The Confabulator Cafe

Category: Uncategorized

  • Prepare for Your Weaknesses

    I’m sorry this is running a bit late in the day; my family just took off, and I’m only just now remembering that I have things to do on the computer. My bad, y’all.

    Thing is, I knew that the second my family hit town, I would forget to do anything online. My family doesn’t live too far — only about three or four hours away, depending on much of a lead foot you have — but I miss them dearly. They usually only come for a day or two, so I pretty much focus on doing things with them.

    Knowing this, I decided that I would hit 50K by Wednesday. It was sort of rough there for a while. I got tired. I got frustrated. But Christie and Jason were going along with it too, and all three of us hit 50K. (I got it done at 11PM on Wednesday, but damn it, it got done.)

    Of course, the novel isn’t done. I pretty much decided to validate and jump right back in to dinner prep. Which was worth it, as dinner was well-received, well-loved, and sent our family right into the throes of a food coma so intense, that I was nodding off at 10PM. It was a great night of delicious drinks and pleasant company. We played Cards Against Humanity, wherein we learned that while my mother might be too nice for it, she would occasionally just drop a vulgar card right when you weren’t expecting.

    Frankly, I would delete my whole novel for more nights just so good. Thankfully, no one expects that.

    That said, NaNoWriMo doesn’t end just because you hit 50K; it’d be against the spirit of it. There are still write-ins to attend, friends to cheer on. I still intend to make every effort to finish this novel before NaNoWriMo ends.

    There’s probably more real life to deal with now than there was pre-Thanksgiving. The mountain of dishes alone is staggering. But Week Four is worth the effort.

  • Plodding Forward

    Last week brought you tales of joy and birthday celebrations. I rode that high for a week before it ultimately had to come to an end. And like most highs (and I’m talking about my experiences with sugar and caffeine highs here, peeps), that end met with a definite crash.

    Last week it was good to be me. This week, I’m willing to offer up a trade. Any takers? No? Fine… I guess I’ll turn all my bitter disappointment into fuel for my writing. And two thirds of the way through NaNo, I finally feel like I’m ready to write again. If I can hold onto that feeling (and all the feelings roiling inside of me) until after Thanksgiving, I might be able to get a start on a new novel. Because I need to get these words out before I burst. Or say something really stupid to the wrong person.

    Last week wasn’t all bad, though. Friday night was the Halfway Party. I felt a bit guilty for showing up, since I’m sitting this year’s NaNo out, but the best thing about my writer’s group is how welcoming and supportive they are. Well, maybe Sarah minded… but that’s only because we talked her into a tequila shot that I think she regretted. The face she made after taking it sure made it look like she regretted it.

  • Writing in the Cracks

    There are two things I do every November. One is National Novel Writing Month. The other is to serve as an election judge for my county. In theory, this is a perfect marriage.

    In theory, there is no difference between theory and reality. In reality….

    Nanowrimo is about learning to write in the cracks of time. If you have fifteen minutes left in your lunch break, you write. You show up early to the dentist so you have an extra ten minutes in the waiting room to write. If you can steal half an hour between the end of your workday and coming home to dinner, kids, and a spouse who wants to talk about the toilet, you pull over in the grocery store parking lot and write.

    Election day is a day full of cracks. You get up at oh-dark-thirty, pack a “nutritious” lunch of caffeinated soda and Girl Scout Cookies, drive through the darkling, still streets to your assigned poll, spend a frantic hour setting up, remind the waiting voters that the poll opens precisely at seven and not a minute more and I don’t care what your watch says, and once the before-work voting throng has dissipated you crack open a sleeve of Thin Mints and settle in for the day.

    I figure in an average election day there’s at least five hours of aggregate time-in-the-cracks. Most voters, once you check their eligibility and hand them a ballot, want to be left alone. A perfect time to get ahead on word count, right?

    Oh, hell, no.

    A poll is a minefield of distractions. If the voters don’t have questions, it’s your chatty fellow poll workers. The county has called to see how things are going; a journalist has stopped by to ask the same question. A voter needs to find the correct precinct. A kid asks for a sticker (of course you can have a sticker!). Do we want to order a pizza? Where’s the other box of cookies? Are there Samoas? I moved across town this summer, can I vote? I never registered, can I vote? I live out of state, can I vote? I don’t feel like driving across town to vote at the precinct near my house, can I vote? I just landed a flying saucer on the lawn on my way to Beta Centauri, can I vote? [0] A poll is a time-distortion field; two hours in you feel like you’ve been there all day, but as evening approaches you have no idea where the day went.

    I can knit in this environment. On a slow day, I can even read. But I cannot write. This year, I didn’t even try.

    [0] These are actual questions.

  • Do as I say, not as I do

    I’m a bad boy, apparently (In the world of NaNoWriMo. Which doesn’t make the “bad boy” title all that interesting. It’s like being the coolest kid at the comic book store: there isn’t that much competition). I do things during November that are frowned upon by the NaNo Powers-That-Be (myself included). I’m a rule-breaker. Who woulda thunk it?

    What’s my crime? I edit while I write.

    It’s a terrible example to set for my fellow November novelists. Editing during the writing process only serves to slow you down, and that’s not what NaNo is about. But I do it anyway. I can’t help it. I tweak, I twist, I tinker. I worry over words, and turns of phrase, and paragraph structure. Every day I re-read the previous day’s work and make adjustments. Sometime I go back even further to add, remove, and rearrange. While some people write linearly, my process is constantly looping and evolving as I progress through the story.

    The result, luckily for me, is a pretty bad-ass first draft.

    Unfortunately, it’s also where the brakes typically engage, completely interrupting the creative process. My first draft, while good, is never perfect (wouldn’t that be something?) and yet I find it very challenging to tear it down and build it back up. It’s like remodeling a perfectly functional house because the flow’s not quite right: some people could easily do that, knocking down walls and rearranging the kitchen appliances. I, however, see a functional house first, and can usually only bring myself to slap a new coat of paint on it (spelling and grammar, or word choice tweaking), or, occasionally, and with great reluctance, removing extraneous stuff. Actual structural changes? Like reframing a character or altering the plotline? Nuh uh. Not up for that.

    It’s perverse, actually, that having an effective process for writing a first draft is actually a handicap when I move on to the editing process. One would think I would learn from previous years, and realize that perhaps I should spend less time editing during my writing, and save it for the actual editing stage.

    One would be wrong, of course.

    Though, actually, thinking about it, things may be looking up with this year’s manuscript. I think it’s a function of a) being incredibly busy during the initial writing process, and b) never really feeling all that attached to the story. At the time of the initial draft, I was disappointed by both of those factors: I didn’t really love my story, and I didn’t have enough time to dedicate to it to get it to a loveable state. Now, however, I feel more free to make the drastic changes that drafts deserve. Need to nix a scene or two? No problem. Character attitude needs a one-eighty? You betcha.

    So, something new. An opportunity for structural editing, due to indifference about the initial process. Odd. All that said, I’m still not done with either the initial draft or the first edit, which are happening in a hodge-podge whenever I can spare the time. But I’m hopeful that, with time, I might end up with a more polished and saleable product at the end of the day. Time will tell.