8/31/2013

Day 21!


I haven't written yet today, but today will be my 21st day of consistent fiction output since I started using Cory Doctorow's tips. I have written 250 words every day, but some days I have written much more.

Observations, so far:


  1. 250 is a low bar, but on nights when I get home from a closing shift and all I want to do is eat then sleep, it can feel really out of reach. 
  2. I do it anyway. 
  3. Knowing I have to do it no matter what makes it easier. 
  4. I want to start doing it in the morning, instead of at night, and I am considering how to make that a more comfortable habit.

ETA: Got today's words. 841 new tiny words of fiction, and all mine. :)  

8/25/2013

Writing Consistently--What I've Been Doing


So my posts here slacked off about the time that I adopted a new personal production policy regarding my fiction writing. After listening to an installment of the "I Should Be Writing" podcast by Mur Lafferty, I went and checked out a writing/tracking tool called The Magic Spreadsheet. It has been, so far, one of the most encouraging tools for the consistent production of words that I have encountered, and I am on a two week streak as of yesterday. I have written my words after long, horrid shifts at work where I would much rather have just showered and gone to bed. I have written big production (1775!) days and in bare minimum (250!) days, but I'm working hard to establish a writing habit that might even supplant my Candy Crush habit.

And that would be for the best for everyone, but especially me.

In the two weeks that I have been writing, I have roughed out (shitty first draft, yay!) a short story about a gender-bending highwayman who ends up back home among the people who knew him when he was a she, and I have returned to what I think will be a short novel about different inheritance structures in a fantasy setting, and how they might shape culture, and the lives of three characters. That sounds dull when I write it out that way, but I aspire to non-dullness, I swear. This one is based on a dream I had months ago, and I have several snippets of scenes that I wrote by hand or for 750words.com when I was trying that tool.  It didn't work for me, but the Magic Spreadsheet seems to be more effective. You might try it, if you have a daily writing goal, or if you want one.

I embraced this tool as a part of trying to follow the writing tips of Cory Doctorow. Here's what he had to say:
  1. Write every day. Anything you do every day gets easier. If you’re insanely busy, make the amount that you write every day small (100 words? 250 words?) but do it every day.
  2. Write even when the mood isn’t right. You can’t tell if what you’re writing is good or bad while you’re writing it.
  3. Write when the book sucks and it isn’t going anywhere. Just keep writing. It doesn’t suck. Your conscience is having a panic attack because it doesn’t believe your subconscious knows what it’s doing.
  4. Stop in the middle of a sentence, leaving a rough edge for you to start from the next day — that way, you can write three or five words without being “creative” and before you know it, you’re writing.
  5. Write even when the world is chaotic. You don’t need a cigarette, silence, music, a comfortable chair, or inner peace to write. You just need ten minutes and a writing implement.
In keeping with these tips, and the notion that social accountability is also helpful to me, I started a closed Facebook group for other people who wanted to commit to a daily writing goal. So far, it's working, and I think for others, not just for me. I can't wait to see what comes from my own committed practice, as well as that of the people who raised their hand for the group.

More here, when I have more to tell!






8/11/2013

Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente

 Doing occasional reprints of reviews of books I really, really loved. This one is so sad and so very gorgeous. I wouldn't recommend it for everyone: it's sort of adult. At the same time, it's a book that's not like anything else I've read in recent memory, and if you think it might be your cup of tea, you should try it, too. --Kristen

PalimpsestPalimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Long ago, I was at a writers' meet-up during NaNoWriMo where I met an older woman of the Probing Question Asking sort. She wanted to know what everyone was writing, and if each story had "a sense of longing" to it. To her, a story that instilled a deep sense of longing in the reader was a GOOD story. Her earnestness in this opinion made me uncomfortable, and I squirmed as I answered her questions about my post-apocalyptic vampire story with killer pagan nuns. Stories that hollow us out and make us hungry, I thought, are not the only stories worth reading...

And here I find a story that would completely satisfy PQA lady. It hollowed me out. It made me sad for the characters. It filled me with a deep sense of longing that they would prevail in their quest. It had as much or more sex than most books I read (and I read Jacqueline Carey!) but none of it felt prurient. Little of it was hot. It just filled me with a desire for the connection that these characters were reaching for, as well.

I'll try this author again, though first I might do a little time with escapist fiction, until I need to be hollowed out again.

View all my reviews



8/04/2013

Kindness by Naomi Shahib Nye



Kindness



Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where

like a shadow or a friend.

8/03/2013

Word count update


4246 / 10000 words. 42% done!

What kind of life can be lived with no margins for error?

I just left the theater after seeing Fruitvale Station. My heart is heavy with the injustice of it, and my head is heavy with this thought, which was my big takeaway from the movie: some of us, because of race or class, live lives that have little or no margin for errors. Have a baby, go to jail...and welcome to a life where it seems you can never, ever get ahead again. Where you can't work for more than minimum wage ever again, or where you cannot It seems to me like when I was growing up there were more success stories, but I'm coming to doubt even that. A life lived at the margins gives no margin for error. There are no second chances, or second acts, in some American lives.

8/02/2013

One Copper Ryan Story--word count thus far.


3448 / 10000 words. 34% done! The ten thousand word count is just a guess, but I have a decent outline and I know where I am heading.

Goal-setting for the next 30 days


The bar is over, and now that I have eight weeks (at least!) to wait on results, I have been taking action to be certain that my goals to develop new, healthy, productive habits.  I'm a list-maker, and I try to document goals as I set them so that I can look back and see how far I have come. Plus, this way you all can see my aspirations, too. Accountability is good, right?

On that note, here's what I am working on for the next 30 days:

  • 750 words at least, every day. I may write more, but I cannot write less.
  • Gym or yoga, every day. 
  • 10,000 steps.