strange kind of day to discover

 journal, the wages of honey, writing life  2 Responses »
Feb 012010
 

Right this very second, I'm supposed to be writing.

And my body is doing its damnedest to convince me we're not capable of sitting still1 or (horror of all horrors) dragging words out of the murky recesses of my consciousness and slapping them down in some laughable approximation of narrative order. My eyes are sagging in their sockets, my shoulders are starting to climb up around my ears, and my legs keep attempting mutiny by standing. Get up, my mind is whispering. Give it up. Do something easy. Like watching TV. Or reading — there's that juicy book you're in the middle of, just waiting for you. Or what about scrubbing the bathtub? ANYTHING BUT THIS.

All because I'm not quite sure what happens next in this short story, and apparently DECIDING is too much to ask.

Honestly, some days I think if you just accomplish staying in the chair, you've won an epic battle.2

  1. at the desk — apparently lying still on the couch or the bed, reading, we're definitely capable of :???: [↩]
  2. Although words and/or plot wouldn't go astray right now. Any second now. Whenever you're ready, words, plot. No, really, take your time. [↩]

this means i need to remember what happened

 away come away, journal, shadow bound  2 Responses »
Dec 062009
 

Tomorrow, it begins.

"It" in this case would be the publication edits on Book 2 of The Binding series. Just in time for Christmas! Which is good, as it means there'll be a whole week during which I only have one job, not two. Almost like a real holiday ;)

It's also just in time to coincide with a rather high-pressure period at the dayjob, otherwise known as a two-month examination, during which period I need to get a minimum of 95% to pass. This is distinctly less good. But unavoidable. C'est la vie.

This means tonight is (probably) the last night I'll be able to get words on the faerie novel for a whiles to come. Poor faerie novel. It's been picked up and put down so many times now… No wonder I have no idea what's going on in that story.

And, because these articles rock, I give you Justine Musk on why you need to write like a bad girl, part one:

We are all born into ways of thinking that we take for granted. We are raised within certain belief systems. We take the dominating voices of the adults around us and internalize them until those perceptions of us become what we are to ourselves.

But when you become your own rebellion you say a healthy Fuck You to all of that.

And part two:

The double standard for selfishness still amazes me. The same culture that celebrates Ayn Rand’s “virtues of selfishness” will turn around and call women selfish and not exactly mean it as a compliment. Call a man ’selfish’ and he’ll shrug his shoulders; call a woman ’selfish’ and she’ll feel so shamed and cut to the core she’ll twist herself inside out to prove otherwise.

And to be a writer, or any artist, is to be inherently selfish. You must claim time for yourself, away from family and friends and jobs and so-called productive activity. You must claim that your art is important because it is important to you. You must make it a priority even though years will pass before you achieve anything that other people might recognize as ’success’, assuming you achieve it at all.

step one you say we need to talk

 away come away, journal  2 Responses »
Nov 172009
 

Today's word I didn't know before is unasinous, which is not appearing in any online dictionaries for me, but apparently (according to my local newspaper) means "equally stupid".

I like this word. I plan to use it at the first available opportunity, preferably one that also involves the chance to get a nice, scornful twist in my lip as I do so. I may even throw in a disdainful sniff. We'll have to see how it plays.

Serendipitously, this word rather aptly describes every possible direction I can currently think of for the faerie novel. I suspect this feeling is caused in no small part by the suspicion that every single word I have written over the past three days is nothing but backstory, and painfully dull expositiony backstory that has no fate except to be cut at that.

I tell you, the dreaded middle-novel-blahs is lasting a long time on this one.

Clearly, it's time for something (or someone?) to explode.

we are ugly, but we have the music

 away come away, journal  Comments Off
Nov 032009
 

I think my cup of tea is giving me hayfever. Can you develop a sudden and inexplicable allergy to tea? Oh farkit, if I'm now allergic to tea that's it, it's all over.

Go on without me! I'm done for! Save yourselves!

Ahem.

I have been meaning to post for a couple of days now, but I've also been trying to get my days' words before posting. This hasn't been going all that well, of late. I don't know what's up with the book (or my brain, or some no man's land where the two are attempting to meet), but it's like pulling teeth. Deep-rooted teeth. Bones of the world type teeth.

So today I come bearing writerly links. Given that it's NaNoWriMo, the internet is full of them! The theme appears to be outlining, the reason for which will doubtless become clear if it's not already.

Justine talks about the book in her head vs the book she wrote, which post came as a bit of an epiphany for me.

When I first started trying to write novels that process really bothered me. It drove me nuts that I couldn’t capture what I’d been imagining on the page. I thought it meant I was a terrible writer. But now I know it’s just part of the process and I enjoy it.

I've been obsessed with outlining and planning in advance, lately — a mindset into which I routinely sink any time the current alpha draft hits a snag and I can't figure out what's hobbling me. If only I had planned it out first! If only I were more efficient as a writer! Next novel, I'm definitely doing an outline! If only this, if only that. I need to remember that outliners face inefficiencies too (different ones, obviously) and comparing the two when I only really have experience of the one is foolish at best. Give me however long it takes me to push through this current phase of the blahs, and I'll start another novel without an outline.1 I'm incurable like that.

Glenda Larke explains how she writes a novel:

People ask me how many revisions I do – honestly, I dunno. Some parts that don't work well have too many rewrites to count. Other scenes hardly change at all from the moment I wrote them. One thing I can tell you – for me, writing is not easy. Nor quick. And everybody is different.

I like this post, because it's very similar to my process — and there's nothing I like more, particularly when I'm not happy with the way I'm working, than to hear that my process is not singular. Although I don't, as a rule, go back and read what I've written — because if I do that, I invariably get caught up in revising.

Diana Peterfreund talks about the four-act structure:

I am a fan of the four act structure. I think envisioning your story like that is one of the easiest ways to avoid the “sagging middle.” Even if you do it naturally, going back and making sure that this is what you have done can often help you avoid later complications from bad planning. (I’m a big planner, by the way. BIG.)

And another link from Diana, which I discovered when I stumbled across her post on the four-act structure: plot boards.

That last link is actually to a category page, rather than a single post, but there's a wealth of material in there. The idea of the plot board appeals to me: it's outlining, but it's outlining AFTER the alpha draft, which is about the only time I can do any detailed outlining. Plus, all those post-it notes and bright colours speak right to my stationery-loving, obsessive-compulsive soul. This is one of the reasons I wanted Scrivener, back when I didn't have a Mac, because the corkboard feature lends itself beautifully to this. The faerie novel isn't up to a full plot board yet, obviously, but I'm trying to be virtuous and fill out those little plot cards as I go. It's going to make starting those revisions so much easier!

And, if you have any links on outlining you think might help me in my efforts to procrastinate from the darn faerie novel ;) share away!

  1. Although I do have a nebulous idea of what the story will involve in my head before I start, and I usually develop a nebulous approximation of an outline during the writing of the alpha draft. [↩]

why didn't i think of this before?

 a crown cast off, journal  2 Responses »
Oct 082009
 

Ugh. I am suffering all kinds of inability to manage my time this week. This has not been helped by a decision to revisit all my account passwords and make sure there isn't any critical overlap happening. I have A LOT of internet accounts.

Neither has it been helped by Australia Post's fine efforts, which included directing me to the wrong branch to pick up my parcel, the staff at the wrong branch first telling me the parcel had not yet arrived and please to come back tomorrow and then, when I came back tomorrow, belatedly informing me to please head elsewhere. At the right branch (an expedition to find which involved maps, no less), the guy behind the desk spent a good five minutes staring at the docket and sucking on his teeth, as if committing one name and address took a prodigious effort, and at last ventured into the (closet-sized) back room (which held all of three packages) with an expression like a man looking for a needle in a haystack.

Meanwhile, I'm still stuck in the awful head-space of trying to fix the holes in the faerie novel, spurred on partly by the fact that I seem to have 70,000 odd words of (dreadful) alpha draft and no actual narrative impetus yet. This has been worrying me a bit, because if that's the 70% mark then I should be getting that rushing toward the end feeling, which has been decidedly lacking.

The solution, it turns out, is simple: obviously the novel will be about 120,000 words long and thus, I'm only just over halfway and THAT's why it feels like I've only just hit halfway. Genius! So genius that, even if it's not true, which it very probably isn't, I'm going to run with it anyway. Any lie to keep the writing going, after all.

my plan is to go (quietly or not-so-quietly) mad

 away come away, journal, writing life  2 Responses »
Oct 012009
 

Can you believe it's only Thursday morning? This has been the longest week known to mankind. Ever. No, really.

Perhaps it's because the weekend is staring me in the face, my already-double-booked weekend with no days to myself, and I am pre-emptively weary.

More likely it's the fact that the faerie novel hates me — no, wait, I hate it. We hate each other!

I've hit the patch in the alpha draft where it's all just an enormous muddle in my head, and I feel like I can't possibly wade forward with the words until I actually see if there's a cohesive story structure hidden beneath the detritus that is the draft so far. On the other hand, if I stop, and attempt to find said cohesive story structure, I know I'll either find myself convinced there is no story, or else convinced there is a story and if I just START AGAIN I'll find it. Or even both, which is not a marvellous headspace in the least, and I don't recommend it. At all.

I tried, on Sunday, to "quickly" scan through what I'd written so far. Not stopping, not plotting, just a read-through to jog my memory as to what happens in each scene so I know what's been set up (or failed to be set up) and what needs teasing out and what needs wrapping up. And, yup, sure enough: I want to simultaneously push onwards and FINISH THIS SUCKA and also go back to the start and write something, I don't know, SALVAGEABLE.

The solution to this dilemma would be ever so much easier if I had any idea what to write next.

you had and lost the one thing you kept in a safe place

 away come away, ficlets, journal  Comments Off
Sep 192009
 

The triptych window in my living room gives me a view of the sky, glancingly pinned to the earth at the bottom of the frame by an apartment block rooftop and the sparse canopy of a nearby gum tree. I forget, sometimes (because when I'm home it's mostly at night and the blind is invariably down) just how perfect it is to lie back and watch the clouds slip on by.

Right now, I'm watching the thick, grey rain clouds draw across the sky, marching the last of the day's light away. There's one that's hanging lower than the rest, a great reaching quadruped of a cloud, like a hungry dragon scouring the land below for sustenance as it passes by. Already it's crossed from the first window frame to the last — they're moving deceptively fast, these clouds.

I have action scenes to write in the faerie novel, and watching this sky is leaving me in a languorous mood entirely unsuited to writing them.

Dammit, she said half-heartedly.

i am getting shameless in the cadging of free rides

 away come away, journal, writing life  2 Responses »
Aug 292009
 

Okay, who noticed that I used the word "warning" no less than three times in my previous post? Worse, said usage occurred not just in the one post, but in the space of two sentences. The shame! This is why editors are worth more than they are paid — because when I get tired, or even just pressed for time, I will re-use words like a dog with a nervous twitch.

Sadly, this blog has no editor, and thus you all must suffer through my nervous twitches. Sorry 'bout that.

(But not sorry enough to be bothered going back and fixing it.)

Actually, I've had a pretty lacklustre week, as far as the writing goes. This is partly because of the rain on Monday making the library exceedingly unappealing of an afternoon, partly because I took Wednesday off to go to a gig (TOTALLY worth it, I've been humming the songs from that set list ever since), and partly because there was a sort of challenge thrown down at the dayjob and I've been breaking myself in an attempt to best it.

Have I mentioned that I get a little competitive when there are goals and targets in sight? If only I could harness this power for good. Or even evil world domination. I'm not picky, at the end of the day.

a thousand words a day – or you'll never write again

 away come away, journal, writing life  2 Responses »
Aug 242009
 

Today I learned that my understanding of the applicability of the phrase "nature abhors a vacuum" was, in fact, completely and utterly misguided. At least according to wikipedia. And we all know what a veritable wealth of reputable information wikipedia is.1

After my sleep-deprived week, I enjoyed a stupefyingly, blissfully quiet weekend which, quite frankly, I wasn't ready to be done with. I demand a recount, damnit! Then I caught up with some writerly friends last night, during which I once again felt ogrishly unproductive by comparison. (You would think I would learn to stop with the comparisons, but apparently I'm a bit slow on that particular uptake.) Oh well. These things happen. I would claim it helped me keep my backside in the library chair this afternoon despite my desire for a nap, but in truth it was the rain which started shortly after my arrival at the library which kept me there.

That rain, and the soaking it gave me on the trudge home, will make going to the library tomorrow afternoon an uphill battle. Rainy days always test my resolve.

But right now, if you'll excuse me, I may or may not be about to eat my own bodyweight in crepes for dinner.

  1. Although, to be fair to the wiki: if the topic is at all related to pop-culture references, I'm not going to argue with it. On science it can get shaky, but on The Simpsons, wiki is da man. [↩]

the atlantic is not a damn girl

 away come away, journal, shaping lily  Comments Off
Aug 222009
 

Let it be known that live music is good for the soul.

Now, I'll grant you that seeing Eddy Current Suppression Ring and Tex Perkins in the space of two nights, one of said nights being a school night no less, may have been more than my bio-rhythms were prepared to cope with, and I would have far preferred to get more than 9 hours sleep in the last 57, but…eh. It was worth it. I REGRET NOTHING.

Of course, as a consequence, today has so far been spent playing catch-up on the chores. And, er, lolling upon the couch. Which is how I intend to pass the rest of the afternoon. Although, in the interests of being a somewhat productive member of society, said lolling will be accompanied by words on the faerie novel, and edits on "Shaping Lily". At some point.

Honest.

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