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

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. [↩]

24 August 2009 @ 20:51 | 2 Comments

today i sat in a beanbag for 8 hours (it was the best day evah)

Today, determined to finish the first pass of edits on "Shaping Lily", I decided to track my progress throughout the day. In the interests of accountability, you understand.

Read on at your own peril. You have been warned.

9:17: Realise I've been dicking around on the internet far too long already, mostly reading through 6 insane discoveries science can't explain (yet).1 This is not a promising start to my revisions. Quickly check my to-do list, and remember in a panic all those bloody things I promised myself I'd do today. Realise edits on Lily is therefore not the first thing I have to do today. Decide edits on Lily are the first thing I'm going to do today anyway.

Read more »

  1. I knew about the antikythera mechanism, but didn't know about the others. Really like the pipes. And the bloop Cthulhu. [↩]

19 July 2009 @ 18:49 | 9 Comments

the view from the tram

There's an old man I see on the trams, every couple of weeks or so, has the look of decay about him. Emaciated, with wisps of papery hair clinging to the back of his grey-skinned scalp, ears grown too large for his frame, and eyes sinking into their sockets. The flesh of his eye sockets is so heavy, so ancient and stretched, that they sag open, revealing their raw pink interior, in stark contrast with the yellowed eyes above, like a basset hound caught in the pallid grey throes of chemotherapy.

His suit is neat, and pressed, although it is probably as out of date as he is, and I've only ever seen the one suit on him.

There are stories in the creases of his skin, stories in the way he moves, the way he holds his shoulders as he waits. Stories in the quiet way he accepts everyone's furtive glances, and in the weave of his well-preserved suit. A thousand stories, carefully gathered and held against the ravages of time.

But he has the look of someone who's never asked to tell any of them.

23 June 2009 @ 18:43 | 4 Comments

hour upon hour of motivation fail

Today I mailed in my electoral enrolment details, officially changing my address to the state of Victoria. On Thursday I have an appointment to transfer my licence from a NSW one to a Victorian one, and to transfer the car's registration likewise. This is it, people: after Thursday it's official. This is no longer just some kind of cheap version of an international working holiday visa.

I had a visit from my family over the weekend, which resulted in the greatest steady consumption of alcohol I have enjoyed since arriving in Melbourne. (My family: we drink to survive each other's company.) Clearly I'm going to have to step up my game when it comes to socialising down here. Do you know, I still don't know the location of (m)any watering holes? That's an appalling lapse of judgement.

The new plan for the writing routine, namely dropping into the library after work, has hit the week-two snag. It's always week two that trips me up. (Sometimes week two is actually week three. As in this case. But I'm sure my point stands, provided you define week two as "the novelty has worn off, but the habit hasn't quite worn in". Which, I'll grant you, is very different to the standard "the second week" definition normally applied to week two. Yeah, my head. I don't make the rules, I just live inside it as best I can.) This week I have hit the I-don't-wanna's, and it's a bit of a slog to convince myself on leaving the dayjob that I really do want to walk to the library and sit down and start working on something else instead of going home and sitting in front of the tv and doing nothing. Meh. Here's hoping the habit wears in quickly.

Still, I got my words and change today, in time to go and see an evening session of Wolverine, which … yeah. About that.

Citywide Rodeo (The Weepies — Say I Am You)

12 May 2009 @ 23:11 |

you mean i have to come up with a title as well?

Stupid o'clock hurt just as much today, but it was nonetheless a smidge easier. It is just possible I might be settling into a routine. Huzzah! (About time!) Of course, my new routine means I'm yawning from about midday onward, and I'm crawling into bed at ludicrous o'clock in the evening, when everyone else is just about starting to wind down and thinking about phoning me to catch up. So there are some issues. But the getting of words always comes with issues of one kind or another.

In non-writing news, I'm not sure if it's just the learning, to which I've always been partial, or the pedantry, to which I've always had a predilection, but the new dayjob… is interesting. :shock: (And huzzah!)

Right, back to the getting of words.

12 March 2009 @ 19:16 | 2 Comments

this is the part where i start making no sense during a conversation

A productive day on the short story today; I finally, after days of false starts, feel like I'm getting somewhere. (Did I mention I think outlining in advance is much more efficient? I did, didn't I? Although, to be fair to my poor beleaguered brain, this story is not entirely without (my kind of) outline. I know the characters, and their motivations, and I know the arc of the story. It just wasn't flowing.)

I've hit the end of the first third, and this is the dangerous time. This is the time when the world-building starts to reinforce itself and remind me I need to actually include it in the story, not just in my head. The characters start doing things which remind me I haven't foreshadowed that particular motivation yet, oops. The plot starts to hang on a few threads I'd meant to set up, honestly, I knew I meant to, I just got sidetracked.

Do you see the danger? This is the point in the story when I want to go back and start revising. And I am not allowed to, on pain of never finishing a story death.

This is the point where I start racing, wanting to get to the end so I can revise, and simultaneously I start toying with the idea of just tweaking this paragraph, just this section, just this whole manuscript so far. Because I hate the idea of the start of the story being broken, and not matching the ending, and what if I do forget the changes I need to incorporate, even though I've just taken the time to write myself a copious note in the margin?1 I've even toyed with the idea of letting myself write two drafts of this story simultaneously, writing the first draft and then, as a reward once I'd hit the day's quota, opening a fresh copy and revising as I go.2

Also, I am really, really tempted to name this story after the lyrics in a Cyndi Lauper song. That would be wrong, wouldn't it? It could also be expensive, which would definitely make it wrong.3

  1. This is not entirely an irrational fear. I've written myself some very strange notes in the margin in my time. I swear I thought they all made sense at the time, but that does not always mean they make sense on the second pass. At least short stories generally have less time between passes, so there's more chance I'll remember. [↩]
  2. Writers really is nuts. Who would think that's a reward? [↩]
  3. But I still wanna. [↩]

Sad & Beautiful World (Sparklehorse — Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot)

16 January 2009 @ 17:04 | 6 Comments

nose to the grindstone

Pledged is duly rechapterised, and I'm celebrating by … starting another project straight away.

Yeah, it's not particularly smart, there's this little thing called downtime which I hear is really effective in guarding against burnout… but this project (untitled, like all my new projects, which makes blogging about them tricksome at best) is a short story, and contracted, so I kinda hafta start it now. If I want to, you know, eat. No biggie.

I also have one (contracted) novel outline, one short story collection critique, and one (uncontracted) (for now) novel outline that needs doing sooner rather than later. It's a good thing I don't have a dayjob at the moment. When I quit the baby mines, everyone was saying things like, "Oh, wow! Two months off work. Think of all the sleeping in you'll be able to do!" I always smiled and nodded, but in my head I was replying, "Actually, I was thinking if I got up early every day, I'd be able to squeeze in even more writing!"

It's a sickness. Really.

Here, to distract you, have some links:

3 January 2009 @ 8:55 | 2 Comments

you know that second book you promised…?

Aaaaannnnd…..book.

Or at least, close enough to call it book. I still need to go through and check my chapter lengths, because I have a feeling (er, I know) they got dangerously out of control in the second half of the book, what with all the revisioning. I have a nasty habit of not bothering with scene or chapter breaks. Ludicrously short or asphyxiation-inducingly long, that's how I write if left to my own devices.

Those of you who've read Shadow Queen will have a hint what I'm talking about, because you'll have noticed the book is basically ONE SCENE with convenient page breaks thrown in, courtesy of my editor (because a) she's nice and b) she didn't want my reading public to fall over dead, or alternatively to hunt me down and beat me over the head with a book that didn't let you get any sleep because you couldn't find a convenient place to stop reading). Trust me when I say my beta readers have suffered.

I did somehow manage to add over 10,000 words to this draft. That's proper words, not manuscript-words: I added nearly 20,000 of the latter. Luckily, I also cut almost as much as I added, so the book is currently at 120,000 manuscript words, or 100,000 actual words, so right on target. (Although a 20% discrepancy between actual and manuscript count bugs me. That's a lot of white space. But perhaps the rechaptering will fix that.)

It occurs to me the problems I was having with the previous drafts of this novel might have been because I, um, skipped bits. Just maybe.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I plan to celebrate. By doing no novel writing whatsoever for the rest of the night rechaptering. (Yeah, I know…)

1 January 2009 @ 17:32 | 2 Comments

a glimpse of banality

As a brief addendum on the when can I buy it? issue, I am reliably informed at least one store is talking about December 19 as the on-shelf date. Make of this information what you will.

I have spent most of the weekend pondering the pc vs mac dilemma, and am no closer to an answer. I suspect I desire a MacBook for three very important reasons: the pretty, the Scrivener, and the avoidance of Vista. But are these enough to make the switch? H'mm… I have researched the word processing options available on the Mac, and am not thrilled with iWork's Pages inability to save in rich text format as a default option. Exporting a file all the time? Bugger that for an idea, if you'll excuse the vernacular.

Anyway. While I'm sure the inner workings of my mind, and my inability to make a snap decision, are of the utmost interest to you all, perhaps I'd best move right along, eh?

Unfortunately for the lot of you, there's very little to move on to, my free time at the moment being entirely consumed by the novel revisions, so I will leave you with an absolute corker of a malapropism I discovered today (but cannot find again now to link to or take a snapshot of) buried in the reviews of apple's time capsule:

It's an ascetically pleasing addition…

15 December 2008 @ 19:03 | 7 Comments

back again (did you miss me?)

Apologies for the extended silence; it was unavoidable.

I've not been idle while I wasn't here, but madly revising a novel and crying out "What was I thinking?! No, really, can you read this sentence and make a guess at what I might have been thinking? It doesn't seem to have a verb in it, so it's not conveying much in the way of information"… well, it doesn't make for exciting micro-blogging, really.

One thing I did discover was that my camera has a sepia setting, among other customisable settings.1 So of course I spent some time running around, taking photos on random settings. Naturally, a large percentage of these photos were of the cats.

Sometimes the delay on a digital camera gives you that perfect moment's capture

Sometimes the delay on a digital camera gives you that perfect moment's capture

Max was a little (okay a lot) more boring, but gee sepia suits brown cats

Max was a little (okay a lot) more boring, but gee sepia suits brown cats

  1. Okay, I knew it had customisable settings. It just took me a while to find them. Little buggers were hidden. You know, beneath the MENU button. Who woulda thunk to look there? [↩]

3 December 2008 @ 6:52 |
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