Month: August 2016

Sometimes I write Good

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The new novel is at the 1/3 mark — just the spot for a turn, a twist, a change that will color the story to come. And much like my two previous novels, the 1/3 point was an important landmark: a point of no return. The edge of the aircraft carrier, where the jet must either take wing or splash into the ocean, a multi-million dollar failure to fly.

And just like in my first two novels, there’s that horrible moment, right before that turn. That slow sensation, that creeping dread, that the story is a dead man walking, that the legs I thought it had are shot through with story-cancer and the whole thing is going to collapse before it ever has a chance to get going. The jet drifts toward the edge. The vast, indifferent ocean looms large. The wheels clear the edge of the carrier, and the craft does what heavy things do — it drops.

But then.

Like the very breath of God, the wind catches its wings. It defies all logic and it ascends into the sky — not like a bird on the wing, but like a shot from a cannon. And within the space of a heartbeat, from one moment to the next — from the terrible, awful, I-don’t-even-think-this-idea-is-viable-anymore words on one page to the next — the thing is flying not just under its own power, but on its own momentum. The very fact that it’s in motion keeps it in motion. The air rushing across its wings is working to keep the thing aloft just as much as the thing itself is fighting to fly.

And, well. That’s enough to keep you coming back for at least one more day of writing, innit?

It’s time once again for an old staple — my favorite thing I wrote today.

For a moment, Linc thinks about arguing the point — that he doesn’t hate these things, not really — but he realizes before he can form the thoughts that Michaels is right. He does hate them. Not in an overt, fiery way that smashes down walls and crumbles buildings, but in the quietly smoldering way of a not-quite extinguished campfire, smoking and hissing and spitting and waiting for a stray breeze to kick it up into a raging, all-consuming blaze.

Whee!

The Weekly Re-Motivator: No Exit

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Linda’s prompt this week is “ex”, and it’s hard to read that and not think about the ways I’m coming up short of late. For the past couple of weeks, I’m an ex-every-day-writer, an ex-dedicated-to-working-out-workout-doer, and an ex-regular-blogger.

It’s hard to lay all the blame on one thing, but I’m gonna go ahead and lay much of it on the new job. I anticipated it would be stressful; I didn’t anticipate that it would leave me totally drained at the end of every day, with very little semblance of my old work/workout/write routine.

And the sad fact is, it’s going to get worse before it gets better, because starting very soon, I’ll be pulling some serious after-school hours, which is only going to exacerbate the problem. There is, in short, no exit.

Not to fear. You’re not off the hook so easily, dear reader. Only a matter of time until I figure out how to make it all work, and I’ve already mostly figured out how to get my daily novel writing in (3000+ words this week — good ones, too).

In the meantime, here are some things that might have merited full blog posts, were I not struggling to move myself from the couch when I’m not at work this week:

Rio crowds heckling Hope Solo by booing her every time she touches the ball, and shouting “ZIKA” on every one of her kickoffs. Solo is hardly the most likable personality on the team, and she’s obviously got some off-the-field issues, but she’s not the kind of player that’s going to buckle to, or even be impressed by, a little bit of hate. The whole thing just kind of makes me laugh — and I imagine that she pictures a deadly cloud of mosquitoes ferrying the ball to midfield every time she hears the odd cry.

Speaking of the Olympics, I hardly watched the opening ceremonies at all — the only thing we caught was a demonstration with a Brazilian prototype airplane that was … I dunno … it started in reality on the field and then turned into this weird greenscreen thing on the broadcast? Between that and the strange box-stacking thing that started it all off, I just couldn’t get into it — and things weren’t helped by the fact that NBC was cutting to commercial every five minutes. I should hardly be pooping on the presentation designed to highlight the spirit of the host country and the camaraderie of the games, but the opening ceremonies are always so odd.

Still, the scenery is absolutely breathtaking — the shots of the mountains overlooking the bay are just staggeringly beautiful, if you can forget about the fact that the water would fail a breathalyzer test if breathalyzers could test for poop.

Then again, it’s hard to forget about all the poop in that water, or the fact that those swimming in the bay were advised “not to open their mouths” while swimming.

And on one final, unrelated note, the new job gives me a somewhat longer commute, which is giving me the time to catch up on some podcasts that I neglected over the summer. I’ve caught up on all kinds of fascinating minutiae. Granny-style free-throw shooting. Supreme Court justice shenanigans. Black hole collisions and gravitational waves (not “gravity waves,” there’s a difference, it turns out). And the ins and outs of shooting a Youtube show as a woman (never read the comments, apparently).

Oh, and Donald Trump is crazier every day; cracking like an overripe egg under the heat lamp of the election spotlight.

I can’t wait for self-driving cars to become a thing, so that I can actually get some work done when I’m driving back and forth to work.

More blargs this week. The universe depends on it.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

Suddenly Supercharged

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There comes that moment when you’re writing a story and it just gets stuck.

Maybe it’s in a rut and not a lot is happening, or maybe the characters have backed themselves into a corner, or maybe it’s you the author who is blocked and unsure where to go next.

I’ve been in that place for the last couple of weeks with my project, probably owing in no small part to the fact that summer is over and I’m back to work. New employer, new commute, new routine, new stress. Hard to dedicate the grey matter that I’d like to the book, and it’s suffered for it. I’ve been writing by rote, pushing the story forward like it’s a stalled Ford Fiesta miles from the nearest gas station. (To say nothing of my scanty posts around here.)

Luckily, though, characters have a life of their own, and every once in a while, if you keep at it, the muse will flutter down and blow some glitter up your butt. My main character — perhaps as frustrated as me at the aimless wandering going on at this point in the draft — took the wheel and steered us right off the road during my morning session. Jumped ahead to a conflict I wasn’t planning until very late in the book indeed, if at all. Exposed the raw nerve floating right beneath the skin and vented some spleen all over the gooey sludge of this story.

It’s a turn I wasn’t expecting — wasn’t even thinking about when I sat down to write — but it fits perfectly with the character and the story. Of course it does. I told myself when I sat down to write not to force anything but just to let a conversation happen, and before I knew it, I was over quota for the day and my protagonist and antagonist have increased the boiler pressure well past the safe range.

Which serves as a good reminder of something I forget often: sometimes you just have to get the fargo out of the story’s way.