Tag Archives: writing

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Am I buzy or just lazy?

Yesterday morning I wrote a blog. It wasn’t a super good blog and it was the first in a month. I sat down and wrote it mostly because I was getting ready to get on an Airplane and didn’t want to get neck deep in reworking a chapter of Wine Bottles & Broomsticks before I had to get out of there. So, what the heck have I been up to? You might imagine that I was steadfastly working on NaNoWriMo. That was true for about the first week. I hit just over 10K words and then stopped. I didn’t stop because I got writer’s block or I was stuck or because I’m a whiny little diva who didn’t have the perfect writing conditions. No, I stopped because the story was starting to meander, I didn’t have a good sense of my character development, and the adventure felt too easy, there wasn’t enough tension (Bottom line: I didn’t like where it was going). Early on, I’d decided to pants it, so outside of a vague idea of certian plot points, I wasn’t sure where it’d go, which is fine. At this point (assuming you’ve read this far) you might be wanting to give me the same advice a ton of others continually do: The whole point of NaNoWriMo is just to get it down, finish it up later. 

The bad news is that I don’t really work that way.

I’m way to lazy for that. Many of us (most? all?) need to re-write a lot and I’m well aware of that fact, so I shouldn’t be scared of rewriting a story. I mean, I’m going to do it regardless and I’m glad. That said, NaNoWriMo taught me something I think I already know -That’s just not how I write. I go in jags – write a lot, think a lot write a lot repeat. I like to work out scenes in my head before trying to get them down. It requires a bit of mental juggling and I do run the risk of forgetting witty or interesting story elements, but in a lot of ways it’s just the same as getting down a thousand words of draft and re-working it until it seems to flow. In this process, the actual draft writing is a bit further down the road to a well fleshed out idea than it might have otherwise been. 

Unfortunately, I’ve not been following this process over the month either. I’ve been mostly programming. It’s another creative outlet for me and also results in a tool at the end that I can use for stuff – like work. The project I was working on is super cool and has been a lot of fun. It’s been a writing detox. The trip to Orlando was awesome because it was a reset that on one end paused the programming  project for a while, put some space beteen me and the Nano project that I’ve decided to put off for a little while, and on the other end got me back into Wine Bottles and Broomsticks. Sometime near the end of the week, I started really trying to change gears I think that happened on Friday night. Certianly as I was trekking across country I got back in the groove. It’s not that I didn’t write on the way down or in the spaces of time after class and dinner and things, it’s just that I wasn’t connecting with what I was working on, and it wasn’t going well. I realized I had really hit the groove again somewhere in the first layover. I saw a dude walking around and was inspired for a character in the book. A woman in line felt like good inspiration too. She had this odd expression as she surveyed the crowd. Her eyes would land on a dude and linger for a while. She wasn’t checking him out physically. I felt like she was mentally checking out his wallet. It’s been a while since I’ve been in the frame of mind of inventing intentions and characters on the faces of people I don’t know and it felt great.

So. There I am. Not lazy, just distracted. Also, I think I’m going to try and make a better effort at updating this blog as I bring Wine Bottles in toward the finish. I’m about 2/3rds of the way in now and I can feel the end. Loads of work remains. The rising action doesn’t rise and the stakes don’t feel very high so I’ve got to work on that, but all of the foundations are there. 
Tomorrow I’m off to the coffee shop in the morning to drop a bit of time on the writing, for now – date night.

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Yes, it’s very far

Have you ever flown from one end of North America to the other? If you’re from Alaska odds are more than 1-in-2 that you have and you probably already have a good idea of where this is going. For work this past week I was asked to go to Orlando for some training. Nice right? In most of the country it’s winter. Not here. It was 80F with 225% humidity (I may be exaggerating). Summer in December for a week, why the hell would anyone pass that up? Because it’s a hell of a long way to go for 5 days, that’s why. We all know Alaska is far from everything, shit it’s far from itself. Some twenty or thirty years ago we had 3 timezones. You can imagine that having Dillingham call Juneau (State capital) would be a bit awkward – they’d be 3 hours ahead. Of course daylight is a finny thing up north, so timezone only sort of matters and only for parts of the year. Timezones aside, what being in Alaska means is that I’m pretty well assured of a flight to Seattle before getting started – not terrible usually. It’s a 3hr flight, Seattle airport is nice and virtually everyone in Alaska goes there, so there’s a good chance you’ll actually run into someone you know. However, that’s when the trip starts. My total trek to Orlando was 10 hours – 2 flights. Not too bad right?  The trip back is a little (lot?) crappier. It’ll be closer to 14 hours with 3 stops and one real tight connection. Sigh, stuck in a tiny box and the stress of possibly missing a flight through no fault of my own. Super not awesome.

Anyhow, to get on to my actual point, I think there may be one and it may be writing related, being stuck in a tiny metal box rocketing across country for 10-11 hours is boring. Except that it’s not. Perhaps you can read for 10 hour stretches, but I can’t. I get to ancy. I can go for an hour or two then I’ve got to be doing something. Sleeping in a cramped seat with little legroom isn’t usually an option either. So what’s left – writing! (See, brought it around). Anyhow, I wrote a good deal on the way down here, a bit while I was here (got stuck actually and I’m going to have to back-track most of what I wrote because it’s trudging off into a ditch). 

My point? Flying sucks – but it’s possibly one of the best times to be forced to focus and write. You can’t go anywhere. Internet is either not available or prohibitively expensive and except for that little magazine in the seat pocket, there’s not much for distraciton. So, here I am, 10 minutes to drop my crap into my bag, run round the room one last time to make sure I’ve got everything and I’m off to the airport to write.

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Writer’s Improvement hell – No helicopters in High Fantasy

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Another random thought while I avoid making my word count on NaNoWriMo. I’ve finished a draft of a high fantasy and I’m most of the way through a humorish urban fantasy (do I really have to put a genre label on it?). I’m having a much easier time of the urban fantasy, in part because the set-up of the adventure stays in one city. A city with cars and trains and stuff. So the events can happen all over the city and a reasonable distance outside of it over the course of a few hours. To simplify things further, the MC is actively searching out witches – providing immediate conflict with very little set up.

In a high fantasy, you might go from one city to the next, but that trip is going to take some time and require supplies, like food and gold and stuff. Not only that, getting all of the characters together in the right spot at the right time takes a bit of work. Then, to give the complexity wheel another crank, the MC is probably trying to save the kingdom or the world, or possibly the universe or a multi-verse. In any case, you’re not just going to get a phone call there and drive off to the evil emperor’s house to have an encounter where somebody just barely escapes with their life and someone else plots revenge. Nope, ‘ol MC’s gotta fight his way through the labyrinth to the goblin city then tell the goblin king “you’ve got no power over me – now give me that staff you weirdo and put some real pants on.” At that point the world will shatter and all of the plot holes will be filled in with unicorn pee and cement. See? Hard.

I will concede that you can pants your way through a good high fantasy, but there are so many moving parts that an average reader is going to spot a plot hole from a mile away. If you’re like me, then this is going to cause problems. In no way am I going to claim I’ve got an answer except to say that writing high fantasy is a hell of a lot harder than folks give credit to and writing a novel is already hard. At some point I’m going to explore this topic with a little more gusto because I need to solve it or my precious high-fantasy series will die on the vine.

Now, back to NaNoWriMo!

 

photo credit: helicopter engine via photopin (license)