Tag: distractions

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.

A Word About the Words

Pavowski2 Comments

Time-out.

If you read this blog in the past two weeks, you might have noticed that I am a fan of colorful language.  And by colorful I mean rude.  And by rude I mean naughty.  And by naughty I mean werty dirds.  (Fargo, there’s no good way to spell that phonetically.)

As I mentioned in a previous post, my dear wife has pointed out to me that due to the visibility of this little dumping ground of mine (and I mean that as an entendre), i.e. that anybody could see it, not least of which my students (fear for the future), I should perhaps be a bit more conscientious of what I post here.

In my head, I argued that conscientiously, I choose virtually every word I recreate here with love and care, and every word which I write here is exactly the word which I meant to write, unless I happen to be posting from the tablet, in which case all bets and all syntax are out the Goldfinger window.

I also feel that a good epithet is the spice of not just language but maybe also life itself, and by that rationale, saying, for example, that a particular sandwich was “a great sandwich” just doesn’t mean the same thing as “a great Fargoing sandwich,” no matter how much we want it to.  Maybe you like some smoked gouda on your burger, and maybe I don’t – but that doesn’t mean that the gouda has to come off the menu.  Gouda, after all, has only the power we give to it and no more.

However, I also know that my dear wife is smarter than I am, so the rational side of me got my foamy-mouthed writer half in a headlock and eased him gently into sleep for a little while.  And by eased him gently into sleep, I mean clubbed him with a DonDraper two by four to lay him out, and hit him once more for good measure once he was down.  Seriously, that guy hasn’t had his shots.  Keep your distance.

So while the unchecked-stream-of-consciousness-happy id-writer Me was napping, world-conscious, livelihood-conscious Me (Goldfingerit, there are so many DonDraper mes crashing around this joint) did a bit of reprogramming and spruced up the place.  To be specific, I stole a page from John Green and crew at CrashCourse and made some substitutions.  John cleverly uses the names of well known authors to stand in for his favorite unsavories; I like movies.  And characters.  And nonsense.  So I’ll use my own code.

So when you’re browsing through these halls of egotism, and you come across a word that sticks out, that just isn’t like the others, fear not, it’s simply the word fairy hard at work keeping this place semi-presentable.  She’s got a lot of Fargoing work to do, though, because I keep a pretty high level of Sharknado flying around this place at all times.  But we can keep it between ourselves, dear reader, you and I.  YOU know what I’m talking about.

Goldfinger it, THE WORD FAIRY, that’s brilliant.  I need to write that down.  Nobody touch that, I’m totally going to use it later.

Anyway, the words may have changed around here, but the feeling won’t.  I write at my best when I let it all hang out, even if it is thinly coded.  I have to say, though, that there is a certain liberation to cutting loose and letting all the gouda bounce off the walls.   Without actually calling it gouda, I mean.  Sharknado, I think my metaphor’s gotten convoluted.

Aaand now I’m hungry.

Writing at home kinda sucks

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A really rough day of writing today.  Lots of things demanding my attention at work (silly work, intruding on my happy writey time) and more roadblocks falling in my path.

But, as we learned in the previous post, when we hit roadblocks – WE DRIVE THE FARGO AROUND THEM.  (We, here, would presumably be me and my slavering pure-id writing alter ego.  Do NOT feed him caffeine.)

From the current vantage point, from the lofty peaks of oh, a week and a half in, seems to be this: the action of writing a play within a play, while I think it works brilliantly onstage, does not translate particularly well in a book.  Or, if it does, let me amend by saying: I do not know yet how to do it right.  I wrote the first sort of split scene today, and oi, was it an exercise in frustration.  I kept finding myself leaning back in the chair, saying to myself, “god, I really don’t like that,” or, “there’s got to be a better way to do it,” or, “WHY IS MY DOORBELL RINGING AT 7:30 AT NIGHT, WHAT ARE WE, SAVAGES?  No, I don’t want to change my cable provider, you can have a nice tall glass of go to haberdashery, now where was I, oh yes, this passage I just wrote is godawful, maybe I would like to talk to you about my options for upgrading my high speed internet for just a little while, please come back?”

Sidenote: writing at home is HARD.  First of all, there’s the sprout, whose demand for attention is akin to a black hole’s demand for swallowing all matter in the universe.  Basically inescapable.  (And yes, I know that black holes no longer exist, or maybe they do, SCIENCE CAN’T BE TRUSTED.)  Then there’s my dear pregnant wife, who needs as much of my attention as I can give her, and bless her, she deserves it, which is why this post will be extra short so that I can get some quality Walking Dead time on with her.  Then there are door-to-door salesmen at 7:00 at night, apparently.  It’s so much easier to take some time on my lunch at work or get to work a bit early, to close the door and bang out some piping hot words and then go about my day safe in the knowledge that I have achieved a personal goal today.  Twenty minutes writing in isolation is worth an hour of writing in the den, and I will take it whenever I can get it.

Of course, as you may have gathered, that did not happen today.  I got about 600 words in during the day – a good showing, but short of the mark – so I came home to hammer out a few more.  And I got them. Oh, boy, how I got them.  Subvert the roadblocks, leave them for Future Me to deal with, move on to something a lot more fun to write and hi-ho Silver, I ended up with 1200 words today.

So I’m still on track.  The Project.  Day 7.  It’s gonna be a thing.

Here’s my favorite passage from today’s session.  Might just have to make this a regular feature.

  • Bernardo was a local man who was very well paid to keep Harold’s drink topped off, to have Harold’s breakfast ready when he came down in the morning, to screen Harold’s phone calls for him, and to otherwise stay the Fargo out of Harold’s way and pretend not to speak English, thank you very much.  For these modest services, he was ridiculously well compensated, and was happy to suffer a week’s worth of abuse once or twice a year.

See you tomorrow, bandidos.  Pew-pew!  (That’s a laser gun six-shooter.)