Not letting these stand in my way because I can’t let go of my desire to tell stories.
Been awhile since I’ve been here in any regular capacity. It seems, as I expected, that the Cafe has survived quite nicely and even thrived in my absence. For those who don’t know, here’s the short version: I got sick, really sick, and had to take some time to get healthy before I could think straight about what I needed to do to be a writer. Let me tell you up front that coming close to dying can truly change one’s mindset. Anyway, I’m a lot better and the outlook is good.
All right, enough about that. It’s old news at this point for anyone who knows me and tedious going for everyone else who doesn’t really care. I mentioned it to give some context to why I think about certain things and how they may’ve changed.
Now [rubs hands together], let’s get back to it, shall we? (more…)
So this is the fifth and (almost) final post about NaNoWriMo for me this year.
I won as I noted last week. I’m over 60,000 words for the month and I’m happy with that. The book is about 60% finished and I know what’s happening next and what happens after that. I know the end.
I’d hoped to be around or even over 70,000 words for the month but that didn’t happen due to some unforeseen though preventable circumstances. I lost access to my computer for five days and I took up handwriting the manuscript. Because of this I have a newfound respect for anyone who’s doing this every day, every year. (Hi, Aspen!)
Writing a novel is a helluva lot of hard work. Don’t let anyone tell you any different. If you’re still writing then what the hell are you doing taking time away to read this? Get back to it! When you come to the final write-in tonight – sponsored by the library, no less! – you can relax if you’ve won. If you haven’t, bring your stuff and we’ll cheer you. We’ll run sprints with you.
Keep going until it’s done. Don’t give up.
Finally, I need to say thanks to all the crew who helped and inspired me to keep going this year. I didn’t make it to as many write-ins as I intended but that’s more an issue with my work schedule than anything else. I worked at home a lot and always worked as if I were in a room with all of you.
Okay, last thing: I’m coming back to post regularly in the Cafe starting in December. I need a day and time from the Boss but I’m feeling like I can be here again especially while I’m finishing up writing the first draft of the current work in progress. And then editing it.
So thanks for reading these updates. I’m glad you did. I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.
So as of this morning I’m a certified ‘winner’ of NaNoWriMo for the sixth time.
Yay me.
Really, I’m proud that I’ve done it. Again. I just wish there hadn’t been something that happened on Friday night that kind of made me struggle through the weekend and thus unable to post on Saturday like I’d planned. So, I’m late here. Again.
Anyway, what happened was – well, it’s not important. Suffice to say that it involved my computer – where all my writing for the last year was stored and stupidly, STUPIDLY, not backed up anywhere else. Except for a few things on my Google Drive and the last addition to the current novel last Thursday.
Hello again. Here we are, having survived the dread week two of National Novel Writing Month and deep in the mushy middle of the book I’m writing.
As I type I’m 35,000+ words into the book, which is planned for 100,000 or so words. The first third is behind me and I’m still liking the book. I’ve done some terrible things to my main characters so far and one of them is still fairly unlikable. But that’s on purpose. Also, only two people have died. One off-stage and the other in front of my eyes. I won’t lie, it hurt. It was necessary to move the plot along and lays some groundwork for the end. Others may die along the way. We’ll see when we get there.
When I’m not working, I’m writing or holding a cat in my lap. Even when I’m at work I’m thinking about what I could be writing. This year counts as a major success for me so far not because I’m way ahead of the game and hitting a higher average daily word count than I aimed at, but because I’m balancing work, exercise (which is more important than ever), family life and the writing all at once. Somehow it’s coming together again.
That didn’t happen last year. The first time was in 2011 and that novel is maybe the best thing I’ve written. Until this year, anyway.
It’s going well, some parts are easy and others not so much. Familiar characters and settings are fun and putting them through their paces is even more fun. I like trying to figure out how they’re going to react. The best part of inventing the future through stories is finding the difficult bits and working through them to the easy ones.
Now I’ve got writing to do. Talk to you next week. Hope your novel’s going well, too. Tell me about it if you want.
I was supposed to post this yesterday but things conspired to help me forget. Nothing bad, though, just life which gets in the way of everything that needs to be done, right?
At the beginning of this I set a daily word count goal of 2000 per day and as an average I’ve hit that. However there’ve been a couple of days when I didn’t make that mark. Luckily there’ve been several days when I far exceeded that mark and thus I’m at 21,767 words in nine days. Not too shabby, eh?
Yesterday, instead of posting here as I was supposed to, I wrote over 3100 words which made up for one day where I only wrote 1300 and one day I wrote 1700 plus a little extra. At the end of the day I checked my progress this year versus the last couple of years and I’m on pace, or just a little behind, where I’ve been. The conclusion I came to is that when I’m in NaNoWriMo, blasting away at the story that will eventually be shaped by revision, rewrite and rethinking into a novel, I’m pretty consistent.
So that’s the process part of where I’m at this year. How about the story? I can hear one of you ask. (more…)
Um, hi. It’s nice to be back. Been a while. How are you all doing?
So yesterday I started my sixth NaNoWriMo story in six years. I’ve won every year I’ve played but twice I didn’t actually ‘finish’ the novels I was writing. The first one (my third novel) just kind of petered out because I was pantsing too much, had no idea where it was going to go or how it would get there. I’ve thought about it often ever since because I love the story (it’s a first contact tale) and the characters. I’ll get back to it eventually.
The other NaNovel I didn’t finish was the one from last year. At 56,000 words I gave up. There were too many issues with it and I was focused on the book from the previous year (my fourth if you’re trying to keep track). That story was so good and the feedback that came back was excellent and I spent time editing it and polishing and revising and re-writing and everything one is supposed to do to a novel. This year it’s spent time out on submission (where it currently is) and I’m collecting rejections.
Last year’s book was a sequel to that one. It’s also the story I’m re-writing from page one this year. I changed the POV and added some really sinister villains and figured out HOW to tell the story that I wanted to tell. It simply took me longer than I thought because I wasn’t totally finished with the first one in the series. (Well, I’m not sure it’s a series yet. As of this writing it’s a book with one sequel. We’ll see.) Anyway.
Because of circumstances, I didn’t get to start writing until Friday evening November 1st. And it was a bit of a struggle. Normally I’m a morning writer so that probably contributed but I think it was really just nerves. Once I got past the first thousand words things seemed to go better. Today (Saturday) I knocked out 2600+ words really quickly and most of them were all right, a few were really good and some will definitely be edited out.
But the point is that the flow came back. And it came back strong, like a Colorado river in springtime. Lots of whitewater. This year will be different for me because I’m going to have to spend more time writing in the evenings rather than the morning because of my job. I’m okay with that but I’m hoping it’s not going to be a real struggle. I suspect not because I’ve got a lot of practice writing. Once upon a time I could tell you how many words I’ve written but not any more. It’s gotta be near a million, but I don’t know.
As I write this, I’m anxious to get back to writing on the novel (it’s called The Silent Well if I didn’t mention that earlier) and I’m hoping to get another 500 or 1,000 words down before I go to bed. So I’m going to sign off here to eat some dinner and try to dig back in.
“The politics of moving, aha – If this message’s understood…”
Recently I sent my novel to a publisher for consideration. I try not to think about it too much but I’ve got my fingers metaphorically crossed they’ll accept it. The key is to keep expectations low.
However, I can’t not think about the future. It’s sort of what I do.
To do that, I think about the past and what I thought the future would be. At some point I (and a lot of others) thought sure that the future would be filled with chrome and jetpacks and flying cars. Even silly things like The Jetsons gave us ideas, like video phones and the three-day work week.
In every version of The Future, there were things that were a lot the same as they were then, or now, if you prefer. There’s always food, almost always entertainment of some sort and always relationships. There are always corporations, too.
Since I’m a writer, the particular corporations I’m interested in today are the ones that publish stories, entertainments. Like the one I sent my novel to.
In the last thirty years, entertainment has changed dramatically. Gone are the 12”, 33 1/3 Long Playing records of my youth in favor first of cassettes, then CDs and now digital formats like MP3. Gone are the four networks and their summer rerun schedules in favor of first VHS, then DVD and now cloud-based streaming on smaller screens. Not gone, but certainly less prevalent are the bound books made of paper that are migrating to a computer cloud where one can read but doesn’t necessarily own anything any more despite paying for the privilege.
Books in particular come in multiple formats: paper, audio, digital. Some are from major publishers, some from smaller presses and a great many more are self-published. (more…)
The forest all around me soughed with the gentle breeze and I closed my eyes and listened to the symphony of oaks and maples and larch and locust and poplar. Each leaf gave an individual sound, the wind breaking through the different shapes and sizes and positions. I understood the complexities of playing a clarinet or bassoon suddenly even though I’d never picked up a musical instrument in my life.
Tools I understand. I’m a Builder. That’s why I was in the forest.
*
“You have to do this for me,” my brother said. He lay in a hospital bed dying of colon cancer. He was too young for this and younger than me. Life isn’t fair. “You have to.” His voice was not even a fourth what it had been when he was strong. Now it was reedy, full of too much air and almost hollow.
He held on to my hand with a strength he’d always had but never showed.
“I will, Ollie. I promise.” I hated this. I was crying and I didn’t want my little brother to see me crying. Our sister would have torn me up for showing emotion like that. Susan was a bitch but I loved her and Ollie more than almost anything. My own family were the only ones above them. I sniffed and stopped trying to hold back the tears.
“I can’t go until you do, Jamie.” Ollie always had a penchant for gravitas and that’s what made him good at what he did. He could write copy like no one else and he had that shelf of awards to prove it.
“I’ll go out there first thing in the morning,” I said. I sniffed again.
Ollie nodded and let go of my hand. The drugs finally took him and let him rest.
*
Out in the hall I stopped to hug Ollie’s wife. We both cried and held tight to each other. In another world, I might have won her affection if I hadn’t met Marta around the same time. Charlene chose Ollie, picked him from all her suitors and made sure he knew just how much she loved him. Being a former Miss Texas USA, she attracted all sorts of men – and women – just by being in a room.
“What does he want you to do?” She hadn’t put on any makeup and her face was blotchy from crying.
“A small thing,” I said. I looked at the floor. “Tomorrow morning.”
“Oh god.” Charlene wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Jesus.”
I took a step back. “He’s sleeping now.”
“You haven’t told me.”
“What?” I shuffled to my left half a step.
The glare she shot me withered away any resolve I might have had. Still, she didn’t need to know everything. I sighed.
“There’s a tree out on our parents’ property. He wants me to use it in the house.”
Her face melted from stern reproach to confusion. “I don’t understand.”
“You don’t really have to, Char,” I said. “This is what he wants me to do for him.” (more…)
The Mad Thinker is a Marvel Comics character created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee back in the day.
Inspiration is a tricky thing to describe. Kind of like trying to capture scents with a mason jar underwater.
I mean to say that one never knows when something will strike the flint and and an idea will erupt into flaming life. It’s part and parcel of being a writer that one must keep records of lots of things.
Of course one runs across so many things in the Age of the Internets. It used to be that I’d just write stuff down as I came across it when I read something else. It all starts, as these things do, in the beginning. The formative years, when we begin to realize that being an astronaut or a fireman isn’t going to be what we really want to do, is when we find something that really connects the dots. One of the first things I wrote down came from Chris Claremont, the writer of Uncanny X-Men:
“What you do not comprehend is that we are dying from the moment of birth, indeed, from the instant of conception. Creation bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
Our lives are finite things. We live our allotted span and are no more. Regardless of what we may do, how hard we try, the best we can hope for is a brief delay of the inevitable. It is sad. Even cruel. But it is our most fundamental reality to be faced and accepted.”
–Colossus, Uncanny X-Men 165 (vol. 1)
That really affected the teenaged me. It was a point of view I hadn’t considered before. It’s something that I have referred to often despite being one of the most overwrought pieces of comic book writing ever. It’s a moment between two people and the feelings are genuine and there are true things said. It’s a philosophy.
It affected me enough to want to be a writer and to, as often as I can, tell the truth as I see it.
As I’ve become more and more a storyteller, I have collected quotes about writing that mean a lot, that keep me moving forward. The Cult of Done has been one of the biggest, most influential pieces, too. I blog about it a lot.
DONE IS THE ENGINE OF MORE.
— Bre Pettis
But then there’s the curmudgeon Harlan Ellison who might sue anyone who quotes him. Still, this bit, from an interview conducted during the release of Dreams With Sharp Teeth (which you should watch often) over at Comic Book Resources, gave me a quote that gets me through every single day:
“You can either seek the approbation of the monkeys or you can continue to produce your art at the level at which you do it best.”
— Harlan Ellison
Since I’ve got a bum ring finger as I type this, I’m going to wrap up with my favorite quote about writing and the process of writing:
Yeah. So moving from the philosophy of Claremont’s most human character to the foul-mouthed-but-sensitive Wendig, the things that inspire me to write are pretty varied. I have a quote for just about any occasion, should I need something to pull me through a tough spot of writing.
Of course every spot of writing is tough. All those scraps of paper tacked to the bulletin board over my desk are there to distract me from the hard work and at the same time remind me that it’s hard work.
“You ready for this?” Martin said. (I won’t use any last names. I can’t bring myself to rat out my friends.) He had his hand on the doorknob and he looked dead serious. “Once you go through, there’s not turning back. You can’t unsee this, or unknow it, either.”
What did I know? He hadn’t told me anything yet. Foolish, I nodded.
We went through the heavy oak door and into a room that reminded me of a Viking mead hall. Candlelit chandeliers hung from bare rafters and there was only one table. Our footsteps echoed off the stone floor. The hall extended in either direction so far that it disappeared into darkness.
Around the table were ten men, all looking like they’d come right off the construction site, same as me. Martin clapped his hand on my shoulder as we reached the table.
“Guys, this is Tom. The one I told you about.” (more…)
