Not much progress

Blogging three times a week keeps me accountable to myself. Every day I sit down to blog I have to look at the progress I’ve made, that I’m here to report. Since Jan 1, I’ve made vanishingly little progress, and I feel guilty about that.

Monday, I started writing my synopsis. I don’t know what the guidelines for a professional synopsis are, but mine is a bulleted, chronological list of “what God knows” about my story. The third-person-omniscient survey of the barebones events, (mostly) lacking adjectives and adverbs, to keep things straight. This is going to be helpful, but it does resemble outlines I’ve made in the past, and my writing tends to have a bare fingerhold on the outline by the time I’m done with the story.

Still, for now, it will help.

As usual, I avoidance-behaviored until I didn’t have enough time left to finish my synopsis before having to run off to the next engagement, so I didn’t. Still, starting it was good, and the stuff I got down definitely helped me line up some limes. If I can just turn Blogging, and synopsis-writing, and other things that start to tickle my creative armpit turn into actual productive writing, I’ll be set.

So, how do I slay the dragon of inaction? Every time I talk to my therapist about feeling creatively blocked, this is what she always asks me. I always feel like shouting, “I don’t know! If I did, I wouldn’t be here complaining about it!” But it’s not like she can tell me how to fix it. I have to figure it out for myself. So, like I have so many times before, I will now enumerate the things I can do to help slay the dragon.

• Do what needs doing first, first. (Shower, breakfast.)
• Do the next things, next. (Check feeds.)
• After those things are done, if there are more things that need done, do them. (Lunch.)
• Then write.

Do Not:

• Turn on Netflix “just while I’m eating lunch.”
• Play phone games.
• Play computer games.

If I can follow this list of things, I should be able to make steady progress on my story. It helps immensely to keep in mind that this isn’t impossible; it’s not even really hard. It’s just a matter of habit and keeping things “the right size.” Everyone is rooting for me, and there are several people who may actually be mad at me if I don’t finish this book. So... I’m gonna birth this goddamned story if it tears me apart! And then I’ll spend the next 50 years or so lecturing it about how long I was in labor. (Baddum ching.)

I’m gonna do it with the wide-open eyes of a person who hasn’t yet learned that being creative is hard work. A person who thinks “improving” instead of “failing.” A person who doesn’t question why, she does it because it must be done, and because she must do it, and it’s as simple as that.

So I’m gonna wrap up this post and get to it now. I wish I could share it with you!

Back on the horse

Today, like most days, I’m finding it hard to get going with my writing.

I got up at 5:30 this morning, dragged Branden out of bed, and hit the gym. We got home and cleaned up by 8 or so, then hit Starbucks before he had to go to work. I considered bringing my laptop with me to sit and work on writing after he left, but I thought the better of it since I still need to finish my corkboard. I figured, with such an early and productive start, surely writing will just fall into place! …Right?

I wish motivation worked that way. I went home for breakfast and checked my feeds while I nommed down some cereal. Feeds, of course, take much longer than cereal (damn you, Tumblr!) and I fell down the Facebook hole for a while too, so now… at 12:25… I’m writing my blog post.

And I still haven’t worked on my story.

When I got back to Denver on Saturday, Branden picked me up from the airport and we went straight to a writing date with our friend and writing-group companion, Bridget. I was nervous about doing this because I was still feeling very overwhelmed with the idea of starting actually writing. I keep thinking up apt similes to describe my feelings regarding my story right now. Here’s my current favorite:

Right now, my story is like a bunch of limes I’m trying to hold. If I try to organize them or move them around, I’m likely to drop them all. Branden (pictured to the right expertly holding all the limes) explained to me that if I don’t put all the limes down, preferably onto a piece of paper, some of them were likely to sneak away. (Sneaky, sneaky limes!) This is true, and I know it, but superstition tends to win. Fear tends to win.

So on Saturday, pinned in the Denver Cat Co with nothing to do but write, I tried putting some limes down.

I ended up putting down 3,250 limes.

And none of them broke or snuck away.

I have many more limes that need to be placed, and some of them are a lot bigger than any of the limes I put down on Saturday; in fact, bigger than all of those limes put together.

Starting the process, and seeing that the whole thing didn’t go up in smoke, helped me unclog my creative pipes to the point where I’m looking forward to making my note cards again. I had sorta lost track of their purpose and I felt really lost when I’d look at them, like, “what were those for again?” I was considering writing irrelevant things down, then I’d check myself and say, “…what? Why is that a thing that needs to go on my board? Where would it even go?” and then I’d stare at the note cards some more, feeling somewhat hopeless. But now I feel like I’ve got it figured out: what they were for, and how they can help. And I’ve got some (many, lots) cards to fill out before I write much more than I already have.

I’ve said it before, but I’m saying it again anyway: this revision of the story is going to be a lot more like a new first draft than a second draft. Five of the characters are still here, with the same names and approximately the same roles, but not a single word from my first go-around will survive, and some of these characters who survived are going to be drastically different. I’d like them to be complex, fully actualized characters, and to do that it’s important that I have who they are written down. It’ll help to have why they are who they are written down, too. And why they have the relationship to the MC that they do.

But, some of that isn’t cork-board material. It won’t be a thing I’ll want to (or be able to) look over at and, in a glance, get an answer to a question. That is what I envision my corkboard being for. If it gets too cluttered, it defeats its own purpose.

I think I’d also like to write a summary, a “what God knows” sort of chronological list of events just so I can keep it all straight. It seems like it’d be hard, but considering that I’m following one main character, the chronology can’t criss-cross too much. That’s the thing that always seems daunting about a summary: “if I mention this thing, then I have to ‘go back in time’ and mention this thing, which happened because of this thing…” and if you have multiple main characters, multiple things can be happening concurrently. Of course, in that instance, chronology is probably even more important, to make sure something that causes something else doesn’t happen after that thing… anyway, I’m getting long-winded.

My trip to Durango went very well. Spending time with my dad was so great. It seems like it’s been years since we had quality just-me-and-him time, and it reminded me why my dad is the best dad ever. It was quick and low-key, just how I like trips home. It’s a little bit weird to know that the vast, vast majority of my friends no longer live in Durango. In fact, I can only think of one who’s still there.

I remembered why being so social was easy when I lived there: anywhere you wanted to be, including each others’ houses, was ten minutes or less from wherever you are, with no interstate between you and them. When I go there, it’s a lot like being a high schooler again—no responsibilities and nothing to do but hang out with friends… so it’s no fun without friends. Wah.

Oh well. Such is life.

Any revision techniques that you favor? Let me know in comments!

A change of perspective

An update to Wednesday’s post: My dad is just fine. It turns out that he had “fluid overload,” and fluid in his abdomen was putting pressure on his lungs. They gave him a diuretic and now he feels much better.

In light of that, the plan to go to Durango was back on.

He and I passed the five-and-a-half hours in comfortable silence and happy conversation. We have always gotten along. At the terminus, I took a luxuriant bath and slept like a dead person, then woke up and had lunch with him and a couple of his friends who had been a big part of my childhood, who I remember very fondly. They apparently remember me fondly, too. This makes me happy.

After that, I sought out my favorite teacher of all time, Tom Byrne. He taught my sophomore and senior English classes, and he was one of the first teachers who made class fun.

Well, I don’t really remember high school that well, but however it happened, he is both mine and Branden’s favorite teacher, and we are both among his favorite students.

Tom hasn’t been doing so well for the last few years. He’s a young man, but he has brain cancer, and after several years of doing pretty okay, it’s starting to get the better of him. He’s in hospice now, which means that, for those of you who are like me and didn’t know exactly what that meant, he’s given up on treating the disease and his treatment is now focused on treating the symptoms, trying to make sure his remaining time is as comfortable and rewarding as possible.

He used to love to travel. In fact, he just got back from Hawaii last month. Sadly, at the end of that trip, his state took a sharp decline and it seems likely, now, that his travel days are over.

I still call him Mr. Byrne to myself and Branden and my parents and really, anyone not him. He wants me to call him Tom, so I do, but when I say “Mr Byrne,” in my own head, that’s an honorific. It’s like calling someone “sensei.” I honor him.

He was very happy to see me. We sat and talked about travel and books and people and cats. Then we went on a long walk and talked more about people and books and Durango and school. Then when we got back, we sat and talked some more about my wedding to Branden, at which he was a guest. He said it was the best wedding he’d ever been at, and that he had been kind of blown away by the fact that we’d wanted to include him in our wedding photos. (For my part, he was certainly a high point of the whole occasion.) At this point, he seemed very tired and despite not really wanting to end our visit, I think we both ran out of things to say.

Then his cat scratched me.

The message was clear.

When I left, we hugged for a long moment and I kept in my tears—barely. I knew I was losing it and he probably did too, but I hate people who visit or call sick people and cry, like, “your illness hurts me! Quick, make me feel better!” I wasn’t going to do that to him. I got to the car and sobbed for a minute or so before starting it up and going home.

After that, I was really emotional and getting weepy at any old thing. My dad took me out to dinner, which was really nice, but I almost wasn’t fit to be in public. I kept a lid on it, knowing that my dad was doing his best to keep my mind off “things,” and he did a pretty good job. But it kept sneaking up on me a little. At any rate, I’m happy to be home, in my bedroom, behind a closed door for a couple of hours.

The main character in my book is named in honor of Mr Byrne. I told him so. He said he wanted to read it. I said of course.

On that note, I think I have found the way I want to begin the revised draft of my book. I think I’m going to try to write a little tonight. Thanks to everyone for your well wishes for my dad. Until Monday!

Unexpected trip

My dad is in town(ish), having a procedure done on his heart. It is non-invasive and, I thought, posed no serious risks.

Right before he and my mom made the trip up here, they found out that my maternal grandma, who has pretty severe Alzheimer’s, was in the hospital in New York (where she lives) with a touch of pneumonia. My grandma has no family near her who could take care of her, and my mom decided to leave Denver Thursday morning and fly out to see her. So they took two cars.

On the drive up, my mom spoke with her mom on the phone and learned that my grandma didn’t know where she was or what she was being treated for, and that the nurses in the hospital wouldn’t help her to the bathroom—they just brought her a bedpan, which they then left her painfully laying on top of for hours.

Of course, this totally freaked my mom out.

She got her flight switched to Tuesday morning and is now in New York. No real updates on my grandma’s status, which I assume means my mom has everything under control. But it left things in a weird limbo with my dad.

I was supposed to go down to Colorado Springs last night and stay the night in the hospital guest house, which is where he went after being discharged from the hospital. We (Branden and I) were going to get dinner with my dad, then Branden was driving our car back home and leaving me there to drive Dad to Durango today in his car, then I’d fly home. Last night, he sounded great and healthy and, while not 100%, probably about 45% of his usual awesome self. The plan was a go.

I picked Branden up from work at six and we started driving down to the Springs. Google Maps reported three accidents between us and the Springs on I-25, and the usually-seventy-five-minute drive was going to be an hour and forty-one minutes. That put dinner at almost eight, which is really late for my hummingbird-like husband.

We’d been driving for about thirty minutes (and still hadn’t gotten out of Denver) when I realized that I had left my pills at home.

I will clarify: my pills include my MS medication and my Adderall, both of which are daily pills and neither of which I can afford to do without.

So... the only option was to turn around and go home. And with the traffic the way it was, that meant staying home and coming back the next day.

At that time, I was under the mistaken impression that I was driving Dad home on Thursday, and that our plan for that night could be easily transplanted to the next night. Of course, that wasn’t the case and I’d need to be in Colorado Springs between ten and eleven a.m. the next day to drive to Durango.

Ugh.

But not impossible.

I asked for (and received) a favor from my good friend Fletch, who agreed to drive me down the next morning. I’d go into work with Branden, he’d drop me off at a light rail station and I’d take the light rail to Fletch’s, then off we’d go. Easy cheesy.

But this morning, I got a call from my dad at seven a.m. He said he didn’t want me to come down. There had been freezing fog overnight: the visibility was terrible and the roads were worse.

But more importantly: he was going back into the hospital. He’d had a bad night and felt short of breath.

So I’m home now, blogging and trying to work up the motivation to work more on my book and trying to put out of my mind that I haven’t heard from him since then, and I haven’t heard from my mom, and I’m worried and scared. I tried to look at it as a relief. I can’t.

But worrying doesn’t do any good either. So I’m going to keep trying.

Wish me luck.

Enthusiasm wanes as capability increases

I received my corkboard and my index cards! I also started reading another mystery novel within the set of books that I would call my inspiration for my story. This one, Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem is entirely different from Dennis Lehane in terms of... well, everything. Gun, With Occasional Music is a satirical science fiction detective novel that adheres faithfully to the more cliché tropes of the noir genre. While it is telling a story, it seems to me that the focus is more on the tone and the world that it builds than the story itself. I say this in part because I’ve read the book at least twice now, and I still can’t remember what the story was at all. But I can remember that I loved it, and that the world that it built was engrossing and entertaining, and the tone was engaging and usually hilarious.

In Gun, the protagonist is a disillusioned, mostly broken PI in a world where no one but private inquisitors and the police are even legally allowed to ask questions, not even the most basic ones like “what’s your name?” (I assume this gave Lethem fits trying to write.) I think this adheres more to the literary ‘definition’ of the noir trope in that we see the PI go from a state of jaded apathy about the client who walks through his door—knowing there’s little he can do to help and sending him on his way—to a grudging, ungenerous refusal to accept that anyone is beyond hope in a just world; refusing to let go of the idea that maybe, just maybe, the world is still just.

My favorite definition of a noir protagonist, and the one I’m calling the ‘literary definition,’ is this:

But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.

If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.

—Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

I’m trying to keep that definition in mind while writing my main character, Cassidy. I think much of my difficulty comes from the fact that I want her to be so much braver than I am.

My first draft came out very tame. While I believe that the mystery was interesting, no character was pushed to the point of desperation, and no real danger was ever encountered—because I have a hard time imagining a person actually taking the actions of a desperate man and sincerely intending to do bodily harm to another person.

When I read it in my mystery novels, it’s shocking because it’s not an action genre with bullets flying and punches punctuating every paragraph; it’s gritty and ugly and real and when someone gets shot, they don’t get back up and keep running. So while I don’t think I’d have a hard time writing the more exaggerated, unrealistic combat scenes that you might see in a Marvel movie or an episode of Buffy, I hesitate to broach the kind of violence that belongs in a noir book, because it needs to be grave, not glorified. It needs to be tense and terrifying, not inconvenient or irritating. In a noir book, the violence should be the thing that ends the book, because it ends either the good guy or the bad guy. It’s not an obstacle.

And then, when the protagonist does struggle to his or her feet, it seems all the more triumphant.

Anyway.

Now that I have my tools in hand, I am predictably hesitant to begin the process of rewriting. After all, I messed it up so bad the first time... of course, without my first try, this story wouldn’t exist at all. I need to start thinking of the words of my first draft as being the shell around the nut of the story. Crack it off and throw it away, and you’ve still got more than you had before. Sure it’s incorporeal, and the second draft may not be much better than the first... but it’s a lot more likely to be closer to the truth of the story than the first was.

So, I am now picking up my index cards and my sharpies and I’m writing things on them. For example:

Cassidy Byrne

Lonely. Brave. Realistic. Observant. Intuitive. Driven. Disadvantaged. Aloof. Curious. Honest. Snarky. Educated. Blunt. Careful. Self-assured. Self-alienated.

Puts ‘morally right’ in front of ‘legal’ in the alphabet, but operates within the confines of the law as often as possible. Desperately wants to know who she was before she ‘woke up,’ but not to the detriment of her clients. When presented with leads on her own case, has a hesitancy to follow them that she doesn’t understand.

Anyone out there struggling with their own re-writes, or first drafts, or inspirations?

What's the opposite of procrastination?

On Monday the 29th of December, I ordered a large corkboard and a pack of multicolored index cards. It’d been about a month since NaNoWriMo and I was itching to start revising my story. Of course, I didn’t really know where to start and I was super nervous. I’ve never revised anything before—in fact, I’ve rarely finished anything before. The sum total of my experience with revision is advice on NaNo boards and the show Stark Raving Mad, which had a gag in its first episode about multicolored index cards and a corkboard just to show how anal the editor was... so I figured that was probably a good place to start.

So I hemmed and hawed and discussed it with Branden (my inspiration and my support) and I wondered what I was going to write on my index cards, and once stuff was written on them, how I would stick them to the board. It was quite literally like owning paper and pencils and a ruler, but no textbooks. I was understandably confused and more than a little scared.

As part of my preparation I decided to reread some of my favorite books within my genre. As I progress (present tense!) through Darkness, Take My Hand, I can plainly see some places where I went very, very wrong. It is humbling but enlightening, and the things I believe I’ve learned through reading the book are extremely exciting to think about implementing. Of course, trying to do so will probably end up looking like a kid trying to fence based on watching a video of fencing... but I will give it my best effort, and practice will eventually make perfect. One hopes.

My goods were supposed to arrive on December 31st, fresh and waiting for me to begin work the next day—but they didn’t arrive. I was full of woe! How would I start revising if my revision materials weren’t here yet? I didn’t want to start anything on the computer, because it would lock me into a certain way of thinking and that way surely lies madness. As usual, I was allowing my black-and-white evaluations of things to block the creative process. Of course, it wasn’t even New Year’s Day yet, so my anxiety was premature.

New Year’s Day came and I discovered I was in no shape to begin revision anyway. I hadn’t had anything to drink the night before but I did stay up till after 3am, and woke up much too early. I was a zombie with a head full of sand, and was actually mostly relieved that my materials hadn’t arrived. Branden and I mercifully spent much of the day watching Supernatural with our friends, allowing someone else’s creativity wash over and inspire us.

Last night, as I settled into bed, I continued reading my book. I read late into the night, hoping that reading before bed would help me sleep better (as I’ve been getting extremely poor sleep of late), but woe, it was not to be. When I finally forced myself to put down the book, my brain was afire with tightly furled buds of ideas, and I couldn’t help myself but try to force them to bloom.

And bloom they did.

Sometime after 3am, I finally fell asleep, but every time Branden or I shifted in bed, or a cat stepped near me, or a fly sneezed somewhere in the house, I woke up again and my buzzing brain picked back up where it had left off, seemingly moments before.

In this fashion, I slept until about 7:15.

So I am here before you now with less than four hours of sleep, eagerly awaiting my corkboard and index cards, and I literally can’t wait to start. When I’m finished with my second draft, it will bear only a passing resemblance to my first, and I think that’s both amazing and wonderful, and slightly embarrassing.

Anyway, here is a line I thought up last night. In hopes to get you hooked:

A dog, fitted with electrodes behind his ears and a talk collar around his neck, shouted “hi” at me halfheartedly as I walked by.

“Hi,” I replied automatically, and immediately felt embarrassed and impotently resentful, as if I’d accidentally waved back at a pickle-costumed human advertisement.

Feels a bit tortured. Any suggestions for making it more streamlined?

Finding my voice!

I return to the world of blogging full of motivation and enthusiasm. Sadly, I’m a tad light on content right at the moment. However, I will find some, and all my readers will be full of milk and honey and other forms of happiness!

On this, the last day of 2014, I’m thinking about Christmas with my family over the years and how our traditions have grown and changed, as our family has grown and changed.

For as long as I can remember—possibly for as long as I’ve been alive—my whole family has had Christmas stockings that were hand-knitted by my dad’s mom. (I suspect my dad and his brother had theirs before they can remember.) They were decorated with reindeer, Santas, trees, snowflakes—many Christmas/winter images. They also had each of our names knitted along the top rim of the stocking. Allow me to emphasize that: every bit of the ornamentation was knitted. Nothing was glued, nothing was stitched, nothing was painted. It must have been an incredible amount of work.

They were such an institution in our household that I remember being baffled at other kids not having elaborate, handmade, personalized stockings.

Christmas in my house has always been so full of love and acceptance and warmth. My older brother could rarely visit home (starving college student followed by starving actor), but he would always make it home for Christmas. And yes, we gave presents and we’d usually all “get a haul,” but especially once we became adults, that wasn’t the point. We loved being together.

Sitcoms and movies make family holidays look like a chore full of drama and no small amount of racism. That humor has always been lost on me. There may be stress related to Christmas shopping or Christmas travel, but come Christmas day, no one ever got out of their pajamas, metaphorically speaking. And usually, we never got out of our physical pajamas, either.

Our family has grown in the intervening years: All three of us kids are married and my younger brother now has a son of his own. Our Christmases include spouses and, very occasionally, in-laws. And the spouses and grub, who are just as much family as the native Lymans (obviously), are nonetheless lacking in handmade personalized Santa/tree/reindeer/snowflake stockings. My grandma just turned 90 this last Christmas, and her days of knitting have passed, unfortunately.

This is a true sadness.

So, one of my goals for 2015 is to start (and hopefully complete?) knitting stockings for the three spouses plus baby.

Our mantel is getting crowded.

The more, the merrier.

Do any of you have Christmas traditions you want to share? Comment below!