Tag: Commitment 2014

One-Month-iversary

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The blarg is a month old!

*pops champagne poppers*

*cranks up the stereo*

*trips over a cat*

I’ve been a capital-w Writer for a month now.  Actually, a month yesterday, but WHO’S COUNTING?  (I am, and EVERY WORD AND EVERY DAY COUNTS)

So, what do I have to show for myself?  Let’s take stock!

I have completed over 28,000 words on The Project.  This fact alone is both overwhelming and overwhelmingly frustrating.  Overwhelming in that I have well and truly jumped into this thing with both feet and given myself a better start than I could hope for.  When I set my goal of 900 words per day, the truth is I felt it was a little ambitious, but I’ve found that with only a few exceptions, as long as I give myself the time in which to get it done, 900 words is not enough for me.  My id-writer is not satisfied stopping at 900, which led me to the super secret goal I mentioned before – and I even make that goal most days.  So the progress is phenomenal.  When you add in the (almost) daily word count I squeeze off here at the blarg, it adds up to a heck of a lot of writing, which means a heck of a lot of practice, which (by virtue of the commutative property or some sharknado – I don’t do maths okay) means a heck of a lot of improvement.  Okay, probably not a heck of a lot.  But if you’ll *never* get better if you *don’t* practice, then if you practice *all* the time then you must get at least a *little* better.  So hopefully I’m getting better.  Still gotta work on those adverbs, though.  But I let the real rules like that slide over here.  Put your feet up.  Throw your peanut shells on the floor.  That’s what we have the army of roombas for.

What’s that?  No army of roombas yet?  Pick up those fargoing shells.

So the progress is stunning, but the partially-OCD side of my brain is irked beyond measure at coming so close to thirty-thousand words for the month and not making it.  And yeah, I *could* go for it tonight, but I’m just not going to.  I accomplished some good writing today and I need to let it marinate before I go after the next scene.  Like a fine wine or a good bowel movement, you just don’t rush this stuff.  That’s not an excuse, that’s just good business.  I don’t know what THAT means, but I know that after this blarg, more work is not something that’s going to be happening.  Spring Break is officially on, which at one time in my life would have meant a lot of imbibing, but like so many other things in my life, I’m just too old for that now.  All it means these days is a bit of relaxation, which is, to be fair, welcome and overdue.

And the blarg!  Apparently I’ve made thirty steaming posts of drivel here, which is well above what I had even planned to write.  Given that I’m unable to keep from going on at length on virtually any topic — even when I start out not knowing what I want to write about, I still end up with more than I intended to say about it — you can peg those posts at a conservative average of 500 words apiece, and that’s really really conservative – this post, for reference, is already past 500 and showing no signs of slowing.  So the commutative property (shut up, I don’t do maths) tells me that 30 posts at 500 words makes an additional 15000 words of non-project writing.  Probably closer to 20000, but we’ll call it 15000 and be joyful; fifteen-thousand words of off-topic, pipe-cleansing ramble.  Sidenote: WordPress gives me happy little notifications when things happen (somebody new liked your post!  somebody left a comment!  you left the oven on!), one of which is meeting your posting goal for whatever period you desire.  The fastest posting goal you can set is one post per week.  So I get a charge out of the cheerful little “you met your posting goal for the week!” on Monday evening when the week is just getting started.  Hooray, “achievements”?

And let me not forget that enmeshed in those 30 posts are five (hopefully, by the weekend, six) entirely unrelated short stories running the gamut from weird to dark to depressing (seriously, why can’t I write a happy short story?) which I also can’t complain about.  Each one is about 1000 words of brain-stimulating, boundary-stretching weirdness, helping me to write outside the box that The Project locks me into.  Not that I feel boxed in with the novel — far from it — but the stories help me to envision other projects beyond the edge of this one.  And to me, they work well enough that I feel hope that those other projects can be as good as this one (which hopefully assumes this one’s any good to begin with?!)

Finally, WordPress gives me a handful of more or less meaningless statistics which are nonetheless fun to noodle over.  It turns out I’ve racked up thirty subscribers to the blarg here.  Given that only a handful of those are folks I know personally, that means that at least twenty people out there have stumbled onto my little pile of drivel and liked it enough to click a button that makes it a part of their daily-ish reading.  While a click of a button is not a big deal, the fact that people who know me only through my writing like that writing enough to invite more of my writing gives me the warm fuzzies.  And the positive feedback from other writers is a solid kick in the hindparts to boot (see what I did there?).

So.

One month.  Twenty-eight thousand words of Pure Project Product.  Fifteen to twenty thousand words of Blargle Fargle Wargle.  Five not-totally-craptastic short stories.  Thirty subscribers.  I don’t see any way to parse that information that doesn’t add up to March having been one pretty goldfinger solid start down the path to capital-w Writing.

Thanks for reading.  Pavorisms will continue after these commercial messages.

More Quotes, More Inspirational Crap, and I’m not very good at writing about music

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Yesterday’s brush with a motivational quote that speaks to me put me in mind of another one that more directly influenced my recent onset of brain fever, AKA throwing down the ink-gauntlet and declaring myself a writer.  Incidentally, the quote is from a band, which is double dumb on me because I typically profess not to get all wound up in the lyrics to songs.  In my defense, how can you?  I listen to the radio every day and wish I didn’t because the songs are so literarily (yep, I did it) barren that it hurts my English teacher brain.  And yeah, okay, I’m sure there are bands out there dropping crazy good poetry penned by angels, but I’m over thirty; I don’t have time to go hunting out new music like I did in my younger and more formative years.  Basically I turn on Pandora and let some music I’ve never heard and never will again wash over my subconscious.

But Pandora’s responsible for this, and I do enjoy Pandora.  I can count on one hand the number of full CDs I’ve bought in the last several years, and I need less hands than that to count the CDs I’m glad I bought.  I also just realized that I’m totally aging myself by referring to it as a CD even at this point.  Does anybody buy CDs?  What do you call it when you buy it online now?  An album?  Sharknado, I’m too old to care about the lingo.

ANYWAY.  AWOLNATION.  The caps are the band’s, not mine.  That’s the band and they’re responsible for the quote.  I don’t know things about music.  I can’t write about it.  They’re best known for Sail, which came out in 2010, and is not the song in question.  Ugh, I’m getting sidetracked.  This is not about the music.  It’s about the words, which are usually at odds with the music.  In fact with AWOLNATION I think the lyrics usually are at odds with the music, which may in fact be the point.  Blarg, there I go off the road again.

Anyway, they have a song called “Kill Your Heroes”.  The video for it is a crackup, riffing on good old Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, and the message is brilliant.  The song as a whole isn’t bad either, but what really gets me is the line at the end of the first verse.

“Never let your fear decide your fate.”

This writing thing, for me, has been a thing that I’ve wanted to try for a long time, but well, I’ve always been afraid of failing.  Afraid that people won’t like what I put out there, that I will never find any measure of success at it, that it will be a waste of my time.  The fact is, those fears may be well-founded.  I may never have success at it, people may not like what I have to offer, and if that be the case, then it sure may turn out to be a colossal waste of my time.

But then, it won’t be, really, because I’m having an absolute ball just writing the novel and writing the blarg here for my audience of a handful (so far!).  And I may not come to anything, and in a few years maybe I’ll have burned out on this and moved on to some other crazy obsession (Civil War Reenactments have always fascinated me.  That’s not a joke.).

But at least this time, I won’t let my fear of the thing keep me from trying the thing.

 

1350 more words today, and the train keeps on a-rollin’.

Forty Two Pages

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Another week in the bag, another few thousand words on the page. I finished today’s writing on page 42, which has a happy significance for me. You sci-fi geeks out there won’t need me to explain this, but my wife will.  Seeing as she reads this pile from time to time, it’s better if I […]

Super-Secret Hidden Writing Goals

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I am pleased to report that I made my writing goal for today.

I am less than pleased to report that it’s the 4th day in a row in which I have just barely made my writing goal for today.

Disappointment over not exceeding goals is sort of a first-world problem to the stars; this I fully realize.  Truth be told, though, 900 words daily for five days every week is not the “real” goal.  Okay, it’s the goal I talk about and it’s the goal I won’t allow myself not to meet.  I understand it’s maybe even still a little bit of a lofty goal for a guy like myself with a full time job and a full time baby and a full time wife and a full time distractable streak hold on while I get a cookie.

Where was I before I ate that ENTIRE BAG OF COOKIES??  Ah, secret goal.  Yes, the 900 words is the public goal, but the secret goal for my id-writer half is more like in the range of 1200-1500 words daily.  “Why two goals,” I hear myself asking myself.  “Because,” my self tells myself, “the first goal is for your baseline don’t-feel-like-sharknado-goal so that you can have the sense of accomplishing something for the day.  It’s the congrats, you got up and put on pants today – you have officially reached the bare minimum for living in society, you may now relax goal.  It’s not the goal you strive for, it’s the baseline standard you set for yourself.”  “What kind of sadist (masochist?) sets a crazy-ANTZ goal like that for himself,” lazy me further asks, “it’s bad enough I’ve undertaken this writing project in the first place, now I have to deal with a bare-minimum goal that’s higher than it really needs to be AND a super-secret psycho goal?”  “Only if you want to feel a soul-saturating sense of true accomplishment.”

Lazy me then kidney-kicks Overzealous me and curb-stomps his neck.  And overzealous me has gotten curb-stomped a fair bit this week.  While the soul-saturating sense of true, deep, secret second goal accomplishment is nice, it just hasn’t happened this week.  Maybe I’m coming down off the high of committing to this project, maybe it’s because I’m about to start the murky middle of the book, maybe it’s because the freaking bottom dropped out of the temperature outside and my lizard blood is cooling in my veins.  One way or another, I just haven’t been able to push through and go the extra mile this week.

This is the same problem that led to my running injury, of course.  The desire to be greater than the challenge rather than just meeting it.  Had I been satisfied with simply starting back to running a little bit at a time following a minor injury, odds are I could have avoided overdoing it and borking things even worse than before.  (By the way, I borking love the Swedish Chef.)  Similarly, if I could just be pleased with myself for meeting the public goal, I wouldn’t have to deal with the sense of shortcoming that I’m suffering on the inside from not meeting the real goal.

Having two goals suddenly strikes me as kind of dumb.  But then, id-writer says NUT UP, SOLDIER, AND WRITE SOME FARGOING PAGES.  This little internal feud is not likely to get resolved or to go anywhere, so I just need to make sure it keeps pushing me forward.

This kind of circular thinking was almost certainly driving my words today; I slipped into a much more verbose, Douglas Adams-esque prose, which never fails to make me smile.  Problem is, I fear it may be a little bit too verbose to be viable if I want to move toward actually getting this thing published.

HOWEVER STILL FURTHER, the first draft is not a time for second-guessing or over-editing.  The important thing is getting the words down.  I accomplished that, and while I don’t know if the way I’m telling the story is right, the story I’m telling definitely feels right.

Here’s a bit of the text in question.

  • “Still,” the reader might protest, “a live chicken?  Surely the ability to produce such a thing at will is nothing short of magical and should, therefore, be outside of the realm of her ability.”  Too right.  And were the muse in question any other than the muse of comedy, the reader would indeed be correct.  However, being, as she was, the muse of comedy, Thalia always kept chickens around in various iterations (live, on the verge of laying eggs, shedding feathers crazily, cooked, rubber) because the comedic possibilities really are inexhaustible, as Gonzo of the Muppets would readily avouch.

    Comedy, however, was the least of her concerns at the moment; what Thalia wanted was a distraction, and as far as distractions which can be found in crummy apartments in metropolitan areas go, a live chicken will certainly do in a pinch.

     

So, I dunno.  Probably too wordy.  But it still kept me on track for today, and that’s 14 writing days in a row on track, and THAT AIN’T BAD.

I don’t always blarg about running…

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More work on the Project, more stumbling blocks, more throatpunches for the stumbling blocks.

I don’t pity Future Me when he comes back around to the words I got down today.  I went back and forth several times during the writing trying to decide whether I wanted the scene to be set in one place or another, whether or not I wanted a certain character to be present, whether whole swathes of exposition should be there at all… yeah, today’s draft is basically a thornbush of dubious dialogue and confusing directions to my Future Self.  “SOME TIME PASSES” and “PROBABLY GOING TO WANT TO CUT THIS” and “WHOOPS NEED TO DO THIS SOONER” are just a few of the notes scribbled in blood in the margins.  Okay, not scribbled in blood, but only because KEYBOARDS DON’T BLEED.  The id-writer had no patience today for sorting through things, and with good reason: I find myself mired in a scene that probably went on for too long.  It gives a lot of exposition which I feel is useful for me but not necessarily useful for any hypothetical reader; information that is probably better discovered scrawled on the cliff face as you hurtle downward past it toward the rocks.

Maybe that was a bit too stream-of-consciousness to make sense.  Can’t question it.  Today is a day for progress.

Anyway, I got the requisite 900 words (953 to be exact) but I’m not quite satisfied, so I will probably go back to it later.  In the meantime:

A post about running!

I don’t always blarg about running, because for the most part, there isn’t that much to say.  I mean, sure, every run is a good run, and every run is a revelation of the air in your lungs and the majesty of nature and the dodging of traffic and blah blah blah.  But you can only write about that so many times before it all sounds like so much whooshing in the ears.  So when I write about running, I try to have something specific to say.

My running has been in the ditch this year, and that could be more literal only if I had actually fallen into a ditch.  In January I suffered a horrific illness which kept me bedridden for days followed by a truly unpleasant foot injury (I snagged it on a nail in the back porch) which had me hobbling for weeks.  My wife would want me to point out why I was barefoot on the back porch in the dead of winter in the dark, and I would point out that every story needs a little mystery.  (I was peeing to save water vis-a-vis not flushing the toilet.  This made perfect sense to me at the time.  It was a weird month.)  GOLDFINGER IT.

So that was January, and in proper tolerate-no-weakness, progress-or-death fashion I went right back out and attempted to run way more than I should have as soon as the foot was even functional again.  Because I had to make up for lost time, right???  SO I INJURED IT AGAIN.  This time it’s a lot less obvious what the nature of the hurt is — something in the heel, probably a strain or a sprain or plantar fasciitis or I don’t know I’m not a fargoing podiatrist.

Whatever it is is (yes, “is is” is sometimes correct, holy Sharknado I just blew my mind by writing “is is” is and it was STILL correct) bad enough that I’ve scheduled a meeting with a podiatrist in two weeks.  I’ve been to the doctor’s office for my own discomfort exactly twice in my life (that I can recall.  And if I can’t recall it, it didn’t happen.  I think that sounds like a good rule).  Both times were for what eventually turned out to be kidney stones.  You know, only EXCRUCIATING AND BRAIN-CHOKING PAIN, the kind of pain that makes you wish you could literally disconnect your head from your body for a while to make the pain stop.

This pain is not that bad, but it’s gone on long enough that it’s time to acknowledge that there may be something actually wrong.

But here’s why I’m stupid.  (Really, I should be writing, here’s why I’m stupid IN THE HERE AND NOW OF THIS MOMENT TODAY.)  I am doing the classic guy thing: “naw, it’s fine, rub some dirt on it, no problem” in that I have started running again regardless.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not out there gritting my teeth and fighting back tears at every step.  In fact, when I run, the pain for the most part goes away.  It’s later in the day, after I’ve been sitting or walking around, you know, NOT RUNNING, that it starts to hurt.  So I have logicked for myself that it can’t be an issue of actual damage (elsewise it would surely hurt all the time, I mean, that makes SENSE, right?) and must therefore be something more like a strain (some muscle or other gets stretched out and relaxed during activity, then tightens up like a piano wire afterward).  This makes sense to my lizard brain and is how I’m justifying continuing to run.

We will see in a few weeks whether it’s actually fine or whether I’ve destroyed my feet beyond repair like Kathy Bates in Misery.  (Pardon me while I throw up in my mouth a little bit.)  So far it’s fine.  But therein lies the problem.  I convinced myself that it’s not so bad; that I can continue to run.

Let me detour to reiterate a fundamental truth that I believe to be true.  THERE IS SOMETHING FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN ABOUT RUNNERS.  Bear in mind, I’m talking about capital-R RUNNERS.  Ask the average person if they’d like to go out for a run, and they are likely to say anything from “No” to “Get bent” to nothing at all in favor of a speedy shin-kick.  Ask a Runner, however, and the answer will be something like “Hey, yeah, I could go for three or four or five miles, I mean I ran this morning but I could use a few more today, in fact why don’t I run from my house to yours so that I can make it an even 10?”  We are messed up, and I fully own belonging to that group.  Card-carrier.  Except we don’t have cards, we have dirty socks and worn-out shoes.

And yes, I’ve read the articles and some books and the studies that show that humans are basically custom-built to run long distances, and I buy most of it.  THAT DOES NOT EXCUSE THE BEHAVIOR.  What kind of an idiot convinces himself that he’s not really hurt so that he can engage in the activity which probably injured him in the first place — an activity, by the way, which is utilized as punishment in VIRTUALLY EVERY OTHER SPORT.  It’s like that parasite that takes over an ant’s brain and forces it to camp out on a blade of grass for the sole purpose of getting eaten so that the parasite can end up in a cow’s digestive tract.  (This is a real thing, I read it on The Oatmeal.)  There’s some similar parasite that infects the brains of normal humans and causes them to think it’s a good idea to run for hours and hours and hours every week.  I’m convinced of it.

So I’m injured and finding ways to run despite the injury.  Such, it seems, is life.  I’m doing it smarter this time than I did back in February; taking nice short distances, going at what feels like a snail’s pace.  So far, it’s working, though it’s tortuous reigning myself in when my brain is constantly whispering go faster, go farther, you’re a wimp, GO GO GO.  But I’m determined to make a positive out of it, and here’s another thing I’ve convinced myself of.  While my physical self has suffered, my metaphysical self has grown. While my body is waning, my mind is waxing, and while my running has been pathetic of late, my writing has been prolific.  The trick will be to keep the two balanced as I (hopefully) bring my physical self back up to speed (oh no, the running puns are starting again, HIDE).  Hopefully there’s enough wax to go around.

+2 points for the continued metaphor, but -10 because… ew.