Tag: Writing

Braindisk

PavowskiLeave a comment

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

Pavowski2 Comments

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.

A Bright Light Shone (Shined?) on Ignominy (Or, How I Learned to Stop Noodling and Love the Bomb)

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Today is the first day of The Project, and like all first days, I came to it with excitement, resolve, and a really irritable bladder.  Seriously, I must have had to pee four or five times during the day at work today, which is just out of line, really.  Who has time for that?

One of the reasons I avoided choosing Accidentally Inspired as The Project is that, really, I’ve already written it once.  Wouldn’t that sort of deprive me of the creative aspect of the process, I asked myself?

Cue the derisive laughter.  In the broadest of senses, yes, I’ve written the story before, but honestly and without irony, the transformation from stage play to prose novel is so complete that I’m just laughing at the me who voiced that concern a week ago.  Silly past me, how much more clearly I see things than you!  The eyeglass of experience casts, like fiery lances, light upon your foolish claims.  Aaand I’ve been reading too much Macbeth.  (Silly literature teacher, letting literature created in a vacuum creep out to poison your daily life.  What’s that?  That’s the point of literature?  Balls, nobody ever told me.)

Things I didn’t have to write when I wrote AI as a play:

  1. Scenic descriptions
  2. Thoughts and internal monologues
  3. Exchanges that took place outside the apartment (Really, this should be worth about 3 or 4 points, as most of the action so far is outside the apartment, which kinda makes me laugh)
  4. Flowery metaphors (okay, the original might have had some of these but you really need a lot of them in a book.  Let me clarify.  I need a lot of them in a book, elsewise every description sounds boring and stilted)
  5. Really virtually anything that’s not dialogue
  6. Extended scenes including lots of dialogue

And the list will probably get longer.  In short, there is a ton of stuff that I have to – nay, that I can – include in the novel that there just isn’t time for in the play.  So thinking of the novel as not fully engaging my creativity is right out the window, even here on Day 1.  I even already talked about other ways I can expand upon the original, i.e. adding villains etc, in a previous post, so that limiting mindset is just doubly out.  Not only is it out, it never existed, and the previous mes who believe it existed also now no longer exist.  The timeline is repairing itself, and I am no longer my own grandfather.  So I feel a lot less like I copped out with this idea.

But, to get down to the meat of this post, here’s what I learned when I shoned my light on myself.

I first really considered giving this “writing” thing a stab oh, I dunno, two years ago.  At the time, I made some google docs, took some notes, jotted down some ideas, and got myself a couple of notebooks.  I told myself that when I felt the urge, I’d pull out one of those notebooks or one of those google docs and, by gum golly, I’d write a bit that day.

To be fair, that’s what I did.  When I felt the urge, I’d write.  Problem is, I’d feel the urge once every, I dunno, week?  Month?  Six months?  Also, to be fair, I booked several pages of hastily scribbled text in those notebooks.  Mad-cow chicken-scratch text, but text nonetheless.  Problem, again, is, that a “page” of chicken scratch is highly subjective, and sometimes when I sat down to write I’d write for five minutes and get half a page, sometimes I’d sit down for an hour and get three pages, or blah, blah, blah.  There was zero consistency and zero accountability, so there was virtually zero product.

BUT.  Because I had no accountability, I was happy with whatever I produced whenever I produced it.  “Hey, I wrote a little bit today; good job, me!  Let me take you out for a drink.”  “Oh, thanks, me, don’t mind if I do.”  “Not at all, good fellow.”  “Splendid.”  I don’t know why the me’s developed British accents in my head just now, but they did, and it just shows how foppish and dumb that system was, except that it was the complete antithesis of a system so I can’t even call it a system, all I can say is it was dumb.

In short (too late!)  I kept these notebooks going for about a year and a half, writing now and then, but never holding myself to any standard for production vis-a-vis quality or quantity.

Now that I’ve decided that I’m really going to for real give this “writing” thing a real shake for realsies, I’ve set some goals which I detailed before.  Those goals include finishing the first draft of a novel by the time school starts up next year (End of August).  Pursuant to that goal is a 5-days a week daily writing goal of ~1000 words per day (900 really, but why not round up) to give me a finished product of ~100,000 words which I can then edit down, like hacking the limbs off a baby octopus (who needs 8 arms, I mean REALLY).

So I sat down today during lunch to write (a portion of) my ~1000 words but decided that I really need to get what I had already in an electronic format so that I can actually work with it, in case I did want to work with it.  (Lest ye think this is just more procrastination, please rest assured, I type like a demon).  It took me about 15 minutes to transcribe (and clean up) everything I had written in my notebook on the project.  Because I’m a sucker for pain, I decided to find out how much work I’d actually done by the only hard-and-fast rubric a writer has: word count.  The total damage?  About 1800 words.

Now, 1800 words is no small thing.  But that’s all I can really say, and even then, I’m deliberately misleading myself through clever use of (lack of) context.  It’s not a small thing for A SINGLE DAY OF WORK.  It’s not even a small thing for a week’s worth of work.  Unfortunately, it’s also NOT A BIG THING by virtually any measuring stick.  To put it in perspective, the short story I wrote on Friday (300 Years a Thief) was 1860 before I trimmed it down, 1550 after.  This post, as I type it, will be passing the 1,000 word mark at roughly the end of this very paragraph.  When I got down to work today on Accidentally Inspired, I set down over 1600 (new) words, that done within the space of about an hour (less some work e-mails, less some students popping in to ask about grades, less a few bathroom breaks [I really wasn’t kidding, it was nonstop today]).  Frankly, I could have done more, but I needed to be professionally as well as personally productive, so I had to leave it off.

All that is to say, that within just over an hour working WITH a plan, I accomplished as much as I accomplished in almost 2 YEARS working WITHOUT a plan.

The lesson, kids, is simple.

Notebooks are the devil; burn them and feed the ashes to your computer as a ritual sacrifice.  Only that way can you absorb their power and open the gateway to…

No, wait, that’s not the lesson.  That was, uh, unrelated.

The lesson, kids, is: I need a DonDraper plan.  Luckily, I have one.  The trick will be sticking to it.  At least I can say this: Day 1 is a ringing success.

300 Years a Thief

Pavowski4 Comments

Here’s a little ditty for Chuck’s flash fiction challenge this week.  My first official one.  I went a bit over the limit but I’m cutting myself a break since it’s my first go.

http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2014/03/07/flash-fiction-challenge-must-contain/

I rolled a 7 (a time machine) and a 7 (a hard drive filled with secrets).  A happier combination for me may not exist. The title sucks, but I’m stuck on it for now. May change later. I am trying to improve, so if you’re out there, let me hear it.

**

300 YEARS A THIEF

It was unlike any electronic device she’d ever seen; a tiny silver box, no bigger than a toddler’s alphabet block; gleaming, square, perfect.  And her design for it was now perfect.  Ugly and functional, but perfect.

**

She didn’t believe that it had been anything at first, it was so insubstantial.  But when she followed Karn’s directions and got it close to the ports in her laptop, it had crazily sprouted wires that reached out for the connection, witches’ arms, grasping.  A flash of light and the smell of burned electrics, and when the smoke cleared, she saw that her old beloved laptop from freshman year was melted and charred, buzzing pitifully as the mechanics tried to spin back into function.  Some heavier gauge wires, lots of insulation and a newer machine had allowed her to successfully connect the cube to her desktop: it powered up happily, flashing strange symbols across the monitor and displaying a progress bar in green along the bottom.  Then the cube had started to hum – its alien mechanisms spinning up to speed – louder and faster until, with a sudden clang and a zapping sound, it launched itself across the room, tearing all the wires and punching a hole in the drywall.

It might have been useful for Karn to warn her about the innocuous little box, but his guidance had carried her this far.  The time for questioning him was long past, not that it was even possible.

**

Lisa pushed her goggles up, the last solder finished.  She slid the cube into place and clamped it down.  Silvery tendrils snaked out to make the connection with her snarled cluster of industrial wires.  Almost a sigh as the humming started.  The parade of arcane symbols marched across her screen.  She wiped her grease-smeared fingertips on her cruddy jeans and cast an anxious glance at the doorway.  The green bar on her monitor began to fill.

**

Seven months ago, she had heard that Karn’s estate was slated for demolition.  Some business had been invented about it spanning multiple district lines, containing materials that were a threat to public health or safety or well-being.  When she went digging, the city referred her to the county, who referred her to the next county over, who referred them back to the city, until she got tired of asking for permission and just broke in.

The inside of his big, dark house had been a rat’s nest of science textbooks, wires, defunct mechanical equipment, hastily scribbled notes and vagrant trash.  It was such a mess that she’d all but given up finding anything of value until she sat at his desk and toppled a pile of notes and garbage to the floor.  But it wasn’t the notes that caught her eye.  It was the network of symbols etched into the desktop, with an IP address scrawled faintly beneath it.  She’d made a rubbing and left disappointed, and the house simply wasn’t there the next day, as if some careless creator had reached down and wiped it out with a giant eraser.

**

The green progress bar filled and disappeared.  The cube hummed happily to itself, vibrating in place on the benchtop.  Her screen blanked out and was replaced by simple, ancient dot-matrix text which blipped into the bottom corner of the screen and asked, directly and bewilderingly, “Displacement vector (hours)?”

**

The IP address had led to nowhere, an empty site.  It was an easy task to set her system to monitor the site, but over the following days it saw no traffic and never got updated.

The funny little chart she’d copied from his desk turned out to be a cryptograph, a bizarre recursive system where a symbol could stand for a number or a letter or another symbol, filled with redundancy and apparent nonsense for good measure.  But there were no messages to decipher.

Until one day, a few weeks later, she noticed a stream of characters had been broadcast on the mystery IP address.  A stream of characters that looked remarkably like the ones in her chart.

Deciphering the first message had been like trying to follow a rabbit through a tangle of kudzu, but follow it she had, and once she got the knack for deciphering the messages, she started noticing them everywhere.  They arrived at unpredictable intervals, sometimes popping up on her computer screen, rarely making sense at the first reading.  She’d had to dedicate a wall of her workshop to his communiques before she started to understand what he was hinting at.  Bits of yarn connected one scrap of paper to another in a gigantic and cascading web of cryptic messages that should have been indecipherable.  Messages meant for somebody else.  Messages that told her how to build the device, how to stabilize it, and finally, where to find the power source: the little silver cube, the hard drive which housed the mind-bending circuits, calculations, and parameters to open a portal in time.

**

When Lisa started translating the messages, she had noticed that each one had a string of characters on the end.  Numbers.  A date.  A timestamp.  Three hundred years in the future.

“Displacement vector (hours)?”

She took a deep breath and keyed in 269274.

Enter.

The cube’s humming climbed in frequency, became a whistling in her ears and then a soundless pressure in her head.  It glowed a bright, luminous blue, an impossible blue, spreading and intensifying, the entire room looking as if it were made of neon lights.  She felt her skin beginning to hum, her insides vibrating in time with the cube, the floor resonating with the impossible frequency bouncing in her brain.  Then a blinding flash, a deafening roar.  She thought, crazily, of the time she’d been skydiving; the sudden, world-shattering wind in her ears.

The cube’s hum died away.  The resonance dissipated.  The computer shut down.  Rain pattered softly at the window.

Had it been raining a moment ago?

She lost consciousness.

**

She’d tried to learn who Karn really was, but there were not very many records to go on.  A recluse, certainly; a genius, probably; and there was also the matter of his being undeniably, bewilderingly, mind-numbingly insane.  One day he’d been an inventor of some repute, living off the patents and income of some gadget he’d thought up around the time Lisa had graduated high school, and then one day he’d quite simply stepped off into the abyss.  He talked about seeing the future and meeting with himself from a hundred years hence, and how he could bring back the technology to save humanity, and what’s wrong with you all, you can’t lock me up like this, you’re all going to die, and … that’s when they took him away.  There had also been the small matter, of course, of him blacking out the power grid for half the city and blowing a crater a mile across in the desert outside of town, whereupon it had rained ash for three days.  The authorities tested the ash and found it to be perfectly harmless, but it had scared the hell out of everybody, and after that, Karn had disappeared.

**

It was, therefore, a great shock to Lisa when she woke up and found Karn himself standing over her, wild-eyed, soot- and grease-stained, raggedly-bearded, holding a device – no, it was definitely a gun, it’s impossible to mistake being held at gunpoint, even if the gun looks like something from a bad Star Trek ripoff – about an inch from her nose.

“Wh… y…” he mumbled, licking at his lips and working his jaw impotently, as if he had not spoken in years.

“Who in the blue FUCKING blazes are you?” He finally spat.

She swallowed hard, tried to focus on him and not on the barrel of the device that had to be some sort of gun.

“I’ve been getting your messages.”

“My messages?” he said, blinking.  He shook his head fiercely, his beard flapping madly.  He pressed his gun into her forehead, pinning her to the floor.  “Those were for me.  For ME.  You should be ME.  I should be… WHO ARE YOU?”

The gun-thing and his raving drove coherent thought out the window.  “I… I…” she stammered, shaking her head feebly.

He slammed her head to the floor, placed a finger to his lips, and darted to the window.  He crept over to it and ducked just below its sill, surprisingly spry for as old as he was.  How old was he?  He stole a glance out then dashed over to her, helping her up off the floor and shoving her toward the back door.

“What -”

“No time.  Run.  Hide.”  Once outside, he blustered past her and broke into a dead run, his unkempt hair streaming behind him.  “They’re COMING.”

She called feebly after him, still shaken from fear, “They who?”  But he was already shrinking toward the line of dead trees in the distance.  A thought nagged at her – those trees weren’t dead before she activated the cube – but she pushed it away.  She looked back past the little house.

Robots.  Hundreds of them.  Coming.

She ran.