These words don’t count.

Nano frenzy iz here.

Actually, I’m having a *lot* of fun – I just nudged past the 20k mark which, considering my goal for the week was 11,700, is not too shabby at all. What’s possibly more important is that I’m really enjoying writing this novel. Considering I’m a practitioner of what is variously known as the crappy first draft, or the ‘exploratory draft’ (version zero), this is looking surprisingly strong, when I stack it up against previous initial drafts.

 

There’s a few things I’m doing differently this year. First off, I’m using Holly Lisle’s Boot Camp for writers ‘Think Sideways’ course – immensely practical and designed to be used to write a novel alongside, so it works perfectly. What’s key is that it’s given me a better understanding of both plot dynamics and how to better use conflict to keep the story wheels spinning. That means the outline I’m working from is stronger than previous outlines, to start with.

I think the second element, also connected to Holly’s lessons, is that although I’ve done less worldbuilding and character development in terms of volume, what I do have is relevant, so I already have my characters straight, so they’re hitting the ground running without any of the initial probing to establish their identities. It also means that when it comes to throwing in the odd twist or ratcheting things up, I know where to hit them so it properly hurts.

Those are the direct-line techniques I’m using.

Others are more about focus and concentration.

I’m not letting myself get hung up on correct words or beautiful sentence construction – I’m just getting the story down. So although a part of me goes ‘hey, hang on, you can’t use ’strode’ again because someone else did that two lines ago’, I’m able to go ‘doesn’t matter, we’ll fix it in the edit. No time to think of a better word now’, and just plugging on with it.

I start a new notebook for each novel, and it carries everything from the initial idea sketches to the worldbuilding, outline, and eventual edit notes. What I’m doing this time that I’ve not done before is keeping a daily journal in that same notebook. That’s where the potential diversions go, the list of names of additional characters I throw in as we go along, and other ephemera (such as the name of the currency). And, at the end of the day, I note my daily word-count, the total word-count, and the number of scenes completed. That’s working well – it means less rummaging through the MS to find the name of such-and-such a person, and it also helps me keep track of any little surprises along the way. One such is a new character who popped up to fill a role in one scene, but then surfaced again in another. At the end of the writing session, it occured to me that I could use him in a couple of other ways, which might give some interesting depths to the story, or at least add another dimension of conflict. But by keeping him out of the story for now, tucked away in the notebook, I’m giving my muse time to play with him away from the main story. I’m not committing to him yet – I certainly don’t want him to derail or hijack the whole story, but he *is* interesting.

And finally, the music. I’ve got into the habit of using music to block out background distractions, and have gradually developed that, so that the music I listen to is in some way connected to the overall ‘feel’ of the novel. So, for example, when I wrote DISCONNECTION, I listened to a lot of electronica, and for CONTAIN THIS HOUR, a lot of 40’s big band. I’m not sure whether it’s just because I believe it’s so that my mood changes to fit the era in which I’m writing, or if there is something in the way the music is structured that reflects the underlying social mores of the period, but it definitely has an impact. In this instance, although I’m not writing an historic novel, there are a lot of oriental elements in the structure of Sere’s society, so Koto music is the sound of choice. I don’t know that I’m learning anything about it, since I don’t actively ‘hear’ anything while I’m writing (it only impacts on my awareness as I come out of a writing phase), but I’m sure it’s percolating around my subconscious somewhere and informing the ‘voice’ I’m using in the novel. It’s certainly a different voice to any I’ve used before, and it’s fascinating, wondering if the music is an influence or a consequence of that process.

Anyway, none of these words count towards that Nano total, and having stayed up late last night to push through the 20k barrier, I’m a little weary. So, for that reason, I’m going to stop whittering on and get back to work.

For all you fellow Nano-ers out there, I hope your muse is treating you kindly and the words are flowing well. For everyone else, I can only apologise for my incoherence. Normal service will be resumed at the end of November.

Let the madness begin …

It’s the beginning of November, and nothing else matters except getting those 50,000 words down, at approximately 1,700 per day, every day for the next few weeks.

I’m excited and a little bit nervous, but overall glad to be finally getting into this novel – it’s been waiting to be written for a long time, and it will be an absolute blast to get it out. Particularly so after a year of working (mostly) on old material in edits and rewrites, trying to get them up to standard. Here’s how it goes:

A skilled courtesan in the opulent decadence of the moon-world Sere finds herself the nexus between four political forces fighting for power after she rebels against her father’s decision to sell her to a political rival.

I do hope I can get that inner editor properly switched off, because I need to be able to just write, oblivious (largely) to quality and just focus on the story itself and in unravelling that. Having an unhelpful person leaning over my shoulder pointing out grammar slips, inelegant sentences and the odd typo is really, truly not needed. I’m working on the assumption that it’ll take me a week or so to get properly into the rhythm of it, so I’m not going to kill myself this week (I’ll save that for the final week of November), but with such a clear vision of the story and its setting, the characters and the outline, the anticipation is mouth-watering.

So, for that very reason, I’m keeping this short so I can get on with some *real* writing, instead of just talking about it.

Wish me luck?

Whoosh! There goes another week …

We had our first full week back at school, and I can’t believe how fast it shot past.

It’s been a tough week for us all. After the comedown of last weekend’s excitement, it’s been all about getting our heads down and re-establishing routines and, for me, starting to tackle the holiday backlog of projects and deferred housekeeping – in the house, the garden, in my writing and in my business.

In a way, it’s a huge relief to move away from the unstructured chaos of the holidays and back into something approaching regularity – we’re not quite there yet, but we’re pretty close.  In others, the expectation that I/we would just drop straight back into it and hit the ground running was unrealistic.

For one thing, Bellaboo has decided she no longer needs her post-lunch nap, so trying to adapt my business working routines is going to be tricky: losing that two hours of uninterrupted time is going to be hard to replace. I think, in theory, that I should be able to get most of it done with her around, but it’s frustrating because it’ll mean that everything takes that bit longer because my concentration can’t be as focussed as it otherwise would be.

I also didn’t anticipate how much the switch back to a ‘working’ routine would drain me – and the children – and that a certain amount of ‘easing back into it’ is in order. Thankfully, the school didn’t load them up with homework, so despite protests about it all being hard work (it is), I think we’ll be back into the swing of it.

The big disappointment, for me, has been that my writing has been slipping. I’d hoped (again) to write six scenes for the CONTAIN THIS HOUR series, but in between exhaustion, unanticipated parental visits, dance class and a night of insomniac infantness, I’ve only got three done.

Possibly, I wouldn’t have even got that, because my lack of any sort of real progress on these stories had started to build itself up into a massive, monolithic monster of self-fulfilling failure, and I was finding myself starting to look for excuses why I shouldn’t write it, that I needed to make some massive changes to the basic premises of the story, that I didn’t have the skills to tackle it YET, that I should shelve it and move on.

But being the persistent devil that I am, in a non-quitting sort of way, I wasn’t prepared to give it up without a fight.

It turns out that a simple routine switch did the trick – I decided to have a shot at writing in the morning, and shifting my textile work to the evening … and it worked very and extremely well. I guess not being tired was a major factor, but I also think that just putting myself into that mental state of “I am going to sit down here and for the next hour I am going to do nothing else but work on this story” was enough to jolt it loose, because I’ve successfully worked on it in the evenings since then. Textiling, I can do when Bella is awake. Writing novels? Not a chance, so the loss of that nap means I can’t make the routine switch permanent. Perhaps, when she goes to pre-school NEXT September, I’ll experiment with the switch again and see how it goes, although, of course, phonecalls &etc can only happen during business hours, so we’ll have to see how that goes.

What is a big (re-)learning point for me is that I do need to re-establish working without distractions. The first part resurfaced quite quickly – that I need to plug headphones in and listen to music appropriate to the genre/period/style in which I’m writing. This week, LastFM has saved me, and I’m actually getting quite into big band music. The second remembered habit came out of the daytime writing session - emails, forums and blogs need to wait until AFTER the daily writing goals have been achieved, and whilst I’m working on them, I must stay disconnected from all distractions.

It has amazed me how easily all those hard-won learning points from earlier THIS year fell away over the slack, pressure-free days of the holidays and how it has taken so much effort to bring them all back on-line so I can get back to productive work. I suppose I need to be grateful that I *am* remembering my effective habits and gradually slipping off the ones that hold me back, but it’s made me feel like my writerly mojo is something that does need to be trained, and kept in good condition, just as an athlete trains their body, to be able to perform well. And, without that regular training, it’s become flabby and less strong, and what was simple is now painful and tiring.

What I’m hoping is that I haven’t lost too much condition, and that I can ramp back up to peak performance pretty quickly: on the plan, I need to have CTH finished by the end of September. Given that it’s projected at 8 stories of 3-5k each, then I think it’s going to be feasible to work 2-3 a week so I should, should, just about squeak in, given a clean run at the rest of the month.

Fingers crossed, eh?

It’s torture

I’ve been itching to write CONTAIN THIS HOUR for so long now, and I had last week scheduled out to start into it – a scene a day, over six days, would have given me pretty much the first couple of stories for the collection.

Did it happen?

Of course not.

I couldn’t settle, couldn’t fix my mind to it, couldn’t set aside the other distractions and demands on my time to give this story, this little, precious, gem, my full attention and let it out.

Admittedly, I did have a lot going on last week. The children went back to school, so there was a fair amount of rushing about to get them ready, and I needed to get myself back into the regularity of that routine, and re-establish my own rhythms in the house after a long 7 week break from reality. One of the most important has been getting back to my textile work after a long break – establishing priorities, schedules and a workplan to develop a small collection of autumn/winter pieces for the gallery, AND starting to work up a couple of commissions I have orders for. On top of all that, we hosted my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary celebrations over the past weekend. All-in-all, I guess I had a lot on my plate.

What I can’t quite figure out is whether these are excuses, or reasons. I can come up with more: I owe some crits to my reading groups, the pressure of them is weighing on me, diverting my energy, even though I have time scheduled later in the month to work on them.

At the end of the week, I’d managed the grand total of a single scene, a mere 1800 words. It’s dreadful: to have this desire, this urge to write, and then to be unable to fulfil it. It’s pure torture. I want my writing mojo back. I want to be able to sit infront of the laptop and let the words pour out, to let the story come alive on the page.

Right now, it feels as though I’m having to rip it out of my soul, screaming and kicking, and fight everything in my life to keep it there.

I hope it gets easier.

CONTAIN THIS HOUR

The holidays are drawing to a close, and already the evenings are setting chilly.

As the summer draws to its inevitably conclusion, t’o-m has observed “you’re about to start writing again, aren’t you?”.

How well he knows me.

Yes, the signs are unmistakeable. I am absent-minded (even more so than usual), grumpy, unable to settle to anything, frittering time away on procrastinatory jobs.

The time has come to face facts: the pre-planning is done, the outlining is done. I’ve read as much background and research data as I need to, and I’ve drilled several old ladies on their wartime experience.

I am all set and ready to go on CONTAIN THIS HOUR, but, as always, standing on the precipice is a pretty daunting prospect – nothing but a freefall of some 50,000 words before me, and little in the way of safety net, parachute or bungee line to anchor me.  It’s the same every time: I want to write the story – it’s been eating away at me for months, and it was a couple of years ago that the idea latched itself on to me. I *need* to write the story – it’s a departure from fantasy, but it’s a departure I want to make, an opportunity to explore a different landscape, to work on a smaller scale, to use different techniques to express the conflicts and resolutions that interconnect this group of stories.

So what’s holding me back?

Nothing, in the physical sense, but there’s always the fear: the fear that the reality of the novella will not live up to the ethereal creation balanced in my head, that something will be lost in the clumsy transmutation from glimmering mind-jewel to corporeal creation, that I am simply not capable of producing the work that I want to generate here and now.

Of course, to expect to produce a perfect first draft is insane, and I know that I will need to polish whatever I produce to bring it up the sheen I see in my mind, but still ….. the fear remains.

The only way to conquer that fear is to face it squarely and to start the work, to do it, and when it’s there I shall see if I’ve spawned an angel or a monster.

So. The goal this week: to write a scene per night, and complete two of the stories this week.

Wish me luck?

Pain, passion, power

I put my fear back in its box
And I put the box where love is blind
And I walk in the dark
Where pain waits smiling
And I know that I can’t leave

I look at what I’ve become
I’m a pure and perfect lie
Like a blind man falling
Scared and helpless
And I’m still falling from grace

I’m so cold
Don’t leave me blind
I’m so cold
Don’t leave me blinded

I don’t know why I’m afraid
I don’t know why I’m unsure
And if it all comes down to
What I’m feeling
I don’t know what I can say

Gary Numan – Blind lyrics, Jagged Album (The link will take you to a youtube recording of the ‘Blind’ performance last night … I wish I could include the whole performance – I can highly recommend taking a look at more of the youtube recordings from last night ).

We went to see Gary Numan at the O2 Shepherds Bush Empire last night, and it was one of the most intense and overwhelming experiences of my life – the man is a legend and I could run out all sorts of cliches to attempt to describe how awesome he was. But I’m not going to do that … I learned some powerful writing lessons last night and I want to try to capture them.

Gary Numan by Arathrael (Flickr Creative Commons)

 

Gary Numan has been one of my heroes for more years than is comfortable to count, and over the past 30-odd years has produced a pretty constant stream of edgy, dark, epics that both keep his existing fans fanatically loyal and attract new fans to his work. As a performer, I guess that 30-odd years of live work has allowed him to hone his stage presence so that he can both hold and electrify an audience to the extent that they are totally with him for the duration. The age range at the concert last night was the broadest I’ve ever seen – from people in their late fifties, through people of my generation right down to teens for whom this must be amongst their first experiences of live music (and it’ll be a hard act to follow if it was).

As a writer, understanding that this is a desirable state of affairs – to have people so loyal to your work that even after 30 years they are still desperate to hear not only the *new* works but to hear again the old standards – made me think a little more deeply about how he does it, what it is about his work that commands such adoration and commitment.

I think there are a number of elements. Firstly, his themes are consistent – dark, edgy, futuristic – and his songs are both passionate and intelligent, and all have that epic electro-synth-rock drive underneath them … but even with this consistency, he’s evolving,  so that he’s moved with the times, from the punk energy of the Tubeway Army through the controlled emotional stillness of New Wave to the current incarnation – electro-rock-god. So, with his consistency in terms of theme, he’s constantly finding new ways of exploring those themes and keeping them relevant to his audience and the musical times in which we find ourselves. It’s an offering that satisfies the needs that drew his original fans to him in the first place, but gives some new twist to keep them interested, a new interpretation, a shift of emphasis and delivery that builds on what has gone before but does not repeat itself. And those same twists, reinterpretations and shifts are what draw in new fans.

That’s something worth thinking about: certainly, I think you could do a lot worse than to have people coming back to you again and again and pulling new people in with them, because your work has something powerful about it that compels such loyalty.

How does he do it?

Thinking about the structure of the set gives some clues. The music is epic in scope, theatrical and utterly compelling, rich, complex and carefully structured so that the contrasts of peaks and troughs add weight and emphasis to the lyrics. The set echoed this, with the slow build of tension and energy up through the songs until there was a massive explosion of power in the heavy guitar drive of Pure about midway through which carried everyone through to the emotional and poignant conclusion of ‘Prayer for the Unborn’.

To engage with and involve an audience to that extent, to carry them with you, is a feat every writer should aspire to, to evoke that heartsick yearning, the adrenaline rush of total commitment to the action, the tearful farewell ….

How does he do it?

And this is where one of Holly Lisle’s lessons is vividly illustrated, for me, at any rate. For copyright reasons and out of fairness to Holly, I won’t go into any detail about the lesson, which is part of her SURVIVAL SCHOOL FOR WRITERS, but, essentially, she says that in order to write powerful, compelling novels you need to draw fully on your experiences, emotions and understanding otherwise you just won’t deliver the goods. I read it, but her meaning didn’t fully dawn on me until last night.

What Gary Numan does so well is to take us to the dark places in our souls, to write out of the fear and pain and longing, the unacknowledged needs and terrors with such total, unflinching honesty that he provides a black box for his audience to place their own fears, believing that he understands and can take their pain and reshape it so that, just for a while, it becomes a little more bearable, to take it to a place where it can be shared and diminished and translated into something common and controllable.

To bring that level of passion and power into my writing, I need to be brave enough to face the levels of pain that go with it, to open up my own black box and take a walk into the darkness to find those levels of emotional honesty that will allow my stories and characters to engage with readers across the barriers of words and genres, to speak from one soul to another and to be strong  enough to bear it and go back again and again.

It’s daunting and frightening.

Those things are in the black box for a reason.

But perhaps that’s the boundary between those people who are artists and those who are not: artists access those dark, lonely places to express and articulate in words or music or images the shared fears and needs and emotions on behalf of everyone else who has to keep them under control and shut away so that society can function. And in return artists are permitted that necessary relief in child-like playfulness, to stay connected to a child-like sense of emotional honesty, intense sensory awareness and distance from social dissimulation in order to both offset and maintain that contact with the painful isolation of the black box.

To go there myself, for real, to allow all artifices to fall away, to fall from the grace of contentment and complacency? 

It’s daunting and frightening.

Those things are in the black box for a reason.

I’m scared and helpless, but I know that if I want to deliver the stories as they exist in my head, then I cannot pull back from those truths, I cannot diffuse them, I cannot distill their power without accepting their poison back into me and hoping that somehow I find the antidote before they drive me into madness.

I know I cannot leave.

A pause for thought ….

It pleased you to make me endless

You empty this frail vessel over and over

Then fill it with fresh life again.

You carry me like a hollow reed over hill and dale

Eternally breathing new melodies through me.

At the immortal touch of your hand

My little heart loses itself in joy.

Still you pour into me, and still there is room to fill.

(Deepak Chopra, Living the Infinite – On the Shores of Eternity, Poems from Tagore)

All in all, a good week – everything on the list is ticked off!! (which is nice), but plenty of food for thought, and so a pause to reflect on what I’ve done and learnt and a look at what I’ve got coming up seemed in order.

I started back into Holly Lisle’s Survival School for Writers (How to Think Sideways) and am up to lesson 14 now.  I’ve reached the conclusion that I do need to be applying this to actual writing, rather than just constructing theoretical situations to test out the techniques. I’ve got so much out of the lessons this week, that I’ve realised that I should be using these techniques on the edits I’ve got in progress AND in some of the short stories that are picking up multiple rejections.

I guess that’s pretty obvious, but eureka moments do shift the universe left a couple of paces and need time to adjust to . 

I’m already being pinged a lot of new ideas and fresh perspectives on existing stories, all of which help me explain and understand the issues with them, AND these ideas are showing me new ways of approaching them to resolve those problems. All of this is tremendously exciting and energising on the one hand, but on the other I feel rather daunted, because the amount of work and the urgency with which I want to carry it all out *right now* is overwhelming.

So, some sort of replanning/rethinking needs to happen.

I’m going to use the ‘time off’ whilst we’re away camping next week to figure it out, I hope.

I’m considering the planned CONTAIN THIS HOUR novella as a test-bed for the HTTS work. As it is, it’s an experimental piece, so I feel I have less to lose by ‘playing’ with it than with the SERE project which is really burning me, and it’s considerably shorter at around 40k planned words than the anticipated 120k-odd that SERE will need. To work HTTS together with the novella in this way fits, more or less, with the headline timings of the different pieces of work I’ve got lined up. 

Initially, I’d planned to clear the HTTS backlog in July, and then work on the ANNETH edits in August, with CONTAIN THIS HOUR dropping into September. What I’m now thinking is that switching CONTAIN THIS HOUR back into July/August will work, mostly because I can work offline in notebooks whilst we’re on holiday.

I did some work on the planning of it this afternoon whilst Honey was riding, and realised it was stalled because other than a pretty high-level concept and a handful of Philip Larkin poems, I had virtually nothing else driving it … so …. back to the drawing board. I’ve now got sentence, a clearer concept/outline query for it, and have started going back over the character pre-plans to flesh it out. I can already see that although it’s only planned as a little novella, it’s going to be a big task to get this story done right.

The first problem is how I weave together two apparently unrelated stories – to an extent I did this in DISCONNECTION, but this takes it a step further – so that they both share the same resolution or, perhaps more accurately, the resolution of the older story, the war-story, sets up the resolution of the contemporary story thread.

The second problem is that this story takes a big step out of the spec fic comfort zone I’ve been playing in up to now, and means that I need to tie this fictional world more closely to reality than I have done before – in novel terms, anyway, as a startling number of my short stories are firmly grounded in a contemporary reality. There’s a part of me that’s rebelling against this, telling me that I could switch it equally well into a spec-fic fantasy environment, but I know that’s just my fear talking: this is a mainstream story, a blending of a WWII love story with a more modern family morality tale and it will be written as such. It will *not* work as well as a spec-fic, because place, culture and historical period are as important to the story as the characters themselves.

A further contributing factor is that because this more mainstream, the themes are much smaller in scale – no epic fantasy heroic struggles here, no space opera political machinations to factor in. This is a human scale story, and the costs and benefits are personal, nor global. The world will not end if Florence’s does, and so getting to grips with her hopes, fears, needs and ambitions requires that bit more finesse. It will be interesting to see if I can manage the subtleties …

So: plenty of thinking done on CONTAIN THIS HOUR. What is equally fascinating to me is the corresponding level of new thoughts going into the novels waiting to be edited, and how this can be applied to my short story writing …. and how the heck I’m going to find the time to work them all in! The novel edits are pretty much scheduled, so that is less a concern, provided I can contain my own impatient enthusiasm to get started on them, but the short stories are more problematical: I guess I need to find some patience from somewhere and just turn them round, one at time, and get them back out there again, better and stronger than before.

I keep hoping that I will learn that time is immaterial, and that I do not need to get stressed that I have so much backlog stacked up, feeling that I have the almighty list constantly on my back like the old man of the sea. I have moments when I can accept that all things have their season, that there is no rush, that I do not need immediate gratification. The frequency and duration of such moments are increasing, so that I feel like that more often, and for longer.

But all too soon the panic returns, the looming sense of onrushing death and failure to shape my stories and ideas and put them out there, the eye of the clock watching me and demanding that I obey its command to perform now and now and now and now, whilst still the stories pour into me, and still there is room to fill.

I need to set aside this need to pour my stories out in a single, rushing stream and become more mindful of what it is that I am doing. In the sea of my own silence, I work these words for my own enjoyment, and the satisfaction of the craft comes as much from the process – as it does in sewing and working with textiles – as it does in the completion of an object or a story.

When I accept those moments of awareness and insight, when I work a story for its own sake rather than to be able to say ‘I finished another story’, then the work I produce is better, and gives me more satisfaction because I have been more involved and more intimate with it, and because it is more wholly given from my core self.

As a writer, this is a powerful lesson to learn.

Rejection: the death of hope

Spent some time updating my submissions spreadsheet this evening, following another pair of rejection letters in the last week. So, my stats are now 10 stories, 34 submissions with 30 rejections, 4 still awaiting response and a total of 1,668 days of hope.

No matter what I try to tell myself, rejection hurts.

Rejection by Slushpup (Flickr Creative Commons)

 

There are all sorts of stories I can tell myself to try to ease it:

1) 30 rejections and 10 stories is really not all that much, compared to other (successful) writers. I’ve got to expect it to take some time.

2) Rejections are part of the writer’s life, everyone gets them, I might as well get over it

3) I’m aiming my stories at pro markets, so I’m competing against established writers, and the very best of the newcomers for a couple of spaces in each edition.

4) Sometimes, the rejection is more because of the ‘fit’ of stories within a particular issue than a weakness of the story itself

There are more. They’re all good stories, and there’s a measure of truth in each one. Not one of them is convincing, though. Not one of them really, truly takes away that instant sting of pain, the death of hope, that each rejection brings.

Perhaps each one is a little dart that will harden my hide so that eventually, rejections will become so much water off this duck’s back, perhaps it will continue to hurt so much.

Every time I work on a story, edit it, take the time to look around, review the available markets, see which one fits best with that story, and send that story out, I am convinced that this time, it will place. This time, it will hit the mark, make the breakthrough and I will see it in print and I’ll be able to point to it in pride and say “I did it”. And hope that it will be the first of many, the beginning of my steps on the path of a career as an author.

So each time the story comes back with a “Thanks for your submission, but it’s not quite right for us”, it’s the death of that bright hope. The fire dies and leaves me with ashes in my mouth, and I can’t help but mourn its passing. And then, there must be the act of courage to scrape together enough hope and optimism to send the story out again – sometimes with a rework, sometimes without – and allow myself to hope again.

Sometimes I wonder why it means so much to me. Why the continual striving for publication, even in the face of almost impossible odds, against a vast sea of untold talent striving for the same goal? Why the need to see my work recognised and published in a respected magazine? Why are the stories I tell myself not sufficient to keep to myself – why the need to share them? Why the need to strive and win the prize of publication? What does it matter?

I’ve never really subscribed to the ‘if I’m not going to win, I won’t play’ school of thought. Regardless of whether or not I ever achieve publication, I will always write. It is too great a love, too deeply ingrained in me, to ever be able to stop doing it. I have terrors of blindness, so that I can no longer read or write, more so than loss of hearing or any other sense of smell.

So it’s not for the competition, for a need to win or excel, to earn plaudits for their own sake.

I liken it more to a rite of passage, a painful initiation into the guild to which I am still serving my apprenticeship, something I must endure to become a journeyman. One day, I hope to become a master of the craft, and to do so I must pass the tests.

Disconnection: dissected

Out of clutter

find Simplicity

From discord

find Harmony

In the middle of difficulty

Lies Opportunity

(Albert Einstein)

I finished the rewrite of Disconnection last week. To say it’s a relief to finish it would be an understatement – the level of writing-discipline involved in a rework of that scale – virtually a rebuild from the ground up, as the themes and structure changed so much from the terrible first draft AND an entirely new sub-story needed to come in – is way beyond what I’d normally exercise, and much more demanding than the wild scrawls of a first draft. Not just in terms of actively shaping and controlling the direction of the story along the planned revision lines, but also in terms of trying to stop the ‘bad habits’ I’ve been picked up on in critiques of previously completed works. Still, it’s a buzz that it’s done, and I can call that a closure and put it aside for a couple of months to let the wounds heal and the emotions subside before I come back for the edits. It’s just too raw, right now.

Disconnection: Kultmagick (Flickr commons)

Learning something new means nothing unless you look back and measure its success. (Alex Fayle, Someday Syndrome).

So, the stats: 46 days elapsed time, start to finish, but only 20 days actual writing. So, between burnouts, illnesses and visitors, I had 26 unproductive days in amongst the writing programme.

Total words in this draft, 57,397.  Average words per day, over the elapsed time: 1,248 wpd. Over actual writing days, 2,870. However, because I switched from a two scene per day writing basis to a single scene-per-day basis, I dropped from a 3k wpd average to a 2k wpd average when I changed methodology.

Going forward, I think I will be using scenes rather than raw wordcount to measure progress – I think it is more productive and makes me focus more on the *story* rather than on just throwing words at the page (and hoping some of them will stick ).

Working on a two-scene -per-day (c.3k words per day) basis was painful and exhausting and led to the need to take long breaks from the MS, and actually meant it took longer, start-to-finish, than if I’d worked 1 scene per day on a consistent, daily basis.

One scene per day felt comfortable, and gave me enough time around the main deep-writing session for wind-up and wind-down activities like blogging and critiquing and other exercises in writing and/or communication. It’s worth noting that if I’d written consistently on a 1-scene-per-day basis, the elapsed time would have been 34 days start-to-finish, and I would have been done before we had the nightmare week-of-illness.

Writing to an outline, note-carded plan worked well for this novel, and I will use it again going forward. What I need to know for my planning processes, is that my average scene is around 1800 words. On that basis, an average 80k word novel will need 44 scenes, and on the basis of writing a scene per day, take 44 days to write. Probably, it should be called closer to 50, since I know it’s inevitable that my life will detonate bombs of some sort during a period of such long duration Sometimes, it will take me much longer. The Sere novel, for example, I have already note-carded, and is sitting at some 68 scenes – that will come out at approx 122k words, which is perhaps a little heavy, but more-or-less in line with the average for the genre. It will, however, take me significantly longer than the month I originally scheduled for it.

This draft of Disconnection, however, has come out a little lighter than I expected – at 34 scenes the average words per scene is closer to 1700 words than my normal 18oo, but I know that I have some scenes that are so dialogue-heavy that there is almost no supporting description, and that, obviously, will need to be addressed. What it does tell me, however, is that if the story is driven so heavily by the dialogue, then character interactions are CENTRAL to the novel. That means I need to make sure that the background detail I add, including supporting character mannerisms and body language etc, needs to be in line with those interactions and enhance them rather than distract. I shall be adding that to the list of things I need to watch for when I do get to the edit pass, later this year. Other things on the list are:

• diffusing the opening of scenes with pointless and confusing ’setting’ description
• adverb & passive voice abuse/laziness
• coherence and completion of individual story arcs
• is the conflict/tension/action close enough to the surface of the story, or have I gone too far in subtlety?
• where have I chickened out of really digging into the dark stuff to nail this story?

It’s a fair old list, but I’ve got some bad habits ….

Looking slightly more broadly, Disconnection has taught me that:

1. I need the space to breathe and play around the intense writing phase of my session, particularly with a novel like this one which goes deeper and darker than anything I’ve written before. As well as giving me a little relief from the hard mental and emotional slog, it also releases me from accumulating stress and frustration around associated writerly activities like reading, reviewing, critiquing others’ work and, of course, the short story administrative workload.
2. I need to disconnect from all distractions and be disciplined about staying disconnected from them until I do hit the session or day’s targets. Added to that, I need a clearly defined start time, otherwise I can fritter time away on non-essential warm-up tasks and end up starting too late to be properly productive.
3. I need more sleep. The days I went to bed at 11:30 pm made for much better next days – more energy, more enthusiasm, more productive and better motivation and focus.

I feel that bringing these things into my planning will allow me to be more realistic about the goals I set myself, and that more realistic planning will make for greater happiness – I will reduce frustration and stress about the targets not hit and the projects not completed when I wanted them to be done.

For now, I must also take on board the understanding that I’ not really comfortable if I have *nothing* to do. I need goals and structure in my life, though I’m not sure why that is, and I’m not entirely convinced that my inability to sit still and just ’stand and stare’ (to quote W H Davies) is a healthy thing.  That is not going to be easy, but then, nothing worthwhile ever is.

End of Quarter progress update . . .

Progress update for end of Q1 2009 . . .

I think it’s overall been a pretty productive one, although as always I find it difficult to recognise my own achievements and focus on where I’m ‘failing’, even though I *always* think I’m going to get more done in a day than I ever do! Still, I’m happy with the quality of the *work* that I’ve been doing, even if progress is slower than I’d hoped.  Time always seems to be my enemy – there’s always more I want to do than I ever have time to accomplish, and the constant juggling gets a bit wearing from time-to-time, and it’s difficult to accept that if I’ve had a good week with the children, then the house looks like a bombsite, but to keep the house clean means neglecting the children …. hello, no-win situation!! The problem is that I end up killing the time I’d use to look after myself – my down time when I’m not parenting, huswiffing or working – in order to keep up with these ‘tasks’, and so it’s the very personal diet and exercise elements that are falling off the radar, as are the handful of self-development targets I’d set myself. I can’t get to them without compromising on the ‘bigger blocks’ of the tasks. I know that rather than bemoaning a lack of time, I should re-prioritise the other things I do, but I’m kind of stuck in a rut with everything, where it’s too difficult (or I don’t have time ) to step outside myself to see what I *need* to do vs what I *want* to do, and prioritising accordingly.

Is there anything I could live with doing less of? The one thing that springs to mind is housework …. it’s something I keep coming back to – can I afford a cleaner to tackle the big cleaning jobs? Do I want a “stranger” in my house? How much time would that really save me? I can’t cut back on the time I spend with the children – until Bellaboo goes to school, anyhoo, nor do I want to cut back on writing time, or the time I spend on Magpies. That leaves precious little else to compromise on. I’m not sure where that leaves me.

One thing this last quarter has taught me, and that I’m facing reluctantly, is that I am getting older, and that I don’t have the stamina I once had. I’ve faced a string of injuries – from a badly torn trapezoid through carpal tunnel, twisted back and swollen knees – and a sequence of stupid coughs, colds, headaches and other minor upsets, all of which tell me that my body can’t meet the demands I’m placing on it any more. Which means that to do more, I need to urgently address issues of health and wellbeing – diet, exercise, and sleep. My hope is that by making myself focus on those areas in the next quarter, by eating right, sleeping well and exercising regularly, I will actually find I have the energy, concentration and focus to better meet the targets I’m setting myself elsewhere, and keep up with the delightful mix of different and interesting activitie s on which I spend my life.

1) Writing  Work list/schedule:

Standard tasks:

- maintain schedule discipline of write/edit/submit a story every other week

In 13 weeks I have written 1 not-so-short story (21k!), edited 3 in detail, and submitted 10 times. Some of those submissions are re-subs of rejected stories. I feel odd about realising that I’m actually on top of the schedule, in so far as I’m sticking to the average of 1 submission every other week, because I’m not writing anything new, nor am I working the backlog. In reality, I haven’t been dropping out of the ‘big’ projects I’ve been working on to hit the short stories, I’ve been rounding up once I’ve finished a project. I think that’s still OK, because I’m averaging around a month on each of the projects, so to slot in a two-week interlude for short-storying etc in between each project is working well for me. Going forward, I think I’m going to make it a target to *add* one new story to the inventory (whether written from scratch or reworked from back-catalogue) each time I do a pass through. This month, it’s ‘In Skin’ which hit the 10-reject mark, and got an in-depth rework – I’m pleased with the outcome, so hopefully it’ll pick up a hit soon ….

- maintain current crit group commitments

Absolutely up to date on this one ….

- complete the “How to Think Sideways” course

I’m behind on this …. I urgently need to knuckle down and put in a good couple of weeks work on it. I got stalled out on the lesson that deals with synopses, query letters and proposals, because they’re so *not fun* and such high-risk activities that I just went into shut-down. However, I need to do these so as soon as I’ve got the Disconnection rewrite under my belt, I’m taking a time out and catching up. Honest.

 Anneth:

- finalise, prepare synopsis and query letters and get out on the submission rounds

Not started! I am so chicken!!! (Plus it’s with my critique group at the moment so will be back with editing needs …..) (and lots of other excuses). I will prepare the synopsis & query letter this quarter, put through any crit-driven changes in Q3 and get it out on the rounds by the end of September.

 Serpent of Colchis:

- complete edit by end of Q1 2009 – DONE!

 Disconnection

- rewrite by end Q1 2009

In progress. It’s a little more extensive than an edit write-in, since the edit pass I did a couple of years ago (the shame of it!!) showed up some major shortcomings which I’ve addressed, and I’ve added in an entirely new sub-plot which both links-in and underscores the main plot activity, so I’ve got about 15k of the original 80-odd-k I wrote that can be re-used, the rest is entirely new. I’m estimating around a 75k finished MS, of which I’ve got 19k written, mostly thanks to FMWriters ‘March Madness’ challenge to write 3k a day.

Writing 3k a day is a tough call when it means that I’ve got to generate 1k/hour out of my daily 3hr writing session. What I found was that I could maintain that sort of pace & intensity for the first 5 days without too much problem, but the last 2 days turned into a real battle for words. At least part of the problem was that this wasn’t standard ‘first draft’ writing, where the words just spill onto the page in more-or-les random fashion, this is a re-write and is a much more controlled and calculating process, less ‘muse’ and more ‘me’ with much closer attention on technical details than I’d normally put into a first draft. So it’s been much more draining as an exercise. My conclusion is that for *this project* what I’m going to do is maintain an intense 5-day-on @ 3k words schedule, but then effectively take the weekends off for critiquing and short storying and blogging and reading and other *fun* things, to stop my enthusiasm stalling to the point where I can’t bear to look at the damn MS. AGAIN.

Textile arts/crafting – from a business perspective, this is more or less where I want it to be right now, though I have branched out to an Etsy shop this year. There are a couple of objectives I want to state, though they feel a little nebulous at this stage.

- try 1 new stitch, technique or craft I haven’t tried before each month

- shame on me! I’ve been so manic, the only new thing I’ve tried is smocking. I liked it, I think I will do it again, and can see several applications (just not in clothing) where it could make a glorious decorative statement. It is rather a labour of love, and once I’d mastered the stitches it’s rather monotonous to do – I’m not sure I’d want to smock an adult garment, for example!!!

- stick to my ‘buy handmade’ pledge

I’ve not bought much for either the house or for myself this year, beyond some supplies for Magpies and a couple of gifts. Sadly, the boy presents I got were stock-from-toyshop because I wasn’t organised enough on the handmade front to get something in time, and it’s difficult to find *good* handmade toys and games for children over toddler age, particularly boys who aren’t necessarily interested in personal ornamentation. Difficult, but not impossible – will try harder!

- stick to my ‘wardrobe refashion’ pledge

on track with that! Have done some refashions for both me and Bellaboo, more to follow …. in my (copious – hah!) spare time …

- do at least one of Marysa’s lovely courses at the Otter Bindery

It’s still on the agenda, but I’ve not been able to get to one recently …. I’m devastated that this weekend she’s doing Japanese Book-Binding and I can’t make it. No FAir!

Personal - not so much here, though with so much going on in the above two, one of them must be:

- REMEMBER I HAVE A FAMILY

- I will take at least 2 weeks holiday this year

 - oooh, ooooh – I’m on track with this!!! I took  a week off for Feb half-term!!!

- I will try at least 1 new thing with at least 1 of my children every month

- well, kind of, but not in a structured way …. I took Bellaboo to the swimming pool & we both had a fantastic time just splashing about. One to try again. Rumpus & I made chocolate chip banana cake. I think he enjoyed cleaning the bowl out more afterwards …. I need to be more relaxed about both mess and the need to do things exactly right, but I think the important thing is to appreciate the one-to-one time that we otherwise miss out on. That came to light in full effect with Honey last weekend …. for whatever reason (mainly her deep immersion in Harry Potter) we hadn’t had any one-to-one time for ages, and on Sunday I washed & conditioned her hair & gave her a head massage and then sat and brushed and dried it to salon standard over the brush – it was just gorgeous to spend the time with her, and made me realise how overlooked she gets because she is so mature and steady and doesn’t need the constant “supervision” the younger ones get. Doesn’t seem fair she misses out, really. My objective is to try to get Bellaboo to sleep and then spend a bit of time with Honey once the others have gone to sleep, just chatting or sewing or playing scrabble/shut-the-box/uno/whatever. I think she needs it – her teacher says she’s rather lost her way this term, and whilst her symptoms match up with classic pre-teen, I don’t think that means I can (as the school helpfully suggest ) just wait it out.

- I will work through the “How to talk/how to listen” book

shame on me! Haven’t even opened it ….

- go to bed before midnight at least 4 times a week

oh dear. can’t remember the last time I did …. tonight, I will!

- Books/Reading

- I will read at least 20 books this year, and I will (try to) not buy any more books (excl below) until I’ve caught up my backlog

- Crystal Line – Anne McCaffrey

- Tortilla Flat – John Steinbeck

- Perfume – Patrick Suskind

- I will catalogue the existing collection on Library Thing

8/32 shelves listed, 3 cartons not even started. A long way to go ….

- After cataloguing the existing collection, I will rationalise it, and divest duplicates, those I won’t read again and the misfits in the first edition collection

- I will reinvest the proceeds of any divestments in new acquisitions that fit with the first ed/rare collection

- house and garden

- grow more fruit and veg this year than we did last year – stick to the planting and maintenance plan

well, that at least is on track …. garden is starting to come together, and the potting shed is looking like day-of-the-triffids …. need to start planting out and getting further successional sowings done. April is a bit manic on the gardening front, I don’t see that much else is going to happen!

- reduce waste again to 1/2 a bin bag every week

That’s going pretty well, and we got an unexpected bonus as the council have announced a switch to wheely bins plus kitchen caddies for food waste as of September, so that’s all good. I look at our 1/2 to 1 bag per week against next-door’s  usual 5 or so, and wonder if I should offer to help them reduce theirs …..

- take another 5% off our total energy usage for the year

My crusade to minimise electricity usage continues in the face of familial intransigence: tho the children have mostly got the “TURN IT OFF” message, t’o-m is consistently the worst culprit, despite my best efforts to represent money-saving aspects …. sigh. The battle has a way to go, but we’re more-or-less holding steady against last year – which is actually pretty good, considering the addition of laptop & Wii to the household. I’ve signed up for Selvedge’s pledge to turn off the tumble-dryer, tho admittedly it won’t save much because it more or less exists with an ‘in emergency break glass panel’ isolation and only really gets used for desperate & immediate nappy needs, and/or holiday packing.

- declutter and redecorate loft, improve my workspace

Did a massive declutter and reorganise, but little has happened since then. I need to decorate and put some shelving up, so that I can shift the 3 big boxes of books onto shelves, and evacuate the copies of Economist/New Scientist/Resurgence/National Geographical out of their storage boxes & onto shelves where theyre more accessible. Difficult to set aside time to do it, because my task-time in the week is Bellaboo’s sleep time – so drilling & that sort of carry on is not an option. Sigh. Looks like it might be a rainy-weekend’s work later in the year ….

- list and sort out all the little leftover jobs now the refurb is finished

Well, we made a list, and it’s more or less been allocated. It’s just a question of working through it now! Things are starting to happen – the kitchen walls are finally de-tiled, re-plastered and ready to paint. We’ve got, we think, a solution to the missing kitchen-floor-tile situation, subject to t’o-m being able to prise them off the floor somewhere else intact. Curse you, Porcelanosa, for discontinuing our tile!!!!

- and last but not least, get my BMI back down to 22. It’s completely out of control since Bellaboo arrived, and I don’t think I can call it baby fat any more. It’s just fat. It must go.

Well, the least said about this, the better. It’s one step forward and 2 back at the moment. I’ve been trying to get into a routine with it, and have been stymied at every turn by illness and injury – either my own or others!! I am, though, determined not to bail out on this, so once I’m clear of the latest cough (me), swollen knee (me), stomach bug (Rumpus) & clock-change induced insomnia (Bellaboo) I’m getting right back to it. I *so* need a Time Turner. Still can’t find one on ebay!