Tag: Writing

Somebody Greased the Wheels

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The words came easy yesterday, easier than they have in weeks.  I wish I could say it’s because I feel confident in my ending, but I can’t.  I still don’t 100% know how the dharma thing is going to end.  I mean, basically, I have the chain of events, but as for the ins and outs, how the characters will react, what will become of them… it’s all up in the air like a bunch of chainsaws at the end of a suicidal juggler’s act.

That said, I had a flow going, and I’m not one to look a gift horse in the beak — that’s a good way to get your face bitten off.  Nor am I one to complain about having an easy writing session, especially when I’ve really struggled lately.  To what can I attribute yesterday’s flow?

I think it’s because, here in the closing moments of the story, there’s a bit of a return to form.  The main character is back on his quest, the supporters are back in place doing what they need to do, and the villains have been more or less dealt with.  Conflicts resolved, the story can proceed happily in the way that it wants to.  It’s all that conflict that gets in the way of just letting things happen.  DAMN YOU CONFLICT.  Except, the ego-writer reminds me, conflict is the sustenance of the story, so even though I’m wrapping the story up now, that doesn’t mean I can hop off the conflict-train to hurt-town.  Incidentally, I spent the evening mulling it over and I spent this morning’s run kicking around the moment where I left off last night and suddenly the last bit of conflict came to me.  Something about the heat and the fatigue and the rivers of sweat running down my face triggered the perfect last hurrah for the story’s conflict.  Conclusion?  All writers should run.  Alternate conclusion?  Running solves every problem.  Alternate alternate conclusion?  It’s fargoing hot outside and I’m a little baked, there is no alternate alternate conclusion.

As long as I stay on track (and, against all odds and expectations, I’ve stayed perfectly on track throughout this entire process), the first draft will be done in about a dozen more writing sessions.  A dozen!  It almost seems too close to put a bow on the events of a story, too immediate to properly process.  Like a sudden cinder-block wall on the highway, it looks like I’m going to plow right into it before I can get to where I’m going.  But I think that’ll be okay.  Rather too much than too little, and god knows how much the draft will change when I get into the editing phase.

I feel like my words of late about the novel betray a sense of melancholy about finishing the book.  Well, “finishing.”  My laser-beam focus since April has been to get the first draft done, and with the achievement of that (I just scared myself a little, considering it a fait accompli) and in that sense, I am finishing.  And I do feel a bit of sadness, a bit of aimlessness, a bit of my-nemesis-is-dead-what-will-I-fight-for-now emptiness creeping in.  But I don’t think that will last.  I look back over what I’ve accomplished in the last few months and I realize that the act of writing no longer intimidates me like it once did.  I have ideas for books and plays that I am just bursting to write, the only challenge when this one is all said and done will be deciding what I set my laser sights on next.

 

85% (Stay On Target)

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It occurs to me that it’s been some time since I posted any sort of progress report on The Project.

The Project, of course, being Novel Alpha, or the reason I started this whole crazy blarg thing which is by all accounts growing faster than my toddler’s vocabulary and spiraling out of control.  As I close in on my hundredth post (seriously, this is post 86, which fargoing astounds me) it seems a good time for a status update.

The novel is at 85% as of today at about 75000 words, give or take a little.  The fact that I’ve made it this far continues to shock and awe me.  I feel like an Aboriginal Tribesman who has never heard of planes, trains, or automobiles and suddenly gets on one of those Japanese bullet trains and travels two hundred miles in like ten minutes and gets off the train saying, “I came all that way?  Impossible.”  Or, to use a metaphor that’s more immediate and familiar to me, like the thirteenth mile of a half-marathon; I’m aware that there was a lot of work involved to get to this point, but the fact that it was done and that it was all done by me is just sort of eclipsed by the lactate burning holes in my calves.Read More »

Baby Loading…

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A long day today.  Too long by half.  Lots of stress, lots of nerves, lots of pain, lots of things.

Certainly I’m one who has been known to overstate things, perhaps to say too much when enough has already been said.  I won’t be doing that today.  Not because I don’t have things to say.  I do.  Great blunderous gushings.  Whimsical musings on the nature of life, the universe, and everything.  You know, the usual.

But today I’m a dad (again), and I’m too sleep-deprived and physically and emotionally exhausted to let words get in the way, so I will let the pictures speak for themselves.

Moments after landing on Planet Earth.
Moments after landing on Planet Earth.
Not particularly impressed with the world as she's found it.
Not particularly impressed with the world as she’s found it.
Saying hi to mom for the first time.
Saying hi to mom for the first time.

Lots more to say tomorrow.

Milestones, or Reflections on Staying Up Past Bedtime On A School Night

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Milestones.

Milestones to the left of me, milestones to the right of me, milestones keep falling on my head.

Shall I count the ways?

The novel is at almost 80%, which means it’s time to start wrapping this thing up like a bad christmas present.  I think the pieces are in place, and despite the twists and turns this thing has taken me on, I can still have the ending that I pictured when I set out on the journey, which is a pretty cool feeling.  Like leaving on a road trip that ends in Seattle and traveling through Arizona instead of Wyoming, but that means I got to see the Grand Canyon along the way, which is something I’ve always wanted to see, so there’s that.  So a pinpoint of light is stabbing through the veil, and like a cartographer’s compass, it’s guiding me home.  A tractor beam pulling me in.  A magnet drawing me toward the finish, as Andre Agassi put it.

One day left in my first year as a high school teacher.  Teaching is a journey in its own right, but considering this is where I saw myself when I started down this road, it’s quite a feeling being here.  Don’t get me wrong, my time in middle school was instructive, but kids at that age are just not a good match for me; I swear I felt myself regressing every day, and I think if I’d spent a few more years teaching at that level, my voice would have undropped and I would have entered reverse puberty, which is totally a real thing that I absolutely did not just this minute invent for the sake of a stupid joke.  Totally.  In seriousness, seeing the seniors I taught this year graduate was a sobering moment that really brings some sense of accomplishment and fulfillment to my career, and the fact that I can even call my job a career is a testament to my wife who pushed me onto this road in the first place.  So, thanks, honey.

Also, one day left in my life as a parent of one.  It’s a rather metropolitan scenario, scheduling the birth of your child, but science does what science must do, and for reasons that probably don’t concern anybody who doesn’t know my wife and I personally, we had a c-section last time and thus must have a c-section this time, and that means we get to pick the day on which Sprout the Second is born.  Assuming she makes it that far, which, as long as she makes it through tomorrow, she has.  I never thought I would be ready to be a father of one, but it turns out not to be nearly so bad as I feared, so the fact that I feel completely unprepared to be a father of two does not daunt me nearly so much.  That said, I know full well that thinking I’m in any way ready for what’s to come is an error of hubristic proportions (yeah, hubristic is a word I just made up, I consider myself a writer now, deal with it).  Sidenote: my writing is going to be completely blown up for likely the rest of the week, if not the rest of my life.  My apologies in advance.

One hundred follows.  If trends continue, I should meet and pass that before the week is out, assuming all my writing doesn’t go over the cliff (which it may well do).  This baffles and astonishes me, because while I like to pretend that I have things to say and an interesting way in which to say them, actually having proof that there are folks out there willing to read my brain droppings (thanks George Carlin) on a regular basis is still a bit of a shock to the system.  I owe a lot of those follows to Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction challenges, but I know that some of you out there have discovered me through my unprompted posts about the bizarre and wonderful act of writing, the bizarre and wonderful act of running, and the bizarre and wonderful act of parenting.  However you ended up with your eyeballs processing my wordy bits, thanks for taking the time out.  Knowing I have an audience, no matter how big or small, is a tremendous motivator on those days when I feel like I can’t possibly complete this thing I’ve now nearly finished doing.  However, for the record, you’ll have nobody to blame but yourselves if and when I actually publish this thing.

What else can I say?  It’s way past my bedtime and it’s a rather big day ahead, my last day as a teacher this (academic) year, and my wife will be getting a healthy dose of poking and prodding in preparation for the Lexi landing on Thursday.  That calls for a drink.

Just kidding, I already had a drink, as my punctuation and rambling in this post will attest.  Happy Tuesday.

 

Today’s Writing Session Sponsored by The Beast, Apparently

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More on that title at the end of the post.

The writing had me in a weird place yesterday.  I was stressed about where my story had ended up and where it was headed, and I felt the significant gravity of self-doubt and intimidation about the task of writing a novel weighing heavy on my shoulders.  It was one of those days when I really think I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, when I wonder if this whole thing was really such a good idea and whether I’d be better off using my spare time to play video games or read or watch TV or otherwise waste my time.  Of course, you have those thoughts, and then you remember the old adage about how nobody on their deathbed says they wished they’d watched more TV.  No, Writing this novel is one of those — I won’t say Bucket List items, because that’s a term that gets tossed around too whimsically for my tastes — but it’s one of those Things I Wanted To Accomplish.  And, like with so many other things in life, I’ve found, the day-to-day struggles become easier to bear if you keep your eye on the prize, so that’s what I try to do.Read More »