Tag: writing

Writing–March Projects

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

February was a disaster in terms of productivity, but I’ll get to that let down next week. Instead, let’s look at what I can be expected to do (and hopefully, actually get done) this month.

I really need to get back to revising The World (Saving) Series. It needs to go back to being top priority. Bottom line, I’m spending my Ides with Stanley.

I need to review/revise a few stories, two of which are a hold over from last month. I need to review “Another Deadly Weapon” and “Erin Go Bragh”. I keep going back and forth on changing the ending of “Another Deadly Weapon”, but I think I’m going to leave it for one last submission. “Play Chicken” needs to be revised. I think I’ve left it alone long enough to gain some perspective on how to achieve the effect and pacing it needs.

I should also probably start work on another freebie story for the blog, but I’ve got some time so that’s pretty low on the priority list for the month.

Here’s to hoping this workload is more compatible with my day job than the last.

Stories By The Numbers

Submitted: 3(Sent out “Summer Rot”; “Spillway” and “Such a Pretty Face”are still out)
Ready: 3
Rejections: 1 (“Soul Sister”)

Writing–Deadlines: Breaking Them

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I don’t like to break deadlines, but I will. In some cases, it’s extenuating circumstances. I’m sick or I have to take my roommate to the emergency room or I suddenly find myself in high demand because if people didn’t respect my writing career as my only job, they sure as hell don’t respect it as my second one.

And then sometimes, it’s just me.

It doesn’t happen much with the first drafts. With first drafts I can just throw crap on the page knowing that I can fix it during revisions.

It happens during revisions more than I’d like. Part of that is because I’d like it to never happen. The other part of that is because sometimes I just don’t like a story. It’s hard to motivate myself if there’s no love. I’m more likely to give up on it all together than try to push myself through it. I don’t intend to write stories that I hate, but sometimes it’s during the revision process that I realize that the original idea wasn’t so great and I’m not sure I want to even bother with it. The deadline comes and I’m not too heartbroken about missing it. It’s a good excuse to put the story away until one day, maybe, I can find my heart for it again.

Sometimes I’m just sick of a story. I’ve seen it so much, put it through so many revisions, that the idea of opening it up one more time makes me want to slam my head in a door. “At 3:36” is one of those stories for me. I’ve revised it and revised it to the point that if I put it on my to do list (it’s up for review in March) that I cringe and put it off until the last because I don’t want to deal with it. I’ve broken a deadline or two for that story.

And then there are stories that I’m just plain stuck on. I have no idea what needs to be done to it to improve it, or I do know what needs to be done, but I just don’t know how to do it. Those are the stories that I sit and stare at and go to bed with and watch helplessly as the deadline creeps up, then looms, then passes me by, grinning as it goes.

Those are the worst. Those are the ones that make me question myself as a writer, question my talent and my dedication.

And then I make my next deadline by three days and I’m really pleased with the result and it totally erases the bitter taste in my mouth.

Thankfully, I make more deadlines than I miss so this sort of internal, self-inflicted drama is minimal. Best to save it for the stories.

Writing–Deadlines: Making Them

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I like deadlines. Deadlines keep me motivated and they keep me honest. I don’t like missing them. Self-imposed or someone else’s, they do me good.

I don’t like missing deadlines. Even if they’re important to no one else but me, I don’t like to miss them. I don’t like to make that adjustment on my day planner. If I write it down, it’s set in stone.

I’m also a dedicated procrastinator. I’m excellent at putting off, which conflicts with my need to meet deadlines.

I’ve gotten better at managing my time and making myself get started. With my self-imposed deadlines, I’ve recognized that I’m better off giving myself a little more time than I think I’ll need. If I set a specific goal in mind for a given day, that helps, too. It’s like a mini-deadline. I need to have this done before I go to sleep. A few of those and the overall deadline is met without much effort.

There are times when this doesn’t work out, of course. For whatever reason, the motivation isn’t there. It’s too much effort to open the file, let alone read the words on the screen. I can’t think of how to phrase what I want to say or change what needs to be changed. The “I don’t feel like it” refrain echoes through my brain.

Which means that when the deadline is looming, the fire gets lit under my butt. The focus might not always be there, but the dedication is and I do whatever it takes to get the job done. Sometimes this means struggling late into the night. Other times, it means I find an hour’s worth of focus, get the job done, and feel like a complete moron for not just doing it sooner so I could have had the whole thing accomplished and off of my plate sooner.

I try to seize the real productive moments whenever I have them. There are sometimes when I’m just in a demolishing mood and I try to get as much done as possible. For example, this past weekend I was hitting all cylinders and as such, I knocked out six blog posts in two days. It was nice to be done with them all with hours to spare before bedtime.

Of course, this came after I spent all week struggling to make revisions on “Phobias Are How Rumors Get Started”, having major trouble getting started, only to find that what I really needed to do took me about half an hour.

But I met my deadline.

“Phobias Are How Rumors Get Started” is now posted. It’ll be up for the next six weeks. Enjoy.

Writing–Sick Days

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I came home early from work last week due to a blizzard making work in the transportation business slower than Wile E. Coyote stuck in puddle of glue. It was a good thing, too, because it was that day that a cold crushed me like a boulder from a cliff.

For the next two days, I might have gone to my day job, but writing did not get done. I could function and didn’t feel anywhere near as bad as I did the first day, but I still felt pretty yucky. And when it came to writing, I just didn’t have the strength.

Considering I have enough trouble getting any writing done on a good day because I’m such an ace procrastinator, getting sick put a major cramp in my style. The dribble of productivity I’ve experienced since getting employed dried up to a desert and then the tumble weeds of guilt started to blow in.

I’ve got a lot to do this month. I can see it written out on my Whiteboard of To Do. There’s some serious work in there. And I took three days off for illness. There’s some conflict there. On the one hand, I was well enough to go to one job, so I should have been able to go to the other, so to speak. On the other hand, it was the going to the first job that wore me out for the second job. It’s important to rest when you’re sick and with a 6:15am wake-up call, my head was hitting the pillow really early.

It doesn’t matter. I feel like a slacker. If I take a day off from writing that’s not scheduled (oh yes, I schedule my days off), then it causes me guilt and pain. Even if the excuse is a good one, like I’m so sick I can’t think, I still feel guilty. And the unscheduled break throws me off my game.

Now I’m faced with playing catch up and considering I started the month unsure of what to work on first (aside from The World (Saving) Series revisions), I’m even more lost and therefore, feel like I’m even farther behind.

I’m in desperate need of a game plan.

And some cough drops.

Writing–February Projects

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

New month, new schedule. It’s going to be a hectic one.

Revisions on The World (Saving) Series will be ongoing. I’ll be rewriting “The Guinea Pig” in anticipation of a deadline. I’ll also be revising “Another Deadly Weapon” and “Play Chicken” for deadlines and “Phobias Are How Rumors Get Started” for the blog (only a couple of more weeks to enjoy “An Old Fashioned Vacation”!). And finally, I’ll review “Summer Rot” for possible submission.

I have no idea how I’m going to do all of that with a day job and blogging and all of the other bits and bobs in my life, but I’m going to try. I’ve got to make good on my committment not to slack.

Stories By the Numbers

Sent Out: 3
Ready: 3
Accepted/Rejected: 0

Writing–Writing with a Day Job

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

Last week acquired a day job. I started working on Monday.

While I’m grateful for the regular income soon to be filling my bank account (before I send it right back out to pay bills), this full-time position brings forth a possible complication, namely, time to write. It’s too early now to judge on how big of an impact this job will have on my schedule. I’m still adjusting to the idea of getting up at 6:30 every morning. Also, I’m just working on revisions for The World (Saving) Series and so far none of them have been very extensive. Doing only one chapter a night, they haven’t really been very plentiful either. But I know some big ones are coming, heavy on the rewrites.

Next month I’ll be doing short story revisions/rewrites on top of the novel revisions. The month after that, I’ll be writing a new short story.

It’s going to be interesting, and I imagine frustrating as well, to see how I will be able to manage my time and rearrange my world in order to accommodate 8 1/2, 9 hours of my day now devoted to something other than playing Facebook games, blathering on Twitter, and, oh yeah, maybe getting some actual writing done.

I know that in order for this to work, I’m going to have to treat it like having two jobs. Sure, I can cram a lot of stuff in on the weekend. I’m already doing my blog posts for two blogs then and the weekends are usually when I make my greatest strides in getting writing projects accomplished (I have no idea why that is; you’d think it’d be the other way around, not doing as much writing on the weekends, but there you go). But for five days a week, I’m going to have to really get serious about time management, take no excuses, shun the distractions, and get something done. Progress must be made every day or I’ll be getting nowhere.

I’ve come too far to have everything suddenly come grinding to a halt just because now I’m spending my day earning money in order to support this career that I really want to have and really want to make work, but now I’m too tired to do it and don’t have the time. I definitely cannot succumb to those excuses if I want to be successful.

And I really want to be successful.

It’s going to be a challenge, but I’m going to do it. I really have no other choice.

It’s a good thing I don’t have a social life. It’d suffer terribly because of this.

Writing–Kiki and the Idea Notebook

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

If I were a more popular writer, I’m sure more people would ask me where I get my ideas from. And I would tell them that I get my ideas from my notebook.

Shall I clarify? I suppose I’d better. Don’t want to be thought of as any more of a loon than I already am.

I get my ideas from my idea notebook. Of course, I have to put the ideas into my idea notebook, too. A lot of those ideas have been in that idea notebook for so long that I don’t remember where they’ve come from, though. Some of the ideas I don’t even remember having them, can’t remember writing them down. Those are the best. They’re so fresh and new. It’s like they were put there by an idea fairy.

As for the rest, I had to get those ideas the old-fashioned, hard way. I kept my eyes and ears open and asked “what if” a lot.

To me, ideas and inspiration can strike anywhere. I get hit with it a lot either in the shower or doing laundry. I don’t know why, but those two activities tend to bring out the best ideas in me. I can almost understand it with the laundry. I write a lot of horror, my washer is in the basement, and my basement can be a creepy place to be. I guess when I’m showering, I’m just looking for a way to keep myself entertained while I go through my daily cleansing ritual without much thought.

My ideas are all different. Sometimes it’s just a scene. Other times it’s a character. There are times when I’ve read an article in the paper or saw a segment on the news or some other program and just kept asking “what if” until I had something I liked. No matter what, almost all of them go into the notebook.

Few ideas come to me fully formed and ready to write at that moment. Even fewer insist on being written that second (if I really like those ideas, I will rearrange my schedule to accomodate them so I don’t lose their urgency and thrill). The fully formed ideas are harder to put into the notebook. They seem to go stale quicker than the fragments, suggestions, images, and dialogue.

I like to flip through my idea notebook at least once a month to refresh my memory on what goodies are lurking in there. Sometimes an old idea jumps out at me like a new frog fresh out of the pond. Sometimes I wonder what the hell what I was thinking when I wrote this bit down. But I don’t get rid of it.

The idea notebook is sacred like that. It’s where my ideas come from. 

Stories By the Numbers

Sent Out: 3
Ready: 3
Rejections: A story I called rejected last week due to no response last week got an official rejection this week (with a personal invitation to submit again because they liked my story, but didn’t think it worked with what they were doing for that project).

Journal Crazy

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

My mother gave me a journal as part of the now defunct “Aunt Kiki” holiday. Pretty and purple, the script on the cover says “Me, Myself, and I: An Instrospective Collection of My Innermost Thougths and Feelings” and the design features three faces in a knotwork ontop of a silver diamond, and it sat for a month before I wrote in it.

In that first journal I admitted that part of my hestance wasn’t just marring a pristine page; I was afraid to remove my innermost thoughts from the safety of my brain. Out of my head, they could be exposed to prying eyes with no respect for privacy and judged harshly. Worse, out of my head, they could be real.

The reluctance is evident in that first journal. First of all, I didn’t use it much. The entries begin July of 2003 and end January 2008. Nearly five years. Secondly, there’s a sense of holding back in some of the earlier entries. I was too scared to put down everything into words, all the thoughts, all the emotions, all the crazy bouncing around in my head.

You can see me get more comfortable with opening up over the course of the entries in that first journal. I got better at it and I did it more frequently.

My second journal I believe Carrie bought me as a birthday present. It’s rainbow colored, cheerful and simple, and I’d say it has about as many pages as my first one. The entries in it cover from January of 2008 until December of 2009.

Yeah, I got a lot better at writing in it more often. I started using it more as it was intended. Instead of being afraid of putting my thoughts down on paper, it became THE place to put my thoughts to get them out of my head. It became the refuge of my frustrations, mostly. It let me get the things off of my chest that other people wouldn’t, mostly because the ensuing arguement would be pointless and solve nothing.

It also became the locked box for the mushiest part of my heart, allowing me to explore those sweet, vulnerable feelings I don’t like to admit I have. There are some romantic ideas in those pages. Ideas that would absolutely shock the people who know me as the horror loving hard-ass that make men cry for their mothers and make women try to befriend me so I won’t eat them.

My last journal was red. That’s it. Just red. The entries cover from December of 2009 to January of this year. This is the journal I got truly comfortable in. This is the journal I put my craziest thoughts in. I gave myself permission to be absolutely ambitious and hopeful and unrealistic and unrestrained. There is some serious, wild insanity on those pages and to date, if there were any journals I’d burn before my death, that would be the first one on the fire.

Since that first journal, I’ve moved from being reluctant to dependent. I did my last entry in my red journal on my birthday with no new journal waiting for me. I’m slowly moving into frantic mode. I have things to write down, thougths that need ink! I’ve gone from not even shrugging at the idea of missing a couple of months to feeling guilty if I only have two entries for a given month.

Right now, I’m thinking about all of the things, good, bad, and crazy, I want to put in my new journal as soon as I get it. I fantasize about marring those clean pages with the inner workings of my mind. It’s going to feel so good to get all of that out.

And with any luck at all, in thirty years I’ll be able to read back over those stored thoughts and marvel at how I functioned, coped, struggled, and felt during those important years, some of which may be lost to the sands of time by then.

More likely, though, I’ll just shake my head and laugh and think, “Wow. You were really kinda nuts back then, weren’t you?” before putting down my old journal and picking up a new journal to scribble once again.

Writing–Social Anxiety Network

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

A big part of a writing career these days is networking. Getting to know fellow writers, making connections with them that could lead to making connections with other people in the business, other writers, agents, publishers, editors.

Networking is also how writers today build a fanbase and attract attention. Through Twitter and Facebook and other fabulous internet socializing tools, writers can sell themselves and their work to the readers they’re hoping to attract.

This is all well and good. It’s a great way to connect with readers and it’s a great way to connect with others in the writing business. It brings down walls and makes the writing feel less lonely. Many writers, even the most shy ones, thrive doing this sort of thing.

However, I am not one of these people.

As ridiculous as it sounds (particularly if you follow me on Twitter), I have social anxiety on the Internet. For most people, the anonymity of the Internet allows them to be more outspoken, more bold. While that does apply to me in certain situations (again, Twitter), that anonymity doesn’t cover them all.

For example, other blogs. I read other blogs, but unless I know the person, I rarely comment. Even if I do know the person, that doesn’t mean I’ll comment. Sometimes I have nothing to say and I really don’t want to force something just for the sake of conversation. Most of the time, I don’t feel comfortable with commenting. I don’t feel smart enough, established enough, or legit enough to share my two cents. I feel awkward coming out of lurkerdom to comment as there is no established rapport. I’m just a stranger stopping by and saying a few words without introduction.

Which is just silly because I don’t feel that way about people who comment on my blog (or reply or retweet me on Twitter). Once I get over the shock that people are actually reading and not everything I babble just disappears into a void, I’m cool with it. I don’t know why I’d feel differently with the roles switched.

It takes me a while to warm up, I suppose.

I’m focusing on blogs because I’m a little more vocal on Twitter, but there’s still a certain amount of anxiety and awkwardness in following people and responding to certain people’s tweets. As much as I’d like to be one of the cool kids, I never have been, never will be, and I still get nervous, even on the Internet, when it comes to talking to them.

It’s a silly little thing, but it’s one that’s holding me back and is going to continue holding me back unless I overcome it. Naturally, that’s what I intend to do.

I prefer to have making an ass of myself on Twitter be my biggest social problem.

Stories By The Numbers

Stories Submitted: 3
Stories Ready: 3
Acceptances/Rejections: 0

Writing–January Projects

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

New month, new year, new projects on the whiteboard of my writing life.

The big project this month is revising The World (Saving) Series. I’ve been itching to get my revising hands on this first draft since I wrote the last word. I love this story and I want to make it better.

I’m re-reading it and making revision notes on it now and for the most part, there’s nothing major story-wise that I need to overhaul, which is nice. Most of the revisions now are just little story things like fixing some details and turning the telling into showing. I think this time I got the story right the first time.

I’m planning on this round of revisions to take two months. Planning. If I can get them done sooner, I will not complain. However, I know they won’t be done there. Not only will the technical aspects still need to be cleaned up, there are certain details I’m still going to be lacking. I’m writing about places I’ve never been to and in some case, never seen. It’s a challenge I’m going to have to overcome, but at a later date.

As I like to say, one catastrophe at a time.

With a big project that’s going to take me all month and beyond, it’s nice to say that I’ve already accomplished something in submitting three short stories. It’s nice to be able to wipe something off of the whiteboard.

Stories By the Numbers

Submitted: 3
Ready: 3
Rejected: 2 (“Game Night” and “Another Deadly Weapon”; both no response rejections)

Stories By the Numbers for 2010

Submitted: 14
Accepted: 2
Rejections: 23