There's an ace in every deck

Recently I've found myself becoming discouraged by other writers' success. People I know or writer friends of people I know have gotten published or are receiving media attention, and it gets me down. I'm happy for them, but it's a reminder of how much I haven't done.

KJ Grigoriadis shared a poignant anecdote with me and I want to pass it along:

At a sales demo, a man invites two women to sit in chairs on the stage, one to either side. He hands each woman in the chair a deck of cards and tells them, "Find the ace. When you find the ace, hold it up and shout, 'I found it!' and I'll give you ten dollars." Meanwhile three people stand behind each chair and call to the women, encouraging, discouraging, or hurrying them along, setting up a powerful distraction. At a word from the man, the women begin searching for their ace. After a few moments, one woman finds hers and holds it triumphantly aloft. "I found it!" The audience cheers for her. The man congratulates her and hands her ten dollars, as promised. He then points out that the other woman has stopped looking for her ace, though her deck still holds one. He never said, "I'll give ten dollars to the first to find it, and not the second." But once the first woman succeeded, the second stopped trying.

My writer friends have found their aces. I haven't found mine yet. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't keep looking. "The Rise of Umbra" is a good story with solid characters. If I don't write it, who will? What stories (or pieces of artwork, or poems, plays, sculptures, songs, et cetera) do you have within you that only you can create?

Filling in the gaps

I'm enjoying this challenge more as time goes on. I'd forgotten how much I love these characters and this setting. As I write each day I'm filling in gaps in my manuscript, places where I'd just had a summary sentence or two to remind me of where I was going during the frenzied writing of NaNoWriMo. It's a bit odd to incorporate setting details I created in the second part of the manuscript into the first part. I'm finding myself putting in placeholders for things and places I've forgotten the names for. I'm spending more time than I expected simply reading the second manuscript. I sit down to find a reference and look up ten minutes later when my screensaver turns on. Is it a good sign I'm drawn into my own writing? My words for today are accomplished, so I can spend some time putting them into Scrivener tonight along with some notes for the aforementioned setting details. It'd probably be a good thing to create a text note for each character, too. The first part characters are all named, but there is a considerably larger cast in the second part.

I realised last night that the second manuscript deals almost exclusively with the technology school and shows very little of the magic school. I wonder if that ought to be balanced out. The primary characters are equally important, so they should get equal time. Though I fear the story is going to transform somewhat if I do that. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. For now, I'll focus on my 500 words a day, filling in gaps, and tracking the information I need to keep my fingers on.

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February challenge:
Day Two: 338

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Scatterbrain and the problem of Motivation

I'm writing this from a newly-installed Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat operating system, which won't mean much to many of you, but it's a distraction all its own this morning. I've finally stopped myself from tweaking and playing with it (and stressing the compsitor out to the point I felt it prudent to reboot) so I can settle down to the business of writing.

I read Gary Henderson's most recent post on WriteWright. He talks about getting back to a story he's been plugging away at for some time now. I'm envious. I have projects (too many, perhaps) but I've always been plagued with the problem of starting something and not finishing. Even NaNoWriMo hasn't cured me of that: though I get the requisite 50,000 words written by the deadline, then I have a manuscript which needs revision, editing, polishing, etc. and it doesn't get done.

I look at Gary's writing blog and I'm envious of it. It's clean, it's neat, it has this awesomely shiny sharing widget that I covet. But he put a lot of work into that site. More than I'm willing or able to put into mine. I don't know if I want to get into the nuts and bolts of building my own blog from scratch, or even from a Wordpress template. I've had my issues with templates here on Blogger, and they handle all the behind-the-scenes stuff for me. There was a time I was more than happy to dive in and get my hands dirty with HTML and CSS and formatting and tweaking and settings, oh my. Occasionally I still get the urge. But usually, I want it quick and simple, with a finished product that looks pleasant and performs well.

During NaNoWriMo, I'm all business with respect to the task at hand. I set weekly goals. I wave rewards in front of my nose to get me to keep writing. I have thousands upon thousands of other people across the world who are doing this mad thing with me, and it gives me strength and motivation to keep going, even if I feel like what I'm writing is scary bad.

What I need is the ability to generate that kind of thing for myself. I've long been very bad at kicking my own butt into gear. If I owe work to someone else, I get it done. If I owe it to myself, well, that's different. I'm me, after all, and if I let myself down, it's just me getting let down and what's that matter? I'm not important enough to myself much of the time, it would seem.

The Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group is gearing up for critique meetings. I'm hoping that by participating in some of them I can get some feedback and motivation for my writing. I need at least a little external push (or pull) to keep me going.

Do you have difficulties with motivation in your creative efforts (or elsewhere in your life?) How do you handle them? Do you have any special tools, be they people, places, or things, that help you deal with them?

Things Which Are Not Writing

There are a lot of things a writer can do which are not writing. Here's my example list:

• browsing Facebook "just for a minute to see what everyone's been up to in the ten or so hours that have elapsed since I went to bed"
•  checking e-mail
• stopping whatever else I might be doing (which might in some rare cases actually be writing) to switch to the e-mail client when it pops up a "new message" bubble in the corner of the screen
• arranging bookmarks in my browser
• daydreaming about joining SFWA
• reading other writers' blogs

I will stare until you feed me.

There are many other things I do in the morning which are not writing, but these are just a few that happened today. Other things which are necessary but are also not writing include doing laundry, cooking lunch, and feeding the cat. I don't feel I can safely cut out those activities, but some of those in the bullet list can definitely go.

Ironically, in reading through some other writing blogs I came up with the inspiration to write this entry. So how do you know if you're just time-wasting or building up a storehouse of future plot/poem/blog ideas?

When I figure it out, I'll let you know. But here's a guideline: if your activities (aside from the purely necessary ones) aren't feeding your writing, you've probably wandered off the track.

Don't be afraid of the blank page! Once you start writing into it, it's not blank any more! Go! Go forth and create, my little ones! The world is yours for the taking!

Ahem. Keep an eye on your own activities. Set up a schedule for yourself if you have to. It works for some people. But be aware of when you've strayed. And don't, repeat don't, beat yourself up if you do wander. It happens. We're human. And you're allowed. Just catch yourself at it and redirect. Back to work, little creative mind. No more Twitter for you. Put down the list of "Most Interesting Stuff That Doesn't Matter But Will Make Your Co-Workers Laugh Their Butts Off" links from Facebook and open the word processor. Take out the notebook. Scrawl something into your smartphone. Just write. That's what writers do, after all.

How to scramble your document

I've been writing in 750words.com for over a month now and I'm fairly pleased with the site. It suffers from occasional glitches and slowdowns, mostly late at night, typically when I realise I haven't done my words for the day and am in a mad dash to complete them. But generally it's a nice place to write. The owner of the site says your words are completely secure, but for some of us that's not quite enough. 750words.com doesn't have a privacy policy as of yet, so sometimes I'm a bit worried about the security of my words.

During the last week of National Novel Writing Month, the official word count validators open up and novelists can paste their writing directly into the site and get an official word count. Some of us, despite the reassurances of the NaNo crew that the words are not retained after counting, aren't comfortable uploading the work we've sweated over for weeks to another person's server. So NaNoWriMo offers a solution: scramble your document.

In Microsoft Office and OpenOffice Writer, open the find and replace dialog and enter [A-Za-z0-9], square brackets included. Don't put any spaces in there. If you do, you'll find your 45,000 word novel has suddenly been reduced to 6,000 or so, as the spaces will get replaced as well as the letters. As this is panic-inducing at the end of NaNoWriMo, I don't recommend it. In the replace with field, put the letter a. Or whatever character you want, really; it doesn't have to be the letter a. Be certain to check 'use wildcards' in Microsoft Office and 'regular expressions' in OpenOffice Writer, or you'll get an error.

Your word processor will replace every alphanumeric character with 'a', or whatever letter you chose. The word count remains the same, but now no one can make sense of what you wrote. The down side on 750words.com is that the nifty statistics the site generates will be absent from an entry you save in this format. It can't understand a page full of the letter a, so it doesn't generate any stats. But your word count will be valid and you can continue to progress toward bigger and better achievement badges. And who doesn't want to earn more badges?

Writing Weight Loss with Twitter

I've discovered that writing Twitter posts has had the effect of tightening up my writing. With only 140 characters at my disposal I'm forced to be very precise with my words. I'm generally unwilling to use textspeak, such as changing 'you' to 'u' or other such nonsense. That just looks uneducated and unprofessional to me. So I gain characters in other ways. It's certainly gotten me to reduce the clutter in my sentences. Adverbs get cut left and right. Sometimes the resulting tweet seems like it's missing something, some slight nuance of meaning that one word provided. And maybe it does. But maybe that meaning wasn't as important as I'd thought.

I also gain a character or two per tweet by not double spacing after each sentence. When I was learning to type in high school, that was the rule: finish a sentence, double space. It's less important now, with so much writing being done on word processors or other computer software that handles spacing. There's a lot of debate and discussion about this on the Internet for those who care to explore it. Me, I'll keep double spacing in my text unless I need that space, as in tweets. You won't notice my double spacing here in the blog, because Blogger automatically changes my double spaces to single ones. One might argue that by changing to single spacing I could save a whole lot of keystrokes over time, since the second space is eaten by Blogger (and probably other online sites I may post content to as well). Think of the wear and tear saved on my keyboard, let alone my fingers! I shall think kind thoughts at those people and continue in my old-fashioned ways.

Writing a poignant tweet is a little like writing poetry. In poetry, every word counts much more than it would in a longer work. It's one of the reasons I love poetry. I love the economy of language, the painting of landscapes in just a few words, the ability to evoke a mood through a clever turn of phrase. I admire poets who excel at this, and I strive for it in my own writing.

What are your techniques for tweeting? Do you embrace or reject textspeak shortcuts?

Carpe Annum!

Seth Godin wrote recently in his blog about the perils of waiting until everything's perfect to take risks and put yourself out there. I've written about this kind of thing myself. Waiting for the Muse doesn't work very well. It does work, but very slowly for many of us. You'll get better results if you go to your Muse and ask her to come round for a cup of tea or the like. Take her out for a walk. Do something different. And observe. Be there, in the moment, during whatever activity you choose. Notice things. Write them down if you like. Sketch them. Or just hold them in your memory until you get back to your creative space to commit them to your chosen form.

Your creative space doesn't have to be perfect either. As long as you have a space where you have room to comfortably work without distraction, you have what you need. Sure, we'd all like an extravagant art studio with all the finest supplies, or a spacious corner office with a glorious view and the most expensive furniture money can buy. But that doesn't make creativity happen. In fact, you might even feel stifled in such an environment. "I spent all this time and money to prepare this space... how can I justify that? I'll have to create a masterpiece/write the best-selling novel of the decade in a place like this!" Carve out a nice space where you can, even if it's mobile or temporary. And then call in the Muse for a little chat.

The most important thing is to seize the moment. The time is now. If you wait until you 'feel inspired', you'll probably be waiting a very long time. And in the meantime, others who've chosen to go ahead and create anyway will be ahead of you, building characters, discovering techniques, making mistakes that they'll learn from.

Don't wait. It's a brand new year, just waiting for you to reach out and grab it.

Detractors: leave 'em in the back of the bus

Seth Godin wrote a fantastic bit of advice in his blog today. It's called "I need you to see things my way". "If you need the validation and acceptance and patronage of everyone you meet," Seth writes, "you'll get stuck, and soon."

As creatives, it's natural for us to want people to like our work, to like us. It's easy to take a critique of a piece personally, to apply it to our own personal self-worth instead of keeping it where it's meant: on the work being critiqued. I've written about this topic here before, but Seth Godin's brief post brings it into focus.

"If the kids in the back of the bus/audience/store don't get it (or don't get you) it's their loss. Focus on those that want to celebrate the work you do instead."

Not long ago a friend of mine stopped by my house and complimented a painting I had hanging on my wall. It's the only example of my own artwork I've so far hung up in my home. If I don't value my artwork, I figured, who will? The friend praised the painting and went so far as to say she might one day purchase one like it for her future business location. People like that are the ones you want to keep close at hand. Turn your back on any detractors you may encounter. Some day they'll wish they could say they knew you before you were famous.

Scheduling and the Creative Process (January 22, 2010)

Partner to my writing creative process is my artistic creative process. It's one I've been overlooking lately. It's been probably a month since I did anything more than the occasional doodle in the margins of a notebook. I used to paint and draw and even collage occasionally. But lately I've found myself bereft of the willingness to break out even my Derwent Inktense pencils, which I dearly love, and work on something. I get a weekly art prompt from IlloAnnounce and yet I don't draw. (Perhaps it's because they didn't display my only submission a few months back and I feel snubbed by them, but that's another matter.)
 
Art has its own way of freeing me, as does writing. It's a completely different way of expressing whatever stuff is inside me that needs to be put down on paper, or, in some cases, electronically. I enjoyed the brief detour I took with my graphics tablet a few weeks ago, but nothing more has come of that. I pondered breaking out the tablet again this week, but the week seems to have gotten away from me. I have a lot of little chores to do, a bunch of actual work to do, and some hobby stuff, in various states of completeness, that would like a little love too. And household chores, don't get me started. Dark laundry leers at me from the hamper in the closet, reminding me that I will soon run out of clean socks if I don't wash it already. The newspapers on the kitchen table threaten to topple out of the chair I put them in, ready to crash to the floor in a petulant demand that they be put into a paper bag and tied up for the Boy Scouts to take one Saturday a month.

Time Flies

I find myself constantly asking, "Where does the time go?" And in response, my mind, trained on an old MUSH I've been a member of for years, says, "Schenectady, ma'am." Well, come on back from Schenectady, there, time, 'cos I got a lot of stuff that seems to not get done every day.

It comes down to scheduling, I suppose. My Morning Pages and daily writing sessions have imprinted a sort of framework for my day, but after dinner it all seems to go every which way. After dinner is, my mind seems to say, play time. You worked during the day, writing and whatever else, and now you get to play computer games, which is what I spend too much time doing in the evenings. And there's a variety of games I visit: I've got a lot to just play on my own, let alone the Internet games that involve other people.

I find that I have difficulty slowing down. The computer contributes to that. Sometimes I long for a quiet evening spent reading or doing artwork. I've been attempting to schedule myself a 'no computer evening' once a week, but that hasn't quite taken off yet. I used to have 'no computer' Saturdays, but my habit of sitting here and writing, on the computer, every day, has kind of put a damper on that. I get my best writing work done, so I believe, in the mornings, before lunch. So I sit here and type for a while before getting distracted by the Internet, eventually to be sucked down into the rabbit hole for at least an hour, reading email or checking Facebook or what have you. There's some time I can reclaim.

Excerpts and Editing

Part of the process of writing involves sharing your work with others and requesting critiques. I've occasionally been given to put excerpts of my work in here for you to read. I'm my own worst critic (aren't we all?) and I often convince myself no one wants to read that drek until it's at least polished drek that shines in the sun. With less than three months until the CreateSpace deadline, I have a lot of work to do on my manuscript, The Rise of Umbra. That manuscript has been lying, mostly ignored, on my bedroom floor for the last month or so. Not a dignified position for a novel manuscript. Not the most respectful way to treat such a thing, either.

Yesterday's post never quite made it live, but in what I managed to write I mentioned that things have been a bit stressful for me lately, and I think I managed to soldier on these last few weeks only to be faced with cashing that stress check this week. That's one of several excuses I could give for my shameful treatment of my work. Poor manuscript, gathering dust on the floor, spiders walking across it, and it just lying there, its metallic binder clips winking in the sun as I pull the shades open. Yes, manuscript, I'll get to you. But only after the eighty-seven thousand kajillion other things that are more important.

And they honestly are important things I've placed ahead of my editing. In part I'm dragging my feet, because facing that editing and revision task is not something I'm looking forward to. It's like anything else, in writing or elsewhere: it seems scariest before I start it. I have gotten into it before and it has been scary, but also refreshing. Cutting most of an entire chapter out terrified me, but, as I mentioned when I did it, it was for the good of the book, and I think it was necessary. Drawing big 'X's across my pages with a highlighter was freeing in a way. But now that I've made the mess, I've got to go clean it up.

So, right, excerpts. I might be posting some of those in here. Some more. Aside from the couple I've posted previously. Yesterday I couldn't get going on my blog post, today I can't shut up. So look for those, or look away, perhaps, when they hit the screen. And I'll leave it at that.

Flow and Answering Your Own Questions

When I write page 1, I don't know what page 2 is going to be like. I write the book to know what's inside. - Julian Green

Particularly when I write during National Novel Writing Month, I tend to start a story without a clear idea of where I'm going. I get the feeling I've written about this topic before in here, but I'm going to continue anyway. I'm with Julian Green: I write the story to find out what happens. During NaNoWriMo I generally reach a point where I need a plan. The story faucet, up until that point flowing freely, begins to taper off until it becomes a trickle. Then I need to start with the outlining. Where am I going, and why am I in this handbasket? Who's in this story? What important things are going to happen? What needs to happen before I can write The End?

In five years of participating in NaNoWriMo, I don't think I've ever actually written The End. My story may wind itself up, but it's never a total beginning-to-end manuscript on the first of December.

But on my original point: I write to see what happens. That's a lot of what gets me through NaNoWriMo. I want to succeed, I want the purple progress bar, and I want the certificate. I want the satisfaction of having a 50,000 word manuscript in my hand, that tangible, meaty sound it makes when I drop it - thunk - onto my desk. But day-to-day, one of the primary motivators is the same as it is when I'm reading someone else's work: what's going to happen next? Will Sarah and Aristotle escape from the beast? Will Dobroy ever give back that oh-so-important chess piece he took? Can the robot convince the two alien races to live in harmony? Will Hypatia stop being crazy? In order to find out, I had to write. And all of those questions have answers now. Each of them lives in a NaNo manuscript I've completed (except for the first one, which got a sequel of sorts in 2008, bringing its total to 76,000 words).

If you create a story you want to read, you're forced to write it until it reaches an end, or forever wonder what might have happened. Go create a question and answer it. Or wait until November and then do it. I'll meet you there.

Contests and Lifeclutter

I'm considering trying my hand at Toasted Cheese's A Midsummer Tale contest. The style is creative non-fiction and the topic is 'make believe'. There are more details on Toasted Cheese's contest page. The deadline is June 21st.

Speaking of deadlines, July is rapidly approaching and I have a lot of work to do on my manuscript before it's ready to be sent in for a proof copy. An entire chapter has to be rewritten. There are several transition scenes that need to be written. When I originally wrote this story in 2005, I hadn't quite gotten into the swing of National Novel Writing Month. I was struggling with the pace and I left out a lot. I was just trying to get to the end of the story. In the process I skipped over things which now need to get put back in to fill out the story.

The bad news is that as I try to get something going for Toasted Cheese's contest and finish my manuscript, I also have other creative projects clamouring for my attention. The worse news is that other things in life are taking precedence, mostly in the form of forcing me to sit here and try again and again to phone this person or that person, only to get voice mail or no answer. It's disruptive, as I ususally start around 9 am, the same time I really get going on my morning work and writing. It's very difficult to get writing flow going when you have to stop every fifteen minutes to call Mrs What's-Her-Name. Again. The sooner I get that done, the sooner I can dedicate my morning time to writing projects. I have a lot of them, and many have gone by the wayside. Poetry, short stories, articles. They've all been mostly shunted aside as other, more pressing things barge in and camp out on the sofa of my mind. Once I feed these freeloaders and send them on their way, I'll be able to invite my Muse back in for a cup of tea and some cookies. Gotta have the cookies.

I hope your creative projects are uncluttered and your Muse is unfettered this week!

Poems and Piccadilly

So National Poetry Month is over. I didn't complete the Poem-A-Day Challenge, but I did write some poetry and I had some fun doing it. I made a plan for a chant-style poem that mocks both major political parties in the US and tentatively subtitled it "The Death Threat Poem", because it's an equal-opportunity offender (I don't get involved in politics: I shun them). I wrote a cinquain about a lawn tool (prompt #8). I wrote a hopeless poem (prompt #27). And I wrote a handful of other poems that didn't fit the prompts.

I did these in my Piccadilly lined notebook, which I grabbed at Borders for about $5. That I bought a Piccadilly and not a Moleskine is not entirely noteworthy; I've been meaning to try Piccadilly books for a while now. That I bought a lined notebook is noteworthy. I've long been a staunch "unlined only" journaller. But the lines are perfect for poetry and other list-like things. I did my Time Finder in that journal, and made lists of things I had to get done in it as well. My one complaint is the poor quality of the cover. I bought a softcover journal, and it's made of basically cardboard with a faux oilskin sheet pasted to it. It started to split when I tried to tuck my steel pen's clip into it. I can bend the cover back and fold it under, but after doing this a couple dozen times, the black fabric pulls away from the spine, revealing the glued-in bookmark. The bookmark stays put, thankfully, but with the fabric bulged out like that it's not the most attractive book. The bulging makes it a bit harder to handle, too.

All in all, though, the Piccadilly journal is a good buy. The quality in certain places is far outshined by Moleskine, but you can get about three Piccadillys for the price of one Moleskine. I'm less touchy about this notebook getting jammed into my bag and maybe slightly abused (by accident, I assure you) because it is less expensive.

My regular journal, which I've been neglecting for a while, mostly because I do my brain-dumps into my Morning Pages notebook these days, is a plain softcover Moleskine, and is nearly finished. When I reach the end of that book, I have a plain Miquelrius to start. I'm already using a gridded Miquelrius for my role-playing notes, and I like the quality and feel of it. They're a little more expensive than Piccadilly, but they have more pages. A mid-range option, I would say.

Piccadilly and Moleskine are available at most major booksellers such as Borders and Barnes and Noble. So far the only place I can clearly recall seeing Miquelrius is at Dick Blick. Got a journalling preference? Are you picky about your journals or do you grab just any old book and get to work?

Two Worlds: Longhand v Digital

This weekend my gaming group created characters for the Dresden RPG, a game based on the Harry Dresden novels by Jim Butcher. I spent a little time Sunday scratching out a more in-depth history for my character, written first-person in the style of the Dresden novels.

I decided to write it longhand in one of my black notebooks. There's something different about the act of creation when writing with a pen or pencil as opposed to typing on a keyboard. When I first started writing, I only felt comfortable writing longhand in a notebook. I wrote ten chapters of a novel in a college notebook, largely in closed study hall in high school. I've yet to find those sheaves of paper, written in ball-point pen, full of scratch-outs and notes in the margins. It didn't occur to me to do my writing on DeskMate or any other word processing software for a while. Once I did, I produced a couple pages of a story where my characters went their own way against my wishes. I abandoned that story, and it set a bad precedent for writing on the computer.

Nowadays I do most of my writing on the computer. The speed is far greater, and I can move text around with a lot more ease than I can on paper. Still, there's something to be said for the old-fashioned method: the choice of most comfortable or 'lucky' pen, the ability to write notes in the margin (you can do this with most word processor software these days, but it's not the same), or do sketches of logos or characters or whatever on the page. I'm big on the tactile senses when it comes to writing.

I think I produce different kinds of writing when I choose to utilise the handwritten method rather than the digital. Both have their merits. I tried writing my National Novel Writing Month novel longhand a few years ago. I got about three days in before I realised that there just wasn't enough time, and I was threatening myself with serious writer's cramp. So for novelling marathons, stick with the digital, I say. But give the old-fashioned a chance too: it can be as simple as picking up a cheap spiral-bound notebook and a pen (I recommend gel pens - ballpoints wear me out too quickly - and find a comfy place to write. You can write just about anywhere with pen and paper, and your notebook doesn't need a power brick or a battery to ensure its continued functioning. You might find your writing style changing. You might find you're reminded of school essays and hate it. However you find it, give it a try this week. And share your experiences here if you do. I'd love to know how it goes.

Intestinal Fortitude

I was reading Sol Stein's 'Stein on Writing' yesterday. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny early spring day and I took the book out into the yard to read for a bit. I read a few chapters, then got to the one about suspense. In it, Stein challnges an author to find the weakest scene in his or her novel, and eliminate it. "It takes guts," he writes, "but do it!"

I did it. There's a scene in The Rise of Umbra that has been bothering me for a while now, and I just grabbed up the closest thing to hand -- an orange mini-highlighter -- and drew a big 'X' through most of the chapter. It was painful, terrifying, and wonderful all in one. But I couldn't heal the patient without cutting him open, so to speak. It's left dangling a bit of continuity, but that can be fairly easily rectified. It's like knocking down a bridge between Town A and Town B. Now I have to find another route to Town B. I have some ideas.

I later received an e-mail from a writer friend who had finished reading this early draft, and he offered some suggestions for improving the chapter I had just carved out. I'll look into that in greater detail, hopefully at some time today.

In the meantime, I need to spend half an hour writing on my short story. Ass In Chair must go into effect, no matter how tired I feel this morning. When I write, I can talk about the process of writing. When I don't, I can't, and that means meaningless blather in here. No one wants that.

In Which I Tangle With A Short Story

I decided to sit down and get to work on my short story, temporarily called 'Prediction'. I pulled up the file I'd been working on last week, only to discover it wasn't the story, but my notes on the story. I poked around in my storage locations, ran a search, and came up with about half the story. I found a file that ended in the middle of a word. Fortunately, I had printed out the page I'd completed last week, but I had printed it before I'd made the last change, so the entire second half of the page is outdated. And the new stuff is nowhere to be found. I remember the gist of it, of course. But having the file go missing is not something that fills me with confidence. Lesson here, kids: just as in computer games, the rule is: Save Early, Save Often. Le sigh.

This is the first short story I've attempted in some time. I'm going at it with the clear idea that it is a short story and therefore must be tight, specific, and precisely aimed. And I'm floundering. I'm also finding myself attempting to revise my story as I'm writing it. I'm trying not to, but my habit is to spread out, to go on about things and explore people and places at length. I could do so and then trim off the excess later, but I fear running into something I like too much to cut. For cutting is a painful and abhorrent process, as I'm discovering with my novel editing (which I've been conveniently avoiding recently).

I have the story all planned out, beginning to end. It's a solid story idea, I feel, but the devil's in the details. I'm finding myself wanting to really bring the setting to life, to make the reader feel like s/he's there. But this is a short story. I don't know how much room I have. There's a lot of debate about the length of a short story. A maximum length of anywhere from 7,500 to 20,000 words is Wikipedia's advice, though if I'm looking to publish I'd be far wiser to worry about what my market's definition is.

I'm not going to go into markets right now. There are far too many, and anyway, I've got to have a story, preferably a salable one, before I need worry about where to sell it.

The only answer I have right now is the obvious one: Write. Even if I end up tangling myself up, I'll have written something from which I can hope to carve a sleek story in the coming weeks.

Art Brain Confession

Time for me to 'fess up: I'm supposed to be composing more awesome bloggage for you folks, but... I watched willowing's vid that I put up here yesterday, and then another one (my favourite and very first willowing video I ever saw, "Treat Yourself Like You Treat Your Best Friend"), and I think I might be doing art today instead of writing. Hm. I've started prepping two sheets of watercolour paper (forgetting until just now that I should be taping them down and not using rubber bands, duh, so they don't dry buckled), and... well, I have watercolour crayons and Inktense pencils and all kinds of good stuff.

So, er, yeah. Not much going on in my writing brain right now. I got that one short story started earlier in the week, but I find myself editing as I write to keep the thing tight and keep out unimportant details, and I could, and probably should, be doing that type of work after the story's finished.

When Art Muse attacks, she does not take 'I should be writing!' for an answer.

In Which I Try To Find A Topic

It's a late morning, my tea is now gone and I don't know what to write about. It appears I owe at least one blog post for this week, though, so here I am. I haven't quite completed (read: actually started on) my topics list for the blog, so I frequently find myself sitting here staring at the screen, the wall, out the window, or grabbing one of my writing books, like Lawrence Block's "Telling Lies For Fun & Profit" and flipping through it for five, ten, fifteen minutes, ending up no closer to a topic for today than when I'd started.

I suppose the lack of ability to find a decent topic is as good a topic as any, given that this is a writing blog. At the risk of writing something so achingly boring and unreadable as to drive my readers away, I will attempt to write about this topic.

I've written about the fear and frustration of facing the blank page. I've written about procrastination. I've written about Monkey Mind. I seem to have a mix of them today. I'm tired and I keep meandering off to look at my email or ponder my previous posts here or worry about having a backup copy of my blog. All instead of writing in here. And now it's getting on to lunchtime and I'm still feeling pretty empty of content.

All this stuff usually gets pushed aside once I get going, but I'm having trouble hitting that mark today. I keep thinking of things I'd rather be doing than sitting here typing out a so-called blog entry for today. A blog entry, says my eager Critic, that has no substance and is useless and dumb and why don't I just save the file as daily writing blah and give the blog a miss for today?

Well, Critic, whether or not this post is full of blah or awesome, I missed a post yesterday and I'll be making up Video Thursday tomorrow (presuming I can find something good to post for that!), and whether or not I've actually got readers who are reading this blog and wondering where my posts have gone, I feel like I need to post something. Could be this is the boringest post evar. Probably. But it's early days, as for the life of this blog, and I feel it safe enough to have an occasional 'whut?' post.

I've reached four hundred words, which is generally my minimum length for a blog post here. I don't want to spam people, but I want there to be enough that my readers feel like they've actually read something.

And hey, readers? Hate to beg for interaction, here, but I'd love to hear from you guys. Post a comment, vote in the little silly poll I stuck up, click a rating at the end of a post, email me directly if you like. I've had a couple emails from irregular readers and those who read mostly via RSS feed, but I'd like to know if I'm talking to myself here. Thanks.

Crossed the five hundred mark, so it must be time to meander off to something else. This week's been a bit of a bear; next week will be a better blogging week, I'm certain. Until next time.

Who's In Charge Here? On Demanding Characters

On Thursday I had the awesome but very odd experience of being yanked to my writing place ... by one of my characters. I've been manipulated by characters before; I've long since learned that, in a similar way to the fact you can't steer a train, I can't force my characters to do something they don't want to do. This was a bit more than I'd bargained for.

The character in question is called Katherine. She's a red-headed Irish Australian living in America, and her son has been taken by the (very corrupt) government and has been held by INS for the past eighteen months. Her husband, normally a quiet sort who bows to her force of personality, has recently stepped up and broken their son out of custody. A peace-loving organisation is keeping the whole family in a safehouse in a nearby city, and the circumstance of living together under one roof again is putting a strain on everyone.

Katherine was painted in a poor light in a previous piece I did, and so when the Muse declared Writing Season open, she descended like a Valkyrie from, er, heaven, I suppose, and demanded to be written.

I sometimes get the sense when I write a character I'm intimately familiar with that I 'step into' them to experience their personas. In this case, I distinctly felt Katherine step into me as I sat at the desk. Very odd, yet very awesome.

So in addition to the thousand or so words I wrote in the morning, I also put down another three thousand or so in the afternoon. Yikes. I am writer, hear me ...er, write!

Video Thursday: Inspiring Authors

This week's video is a bit of inspiration from published authors about writing. They give some very useful and entertaining advice.