Writing Life | scribbling damselfly

i can't help but count the seconds ticking by

Time is proving more elusive than usual, of late. This is possibly (shh, don't tell anyone) due to being a smidge over-committed. On pretty much all fronts.

There's the personal deadline for the zero draft of the faerie novel, which is fast approaching (and the recalcitrant thing shows no signs of approaching its narrative end any time within that deadline). Of course, being self-imposed, that's a little flexible — but I'm loathe to mess with it, because I need to be able to stamp =30= on something approximating a draft of this thing and let it collapse under its own weight and sort itself out in a drawer for a while. It's well past time.

Then there's the bunch of short stories, most longer than short and one (hopefully) just normal short, that I've committed to writing. Those deadlines are not flexible — and, I admit, it bothers me that I don't have any words against any of these stories yet. (Well, I have a collection of notes against one of them. I did have 10,000 words on that one, but that was me feeling my way. In the wrong direction, as it turned out. C'est la writing process, eh?)

Still. I trust my process (or I'm resolutely telling myself I do), if not that I'll have time to dedicate to it.

On top of that there's the Kindle links, which I am still getting to but so inch-by-inch that it breaks my heart. I've managed to pretty up the page some, and I've just yesterday included a form so that now people can submit their own links.

This sort of workload and over-commitment is always dangerous, for me. I'm far too inclined as it is to spend my weekends on words, and when I feel I have no leeway it's too easy to forget that I need time away from the words in order to be able to work with them.

Luckily, life is compensating by throwing social engagements my way, whether I want them or not. It's almost like it's summer, and normal people don't catch cancer by venturing outdoors at this time of year. Crazy!

4 February 2012 @ 16:12 | No Comments

creativity is an addiction

A golden outfit made from spider silk has gone on display at London's Victoria and Albert Museum:

The four-metre-long hand-woven textile, a natural vivid gold colour, was made from the silk of more than one million female golden orb spiders collected in the highlands of Madagascar by 80 people over five years.

I remember hearing about endeavours by scientists to mass-produce spider silk. The approach, if I remember correctly, was to modify the DNA of goats so that spider silk proteins were produced in the goats' milk. I even wrote a (terrible) story around that premise during my stint at Clarion South. But I haven't heard any more on that front for years — I wonder what happened?

I never knew that anybody had collected enough spider silk by hand to weave fabric from it, which is apparently an until-now forgotten art.

The effort involved in such an endeavour — catching the spiders every morning, harnessing them into contraptions designed to extract their silk, making thread out of the silk and textile out of the fabric — the patience and time and labour that has been poured into it is … humbling.

It made me think about all the energy that I pour into my writing. Sometimes, when I'm tired, when I'm frustrated with my chronic time-poverty, it's easy to feel dispirited. About a lack of progress, or the latest mental block, or the sheer enormity of the task still to go. And I can't whinge, like I want to, because I chose this, and I keep choosing this. Every day I choose writing. (Even if it feels like a Clayton's Choice, but that's a topic for a whole different post.)

It helps me to stumble across stories like this. Tales of fascination, and the endeavours born out of and carried onwards by that fascination. Perhaps making a coat out of spider silk does nothing for us on a practical level: but I, for one, smiled when I heard of it. And felt inspired.

And now I have a new trick to add to my toolbox for when I get the grumps with the process: I shall simply consider my words to be little golden orb spiders. All I need to do is catch a few dozen a day, and coax them gently into a pleasing order.

And hope the wily bastards stay put.

Keep Breathing (Ingrid Michaelson — Be OK)

26 January 2012 @ 10:46 | 2 Comments

sometimes, daily means when you can

I started this year with an admittedly-ambitious daily target: 1,200 a day on the faerie novel and 700 a day on a short story (which will probably end up not entirely that short). I could have aimed for a lower target, but that would have meant working on Saturdays and Sundays and one thing I learnt last year is that time off — and flexibility — are things I can't skimp on.

So naturally this week threw me two non-writing day curveballs in the form of a 3-hour round trip to get the hail damage on the car assessed on Thursday, and a dizzy spell on Friday. So today has been all about catching up (on the faerie novel, at least). Sometimes, writing every day does not mean writing daily.

Eh. Whatever works, right?

I "met" this fellow at the Tiergarten Schönbrunn: he's a Marabou, a species of bird of which I had never heard before that day. He's part of the stork family, and he's from Africa.

And he has a magnificent get-off-my-damn-lawn! dance the like of which I have never seen before. Wings akimbo, he would cover the length of each wall of his enclosure in a sliding-hopping-gliding motion in heartbeats.

Do storks dance in courtship, or is it only the crane family who do that?

I wonder if the poor, magnificent fellow was simply bored, and passing the time?

I'd love to see him in the wild.

7 January 2012 @ 20:28 | No Comments

oh for aircon

One of the things I'd like to do more of in 2012 is blog, or at least blog more routinely. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that this website needs a serious overhaul to enable me to easily dash off quick or brief posts, lately all my posts have been long or in-depth or emotionally weighty affairs. That starts to drag after a while.

Forty minutes later and one of the major culprits standing between me and a quick post, namely a default featured image, is … well, not fixed to my liking, but there's a band-aid in place. That will do for the short-term. It will have to. Given my tendency to manufacture projects on which I can spend weeks procrastinating, I'm rather proud of myself for going for the band-aid solution. And for waiting until I'd gotten today's wordcount before attempting it. (Well, I got wordcount on one of my two projects, at least.)

Now, I'm off to get wordcount on the other project. And to kvetch about the weather. Which looks like this:

2 January 2012 @ 16:41 | 2 Comments

hours and words (eventually) make a manuscript

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, and as is periodically inevitable, lately I've been struggling with morale. C'est la vie.

I've hit that spot in writing a novel where the whole thing feels trivial and trifling. Although if I'm honest, it's a feeling that's been plaguing me since I can't remember when; and because I have a nasty habit of high expectations, and wanting everything I attempt to be (at least subjectively) worthwhile, the pressure for this novel to be spectacular is beginning to effect my ability to actually write the damn thing.

This novel has been difficult from the get-go, and I've come up with a hundred reasons why, and ways to fix it, but somehow none of them seem quite to explain everything. When I was writing Shadow Queen, I had a certainty that there was something about that book that would work, not just for me but for other people. Which turned into a bit of a superstition because it went on to sell, and sit on actual bookstore shelves for other people to read. So it's been bugging me that, for a long time, I haven't had a similar certainty about the faerie novel.

But superstition is not going to stop me from finishing it, for the closure if for nothing else. Perhaps that certainty will become apparent during the rewrites — it isn't wise for a writer to trust her own mindset or judgement when she's a long way into the hard slog of a novel, after all, and it's still a story I'm enjoying, which means it's still a story I believe in. (Although I have given myself permission to skip such pesky things as transitions and leave them for the next draft.)

As if to reward me for such self-enlightenment, the internet has since been sending me little reminders. One was a conversation about the power of the square bracket (hello transition which reads simply: [they go here]!), and the other was a post by John Barnes on the effort of quality:

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing poorly at first.

I've seen this advice before, of course, more often in other guises. Give yourself permission to write a shoddy first draft. Write first, edit later. You can edit shit, but you can't edit a blank page.

The post has other gems as well — I particularly liked the remark that fiction doesn't depict nearly enough failure. As an engineer and a writer, I know what it's like to smack my head against a variety of brick walls and seemingly end up nowhere, so that trying apparently-fruitless approaches seems viable and failures teach you more about your task than achievements ever could.

The last reminder (so far) has been a startling realisation, just yesterday, of what's wrong with the faeries: I don't want them to be faeries. Somewhere in this draft I'd gotten too caught up in everybody else's mythologies, and they lost their vibrancy for me. So fixing that will change everything. Again. (I've lost count of how many fundamental everything-changing realisations I've had to slog through 100,000 words for in this book.) (This time, I shall be very good and NOT go back to the start again; I shall simply make a note in the margin for the next draft and, pretending it's fixed already, and forge ahead.)

Out of curiosity, the other day I had occasion to count all the hours and words I've spent on the faerie novel to date.

The answer? 483 hours, spread over a stint of days that add up to about 3 and a quarter years. (The first word was written in 2007.) In total, I've written 168,000 words of manuscript draft, 141,000 of them from scratch. (At one point I reached 95,000 words before scrapping all of them because of a startling realisation that made them redundant. That hurt. So far it looks like I've managed to salvage about 20,000 of those 95,000, but it was in such an altered form it may as well have been from scratch as well.)

Having said that, by the time I was done with Shadow Queen (including all publication-level edits etc), I'd spent 1,143 hours, and Shadow Bound cost me 871 hours.

So looks like I'm still only halfway at best on this sucker. Onward and upward.

31 December 2011 @ 12:49 | No Comments

dear scrivener: i've come back. never leave me again.

Over the weekend, I moved the current draft of the faerie novel back into Scrivener.

I loved Scrivener almost from the moment I first purchased it. The corkboard feature alone pretty much sells it for me, especially with my preference for writing without an outline, stopping half-way through in a panic because none of it makes sense, rearranging scenes in a whole new pattern that makes only slightly more sense than before, forging ahead again, retreating, wandering off sideways, pausing for some world history, and so on. But about a year ago, I had to give up using it because I needed to be able to work on my manuscript anywhere, including cross-platform. I knew Scrivener for Windows was in the pipeline, but I also needed to work on computers on which I had no administration rights, and I couldn't rely on SfW releasing a portable version. So back into MS Word I trudged.¹

But last week I discovered that the current version of Scrivener syncs with simplenote, or with an external folder.

I have to admit, my first inclination was to shout at the whole internet: WHICH OF YOU KNEW ABOUT THIS, AND WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME?

My second was to embark on an attempt to convert the pterosaur to the wonders of this software, even though he will have no earthly use for it in all his days. (He was very patient, and ooh'ed and aah'ed over the prettiness of the corkboard. I think mainly because he could see that was the best way to placate me and therefore escape.)

The worst thing is, I have the sneaking suspicion that this current version was released about a week or so after I moved back to Word. All this last year, labouring in Word, without a corkboard, when I didn't need to!

That'll teach me to read the release notes.²

Actually, I don't hate MS Word. I kind of like it, if I'm going to be honest. But it does like to get in your way a little bit, and every install requires me to ruthlessly and rigorously train it out of autocorrecting and autosuggesting and generally being a nuisance. But I do hate outlining in it. Hate, loathe, stab it with a fork. [↩]
In my defence, they always pop up at me when I'm trying to do something else. [↩]

22 August 2011 @ 16:17 | 6 Comments

never trust an outliner

The other day I stumbled across a link, something along the lines of 25 ways to torment your characters, and in idly perusing this list I realised that one of the reasons I'm struggling with momentum on the faerie novel is because the characters' wants, needs and fears have evolved as part of the plot but I hadn't kept up. I need to check what's changed and what hasn't, and whether that leads to new plot.

And do you know what this means? This means I'm trudging (once again) through the dreaded Middle of the Book. Figuring shit out in the dark, with no idea how I'm going to get where I need to, or whether that's even where I still need to arrive.

And that's okay. I'm practiced at this, I know how to write a book without knowing the path.

What's not okay is that this time I wrote a synopsis. Isn't that the whole point of planning in advance? I trudged and slugged through months of trying to plan this novel in advance — one of my least favourite writing activities — specifically so I wouldn't have to feel lost in the middle and OUTLINERS, YOU LIED TO ME.

So, okay, it wasn't the world's most comprehensive synopsis. But I still maintain that's not the point.

And also, where the hell do I fit all this worldbuilding that dropped into my head while watching a show about Darwin's orchids? Huh?

4 August 2011 @ 15:04 |

in a win for all future mornings, i did not go back to bed. but it took eating easter chocolate.

Some days it takes every trick in the book to get up and sit down, even promising yourself that you don't have to write when you get there. (You're lying, and you know it. But you're counting on your inner perversity to carry that one through.)

Then there's days, like today, when you sleep through said every trick, and it takes more, it takes the panicked sting of adrenaline to get you going.

Then you find out your mother's flight has been cancelled. And she's arriving later. And you have time to spare now.

And you know this kind of 'reward' is only going to reinforce the bad behaviours.

29 July 2011 @ 7:55 |

whilesoever the second is true, it outweighs the first

Things that suck about being a writer:

You can never find (enough) time to write.
You can never find (enough) time to get anything done as thoroughly as you'd like.
You carry a vague and incessant guilt with you everywhere, for: stealing time to write; not writing every second you find you have spare; promising yourself you'd get three pages but only managing two, or one; neglecting the vacuuming; neglecting your friends; insert reason here.
You don't understand the phrase "time off".
People will think you're joking about not understanding the phrase "time off".
Remuneration. Even if you get some, chances are it's so small it redefines the term "pittance".
Remuneration. Even if it's not a (writer's version of a) pittance, nobody but you will see the years of work that went into earning that apparently-impressive amount which is, on a dollar per hour basis, a pittance.
You compare yourself to other people in unrealistic — not to mention unhealthy — ways.
You cannot, even if you do write fast, write fast enough.
Loved ones will urge you to put off today's writing "just this once", blithely unaware that they are not the only ones urging that on any given day. You will blame yourself for the discord caused by saying no to them.
You have those days when you doubt not just your stories, but your very self. Because you've taken such a huge gamble, and wandered so far out the branch beneath you has turned into a twig, those doubts are damn scary ones.
You watch writers get published and writers fail to get published, and there is no pattern, no clear line that puts the good ones in one camp and the mediocre in the other. This is both terrifying and comforting. But mostly terrifying.

Things that are awesome about being a writer:

You write. It's incomparable.

The funny thing, it's not like I've been toying lately with the idea of not writing. Far from it! Oh, I've had my flirtations with that thought, in my time, but not lately. Yet this is the list that poured out when I sat down to the blog today.

I guess I needed the reminder.

25 July 2011 @ 19:57 | 6 Comments

social networking overload

Croatia is, well, it's partially booked, and the rest of it is planned. That totally counts as progress. I'm going to be seeing Zagreb, the UNESCO listed Plitvice Lakes, and the Dalmatian coast. This strikes me as a most excellent way of spending some time.

This weekend I also managed to book my flights to America for WFC 2011. Yet more progress!

In more ephemeral progress, I've also been pondering the thornsome dilemma that is social media. There is, quite simply, too much of it.

I like blogging for the fact that it's my website, and my voice, and I like the space you get in blog posts, both writing them and reading them. Conversely, I like Twitter for its immediacy, and for its ephemeral, thrown-off nature. I don't like Facebook — too much noise to signal, and the platform makes it impossible to filter content from chatter. I have a Goodreads account, but I can't remember the last time I found time to log in. I'm on Google+, which I like better than Facebook if only for its more easily-accessible privacy and filtering utilities, but it does feel like yet another platform I'm supposed to keep up with. Yet another platform where I have to face the dilemma of whether I cross-post, and commit the sin of forcing people who are following me on more than the one platform to trawl through duplicate content, or whether I strive to come up with original content for just this platform…

It's frustrating, because I enjoy the interaction, but the time consumption and the fragmented concentration is simply too draining.

So I am hereby giving myself permission to say that two social media platforms is my limit. For now that's my blog, and twitter. I'll still lurk on the other platforms, but I won't be logging in unless they demand my attention.

I think this also counts as progress.

18 July 2011 @ 20:24 | 9 Comments

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