Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

Eyes Up

Pavowski4 Comments

I think I said it at the end of last week, but I’m saying it again to convince myself.

The first edit is done. When I say “first edit” what I’m really talking about is the first series of edits, a smattering of various angles of refraction on this novel of mine that I’ve been alternately using and discarding over the past… god… seven months? Seriously, the time for this “first edit” has now handily outlasted the time it took me to draft the novel in the first place. That fact makes sense to me now, having gotten my hands and feet quite bloody along the way and having read a lot of advice in the interim, but if you’d told me at the outset that editing would take longer than writing the novel in the first place, I’d have had a good laugh at you.

I mean, the writing — spinning the tale out of the void — that’s the hard part, right?

Ha. Ha, ha ha ha ha. No.

But I’m not here to talk about the edit. I’m thinking about what comes next. Because it’s now time to cut the cord on this thing and release it into the wild. And then I’m going to have to play a waiting game in the meantime while it founders around out there, waiting to hear from actual real people what I need to do to actually really fix it and make it worth possibly sending to a for real editor, agent, publisher (seriously, I have no idea what to do from here).

To my way of thinking, there are basically two things I need to consider after I send this thing out for reading and do my best to put it out of mind for a month or two. 1) Figure out what my plans are, and my time frames for accomplishing said plans, for when I get some reviews back. 2) Decide what the next project is. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout this whole writing process, it’s that momentum matters.

So, it’s time to get my eyes up on those two things. In fact, I took a break mid-post to take a step on the first thing, and reached out to a friend of mine whom I’ve been out of touch with for entirely too long. Sorry about that. But there’s no time like the present.

And nothing like a stream-of-consciousness post to kickstart my thinking and remind me there are things I should be doing.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Lingua Caca

Pavowski5 Comments

Today was a day of great pain and sorrow for me, because today I made a pass at cleaning up the language in my novel.

I really feel two ways about this. On the one hand the language, most of the time, feels natural and right and perfectly at home in the book where it was. On the other hand, I’m willing to accept that, perhaps, foul language is a crutch that I maybe lean on a little too much.

Want numbers? Here are numbers:

  • The novel as a whole is ~97,000 words in its current iteration. (It probably still needs trimming, but we’ll see what my first round of readers thinks.)
  • 37 were Fargos. (7 of those in my notes to myself. I’m a bit of a self-abuser in my own editing.)
  • 53 of those were Sharknados. (only 3 in my self-abuse notes. Also, and I’m rather proud of this, 7 of them came in one sentence. It was a good sentence.)
  • 1 Ash. Not a word I use a lot.
  • 48 Haberdasheries. This one makes me laugh a little, because its usage irks me in popular shows. If you watch Once Upon A Time critically, as I like to do (who am I kidding, it’s also a lot of fun), you might notice that they lean on the phrase “what the hell” or “who the hell” or “how the hell”. I can usually count 3 or 4 iterations per episode. Well, 90% of my offenses came in the same flavor. That old adage about the man in the mirror being a big, fat jerk comes to mind.
  • 7 Clams. Again, not one I overuse. 2 of them were directed at myself. This is within acceptable parameters.

So, after a few surgical strikes with the delete key, what did I accomplish?

  • There are no f-bombs left. It hurt me, but in every instance I was able to find a way to say what I was trying to say, only, y’know, with less fargoery.
  • There are 2 sharknados left. The ones still standing are really fargoing funny, and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t find a phrasing any sharper than a well placed s-word.
  • The ash is gone. I didn’t feel strongly enough about it to fight my ego-writer for it. No great loss, there.
  • The clams stayed. I figure if a person can handle a couple of sharknados, they can clam sure handle a few clammits.
  • The haberdasheries… well, I’m addressing those tomorrow. I can probably cut most of them, but again, for emphasis, a little haberdashery is hard to beat.

So how do I feel about all of this? I’m conflicted. The Fargos and Sharknados were easy enough to trim out. Those are the biggies, that people really seem to take issue with. Higher on the hierarchy, if you will. In a novel of almost 100,000 words, I think a couple of profanities are well within reason.

Aren’t they?

My wife argues (probably rightly so) that my novel may lose some of its appeal for younger audiences with the profanity intact. To be more precise, with the profanity in place, the book could get labelled in such a way that might make it hard to sell parents on letting their children read it. (As a teacher, I can assure you that a stray f-word or worse does not bother the average whateverteen-year-old in the least.) And I guess that’s a consideration worth … considering. Then again, the language is as natural to me as breathing, and I think that removing it from my characters’ mouths (and rarely from the prose) is a little like the aliens taking the nose off the Sphinx. (What, you don’t think aliens built the Sphinx? LOOK AT THE FACTS.) Maybe it looks better that way, but still, it feels … off, somehow. Certainly it feels like adjusting my style for an external factor, regardless of how relevant that one factor may be. One character in particular was exceptionally foul-mouthed in the first draft. Like, it was an integral part of what made him unlikable (I thought). The character works without having a sailor’s vocabulary, but knowing what he was, he feels like, I dunno, maybe 80% of what he could be? 85%?

Then again, maybe my wife is right, and the language is a barrier to more readers than I think.

It’s weird; usually I can bring an issue here to my dumping ground, marinate on it for the forty-five minutes or so it takes me to pinch off a blarg post, and come away with some clarity and feeling a little lighter. But on this one I feel even more conflicted than when I started.

What to do? Leave the salty language intact and ask my beta readers how they feel about it? Or proceed with the edited-for-TV version and ask, at the finish, whether foul language would read better?

Is the language a part of my authorial voice? Or is it a crutch getting in the way of my voice?

Sharknado.

Bamboo Patience

Pavowski1 Comment

This is one I tossed off while I was guest-posting at LindaGHill’s site many moons ago. It’s a good one, though, and I wanted to have it on my site, too, because I’m greedy like that.

Pavowski's avatar

I’ve just read a fascinating article (which is always dangerous) and I went and generalized it (which is always entirely justifiable… maybe not) and made it about me (which… come on, I’m a blogger, what do you expect).

An article about bamboo.

I’m not a gardener. In fact, if the word “gardener” has a polar opposite, then I’m that. (Blighter? Destroyer of things green? Seriously, you should see my front yard. By which I mean, my front collection of weeds.) But through the whimsy of the internet, I found myself reading this article about bamboo farmers and success. It’s worth five minutes of your time, but here’s the quickly-generalized, me-centric summation of the article.

Bamboo is one of the fastest-growing plants on the planet. It grows so quickly and so prolifically, and is so incredibly strong (it has a tensile strength close to that of steel) that…

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Get Up and Go (A Gramble About Gumption)

Pavowski12 Comments

By the way, “Gramble” is just a word I made up. I wanted to keep alliterating with “G”s so I stuck one on the front of “ramble”. Don’t be afraid of my Frankenstein’s monster of a word. Its literary thirst for blood can only be satiated with ink.

Anyway. Gumption. Where does it go?

Some days the gumption is there; it burns away in your belly, it secretes its smoky certainty through your pores and fills you to the tippy top with vigor and optimism. Other days, the fire goes out, and all that’s left is the ashy residue of a bonfire, some empty beer bottles, and a few condom wrappers from where all the cool couples disappeared into the woods.

“Gumption” itself is one of those outdated words that you don’t hear much anymore, but there’s no word quite like it. We’ve got the newfangled Play-Doh lump of a word, “sticktoitiveness”, which is not so much a word as a philosophy. There’s “tenacity”, which has something to do with gumption, but isn’t the same thing. Then you can go and get all negatively-connotated and toss out “stubborn”, which, again, rubs up against gumption but doesn’t take the prize turkey home.

“Gumption” is homey and colloquial and down-to-earth. It’s a don’t-give-up mentality that somehow runs the gamut between boundless optimism and pigheaded refusal to back down. It’s a quiet, determined certainty that with hard work, anything can be achieved.

Maybe it’s one of those things that’s impossible to define, but you know it when you see it.

Gumption is a concept that has resonated with me since I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. I first read it in my senior year of high school, then again in my sophomore year at college, then again in my fourth year of college, then again shortly after graduating college, then again after I graduated college again, and it’s recently been in my brain that maybe I ought to read it again. It’s a fascinating little book that’s not actually very much about Zen or motorcycle maintenance, but rather about the world at large and how you choose to view it. If you’re philosophically inclined at all, you’ll probably get some mileage out of it. One of its defining moments for me is a scene wherein the protagonist fixes his buddy’s misfiring motorcycle with an old beer can. The protagonist is pleased with his ingenuity; the buddy is flustered and ultimately unable to live with the notion that a piece of trash could fix everything that’s wrong with his bike. He’s too caught up in the idea of what the bike should look like and what fixing it should entail to realize that the chemically-treated, rust-proof surface on the inside of the can provides all the fixing his bike could ever want at a fraction of the cost and time needed for a “proper” fix.

Anyway, I love the idea of gumption — that inevitable, inescapable quality within the self that just knows how to buckle down and get sharknado done — but I’m faced with a terrible truth lately. Mine is gone.

Like, a few months ago, I had it. I knew right where it was. In the left lobe of my brain, next to the wrenches and the repository of dangling participles. But now it’s gone. Misplaced? Stolen? Dried up?

I’m reminded of an Aerosmith lyric: “My get-up-and-go must have got up and went.”

Seriously. I’m behind on the novel. I wanted to finish the first edit by the end of January, and now it’s trailing off into March and I’m always “just a few weeks away.” I’m behind on grading papers at work and have been since… well… January. Even my posts on the blarg have been fewer and farther between since… ahem… January.

What happened in January?

I have no idea, but whatever it was ran my gumption right out of town. But, see, that doesn’t make sense. Because gumption is a part of who you are. Right? It can no more leave you than your wits, or your good looks, or… maybe these are bad examples.

The point is, my gumption is missing lately. If you’ve seen it, please tell it I would very much appreciate it if it would return home. I have a lot of work to get done. And a lot of get-ups that need to get going.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

The Speed of Write

Pavowski3 Comments

Everything is relative. Right?

It’s so easy to look at the body of work being produced by, oh, let’s just say anybody who has a body of work to speak of, and be intimidated. It’s so easy, as a writer, to think, “my writing is horrible. I’m horrible. Who would read this? Why should I bother? Why does it even matter?” And, from there, it’s a small hop, skip, and jump (maybe more like a trip, lurch, and fall) to quitting altogether.

And it’s not just writing, right? It could be exercising: “It’s too hard. Look at how much weight that guy is lifting / how far that girl is running / how much more flexible she is. I’ll never get there. I might as well give up.” Or knitting: “I’m awful. Look at this awful tea cozy / dog sweater / who-the-hell-knows-I’ll-just-call-it-a-scarf that I made. Who would ever want this? I’ll just buy one at the store and be less embarrassed.” Giving up is easy. Practicing, getting better, learning how to do the thing you wanted to do back on January 1st or whenever you decided to do the thing… it’s HARD. And those people who are doing it — and being successful — are just so DonDraper’ed visible, and so successful, and GOD they make it look so easy. They make it look so easy, that as hard as it is for me, I might as well quit. Right?

No. Fargo that. That’s the Howler Monkey of Doubt screeching in your ear and throwing its feces at your eyes. The monkey wants you to quit, because if you quit, then he gets to watch reruns of The Bachelor through your eyes and eat a tub of chocolate chips through your mouth and sleep the day away through your backside on your bed.

But that way madness lies. The Howler Monkey doesn’t know sharknado about hard work because it’s only concerned with taking the easy way out. The truth is, it’s pointless to compare yourself to the people writing bestselling novels, or bench-pressing small imported cars, or running marathons, or knitting afghans for the Queen. Because the person doing that incredible thing has been practicing his or her craft for countless hours to make it look that easy. You don’t see the failures. You don’t see the miles and miles of smoldering wreckage of his crashed and awful manuscripts leading up to the good ones, you don’t see the painful mornings and hours and hours of training she put in to work up to running that marathon, you don’t see the hundreds of horrible golf-club covers she made to practice up for Queen afghan-making.

The point is, we are all points on a continuum. Yes, you may suck now. I may suck now. I probably do. But if I go back and compare myself to the poor schlub who started this journey almost a year ago, I’m pretty confident that I’m at least a little better off. A little more comfortable with the virtual pen in my virtual hands. So a bestselling novel is maybe not in my immediate future; doesn’t matter a whole lot, it’s closer now than it was a year ago. So you’re not going to run a marathon next month — but last month, you couldn’t even run a mile, and now look at you. Last month you nearly put the dog’s eye out with your knitting needles, and now you almost know which end makes the scarf.

The only person worth comparing yourself to is other versions of yourself. Compare your current self to a past version of yourself and make sure you’re moving in the right direction, and if not, FIX IT. Compare your current self to a potential self and see if you like where you’re headed. If not? FIX IT.

Even the slowest marathoner is miles ahead of the guy who never gets off the couch. Even the worst writer in the world is pages and pages ahead of the girl who dreams of writing a novel but never quite gets around to it. Even the most unfortunate knitter… you get the idea.

Somehow we got the idea that if we’re going to do something, that it has to be perfect. That there’s some absolute standard out there for any given endeavor, and if we can’t reach that standard, we might as well not bother. Bollocks. The standard for personal success should be relative success. Am I writing as much, or better, or more creatively, or more comfortably, than I was a year ago? Then I’m doing all right. Am I running farther, or faster, or with less injury, than I was when I started? Then it’s all good. Am I… okay, I’ll be honest, I don’t know anything about knitting, let’s just assume I had something clever to say about the relative improvement and progression of a career in knitting, and call it a day, yeah?

Focus not on that faraway, nigh-unreachable goal that feels so intimidating. Focus on small victories, tiny relative leaps, and just keep pushing the needle.

Now it’s time to get some sleep so that I can go back to work on my slightly-less-than-awful novel.

This post is part of SoCS.