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Excavation

24
Jan 2012

I spent the bulk of my weekend and many evenings last week cleaning. By cleaning, I mostly mean getting rid of things.

I continue to be amazed at how things can collect in corners and unused spaces. I started joking that things kept respawning. I’d clean out a space, only to find more stuff had materialized in the time it took to carry a load to the car. A life lived as fully as possible can lead to this sort of overflowing, I think. That’s what I tell myself when I’m being patient and loving, anyway, lol.

I wonder if ideas work the same way, at least for me. I’ve got a full mind, always have. I don’t do quiet well. I have speakers set up in my bathroom for podcasts while I shower. I listen to Pandora* while I exercise and am apt to knit in front of a great television show.**

I started practicing mindfulness and meditation many years ago and I’m always laughing at myself because there is so much going on in my head. Meditation is more like the me show. Now with less rumination and more random thought bubbles!

Ideas come slow for me, I’ve talked about that before. I wonder if it is a matter of unloading all the busy loud that usually goes on in my mind. I have to clear out the unused “oh don’t forget to”s and “oh hell why did I”s. I have to dig past the same old boring stories I tell myself and look for the stuff I’ve forgotten underneath. My creative mind works, it just lives in the bottom of a cave under a very tall mountain of stuff. My creative mind is apparently a dragon, hoarding its treasure and being very stingy about who’s allowed inside.

Well you know what? It’s the year of the dragon, motherfucker. I’m coming for you.

 

*http://www.pandora.com/#!/stations/edit/6509559808670288 (if you like folk music)

**I used to be one of those snooty anti-tv types. Then I discovered a show called Firefly. From there, I discovered that television has gotten significantly better than the last time I watched it. Now, I don’t feel at all wasteful watching shows like American Horror Story, Dexter, Doctor Who, and Psych. These are brilliant, witty stories written with amazing skill. I see it as research and actively study the story elements I admire in each. I guess I’m a born-again tv enjoyer!

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Win! A success story, less 10K

28
Nov 2011

Woohoo! I’ve hit the 50K mark (and change) for November writing, thus winning my sixth NaNoWriMo challenge. I actually won the thing while watching the Thanksgiving parade on mute. That was surreal, as it turns out. Huge balloons and dance routines with no sound? Just a bit Ood.

The book is not quite finished. I’m about halfway through the pivotal end scene. Horror and death will soon ensue. I’m looking forward to diving into it today, actually. Horror and death are fun to write. I often wonder what is wrong with me, then I shrug and get back to the killin’ (but only on paper. Yeah. Only paper.)

This was the fastest I’ve ever crossed the NaNo finish line. Looking back, I can think of a few reasons I flew through this novel with six days to spare. (Six days! Luxury.)

1. A writing habit. I had been writing daily, as you, invisible imaginary reader, know. I had been writing/editing nearly every day, possibly with weekends off, for at least a month or two before NaNo began. NaNo doesn’t really allow for days off, but all I had to do was add a couple days a week rather than shift from zero to seven.

2. The story. I had a story well underway by November. I’d written 15K, but more importantly, I’d done nearly all the world building and character research I needed to do already. I had an outline. The outline still had the “and them some stuff happens” 25-35K section, but I had a far better idea where I was going than I have in previous years. I even had something of an endgame in mind, though the endgame got pushed up to the end of the middle game and a different endgame was born. Kinda. This is how it goes, though, as you draft. Middle game. It’s a thing. I also had a real vision for the pacing and theme of the story, so I could always return to those things when stuck.

3. The midnight dash bump. No really. Two sets of word count in one day really do set me off right. I was double where I was supposed to be by the end of day one. It helps.

4. 2K per day. I aimed for that instead of the usual 1667. I read on Twitter that someone was aiming for that, in 500 word chunks. 4 500 word sessions is way less daunting than one 2K session. There were many days I hit 1500, then thought that 500 was so easy, might as well do that also. Worked really, really well.

5. Write ins. I didn’t make very many, due to certain spouses having the nerve to need to work late or something. Gah, don’t spouses know that writing maniacally with a bunch of other writers is more important than income?! Sheesh. However the ones I did get to helped me double my word count for the day.

6. I’ll confess to a small amount of racing with one of my NaNo buddies. I won, too, by about 12 hours. MWAHAHA.

7. Tea. Lots of tea. I can’t really eat as much pie as I would like these days, so went to the mall and treated myself to some tasty fancy teas. Then consumed them in mass quantities (quantiTEAS. See what I did thar?). Treating yourself is always a good thing, no matter how you do it.

8. Constant creative mindset. Even when I wasn’t writing, I kept the RadioMuse channel tuned. I heard a lot of static, but I kept listening. Occasionally something came through, and was beautiful. I was angsting about a certain plot point on Twitter, and the second I posted about it, the idea came to me. Keeping the creative juices flowing throughout the day really helped the story gain traction.

Don’t get me wrong, there were difficult sections. I’m convinced that 20-35K is the swamp of sorrows for first drafts. It’s like, the more you struggle, the faster you sink to your death. I don’t know why, but I’ve encountered the phenomenon enough times to know it isn’t unusual, at least for me. I’ve learned to take that section one word at a time, just keep slogging through, and eventually the magic will occur and there will be a path out.

I hope everyone is having a great end run toward 50K about now, or already validated and coasting on the high. Either way, see you on the flip side, NaNoEdMo. *shudder*

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Narcissistic Hubris

14
Nov 2011

Otherwise known as the excerpt from the WIP. Writing is hard. Why didn’t someone warn me about this?

Anyway, here is an excerpt from the NaNo, which is going strong at nearly 30K. I’m on the other side of the hill now, in both NaNo word count and in the book itself. I’ve got a middle and an end planned out, the rest is just details. Difficult, fussy details. But I digress. This is mostly unedited. Theoretically, everything is spelled correctly. I do not think this is a final draft, but I think it’s a fun little piece of my raw writer’s delusional mind. Or something like that.

The man stood on the far end of the parking lot, illuminated under a single halogen lamp. He wore no clothes but for a length of cloth tied around his waist and covering his genitals. Light flashed in the Weir’s eyes, and his white teeth gleamed in the dark. The man was grinning a sick, mental grin. Intel hadn’t been bad—the man was covered in tattoos. No skin remained untouched apart from a small frame around his facial features and presumably the genitals although Iain wondered. His skin was a riot of color, bright and faded. The rough ground of the asphalt must have been grinding into his bare feet but he didn’t seem to register anything but Iain and the Lord arguing across the way. Tattoos of koi and samurais writhed in the yellowed light. They danced and bulged and twisted all over his skin like they could fly right off and become real. Iain realized with a start that the man had already summoned a demon.

He shouted to the Lord, he remembered that much, but then he ran. He ran as far and as fast as his body allowed. He was a servant then, still in training in a compound outside of Dublin, and in the best shape of his life. He ran without looking back. The pressure in the air changed—what had been a damp London fog became a hot, dry desert as he ran. His ears popped as the creature emerged from the Weir*. Still he ran, lungs burning and muscles screaming for oxygen.

He had no idea how far he ran. When he finally collapsed in an undignified heap on the pavement, people stepped around him. He’d run toward the city center, it appeared, which bustled with people. He dared to look behind him, and the convention center was long out of sight. The Lord was also nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he’d run a different direction. Cautiously, he made his way back, always looking for the demon sign—a smell of sulfur or a brightly colored smoke but none made themselves visible. He got nearly back to the convention center before he saw it.

From a long way off, he saw a smear of orange passing under halogen after halogen, disappearing in the dark in between. The Weir, an even smaller smear from this far away, seemed to be standing exactly where he had been. As Iain watched, the demon floated around lazily. His training told him the creature had consumed everything it would, sent all life around it to the Great Void for his fellow demons to feed on, and now simply waited to die. No demon could live long in the world, they were compelled to die once through. The Lord, of course, was gone. Iain held out a brief flicker of hope that the idiot might have run away, but his sinking gut told him the truth. The man was dead, consumed by the demon. Shit.

*Weir: a person who can open a gate with their body to summon demons from the Great Void.

Back to the salt mines! How are your NaNovels going?

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Friday Flash You

28
Oct 2011

Remember Blackbloom?

The new challenge is to create gods for the world created by the winning choices. Here’s my entry:

Fate

One of the elder gods, Fate is often considered to be the father of Chance, Perseverance, and Poker. No one knows who their mother is.

Fate is the god most often associated with the Games. In ancient times, competitors often sacrificed their first-born children as an attempt to win his favor. Now he’s often a judge and therefore accepts bribes rather than supplication. Everyone agrees this is a better system, apart from those who don’t particularly like their first-born children.

Note: Fate is not to be confused with fate, the concept of the prewritten destiny. That doesn’t exist.

You should go create a god! It’s a great NaNo warm up exercise. Kind of like lunges, but without the burning thighs.

Thanks Chuck Wendig! I’m enjoying these mightily.

ETA: AUGH! I just noticed how often I used the word often.  Rats. You’d think with all the editing I’ve been up to I would have noticed. Amazing how the eye skips right over stuff like that.

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Friday Flash

07
Oct 2011

I FLASH YOU!

Over at Terrible Minds, there’s a little flash project going on that is absolutely fascinating:

These are the only things you know about Blackbloom.

First, that is its name. Blackbloom.

Second, it is a place where human and non-humans alike dwell.

Basically, it is a world building exercise. Write a little bit about Blackbloom. The entries are fantastic, lots of variation and I find myself wishing the stories existed. Go check them out!

For fun and profit (???), here’s my addition:

Blackbloom: a space station orbiting Europa. Earth is in desperate need of fresh water.

Drilling is going well, popular opinion polls tell us we are favored among the human race. Living far from home is weird, but not in a bad way. Last week, A comet flashed by us trailing a cloud of ice crystals. Everything looks different here, so far from the sun.

We’d be perfect if it weren’t for the black tar that gums up the works of the drill. Every day half of us drill and half of us burn away tar. The brains are working on a solution, but so far, burning it off seems to work just fine.

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Ideas

03
Oct 2011

Whenever I read about writing, I always read about people who have so many ideas they simply can’t record them all. They are so busy with ideas and people in their head, they can’t get it out fast enough.

I confess, I’ve felt some ugly jealousy with regard to writers with ideas. I don’t get them like that. I don’t wake up in the middle of the night with ideas (well, once I did, that’s gonna be a weird book). My muse isn’t as much a pretty lady wearing a toga as this:

I read about King’s muse in On Writing. He describes his as a cigar chomping dude in a basement. That image appealed to me for years before I finally stumbled on my own mental muse: a radio. A badly tuned, ancient radio.

Mostly I get static. Especially when I’m looking for a channel. I can spin the dials all I want but all I get is white noise (that’ s a thing, kids, use the googles. Man I’m old.) Every once in a while, when I’m driving or eating dinner or somewhere with no computer or paper, the dial will spin itself and BAM, I’ll find a station playing in my head.

There’s several channels broadcast via Radio Muse, but trust me, none of them are on all the time. Often, the wrong one is on at the wrong time. I panic whenever I’m needing ideas because I don’t get them like that. They aren’t there all the time, they are there when the radio feels like turning on. I get an idea when I’m reading about a Goldilocks planet (last year’s NaNo). I get an idea when my husband has a dream (NaNo ’09). I get an idea while getting tattooed (Worse Things). The ideas are sparse, badly formed and often before I can grab onto them they have slipped away and the radio is back to white noise again. Laughing at me, I think. That radio creeps me out.

All that said and bemoaned, I do get ideas. I’ve got a backlog of ideas now, even, many in messy first draft forms already. I’m so thrilled at this moment, because I actually have things to play with. Books to write. Books to edit. I can actually see myself finishing things and starting new things. The radio finally gave me enough to play with that I feel like I can be a Real Writer ™. I think once I am willing to listen, it gives up a little more each time. Which means I have to keep listening, even when I should be doing other things.

So if you see someone in a minivan lingering at a red light, just give me a little honk. I was probably listening to the radio.

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