Drunken Owls and Other Delights

Man, it's been cold here in the Bay Area lately!  We've been waking up to chilly mornings in the 30s and 40s and it hasn't gotten much warmer than the low 50s the last week or so.  We of course have been hunkered down in the apartment, heat on full blast, drinking coffee and tea and wearing our fingerless gloves in order to keep warm.  [I know, I know...some of you dear readers are calling us pikers right now.  As former east coasties we'll totally cop to having gone soft.]

I've been thinking the last few weeks about how I'm going to wrap up this year.  It's been an interesting one, to be honest.  It was an endurance test to learn how to not be miserable despite the frustrations of current politics.  It was hard not to get pissed off when the dipshit-in-chief (I still won't call him President and don't plan on it ever, even after he leaves, whatever process that may be) constantly finds new and and more creative ways to piss off the rest of the country and insult or disenfranchise those near and dear to me.  But I've also been warmed -- repeatedly -- by the fact that I wasn't alone in feeling this, and that there were countless others more erudite and active than I could ever be, fighting back. And often winning.  THAT, in particular, made me feel comfortable in accepting that I didn't have to be stressing over this 24/7 like I otherwise would have.  I could focus on important personal things. 

In fact, it drove me to take my own personal life and my writing career much more seriously.  I had to be more positive, keep myself from dwelling in the negative for long periods, and channel that energy into creations instead of outbursts.  I didn't want my own fears and frustrations paralyze me from living a normal life, especially now.  So instead I kept pushing myself.  I thought, I'll be damned if I'm going to have this administration keep me from advancing my career, directly or indirectly.  No way in hell was I going to let That Shithead Jock From High School ruin my life because he didn't like me for some dumbass reason.  No fucking way.

[As you can see, one interesting side effect of this administration is that I swear a lot more.  Not always out of anger, either.  Just that my bullshit level has seriously dropped.  I actually find this healthier for me, to be honest.]

All that said...I'm glad I took that route, because it made my life so much more positive, creative and productive in 2017.  I finally completed the Trilogy project.  I wrote a new novel in six months, and while I'm doing the post-production on that one, I'm doing the pre-production on the next one.  I kept a solid twice-a-week schedule on not one but two blogs, continued keeping a daily (on weekdays) longhand journal, and for at least six or seven months wrote daily practice words.  It drove me to think more seriously about the business end of my writing career, which I've been ignoring or delaying for far too long. 

So all in all, despite 2017's public shitshow, I'd say I actually had a damn good year.  And I'm looking forward to 2018 as being an even more positive, creative and productive year.

For those of you who follow me over on my Tumblr site, you may have noticed I've decided to take part in Inktober, which I would describe as an artist's version of NaNoWriMo--draw something every day of the month and post it somewhere using the #inktober hashtag. The only rule being the end result has to be in ink (and again that leaves it wide open--I've used both my art pens and a ballpoint Bic from my back pocket). It's been fun so far, because I get to doodle something every day! I'm not going out of my way to make a masterpiece...just a caricature or a Murph drawing or something that usually takes no more than a half-hour tops to make, and post it using my phone.

This is on top of my ongoing attempt to ramp up the output. Per my last post, I did pretty good with hitting goal at 750Words.com 29 out of the 30 days. Some of those entries were just personal ramblings, but many of them ended up being exercises in figuring out who the characters in my latest project are. I'd have conversations with myself, asking 'what does [character] look like?' or 'what's their ultimate goal in the story?' and so on, and it really helped me figure out where it's going. The other goal of using 750Words is that it forces me to sit down and think about writing-related things for a bit--it's breaking the wall of procrastination that bites me in the ass so often. And ultimately, it's gotten me back to the 2001-2003 levels of dedication to my writing, which is what I've been aiming for. Those were the Trilogy years where I was down in the Belfry without fail, every single day, working on something...and this is exactly what I've been aiming for, and I'm quite happy about that.

Oh! And also, we have a new modem/router! Yay! Our 2Wire has been in the apartment for a few good years, and it was starting to crap out more than usual. It would drop at the most inopportune times, especially while we were working. I'll admit we were taxing it during the day, what with her terminal, my work router, and me streaming a radio station. This new one's a Pace and it's working a treat. Quite happy with it so far.

So. Today's goal, outside of writing? Ice cream! I heard tell that there's a nifty ice cream shop down in the Sunset on Noriega that we should check out. Has numerous flavors and they're made locally, and it's quite a find. We may just jump on the 29 today and check it out. :)

Oof. It seems one well-meant system rollout at work that went awry made my productivity go all pear-shaped in January. Thankfully it's sort of back to normal, but I did a lot less work than I'd wanted. Having to do the financial equivalent of medical triage all day for about week and a half can really take a lot out of you. Still...things have calmed down, so it's time to turn it around and get things done again.

One of the things that immediately fell by the wayside was the 750 Words. I just had no time or inclination to do morning words (or in this case, "early evening words just before I start up on revision again"). However, it's a new week and a new month, so it's a perfect time to get back on the horse. I kind of cheated last night with my daily words, but I figure I can accept it this time, as these words for a long-delayed post. These were the 2k-plus words to finish off the most recent Blogging the Beatles installment, which means we have one left to go!

So...was January a wash? Far from it. I finished off the main revision sweep of A Division of Souls, and though I'm sure it can probably use one more go-round, I'm happy with the work I put into it. The very next day I started in on the revision of The Process of Belief, and BOY was Chapter One a doozy. I definitely need to work on that one again. Thankfully I did a marathon eight pages of Chapter Two the other day, and it looks pretty good...so I'm not too worried. I just have to remember that this novel has a different voice from the first two, and for a reason: things have changed for all the characters, and they're definitely not the same people they were just months previous.

I did manage to get a number of journal entries and even a few poems in here and there. This side of the writing is a more personal tug of war, as part of me wants to tackle something every day--a journal entry, the daily words, and some kind of poetry--but some days I just don't have time for it. January was packed with events in and outside the house, so I had to remind myself that it was okay to miss a day if it comes to it.


So what does February have in store for me? Aside from the major revision work for Book 3, I'm going to try to get back into the schedule I'd planned. I also want to get cracking on a few new things as well--specifically, start making notes for future proejcts, as well as get some actual writing work done on Walk in Silence--both the blog and the book. Thirdly, it's high time I picked up the Wacom again after running out of time to play with it. I have a few interesting plans for that little project.

So yes--February looks to be equally busy, but in a good way!

I've been thinking lately about how a reader would digest my trilogy. By digest, I mean how they would understand it, process it, and what their reactions would be. What would be their take on it? Would they love it? Hate it? Be indifferent? Of course, a lot of writers think this at any given time. Some obsess over it, some dismiss it. You can't avoid it, but you probably shouldn't let it ruin you either.

I've also been thinking about how some manga artists and writers react to this as well. Every now and again if you pick up a tankobon (one of the bounded volumes), you'll often see the occasional afterword page often adorned with a silly self-portrait, with the artist/writer saying something to the effect of a humbled "thank you for buying the book/following this series!" and a promise to do the best they can ("Ganbatteimasu!") to keep you entertained with the story and hope you stay until the end.

I've been taking that to heart over the last few years--not the American "do your best" (i.e., aim for bestseller) (yes, I mean that with tongue firmly in cheek) but the Japanese "do your best" (i.e., aim for the best that you can possibly achieve). I don't want my book to be a bestseller or get all the awards. I want someone to read my book and say "wow, that was impressive." I want them to have the same reaction I have when I read a book or see a movie that moves me that much.

I'm curious as to what the reaction to my trilogy will be. If anything, I want to say it's Science Fiction, maybe with some Fantasy elements to it. It's not a typical adventure or quest, or a war against overlords, or a political thriller, or an allegory about the world we live in. If anything, it's an internal quest--it's a story about being given an ultimate goal and how tough it is to keep focused on it. It's a war of one's own being against outside influence. It's a spiritual thriller (not a religious one--and this isn't Christian fiction, in case you were wondering). It's an allegory about our inner worlds, our mind and heart. I often wonder if the reader will get all that. I'm doing my best to convey those things, without forcing it or making it too vague, and at the same time making sure it's not too fantastical.


When I first started trying out this whole writing thing, I of course thought the same as every other beginner--my stuff is awesome! It's got cool scenes! People are going to love it! We all know how that usually ends...! The second stage is usually 'okay, I know better now, this is more professional...people really will love it this time!'...which usually ends the same way. It's that third stage, the make-or-break, the "oh GOD my stuff sucks ass, who will even read this crap?", that really tests you. That's where you make the real decision to move ever forward, or give it up and become a register jockey at a shopping mall. Thankfully, I was stubborn and crazy enough to still enjoy this writing thing, and kept with it.

It's been thirty years since I thought of taking writing seriously, and twenty since that first initial "Vigil" idea that eventually came the trilogy. It's been a long haul with plenty of hard work, sweat, wrong turns, laughter, tears, annoyance, disappointment, half-assed attempts, trunked ideas, naivete, amusement, entertainment, and learning between then and now. It's not for the weak, I'll tell you that. But I'm doing my best, and I'm glad I am.

This past year has been pretty interesting for me...on the one hand, I dropped the self-imposed weekly schedule and some of the side projects, and stopped updating (or closed down) a handful of my blogs. On the other hand, however, I focused solely on this current revision of A Division of Souls, which I'm finding is infinitely better than the last few revisions I'd made, and I've also made some interesting strides on my posts over at Walk in Silence, specificaly with the Blogging the Beatles series I started. I think this move was the right one, as I'm feeling a lot more confident in my output. That was the main aim this year--to focus more on the quality than the quantity, and I think the end result is quite positive.

That said, I would like to return to the weekly schedule again. It probably won't be nearly as packed as it was in the last few years, however. I'm going to remain focused on the Eden Cycle revisions, but I would also like to reintroduce more time to working on Walk in Silence, assigning myself a daily or weekly poem or passage to write (the main focus there being to work on something completely new, however small). I'm going to sit on Love Like Blood a little while longer. If I have time and the inclination, one of my other backburner projects might pop up later in the year...we'll see.

I also enjoyed the weekend/midweek posts of poetry and pictures, and I'd like to revive that again. Those were fun mini-projects to work on, and I think are worth revisiting. They only took maybe an hour or so out of my day, so it wasn't as if they were intrusive. If anything, that's the same amount of time I'd probably be wasting online or goofing off. This will help eliminate that to some degree. I don't mind the goofing off, it's quite a normal thing to do--but I feel I do too much of it.

So for now, I'm going to finish out 2012 with what I've been doing for the last few months...I'm continuing with the ADoS revision and doing the occasional blog post, and that's it. I'll toy around with schedule ideas this coming month, and post it come the first of January.


Hope everyone's had a great 2012! :)

Another week in which it feels like I kinda-sorta-but-not-quite got work done writingwise. On the one hand, I felt I wasted too much time goofing around on the internets...but on the other hand, I finally finished Chapter 5 to the point that it works a hell of a lot better...and in the process, moved a scene that was originally after that chapter back to Chapter 3 where it made more sense and had a lot more bite...and in the process did a little more editing to Chapter 5 (ultimately deleting about ten lines) so the scene move would make more sense...and finally getting to start in on Chapter 6.

This revision feels very strange in that I'm reading it with an extremely clinical eye. In this sense, I'm focusing more on how I told the story. This is where I think I got confused, and where a lot of starting writers stumble...when you're reading a story that is completely you--that is, when you're going over a story or a novel that is completely from your imagination, created solely by your brain creating scenes and your fingers dancing across the keyboard--it's kind of hard to distance yourself from that extremely personal relationship you have with those words. There's that fear that any clinical dissection of these words is a dissection and perhaps ultimately a disconnect in that relationship, making it seem less than what you want it to be.

I can't talk for anyone else here, but personally, I think I finally got over the fear of dissecting my words and exposing the cracks. I finally got over the fear that I would personally lose interest in my own words--a long-standing fear instilled in me in high school when I was taught to brutally dissect Lord of the Flies. [Aside: it's been over 25 years of me complaining about how much I loathed that book...I just picked up a used copy at Green Apple today to see if my feelings have changed any.] There's this common misconception as a beginning writer, where one thinks that in order to get to a professional level of writing, one has to give up words that you've slaved over, and writers HATE having to make that sacrifice. I still hate it, but it makes sense to sacrifice if you're going to replace your work with even better work. In the end, it's totally worth it.

But really, I've finally come to learn that storytelling isn't just about using words creatively and making up really neat scenes. It's a crapload of things, really...there's creating a plot that is never (or rarely) static; there's keeping some sort of essential logic, real or created; there's knowing when to expand and when to contract the scene; and with the point of this post, there's coming to terms with the reality that sometimes, the words you used or the scene you wrote may not quite work. There's a lot more of course, this is just a part of it. The trick is knowing when it's good and when it needs fixing...and it's different for each writer.

Personally, each level of writing a story has a distinct feeling for me:

When I'm writing new words and unfolding a scene for the first time, either straight from my head or using the sparsest of outlines, there's that thrill--that excitement of, for the lack of a better term, 'making shit up as you go along and getting away with it.' I absolutely love that feeling of the words spilling out as I'm writing them, because it's something I know I'm good at, and something that's truly from me and not somewhere else. I get the same feeling when I'm writing poetry, or drawing and sketching. In a weird way, I envision word count as getting a High Score on some old school videogame like Galaga or something...the higher it is, the prouder I am that I got some serious work done.

When I'm planning out a story, the excitement of creation is there as well, but it's different. It's not the thrill of getting words down; rather, it's the thrill of personally unfolding a story. Back in 2002-04 when I was working at Yankee Candle during the day and writing in the Belfry at night, at work I'd grab a blank piece of paper and plot out the next few scenes when the days were slow, and write them out when I got home. Given that this job was primarily physical, I'd save a lot of my mental gymnastics for the writing sessions. I don't get to do this nearly as much as I'd like to nowadays, but I'm slowly making the change so I can do taht again.

And now, for probably the first time, I'm finding out how it feels to revise. Not just reading the story for grammar and spelling, and not just to make sure the logic works, and not just to fix any plot holes. For the first time, I'm finding out how it feels to look at my own work clinically and unemotionally. I'm not letting myself get lost in the made world. I'm looking at the scene, paragraph, and sentence levels, parsing what works and what needs work, and editing and revising where it's needed.

So how does it feel?

It's strange, really. Like I said, there are days when I feel like I didn't get anything done and I'm still focusing on the same damn sentences I was staring at three days ago, and then I look at the end of week tally and find that I've revised a good fifteen to twenty pages over the course of a week. There's definitely progress, it's just less obvious. It's a hell of a lot different than trying to make wordcount--you're not creating new words or aiming for X number of words. If anything, my aim is to get it done and polished, period. I don't know how long it'll take, but it'll have been worth it by the end.

No new project as of yet, and nothing of note, but I'm writing on a daily basis again. I've returned to 750 Words and I've been making myself hit a daily goal again, just to get back into practice. Most of it has been rambling and inconsequential, but it's something, at least. The main reason for doing it is to get myself back into the habit. I have the time to do it throughout the day, so I've been entering a little bit here and there.

I started doing this on a whim this past Monday and have been hitting goal every day since then, so I'm quite happy about that. I think the trick is that I'm not trying to get these words down in a finite amount of time--that is, during a specific writing session--which is helping them come more freely. I have the entries in locked status so they're not readable to the public, mainly because a lot of what I'm tying is semi-personal and not really something I want to share at this point. I'm considering this, though, as a sort of 'Roughdraftland' for possible future things to work on.

Another reason to do this is that I've never been one to be able to write stream-of-conscious style, unless I was playing with words in the style of John Lennon (which I've done many times and let me tell you it's a HELL of a lot of fun!). Playing on this site is curing me of that, however, because I'm laying a few ground rules:

1) No revising. Translation: No sweating and slaving over the correct words to use.
2) Slight editing is okay if I'm repeating myself or see a better direction in which to go.
3) No holding back. Feel free to get as personal or as extreme as possible.
4) 750 is just the finish line. Going over it is totally fine if you're on a roll.
5) Alternately, it's okay if you're short. Consider the goal-reaching filler as a fun extra credit.

These ground rules are put there basically because those are the biggest obstacles I have with my writing in general. I'm using this site as a way to break free of them. I'd like to think that it's worked pretty well so far.

On the first day of 2011, I posted my writing schedule for the year. It included the picture of the whiteboard on the wall above my desk that I referred to over the course of the last twelve months. I tried to even things out so I was always doing something every single day, even if it was something quick and easy or fun, like posting a picture or writing a poem. The post also included a suggested schedule to work off of, similar to the whiteboard but in more detail. It wasn't something I had to adhere to, only a suggestion. I tried to include my multiple open projects when I could.

So, how did it work out? Let's do a review:

--The whiteboard schedule worked out nicely and to my advantage, actually. It was a great daily reminder to get something done, even if it wasn't exactly what I should have been writing on. If I was already in Spare Oom (usually if I'd been working from home that day), all I needed to do was pop my head up and see what I needed to do on that day. If I was out in the living room instead, I'd just pop into the room to review.

--The 'suggested schedule' part of the post didn't quite pan out the way I wanted it to due to different reasons (wanting to catch up on something else, lack of time/inspiration, etc.), but in the end I'm looking on the positive end of it. After awhile I dropped the "project #2" (at the time it was the Love Like Blood revision) and focused most of my time on the major revision of A Division of Souls, and I'm glad to say I'm about halfway done with it already. I also got a lot farther with Walk In Silence than I expected, even though I have a lot more writing to do for it. I didn't get as much poetry written as I'd wanted (I'd originally planned on twice a week), but 51 poems of substance over the course of a year is actually pretty good for me, considering I only wrote about twenty total over the last five years. The writing LJ (the one with my name on it) kind of fell by the wayside too, and my last post there is two months old. All that said, I'm not exactly frustrated or annoyed that this part didn't pan out. I just need to adjust it more to my abilities.


So where do I go from here? What should I change and what should I keep? What should I adjust? More to the point, what are my goals?

Well, more on that tomorrow, when I post a new Day One writing schedule for 2012. For now I'm doing something slightly different here...I'm playing around with my schedule by using a legal pad and working it out longhand (longhand itself being another goal). I'm aiming for this coming year to be more creative than ever, and I'm really looking forward to it.

For now I'll just say that my plan for 2012 is to take It would be a neat idea to eventually _______ and reword it to say _______ is a neat idea--let's find the time to do it!

So not only did I forget about posting every Wednesday at my writing block, I completely forgot to write a poem at my Dreamwidth blog! Further proof that I desperately need to make deadlines for myself, or I'm never going to get anything done.

Okay, to be fair, I didn't post anything Sunday because I had a busy weekend--between going to the Symphony on Saturday night, going to the opera Sunday afternoon, and watching football and doing other things once I got home, I simply forgot about it. Not bad, considering I've written fourteen poems there every Sunday and only barely missed it once.

Tomorrow, if we're both up to it, we may head down to Target and buy random things (we need more Christmas wrapping, as the rolls I snagged at World Market last weekend are almost out already), and one of the things I had thought of was a marker board and a corkboard. The corkboard I'd put near the door, next to the calendar, as that'll be where the bills, coming attractions and whatnot can be placed (instead of on my desk). The marker board? Well, I'm thinking of looking for one similar to the one I had down in the Belfry for a few years...one that has a blank calendar template. As stated above, I'm thinking my 2011 goals are doable but I need to give them a deadline, or else they'll never get done. That worked pretty well with the trilogy for the most part, so I'd like to give that a try and see where it goes.


Speaking of which, I've been disgustingly lazy and not done any writing work since Saturday. THAT WILL BE RECTIFIED TOMORROW!