Tag Archives: writing life

…Wow. Words I never thought I’d type. Ever.

“I Suck.”

We’ve all been there. You probably deleted something you spent hours on and replaced it with those two simple words.

Ugh.

So yeah. I failed NaNoWriMo for the first time in like five years. And that hurt worse than breaking bones, burned more than the fire in my hearth, and all around just made me feel like a total and incomplete waste.

But I shouldn’t feel this way. I know. You tried your best, you gave it your all. Better luck next time, champ.

Even in my failure though, I accomplished something that many people never thought they could do. And for 30 days I was a champ.

My total writing output for the month was a little over 60,000 words. But that’s winning, isn’t it? You’re supposed to write only 50,000!

My NaNo this year was to finish my novella and write the first half of a standalone novel all the while outlining and index carding two other books.

Way too much on my plate. In the end, I charted 37,258 on my standalone and mixed the rest up with my novella and a couple of index cards and a sample chapter or two for Night Watch. And redesigned my webpage. That was excruciating.

If writers are gluttons for punishment, and even a tad sadistic with what they do to these poor little characters on paper, than web designers are masochists. And my heart goes out to them.

Seriously. That stuff is hard.

But, now my grand total on the standalone is 25,111. Don’t ask. The pruning sheers were excellent. And justifiable.

Given all the freak accidents and bad luck that befell me this month, 25,111 is something to be proud of.

Then why don’t I feel like such a hero?

Because I don’t have anything to show for it.

Except for 25,111 words?! That’s more than most people write in their lifetime.

I think part of it stems from my reckless abandon as I chased the finish line and impulsively checked my word count every five minutes.

I wrote scenes that were 1,000 words long because they needed to be 1,000 words long. I didn’t force myself to stretch a paper thin premise for an extra 600 words that I knew it didn’t need.

Because what would that accomplish? A little check mark on my daily planner.

Big stinkin’ deal.

I can’t help but prune as I go along. Even when I turn spell check off, I still see that tiny little oopsie and I go crazy. Out, damned spot!

Were they distractions? Yup. Were the necessary distractions. You’re damn right.

I’ve never “not finished” a book because I got hemmed up on the distractions of the craft. I’m the type of person that would prefer to do something write (yes!) the first time rather than go about and redo it six times when it could have been perfect on the first.

I know this NaNo will get finished. It just won’t be done for the month of November.

Because you can’t microwave dinner and call it a gourmet meal, no matter what the pretty packaging will try to convince you of.

And even though I spent a good three hours designing a pretty cover that I hoped to have on a printed ARC for next week, it’s okay. Because I know something that pretty deserves to be on something that twisted.

But, when it’s done and I approve, I know it will go next to all my other books. If I’m going to put my little pile of dreck next to Stephen King and Jeff Abercrombie, then you can bet I’m going to do the best I can to make it FIT on that shelf.

You can’t dress up a rusted out Beetle to make it look like a brand new Benz.

And my little books keep company in high society on my shelf.

So, I won, even though I failed. But I won. I know, it doesn’t make sense, but it does. The point is, you don’t need one month out of the year to prove you can write. You can do that every month. And every day. Even if you failed, you still accomplished something.

And something is better than nothing.

So, did you guys win NaNo this year? What beat you down? Did you celebrate your success?

My Alien Being

December 6, 2011

Ace Jordyn

I’m sitting on the beach in Essouira, Morocco. No bikinis dot the Sahara-red sand. There’s just kids playing soccer, tourists declining barkers carrying silver trays of delicate sweets rebaked in the afternoon sun and camels carrying giddy riders through sea side dunes. Surf’s high – so high the pulsing ocean is blood red with a ribbon of frothing foam and the sea monster’s mouth snaps shut on the shore. A shard of light spears roiling storm clouds. Awestruck, I gape, ignoring the stinging sand in my eyes and the salty spray turning my hair prematurely white. I want to fall to my knees in reverence knowing that if I wasn’t a child of science, this moment would be my moment of truth because I’ve seen the Angel. From this point forward, my writing would no longer be of fantasy but of prophecy and revelation.

Walking through the Medina, with store keepers cooing enticements of shared tea or special deals for pretty women or special Berber massages, I’m reminded that I’m not simply the observer, I’m the alien being observed. No matter how modestly I’m dressed, how respectful I’m being, I’m still a foreigner in a country where I don’t speak the main language. And I love it. I laugh at the offers, banter with the best all the while noting my reactions and theirs. But then I’ve had enough. Enough of the smells of sweet spices teasing my nostrils which have just been assaulted by heaps of raw fish. Enough of chickens squawking while docile rabbits nibble grass in the butcher’s stall. Enough of brightly colored linens carefully displayed, leather goods spilling into the street, metal workers hammering out bowls. Enough of watching the ebb and flow of tourists pushing, vendors enticing and arms desperately flailing about to secure a good deal.

Alienness overload. That’s what this is.

Somewhere deep inside, we all try to understand the alien within ourselves otherwise, we wouldn’t be writing fantasy. But writing is a safe way to practice the alien experience vicariously through the new worlds we’ve built, through plot twists and every character’s angst. Sometimes it’s too safe and our writing suffers for it. When we’re too familiar with something, we lose the rawness of wonder. We need to remember that rawness, that excitement and fear when our character enters a new world. We can’t let our familiarity overshadow the character’s experience.

That’s why I like to travel to countries where I don’t understand the language and the customs are totally new. It’s raw. It’s exciting. Sometimes it’s overwhelming. But always, it reminds me that my characters have their own points of view about the world they’re experiencing. I know that when something so familiar to others is so new to me. It’s safe but it isn’t. It’s fun but it’s scary. It’s awesome and it’s overwhelming. Those feelings are what I must hold on to because my characters can never be as comfortable as I am about the new world I’ve created for them.

I am their interpreter. Bringing their experiences to life on the page. Finding that raw edge, the vulnerability that makes them spin out of control or struggle for control in the alien landscape. I challenge them by committing the cultural faux pas which forces them to take desperate actions to survive.

Understanding the alien within never gets any easier – it only gets more exciting. Our need for belonging and security heightens our awareness yet when those needs are our memories of alienness drift away. So I travel the roads unknown taking care to note the alien nature, the creeping comfort of familiarity and to translate that to the written word. Somewhere in those gems of observations are not only the feelings my characters will have, but the sparks of ingenuity for inspiring deeper, richer worlds where angel swords pierce the heart, sea monsters snatch unwitting victims from the shore and someone falls in love with the alien.

The Invisible Library

November 18, 2011

psdemian

P.S. Demian Reading 3 Comments

I love collecting digital bits.

And I am considered an early adopter by friends.

As disorganized as I may be with files littering my virtual and actual desktops, I have an excellent track record of not losing digital data. Misplacing, yes, but my backup processes are fairly secure.

I hit the save key reflexively every few seconds or whenever I stop typing. I email copies of documents to myself to ensure they’re backed up in the cloud. I have onsite and offsite physical backups of all my files.

Ever since the advent of the Kindle and the iPad, I’ve been delighted. There are so many ways to access the rich library of documents I’ve been squirreling away for all these years. And with tools like Dropbox and various PDF viewers on the iPad, I’ve been able to have useful subsets of my digital library with me wherever I go.

Recently I’ve even begun backing up bits of my library. I’ve taken a number of big tomes and sent them to Blue Leaf Bookscanning to get turned into PDFs and word documents and even robot-read audiobooks.

But there’s a cost for me to digitization.

Serendipity.

In my home I have bookshelves. Many of them. And I have an area where I keep all my language books. And sometimes, when I walk over to that part of the shelf, I feel compelled to learn some more Portuguese verbs. Or another Latin phrase. It’s not planned.

I have another shelf full of mid 1800s American “Cyclopediae”. Had I planned to look up something in that? Not really. Was I enriched by it? Yes.

I have a shelf next to my bed, supposed to be a nightstand. It’s actually a two foot wide, 5 foot tall shelf. It has possibly 50 books I’m in the middle of browsing or reading. My “nightstand” gives me that same feeling I get when I stand in front of the magazine stand at a good bookstore. “Oooh – what am I going to choose?” There are too many good choices.

To be fair, I have experienced some form of this on my iPad. I’ve loaded up a ton of PDFs into the Apple iBooks app. Sadly (for Apple), I have to say that iBooks is only used store PDFs; Amazon has my eBook business and will keep it until I can read iBooks on my computer. (But that’s a separate rant.)

And so occasionally, I have said “why look there, there’s a book on programming Ruby on Rails, I should browse through that.”

“Oh theres that manual I downloaded on Intellectual Property and patent drafting, I’ll read it. ”

But the point is, I think it will be a while before I have the scant 64Gb of my iPad chock full of ALL my digital documents. Years in fact. I just don’t see it. First theres the scanning, or re-acquiring the book in digital form. Then there’s the filling the space, or hoping that “cloud books” comes out when “cloud music” is just getting started.

There’s no question that eBooks are rising fast. So much so that they will be the most significant part of the Western reading market soon. Ebook sales will be the driver, not just a growing segment, of book sales.

Books will go down fighting. It will probably take generations to fully marginalize books, even though digital formats are eclipsed within two decades. VHS. Tape. CDs. DVDs. Blu-Ray. These are all formats-come-lately. They have not persisted. Photographs and phonograph records are a bit longer lasting. But printed word has millennia of success.

So what of the browse? What of the bookstore? What of the random luck that comes from browsing not just a corner bookstore but of rediscovering one’s own library? Or of putting a reminder to one’s self to read a book, by leaving it in your bag?

When all books are equally accessible in a huge digital bookstore on your iPad, and when new books are constantly marketed to you, invading the privacy of your own tablet, what will this do to undirected reading? How will one continue to enjoy these essential and random encounters with books?

I don’t know. What I do know is that my family is shopping for a house right now. And after digging through probably a hundred houses on the multiple listing service, I remember just two have really stood out to me. I may make an offer on one next week. And only when I was finishing writing this article did I realize something.

Both of those homes have a library.

Taking Advice

July 29, 2011

Brandon M Lindsay

Brandon M. Lindsay Craft & Skills Publishing The Writing Life 4 Comments

Everybody has an opinion. Oftentimes, a person’s opinions and ideas about a given subject will contradict those of other people. Writing is no exception.

Take any topic within writing, ask a bunch of writers what they think about it, and the answers you’ll receive will be all over the board. It doesn’t matter if the topic is agents, dialogue tags, or the best hours of the day to write–opinions on such things will vary widely. But does this mean there is no one right answer to the question you’re asking?

At first, it might be easy to think so. After all, what these authors are doing obviously works well for them. But there’s the rub: what they’re doing works well in their situation.

Now, I’m not advocating the position that there are no universal truths in the world or in writing, which I would argue is a philosophically invalid and practically worthless position. What I am advocating is the notion that these universal truths only apply within a given context.

For example, let’s say you’re trying to design a book cover for your Tolkienesque epic fantasy novel. You might think, “Well, book covers that have tramp-stamped female characters on motorcycles holding shotguns are selling like mad. I’ll think I’ll jump on that bandwagon.” Doing so would absolutely ruin your book and everyone who read it would hate it. Why? Because books with that kind of cover only sell well in the context of urban fantasy novels, not epic fantasy novels.

The reason context is so important is because our careers, our writing styles, and our stories, could potentially manifest themselves in a vast number of ways, some of which could be very unlike others who have written in our respective genre. While a particular method for getting published or selling books might have worked for one person, that same method applied by someone with very different personal qualities or writing strengths could crash and burn.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have anything to learn from those who have come before us. It does mean that we have to know ourselves, our situations, and our writing, and that we have to know how to apply the things we’ve learned in a way that benefits us. While our writing and our careers may look nothing like someone like Stephen King’s, there is still much we can learn from him (if you haven’t already, read his book On Writing).

So if I were to give you one piece of writing advice that is universal, it would be this: do what is appropriate for your story, and do what is appropriate for your career.