I find something that I like to do, I want to do it right. I want to spend lots and lots of time doing it. I want to clear my schedule for that thing. I want to take my time. I want to treasure it. Otherwise, I find it difficult to focus, and I become a cranky jerk. I don't feel right about myself, or about other people. I become irrational. I lose it. It's indecorous.

When I decided to clear my schedule for writing, three years ago or so, I began to poke around looking for advice from other writers in my situation. I talked to friends about it. A lot of them were trying to skootch 15 minutes of writing into their week, or whatever. They were sad. They weren't really writing.

My martial arts background has served me well, in many ways. I know that you can't learn something by practicing it for 15 minutes once a week.

I wanted to find writers like the one I wanted to be, meaning writers who write all the time and still stay afloat financially without becoming super burned out.

I spent some time researching this. I looked into writer's blogs of various kinds. The successful ones mostly seem to have hatched from an egg with a contract with a major publishing company clutched in their yolky talons. When a well-established writer did talk about the days before he or she made it, the stories tend to be about slogging at a day job and crying into the keyboard while becoming increasingly sleep-deprived. While I respect and admire people who work at soul-grinding, mind-sucking jobs - or even just full-time, regularly tiring jobs - and then come home and still find time to write copious gouts, I just can't.

I'm getting old? I don't know if that's an excuse or a reason. I'm getting impatient is more like it.

With a little more research, I found some blogs by writers just starting out, who talked about freelancing to fill in the gap in income. Fortunately for some of these aspiring writers, they happened to be skilled in certain highly valued and well-paying areas that meant they could divide their time between writing and paid work and still make a good living. Unfortunately for me, my degrees are all in the arts. These days, let me tell you, it seems that nobody wants an English major. Especially not one with a PhD.

Ultimately, my goal was to create time to write, meet my financial needs, and allow me to feel like I still had some juice left over after I did work for pay.

Because there is a dearth of information out there about the seedier choices made by aspiring writers, and I am (pretty happily) living some of those seedier choices, I wanted to use the space of this blog to post about how I'm managing to stay afloat while still doing what I want.

I hope that parts two and three of this series will be useful to you, especially if you're facing a similar set of conundrums.

You're Not Going to Like It

Yesterday I was working on a scene in which a character has to tell another character some bad news. The exchange went something like this:

A: What about X and Y? What happened to them?
B: I can tell you that, but you're not going to like it.
A: Please, just tell me.
B: Okay. [And B goes on to tell what he knows]

I finished writing that, sat back, and thought, what the hell? That's terrible. No one says "You're not going to like it" in real life. Where did that come from?

The answer: TV.

Back in the 70s and 80s, if a TV writer needed to put characters in a dangerous situation, nine times out of ten he or she would slip some quicksand into the mix. Need to add an extra level of danger? Throw in a snake with that quicksand. It will make your upside-down rescue all that more impressive.



"You're not going to like it" is the new quicksand. It's a shorthand signal to the audience to gear up for some tension.

But like quicksand, "You're not going to like it" is rarely spotted in the wild. It's not something people say to each other.

Listen, if I'm telling you something you're not going to like, the last thing I'm going to do is flag it for you. If you're going to get mad at me, you're going to have to do it under your own power. Seriously, I've got something not nice to tell you? If it's my fault I might pretend it's okay and hope that you won't blame me. Or if it's someone else's fault, I'll drop it on you like an anvil and let you get mad if you're so inclined. Maybe I'm hoping you'll get mad. Maybe I'm telling you that thing you won't like on purpose, so that you'll be on my side and we can plan our vengeance together.

However it shakes down, I'm not going to tell you what to think.

Bottom line, "You're not going to like it" is bad dialogue. As a writer, you've got to have each character's perspective and personality in mind as you compose. This can be tricky, and it's good if you're making a character say something nasty, and it's great if you're thinking, "Oh man, A is not going to like what B's got to say." But don't make B say that. It's a poor attempt at manipulating the reader.