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Tag: writing
Writing–When It All Goes to Concrete
I wanted to write a novel this summer. I had the idea all ready to go. I was going to do it the same way I wrote an impromptu novel last summer, just a thousand words a day, a very loose outline. I even mentioned it in my writing projects post, that’s how sure I was that Suicide Paris Green was going to be a thing.
Forty pages in and I realized, that no, it’s not going to be a thing. Well, not a novel thing, anyway.
I’ve written first drafts before in which I could easily look at it and say, “This is fucking garbage”, but then I’d say, “It’s okay. I can rewrite it.” I looked at this first draft and went, “Nope.”
I can’t say how I know that something I’m writing is just not going to work. It’s actually very rare that it happens. I usually finish the first draft of most things and it may be after I’m done that I look back and go, “No, it’s not worth the effort to fix”. And that’s fine. I don’t think everything I write is meant to be finished to ultimate completion. Sometimes I just need to get the idea out of my head and once it’s out, I’m done. I’m cool with that. I don’t consider that in any way to be a waste of time or effort because in the end, I’m practicing my craft.
But there are those rare occasions when I’m writing something that I just know it’s a lost cause, that it isn’t worth pursuing. It’s definitely an intuitive thing. The only way I can describe it is that the idea, once fresh and new and liquid, now feels like old, set, scarred concrete in my head. There’s just no life to it anymore, no movement.
That’s what happened to Suicide Paris Green. I was working on it yesterday morning, typing away, and I realized that it was concrete in my head. I know what I wanted from it, but in the act of actually writing it I realized that I wasn’t going to get what I wanted. I was going to end up with an unreadable mess that I’d never want to look at again.
It just killed my mojo.
I hate it when that happens to my ideas and I’m happy that it happens rarely.
But all is not lost, at least not in my world. Not long after I called TOD on this draft and decided not to write another word, my eyes lit up at the prospect of stripping the draft and the ideas I had for the story for parts. What might not work as a novel may just work as some short stories with a similar theme. And maybe I’ll write enough of them to put together another collection.
And I’ll save the title for a living manuscript, too.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
So, maybe instead of a writing a novel this summer, I’ll just write some short stories instead.
May Writing Projects
April turned out to be quite a productive month for me, quite unintentionally really.
I finished the latest round of revisions on The Haunting of the Woodlow Boys as well as the first drafts of all five of the potential script contest entries (first fifteen pages and one-page synopsis) before I left for Chicago. Part of the purpose of going to Chicago, besides seeing friends and eating orange chicken, was to be able to work on my writing without interruption or distraction. I found myself in a hotel room with no major writing project demanding my attention as I was still undecided what script to do for the contest. I ended up polishing “What You Don’t See” and “Short Hallway” (I polished a haunted hotel story in a hotel room while watching 1408 because my commitment to a theme cannot be denied) and got about a third of Voice polished before I left. A productive short trip despite the anxiety troubles I had.
I finished polishing Voice after I got home. I then turned my attention to the script contest. I ended up picking one called Open Christmas Eve and did my best to get those first fifteen pages perfect. I hit the “What the fuck am I doing? I can’t do this! I have no idea what I’m doing. This is pointless” wall Friday night, got my “Fuck it” second wind Saturday afternoon, and after a few more tweaks and some polishing, I submitted it Saturday night. I recognize that it’s probably a waste of an entry fee (and only with extreme luck will I even win that entry fee back), but I still did it. There is some kind of accomplishment in pushing myself to explore different forms of writing.
Speaking of, April was National Poetry Month and as an exercise I made myself write at least four lines of poetry a day. They’re just scraps of poems, nothing glorious, and I have no idea what, if anything, I’ll do with them (I posted one on my Instagram at the end of the month to celebrate), but it was a fun little project.
After all of that in April, what’s to be done in May?
I’m going to completely finish The Haunting of the Woodlow Boys. It needs a little more revision (just some tweaks), a beta read, and a polish. Once that’s done, I’ll get to work putting together the ghost story collection. I’m also going to work on finishing the first draft of Open Christmas Eve. Now that it’s submitted, the rest of the script should be easy to finish and I’ll feel like less of a cheat having the whole thing written.
I sort of feel like spending the summer writing a short novel. I’ve got the idea (actually, I have two ideas, but I think I’m going to save one for NaNo) and I think I’ll spend some time this month working on fleshing it out.
No worries about getting bored. Still plenty left on my To Do List of Doom.
April Writing Projects
Remember last month when I said that I was forcing myself to revise two short stories that needed a lot of work and I didn’t like them and it was going to take me forever and everything was terrible?
Yeah, that was all nothing but an empty whine because I ended up getting them both done in about two weeks. I didn’t anticipate that, but it happened, and I’m happier for it.
And since I got them done so quickly, I just moved right on to the next big revision, The Haunting of the Woodlow Boys, which I’ll continue working on this month. I’ve got over half of it done already, but it’s the last third or so that really needs a lot of work and rewriting. I’m going to take my time with it. It’s the last story in the still-untitled ghost story collection that needs major revisions. Once it gets done, that whole thing should come together pretty quickly.
In side project news, if you follow me on Twitter (you probably shouldn’t because I’m terrible) or read the tweets that come up on the blog, then you know I’ve been referencing five outlines. First I talked about finishing them; now I’m talking about writing synopsis and fifteen pages. It’s possible you might be wondering what the hell I’m talking about.
(It’s also possible that you don’t give a shit, and that’s also valid.)
I’m going to try my hand at the Writer’s Digest Annual Writing Competition again. Nine years after winning 10th place in the genre category and a few failures in other categories since then, I’ve decided to try my hand at the script category. I’ve only written a script once before for Script Frenzy (which they don’t do anymore), so I’m looking at this as a personal challenge that’s going to cost me a $25 entry fee.
So what’s the deal with the five outlines? I took five ideas that I had and outlined them. Now I’m writing the first fifteen pages and synopsis (the requirement for the entry) of each one to see which one I think is the strongest entry. Then I’ll take the one I think is strongest, polish it all up, and submit it. Is it a lot of extra work to do it this way? Yeah, probably, but it gives me some practice. Am I cheating by only doing the first fifteen pages? Yeah, probably, but I will finish whatever one I submit for sure. It just won’t be done by the deadline, which is in May. I only have one more outline that needs fifteen pages and a synopsis written, so I’ve got plenty of time to get this done. I find script writing to go very quickly for me.
Which means I’m probably doing it wrong.
March Writing Projects
Beware the Ides of March! Or in my case, the whole month because this one is going to suck for me.
What possible writely punishment could I be putting myself through? I’m revising two short stories I don’t like.
I really liked the ideas of “What You Don’t See” and “Short Hallway”. However, the first draft executions of both were awful slogs that did little to capture what was in my head. Not a problem, as I tend to be hard on myself during first drafts and I feel like revising is something I’m better at.
I reread both stories last month after I finished revising Voice, thinking I’d make notes on them and get a jump start on their revisions.
Instead, I made a few notes and then put them both aside to sit for the last week of February because I had no desire to even attempt to start to revise either one of them. The first drafts are as a bad as I remember and they’re going to take a lot of work to revise and it’s going to be such a slog because I don’t like the stories. Any time I decide that I don’t like a story, it means that all future work on that story is going to be painful. I’ll be stomping my foot like a little child being forced to do something against my will, procrastinating even though I know it would be better to just get it over with. I can’t help it. On the outside I’m 36, but my Rainbow Brite shoelaces should tip you off that on the inside, I’m 5.
Why don’t I just give up on the stories if I don’t like them? Two reasons. One, I’m loathe to give up on ANY story no matter what the circumstance. Two, when I finally do quit on a story it’s because I’ve tried everything and the story just doesn’t work. I’ve completed and submitted and/or published several stories that I hated from first draft to last, but they worked. Even if I hate them, I have to honor that.
I think with the required effort, these two stories will work.
It’s just a matter of summoning up the necessary energy in order to put in the required effort to make them work.
I don’t wanna.
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February Writing Projects
Last month I finished the first drafts of “Short Hallway” and “What You Don’t See”, which were both a real slog for some reason. I also wrote, revised, polished, and submitted a short story called “Don’t Feed the Animals” to a contest. It was one of those rare stories that came out pretty much done in the first draft. It just needed some minor tweaks. Pretty handy since I needed to have it ready to go in only a few weeks.
I think I was going to try to write and enter two stories because at the time I had two ideas, but when it came time to focus, I only had “Don’t Feed the Animals” in my head. I can’t for the life of me remember what the other idea was. Oh well. It was either a moment of brilliance lost forever or it was an idea better forgotten. I’ll never know.
This month I’m going to go back to revising Voice. I’ve done the structural changes and I’ve made all of the notes. In theory, this shouldn’t be much of a challenge to fix, but I haven’t been able to bank on anything lately. It’s been a tough go mentally as of late for me (but that’s another post).
If I somehow get done with Voice, then I’ll move on to revising something else that’s going into the ghost anthology because there’s a lot of revising needed to be done for that.
I’m going to be doing so much revising this year.
So much.
January Projects
New year, new stuff. And old stuff. The stuff never ends, really.
I’m finishing up a couple of short stories, “What You Don’t See” and “The Short Hallway”, for the ghost story anthology I’m working on. They’re the last two I needed first drafts of. From here on out, it’ll all be revising and polishing for that book. As of right now, it’s the only one I’m planning on putting out in 2016.
I didn’t get as much revised on Voice as I would have liked, but I did get the important structural stuff that needed to be changed done. Now it’s just a matter of doing the rest of the heavy lifting and I’ll probably get to that next month.
A short story contest came across one of my social media feeds and I’m going to do something for it. It’s literary, not strictly genre, but it’s no fees and you can enter up to two stories and I’ve got a couple of ideas that might work.
Can I write, revise, and polish two short stories in a month?
Sure.
Why not?
December Writing Projects and Other Tidbits
It’s December! And December means that I don’t do as much writing work because I’m too busy wading through all of the holiday cheer to get much done. And yes, that was sarcasm because this has long been my least favorite time of year and I think I lost what precious little Christmas spirit I might have had back on November 1st when I inhaled about a pound of artificial snow during a floorset.
Anyway. Writing projects.
I’m going to continue working on The Haunting of the Woodlow Boys novella. Just writing 500 words a day, taking it very easy. I’m also going to start revising Voice, again taking it very easy. I have almost nothing made for Grinchmas so that’s where most of my energy is going to be directed. Making little bits of progress on writing projects is better than making none or stressing myself because I’m struggling to write and make Grinchmas. I can go full blast again in January.
Tidbits and News:
The distribution of The Ivy Russell Novellas paperback has hit a snag because that book is jinxed and/or I am terrible at my job. So for the foreseeable future, it will only be available on Lulu. Sorry for any inconvenience, but there shouldn’t be much because Lulu is just as good as the more popular marketplaces.
Speaking of other not so popular places, I’m doing a couple of holiday deals through Smashwords (which is compatible for most all eBook platforms) for my two 2015 eBook releases, The Ivy Russell Novellas and People Are Terrible.
Use the coupon code CW86C to get 15% off of The Ivy Russell Novellas.
Use the coupon code DS99F to get 15% off of People Are Terrible.
These coupons are only valid at Smashwords and the deals end on Christmas, so don’t miss out!
NaNoWriMo 2015 Done and Other Stories
I officially reached 50,000 words and the end of the first draft of The End of the (Werewolf) Curse yesterday. Compared to the last two years, I was positively slacking on the daily word count and the speed because it took me nearly three weeks to finish. In 2013 I finished in 12 days and in 2014 I finished in two weeks. I averaged between 2,000 and 3,000 words a day this year, which is good, but I still felt lazy.
I felt so lazy, in fact, that I started working on a novella in addition to working on NaNo. At just a page a day starting on November 3rd, I managed to get about 5,400 words written on The Haunting of the Woodlow Boys.
But, back to NaNo.
The use of the loose outline worked out pretty well for me in terms of getting my word count in every day. My biggest hang-up as always is just getting started for the day. Once the words start, I usually hit my daily target in no time.
However, I admit that this first draft felt like a total slog. There are aspects of this story that I really like and I really hope I can build on when I revise it, but I also feel like this thing is boring as hell and my characterization is shit and everything is terrible. Considering I feel that way about a lot of my NaNo projects, I may be just a tad pessimistic about it, but I don’t think so.
But it’s done and that’s always the goal and it’s time to start thinking about other things.
When I’m doing NaNo, I don’t really want to do much else. I don’t want to read. I don’t want to write blog posts. I don’t want to work on any other projects (obviously writing the novella at the same time this year was the exception, not the rule). When I finish NaNo, it’s like touching back down after orbiting the Earth for a few weeks. Time to get back to the other things on the To Do List of Doom.
I’m working on getting The Ivy Russell Novellas paperback out and about. Right now, it’s only available on Lulu, but eventually, it’ll get to Amazon and Barnes and Noble and such. I’ll also be updating the links to The Ivy Russell Novellas eBook, as it’s finally hit some other marketplaces. So be sure to check that out!
Now, back to the word mines.
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