Interrobang‽

This isn’t news to most people following this blog, as most people following this blog are either my own doppelgänger (Branden), follow the same nerdy sites as me, or are well-versed in their own right, but this. This bit of punctuation! I didn’t know that there was a way to type it. There’s apparently also a punctuation mark that is a backwards question mark and a forward-facing question mark that share the same dot, which is called a “love mark” and is meant to end a sentence that expresses love, like “Happy anniversary.” I wish there was a way to type that, but so far I haven’t found it. (There are also many other cool punctuation marks that mostly don’t have a way to type them. See here.)

Second super-fun thing: Neil Gaiman will be signing books at Old Firehouse Books in Fort Collins on February 6, starting at 4pm! I think I’d like to try to get there, but I don’t know if I actually will, knowing me. If I did go, I’d bring Neverwhere for him to sign. And maybe book #1 of Sandman. Is that how book-signings work?

Having just reviewed my blog post from Monday, I can say, wow, I was loopy. That’s okay, I’ve written things while loopy that I wonder why I can’t write like that while fully intact. On Monday, after my blog, I did manage to write a little more. Not a lot; only about 200 words, but better than nothing.

I’ve been reading my tumblr and checking my deviantArt feeds till now and I think—I think—that I’m going to be able to open up my writing and write! That will be excellent. I have to say, I’m looking forward to having a finished project. And that anticipation should carry me through the rewrite.

I’m starting to identify more with Cassidy, and that is extremely helpful. I still stress about my ability to pepper clues and red herrings throughout the book, but I can’t fail until I try. What’s more is that the clues, while important, are actually much more understated than it seems they might be if you’re not really analyzing a work. I mean, a lot of the time, “clues” are just things that happen that your investigator doesn’t have the proper context for, that make sense after the mystery is solved. Only very occasionally are clues going to be the fingernail trimmings found in the ashtray, or the discarded zorro mask. More often it’s the fact that the baby’s blanket disappeared, or the friend you haven’t seen in a decade happens to drop by.

I’m trying to work Cassidy’s history into the “present-tense” narrative of the story, and I’m not sure if I’m doing a good job, but hey, that’s what writers’ group is for, right? I’m liking how the theme of the book—identity—is working its way into the peripheral parts of the story without my having meant to squish it in. That’s pretty cool. Mostly, I’m appreciating the things that happen when my brain percolates the story, and I really look forward to writing those things down. So now I just have to conquer the sleepies and the what-if’s and the what-then’s and start writing things down. I managed the first draft in thirty days. Twenty-eight, maybe. If I set myself a word goal, maybe I could manage the second draft in, say, sixty days.

That’s it. I’m setting myself a weekday word goal of 2,000 words per day. I don’t have a top limit, so that’ll be until the book is written, however long that is. On my blog posts I’ll be posting my word count, so all of you readers, you many readers, you legion of readers can keep me honest.

To infinity. And beyond! (Today’s word count: 5,129. Special character? ᐉ [typography is fun])

Finally! Progress!

Although I seem to have contracted Captain Tripps, which is true every time I get sick, I somehow managed to write yesterday. I wrote slowly and laboriously, writing only about 1500 words in something like six hours (with breaks, of course). I’m not sure any of it is worth anything; I haven’t reread it in the cold light of day. But I’m supremely glad that I wrote.

Days dawn and set and every one, I am excited to work on my story, but things stand in the way. Stupid things. Bite-sized things. I’ve talked to my therapist about this, and she and I agree that there is little for it but to just do it. Change scenery, change attitude, change implement, but really, just friggin do it. I’ve been giving myself a sanctioned break because I’ve been so sick, and I’m okay with that, for reals, and because it’s “mandated” I’ve had the luxury to feel antsy about not working on it—as though, if I weren’t sick, I’d be dutifully cranking out twelve hundred words an hour with one hand while luxuriously painting my toenails with the other. Self deception is best deception.

Every time I write I realize anew that writing isn’t so unapproachable. That’s a very good thing. I remind myself that I have no real deadlines and I should feel no real pressure, and my writing group will keep me writing (which is how I’ll avoid abandoning projects as I’ve done so many times in my life). As long as I do as much as I can, when I can, I’ll be okay.

So I finished my outline (as I said in an earlier entry) and I did a card or two for my corkboard, but once again the festering pustule that was my Inner Critic was getting so big that it was crowding out everything else, censoring my cards and rendering them neutered with regards to their power. So I had to write narrative instead, and I found once more that writing narrative serves to drain off the Critic-cyst, to relieve the pressure, and to put everything back in its proper place. Plus it means I’ll have something to share at writers’ group, hooray! I have recently realized that sharing WIPs is not as useful as sharing completed works, but I still get good, useful feedback on my prose. I just wish I could write more...

I’m going to wrap it up because I can feel myself meandering. I am still fully sick, have patience with me. I’ll be back Wednesday to say some more stuff about writing, I hope.

One tall step down... the rest of the book to go

Moments ago, I finished the outline/synopsis/What God Knows for my story. There are some middle parts missing, but considering how I tend to “follow” outlines, that may not be too bad of a thing. I also wrote several more cards for my corkboard. I did more writing today than I thought that I could, and tomorrow I can start writing narrative again. Weirdly, I think I need to get further in my narrative before I can flesh out the corkboard much more, but I can probably add a card or two before putting it on hold.

I admit I’m nervous about writing narrative. The voice of my narrator (now also my main character) is really different from last time, and somehow I’m not sure I’m fully behind it. I think it’s better, but it’s not what I had envisioned it at the onset.

Part of what kept my momentum up during NaNoWriMo was the fact that I was fully engaged in the tone of my story. It was my voice, and I didn’t care overmuch what anyone else thought. Now I’m hoping to make a work that will stand up on its own among other works within the genre, and it sounds really egotistical in my own head to say that.

But if it doesn’t stand up, what’s the point? I mean, you don’t literally “level up” in writing. You get better with practice, to be sure, but your first book needn’t be crap. Look at John Kennedy Toole—he wrote two books ever, and the one he wrote first was published second, and both after his death. A Confederacy of Dunces, the first-published one, won a Pulitzer Prize.

So, just because you aren’t published doesn’t mean you aren’t a good, skilled writer. It does mean that your attempts may require a little more editing/revising than some other authors’. But you can revise and edit it until it, the work itself, is a venerated old guy with a grizzled beard and a grizzled voice, and it speaks with authority when it tells the story that was etched into it over months and weeks and years of hard, hard work.

Anyway. I’m sick and I think I’m rambling and I started this entry over four hours ago and keep getting sidetracked from finishing it. I’m proud of the work I did today, meager as it was, and I hope to do as well or better tomorrow—but we’ll see, because tomorrow has this whole other set of responsibilities, and I imagine I’ll still be sick.

I’m proud of my work. I just wish I could work up the willpower and momentum to work every day. Once I get to narrative stuff, I think I’ll set myself a daily word goal, like in NaNo. We’ll see.

At any rate, now I sleep. See you Friday.

There are always excuses

I meant to blog on Friday, but it ended up not happening.

Friday, at least, I had a good excuse.

Due to an unfortunate series of events, I ended up taking two doses of my medicine on accident. My Gilenya (MS medicine) and my Adderall. Because of the double dose of Gilenya, I first attempted to induce vomiting (which I failed. I could never be bulimic) and then spent about fifteen minutes on hold with the hospital trying to find out what I should do. The safety information on the drug said I should go immediately to the ER and that I would have to spend the night there with continuous EKG/heart rate monitoring. I was not excited about that prospect, so I really wanted to make sure that it was actually necessary—thus the long wait on hold.

(As a note, the more relevant reason I chose not to go immediately to the ER was the very valid fear that they wouldn’t know what to do with me. My medication is not particularly common, and I would be surprised if the doctors on call knew what it was, what it treated, and what to do in the case of overdose. So... yeah.)

Anyway, after waiting on hold for a total of twenty minutes, I finally got someone who could ask someone to call me back.

Shortly, the nurse called me back, scolded me for taking two doses in one day ( O_o ) and said I’d be fine.

Whew.

Once that emergency passed, I was able to focus on the issue at hand: I had twice the usual amount of Adderall in my system. I felt like I could have cleaned my whole house, twice.

Luckily, I had a friend on hand to keep me busy, so I did no such thing. Luckily.

So, between panicking and being distracted, I wasn’t able to blog on Friday. That combined with the fact that I didn’t have much to say, I didn’t feel too bad about letting it slide.

The following day, I was exhausted (perhaps predictably), but I did my best to add to my summary. I made significant progress, and I’m happy with that. But I haven’t written a word since then. Which brings me to my post title: there are always excuses.

Frequently, they’re very good excuses. Frequently, they’re reasons and you should do whatever the thing is that you need to do. For example, I needed to get my prescription filled today, and pick up food for tonight’s dinner, and then subsequently cook that food.

But even more frequently, they’re not good excuses. The reasons are “poor time management,” “lack of prioritization,” and the like. (Even today, there was plenty of those.) It’s very frustrating to me when I sincerely want to write; I’m even inspired to write, and I just can’t seem to do it. I don’t know how it manifests for other people, but I open up my file and immediately get incredibly sleepy.

The bitch of it is, I can’t seem to actually sleep at those times. I’m just a zombie. But, it’s not a good excuse. It’s my body writing me a note to give to my writing, excusing me because I “have asthma”. But I don’t have asthma. If I just pushed through it, the sleepiness would subside and give up, crawl back in the cave it came from.

And because I know that, my body or mind have found other ways of cutting my legs out from under me.

Now, this concerns me a lot. On days that I go to the gym, I find it very difficult to write (or do anything creative) afterwards. I don’t know why, but I hate it. I want exercise to be an invigorating, energizing activity, not something that shuts me down for the whole rest of the day. Because if it is something that shuts me down, that means I should probably do it after writing... but then I know I’d never get up the motivation to go at all. And it’s very important for disease management and maintaining this hot body that I get to the gym on a regular basis. Also, going to the gym gets me physically out of the house, which is definitely not guaranteed in a day, otherwise. I don’t know if employed people can actually sympathize, but sitting for sixteen hours a day is... really not good.

Anyway, this is sort of a venty post. I’m going to spend some time working on my summary tonight and hopefully I’ll have something more interesting to post about on Wednesday. Thanks for listening!

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!