Month: March 2014

5 in the bag

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Getting my writing done in a crazy busy day like yesterday is a pretty significant accomplishment. Only 1100 words, but still ahead of schedule. More importantly, the siren’s call of laziness, sounding loudly by virtue of having filled my quota for the week before Friday even started, failed to pull me off course. So for my first week of the project, I met all my goals : 5 days of writing at 900 words a day, stayed on topic, even posted to the blog a few times.  The sweet, sweet smell of accomplishment. Smells like donuts. Is it donuts?

So now I get two days off. But percolating for the weekend is a Flash Fiction from Chuck Wendig. I am not sure yet if having little side projects will help or hinder the central project, but as long as the ideas keep coming, why not give it a spin?

There is also the issue of momentum ; I am saddled with fear that if I stop pushing, stop driving forward, that the tires will bog down in the mud and I will be discovered years from now, a dessicated skeleton lazily raising a cheeto to its mouth (the cheeto, I believe, would still be intact, crunchy, and delightful).

The same could be said for my running, which is currently in the ditch belching black smoke. A part of me fears that if I go too long without a run that I will never get back into it, so I keep pushing myself to get out there and in all likelihood I keep making my injury worse. But KEEP PUSHING OR ELSE YOU’LL BE FAT FOREVER so off I go and then a few hours later ohgodithurts.

Sharknado,  I just came a little close to psychoanalyzing myself. ALL HANDS ABANDON SHIP RUN FOR YOUR LIVES THE ABYSS IS HERE.
Ahem. Next post should hopefully be a Flash Fiction about time thieves.

BTW, words that the tablet did not want to let me write in this post: belching, dessicated, cheeto, sharknado, virtue, psychoanalyzing, fat, abyss, bog. Predictive typing, my assignment (yep, it just made that “correction” too). It’s like it doesn’t know me at all.

Braindisk

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No post yesterday, a bit of a let-down: it was a private goal, not a public one, to try to post a little something here every day.  However, to be fair, I do have a decent excuse.

I started this little project on a really terrible week to be taking on an extracurricular activity like my novel.  Our play is in production this week and I’m spending more hours at the school than I could really ever advise any teacher to spend.  This is affectionately known to theater-folk as “hell week”, and to non-theater-folk as “where the hell is my husband week.”  Lots of hours and mental stress make it a terrible time to be taking on anything outside the norm as far as responsibilities go, so choosing to start my novel this week was, um, let’s not mince words, a bonehead move.  Oh, I have this mountain to climb, why don’t I strap this big Goldfinger rock to my back.  Rock-carrying is a thing I’ve always wanted to do.

Regardless, I’m clipping along just fine.  Though I didn’t post, I did get my requisite writing done: 1600 words yesterday, and 1560 today.  I was expressing to my dear wife yesterday how I really don’t want to get boasty or braggy about making my word counts because I know that I’m coasting merrily along in the honeymoon stage where undertaking this thing still seems like a pretty good idea.  That will fade, and I am hoping that when they do I remember to have my dukes up so I can fight through it.  That said, it’s hard not to feel heartened by the progress I’m making.   I’ve got almost 7,000 words in the bag already, which, if we track our maths, is almost 10% of what I want to arrive at when all is said and done.  Again, that’s inflated, and I do not expect to keep up that amount of flow throughout the process, but it’s not bad for 4 days’ work.

I even got a run in yesterday morning, which is always nice for making me feel productive.  It rained on me a little bit, but that doesn’t bother me; in fact, at sixty degrees, a bit of rain on a run now and then is welcome.  Non-runners hear that and think, running’s bad enough in the first place, why make it worse by doing it in the rain?  Of course, many of us are simply broken individuals.  The stuff that most folks would never consider is the stuff that keeps us going.  It reminds me of Calvin’s dad:

calvinandhobbes

I miss that comic so much.

I even, while I was running, had an idea for another project.  It’s stupid.  I once had the big bang explained to me thus: all the matter in the universe collected in a big round disk like a pancake, and at the moment of explosion the matter spun out sideways, bits of stars and planets and galaxies flying off and glomming together as the gravity of the central mass just wasn’t enough to contain them.  In this metaphor my brain is the disk, spinning up to speed and throwing off all these ideas that I will never be able to recover or develop.  Still, better too many ideas than too few.

Going Strong and Extra Long

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I am not sure to what I should attribute my incredibly productive first few days, but I have been incredibly productive and it’s kind of awesome.  The Project is alive and on fire; it’s sprouting extra arms and heads and other appendages that I don’t have words for.  I know better than to think that it will be like this all the way through August, but for the moment, the tide is high and I’m riding that wave.  1600 words yesterday, 1800 words today.  It’s a damn good feeling, balm for my languishing writer’s soul, a cold beer on a hot day.

In my musings on the play as I left it many years ago, there were a lot of criticisms that sprung to mind.  The rambling nature of the way the characters speak for one, the deus-ex-machina-esque nature of the ending, the distinct lack of pyrotechnics.  One critique that never occurred to me, however, was not “he needs a love interest.”  There was simply enough going on in the play that it felt (to me) complete without one.  In the meantime, it was suggested by my dear wife that a love interest would serve the story well.

“Why,” I asked.

“It just does,” she said.

“Why,” I insisted.

“Girls like love stories,” she said.

That makes sense enough, I suppose.  She is a lot smarter than me, after all.  So I thought about how to make the love interest work within the scope of the play as it existed.  And it just didn’t work.  It didn’t make sense to me.  Couldn’t make it jive.  It became part of the reason, I suppose, that I fell away from the project and didn’t come back to it until now; it was a problem I couldn’t fix.  (There I go again, blaming past me for my problems.  That guy really screwed my life up.  Except for the things he got right.  Ahh, I can’t be mad at that guy.)

Now, however, armed with new resolve, new confidence, and new pants (true story, none of the pants from back then fit; yes, that’s me tooting my own horn, because occasionally I need to remind myself of the little things I do that are awesome), I am attacking the problem head-on (apply directly to the forehead).  I am trying, in this grand experiment, to lean into the problems that seem unfixable.  They’re going to come up, and they don’t have to be fixed at the moment they come up.  Love story doesn’t work in the context of the story you wrote?  Create a new context.  Work around it.  Try something new and crazy and different.  So today, the story grew a new character.

I have to be careful to make sure that she’s not a tossed-off perfect creature, but on a first spin she seems like a pretty good fit.  There was a natural place to bring in somebody new anyway; why not make that character a central one?

Lots to think about, lots to write about. The temptation will be to consider the extra writing I’ve gotten done over the last couple days as a credit in the bank and let myself slack off from a day or two. Gotta stomp that down.

A Bright Light Shone (Shined?) on Ignominy (Or, How I Learned to Stop Noodling and Love the Bomb)

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Today is the first day of The Project, and like all first days, I came to it with excitement, resolve, and a really irritable bladder.  Seriously, I must have had to pee four or five times during the day at work today, which is just out of line, really.  Who has time for that?

One of the reasons I avoided choosing Accidentally Inspired as The Project is that, really, I’ve already written it once.  Wouldn’t that sort of deprive me of the creative aspect of the process, I asked myself?

Cue the derisive laughter.  In the broadest of senses, yes, I’ve written the story before, but honestly and without irony, the transformation from stage play to prose novel is so complete that I’m just laughing at the me who voiced that concern a week ago.  Silly past me, how much more clearly I see things than you!  The eyeglass of experience casts, like fiery lances, light upon your foolish claims.  Aaand I’ve been reading too much Macbeth.  (Silly literature teacher, letting literature created in a vacuum creep out to poison your daily life.  What’s that?  That’s the point of literature?  Balls, nobody ever told me.)

Things I didn’t have to write when I wrote AI as a play:

  1. Scenic descriptions
  2. Thoughts and internal monologues
  3. Exchanges that took place outside the apartment (Really, this should be worth about 3 or 4 points, as most of the action so far is outside the apartment, which kinda makes me laugh)
  4. Flowery metaphors (okay, the original might have had some of these but you really need a lot of them in a book.  Let me clarify.  I need a lot of them in a book, elsewise every description sounds boring and stilted)
  5. Really virtually anything that’s not dialogue
  6. Extended scenes including lots of dialogue

And the list will probably get longer.  In short, there is a ton of stuff that I have to – nay, that I can – include in the novel that there just isn’t time for in the play.  So thinking of the novel as not fully engaging my creativity is right out the window, even here on Day 1.  I even already talked about other ways I can expand upon the original, i.e. adding villains etc, in a previous post, so that limiting mindset is just doubly out.  Not only is it out, it never existed, and the previous mes who believe it existed also now no longer exist.  The timeline is repairing itself, and I am no longer my own grandfather.  So I feel a lot less like I copped out with this idea.

But, to get down to the meat of this post, here’s what I learned when I shoned my light on myself.

I first really considered giving this “writing” thing a stab oh, I dunno, two years ago.  At the time, I made some google docs, took some notes, jotted down some ideas, and got myself a couple of notebooks.  I told myself that when I felt the urge, I’d pull out one of those notebooks or one of those google docs and, by gum golly, I’d write a bit that day.

To be fair, that’s what I did.  When I felt the urge, I’d write.  Problem is, I’d feel the urge once every, I dunno, week?  Month?  Six months?  Also, to be fair, I booked several pages of hastily scribbled text in those notebooks.  Mad-cow chicken-scratch text, but text nonetheless.  Problem, again, is, that a “page” of chicken scratch is highly subjective, and sometimes when I sat down to write I’d write for five minutes and get half a page, sometimes I’d sit down for an hour and get three pages, or blah, blah, blah.  There was zero consistency and zero accountability, so there was virtually zero product.

BUT.  Because I had no accountability, I was happy with whatever I produced whenever I produced it.  “Hey, I wrote a little bit today; good job, me!  Let me take you out for a drink.”  “Oh, thanks, me, don’t mind if I do.”  “Not at all, good fellow.”  “Splendid.”  I don’t know why the me’s developed British accents in my head just now, but they did, and it just shows how foppish and dumb that system was, except that it was the complete antithesis of a system so I can’t even call it a system, all I can say is it was dumb.

In short (too late!)  I kept these notebooks going for about a year and a half, writing now and then, but never holding myself to any standard for production vis-a-vis quality or quantity.

Now that I’ve decided that I’m really going to for real give this “writing” thing a real shake for realsies, I’ve set some goals which I detailed before.  Those goals include finishing the first draft of a novel by the time school starts up next year (End of August).  Pursuant to that goal is a 5-days a week daily writing goal of ~1000 words per day (900 really, but why not round up) to give me a finished product of ~100,000 words which I can then edit down, like hacking the limbs off a baby octopus (who needs 8 arms, I mean REALLY).

So I sat down today during lunch to write (a portion of) my ~1000 words but decided that I really need to get what I had already in an electronic format so that I can actually work with it, in case I did want to work with it.  (Lest ye think this is just more procrastination, please rest assured, I type like a demon).  It took me about 15 minutes to transcribe (and clean up) everything I had written in my notebook on the project.  Because I’m a sucker for pain, I decided to find out how much work I’d actually done by the only hard-and-fast rubric a writer has: word count.  The total damage?  About 1800 words.

Now, 1800 words is no small thing.  But that’s all I can really say, and even then, I’m deliberately misleading myself through clever use of (lack of) context.  It’s not a small thing for A SINGLE DAY OF WORK.  It’s not even a small thing for a week’s worth of work.  Unfortunately, it’s also NOT A BIG THING by virtually any measuring stick.  To put it in perspective, the short story I wrote on Friday (300 Years a Thief) was 1860 before I trimmed it down, 1550 after.  This post, as I type it, will be passing the 1,000 word mark at roughly the end of this very paragraph.  When I got down to work today on Accidentally Inspired, I set down over 1600 (new) words, that done within the space of about an hour (less some work e-mails, less some students popping in to ask about grades, less a few bathroom breaks [I really wasn’t kidding, it was nonstop today]).  Frankly, I could have done more, but I needed to be professionally as well as personally productive, so I had to leave it off.

All that is to say, that within just over an hour working WITH a plan, I accomplished as much as I accomplished in almost 2 YEARS working WITHOUT a plan.

The lesson, kids, is simple.

Notebooks are the devil; burn them and feed the ashes to your computer as a ritual sacrifice.  Only that way can you absorb their power and open the gateway to…

No, wait, that’s not the lesson.  That was, uh, unrelated.

The lesson, kids, is: I need a DonDraper plan.  Luckily, I have one.  The trick will be sticking to it.  At least I can say this: Day 1 is a ringing success.

Daylight Savings Time is Government-Sanctioned Time Travel

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So here we are, at that time of year wherein we have to “give back” the hour that we “gained” back when we fell back in fall.

It’s not for me to say that for the vast majority of the country, the practice is arcane and distracting.  But it did spawn an interesting idea, perhaps and probably influenced by my short story from yesterday.

Time.  Never enough of it, always slipping away.  Sometimes it creeps by and stretches out for miles, other times it’s gone before you can say “Sharknado, I’m late.”  So here, we have this bizarre practice.  A bit of give and take.

In the fall, you get this extra hour.  In the spring, you give it back.

Put aside the fact that the extra hour comes in the middle of the night.  They just say that to throw you off. Time is time, and just like energy, nobody but nobody can destroy it nor create it.  No gain without sacrifice.  No yin without yang.

So we have this extra hour in November because society decides that we do, and then we skip an hour in March to bring balance to the force.  But all we did was move the hands on the clock; we might as well have switched out the labels on our day-of-the-week underwear.  What, you don’t have those?

But what if we actually – really – honest-to-goodness – gained and lost time once every year?  Even if it were just an hour, imagine the possibilities.  You cut a bargain with the gods (or devils) of time.  Sign it in blood, because, you know, that makes it for realsies.  You get to live one hour over again, and then you have to lose out on an hour as payment.  What could be better?  Didn’t kiss that girl at the end of the date?  Go back and try it again, for the low, low price of missing out on an hour in the office.  Got to the bank five minutes after it closed and thus missed your mortgage payment and they’re gonna repossess your house?  No, they’re not, because you just went back in time and cashed that check.  And you just have to give up one hour of sleepytime.  Wanna relive the time you found that $5 bill on the sidewalk and declared it the best day ever?  Knock yourself out.  You only have to skip over the hour when the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Photo Shoot bus broke down in front of your house and all the models had to pile in and borrow your phone and your shower.  Well, you can’t win EVERY time.

But why stop at an hour?  Would you give up a day to try one over again?  How about a week?  A year?  Would you give up a year wearing adult diapers and puttering around the house remembering the good old days to try another year in your twenties and fix everything you screwed up?  Pass on your fifties entirely for the chance to be a teenager again?  Or maybe you could skip over the boring kid years and gain some extra time on the back end.

I think there’s something there.  If time is so insubstantial that we can simply shuffle the board around and say we’re on the same page, then what does it even mean?  Never mind, forget I asked that, let me just go back to watching this video of a dog saying “I love you.”