Thinking About Writing

I haven't done a lot of writing lately. That's the short answer for why I haven't posted in a while.

I did write a piece of flash fiction (it's a couple hundred words, I think) that I'll be putting on Instagram eventually, but it requires some artistic steps before that's ready. I'd like to start writing more, again, but I have to actually work on making that a habit. Otherwise I think about doing it, but don't actually ever do it.

This Is Just To Say

It's been a while, I know. Sorry about that.

So, Camp NaNo. I ended up not making my word goal. Which was fine. I said, "I'll just extend my timeframe and keep working on this." I did not. This was not fine.

Launching Myself Into Space

I'm not going to finish Cold Blooded by the end of the year. It's just not going to happen. I accept that.

I don't want to abandon it entirely, but the time is coming when I have to start planning for NaNoWriMo in November. Sure, I could be a NaNo rebel and write a revision for the month instead of something new, but I don’t want to do that. Largely because I like the absolute freedom to write meandering crap and self-indulgent bullshit during NaNo. I don't want to get hung up on trying to write a "good" second draft.

This year's meandering crap and self-indulgent bullshit is probably going to be the yet-unnamed space story I was messing around with last year. I'm not sure if I've mentioned that decision yet. I can't keep track of what I've been saying, especially going so long between posts like this.

Going to the Mountain

Where have I been? Not writing, unfortunately. Mostly just watching Fringe.

Here was my plan. Spend all of 2019 getting Cold Blooded smooshed into something that people could actually read, and then spend 2020 trying to find people to read it.

But here we are. It's mid-August and I have very little to show for it.

I very much want to write this book. Or rather, I want to have written it. But I just don't seem to have the motivation or the discipline to do it.

I know I need to sit down every day and write. I know it. But what do I do? Play games on my phone and watch TV. Just passively absorb entertainment rather than actively creating something.

And why? Why, when I want to write this book, do I sabotage myself instead?

Breaking Through

That's right, I'm still alive. I told you I'd be back in April sometime.

I really haven't gone anywhere, there's just been a lot going on. Not a lot of time or brain power for creative pursuits.

I did manage to set a goal for Camp NaNo of 5,000 (a meager amount, but whatever), and I've just finished with 5,028. So, I've accomplished something. I wound up with two short stories revolving around portals to a sort of shadow dimension. I watched Stranger Things finally, and it's infiltrated my brain.

But the real goal was to get my mind off of my vampire novel, in the hopes that ideas for it would come when I wasn't trying. So there I was, last night, 40 words short of my 5,000 word goal, and I find myself working on my novel outline.  The distraction seems to have done the trick.

I still have all these subplots I'm not sure what to do with, and random scenes I'd like to incorporate, so I'm not in the home stretch by any means. 

Making Promises

I haven't been working on anything lately. I have all these things I want to do, all these grand plans… all these murders to commit. Fictionally, speaking, of course. Of course…

That's the downside of all this. It makes me sound like a psycho something.

Anyway, I have the ideas. I just don't have the motivation. I could barely get the motivation to write this post.

The question, then, is what do I do about it.

Much like inspiration, you can't just wait around for motivation. You just have to do it. You have to make it a habit, a routine, and just sit down and do it, even when you don't want to.

As you can see, I haven't mastered that yet.

Utter Nonsense

What if each thing you ate had to have at least one ingredient in common with the thing you ate before it?

What does that have to do with anything? Not a damn thing. These are just the sorts of things I think at 1 or 2 in the morning.

I was going to write this post Friday night so that it would be up on Saturday, but by the time I got home, with a terrible headache, that just wasn't going to happen. So here we are. I'm doing my best. Or, well, probably not my best, but safe to say, not my worst.

Mostly, I'm getting distracted by the internet lately. It happens.

Getting Distracted

I'm trying to focus on the project at hand, but I keep getting distracted by an idea for a romantic comedy, of all things. It's invading my brain. It's from a picture I saw on Facebook of a Tumblr post that was a picture of a craigslist ad. So it's come a long way to reach me in the first place.

But I'm not going to write it.

Not now anyway. I have a revision I'm supposed to be working on.

And I'm kind of torn on the whole thing. I think it could be a fun story. But there's a big part of my brain that is wired to reject things like that.

A Project, At Last

I have no ideas. Zero. This isn't even writer's block. This is just writer's meh.

I want to work on something. Anything. I've been going through all these writing prompts and nothing has ignited that spark. I'm trying to make a fire with wet paper over here. Any little inkling of an idea I get quickly drives itself into the ground in a spectacular show of boringness. They never even have a chance. As I try to develop them, the creative part of my brain just fucks off, leaving the part of my brain that ruins things.

I had this whole plan at work today. I was going to come home, pick a prompt from my giant list, and talk a bit about its possibilities. What I could do with it. What sort of characters might be called for. And then I'd write an actual short story for Friday. Then I got home, looked at the prompts, and thbpbp! Nothing good.

Stalling Out

Basically the moment I dove into this Waffle House idea, I was tired of it. I know, it seemed like so much fun. I thought, this will solve all my problems, they'll just pass through the Waffle House to an infinite number of worlds, and I'll have all the worlds I need.

But, It's. Not. Working.

So Infinite Steve: Evil Edition (who is actually called Esteban) has kidnapped Andrea, because a series of fortune cookies told him to. Essentially, he thinks that she is the key to getting back to his reality, because the fortunes led him to her. They were:

• Enjoy the good luck a companion brings you.
• When the universe closes a door, it opens a window.
• A chance meeting opens new doors to success and friendship.

Rough Roads

For some reason the super fun, super random, super easy story is super hard to write. I'm way behind on word count, and the story is dragging like it's trying to pull lead weights through the Swamp of Sadness.

I have all these great ideas, about divergent timelines, but they have to happen later, or I'll run out of ideas later, instead of running out of ideas now. I mean, I have divergent timelines, and alternate realities, and time loops, and a potentially haunted cooler, and none of it's happening right now.

Why?

The Consequences of Vagueness

Outlining is great. We’ve learned this. We can put all our plot points onto a line and see the skeleton of our story.

But it's just that. A skeleton. It doesn't have any tissue or muscle or ligaments. No juicy bits to bring the skeleton to life. That's what actual, you know, story is for. The scenes and the action and the dialogue. And that all comes later.

The problem arises when later comes and you realize you don't know what's supposed to go on this part of the skeleton.  We know the general shape of it, from the bones, but is this supposed to be a hand or a flipper or a wing? The squishy parts are unclear.

Flawed Execution

All right, the story isn't done yet. I know, I know. It will be. Don't worry. I'll admit, I wimped out a little bit and dropped the goal from 10,000 words down to 7,000 before they were locked in. But I still haven't even made it to that many words. I will. Eventually.

I just haven't been feeling motivated lately. That's a big part of writing. If you can't muster up the will to write, well, no writing is getting done. "But why?" you might ask. "Aren't you excited about this story?"

Well, that's an interesting question. With a maybe interesting answer.

As with all of my stories, I'm excited about the idea. That's why I choose to write the stories I do. I get an idea, I get excited about that idea, and I sit down to write it. And there's where it all goes awry.

Every plot idea in my head is a gem. It's the best story ever, and it's going to be great and everyone is going to want to read it. But then I start writing. And that all goes to hell. Suddenly my great idea doesn’t seem so great. Something is lost between the idea and the execution.

Random Screaming

I appreciate everyone's feedback on my last post. The general consensus seems to be "more." And I agree completely. I know that I rushed the ending. I tend to do that. I realize the story's not going the way I want, so I just wrap it up as quickly as possible.

Pacing, that's the issue. Slow enough to build up tension but fast enough to not be boring. It's a careful balance that I have nowhere near mastered. If I think it's moving too slow, I just skip it forward to something exploding. And that's not always the best approach. It's hardly ever the best approach.

Head in the Clouds

Sorry I'm late. I had a job interview earlier, so I didn't want to stay up all night writing the blog post I had forgotten about. So here we are.

I've started writing my story, finally. Nothing like waiting until the last minute. It's tentatively called "Losing Daylight" and it's taking a while to get started. I spent probably an hour yesterday trying to think of a name for the airship.

The Saga of Steve

Recently I mentioned throwing a random guy named Steve into stories. Not just mine, but those of my NaNoites as well. This is a long running joke that goes back to my very first NaNo novel in 2010. It was a Steampunk story involving Nikola Tesla, Jekyll & Hyde, The Time Machine, Sherlock Holmes, and Jack the Ripper. See, ol' Jack was a Morlock from the future who came back in time to, I don't know, eat people. Lots of random things happened in order to keep the word count up.

At one point, unsure of what to do next, I asked my Facebook friends, "What should happen next in my novel?" with no context or clue what the story was about. One suggestion I was given was, "Steve takes one for the team." So then I had to create a character named Steve, who was then murdered horribly by Jack the Ripper while my other characters escaped.

Then, it became a running joke. In total, Steve has appeared in some form in five of my projects (yes, I just stopped to count them). The funny thing is, the joke is that "Steve is a douche, and he's probably going to die," even he only actually died in the first one.

Steve is also the only name that's allowed to be repeated. As a general rule, once I use a name in a story, I can't use it again. I think I started that to prevent me from reusing the same names I like over and over. If I do reuse one, a certain number of years must pass first. But not Steve, he can show up in every story if he wants to.

I started sharing Steve with the other NaNo writers around me. See, there's a lot of recurring elements across NaNo novels, like the Travelling Shovel of Death and a fellow named Mr. Ian Woon (an acronym of NaNoWriMo). So, I've made it my mission to infect as many novels with Steve as I can. I created the Big Bag of Steves for my regional gatherings, and I even offered the list up online to spread the plague of Steve even further. It's my goal that one day, every NaNo novel will contain a random character named Steve (or some variation thereof).

So if you, silent reader, find yourself working on some fictional endeavor and needing a random character to do something, I encourage you to add a Steve of your own.

Breaking Blocks

I'm going to be honest, I haven't written anything super exciting. That's the problem of having a word goal of only 10,000. That means the daily quota is only 334. So we're not exactly flying through this. I did write some dialogue that I liked, but I don't think it stands on its own very well.

So I guess we're going to talk about writer's block today. I wouldn't say that I'm blocked, really, but I don't really know what happens next. Luckily, I have a whole pile of things to deal with just that. As Municipal Liaison for NaNo, I like to provide all kinds of helpful stuff for my NaNoites. I have two bags of little paper slips that I take to write-ins.

One is labeled Scene Unstickers. These are random events that can happen to get a scene moving, such as:

• A fire breaks out
• Someone makes a confession
• Someone is running late
• Two words: Tequila shots
• Someone DIES!

The other is the Big Bag of Steves. It involves the many misadventures of a guy named Steve (there's a story there I'll eventually explain). These include:

• Steve shops for kiwis out of season
• Steve doesn't look where he's going
• Steve doesn't think it's poisonous
• Steve calls everyone by the wrong name
• Steve wants to invade the North Pole

The idea is that you draw one of these out of the bag, and try to steer your story toward making that thing happen. This might not be the best part of your story, but the idea is to get the story moving and the words flowing. Hopefully this random thing will lead to other things.

As for my story, The Shattered World, some random thing needs to happen right now, to get things moving. So later today I'll probably be diving into my stash of inspirational tidbits, and we'll see where it goes from there. Hopefully by Friday I'll have something more exciting to report.

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