The Confabulator Cafe

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  • I’m in a Glass Case of Emotion

    My NaNoWriMo wordcount holds no fear for me, anymore. I’ve written under adverse conditions. I’ve done 5k weekends and 5k Saturdays. I’ve written 11k in a single day, while still going to my day job and getting my work done. And one year I restarted halfway through November and wrote my 50k words in 14 days. I know that I can do this. There’s no question about that anymore. You could ship me to the moon and I would probably get my wordcount in for the month.

    So why am I running 2 days behind par? Why am I constantly and consistently writing 500 or 1,000 words a day instead of the 1,667 needed to catch up?

    I said last week that 1,667 was just a little too much for me and I need some downtime in between my good days. That pattern is holding. I wrote 5,800 words over the weekend and then promptly fell behind again. It’s not a question of time or energy. I have plenty of both when I’m pacing around my living room not writing. It’s a question of emotion.

    When I write, I need to feel emotions. I feel the adrenaline in my character’s body when someone is shooting at her. I feel her heart flutter when she sees Mr. Wright.  And I feel the gut wrenching betrayal that will come when she learns the truth about him. And there’s a certain amount of panic at the thought. My chest gets tight. My face scrunches up. My limbs tell me with every nerve ending they possess that it’s time to run away. Which probably explains why I pace a lot when I’m thinking about my writing.

    I’m not very comfortable with strong emotion, you see. It’s something that I have a hard time tolerating. People sometimes describe sadness as a sea. For me, sadness and all of those other emotions are a great big ocean that I’m living in the middle of, on a little island, below sea level, with a rickety dam built all around to keep the feelings back. Let in a little bit, and the rest will break through the dam and flood me.

    I have a highly developed ability to keep it all bottled up so that I never feel more than a small wave to rock my boat. But I need those emotions when I write. In a safe way, so that I don’t get overwhelmed. I have to willingly pull a small part of them up out of me and use them up before their big brothers come looking for them. And I don’t always trust that I can do that.

    And if this is all sounding a bit melodramatic to you, I’m right there with you. My point, if I’ll ever get around to it, is that writers all write differently. Some of them work best on cloudy days, some in their writing sheds, some only on weekends. I write best in short bursts. Like ripping off a Band-Aid. One Band-Aid equals about 400-500 words. Now imagine how many Band-Aids you can tolerate ripping off of your skin one after another after another and you’ll get an idea of why I don’t hit par every day.

    But what I really need is an external deadline and a combination of enough passion for the project and just enough panic that it overwhelms everything else and short-circuits my emotions so that I can write. That usually kicks in around week three for me. Until then, I rip off a few Band-Aids here and there when I can stand it. And my wordcount slogs on.

  • On the Twelfth Day of NaNo, the Muses Brought to Me…

    NaNoWriMo week two is in full swing. Most of us know of this time as the dreaded week two, and/or The Week Satan Created. It’s a tough one. You’re probably stuck, or looking down the barrel of stuck at a few looming plot holes (ME! That would be me!).

    So take inventory: How are you feeling? What is working, what isn’t? Hydrated? Grab WATER- Not soda, not coffee, not Whiskey. Water. Drink a lot of it.

    Are you listening to music? Does your playlist inspire you? No? Change your music. Get a different chair. Use a pen that you really love- mine is a Retro 1951 ‘Tornado’. It’s a beaut.

    Do the thing that is necessary to get you out of your funk.

    Opposite of that, what is working? Have you found the perfect seat in the corner at Starbucks (Me! That would be me!)? Have you struck inspiration gold in a NaNo forum? Is your outline shining brilliantly during this marathon writing event? Excellent. Keep up the momentum.

    Keep the line moving, as they say.

    It’s Day 12. You’re almost halfway there.

     

    On the twelfth day of NaNo, the muses brought to me…

    Twelve chores I’m ignoring

    Eleven late nights writing

    Ten plot holes looming

    Nine pens a’leaking

    Eight websites crashing

    Seven caffeine headaches

    Six antagonistic protagonists

    FIVE PROCRASTINATION FACEBOOK/TWITTER/BLOG/FORUM  POSTSSSSSSSSS

    Four new friends made

    Three badges earned

    Two regional write-ins attended

    And a novel that I’d like to throw from my window.

     

     

  • Motherhood Makes for Great Horror

    Remember how last week I said we’d talk about how writing in a real-life historical setting was hard? That was a lie. I have nothing to say about it that someone with, y’know, actual experience hasn’t already said. Instead, I want to talk about the specific sort of horror that comes with motherhood.

    My main character is a pregnant woman who has previously experienced a stillbirth, and I’ve enjoyed mining the horrors of pregnancy and birth to compliment the supernatural horror in the story. I feel like the very real nature of one lends weight to the fictional nature of the other.

    I usually try to be egalitarian when referring to the work and stress of parenthood, because a lot of the it is experienced more-or-less equally by both sexes. Both parents (and stepparents, aunts/uncles, grandparents, etc) experience the loss of identity, lack of sleep, fear of physically or emotionally damaging another human beyond repair, the anxiety of the world around you doing it even if you don’t, etc. And I do think that playing on those fears in my story is interesting.

    But motherhood as an experience of building and carrying a baby has some special layers of horror that non-carrying parents don’t personally experience. I will sum up the most obvious with this gif:

    Pregnant Woman, Baby Kicks Glass
    THE KICKS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE

    My fascination with mixing the body horror of pregnancy with the holy-shit-elation that comes with having a baby isn’t new. Back in 2012 I wrote a piece of m-preg (yeah, fight me) that culminated in the magic wearing off (long story) and both the father and baby dying. (Except not! Because angels fixed it. Supernatural-ex-machina for the win.) Writing the sequences wherein the main character was in the process of dying traumatically were fascinating.

    That said, while I have a weird fascination with the body horror — it’s easy. The hard stuff is psychological. Having a baby will fuck you up mentally. Something like 10% to 20% of mothers suffer from postpartum depression or worse. In particular, I’ve been reading about postpartum psychosis — wherein women have hallucinations and many other symptoms, and can ultimately end up harming themselves and their child.

    What does all of this have to do with my NaNoWriMo project?

    Right, so, I’m 4,000 behind par as of this morning. It’s… well, it’s week two. I’ve fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole in my novel. I have two important subplots, one I’d planned and one that’s sort of fallen into my lap.

    The first in instrumental to the plot. My main character, Nora, is a rich man’s second wife — his first wife died “in an accident” ten years previous, which tragically also killed their newborn son. Nora comes to learn throughout the story that the “accident” was that she leaped off the roof of their home, believing something to be coming for her and the baby. I was telling August last night that this subplot is interesting to write, because Nora unfolds this bit by bit, thinking that the woman’s death was caused by the supernatural. However, I want to unfold in such a way that the reader can see the truth: Amelia was just very sick and not getting the help she needed because her family didn’t want to overreact.

    The second came in one of those day-one scenes: my main character goes to visit a casual friend who has newborn twins, and is obviously (to the reader) suffering from PPD. Recognizing this in her friend, and trying to find a way to help is one of the first autonomous steps Nora takes in the story.

    Unfortunately, I’m having trouble digging out of that second subplot and getting to the actual plot of the novel. The further I get into this portpartum mental illness plot, the more I start to get overwhelmed by imagining the scope of my edits. I was telling my friends the other day that I’ve never successfully edited a novel, and the more I look toward that inevitable end-point for a story I really like, the more I shrink back.

    So tonight, I need to go back and find the spot where I diverged away from “Nora decides to get her daughter back,” because she’s too far from that plot. I think once I get back into the main plot, I can recover better.

    I’ll report back in a week and let you know how it went.

  • Surviving Another Week

    Wow, a lot has happened in a week. I celebrated my birthday with friends on Friday. Then pulled two 3k writing days. Yesterday I spent the day curled up in bed battling some sort of stomach bug. I’ll spare you the details, but safe to say it was pretty gross.

    I’ve been hovering around or slightly above par most days and I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I’m not getting burnt out by writing 3k+ words every day. On the other hand, when I have days I fall behind that means I don’t have nearly as much buffer.

    My novel is starting to come together. Though I’m starting to worry that I don’t have enough material to make it stretch to 50k. Not without throwing in another subplot or three. I suppose this is where being a pantser starts to become problematic. Oops.

    Amelia nearly ran off to India this past week and was very narrowly talked out of it. Mainly because I did not want to write a novel about a several month long boat ride. I know very few nautical terms and would end up spending half of my writing time doing research. If you’re following along from last week, I am no closer to discovering if Amelia is or is not in love with her best friend.

    There’s still time though. At least, that’s what I’m going to keep telling myself.

  • Week 1: What the Hell?! I’m behind already?!

    They call me the Terminator. It could be that when wearing sunglasses, I bear a slight resemblance to Schwarzenegger. God knows that we have the same muscular build that simultaneously inspires and intimidates.

    Well–that’s not true. They call me that because I sit and write without distraction. I always push forward, and I never miss my word count. So why, only a week after giving a speech about always being able to find the time to write, have I not found the time to write?

    There are a load of reasons and none of them are particularly good. I could point at work being busy, but work is always busy this time of year, and I haven’t been in for the last couple of days due to having some sort of sickness that started in sinuses head and has descended in to my lungs. I could blame it on being sick, but I’ve written while under the weather before. Hell, it is one of the best things about being a writer. You can work without risk of giving the plague to someone else.

    I could blame it on Penny, our new puppy. But really, why would you ever blame anything on a puppy? No, the truth of it is that I have failed for no good reason. The novel is coming along fine. I still have a lot of story ahead of me, and I know where I am going next. What I’ve written, I’ve done in two large chunks of over 3,000 words each, so the words are coming easily. I simply have not made enough time to work on this project, so far.

    This isn’t really a problem, not at this juncture. I will probably go for another 3,000 words or so today, which will put me only about a day behind schedule. This early in the month, it really isn’t that hard to make up for a few lazy days. It just takes a couple hundred extra words a day, hardly anything in he grand scheme of things.

    However, most people start off NaNoWriMo with a bang, charging forward and killing the majority of the first ten thousand words in just a few days. It’s generally a bad sign to be lagging behind already. That being said, I still believe I will make it to fifty thousand by the end of the month, as long as I make the time to write this book.

    I’ve just done a poor job of it, so far.

  • Cheering from the sidelines

    I am not doing NaNoWriMo, and it feels like I’m opting out of a big party in order to study or something. (more…)

  • Falling Into Old Patterns

    I’ve been doing NaNoWriMo for *does math* a lot of years and in the months between Novembers I forget how hard the day-to-day writing is for me. Every year I make plans to break my writing into chunks throughout the day, to write on my lunch break, to sneak some words in while dinner is cooking. And every year I sit down at nine or ten o’clock at night and frantically pound out some words while hating myself.

    It’s not a great pattern. On this, the sixth day of NaNoWriMo, I find myself turning back to familiar habits. I have not written this morning. I will probably not write on my lunch break. And I’m consistently running about a day’s worth of writing behind par.

    My NaNo stats always take on a sort of roller coaster feel (worse in some years than others). I have one really good day, followed by a day or two where I lag. Then another really good push, and maybe a 200-word day. And then I panic on Saturday and write 5,000 words, only to follow it up with a useless Sunday. Because 1,667 words per day is just a little too much for me. It’s just a little out of reach. I’m comfortable writing 500-800 words a day and finding 1,667 words inside of me does more to exhaust me than to energize me. So I need some recovery time sometimes. And that’s okay.

    This year started the same way. 1,700 words on day one, and then about 500-800 words on days two and three. Writing those words was like pulling teeth. Everything felt trite and contrived. I flew through some plot points like I was checking them off a list. Girl meets boy. Check. Girl likes boy and is stereotypical about it. Check. Girl is mistaken for spy. Check.

    These scenes are placeholder scenes. I’m getting to know the world that I’m writing and my characters, still. The early scenes are almost certain to change as I learn more and the plot/world/characters start to become richer. I know that, but it’s still demotivating to sit down and write only to have crap pour out of your fingertips.

    And then on day four the heavens opened up and I remembered how scenes work. My characters started to take on personalities and bits of their backstories became clear. Description started writing itself. I hit my word count and tried to sleep as my brain unfurled the next three scenes for me (semipro tip: Write down your ideas before bed. Your brain is about to fall asleep and hallucinate vividly for eight hours. It’s got other shit to deal with than remembering the intricacies of your novel’s plot).

    And none of that would have happened if I hadn’t slogged through three days of nonsense to get here.

  • NaNoWriMo Day 5: A Royal November

    Royals baseball is over for 2015.

    The parade has come and the crowds have gone.

    Memories were made. A championship was won. My home, my city came together in a way like I’ve never experienced.

    In 2014, the Kansas City Royals lost the World Series in Game 7 against the San Francisco Giants on October 29th. I was in Augusta, Georgia for work and scribbled my NaNoWriMo outline notes at a table at Buffalo Wild Wings with a crowd that barely noticed the World Series was happening. I was nervous for the impending November because I didn’t feel ready. I felt consumed by October fall ball.

    In a city I didn’t love, with a few colleagues I barely knew, I watched my team fall heart-breakingly short of a world championship we’d yearned for in 29 years of [mostly] bad baseball. We wanted the crown, and we watched another city take it from us.

    I finished NaNoWriMo 2014 with just over 50k words. It was my third NaNoWriMo and my third win, but I was heartbroken during most of November. I did get a full November, though. I may have scribbled frantic notes for a mostly useless outline in a notebook I wouldn’t know where to find now, but I was able to start writing my novel on November 1st without many distractions. I threw myself into that novel because there was nothing else to throw myself into.

    This year, the Royals WON THE WORLD SERIES! In Game 5, down by 2 runs against the New York Mets. In the top of the 9th we scored two miraculous runs to tie it up, and in the twelfth we scored five more to take the crown we knew we deserved. The one we missed last year.

    That was on November 1st.

    It almost seems like a lifetime ago. It was less than a week from the time I’m writing this.

    We’ve had late night watch parties, parades, celebrations that are, potentially, once-in-a-lifetime events take place in Kansas City. Excuses are excuses in my book, but I am willing to concede that Royals baseball has made it an extremely hard first few days of NaNoWriMo (in Kansas City…)

    I wouldn’t trade it for the world, of course.

    I guess the point of all of this is that this October and November has been one of the most exciting, gut-wrenching, heart-pounding falls of my entire life. And then NaNo started. If I could set up life in a perfect bubble, the Fall Classic and NaNoWriMo would not coincide. Perfect is relative, though, and I’m not sure I want a perfect life. Perfection is boring writing, and a perfect life gives me no inspiration.

    What I’m taking from the experience is a lesson the Royals taught me: be relentless. Fight! Never give up, never back down, never look away when you’re backed into a corner. Believe. Do work and make it hard work.

    It’s day 5. I’m behind in my word count. But I’m from Kansas City, a Royal town. I’m a comeback kid who’s learned from the best comeback kids in all of baseball, maybe all of time.

    I’ll win this Fall Classic. I’ll take that halo.

  • On Using NaNoWriMo as Intended

    Welcome to the dawn of day four (of NaNoWriMo), and a new liveblogger! (Not new. You know me. I’ve been here forever.) Since you haven’t met my novel yet, let me start you off there:

    NaNoWriMo 2015, "The Departed Daugther," Ashley Hill
    I just really wanted to write about twilight sleep.

    There are a lot of things to say about the challenges of writing a story set in 1914 in a city I’ve never visited, but I think we’ll come to that next week. This week, let’s talk about what I really hope to get from this month.

    My goal this year has been developing a less frantic process, and that really culminates for me here during NaNo. In years past, I’d write and write and write until I was exhausted — and I’d be fried by the end of November. I wouldn’t work on anything for months, and tended to spend the rest of year poking my writing at a plodding pace. I’d say I had no ideas, and just resign myself to only being a NaNoWriMo writer.

    Two things are different about this year for me.

    The first was that I submitted a short story to a magazine and subsequently had my first short story published this summer. While I didn’t instantaneously become Ashley M. Hill, Extremely Serious Author, I did find myself thinking, Hey, maybe people could actually like what I write. So I’ve started to be tiny amount more serious with myself.

    The second was that I started keeping a checklist of my ideas when I had them. I use Google Keep, so that I have one note that is my checklist, and then write any additional notes in a different note when necessary. And as it turns out, I have a lot of ideas. They’re not all novel ideas, but they’re all stories to be told.

    I just have to get into the habit of telling them.

    So this year I’m working on writing to a logical stopping point, and then stopping when it feels right. Instead of forcing myself to keep going further and harder, I save my progress, log my word count, and do one of the many other tasks that fill my evenings. I have a lot of things to do with my day-to-day life. I have to make sure my son is taken care of half of the time. I need to meet my other, non-writing goals. Sometimes I want to read. My boyfriend recently bought me Don’t Starve for the PS3, and I need time to enjoy that.

    If I can do all of that stuff and only lose my mind once in a while, I can also find time to write.

    The teal deer version — I’m doing with NaNoWriMo this year what Chris Baty intended: finding out how being a writer can fit into my life filled with social stuff, family stuff, and a day job.

    (P.S. My stats are fine, if unremarkable. I ended day one with a buffer, and have written ~1600 words each day since, so I’m staying just ahead of the curve. I’m usually at about 1.25 par for the day.)

  • Starting Out Strong

    Hello! Welcome to day three of NaNo. Everything’s going well so far. However, I’ve spent far too much time looking up one random fact or another that I think I might have to throw in the towel and admit I shouldn’t be a pantser. Then again, I think even if I better planned my novel, I would still be googling “Regency House Names” because if there is one thing I remember from regency romance novels, it’s that every house has a name.

    Hey Ashley–you’re a house now. Hope that’s cool.

    I’m trying out a new genre for NaNo. Typically I write fantasy geared toward young adults. In fact, two of my NaNo wins have been in this genre. The one time I deviated from it I had a ton of fun but ultimately hated the end product. Then again, I wrote in a genre I don’t read. This year I’m at least sticking with something I enjoy. Regency romance novels are my guilty pleasure. I can chew through several in an afternoon. In fact, in preparation for my new novel I spent a week with my nose buried in the spines of one of my favorite authors. (more…)