Tag: word count

Our Voices Reach Far

Pavowski4 Comments

The focus of this blarg has never been to rack up huge numbers of readers or views. Those things are nice — it’s nifty to watch the spinning wheels of the virtual odometer on the wall click over and reach new heights — but, even almost two years after I laid down the first lexile brick here on my corner of the net, the purpose is the same as it was: to think and write about the process of my “real” writing, and to serve as a release valve to vent my spleen from time to time.

Still, it’s neat to see those numbers grow. And while it would be hard to call my readership a horde, there’s an uptick that’s measurable. 1000 more views from my first year to my second. I’ve already had as many unique visitors this year as in last year, with three months to go. Which means that my little imprint here is growing, that more people are reading what I’m shouting into what I so often think of as the void.

measured-sandwich
I went to pixabay.com for an image of an odometer and found this picture instead. You’re welcome.

 

And that inevitably causes me to wonder how people end up at my site, and for those that end up clicking around a little bit, what makes them stay. Usually I have no idea. WordPress reveals my “trends” and my most popular posts to me, but there’s little rhyme or reason there. This year, the top of the pops has been my “Do You Wanna Go To Target” bit of fluff, composed after listening to the Frozen soundtrack for roughly the three-thousandth time when my wife and I were making a day run to Target. Then there’s a little muser of a piece I popped off about the symbolism and the ubiquity of light and dark in literature, which gets a handful of hits every week. And then, it’s been a constant head-scratcher ever since I penned it, but the story I didn’t write about giving my son an enema never seems to leave the top five.

Still, trends seem to balance out and I have a more-or-less regular crew of readers, I think. Unless I go crazy and write four or five posts a week, I usually get about ten reads a day. And while that’s not shattering any internet records or anything — I mean, if I wanted views and clicks, I’d go spout profanity about Donald Trump while wearing a fire helmet and slathering myself in chocolate sauce on youtube or something — it’s an extra little kick in the pants to keep me writing, knowing that there are people out in the cyberverse picking up what I’m putting down.

But then there are the outlier days, like this wekend, that strike like lightning and with about as much explanation. Saturday, my website was accessed from eleven countries. Eleven! Imagine, the drivel I penned while sitting on my couch with my lazy golden retriever sitting next to me and my kids strewing Legos across the living room floor (setting traps for my tender feet), somehow made it, literally, to the far corners of the globe. Wild. And then, Sunday, my website had over 100 views. A hundred! That’s never happened, and I have no idea why it happened. I can hope that some doppelganger, some kindred spirit, read some old post of mine and spent hours plumbing the depths of my site, nodding his (or her!) head in silent, shocked agreement and wonder. Equally possible, I guess, is that it was a gaggle of readers whose cats fell asleep on their keyboards and kept hitting the refresh key.

Who can figure these things out? Determining what will resonate with readers is about as easy as reading your future in the entrails of the hobo you killed and buried in the crawl space. Which is to say, tricky at the very least.

As usual, the only thing to do is keep writing.

Thanks for reading.

Or, maybe, thanks to your cat for falling asleep on the keys.

The Weekly Re-Motivator:

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Linda’s prompt for Stream-of-Consciousness Saturday this week is “-est”. Usually I like to find a single word or phrase using the prompt, but this week, when I plopped down to think of an -est word, the unusual happened.

Normally, I take the prompt and one of two things happens: either a single word hits me right away and, like the moon drifting across the face of the sun, immediately eclipses any other ideas, or a different moon drifts across the same sun and blocks out everything, and I sit there, unable to think of a single way to interpret the prompt, for hours. But not today. Today my brain is a slowly-spreading pile of gasoline, and the prompt is the casually-tossed cigarette of a black-clad action hero.

Too many words to choose from, so I’m gonna use as many as I can.

Our creativity, like the heavens, is inestimable, full of wonders we can hardly imagine, if we only have the courage to explore it — unfortunately, so many of us never do.

Our forebears in America were compelled to go west; partially out of a dissatisfaction with the way things were, partially for the promise that the unexplored country held. The artist needs more than a little bit of that wanderlust, of that westward yearning; the artist satisfied with where he’s at is an artist who stops pushing his boundaries.

Pushing the boundaries, though? When it goes well, it’s a(n) euphoric love fest. The ideas come fast and fresh, blowing through your hair (or in my case, across your dome) like the top’s down in your mid-life-crisis-mobile. But there’s no guarantee it goes well, as any writer will attest; and when it does go poorly, as inevitably it will, the whole affair can feel like the universe’s cruel jest. Every idea falls flat, every word feels forced; some days it’s all you can do to keep putting one word after the other.

But because it matters to you, you persist. And maybe you ingest some liquid courage or some chemical inspiration to kickstart the process, but one way or another, you keep on pushing your Sisyphesian boulder along. (Lest we forget, momentum matters.) Because you know that if you stop moving, if you bog down and leave the work for another day, one day quickly turns into another, which turns into another, and then, like a fetid pool, your creativity begins to fester, and even the stuff that looked good a few weeks ago begins to rot.

Still, the brain is a muscle much like any other, and a little rest brings it back to full functionality. Invest in a day off here and there, and somehow or other, the muses will wander their way back to the dark corners of your mind and drive your storytelling anew for a few more days. But it’s a foolish artist who relies on the muse too much: her magic is intoxicating and enticing as a desert mirage and just as fleeting.

The better way — the safe way — the only way, in fact, that works for more than a few weeks — is to establish the habit. Work for it. You don’t eat an elephant all in one sitting, you do it a little bit at a time, working day after day, checking your westward expansion by the stars overhead, the words on the page, the story twisting in your gut. Gestating. Improving, getting stronger with time, even if you can’t always tell quite how at the time. You keep writing. You keep pushing. And eventually, maybe, you bring your creation, squalling and covered in phlegm and gore, into the world.

Is this the best way to do it?

Hell if I know.

Writing is nothing if not an experimental flight in an experimental aircraft with an experimental pilot. Each and every element is a test.

But it feels good when it’s working.

Image result for just keep writing

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

Sometimes I write Good

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The new novel is at the 1/3 mark — just the spot for a turn, a twist, a change that will color the story to come. And much like my two previous novels, the 1/3 point was an important landmark: a point of no return. The edge of the aircraft carrier, where the jet must either take wing or splash into the ocean, a multi-million dollar failure to fly.

And just like in my first two novels, there’s that horrible moment, right before that turn. That slow sensation, that creeping dread, that the story is a dead man walking, that the legs I thought it had are shot through with story-cancer and the whole thing is going to collapse before it ever has a chance to get going. The jet drifts toward the edge. The vast, indifferent ocean looms large. The wheels clear the edge of the carrier, and the craft does what heavy things do — it drops.

But then.

Like the very breath of God, the wind catches its wings. It defies all logic and it ascends into the sky — not like a bird on the wing, but like a shot from a cannon. And within the space of a heartbeat, from one moment to the next — from the terrible, awful, I-don’t-even-think-this-idea-is-viable-anymore words on one page to the next — the thing is flying not just under its own power, but on its own momentum. The very fact that it’s in motion keeps it in motion. The air rushing across its wings is working to keep the thing aloft just as much as the thing itself is fighting to fly.

And, well. That’s enough to keep you coming back for at least one more day of writing, innit?

It’s time once again for an old staple — my favorite thing I wrote today.

For a moment, Linc thinks about arguing the point — that he doesn’t hate these things, not really — but he realizes before he can form the thoughts that Michaels is right. He does hate them. Not in an overt, fiery way that smashes down walls and crumbles buildings, but in the quietly smoldering way of a not-quite extinguished campfire, smoking and hissing and spitting and waiting for a stray breeze to kick it up into a raging, all-consuming blaze.

Whee!

Suddenly Supercharged

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There comes that moment when you’re writing a story and it just gets stuck.

Maybe it’s in a rut and not a lot is happening, or maybe the characters have backed themselves into a corner, or maybe it’s you the author who is blocked and unsure where to go next.

I’ve been in that place for the last couple of weeks with my project, probably owing in no small part to the fact that summer is over and I’m back to work. New employer, new commute, new routine, new stress. Hard to dedicate the grey matter that I’d like to the book, and it’s suffered for it. I’ve been writing by rote, pushing the story forward like it’s a stalled Ford Fiesta miles from the nearest gas station. (To say nothing of my scanty posts around here.)

Luckily, though, characters have a life of their own, and every once in a while, if you keep at it, the muse will flutter down and blow some glitter up your butt. My main character — perhaps as frustrated as me at the aimless wandering going on at this point in the draft — took the wheel and steered us right off the road during my morning session. Jumped ahead to a conflict I wasn’t planning until very late in the book indeed, if at all. Exposed the raw nerve floating right beneath the skin and vented some spleen all over the gooey sludge of this story.

It’s a turn I wasn’t expecting — wasn’t even thinking about when I sat down to write — but it fits perfectly with the character and the story. Of course it does. I told myself when I sat down to write not to force anything but just to let a conversation happen, and before I knew it, I was over quota for the day and my protagonist and antagonist have increased the boiler pressure well past the safe range.

Which serves as a good reminder of something I forget often: sometimes you just have to get the fargo out of the story’s way.

 

Project Update

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I can’t write about the thing I really want to write about. I can’t. Dammit!

I just can’t. It’s too close to home. Fargo. That’s okay. There are other things.

So instead, I’ll share with you something I haven’t done in quite some time. Here, then, is my favorite passage from today’s writing session:

“Just go away.”
An ordinary little sister might climb up on the mattress and bounce on him to frustrate him. Rip the covers off and throw the blinds open. Maybe dump a cup of ice water on him as he lies there. But Kitty is never so subtle. She lifts the entire bed and shakes Linc out of it, like a chef sliding an omelet out of the pan. He thumps to the ground, clutching at the blankets and pulling them close around him, but she rips them away with enough force to spin him around on his rear end.

So I’m not 100% on the names as yet, but I’m 110% on the dynamic between the two of these characters. (That’s a lie. I’m never 110% on anything, because YOU CAN’T BE 110% ON ANYTHING. 100% is the max. People who say otherwise need to go back to … sharknado, I dunno, 4th grade math, or whenever you learn percentages. I’m especially talking to you, high school coaches of EVERY SPORT.)

Did I mention that the new project features superheroes? The new project features superheroes. AND SUPER VILLAINS. Especially villains.

Anyway.

I got 1200 words done today, which is a pretty good yield for a one hour session. I only crank out that kind of word count when I’m really feeling the idea, and today, well, I was feeling it. I’m about 13,000 words into the current project and it’s finally catching its wind and moving under its own momentum. Which is actually kind of late, actually — things should probably get crackling way before that — but that’s what the first draft is for, innit?

You can always fix it in the edits.

1200 words. A solid workout. A trip to the pool with the kids. A storm that threatened but never materialized. None of the kids barfed or shat on me today. Stayed on top of the dirty dishes.

Sometimes, all you can hope for are the small things.

Happy Tuesday!