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Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

There are three days left of Nano. I have 12.5k words to write, so about 4k a day. I haven’t done anything in the past two days thanks to work and general laziness. But with November ending with a weekend, I think I can get it done. And I really really want to.

I don’t think I’ve talked about my novel too much here, so I might as well now. It’s titled “Alexander Hayes vs. The Seven Deadly Sins.” It started as an idea of a series of short stories about a cowboy preacher fighting evil. You know, “Alexander Hayes vs. The Poltergeist of Whisper Canyon,” “Alexander Hayes vs. The Obsidian Steam Tank,” etc etc. Now he fights his toughest challenge yet, as the embodiment of the Seven Deadly Sins from Catholic mythos are trying to bring about the apocalypse, and he has to protect the young girl who holds the key to it all.

I have basically tried to think of every cool Western pulp trope and take it to eleven. There’s gunfights through a town, a train boarding, saloons and brothels, and everything else I can think of. I don’t know if it’s any good, but at least it’s fun. Which is why it’s a bit frustrating that I’m so far behind. I enjoy writing it, so damn it, what’s the deal?

The number one comment I get from people when they see me handwriting large blocks of text is, “I could never do that! My arm would fall off!” Basically, they’re afraid of pain.

Wimps.

Like any physical skill, you have to practice, you have to prep, and you have to use an appropriate technique. Let me give you my A+ Rule #1 for avoiding 99.94% of all handwriting problems.

Slow the fuck down.

If you’re writing too fast, you’re scribbling and you’re going to tense up. You’re going to hold your pen too hard, you’re going to curl up over your notebook like a gargoyle with osteoporosis, and your handwriting will look like a Jackson Pollock painting. Slow your roll.

“But wait,” you cry in existential angst. “I can’t possibly write as fast as the thoughts come! I’ll lose words!” To which I reply, “So what?”

Your words will wait. The stampede of your words will circle back to stampede in front of you all over again. Some may escape, never to be seen again, but they’ll be replaced with other words. Better words. You’ll never be able to write, or type, or dictate as fast as thought. Stop thinking of it as a footrace—when it’s really a flirtation.

My final word about pain is this: if any part of this hurts, you’re doing it wrong. You need to figure out what it is and change your technique. You might need to take a break, or sit in a different chair, or adjust the height or angle of your desk, or try a different pen, or even just get up and take a nice jog in the park for a while.

You can sit or stand, doesn’t matter, as long as your back is straight and you’re comfortable. Do not hunch over your notebook like a dragon guarding his hoard. Sit up tall, feet on the ground or a footrest [0]. Office chairs are office chairs for a reason—they’re designed to support you for long-term sitting. But you can still use the dining room table, the couch, the comfy chair, or even in bed, as long as you can sit up fairly straight. Prop yourself up with pillows if you have to [1].

You will need a hard surface, or at least a hard backed notebook. If you’re at a desk or table, that’s great. Otherwise, I recommend heading down to the craft store and picking up a good-sized lap desk, the kind where the pillow is a bean bag. They’re not terribly expensive and they add a lot of flexibility to your work space. I like the larger ones so my notebook doesn’t hang too much over the edge.

For that matter, if you are using a desk/table/kitchen counter, clear that sucker off. Give yourself some room to spread out; you might find you’re more comfortable with your notebook farther away rather than stabbing you in the chest.

A hundred years ago, professional copyists used a slanted desk for writing all day in relative comfort. I would personally love to have an adjustable drafting table, but unless I can find a nice one in the dumpster, it’s not going to happen. Some modern handwriting coaches recommend using a tabletop slant board. You can spend a couple of hundred to buy a nice one, DIY an ugly one for cheap, or shake all the beans in your lap desk to one side and plop it down on your tabletop.

If your hand is cramping up, you’re probably holding your pen too tightly. If this is a habit, you may have to consciously retrain your grip, but it could also be that you’re using the wrong pen shape— too fat, too skinny, too heavy, too light, too cushiony, not cushiony enough…

Another mistake leading to hand cramps is making your fingers do all the work. Your fingers are controlled by little muscles in your hand and forearm, which are great for precise movements but tire very easily. You want to use the larger muscles in your arm and shoulder to put your hand in the right position, and then your fingers form each letter. If the muscles in your shoulders and arms are tense, you’ll lose comfort and legibility.

Take regular breaks to rest, roll your wrists and hands, stretch out your nick, and generally change position, particularly when you’re just starting out. You’ll need to get into condition before beginning any marathon writing sessions.

I don’t know anybody who actually likes their handwriting. That’s because most of us try to write too fast and just scribble. I’ve noticed that a person with very neat handwriting takes the time to carefully draw each letter. Writing slowly and beautifully is a habit they’ve developed over their lifetime.

Some people bemoan cursive as a dying art. I call bullshit. Cursive is supposed to be faster and neater, but it drives me nuts— there’s all those extra loops and backtracing. Today’s standard is more of a half-joined up print where you join letters when it makes sense and lift your pen otherwise.

You can download all sorts of handwriting practice sheets aimed at homeschoolers, but I would avoid these. They’re boring. Instead, remember Rule #1, and practice on things like grocery lists.

At some point you are going to want to input your writing into a computer. At first blush, this seems to be a dull time waster. However, this is actually a great opportunity to give your manuscript a close reading. Once you’ve typed it in, it’s easy to rearrange sentences and paragraphs and adjust your word choices. Typing is a chance to write a second, and usually vastly improved, draft.

A typing stand, or a copyholder, is a must. Typing stands, which hold your notebook up at an angle where you can see it, used to be standard office equipment, but they’re harder to find now. A cat destroyed mine, but I discovered that a small tabletop easel that I bought at a craft store for another project works just great.

Basically, try a bunch of stuff out until you find out what works. And happy handwriting!

[0] Especially for short people. You can fake a footrest out of a couch cushion in an emergency, but my favorite inexpensive expedient is to duct-tape a stack of phone books or newspapers together.
[1] Assuming you haven’t already used the pillows to build a blanket fort, which would be a cool writing space.

One of the most difficult challenges in writing for the Cafe is to come up with a monthly piece of short fiction. A thousand words with a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is a writing skill I’ve wanted to gain, and I figured with the same discipline, work, and a lot of words on the page I’d figure out this short story stuff the same way I figured out how to win Nanowrimo every year I’ve participated.

Sometimes it works. I’ve produced some pieces, published here at the Cafe, that I’m rather proud of. It wasn’t exactly easy, but I got in the zone, found a groove, and mixed metaphors like a boss and within a few hours I had something worth sharing with the world.

But usually I got nothing.

I’ve tried starting with prompts, with themes, with characters and situations and conflicts and a firm deadline. I can brainstorm, free write, take long walks and showers, make tripartate lists describing everything I can think of. But I can rarely find a character, a goal, obstacles to overcome, and a solution that fit within a thousand words. Mostly I can’t find an easy source of conflict, and if I try to force one for the sake of the story, it breaks the logic of the world. And, to misquote Elizabeth Bennett, I am unwilling to speak unless I expect to say something that will amaze the entire room.

I have always told myself private stories to stave off boredom. But I realize all those stories have been at least novel-length. The characters aren’t dealing with short-term crises, they’re dealing with the problem of finding meaning within a life that can, in some circumstances, span centuries.

Perhaps this reflects my own life, one I’ve managed to constructed to be remarkably free of drama. While some might bemoan my lack of passionate affairs, there also aren’t any fights, misunderstandings, abuse, or many sudden and traumatic losses. My life is pretty placid; possibly even boring, and I like it that way. Drama, to me, is a distraction.

This perhaps explains why I’m not a big fan of chick-lit and romance. If everybody in those books would use their words and take one another seriously, well, the book would be a lot shorter.

I guess that’s what they mean when they say to write what you know. Write your own journey. It’ll take as many words as it takes.

When I started writing my great non-nationalistic novel, tentatively titled “There Was No King,” I knew my characters and plot were loosely based on the biblical book of Judges. I knew the setting was the great post-nation-state Kansouri, one of the many regional confederations created after these United States were united no more. I knew the church would explode at some point. However, I did not know that Delia, one of the main characters, would be a phrenologist.

But as I started on that rough draft, back in 2010, Delia decided on her own career. Somehow, in that future world, after all the institutions that preserve actual scientific knowledge disintegrated, my rational but passionate betraying minx became a student of head bumps, a pseudoscientist-psychologist-small business owner. I wanted her to be a border guard! Or maybe a courier for underground networks, or a low-level government worker, or a hacker like her boyfriend. Certainly not a phrenologist. But she decided, and all my attempts to coerce her into another career failed.

Since I didn't know much about what she did, I had to investigate her job and education. And I found out a few interesting things. Phrenology wasn't really about the head bumps, but a theory that sections (organs) of the brain influenced different character traits; short of breaking open the skull, there wasn't any other way to figure out the size of those “organs” than feeling the bumps on the skull. It wasn't ever really accepted by the scientific establishment. It contributed a lot to racist pseudoscience and early criminology (“the criminal type” kinds of BS), but it also prefigured developments in neuroscience that recognized different parts of the brain did, in fact, serve different functions. There are also still adherents of phrenology out there somewhere in the world. Thank you, internet.

Now, Delia won't have to depend on feeling the skull–she can do a quick mini-MRI of the future on her clients and offer them a detailed read-out. Of course, in the future, phrenology is more the province of prospective mothers-in-law than racist scientists. But Delia, like her predecessors in the 19th century, will practice her art with great ceremony and drama. She will offer counseling to understand the results. She will struggle with whether to practice adaptive phrenology, the altering people's brain architecture to change their personality. She will be a psuedo-scientist with the best of them, and she will think about the differences between popular science, fake science, and “real” science a lot. I look forward to learning more about this profession along with her!

You type a word on the page, pick up the pencil, initiate the writing process. You hear the sentences in your head. You know the characters, the plot, the style, the voice will coalesce to something that resembles a novel by the end of the month. At least you hoped so.

All NaNovelers know the difficulties of choosing a point of view and tense for a novel. One must strike the balance between straight-out memoir chronicle style and dry documentary; future tense is presumptive, but delightful at times; past tense was the novel default for years, but now perhaps present tense usurps it. And then the direction of the text depends so much on its pronouns. Shall “I” personalize the novel, perhaps too much, blur the lines between narrator and author? Can “you” participate in the novel as character and audience? Does a plural third-person narrator impose a false unity? And what of the glorious omniscient observer, the third person who knows and sees all but is no one?

(more…)

It’s pretty obvious how you make your zero draft readable, right? You highlight everything and hit delete. Then you pretend that it never happened.

Okay, so not really. At least not for me. Then again, I’ve only done NaNo once and therefore have only ever had one draft zero. I’m also pretty sure the process I did didn’t work out super well for me.

My first mistake was that I started editing about five days after I finished the draft. Yes, I started with the sections that I’d written back in May, but that still meant that I didn’t ever actually take a break from it. (more…)

November 30^th. The last hours of NaNoWriMo are upon us.

Today’s a rough day for me. I’m doing my best to cheer on my WriMos and get as many across the finish line as possible. That part’s fun, and rewarding. I love my job as an ML. But personally? It’s tough. Not because of today, but because of tomorrow.

December 1^st is always a lesson in the Newtonian laws of motion.

Right now, I feel like I’m leaning out of a train car that’s hurtling forward at an ungodly speed. Up ahead, I know the train is going to stop. Abruptly. Absolutely. Violently.

I’m watching the ground go by in a blur, and I’m thinking, If I don’t jump off, I’m going to come to an abrupt, absolute, violent stop. Ouch.

But then I think, If I do jump off, just how fast can my little bitty legs carry me? Without the support of the runaway train, how far can I go? How fast? Can my little engine possibly compete with the full speed locomotive of NaNoWriMo?

What if I stumble? If I fall down? Will I get back up? If I somehow manage to keep my footing, and keep moving forward, for how long? What if I finally pause to take a breath, and realize that standing still feels pretty good?

November is all about gaining momentum via the surge of other writers all doing the same thing as you. Giving you an excuse to ignore all other distractions for thirty days and focus on just one thing: writing.

But once November’s over? Boy, does the party end quickly. The forums become ghost towns and everyone realizes, “I need to get back to other things! Writing isn’t the only thing in my life!” It’s not just a lack of wind behind your sails. It’s turning the sea to cement, the air to molasses, the will to write sapped to nearly nothing.

Ugh. Tough to keep going when November passes, and the December Friction descends.

Here’s to hoping. I have a lot of story left to tell.

I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.