Category Archives: writing

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Over the hills and far away

Last week, I went to Kansas City for training. I rarely go out of town, in fact I don’t think I’ve gone out of town for work in over a year and that last one was a very short trip to Fairbanks. Living in Alaska, everything is far away. Even stuff up here is far away. From where I live, the capital is about 1 ½ hour flight and it can’t be reached by road. I’m actually closer to Seattle from where I’m at than I am from the farthest corner of this state, and I’m a three hour flight from Seattle. Anyhow, a trip to Kansas City, which is generally a few hours of flying time at worst (unless you’ve got to take a really wacky series of layovers) from most parts of the country. For me, however, we’re talking a minimum of 8 hours travel time involving at least 1 layover. To put icing on that cake, most AK to lower-48 flights leave sometime between the hours of 11pm and 6am.

The moral of this story is that not only do these trips trap me on an aircraft for two full days, it results in serious jet-lag and exhaustion. It’s true this trip was for business, and I committed myself to carrying out those responsibilities and talking shop for many extra hours too. One would think that I’d be too tired for creativity – which is something I hear a lot during the procrastination process. While I believe ‘too tired’ is a legitimate reason to put the writing down for a bit, after all we all get there, I feel that there are strategies for dealing with it. In any case, being away from home I was left without many of the usual distractions and responsibilities. So, even in my state of ‘holy crapamoly I’m tired’ I was able to take what little energy I had and focus it.

From the perspective of writing I learned a couple of things about myself and writing on this trip. The first is that I really need to have coffee to write. At 6:00 am I was on the plane with my iPad and couldn’t bring myself to turn it on. Once they came round with coffee I fired that bitch up and didn’t stop until the wheels hit the ground. Lesson learned: If I’ve got a warm cup by my side, I’m a lot more productive. In the evening, when coffee is a bit dicey, a beer or whiskey also seems to fill the niche (herbal tea or decaf works through the week when I’m being good). The second thing I learned about myself is a bit more involved.

Ahead of the trip, I had decided that I would focus my free time on writing, so I planned to stay off of Twitter, avoid much on Facebook (I did flip through a few times), and not even open Wordpress. I’d say that I was fairly successful there. However, I’m not convinced these are actually the source of most of my distraction. Sure I can kill an hour very rapidly by sifting through various blog posts and wipe out 5 minute spans of time keeping an eye on twitter, but those actually don’t really tear me away from what I’m doing like other sorts of things. I also didn’t turn the TV on while I was there. With that noise box silenced the hour in the morning and hour or two at night I had for writing (the same as I have now, incidentally), was uninterrupted.

The most important thing I learned, however, was that over the course of those three days last week I found that if I’ve got a strong idea, and few real distractions (and even if I’m exhausted) I can write – a lot – not polished, ready to share work, but solid rough draft material. I don’t ever recall having written 6,000 words over the course of three days while still putting in 8 hours of work plus a few hours of work-place networking before. Hell, I don’t know if I’ve ever written that amount during time off. If I hadn’t been so fried on Friday I’d probably have knocked out another 2-3K on the airplane, which would have been about half of chapter 9 of Wine Bottles and Broomsticks.

Now I’m back home and back in my usual routine and I’m not entirely sure how to apply these lessons to my day-to-day writing (except the coffee – that’s easy) given that when I get home it’s time to cook, clean up and manage children, those TV free hours are lost anyhow, it’s later that I’m still working out. I do like being able to unwind with a little TeeVee but I’d also like to get done with my book. I suppose though that just knowing that I can produce a lot feels like a personal victory and knowing more about how I work best is helpful. With that in mind, and because I’ve been kicking the idea around for a while, I signed up for NaNoWriMo. I’m planning on tackling a project other than Wine Bottles and Broomsticks. However, in order to ‘win’, I’ve got to write something on the order of 1700 words per day. Anyhow, we’ll see how it goes. For starters, I need to be well prepared so at some point soon, I’ll start outlining like a fool and sketching characters.

So, there’s my thought for the week. I should probably think them out on this blog more, but too many distractions. Off to that cup of coffee and the last ten minutes remaining to me this morning.

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Deadlines for a not-professional writer

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One nice thing about being a not-professional writer is that I don’t have any deadlines. It’s nice because if I can’t get it done, there’s no harm done. I’m the only one impacted and frankly if I couldn’t get to it, I had other stuff that needed attention. That said, I do have a deadline of sorts for Wine Bottles and Broomsticks. I’m publishing a chapter a month on channillo.com I think that if I missed a deadline there, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. People have subscribed and presumably are reading it. From that perspective, I do have a deadline.

What’s interesting is that I’m holding myself to that deadline. Of course, one chapter a month isn’t a particularly lofty goal. Some folks out there are publishing daily and weekly. This is not something I could do. It just takes me longer and I’ve got few hours in the day in which to write. In fact, I got up at 4:30am just to slap this silly post together. That said, after nearly missing the second deadline I set for myself, I decided I really had to work ahead. Now, I’m a few months ahead of schedule and working as much as I can to actually have all of the chapters of this book done, but the pressure is off and I’m stuck somewhere in the middle of chatper 6. I know exactly where I want it to to and chapter 7 too, I even have the end sketched out.

So what if you’re stuck Dave, you’re months ahead of the game, why don’t you let it cook if you need to?

Because I want to get this project done. I still need to get back to the War of Shadows re-write and also start working on another project I’ve got rolling around in my brain which I think I’d like to do Nanowrimo this year. Not only that, the Wine Bottles and Broomsticks project is really a hell of a lot of fun and I’ve already got a pretty good sketch for a second book, and dammit if I don’t want to get to that too.

Anyhoo, this rambly ramble is about considering the possiblity of upping the stakes for Wine Bottles. I’m debating putting the pressure on and releasing ever 2 weeks instead of monthly. Now that it’s winter and I’ve finished the new duck house and various other outdoor projects I’ll actually have half a sunday or so to sit down and work on it. I know that when I actually have time to focus I can knock out about a chapter a week. This gives me one week for writing and one week for revisions/rewriting. As a not making money from writing and having a good time with writing but aiming at being a full-time this is my actual job sort of writer, it’s a pretty aggressive schedule. However, if nothing else it’ll motivate me to finish. 

I still haven’t made the actual decision to go to evey 2 weeks, I think I want to get through chapters 6 and 7 before I make that call. Anyhow, that’s my update – I’m writing, I’m making progress, and I’m actually having a good time with it. With that, I’ll leave it. I’m out of time, the day job beckons!

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The muse

I haven’t blogged in almost two weeks. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I’ve been distracted. Mostly, I’m having such a good time with Wine Bottles and Broomsticks that every free minute is devoted to getting the next line of that story down.

I promise I’m not going to bang on about my progress and number of words written and stuff. Last night I had a thought about the muse, and I wanted to share. Anyhow, maybe this shouldn’t be important, but for me I think it is. The definition the muse is a femenine figure who inspires an artist. Now, I’m not claiming that I’m an artist, I’m more of a guy who likes to tell stories, and there’s an art in that, I suppose. Anyhow, I like to think about muse in a slighty broader sense, in the sense that I’ve got a character and that character, be it male or female, is inspired by another person. To be clear, of all of the things I need to work on as a writer, character development remains my biggest problem. I’m not talking about just the character arc, I’m talking about just defining a character, anwsering the question: Who is this guy and why do I care? 

In one project, the main character has no real definition which does awful things for a story that probably has a good central concept and it’s borderline beyond my skill to fix it. In a few other projects, really these are more sketches and concepts for the most part, but I don’t have a clear picture of characters in my head. None of this is strictly true with Wine Bottles and Broomsticks, the characters are much stronger though I will conceed I’m not doing an expert job at drawing them, but I feel like I’m doing a much better job than usual. It’s growth and I’ll take it, even if it’s pretty incremental. 

Last night as I was forcing myself to go around a tiny track, hoping the tight little corners didn’t ruin my feet, I was thinking about my characters in Wine Bottles and Broomsticks. Once again, I realized that the main character needs something more. With this in mind, I turned to the other characters in that story – where did they come from? Well, I’m using muses, a lot. With one character in particular, the muse is an actor I’ve seen in several different TV shows. I haven’t picked a specific role to base my character off of, instead, I invented the character gave him a sketch and a role in the story, then as each scene unfolds, ask myself how would this actor play this character, what sorts of things would he add here? 

I took the trick to my main character. What actor would play that role if it were on TV? It came pretty quick actually. I realized I’ve got to go back and make a few changes, but nothing huge. The rest of it is a matter of sitting back and asking: How would this actor play this scene? That said, I this is really a guide to help me get past sticky spots and smooth out dialogue, not a strict set of rules. There’s plenty I’m doing with these characters that is unique to them and the story. At some point these characters will be stong enough in my head that I’ll asking how would this character do it more than how would this actor interpret it? Anyhow, it’s working for me to get me off the ground, and it’s making the project a little more fun to work through.