Returning to the Land of Blogs

It's been a while. So much has happened, and is happening, both in my world and the world at large. Most on my mind nowadays are the wars in Ukraine and Israel because I have family in both countries, so you can imagine what my news feed looks like. My husband recently commented that he doesn't know how I can stand to look at it at all with all the horror that's a lot more immediate than the usual human-nature view of "this sort of thing happens to someone else". But what am I supposed to do, wait for the news to tell me my home town's been overrun by terrorists? Not going to happen, so I read what's in the news feed. It's scary, I worry about my family, and it takes some doing to remember to concentrate on things I actually have control over.

Speaking of which. I've been writing consistently and am a lot closer to finishing the Magical Novel. Yes, there's still no title, and since this is only the first draft it's ok. I figure there's plenty of time to pick a title, otherwise I'd be reminding myself of that kid in John Corey Whaley's Where Things Come Back who kept a running list of novel titles but didn't actually write any novels. Funny thing about first drafts: I thought I'd be done at around 70K word mark, but now that I'm almost there (or am there, it can be hard to tell with writing longhand in a notebook and not typing up the pages too often) it's quite obvious that it'll be closer to 100K, or even higher.

The notebook helps a lot. The Internet is officially the writer's worst enemy when it comes to being productive and getting words on the page, so by eliminating the temptation I'm able to get quite a bit accomplished. Well, quite a bit for a slow writer. I've been trying for a minimum of 14 notebook pages a week, which comes out to 3200+ words a week on average, nothing to sneeze at for a part-time writer with a full-time day job. I am thinking about cutting back a little though. I've been writing so much that I haven't been reading at all, and everybody knows writers need to read. I've got a comfortable reserve of pages to send to my crit group, so I'll be slowing down for the foreseeable future. Will let you know how that goes.

To keep myself on track I went even more old-school than pen and paper: I got a chalk board, drew a grid, and have been logging my daily page count in it. Seeing those numbers line up strokes the ego like you wouldn't believe, and my husband has an excuse to be even more supportive of my efforts than he is already, which is nice.

Also, revisions loom large on the writerly horizon. I keep catching myself thinking about how to tighten the plot, how to streamline the characters, what to cut and what to add. I'm more a pantster than a planner (although writing an outline before NaNoWriMo definitely helped), so plotting like this feels like I'm on a new level, feels grown up in a way. Kind of scary and exciting at the same time.

I've been reading more about writing lately, and here the Internet is actually helpful. Twitter alone is a  great resource, through it I found mswishlist.com and now check it regularly. My other 2 go-tos are Chuck Wendig's Terribleminds and Anne R. Allen's blog. If you aren't frequenting these two and/or mining the archives for treasure you really should. Because there's treasure and everybody's welcome.

So that's what I've been up to. Hope your writing's going well too!

The long hiatus

My friends, I haven’t been posting in a very long time. My apologies for that. I don’t know when I’ll be back. I haven’t been reading much lately because for over three months now I’ve been dealing with health issues in the family, and at the same time watching events unfold in my home country, Ukraine.
Here in the States my husband has had two surgeries since November, one ER visit, and his existing conditions became aggravated because he’s been unable to do his therapy exercises. He is healing slowly, but we still have a long way to go before he is as close to normal as possible.
In Ukraine a protest became a standoff, which became an armed conflict, which in turn became a revolution. Close to a hundred people died, hundreds were injured, many disappeared, a president was voted out by the parliament, a new government was established, and before the people could celebrate their blood-soaked victory a war broke out. You may have heard about all that on the news. If you haven’t, here’s a post on the New York Review of Books, which will shed some light on the events, and here’s a slide-show that will show you what the NYTBR can’t show in a blog post. These posts are a few days old, and the situation changes hourly, but they do provide a background. As of this morning no shots have been fired, but the Russian fleet has given the Ukrainian armed forces till 5 AM tomorrow morning to surrender, after that they will begin full-on attack. All of my family is still in Ukraine, and although they are not in the middle of the conflict, that may change at any time. You see, Ukraine is not that large of a country, only roughly the size of Texas.
As you can see a lot has been going on for me, a lot to watch and a lot to worry about. I’ll be back when I can. Thank you for bearing with me.

Resurfacing after NaNoWriMo

My friends, it’s been a long month. While I didn’t “win” NaNoWriMo in the strict sense, I did meet my personal goal of finishing 30K words while keeping up with the necessities of life, such as work and family, and managing an emergency or two, so I’m still declaring it a win. Here are five main things I learned during November, in no particular order:

1) Getting butt in chair and fingers on keyboard works. If you do that – you are ready to write; if you don’t, guess what, no words will appear on the page. Seems like a no-brainer, but for me it was doubly true because I work best while I’m working, and even if I’m stuck, being at that computer means that when the bottleneck clears words go right where they need to be. Walking away is just giving your brain permission to get sidetracked. Stay in that chair, folks, show your brain who’s boss.

2) The internet must be off. I love the internet and there’s always something that I want to look up or look into, so I had to make sure the internet was simply not available during writing time. I turned off Wi-Fi and very sternly told myself No whenever my brain started to look for excuses to turn it back on.

2.5) Same goes for anything that’s a distraction for you. Family members watching your favorite show without you or listening to the radio too loud? Earplugs work wonders. Your spouse opening the door to your writing space every five minutes to ask how it’s going or whether you want some tea/cookies/a hug/to pet the dog who’s oh so adorable? Tell them, very kindly but firmly, that you love them and appreciate that they want to help, but they’ve got to go occupy themselves with something else because you’re writing and you’re going to keep writing until you’re done with the daily goal.

3) Sometimes you need to turn on the Wi-Fi and do some research. Toward the middle of the month I got stuck, and even though I knew what the next plot landmark was I simply couldn’t move forward. It took a bit of thinking to realize that I couldn’t visualize my characters’ environment, and turns out I have to be able to imagine where they are, what they see and smell, what they eat and who they interact with besides each other. I put my writing on hold and turned to the Internet. Guess what, it worked. I was able to fill in the sensory details and the story started to move forward again.

4) If winging it is not producing results prepare an outline. I don’t know why I thought that I could wing it. Everybody who knows how much I love spreadsheets and how I planned for the last vacation teases me about it. The outline allowed me to not worry about the major events of the plot, and instead I could focus on my characters and on tying the plot points together into one coherent whole.

5) You’re probably underestimating yourself. Don’t. With everything that’s been going on I averaged 1000 words a day. I’ve never thought that I could produce that much in a month, under any circumstances. When I took the stack of pages that were the result of 6 months of work before November and the stack from November, and compared them, the difference was eye-opening. The November pages probably aren’t all that good, but you know what, they’re there, on paper, and the first draft is just material for the second draft anyway. So no more excuses, there’s proof that I can do it, tangible and undeniable, and if I allow for reading time I know I can manage 500 words a day, no problem.

So there you have it, some pretty good lessons to learn. Now let’s go write.

NaNoWriMo Prep & Color-Coded Index Cards

Now that I’ve gotten the news about season 3 of Sherlock out of my system, kind of (see previous post), my brain’s back to thinking about November. NaNoWriMo.

I’m joining the hordes this time around. My writing group, Chattanooga Women Writers, is doing NaNoWriMo our way: we’ve decided to set our goal at 30,000 words and we’ll be working on our current novels, because although we’re allowed to suck we want to cut back on suckage as much as possible while still writing feverishly. We’re planning writing sessions during which there will be no talking or internet (that’s the plan anyway), and we’re planning on emerging victorious from this crucible of creativity and hard work.

So in order to make it possible for me to pound out 1000 words a day (which is a lot for me), I’ve been writing a pretty darn detailed outline of my WIP. I’m about 2/3 done and something has occurred to me: color-coded index cards would be very helpful in keeping track of character arcs, sub-plots, world-building and basically who said what when, and what day of the week, or month, it’s supposed to be. It’s kind of ridiculous, I can remember other people’s books in minute detail, mine – not so much. Maybe it’s because my brain is too busy constantly working on “what’s next” to remember two chapters ago. Who knows. One thing is clear though: index cards, or at least a color-coded spreadsheet might be an order. Now there’s an idea…

19 January 2014 on PBS

Write it and forget it. For a while, anyway.

I’ve done all sorts of writing things in the last several months: I’ve outlined, I’ve written, I’ve renamed a character and then renamed her again, I’ve scrapped whole sections immediately after writing them because they just didn’t feel right. What I haven’t done is read what I’ve written several weeks after writing it, which is exactly what I did on Monday for my critique group.

This experience proved to be nothing short of eye-opening. I saw some things I wasn’t proud of (grammar and spelling, I’m staring right at you), some that surprised me (one scene that gave me trouble when I wrote it read better than the one that came easily), and some that gave me pause (I’m not trying to write a YA novel, why did this section read like it belongs in one?). Sometimes it was downright embarrassing: you know it’s bad when you wrote the scene and you yourself can’t tell who’s talking. And it read just fine when I checked the pages before sending them out!

By the time I finished the two chapters I fully understood what Stephen King was talking about when he recommended leaving the book alone long enough for you to forget what exactly is in it. Doing that reveals all kinds of first-draft issues that hide in plain sight when you go over and over the same text in a short period of time. It also allows for more consistent revisions when you get to that step, whenever that might be. I know one thing: I won’t be revising until at least a month after the book is finished.