Tag: The Project

Baby Steps

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Writing is a journey, yeah?

You start off uncertain whether the two words you just committed to the blank page even belong in the same zip code with one another, or whether, like tinfoil and microwave ovens, their relationship is doomed before the heat even gets turned up. But you press on, smashing words together with the blithe indifference of the LHC, watching for sparks, looking for anything that resonates, and before you know it, you have a thing.

Maybe it’s a novel. Or a screenplay. Or a short story. Or a poem. Or a lyric. But you have this thing, born from the unfathomable space between your ears, and it’s raw and wriggling and it may or may not have a chance in this world, but it’s yours.

And at first, it’s all: whoa. I did that. I created this thing from nothingness. And you float on that godlike feeling for a while. But it only lasts for so long, because we’re talking about literature of one caliber or another, here, and literature is only as important as its audience decides it is. And that means that, first and foremost, what it needs is an audience.

But it’s not ready for an audience yet. Too many rough edges, too many unshapen limbs, too many vestigial tails. You shape it, you trim it, you coddle it in some places and you axe its redundant bits in others, never really knowing if you’re helping it or dooming it, only trying your best to give it a chance to breathe the air of this strange and indifferent world. Like it or not, eventually that moment comes, when it must leave the nest and survive or die trying.

The second draft of my novel is out today to three beta readers. The first was my wife, and as much as I love and appreciate her for reading my drivel, I can’t trust her feedback alone. She’s more or less obligated to tell me it’s good, and that I haven’t been banging my head against the keyboards of various computers for the last seventeen months for nothing. And I value her feedback, I do — she’s a hell of a lot smarter than I am — but I’m (hopefully) writing for an audience that’s larger than just my wife. And I’m not ashamed to tell you, even though I know these beta readers personally, I am scared sharknadoless to get feedback from them.

It’s odd. I am hoping that they’ll be impartial enough to give me the feedback that I need to better the story, but I’m terrified of what that feedback will be.

Still, it’s a necessary step in the process. In order to grow, we must shed our skins, leave behind the old uses that threaten to keep us from becoming the new and future uses. (That’s “us”es, not “uses”.)

Of course, that doesn’t make it easy.

Goals and Sub-Goals

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I sat down to write a blarg post tonight, and all I wanted to do was work on my capital “W” Writing projects.

So I did.

And it got me to thinking, for all the time I’ve spent working on those projects, it’s about time I did something with them. Publication is the sort of over-arching goal for the foreseeable future — of my novel, of course, but really of anything — so I need to start finding out whether anything I’ve written is worth, you know, actual money to somebody. Which means it’s time to get over my big fear and start sending some work out.

And if I’m going to send work out, it damn sure needs to be my best, or at least my best for right now. But as I know from oh, the past 34 years of my life, if I don’t have a deadline, it won’t get done.

So, some new goals:

Existing already: first draft of second novel completed by September.

Nebulous at present: get some more feedback on edited version of Accidentally Inspired over the summer.

New goal: Brush up and extend at least 3 short stories to about 3k words in length in preparation for submission by the end of June. That’s about 1 per week, which should be easy, given the number of old flash fiction ditties I have kicking around the cellar here.

Tonight I added about 500 words and spruced up the wording a bit in one of my favorites. Not a bad job on my day off from working on the novel.

So: for anybody reading, are any of you published, including novels or short fiction? What advice do you have for a guy taking his tentative first steps? What works, what doesn’t? How should I focus my time? What steps should I be taking?

Word Wars: A New Hope

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I’ve been in a writing funk for, gosh, let’s just go ahead and call it three months.

I’d been beating my head against the wall of the edit of my novel and… it’s just so exhausting. Reading the pages over and over again. Checking for continuity. Evaluating the language. Fixing this. Tweaking that. Blasting holes in the drywall and going back in with a blowtorch to re-weld the pipes. The most tedious and thankless of work.

Yeah, WORK. Who ever thought this writing thing would be WORK? It turned into such an ungainly mass of WORK that just like real work, I was hiding from it, finding excuses not to do it, stretching it out, and basically procrastinating myself into a corner, and teaching myself to hate it at the same time. Seriously, if I didn’t love it so dearly, I could almost say I hated the project right now.

But it’s out of my hands now. I’ve passed it on to a few beta readers and I have feelers out for a few more, so now it’s time to cut the cord and let that one fly away (birds have cords, right?). I started thinking about the other novel ideas I had kicking around in my head from a few months back. I stopped stressing about the details of the “finished” work. I began thinking about what sort of deadline I could impose upon myself for a new project; how many words a day I could write, how many months it might take. I started dreaming up characters and themes and plots and motifs and a hundred other little things I want to include in the next story. I cobbled together some notes and a ghost of an outline in Evernote (god I love Evernote, it’s like a personal assistant I don’t have to pay or buy lunch for).

And then last night, the craziest thing happened. I cracked the seal on a brand new word document, breathed in the heady aroma of that blank page, and started writing. Originally I only planned to get a couple hundred words down — just the introduction of a character and a place — but before I knew it I was back in top drafting form, slinging words with abandon, hastily leaving notes to myself, swearing at myself in the margins, in short having a ball of a time. Within just forty five minutes, I’d penned a thousand words, and it had felt as effortless as falling off a toaster. This, I reminded myself, is what it’s supposed to feel like. This is why writing is awesome. Creating people, giving life to worlds, unearthing plot devices from the raw soil of my cerebellum… ahh yeah, that’s the stuff.

The months of ennui fell away like a cobra’s skin. Underneath was the churning engine of creation that so wrapped me up and carried me away at about this time, one year ago. Still purring like a kitten, still snarling like a junkyard dog to chew up some words and spit out some copy. I felt glorious; I felt renewed. I guess this is the start of the next chapter.

When I started my blog last year hand in hand with my novel project, I had a simple system for organizing posts. Everything I posted about the novel here on the blarg last year, I tagged “the project” and/or “commitment 2014”. I had promised myself that I’d get the first draft written before 2014 was out, and I fargoing did it despite my own expectations that I wouldn’t. I’m on Twitter now, so I guess it’s only right that I start the tradition anew.

#TheProject lives.

#Commitment2015 is here.

Fasten your seat belts and hide your children.

Achievement Unlocked: First Edit Complete!

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There’s a great moment in Hook, that early 90’s Peter Pan reboot, where Tinkerbell suddenly grows to human size and her house explodes around her as she embraces her true feelings for Peter Pan, confessing her undying and eternal pixie love for him.

Actually, that moment was a little bit weird. Creepy, even, somehow. But that’s off the topic. She unleashes a blast of magic she didn’t know she had, and with a demure little gasp of surprise, she yelps, “I did it!” Just as much in shock as Peter.

Well, that’s me right now.

Because I did it.

I bound up the sprained ankle I mentioned in my last post — you know, the one where I stepped in a literary pothole — and heaved myself bodily across the finish line. And that’s it. It’s over.

Well, not over over. But the first edit is over. Like really, legitimately, no-more-bullsharknado over. The only thing left now is one final pass for formatting, and then I can put the last nail in the coffin and decide who I’m going to burden with the first reading of this coalesced glob of proto-babble I’m tentatively calling a book. And for that step, I’m allowing myself no more than a week. One week — seven days — and then it’s time to figure out who I trust enough to tear my crazily crafted tapestry to shreds.

But here’s a dirty secret. I didn’t want to be finished. No, that’s not right. I was dying to be finished. No…

Truth be told, I was 50-50 split on whether I wanted to be finished with the whole thing or whether I was going to undertake another massive rewrite. It would have been easy to take the rewrite and stretch the process out for another month or more. So easy. I could still do it, in fact.

The fact is, I just slapped a band-aid on the problem of the disappearing character. She had disappeared without a trace, and I just wrote a magical exit from the narrative for her. (There’s magic in my story; I can totally do that.) Solving the problem she presented for me consisted of writing a single paragraph and changing a few sentences in the chapter at hand. That’s all.

But while I was writing the easy fix, a bigger fix crept into my head. A divergent fork in the road. The road overgrown with weeds and bramble and teeming with dark critters and glowing eyes floating in the mist. And this time… this time… I decided to let the harder road be.

You can bet dollars to doughnuts, though, that I wrote down the idea for the rewrite in case I need it later.

So, that’s that. The first edit is concluded. Or so nearly concluded as makes no difference. Concluded in every practical sense. Pat it on the head, send it on its way.

So what does that mean? It means it’s time to stop thinking of this novel as a pet project and get serious about the business of turning it into an actual book that you, reading this, can actually hold in your actual hands. Or, you know, into a collection of ones and zeroes that your handheld computer can belch up at you without the need for all that clumsy processed tree getting in the way. Either way.

And then…

And then, I guess, it’ll be time to don the greasy garb of the pit fighter to begin once again the dirty work of drafting something new. Because momentum matters, and just because the first edit is done is no reason to consider the work finished.

I was reading some notes by Stephen King about how he prepares to work on a story, and he wrote rather anti-eloquently that he gets the idea in mind and then just goes about his life until the muse — and I’m paraphrasing here, but the operative words are definitely his — shits on his head. Maybe I should start carrying a roll of toilet paper around in my man-satchel.

You know, just in case.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Just Junk

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In keeping with my realization and resolution yesterday (not a New Year’s Resolution, just a regular old un-arbitrarily-linked-to-meaningless-space-time-data resolution), I attacked the edit hard today. Lots of parsing, lots of tidying, lots of trimming and sweeping, but no reconstructive surgery. And I was flying. I got through twenty pages, wrote several new paragraphs that needed inserting and deleted a handful that were just cluttering up the joint. Twenty pages in a day!

And as I always do when I’m reading over my own writing, I realized another thing. My prose is lousy with junk language.

It’s a first draft, so I’m not mad at myself, but it was still shocking to see how much I lean on empty modifiers and redundant qualifiers. Prime example? Just.

Not just as in right, but just as in only just. This is a word that’s practically invisible to me in speech — I knew that already — but in my writing, it flows out just as invisibly (see? Just there. AND AGAIN.) To be honest, I didn’t even spot it until I was thirty minutes into my work, and then only because just appeared twice in the same sentence. I’d carelessly used it twice by mistake, but the sudden jolt of reading it twice gave me pause. Then I pondered.

An invaluable tool during the edit has been the “find” feature. I can search for swear words (which need editing out), chapter titles (to track down errant plotlines and quickly navigate the document), and goofy little symbols I’ve thrown in to mark trouble spots. It’s a great tool for making quick work of pervasive problems and finding my way around, but today it found a new task: Seek and destroy.

“Just” went into the finder. Actually, “just ” with a space went into the finder, to weed out any fancy words like justice or justified or Justin (all Justins should be removed from all books, just on principle, but that’s a topic for another post). The result? I had written “just” into the book 358 times. The number as a number doesn’t do itself justice. That’s three hundred, fifty eight times I used the word “just” as a modifier in the course of a book that’s 175 pages in Word. Two per page.

An epidemic.

Out came the scissors and the “just”s began falling to the ground like my hair, back when I used to have enough hair to necessitate going in for haircuts. Fifty of them got cut with no other modification to the lines they appeared in, another fifty got removed with minor modification, and the other two hundred fifty are slated for summary destruction tomorrow. Now, don’t get me wrong. Adverbs have their place. But for me, this junk language is as obvious a crutch as you could hope to see.

I usually like to dig below the surface and make extra meaning out of my issues, but there’s nothing extra in this one. There’s something to be said for conversational tone here on the blarg and in, y’know, conversation. But that junk language creeping into “proper” writing is bad news, and I have a feeling that much like roaches in your kitchen, there are a hundred hiding in the walls for every one that you see in the open.