A Writer's Paradise

The Powers Process

I am about to attempt the Tim Powers Plotting Process.

This after I sat down with fourteen colors of Sharpie marker and did a kind of mind-map thing:

It's not done, but it got down the basics. I sort of understand the larger issues of plot and theme to this project. What project? This project:

Yes. The icon says: "It's a post-apocalyptic far-future medieval assassins story," which is true and just about all that I'll say about it.

Anyway, that's where I'm going.

I may emerge unscathed.

Triage

From Steve Palina's 33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity (vol. 2):

#21: Triage. Save the lives of your important projects by killing those that are going to die anyway.

Sounds more like euthanasia than triage, but it's an interesting idea to apply to writing--if you're like me and you have trouble focusing on just one project at a time.

For those of you who don't have that problem, move along. There's nothing to see here.

Becoming that hot sweaty natural-born writer I know I can be....

Thanks for the comments on the dead horse entry; I'll respond in depth this weekend, 'cause I think there are some things to say about all that, but I must mull first.

Instead, I'm going to point out this awesome link to Humans are hot, sweaty, natural-born runners, an article that discusses persistence hunting and various other anthropological goodies (I was an anthro major for those just joining us). This article also gives humanity a nice pep-talk, working against "the long and firmly held belief that humans are the animal world’s biggest wimps"--and it also has a lot to say about humanity's legacy of endurance.

It made me think about persistence as being akin to endurance. We all know that persistence is pretty damn important in the writing game. It takes endurance and persistence on both sides of the equation--the writing and the seeking of publication. I've managed to maintain pretty good persistence for the seeking of publication since the beginning of this endeavor. Since April 2003, I don't think a day has gone by when I haven't had SOME story sitting in some slushpile somewhere. I've slacked off a bit since the beginning, unfortunately; I let the rewrite bugs bite me too often, and that means that I don't always turn stories back around the day they're rejected. But I try. I don't let them often sit more than a week, and rarely more than a month.

(OF COURSE this current month is a terrible example of my persistence, since I have three stories out of circulation--one rewrite, two waiting for Interzone's brief email window (yes, two; I know Jetse will turn around an answer on the first one fast enough to make it worth holding two).)

But where my endurance is less impressive is in the writing. I write a lot, and often, but I don't finish much. Year to date, I've finished one short story--and I didn't finish much last year (four short stories). I lack focus. And, you know? Focus is part of persistence. You can't chase eight different zebras, hoping to tire them out; you gotta hunt one zebra at a time--to extend the anthropology metaphor a bit.

And yes, I've known all of this for a while. But it really struck home today. When I realized I'd sold 1/4 of the inventory I finished writing last year. With one sale.

So, yeah. My new thing is going to be focus. In a big way.

True Confession

....and I didn't write beyond a few hundred words today.

Just... couldn't. Didn't. Something. This is the dark side of stunt-writing, my friends. The dark side of that, and wanting to have some weekend, and making Moroccan Chicken Pie and blueberry strudel, and having a brief morose period brought on by inappropriate Googling, and watching Rome with my pal so she could escape Superbowl.

Word on the street, though, is that this stunt-writing project looks kinda viable, and it will be added in to the rotation soon. Hey, I have almost a quarter of a novel done that I didn't have done before, so it's not like it hurts.

Six point five hours of sleep

I headed to bed at 3:30. End of scene. End of sanity. MS is only 17,000 words. My wordcount slowed terribly as I once more got caught in the research trap, and deleted some stuff that no longer worked.

Mr. Haskell, who is cheerleading this whole thing rather in the manner of Sarge from Gomer Pyle, is not happy about the deletions. "You cannot delete! You cannot edit! You are to be writing!"

I'd probably not be past 20k without deletions, though, and honestly. There was just no place those two scenes *fit* in the MS anymore. They referenced things that did not happen in ways that were impossible to adapt.

It's 10. I'm up, I'm tired, and I snoozed the last hour, ricocheting from dreams about the novel to dreams about writing it to dreams about Aeon Flux infiltrating a vampire mansion. Rough night.

Don't ask me how...

But day two was much harder than day one. I've only accomplished about 5,000 words today, bringing the project total up to 15k.

I'd say that just possibly I care slightly too much about the project to write gonzo fast. I do occasionally correct errors, and pause to think the next step through, and today I had to pause to research clothing. Like, did Ancient Romans have buttonholes and cotton. (Ancient Romans *did* have cotton, but it was a luxury like silk!) And how did Regency underpants get fastened? (With adjustable tapes in the back--for the men. As far as I can discern, Regency ladies did not wear the underpants.)

I also had to pause to take a nap, to quiet my unhappy tummy, and to eat shepherd's pie... dinner somehow took two hours, beyond the napping and tummying. So that was a substantial chunk of time out.

The good news is, with the nap in me, I can probably keep working for three more hours. I have no idea if I can scrape together more than three thousand words in the next three hours, but hey. I'm not unhappy with my progress, regardless of the stated goal. It's 15,000 more words of novel than I had thirty-six hours ago.

Beginning Again

With a solid 7 hours of sleep in, I should feel more lively, but I think I'm coming down with a cold. I hope the tea-pounding helps.

I'm not quite sure where the last hour went. I was awake at 9. My husband started investigating my iPod to see why it didn't start playing beautiful music this morning at 8:30 (as requested), and suddenly we were watching "White and Nerdy" and looking at my Montana photos, and somehow that took 45 minutes. So, I didn't even get a shower in... I am doing that great filthy-writer-in-jammies all day thing that has always been my dream. Or something. I mean, not that genre writers do this. I'm talking about those mainstream folks.

It's probably time to confess that I'm working on the novel-length version of The Roman and the Regency... I didn't want to jinx it before, when I thought I might cut out and start something else if this didn't flow. But it's flowing. I actually like what I'm writing, which is a good sign (for me) for a first draft.

My other option was to write the alien conquest novel that has been simmering for years now--I believe I wrote a 10 or 20k draft of the first bits and thought it was a short story almost four years ago, and was shopping it as such until my writing group forced me to re-evaluate. So, it's ready to be written... and has been... I didn't want to waste my great concept on my first novel skills, so I've held off. But I think after the Tarot Book and revising The Bitter Road and puttying up the holes in R&R, I'll be ready to try for alien conquest.

It was mostly a matter (I think I mentioned in my first post) of deciding what novel it would better to have as a 50k draft in the end. And it's much easier to flesh out a time-travel Regency from 50k than something that must needs be twice that long.

And honestly, those were the only two books I could sit down and write madly on for a weekend and not have to stop and grow plot for (like I've already had to do with the Tarot Book).

I attribute this to the fact that I notecarded them both at one point. I notecarded R&R on my honeymoon--so three years ago--and I notecarded the conquest story longer ago than that. (In fact, that was my first foray into notecarding.) For both of them, I used a combination of Holly Lisle's fast plotting and the Marshall Plan, which I will detail later if there is any interest (or I get bored and need a topic).

No, I don't think this is necessary, and I'm not working from my notecards at all; but it did help shape the plot in my mind, and I have a good sense of the turning points that I don't know that I would have otherwise. Something for me to consider, as I create my process.

Beyond that, I had written short story treatments of both of the ideas, though in totally different fashions. I wrote the short story "The Roman and the Regency" and it was only when I was cutting it down to fit into a short story that I realized I had a novel on my hands (later I notecarded); and for the alien conquest story, I knew I had to know exactly how the aliens invaded, even though I was starting the story a year after the aliens arrived--so I picked a secondary character and told her, uh, origin story as a short, and that's "Almanac for the Alien Invaders." It made me exceedingly happy to have it done and thought out; I hope it sells and all, but it did an important job if it doesn't.

Okay, done multi-tasking here... breakfast is done. I must write. After I turn on the thing on my iPod that keeps the music all at the same volume. Grr.

More breaks

Seems imperative that I need to look away from the screen more often. I just had a little bit of the dizzies there for a moment. So I changed into my jammies, and resolved also to stop doing so much research. Right now I have 31 separate tabs open in Firefox, and have only made a 100-word gain in the past half-hour. But! But! Centurions! I must know everything about centurions!

I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to make it to 10,000 words tonight as I am rapidly approaching that point where, if I were a Sim, I'd fall asleep standing up in a puddle of my own piss. Sort of. I am a bit more awake than that because of all the tea, but I've also reached the point where I can't actually ingest any more liquid, and the kidneys haven't kept up with the intake.

But, really, this is all going quite well for now. Except for the dizzy-sleepy-tea-tummy parts.

Update

Total words: 5613. I'm 10% done with the weekend's goals, and half-way to being done for tonight.

I'm only on my second mug of tea, since I curdled my original second mug. I'm trying to figure out what I'm missing in terms of snack foods. Maybe I just need gum. I wish there were a way to chew and chew and chew without getting full--that wasn't gum. Beef jerky is as close as I've ever come, but you do get full of that eventually. In any case, no beef jerky in the house. Durn.

And so we begin

50,000 words this weekend... or bust.

My husband said this morning, "Frazzled, sleep-deprived, pushing-herself Mer is so funny. This is going to be the best weekend ever."

With the aid of my nissan thermos-mugs, I have two mugs of tea ready to go, a sleeve of digestive biscuits, the playlist on the iPod going, and Jane Austen the action figure watching over me. Onward.

My plan, this weekend

Stunt-writing: it's not just for NaNoWriMo anymore.

I've actually wanted to do a three-day novel challenge for a while now, but I never seem to find out about them until after the fact. And it's no fun to go it alone. So, I won't: I am as ready to write a novel in three days as I'll ever be.

Not that I'll write a novel in three days, by anything other than the most technical definitions--if I'm lucky and smart and don't trip over my own feet. But I have chosen a project that lends well to later padding out with subplotting, so I hope to have a beginning, a middle, and an end on paper by Sunday night, and hopefully, 50,000 words to go with them. (If not 50, then 40.) I'll fill in the rest at a later date (say, this summer, after the Tarot Book is drafted and The Bitter Road is rewritten).

No, it probably doesn't look like a good idea from the outside. My husband thinks it's impossible, in fact (in a loving way. Mostly he said, "So, by my calculations, you'll get about three hours of sleep in a fifty hour period. Uh..." I am touched that he knows my hourly word-rate so well). (And I've only ever written 10,000 words in a day once before, and here I'm calling upon myself to double that two days in a row.)

Probably the most interesting thing about this (to me) has been choosing my project. On a given day, I touch on three to six of my novel concepts in my mental perigrinations--and they're hardly ever the same six novels (though usually one or two stays at the forefront for weeks at a time, and my whole Journey as a Writer (TM) appears to be keeping things at the forefront long enough to finish something). So there's quite a merry-go-round in my head. In a given week, I may have thought of plot points or characters or a world-building detail for up to thirty-odd different novels. And that doesn't even include short stories.

(Do you see why I need so many notecards, now? Because I write almost each of these thoughts down. I used to write them all in notebooks and transcribe them into computer files or onto notecards every few months, depending; now I just write directly to notecard unless I forgot my notecard holder, at which point any scrap of paper will do, and it's not actually that much more efficient, but I fool myself that it is.)

I have a little mental game about this Door of Revolving Plots, and the game itself varies. Sometimes I feel rich in thought, too rich, perhaps, and wonder when I'll ever get the time and gumption to sit down and convert all these notecards into actual stories. Other times, I feel poor in thought, and wonder how I think any one of these things would actually make a decent novel. Either way, I remain convinced I am doing something wrong, and the extremes of both games involve sitting down and making a list of every book in my head at the moment, ranked according to how complete the plot is in my head, or how close I am to finishing them, or to starting them, or whatever. I played the game today (I felt poor), and could only come up with thirty-seven books. I've since thought of a dozen I forgot at lunchtime.

REGARDLESS. Making a list of all my possible options for this weekend's madness was fruitful, because I did come up with two options, I think. I like both very well, but I think I'll go with the shorter one, because 50,000 words is much closer to 80,000 than 100,000, and the goal at the end of this weekend is to be closer to finished with something than closer to the middle of yet another project.

Anyway. That's where I'll be this weekend. I won't probably post any journal entries about it except word counts, because journal entries take time.

You know...

Being sick and cranky, I may not be in any state to wax nostalgic for how much I wish Sheila Simonson and Marion Chesney were still writing Regencies and Doris Egan was still writing anything that was able to be held in my hand... (When favorite authors of mine appear to stop publishing, I prowl those big volumes of Contemporary Literary Biography at the library looking for noms de plumes that I might have missed, that's how desperate I get.)

This is not like lamenting the fact that there are no more Burroughs Tarzan books to be read, or that Patrick O'Brien died. This is just my Entitled Modern Reader lamenting the economics of the situation.

For, AFAIK, Sheila and Marion and Doris are still capable of writing those things, insomuch that they possess fingers and brains. My Entitled Modern Reader Brain likes to pretend they have stacks of unpublished novels moldering away, held down by the cruel machinations of the publishing system. And to that vision I say, FIE. Seriously. I would spend double-to-triple the cost of a normal book to get even a lulu.com version of anything those three authors put out in the right genre.

Which is not to say that they should. It's just saying I would.

My Angry at the Entitlement Gnomes Modern Writer Brain thinks quite differently, of course. But I'd like to think that if the Big Show comes... and then goes... that I'll go ahead and throw my hare-brained ideas onto lulu.com or the next iteration, devil may care. 'Cause, hopefully, there'll be at least one person out there sitting around muttering imprecations and wondering why is there no other Regency as good as Lady Elizabeth's Comet, or why are there no more light-but-deep science fiction about folklorists? And hopefully also waving their checkbooks.

But that's a lot of ifs and a lot of suppositioning. The reality is, I'm stuck in a world where I nearly bounced off the wall to discover a short story by Sheila Simonson I didn't know about. But once that's read... back to the Shack of Infinite Sadness for me.

The next best thing, of course, would be to just write a variety of homages to these ladies.

So I'll probably do that.

On the other hand, I don't know how to give up

...sometimes I think the real problem with The Bitter Road is that it's a book about setting as much as it is anything else, and I can't properly write a book about mountains while living in a flat land.

I'm going to see how I feel about shelving the book after I visit the Grand Tetons in a few weeks.

(In the meantime, I'm going to declare this short story month, part deux--helpful now that it's half over and I've already been writing short stories for all of it. The goal is to do my rewrites on the two stories I completed recently, to finish a third and rewrite it, and to rewrite one to two more stories. If I am successful, this will bring my inventory up from five to nine or ten. This is still three shy of my ideal--I have a superstition that I sell best when there are thirteen stories in inventory, though lately I've had ample evidence to the contrary--but it's a good start, and enough to feel like I'm in the game whilst working on novels again.)

My Pledge

My pledge to you: I will never write a book or a short story about a novelist or a short story writer.

Note that journalists, bloggers and poets aren't out of the question. Editors, dictionary-makers and science writers may yet make it. Newsletter writers, typographers and publishers--all welcome. But no novelists. I hate everything I've read with novelist characters. I can't imagine that anything would be any better with short story writers. Mostly, I hate these characters because they're such obvious stand-ins for the author. So, I could conceivably break my promise to you if I wrote a novelist who wasn't a stand-in for me. Maybe.

Admittedly, I've never read Misery or seen the movie. I'll concede that one might be ok. Crazed fans breaking limbs to force the writer to produce sequels? That's kinda fun.

But otherwise? I will almost assuredly not break my promise. Not easily, anyway. Yep.