The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: writing

  • The First Finish Line

    What’s the most wonderful time of the year? During NaNoWriMo when I cross that first finish line.

    It’s the end of week 3 of NaNoWriMo and hey – look! I broke 50,000 words on Wednesday.

    While I’m VERY proud of having done this for the second year in a row, I’m not done writing. My plan for this book was to get a good novel-length story told as quickly as possible in order to go back and edit it into something I could be even more proud of.

    So I’m not done writing.

    But because I finished early and there’s no one clamoring for this book (it’s a sequel to last year’s) I can slow down into a nice rhythm of writing about 2K per day. If I do that I will have written about 66,000 words for the month. And that would make me very, very proud indeed.

    See, NaNo teaches you the mechanics of how to be a writer:

    1. Sit down. (Or stand up if you’re Ernest Hemingway.)
    2. Put your fingers on the keys.
    3. WRITE. Make your daily word count and don’t whine about it.

    Everything else, EVERYthing else, is secondary. Just get in the habit of writing, of putting one word after another into a line while making some sort of sense.

    I’ll get more into this in the post-game when that comes up, but my biggest headaches so far this month have been making sure I don’t head-hop and trying to put some variety in my sentences, structure-wise.

    But see, that’s just whining.

    I’m enjoying the fact that I wrote 50,000 words so quickly, just as quickly as last year. I’m very happy with my story and how it’s coming along. I like it and it’s getting exciting. Stuff is happening. My goal this year was to write more in the month than I did last year. At one point I was on track to write nearly 75,000 words. I don’t thing I’ll make that but I could conceivably hit 70K+.

    So I want to reward myself. I’m allowing that I have some other work that needs to be done now that this major milestone has been reached:

    1. I have to revise last year’s novel for passivity and resubmit it.
    2. There are plans to be made for the coming calendar year in regards to writing.
    3. And yeah, some downtime.

    It’s been a great NaNoWriMo so far, but it’s not over. I’ve got seven days left. A week is a long time. That’s at least 14,000 words.

    Pretty sure I’m gonna make the goal I set for myself.

  • Abandon All Hope (of a ‘regular’ life)

    Those of you in the know will get this. There will be shuttles this year, too. Photo from Wikimedia.

    Ah, it’s November. That means that I’m writing. This year it’s another novel, just as ambitious as the last one and in fact a kind of sequel to last year’s.

    Those are the plans.

     

    The best laid schemes of mice and men
    Go often awry,
    And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
    For promised joy!

    -Robert Burns, “To a Mouse, on turning up in her nest with a plough”. 1785

     

    Which means it’s up in the air at the time I’m writing this. (It’s not quite Halloween yet in my timestream.) (more…)

  • Start. Stop. Fix it. Ugh.

    I can keep this week’s post very short.

    The easiest thing about writing? Writing. Telling the story, inventing characters, creating places and events and conflicts and disasters. Delving into the motivations of the cast of sundry folk that make the plot twist and turn.

    That’s easy.

    The penultimate hardest part? Starting. Pushing past the inertia of not writing to start writing again. Once I remove the chocks and get the wheels rolling, I’m good. But I stop and start (which I shouldn’t, but I do) and that initial start is…very tough.

    The absolute worst part? Editing. Not copy-editing. That’s stupidly easy, and I do it on the fly. But going back and editing the actual story? Uh…how do you DO that? Maybe that’s  Which is why I haven’t bothered…yet. Gotta start that some time, but…see penultimate hardest part for my issue with that. 🙂

  • What Makes It Great

    There are a lot of times when I’m writing that I feel like this guy but without the spectre of death looming over me. Image borrowed from this site.

    When I read something I really like, that makes me think, that just stuns me with its elegance or simplicity or beauty, I want to emulate it. I want to know why it works so well, why it hit me so hard. I want to dissect it and hold its beating heart in my hands in order to understand. When I get frustrated, I watch this clip from A League Of Their Own.

    However, since I have very little schooling, or formal training, as a writer I don’t have any way to really dig in and get to the core of something I want to learn. The tools just aren’t there. So what I have to do is sit down and study. And study hard.

    The thing is that when I do that, it’s kind of frustrating. Actually not just kind of frustrating, really frustrating. (more…)

  • Writing is Simple but Not Easy

    The number of times I’ve sat down to write this blog and failed made me realize that basically everything about writing is difficult.

    The hardest thing about writing for me is just sitting down to do it.

    It’s like exercise. You know you need to do it. You know once you do it you’ll feel better and that it’ll be fun once you get into it. You know the results are worth it.

    But that doesn’t always mean that you’ll do it.

    It’s hard to get started but it’s also hard to make the time, stay focused on a project and see it through to the end.

    Of course I love to write, but you’d never know it sometimes. Given the choice, I will come up with a million other things to do instead. If I know I need to write, suddenly there are chores that need doing and errands that need running. Books to read or TV shows to catch up on.

    Because putting it off is easy. All the rest is hard.

    (more…)

  • If You’re Really My Friend, You’ll Cook Me Dinner During NaNo

    I’ve known since I was little that I wanted to be a writer, and my parents have had time to come to terms with it. It helps that I grew up in an artistic household. My dad went from freelance artist to working for TSR to making video game art and then back to freelance art. Growing up with this lifestyle has made me realize that people can support themselves and a family off of art, but that sometimes it’s really difficult to make ends meet. My parents are one of my primary sources of encouragement and support for my writing, but they also want me to be realistic.

    When I went off to college to pursue a Creative Writing degree, they kept suggesting I consider how I was going to support myself and reminding me that most writers had a day job. Up until recently, I always assumed that I would support myself by working the fast food industry, because that’s what people who have English degrees do if they’re not planning on teaching, right? Luckily, I managed to find a desk job—something I never thought I’d see myself doing—that I actually enjoy most of the time. Writing has currently been sidelined to a hobby. At some point I would like to see it become something more. Though I think if I ever quit my day job to pursue writing full time, my mom might have a panic attack. (more…)

  • A Little (Orange) Notebook

    I’ve never been worried about running out of ideas, though I do worry about losing them. Like a lot of writers, I keep a little notebook for jotting down ideas. (And like most other things I own, I frequently lose this notebook.)

    Honestly, this notebook tells me more about my own state of mind when I had an idea, versus the idea itself. Mos ideas in there are just little notes; they might form a character later or a single scene in a larger work. The ideas usually stem from something that happened to me, or something I saw, and lets face it — if real life were all that fascinating and exciting all the time, we wouldn’t be so in love with fiction.

    (more…)

  • The Idea Dump

    That’s me swooping in to pick up an idea for a story. Image source.

    I have a folder. This folder is sitting on the hard drive of my new computer and it’s origin lies somewhere in the depths of either the early days of my first laptop or the last days of my desktop.

    It’s the Idea Dump.

    It has a couple of companion spiral notebooks and far too many offspring comprised of bits of paper that float around my office, in my briefcase, in the car, my office, on the mantle above the fireplace or the shelve on either side of it. 90% of these notes are of the “what if” variety or they’re a snatch of conversation or a phrase that caught my ear on the radio or at a restaurant or on TV.

    (more…)

  • Write for Yourself; Edit for Others

    I never worried about judgment of my writing before I started to submit my work. As I continue to put myself out there, and now that I have my first short story published, I find myself suddenly paranoid about what people are going to think when they read my stuff.

    I don’t think it ever really crossed my mind before, though, to worry what the people I know would think of the subject matter of my stories. Well, in the sense that they’d be offended, anyway. My main concerns about judgment were more about whether they’d think my writing was horrible.

    I don’t fear the horrible writing criticism much anymore, mostly because I know that I’ve grown a great deal as a writer over the years and most of what I write isn’t horrible. Also because I know I write better than a lot of bestsellers these days, so obviously there is no accounting for good writing anymore.

    Alas, I digress. (more…)

  • A Writing Partner

    Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, His Girl Friday
    This is how I like to imagine my wife and I when we write.

    Seven years ago, I married my best friend.

    I could tell you the story of how we met. I’ve told it a million times. I could tell you of our mutual love of all things Disney. I could tell you of our honeymoon at Disneyland, during the 50th anniversary of the park opening.

    But I’d like to talk about a different aspect of our life together, and how she saved me.

    You see, when Rachel came back into my life about eight years ago, we hadn’t seen each other in years. Despite being great friends, our lives had taken different paths. She was married, had kids, and traveled. I stayed here, working and trying to be a writer. And we both went through some rough times. She got divorced. I lost my parents. We both struggled for a while. But we each came through it stronger.

    After a short engagement, we were married. And a few months later, when I told her I wanted to leave the information technology support position I had held for five years, she understood. She encouraged me to pursue my dream, whatever that may be.

    The following years were rough. I tried teaching for short time, but that wasn’t for me. So I put our savings and my trust in a plan to build a home business on the Internet. I failed fast, and started looking for work. This was around 2006, just as the U.S. economy was starting to turn south. Finally, as the last of our savings was spent and we were paying for groceries with credit cards, she noticed an ad for a copywriting position.

    I applied and was offered the job, which started my second life in the corporate world. For the past several years, I’ve been happy working as a copywriter for a digital marketing agency.

    Once we had some solid ground under our feet, I started writing again. As I mentioned last week, it wasn’t really until 2010 that I began writing short stories and novels again. After more than a decade, the stories started to come back to me. Little by little, I started to remember how to use those tools in my writer’s toolbox. She dragged me to a local write-in for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Though I didn’t finish that first year, I finished the next one. And I haven’t looked back since.

    The Confabulator Cafe has given me a great base of operations, forcing me to write something every week. It’s a nice departure from the marketing work I do all week at my job. Most importantly, it allows me to work alongside some wonderful local writers who amaze and inspire me.

    I don’t know if I could pick the moment in my life when I decided to be a writer. I was likely still very young, pecking away at my mom’s typewriter and dreaming of stories to be told.

    But I can tell you when I became a copywriter. And when I entered NaNoWriMo for the first time. And I can tell you that neither would have been possible without my writing partner.