Tag: Commitment 2014

It’s Over

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Remember in the Looney Tunes how Wile E. Coyote would go chasing the Roadrunner all over creation? Of course you do. Who doesn’t? (If you don’t, please feel free to exit the ride.) And then the Roadrunner would take a turn really quickly or leap a great chasm and the Coyote would miss it and just keep running straight off the end of the cliff, but as long as he didn’t look down — as long as he wasn’t aware of his mortal peril — he was okay. I think I can identify with the poor guy.

The first draft is done. It’s over. Finished. Put a fork in it. Aaand I pretty much hate it. Like, I’m fairly certain it’s among the worst things ever written, and I’ve read Twilight.  For all the reviewing I do at the start of every writing session, for all the time I spend thinking about the damn thing, I feel as if I’ve had a bit of Luke Skywalker tunnel-vision (stay on target) on it for the last month or so, and I’ve been so focused on catching the Roadrunner I hadn’t noticed that I’d gone over the edge of the cliff.  But now the chase is over — Roadrunner escaped, naturally, otherwise I’d be looking at a perfect draft — and it feels like there’s nothing left for me to do but look down so that I can get on with the business of falling to my death.

Is this how it’s supposed to feel??

Four months have gone into this project.  Four months of writing over 900 words a day, five days a week, and I NEVER MISSED A DAY outside of the week I took off when my daughter was born.  The commitment, back when I first made it, was a ludicrous one; the fact that I followed through leads me to believe that I’m actually living in a parallel universe right now, like somehow I skewed off from a reality wherein I should have crashed and burned and wound up in this altered state where I diverged and finished the mission.  It shouldn’t have happened so cleanly, so efficiently, so very on schedule.  That’s not how I operate.  IT’S ALL WRONG.  And yet I have it.  Backed up in three different locations, saved in three different formats, it’s now for all intents and purposes done.  I expected to hear choirs of mothertrucking angels on LSD, I expected an euphoric lightheadedness, I expected to literally step onto a beam of sunshine and sail off into the ether when I finished this thing.  Instead, I feel like I’m about to step in front of a firing squad.

Don’t get me wrong.  The sense of accomplishment is there.  It’s impossible, I think, to write ninety thousand words and not feel a sense of “well, I definitely did that” about it.  And I do feel good about the story I’ve written… in general.  I’m pleased with the way the conflicts unfolded, with the way (most of) the characters developed, with (a fair chunk of) the prose.  But there are holes.  Good god almighty, are there holes.  Let me count the ways.

I’m pretty sure any semblance of a voice that I had in writing the thing dissolved after the first act.  I wrote the beginning of the thing with great swagger and confidence, having a grand old time and chuckling to myself at how clever my bits of prose were.  Everything after that was crawling over broken glass through a minefield.  No room for eloquence. No time for embellishment.  Just raw, ugly, get-the-work-done-and-stay-the-fargo-down boring writing.  I feel like after the first twenty thousand words or so, the thing reads like an instruction manual.  In German.  If you’ve been reading for a while, you might remember that I used to post my favorite passage that I’d written in the day.  I’ve not posted a favorite passage in over a month.  THAT AIN’T COINCIDENCE, COWBOY.

The ending sucks.  It’s really terrible.  I mean, I guess I like what happens but the way I told it, the way I framed it, the way I presented it feels all wrong.  It’s like a Picasso painting, all funny angles and misshapen bits and awkward forced perspective, except I didn’t do it on purpose to make you think, it just came out that way because I’m awful and OH GOD WHY DID I THINK I COULD DO THIS.

Loose ends.  The thing has so many unresolved bits, so many loose ends and characters and plotlines left flapping in the wind that it’s like trying to count the untied shoelaces in a kindergarten class.  And don’t get me started on Velcro, god knows if I could’ve used Velcro on my story it wouldn’t have turned into the Gordian Knot of snarled action that i is.  The thought of tying up those loose ends makes my fingers hurt.

Just thinking about it is enough to make me want to curl up with a bottle of whiskey and drink until the whole thing goes away.  Maybe the best thing that could happen is that I black out and destroy my backups and we forget this whole thing ever happened.  That could work, right?  I honestly hate the draft so much right now.  I hate it for being so bad.  I hate the time I spent on it for being wasted in producing such a monolithic pile of dogsharknado.  And mostly I hate myself for actually thinking this was a thing I might be good at, because I can look at virtually any part of the draft and realize that IT CLEARLY ISN’T.

And yet.

The fact that I hate it gives me pause, because it means I can tell the good from the bad, and that’s worth something, isn’t it?  And the fact that I care that it’s awful is encouraging, because it speaks to a dissatisfaction that is calling out for improvement, and that’s worth something, isn’t it?  I mean, if it were awful and I didn’t hate it, then I might as well just pack it in right now, yeah?  But I don’t feel that.  I hate it and it’s awful but I don’t feel done; in fact I can’t wait to get started on the task of fixing it up so that it doesn’t suck quite so bad.  And that’s worth something, isn’t it?

Mixed feelings, no doubt.  But the draft is done, and that can’t be taken away from me, and that’s a pretty major fargoing accomplishment.  So as much as I hate it, I’m going to cling to that for now and be happy with it.  At least, I’ll try to be happy with it.

Good talk.  More to say about the first draft later, but for now, it’s time to give it some room to breathe so that I don’t feel the urge to accidentally delete / destroy / burn it.

One Door Closes

Pavowski3 Comments

I’m nearing completion of the first draft of Accidentally Inspired.  It should be done this week.  And it leaves me wondering: what the fargo do I do when it’s over?

Like Inigo Montoya after slaying the six-fingered man, I fear I may run out of steam a bit once the Project is over.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned from running, it’s that momentum is key.  He who stops might never get started again.  Succumb to allowing myself time off and next thing I know I’m sitting on that draft that I never did anything with, sucking down more Cheetos and licking the orange dust off my fingers instead of getting it all over my keyboard.  Except that in this example, getting the cheezdust on my keyboard would be something that’s desirable.  Y’know, because that’d mean I’m using it, and otherwise I’m just a sloth with Cheeto fingers.

I’ll allow myself a little time to decompress after finishing this draft.  Writing it, as much as I’ve enjoyed the process, has been taxing and exhausting in some ways I never imagined.  Be it slogging through endless hours of drafting characters who, to be honest, I’m growing a bit tired of, or writing into the wee hours of the night because I can no longer find time during the day, I’m beat.  I feel a bit like Forrest Gump after five or six trips running across the country: I’m tired, and I think I’ll go home now.

So a LITTLE bit of time off, but not so much time that I slip into the warm comfortable Snuggie of NotWriting.  Because as comfortable and comfortING as that Snuggie is, I recognize it now for the deathtrap it is.  The deathtrap that hoovers up the creative energy I should have been venting for the last ten years of my life and devours it like a great Sarlacc pit in the desert, where it withers and dies and doesn’t give birth to interesting stories or make me feel wonderfully productive and interesting or make me rich and famous (because that’s likely in this path I’m trying to walk, right?  RIGHT???).  No, as inviting as that Snuggie is, I will be doing my damnedest to let it collect dust and spiderwebs in the garage, because even though I’ve spent the past four months writing my butt off, I feel like there are miles to go before I wake.

As the proverbial door closes (okay, it’s not like the door closed because I took that door and explored the fargo out of it, but let’s pretend the metaphor holds), what proverbial window stands open in front of me?  It’s hard to say.  I’ve got the other novel ideas that I was considering back in March when this jolly parade first lurched like a herd of turtles into motion.  I’ve got a not-insignificant little collection of Flash Fiction which I’ve dutifully written almost every week; many of those stories are itching to be expanded, fleshed out and stitched into a living, breathing and terrifying Pavlak’s Monster if I can wrangle a bolt of lightning into their harvested parts.  And of course, after a bit of time passes, I’ll need to start on the monolithic task of editing AI, which means I’ll need to sharpen my bonesaws and reinforce my sledgehammers to start smashing that thing to pieces to put it back together Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger-like.  Or, who knows?  Perhaps I’ll be struck with a new bolt of inspiraton, like a lonely sheep in a lightning storm.

Um… pardon me for a second.

Sheep gets struck by lightning, develops super powers, bites farmhand, farmhand develops superpowers, gets the girl, saves the earth, knits a lovely lightning-imbued sweater, rides his shorn lightning-sheep into the sunset.

Okay, I’m back.

Anyway, if you’ve read my previous posts you might know that I’m a tremendous fan of Douglas Adams, and anytime I can compare myself or my work to his stories I end up feeling in a better way about myself, so here it is.  In the latter phases of his last (not really the last) book of his Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy (not really a trilogy), the hero finds himself on a faraway planet viewing God’s last message to his creation.  He sees it, sighs, and says, essentially, “well, that’s that.”  And goes home.  Of course, Adams decided he hadn’t had enough after all and wrote another book after that.  But I feel very much like that.  Here I am, novel nearly finished, and there’s a message just over the horizon in flaming letters forty feet high that I can’t quite make out yet, but I have the sneaking suspicion that whatever message those letters carry, it won’t fill me with the deep spiritual calm and satisfaction that this little endeavor of mine was worth doing, and it’s done now, so now I can rest.  It probably won’t mean anything at all, in keeping with my little philosophy on this site: “Things don’t always have to mean things.”  But it’ll be there, and I’ll see it, and then I’ll have to find something else to do.

I’ll be on the lookout for any windows that happen to be popping open in my near vicinity.  Or maybe I’d be better off setting some charges and blowing down a wall.

Any fellow writers out there have advice on how to tackle this mounting sense of… I dunno, fear? dread? exhilaration? aimlessness?  Whatever it is that comes with “finishing” (yeah, it’s not even really nearly almost finished) a project?

85% (Stay On Target)

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It occurs to me that it’s been some time since I posted any sort of progress report on The Project.

The Project, of course, being Novel Alpha, or the reason I started this whole crazy blarg thing which is by all accounts growing faster than my toddler’s vocabulary and spiraling out of control.  As I close in on my hundredth post (seriously, this is post 86, which fargoing astounds me) it seems a good time for a status update.

The novel is at 85% as of today at about 75000 words, give or take a little.  The fact that I’ve made it this far continues to shock and awe me.  I feel like an Aboriginal Tribesman who has never heard of planes, trains, or automobiles and suddenly gets on one of those Japanese bullet trains and travels two hundred miles in like ten minutes and gets off the train saying, “I came all that way?  Impossible.”  Or, to use a metaphor that’s more immediate and familiar to me, like the thirteenth mile of a half-marathon; I’m aware that there was a lot of work involved to get to this point, but the fact that it was done and that it was all done by me is just sort of eclipsed by the lactate burning holes in my calves.Read More »

It’s Monday. Here Are Some Words.

Pavowski2 Comments

I wish I had more to report today, but I don’t.  I could speak of the massive headaches and heartaches and the disgust with humanity and gnashing of teeth that comes with being a teacher — doubly so a teacher of high school seniors, some of whom have failed and will as a result not graduate — at the end of the year.  But I won’t.  Partially for reasons of confidentiality, partially because I’m a softie at heart, but mostly because if I spend another instant thinking about it today I might just have to kick one of my cats, and my cats don’t deserve it.  At least, not today.  Not that I’m aware of.

Disclaimer: I would never kick my cats.  Hard.

Instead, a reflection.  I’m at 70% complete on the Project.  Fascinating.  I’m far enough ahead of schedule that I could significantly scale back my daily goal and still finish ahead of my goal of early August, but of course that defeats the purpose of goals.  No, I will keep on pushing and finish probably in early July, which will be fantastic, assuming of course that things don’t fall into the wood chipper over the summer.

In other news, things may fall into the wood chipper over the summer. Read More »

Why Does It Have To Be Said? (Look After Your Kid, for God’s Sakes)

Pavowski1 Comment

You don’t go to an auto mechanic and then ask them to repair your back porch.  You don’t hire an interior decorator and then ask them to write your dissertation.  You don’t hire an exterminator and ask him to bake you a pie.  So why do people think that every place they go is in the childcare business?

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