Tag: word count

4 Questions & an update

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Two Blargs in one day?  Shenanigans.

Actually I wrote 90% of the one about my feet last night so I can’t really claim it as today’s work.

SO: today’s blarg.

It’s Day 2 of Spring Break (the weekend doesn’t count – that was a day off anyway!) and it’s been pretty productive so far.  I had feared that it would be difficult to maintain momentum with my daily routine getting bashed up (write for thirty minutes or so on my lunch break, finish it up and blarg in an hour or so at home), but it’s been okay.  I got my Project writing done last night thanks to a bit of time granted to me by my dear wife, and today’s words came out courtesy of the sprout’s solid 2-hour nap.  And I’ll get some more blarging in besides.

And!

A favorite passage from today’s writing!  I fell off the ball with these, partially because it’s hard fargoing work carving out time for all the writing I’m trying to fit in, and partially because a lot of what I’ve been pushing out lately hasn’t been particularly … what’s the word… artful?  It’s good but it needs polish.  Not done cooking.

This bit, I think, is fairly sound.

Accidentally Inspired was, when I wrote it as a stageplay, a bit autobiographical, and now expanding it as a novel, yeah, it’s still autobiographical.  I think this bit was me pulling right from the heart today.

     “Sooner or later, you dig deep enough, you’ll hit the Bottom.” The capital B was evident – again, the gods’ phones have no difficulty translating intricacies of inflection and emphasis. It just sounds like static or wind noise on human phones. “And when you hit the Bottom, one of two things will happen. One: he’ll figure out that he doesn’t really want to be in that hole — not really — and then you can start to climb out again. Or two: the Bottom will cave in, and you will find yourself somewhere else entirely.”
“What do we do if that happens?”
Exasperation crackled through the ethereal wireless connection. “You figure it out, Thalia. Gods, are you a grown woman or not?”

 

WordPress has me at almost 40 followers now.  Pretty cool.  Part of that is community, and thanks to the content of what I’m posting here, many of the people seeing my brain-droppings (RIP George Carlin) are a part of a pretty significant writer’s community.  Collaboration is always a good thing, so I thought I’d acknowledge that some of those writing blogs out there have helped me and inspired me and given me some ideas along the way when I’ve been stuck.  So thanks.

In poking around on the WordPress reader, I came across this little tidbit posted by one of the first members to check out my blog and give me a follow, Jodie Llewelyn.  It made me think for a minute, and what I think about I usually end up writing about, so here you are.  Four little questions to tickle a writer’s brain.

1. Why did you start writing?
2. What do you love the most about writing?
3. What goals are you working towards, right now?
4. What advice do you have for other writers who may be struggling with a lack of inspiration, right now?

Here, then, is how I answer.

1. Why did you start writing?
I wrote my first creative stuff, real genuine doing-this-for-my-own-dark-and-slimy-writer’s-heart after playing a video game, of all things. It had such a great (to me, at the time) story that I felt compelled to write a similar story without the video game construct. God, it was awful.  (The game, if you’re curious and go way back, was Final Fantasy 2.  I wish I could say it was the much better and much more widely acclaimed Final Fantasy 3, but that one wasn’t out yet.  I’m sure it played a role, too.)

So my little story (I think ultimately it came out to be 100 pages of chicken scratch, or maybe about twenty thousand words or so were I to really do anything serious with it, like type it out, which I never did, because what do you want from me, I was a teenager, and a dumb one at that) was crap, but it showed me that anybody — but anybody — even dumb ol’ me, could write a story.  It wouldn’t necessarily be good, but it could be done.  By that rationale, I mean, they’ll let anybody drive.  But I noticed, after I wrote it, that there were bits of it that I didn’t like.  That didn’t work.  So I edited it, by hand, in that crappy little spiral notebook, and continued to do nothing with it.  I just retooled it a little here and a little there, until I got tired of it and forgot about it.  I think of it fondly now, not because it was good or because I may return to it (not ever going to happen in this world or the next), but because it’s a pinpoint of cosmic get-your-head-on-straight guidance.  A beacon in the dark of doubt and misgivings that swallow up, I think, many a writer, not least of all me.  If a dumbANTZ (I really have to get some better gouda for the a- word) fourteen year old can punch out a twenty-thousand word little fantasy story, how can my thirty-something-year-old self, with his nearly infinitely grander life experience, measurelessly improved vocabulary, and unfathomably deeper ability to overstate and belabor a point FAIL at writing a complete novel?  It’d be an insult to that pimply-faced fourteen year old.  And I won’t do that to you, Past Me.  You had it rough, back then.

2. What do you love the most about writing?
The raw, maker-and-breaker-of-universes feeling. And the release of psychic tension. I said psychic when I meant to say intellectual, but I’m sticking to it, because I am the maker-and-breaker-of-universes and surely the maker-and-breaker-of-universes says what he means and means what he says.

But honestly, I’m not an Alpha guy.  I don’t know if Alpha guys (or gals) even have the inclination to be writers.  I could be wrong.  But there it is.  I’m not afraid of people – far from it.  I just prefer to let other folks take the lead most of the time.

But.

Give me some fake people?  Let me tell a story, let me decide the conflicts, the combats, the pitfalls and the possibilities?  Ooh, brother, it’s on like Donkey Kong.

So yeah, then there’s the intellectual tension.  In the last month, I’ve found that I feel clearer of mind, quicker of tongue, and in general a little happier.  Given the fact that my running is in the ditch and I have no other physiological cause to chalk all this up to, I can only imagine that the writing is playing the primary role.  I think the main project is great for focusing my mind and keeping me lasered in on what I’m trying to do, and my blarg is doing a bloody brilliant job of siphoning off the ancillary thoughts, clearing out the clogged mental pipes and generally just burning out the gunk that the average day’s crap pumps into my brainholes.

3. What goals are you working towards, right now?
Finishing — really finishing — like, for serious, really and truly nail-in-the-coffin finishing — my first novel. Also, developing some ideas for future novels so that I won’t have what happened last time I finished a creative project — I stood around for a while, thinking “what now”, couldn’t think of anything, and quit — happen again. The construction of that sentence is correct, and again, maker-and-breaker-I-do-what-I-want.

I’m not sure I ever felt better in my life about myself as a human than after I finished, really finished, the stage play of Accidentally Inspired and saw it to a full production.  Except maybe for the birth of my son.  Yeah, usually sappiness has no place here but I’m a relatively new dad and about to be one again, what can you do.  (Obligatory – my wedding day was pretty great, too, but heck, anybody can get married.)  It slipped away from me then because I lacked direction and didn’t know what to do next, once that was finished.  A mistake I don’t plan to run into again.  Between the blarg (where I vent what’s in my brain on the regular, and which is quickly becoming a repository of little novel seedlings vis-a-vis my growing collection of flash fictions) and the spin-off ideas that creep in there when I overhear snippets of conversation or just, I don’t know, where do ideas come from?  They come, and I write them down now (something that, again, I have neglected for far too long), and I’m saving them until they’re ready.  I’m not actively thinking about them, but even when I’m working on AI, I can feel them back there, bubbling away in the dark.

4. What advice do you have for other writers who may be struggling with a lack of inspiration, right now?

This is one I really feel entirely unqualified to answer, because I’m just bouncing back onto the horse myself after getting thrown off it, what, seven or eight years ago?  (God, kill me.)  But in my short experience at capital-W Writing, here’s what’s working so far:

Write off topic or read. Writing about something unrelated to your focal project has, for me, a way of unstopping the pipes and burning out the gunk. Reading — whether it’s good lit or bad — fills my head with all kinds of ideas — new storylines, phrases, voices, characters, conflict structures, paces, artful misspellings, the list goes on — that, after a while, I can’t wait to bring back and experiment with over in my shallow end of the pool.

 

 

 

 

So there you have it.  A few thoughts on writing from your resident Pav.  Maybe it’ll help you out, maybe not.  At any rate, it helped me, and that’s the point of all this, so consider me selfish, and turn the lights out when you leave.  I do my best thinking in the dark.

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.

Please Shut Up

PavowskiLeave a comment

I really wanted to find something I could blarg about this evening.  I really, tried hard.

But I am tapped.

I don’t really know why.  Today was a day at work much like any other day.  I hammered out a pretty solid 1300 words and change.  Felt the flow pretty strongly, too; no piddling around, no aimless wandering to get the juices flowing, just down to work and kept smashing away at it.  Like a rock.  Left myself well poised for tomorrow’s session as well, a trick I’m learning to embrace and enjoy.  But that’s it.  I keep searching for off topic ideas to write about and I’m coming up empty.

Actually, I do have something to say, but it’s a little preachy, so I’m going to keep it brief.

Parents, teach your kids to appreciate the value of silence.  Take some time to teach them that not every fargoing minute of their existence has to be filled with distraction, with music, with jokes, with youtube videos, with gossip, with dancing, with ANYTHING.  There are times for all of those things. Those are good things a lot of the time.  But for god’s sake, let the silence in and enjoy it every now and then.

As a teacher, nay, as a parent, NAY, as a HUMAN BEING, it’s so frustrating to see the scores and scads of children — who are about to become adults! — who, when faced with a few minutes of quiet reading or study time, reach immediately for headphones, or can’t help but whisper (or just flat out talk) to a friend, or drum on their desks, or find ANYTHING TO DO EXCEPT KEEP SILENT AND FOCUS.  I get it.  They’re kids.  School is not the thing they really want to be doing with the day.  That’s okay.  I’m not faulting them for that.  But I think there’s something wrong when you can’t simply let yourself be alone with your thoughts for a little while.  When you can’t just turn off the music, put the goldfinger phone down, and actually listen to somebody else talk for a little while.  I don’t even mean me.  Just listen for a moment to process and consider the thoughts of another human being.

And the talking, ye gods.  They talk at each other and past each other but it’s a rare moment where any of my students will actually say anything to one another.

And yeah, I know, giving voice to these thoughts makes me sound hideously old and tired and get-off-my-lawn-ish.  I can’t help it, and I’m not sure if I want to.  Because if a kid can’t stop and think, how is he any better than an animal?  What’s the point of tens of thousands of years of evolution if we’re going to de-sensitize the one organ that gives us an advantage over every other creature on earth?

Okay, the lament for our future is over for now.  Pardon my soapbox.  I’ll just close the door as you leave and cry inside for a while.

TOYS.

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I am obsessed with toys.

Not the toys that my toddler leaves strewn about the house.  Those haberdasheryspawned contraptions of plastic and plush and cacophony without cease are the stuff of my nightmares, and I’m convinced that, when I have shrugged off this mortal coil, if hell is waiting for me, then at least one level of it will be a simple living room floor covered with toys that, much like the severed heads of the hydra, only spawn more toys when I try to clean them up.  An ever-growing, inescapable bramble patch of sharp-edged Legos waiting for my tender underfoot, a never-flagging symphony of bells and xylophones and singing woodland creatures.

Ahem.  Not those toys.

I’m talking about adult toys.  NO NOT THOSE ADULT TOYS.  Toys for grown folks.

The problem is, they don’t really make toys for grown folks.  There’s a toy section at Target (Yeah, Target, because FARGO WAL-MART), but it’s for kids.  Toys for grown folks underwent some serious branding a long time back and are now known as “accessories” or “programs” or “electronics” or whatever other title the little odds and ends are for whatever fascinating little squirrel-hole of a hobby you find yourself falling down.  My holes are reserved for things like running and writing and watching movies and maybe I should rethink the phrasing of this sentence.

I should make something clear at the outset here.  I’m a packrat.  It’s awful.  I love stuff.  I really do.  The American credo of getting as much as you can (that’s a thing, right?) has found a happy little home in my brain and I feed it at every opportunity I get.  I find a hobby, or a thing that I love, and I buy all kinds of little useless crap that has anything to do with it.  I’ve got a storage tub full of decks of cards from when I went through a card tricks phase a few years back.  I’ve got boxes in the garage filled with little action figures (THEY’RE NOT DOLLS, SHUT UP) from cartoons (okay, anime) I watched in college.  I’ve got dusty plaques and trophies from when I was less than ten years old.  No less than four sets of serious-ANTZ darts (because, yeah, darts were a thing for me for a while) — the ones that come with their own little carrying case and you have to screw the whole shebang together, feathers and all.  A personalized goldfingered bowling ball from when I was in a bowling league at the age of fifteen.  It’s not memorabilia.  There’s no sentimental value.  It’s my STUFF, man, and I’m a-keepin it.

So I hoard stuff.  And my wife hoards stuff, too.  Like opposite ends of two magnets, we attracted one another, except that like magnets would repel each other, and we’re the same, so the metaphor kind of falls apart at this stage, but sharknado, I’m on a roll here.  Our garage is not a place we like to show off to people.  It’s a repository of our shames.

Because, make no mistake, there is bountiful shame.  I know that, on many levels, it’s ridiculous to have all this stuff.  Who the haberdashery needs thirty decks of playing cards?  And yet, I can’t get rid of it.  Even as I profess to strive for minimalism and simplification in my more recent years, the demons of my past keep working behind my back.  Organizers to decrease desk clutter?  Yes, I’ll take two, and try them for a week, and then put them on the pile of clothes that I keep meaning to donate out in the garage.  A fancy new bag to keep my job stuff organized as I go back and forth from home to work and back?  I’ll take one in blue AND black.  One will live in the back of my car; I will call him Tim, and feed him empty tin cans and drive-thru receipts.  BECAUSE I KEEP THOSE TOO.

New hobbies?  New toys.  With running, it was new shoes, the soles lined with the down of angels to comfort my delicate feet, new socks made of synthetic fibers to absorb shock and sweat (socks that actually care which foot you put them on – seriously, I had never seen socks emblazoned with tiny L’s and R’s before I took up running), a fancy watch which can triangulate my position and tell the government (I mean me) how fast I ran that mile, what neighborhood I ran it in, and how long I was meeting with the terrorist operatives in the woods (wait, what?), new shirts woven of mystical threads to provide legendary comfort and style, hats, gloves, shoes, headphones, all of which are covered with little reflecty bits to ensure that I am not struck by oncoming traffic whilst I’m out pounding pavement when the rest of the world slumbers.  They say running is cheap — all you need is your shoes and you can head out the door.  The romanticism of that idea drew me in.  I shudder to think how much money I’ve “saved” by taking up running rather than or instance shelling out for a gym (which I would not have gone to, that’s off topic, STAY ON TOPIC).

Now, writing!  I am new to Serious Writing (about as new as this blog is, which is to say, not quite a month in), so my list of purchases is still rather short.  BUT NOT NONEXISTENT.  I am typing these very words on a spiffy new bluetooth keyboard with my tablet (the bluetooth keyboard actually makes the tablet totally decent to write on). I bought some e-books, which DON’T COUNT because they don’t take up space, but yeah they still count because they are still representative of my inner slobbering consumerist packrat self.  A new bag, to facilitate carrying the tablet and keyboard as well as my other stuff going back and forth between work and home (yes, I got a new bag a couple paragraphs ago, just… okay?)

And apps!  Holy schlamoly, there are so many apps out there for writers, it’s a wonder that writers haven’t buried the world in the pages produced by all the productivity they’ve gotten out of all these apps. (Because a thing that writers definitely do NOT do is buy all these toys, read all these things, download all these apps, and proceed NOT to write anything of value, right?  Right??)  Dictionary apps and thesaurus apps and blogging apps and word count apps and timer apps to make sure you work undisturbed until time is up and apps that shut down the Internet while you’re working and apps that do all of these and also pour you a nice cup of coffee, just kidding, unless you’re reading this from the year 2020 because surely by then there will be an app for that, right?

My favorite at the moment is a little word processor called WriteMonkey, a stripped-down plain text editor which aims to eliminate distractions and allow you to focus on your writing without the urge to check e-mails, surf the web, watch an hour’s worth of Mental Floss videos… to be fair, the urges are still there, but the program blacks out everything else on your screen, theoretically making it more difficult for you to indulge your urges.  Out of sight, out of mind, and all that. It operates pretty well as advertised.  But the big dumb draw of it for a distractable donut like me is that you can toggle on these little keyboard clicks to make it sound (and, if you’re really into it, look) like you’re typing on an old-school typewriter, complete with a cheerful ding when you hit return.  I know, it’s dumb.  But it sucks me in, man, like a brand-new Dyson.

I punched out a solid 1400 words today to the soft ratatat of classic typewriter keys today, and left myself well-poised to jump right into Tomorrow’s writing (getting started is the toughest part).  Who knows how long these new toys will hold my focus, but I’m gonna keep working them as long as they’re working.

So.  Many.  Things.

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 […]