Tag: The Project

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.)

 

Comment Commentary

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My favorite passage from today’s work:

  • He lowered the paper to examine the details of the place, but found that the restaurant had vanished and been replaced with his crummy apartment again.  Even the heavenly garlic bread smell had been replaced with the unmistakable aroma of “please take out the garbage.”  Frowning, he wound the paper back into the typewriter, and the smell hit him again.  His aunt Martina used to make garlic bread that smelled like that, and it always made him think of summer nights in the rolling hills of Salerno, except for the fact that he’d never left the United States and his aunt Martina was as Italian as Honey Boo-Boo.

So, it will bear editing, of course, but it makes me smile.  Also, I formatted that on the fly, and the look of it pains me, but I’m in a serious-ANTZ can’t-be-bothered mood as far as my writing goes today.  I’m getting some sweet Word Count in; ain’t nobody got time for all that flowery make-it-easier-on-the-reader Sharknado.

Except for you, reader.  You’re awesome.

The weekend is never long enough, but this weekend was a good one.  Lots of family, lots of cleaning, the culmination (and pretty fantastic reception) of a big work project, and I even got some extracurricular writing done.  Really happy with this week’s Flash Fiction, and really pleased with today’s writing.

I got 1639 words done today, which is pretty impressive, considering how badly I was struggling to get my wheels turning.  Luckily, for today at least, once I was able to break the wheels out of the ice, it was smooth sailing.  But I’m learning some tricks to keep from getting stuck.

The trick of the day is Comments.  I am growing to love using Comments when I write.  Past Me would, when having difficulty with a passage or a phrase or any other sort of roadblock, sit and stew in front of the screen until he could come up with something at least passable to use to surmount the problem.  It was frustrating, slow, and perhaps more than anything, made me feel inept and uncreative and ill-suited to even be writing.  In other words, I’d get hung up on some insignificant detail and after a few minutes, my inability to come up with a good peripheral character name or clever made-up song title would balloon into WHY ARE YOU EVEN BOTHERING YOU’RE AN IDIOT YOU CAN’T DO THIS JUST EAT A CUPCAKE AND FORGET THE WHOLE THING.  Eating cupcakes is easy and that voice in my head was loud, so there you have it.  (I wonder why that voice of inner doubt is always shouting.  Probably mommy issues.)

Present Me, on the other hand, hits a roadblock then powers up his PNEUMATIC JUMPING CAR (note to the future, invent pneumatic jumping cars), jumps the obstacle/plot hole/misplaced character/encroaching cupcake (okay, let’s be honest, I still eat the cupcake) and sticks a flag in the ground when he lands, warning Future Me HEY LOOK OUT THERE’S A PROBLEM BACK THERE, HAVE FUN DEALING WITH THAT SUCKER, I’LL BE UP HERE STILL WRITING LOL WOO TYPETYPETYPE.  (Turns out my voice of inner writing badANTZery shouts a lot too.  Who knew.)

So my first draft is a Haberdasheryscape of stuck-in comments like “omg this part, help” to “MORE BACKSTORY, WRITE IT LATER” to “jesus, so BORING”.  They say that writers are their own worst critics, and that certainly seems to be holding true at the moment.

In short, Present Me is a Darwin to Future Me, but at least Present Me gets to stay productive and keep moving so that Future Me will have the opportunity to do the same.

5 in the bag

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Getting my writing done in a crazy busy day like yesterday is a pretty significant accomplishment. Only 1100 words, but still ahead of schedule. More importantly, the siren’s call of laziness, sounding loudly by virtue of having filled my quota for the week before Friday even started, failed to pull me off course. So for my first week of the project, I met all my goals : 5 days of writing at 900 words a day, stayed on topic, even posted to the blog a few times.  The sweet, sweet smell of accomplishment. Smells like donuts. Is it donuts?

So now I get two days off. But percolating for the weekend is a Flash Fiction from Chuck Wendig. I am not sure yet if having little side projects will help or hinder the central project, but as long as the ideas keep coming, why not give it a spin?

There is also the issue of momentum ; I am saddled with fear that if I stop pushing, stop driving forward, that the tires will bog down in the mud and I will be discovered years from now, a dessicated skeleton lazily raising a cheeto to its mouth (the cheeto, I believe, would still be intact, crunchy, and delightful).

The same could be said for my running, which is currently in the ditch belching black smoke. A part of me fears that if I go too long without a run that I will never get back into it, so I keep pushing myself to get out there and in all likelihood I keep making my injury worse. But KEEP PUSHING OR ELSE YOU’LL BE FAT FOREVER so off I go and then a few hours later ohgodithurts.

Sharknado,  I just came a little close to psychoanalyzing myself. ALL HANDS ABANDON SHIP RUN FOR YOUR LIVES THE ABYSS IS HERE.
Ahem. Next post should hopefully be a Flash Fiction about time thieves.

BTW, words that the tablet did not want to let me write in this post: belching, dessicated, cheeto, sharknado, virtue, psychoanalyzing, fat, abyss, bog. Predictive typing, my assignment (yep, it just made that “correction” too). It’s like it doesn’t know me at all.

Braindisk

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No post yesterday, a bit of a let-down: it was a private goal, not a public one, to try to post a little something here every day.  However, to be fair, I do have a decent excuse.

I started this little project on a really terrible week to be taking on an extracurricular activity like my novel.  Our play is in production this week and I’m spending more hours at the school than I could really ever advise any teacher to spend.  This is affectionately known to theater-folk as “hell week”, and to non-theater-folk as “where the hell is my husband week.”  Lots of hours and mental stress make it a terrible time to be taking on anything outside the norm as far as responsibilities go, so choosing to start my novel this week was, um, let’s not mince words, a bonehead move.  Oh, I have this mountain to climb, why don’t I strap this big Goldfinger rock to my back.  Rock-carrying is a thing I’ve always wanted to do.

Regardless, I’m clipping along just fine.  Though I didn’t post, I did get my requisite writing done: 1600 words yesterday, and 1560 today.  I was expressing to my dear wife yesterday how I really don’t want to get boasty or braggy about making my word counts because I know that I’m coasting merrily along in the honeymoon stage where undertaking this thing still seems like a pretty good idea.  That will fade, and I am hoping that when they do I remember to have my dukes up so I can fight through it.  That said, it’s hard not to feel heartened by the progress I’m making.   I’ve got almost 7,000 words in the bag already, which, if we track our maths, is almost 10% of what I want to arrive at when all is said and done.  Again, that’s inflated, and I do not expect to keep up that amount of flow throughout the process, but it’s not bad for 4 days’ work.

I even got a run in yesterday morning, which is always nice for making me feel productive.  It rained on me a little bit, but that doesn’t bother me; in fact, at sixty degrees, a bit of rain on a run now and then is welcome.  Non-runners hear that and think, running’s bad enough in the first place, why make it worse by doing it in the rain?  Of course, many of us are simply broken individuals.  The stuff that most folks would never consider is the stuff that keeps us going.  It reminds me of Calvin’s dad:

calvinandhobbes

I miss that comic so much.

I even, while I was running, had an idea for another project.  It’s stupid.  I once had the big bang explained to me thus: all the matter in the universe collected in a big round disk like a pancake, and at the moment of explosion the matter spun out sideways, bits of stars and planets and galaxies flying off and glomming together as the gravity of the central mass just wasn’t enough to contain them.  In this metaphor my brain is the disk, spinning up to speed and throwing off all these ideas that I will never be able to recover or develop.  Still, better too many ideas than too few.

Going Strong and Extra Long

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I am not sure to what I should attribute my incredibly productive first few days, but I have been incredibly productive and it’s kind of awesome.  The Project is alive and on fire; it’s sprouting extra arms and heads and other appendages that I don’t have words for.  I know better than to think that it will be like this all the way through August, but for the moment, the tide is high and I’m riding that wave.  1600 words yesterday, 1800 words today.  It’s a damn good feeling, balm for my languishing writer’s soul, a cold beer on a hot day.

In my musings on the play as I left it many years ago, there were a lot of criticisms that sprung to mind.  The rambling nature of the way the characters speak for one, the deus-ex-machina-esque nature of the ending, the distinct lack of pyrotechnics.  One critique that never occurred to me, however, was not “he needs a love interest.”  There was simply enough going on in the play that it felt (to me) complete without one.  In the meantime, it was suggested by my dear wife that a love interest would serve the story well.

“Why,” I asked.

“It just does,” she said.

“Why,” I insisted.

“Girls like love stories,” she said.

That makes sense enough, I suppose.  She is a lot smarter than me, after all.  So I thought about how to make the love interest work within the scope of the play as it existed.  And it just didn’t work.  It didn’t make sense to me.  Couldn’t make it jive.  It became part of the reason, I suppose, that I fell away from the project and didn’t come back to it until now; it was a problem I couldn’t fix.  (There I go again, blaming past me for my problems.  That guy really screwed my life up.  Except for the things he got right.  Ahh, I can’t be mad at that guy.)

Now, however, armed with new resolve, new confidence, and new pants (true story, none of the pants from back then fit; yes, that’s me tooting my own horn, because occasionally I need to remind myself of the little things I do that are awesome), I am attacking the problem head-on (apply directly to the forehead).  I am trying, in this grand experiment, to lean into the problems that seem unfixable.  They’re going to come up, and they don’t have to be fixed at the moment they come up.  Love story doesn’t work in the context of the story you wrote?  Create a new context.  Work around it.  Try something new and crazy and different.  So today, the story grew a new character.

I have to be careful to make sure that she’s not a tossed-off perfect creature, but on a first spin she seems like a pretty good fit.  There was a natural place to bring in somebody new anyway; why not make that character a central one?

Lots to think about, lots to write about. The temptation will be to consider the extra writing I’ve gotten done over the last couple days as a credit in the bank and let myself slack off from a day or two. Gotta stomp that down.