Towards the end of December I got a real bee in my bonnet about ripping apart and revising The World (Saving) Series. I put it off because with the holidays and all, I didn’t want to get into it. And there were a few short story things I wanted to wrap up.
Hopefully, the bee hasn’t settled down and I can get some major work done on World. I’ve really got to be more consistent and dedicated to revising a novel to completion. This is my shot at doing that and I’m going to take it. I want to see how far I can get this month.
I’m also kicking around an idea for another project. I don’t want to say too much about it because I know how I am. I think something is a good idea, I talk about it, I start doing it, the idea dies, and nothing comes of any of the talking that I did. Talking about an idea that doesn’t have some actual substance to it in the sense that I am either done working on it or nearly done working on it is a jinx for me. Total jinx.
But there is a project idea I’m kicking around, so if it comes to being anything, we can all refer back to this post as the one in which it was first mentioned.
I feel like that sometimes, like I have no clue what the hell I’m doing. Not just when I’m working on my writing, either, though that happens plenty of times. For every day I think I know what I’m doing, there are two that I feel like I don’t.
I’m still not sure I know how to write a novel because I’ve yet to successfully revise one into completion. Working on short stories, more than once I’ve stopped to ask myself, “Is this right?” Even when it comes to blogging, I feel lost at times, like I’m just faking my way through it, looking like an idiot all the way.
But this feeling of not knowing what I’m doing goes beyond the writing doubts. It encompasses my whole career (if you want to call it that). Should I be splitting my time between writing novels and working on short stories? Is the Outskirts a waste of time? Should I really be self-publishing my novellas? Should I even be writing novellas? Should I focus all of my time and energy on getting one novel manuscript finished so I can start shopping it to agents? How do I connect more with the writing community? I need to get into it, but where do I start? Should I wait until I do have a novel manuscript finished and few agent rejections so I don’t look like the impostor I feel like? I consider myself a writer, but will they?
It feels like flies on a dead body in June when my brain buzzes like this. It freezes me. I can’t make any decisions, can’t even look for a logical place to start trying to figure anything out. I can’t even figure out what I DO know because I’m not sure I actually know it.
It’s kind of a bitch.
When this sort of overwhelming “where am I?” happens, I find myself throwing up my hands and yelling “fuck it!” at the sky and going back to work on whatever it is I’m working on. Do I know what I’m doing? Fuck it! I’ll do it anyway! That’s the spirit!
Which really doesn’t do me any good because it doesn’t fix the underlying problem, but at least I do get something done. And the productivity makes me feel better. It makes me feel like I at least know how to cross something off my To Do List for that given day. It’s a sense of accomplishment.
It’s just the rest of it I still need to work out.
December is always a screwy month for me. I’m coming down from NaNoWriMo, I’m dealing with the holiday gauntlet, and in general my time and energy is in flux. I never know what to schedule for myself during December because I never know how this roller coaster month is going to work out. I either give myself too much to do, decide to take on projects that are too ambitious, or I don’t give myself enough and I end up feeling like a slacker.
I’ve decided to err on the side of slackerdom this time around. I think I’m going to end up working on some Outskirts stuff. I’ve got a Paxton story I’m working on and some ideas for some Maisie Day stuff. I’ve got this idea for a couple novellas as written by Maisie (since she is a writer, you know). I think that’s what my morning project is going to end up as and I think I’m going to revise and cut down the Ivy novel I wrote over the summer to be one of Maisie’s. I’ve also got an idea for another one, but I haven’t done anything with it yet.
Working on all of that is both productive, but also low-commitment in a sense. There’s nothing urgent about it.
I will also continue my quest for rejections. It’s because obvious that I’m not going to meet my goal of 50 by the end of the year since I’m sitting at 15 right now. But 20 is within reach and I’ve got five stories out and four ready to go. If I finish the revisions on “Just Visiting” (I’ve already done most of the heavy lifting), that’ll be five. I didn’t submit at all in November, didn’t even really look around much. I need to finish the year with a final burst.
I’ve read in more than one place that writers should reward themselves for the little accomplishments they have along the way of bigger successes. They should do that because writing is a long slog from first draft to publication and while you’re doing it, it feels like you’re doing it for nothing. You put in all of this work and in the end, you might not see a dime for it. Rewarding yourself during the process helps alleviate that hopeless feeling that tends to creep up when you’re not looking.
Personally, I think it’s a great idea. Eating some ice cream at the end of a first draft, drinking some wine after slogging through revisions, playing a video game after meeting the day’s word count, or going out with some friends after submitting that short story is great. It’s a nice motivator to get through the hard parts and it’s a nice release once you do. Whatever reward you come up with, good on ya. Whatever flips your skirt and rocks your boat.
I’ll just be over here wishing I could do the same thing.
I don’t reward myself. At all. Ever. Even on the rare occasion that a short story gets accepted somewhere, the most I do is pause for a fist pump and then get back to work.
Why?
I guess it’s because of the way I was raised. Yes, of all the things to blame on my parents, I blame not eating pizza after finishing a first draft of a novel. But it’s true. My parents didn’t believe in rewarding us kids for things we were supposed to do. I didn’t get an allowance for cleaning my room. I was supposed to do that. I didn’t get a trip to Dairy Queen for making good grades. I was supposed to do that. I remember when I was a kid finding out that my friends got paid a dollar amount for A’s and B’s. I asked my parents why I didn’t get paid like that.
I was supposed to do that.
So here I am, 32 years old, been writing most of my life, and while I approve of the idea of getting a treat for finishing a first draft or revisions or submitting or accomplishing anything, big or small, related to a writing career, I can’t bring myself to participate because…I’m supposed to do that.
I’m supposed to finish that first draft and finish those revisions and submit that story and do that research and this, that, and the other. It’s part of my job. I don’t get rewarded for supposed to’s.
I would imagine that my attitude won’t change much when (not if!) I get my first novel published.
Because as a writer, that’s what I’m supposed to do. And as I writer, I’m supposed to write another.
So, I’d better get on it.
There’s no time for me to celebrate supposed to’s.
My focus in August is going to be finishing the revisions/rewrites on The World (Saving) Series. I’ve got less than ten chapters to go and while the rewriting is going to be heavy, it shouldn’t take me the whole month to finish.
I started two short stories at the end of last month, “Just Visiting” and “Lady on the Stairs” which I’ll be finishing as well.
And then…?
I need to get back to working on the Ivy novel. Things got derailed when I did my writing protest for a week last month. I’m not sure how much I like the outline/write/revise method. I think that’s where part of my writing frustration came from. I may just finish the outline and then write the rest of the novel so I can call it done. As it stands, I’ve written/revised over half of it so I wouldn’t be in horrible shape if I did it that way.
I’ve got half a mind to start outlining another big project. It’d be a freebie for the blog. However, I make no guarantees that anything will ever come of it. It’s just something I’m thinking of doing.
And of course, I continue on with the 50 Rejections saga. It’s been rather disappointing lately. I don’t want to talk about it now.
I’ll wait until I can go on and on at length in a post of its own.
The week in solitude with only two dogs and three cats to demand my attention and limited Internet access did me some good. Not only did I get several chapters of the Ivy novel written and revised, but I also found a new creative spark for revisions on The World (Saving) Series.
The first two days there I admit that I kept the same slow, slightly distracted pace. But by Saturday night I realized that I was getting bored and needed to do more work to better fill up my time. That was good enough to light the fire under my butt. I found myself doing twice as much work as I usually did when I was home.
The exceptions were Tuesday and Thursday. Tuesday I had a job interview and was gone a good chunk of the day, so I only did some outlining. Thursday I got a chapter written and one revised, but didn’t have the attention span to push it past that. I was looking forward to my aunt coming back that night so I could go home. It was nice to get away, but I was ready to get back to my bed and my fridge and my animals.
I’m pleased with the productivity I had that week and I hope at least a little of it carries over back at home. The Ivy novel is going to continue to take its dear sweet time and I’m going to get frustrated with my lack of progress on it and I’m going to deal with my bad habit of procrastinating, but I think this burst of productivity will help propel me through the hard parts. And I’m really glad that I had a chance to tinker with The World (Saving) Series again. It’s gotten me excited to get back to the project and I think I can hammer out the revisions on the first third of the novel before the month ends.
In the end, it’s all about discipline and focus. I need to carry the writer’s retreat mindset of getting my work done in my mind all the time.
A saying has floated on my Twitter timeline repeatedly and it’s so very true:
Writing is 90% not getting distracted by the Internet.
Okay, that isn’t entirely true. In my quest for 50 rejections, I’ll continue to review, revise (if necessary), and submit my short stories. I’ll also do another round of revisions on “Gone Missing” to try to get it into publishable shape.
But my main creative focus is going to be on two of my novel manuscripts.
The first doesn’t have a title yet so I’ve just been calling it The Ivy Novel since the main character’s name is Ivy. I started working on the first draft last month, taking a different approach. I outlined the first five chapters, wrote the first four, then revised what I wrote. I’m going to do this leap frog method of writing for this draft just to see how it works out for me after doing so many first drafts in the NaNoWriMo style.
Not that I’ll ever stop doing NaNo. I’m addicted to that self-competition. And I like revising a crappy first draft into something better. It’s a winner all-around. But, I also think I should explore as many methods as possible. It’s all in the pursuit of getting better.
I also intend to revisit The World (Saving) Series. I do not deny that I hit a wall when it came to revisions because while I knew significant changes needed to be made and I had a good idea what they were, I also felt like the manuscript was lacking something. Between work on The Ivy Novel (which has a slight connection to Series) and the magic of me getting ideas in the shower, I think I found my gimmick for the book. I want to test it out on the first few chapters of the revised manuscript to see how it works.
I’m looking forward to working on these two projects. I need to stop avoiding the work it takes to produce a good novel manuscript in favor of the more instant gratification of the short story.
It’s time for me to long-haul this with some focus.
Last month my main goal was to get down a first draft of a personal essay that I want to submit to a contest. This month my main goal is to see if I can work that first draft into something I want to spend 25 dollars on in order to submit it to a contest. I believe the early bird deadline is May 1st. So, this will be fun. No pressure as I reserve the right not to submit an essay I don’t think is good enough to go since it will cost me 25 bucks to submit and right now money ain’t growing on trees.
Other April projects include revising “Gone Missing”, the not so short story. The first draft ended up being just about fifty pages, a little over 10,000 words. I need to figure out what I’m going to do with it. It’s hard enough for me to sell a story period. Trying to sell a longer story like this one ups the level of difficulty. I’m looking into the possibility of self-publishing it, say on Smashwords so it would be available strictly for e-readers, but my self-publishing success hasn’t been the greatest. But then, my publishing success in general is questionable, so really, I think I can hack it and break even either way.
I’ve also got a novel idea that has taken hold of my brain and won’t let go. I’ve got the basic plot, a subplot, the main characters (all except the bad guy…he doesn’t have a face or a name yet, but that will come, oh yes), and an idea of what I’m doing. I’ve already started working on an outline and jotted down a few scenes so I don’t forget them. Writing this a little a day will be a nice break from revising.
My quest to get 50 rejections this year continues. To check in, as of then end of March I have 3 rejections, 1 acceptance, 9 stories still out, and 2 ready to go. Obviously, more submitting will be done.
Let’s hope the next time I check in at the end of June, there’ll be more rejections (and acceptances!) counting towards my goal.
At the beginning of February I was all fired up to take on my short stories and get them all revised and polished up and sent out. About ten days in, the whole thing blew up in my face.
I didn’t want to look these stories anymore. I felt like even though I was spending a whole afternoon one one story, nothing was changing. The stories weren’t getting better and worse, they weren’t getting done. It was some weird limbo state in which I banged my head against the words and the words kept winning.
So I took a weekend off and didn’t look at the stories. When I came back to them on that Monday, I came back with a different approach. Instead of trying to sprint through the stories and rush to get them done, which did little in the way of progress, I slowed myself down. I only allowed myself to revise two pages of the story a day and worked on two or three stories at a time. The result? Progress.
By working on just those two pages of the story, I was able to focus my efforts. I blotted out the big picture and focused on just the details of those two pages. It worked. Oh, I still didn’t get as much done last month as I wanted to, but I did get things done, something that wouldn’t have happened if I had kept up with my frantic, flailing pace.
This is something I struggle with. I get in a hurry because I want to be done. Writing isn’t a sprint, but I sometimes treat it like one. I think I SHOULD be done by a certain time and then rush to make it happen. This sort of approach might work for NaNoWriMo or the first draft of a short story, when the brain just needs to dump the words on paper. But when it comes to revisions, that’s not something I should rush myself through. That’s when I need to take the time to focus and do it write. That’s when speed is my enemy, not my friend.
Right now I’m so desperate to get things going that trying to push myself along is really holding me back. I feel like I’m so far behind everyone else and can’t catch up, but I have to remember that this isn’t a race. This is just me. And I need to do my best.
Slowing down (and more importantly focusing) will help me do that.
February is being dedicated to the short story now that I’m finished with the initial (and crappy) rewrites of Spirited in Spite. I’ve got this goal of getting 50 rejections this year (more on that next week) and it’s really spurned my creativity in regards to my short stories.
So here’s my short story To Do List this month:
-Revise/Polish “At 3:36” (I’ve already done initial edits in changing it from 3rd to 1st person)
-Revise/Polish “An Active Sleeper” (I think I’ve figured out how to fix this story)
-Revise/Polish “Everybody’s Time” (I wrote it at the end of last month)
-Review “Powerless” and revise/polish if necessary (It’s my first rejection of the year)
-Write “Notorious” (about the survivor of a serial killer)
-Write “Hear It?” (about a person suffering from auditory hallucinations; title may change)
-Submit any stories that are ready.
I’ve got a couple of other stories (“Anniversaries” and an untitled one) that I could revise if I get the time, but I’ve left them off the list for now simply because I’m not sure what to do to them yet. The stories need tweaking to make them work, but I’m not sure what the tweaks should be. I’m sure it’ll come to me.
Ideally, at the end of the month I’ll have at least four stories that can (and hopefully will be) submitted.
Gotta keep producing and submitting if I want those 50 rejections.
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