Posts Tagged ‘writing’

It only take the tiniest of fires sometimes…

Sep 3rd, 11 / Comments Off

Yesterday was an incredibly good writing day for me, surpassing what I’d hoped to achieve.  Which translates as over 2,500 words and the discovery of the end of this draft of Ghosts.  I feel like I’ve found the shape of the story now, and have passed it onto my writing group to see what they think.  Hopefully at least one of them has time to look it over before the next meeting, which is tonight!

Does anyone else have the time and inclination to beta read for me this weekend?  This draft is just over 6k, and it’s dystopian science fiction.  I really want to get to work polishing it on Monday, so I’d need some feedback before then.

The rest of the day was spent mostly doing house stuff and chasing the kidlet.  I have started making some inroads into my Aurealis Award reading and managed to find my first truly awesome story.  This is why I love reading for awards – I read a lot of stuff that isn’t my personal cup of tea, but there are the incredible gems that I wouldn’t have necessarily read.

I did get a couple of bonus hours to myself (alone! in the house) because the husband took the kidlet out in the late afternoon.  My brain was, as always, fried by then, so I did a little reading and then just settled back and watched some Skins.

And now it’s the weekend!  We have a bit of running around to do today, including the excitement of me getting my hands and feet X-rayed to see if I’ve had any joint erosion from my arthritis.  Always fun.  And tomorrow is Father’s Day, which is going to be bittersweet.  Awesome that the hubby gets to get celebrated, but it’s the first Father’s Day for me without my father here.  Still, I’d rather that than he still be alive and suffering the way he was for the last few months of his life.  Cancer sucks, as I think many of you will agree.

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Taking the other path

Aug 24th, 11 / Comments Off

Blogging has been quiet here, due mostly to me being generally exhausted and unwell.

I have been writing, though.  Bashing my head against a short story, to be precise.  I have a shaky first draft, and have set it aside for a few days before coming back to edit and mash it into something like a shape.

I have also, after some thought, decided to set aside Thought and Memory for now.  It’s lacking something, and I can’t see the shape of what that something is.  So it goes on the backburner for a while, and hopefully the men in the basement will figure out what’s missing.

And so I turn again to Never.  As things stand, I have a first draft.  I’m going to start, as I always do with second drafts, from scratch.  Which means writing up my character dossiers and the like again.  And doing some research reading, setting up playlists and all those fun things.

 

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A Good Day

Jul 11th, 11 / 1 Comment

Today was not a great writing day.  I futzed around with a scene that, quite frankly, bored me to tears to write.  I suspect that tomorrow, it’ll either be getting trashed, or completely gutted.

However! Today was, apart from that, a good day.  I woke up feeling like I’d had enough sleep (which is a very rare thing), and had a very productive morning.  Played with a happy kidlet and did a tonne of housework.  Looked out at the grey, rainy day and was happy that I didn’t have to go out in it.

Of course, said rainy day has now worked its way into my joints, despite me actually being in the heated house all day.  That happens, though.  Arthritis sucks, but there could be a million worse things I have to deal with.  And mine is mostly manageable, thanks to my spectacular rheumatologist.

The kidlet continued to be happy all day, which is a thing of joy.  And a rare thing, given that he’s on the slippery slope to approaching the terrible twos.  And he even ate somewhat normally without making a huge fuss, which is always a bonus with him.  And the icing on the cake was that he had a nice long nap today, which meant that I got some reading done.

I finally finished China Mieville’s Embassytown.  Which means that I can finally listen to the last episode of The Writer and the Critic.  I really liked Embassytown, though I think it’s going to require another couple of reads to fully appreciate.  Though certain plot points reminded me a lot of David Zindell’s Neverness and Christopher Hinz’s much underappreciated Paratwa books.   Not to imply that Emabassytown is derivative of either, mind – it is very much its own beast.

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Sometimes it feels like drowning…

May 11th, 11 / Comments Off

Today has been a weird day.

It started off…slowly, I guess, is the best word to use.  The kid had a bad night, which means that I had a bad night.  I got enough sleep, but it was broken, and therefore probably suffering for a lack of actual deep, restful sleep.

I decided to take the kid for a walk this morning, which is a deviation from our usual routine.  And possibly not a great idea, because he threw several epic tantrums.  I was very happy to hand him over to my mother to be watched and get a little bit of work done.

Writing was had, and it was actually kind of fun.  I’m nearing the end of this draft, which is very short and bare bones.  And I’m rediscovering some of the joy I have for it, and making tonnes of notes on what I need to fix on the next draft.  It’s actually going to be hard to not start editing right away.

Reading was had, in which I finished Jack O’Connell’s The Resurrectionist, which I was reading before listening to The Writer and The Critic review it.  Interesting, vivid book.  I don’t know if I can say anything else about it right away, but I’m going to be interested to listen to the podcast now.  Picked up a new book, but then the kid decided to wake from his nap.

Feeling decidedly off this afternoon, though.  Vague headache/nausea weirdness happening.  Which could be from me pushing myself too much going for a longish walk this morning, just being tired or general usual body stupidness.  I miss actually feeling well.  Not that I’ve felt that way much over the last nine years.  </end pathetic moaning>

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Back on the horse

May 9th, 11 / 1 Comment

Back to writing today.  Which, as always after a break from it, feels like rusty gears grinding together.  Ugh.  Still, I dutifully turned up to the work and ground out some words.

And realised how close I am to the end of my outline.  At the moment, this draft is only about 53k, so way, way short.  I know that I’m going to need to do a lot of fleshing out in the next draft.  And hey, it looks like I have room for it ;)   I especially need to work on the end.  I’m just at the point where I’m sick of writing a first draft and I want to be doing anything else.  Which is usually when I rush my last scenes, just so I can start editing ;)

I’m starting to feel better, though my stamina is extremely pathetic, and probably will be for another week or two.  But at least I can sit up for long enough to write, and I can walk across the room without winding myself.  Anaemia sucks.  But at least it’s easily fixable, though it does take time.

Our weekend was kind of awesome, though.  It was the husband and mine’s five-year anniversary, and to celebrate, we bought a new bed.  And we don’t do things by halves…

Wanna see?

Read More

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On discipline

Mar 19th, 11 / 1 Comment

This is just another reason why I love and adore Cat Valente.

And also a timely reminder from the universe to myself.  I’ve lost the last two weeks to me being sick and my son being sick, two things that I could do nothing about.  He’s actually been sleeping and napping well for a poor sick boy, but I’ve been so exhausted that I’ve been resting and napping at the same time as him.

And it’s frustrated me.  I’ve wanted to be writing, to be creating.  I’ve had story welling up within until it threatens to choke me and I’ve been unable to give vent to it.

More than once I’ve caught myself thinking “If only I were the kind of person who was content just being a homemaker and mother.”  With total respect to those who are and are fulfilled as such.  It’s damn hard work -  mothering is a job that never ends, and we never get holidays.  I never really realised that properly until I had a kid.

The thing is that it would be easy for me to just say “Okay, I’m just going to not try to push with the writing”.  I could just become a fan of daytime TV, spend my days going to playgroups and the like.  But here’s a secret – even though I love my son dearly, I would be miserable.  And if I’m miserable, I’m not going to be the best mother to him that I could be.  I want him to see me as a woman who is strong and accomplished, to know that women can be everything they want to be.

This year has been a bust so far for me writing-wise.  I’ve managed to keep up my reading and reviewing, but I’ve really done very little of the writing that I want to.  And yes, there are reasons for this, and I’m not going to beat myself up about it.

I have found myself getting frustrated listening to podcasts and reading blogposts and articles about how people write.  How they get to spend 6-8 hours a day behind the keyboard, or get up at 4am to get two hours of writing in before their kids wake up.  It’s time I suck it up and realise that I’m not going to get 8 hours a day to write (and hell, even when I *had* the time, I never spent that much time at the keyboard), and I’m never going to be able to get up at 4am to write.  My sleep and health are tenuous at the best of times.

So, it’s time for me to step back and take a good long look at the time that I do have and how I use it.  I’m lucky in that I have someone who can watch my son for me for one or more hours a day.  At the moment, he’s napping well in the afternoon.  I have all of that time to be used.  And I’m just wasting it.  I mess about online, on Facebook and Twitter and the usual sites.  I let housework bleed into those hours.

I need to make writing a priority again.  Accept that the house is going to be a little cluttered and disorganised (and even if I was spending hours a day cleaning, I have a toddler who will dismantle all of that within minutes), accept that I will not die if I miss things on Twitter.  I’m considering some serious pruning of my LJ/DW reading lists as well as my rss feeds.

There are some things that I cannot sacrifice, and that’s okay.  I need to be precious with my sleep, with my health in general.  Which means that I need to eat well (which I haven’t been doing while sick), I need to exercise regularly (which I have been doing).  I also need downtime, which for me generally means reading.  And I need to work on honing my craft all the time.

Monday, it’s back to the life of discipline for me.

Because, it’s as simple as thing: what do I want?  To write.  And so I will.

 

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Not enough

Mar 3rd, 11 / 1 Comment

I’m finding myself more and more frustrated by the “not enoughs”.  Not enough time, not enough energy, not enough sleep, not enough focus.

Rough week around here – the kidlet is sick, and as a result, hasn’t been sleeping.  And of course, that means that I haven’t been sleeping.  Which leaves me pretty much a zombie during the day.  I can’t focus on much, and though I’ve been trying to write, I’m pretty much only producing a mess.

This is when it gets really hard for me.  I hate looking back on a day and realising that I haven’t produced anything.  Today, I wrote a couple of hundred words.  Those words will all be scrapped the next time I sit down to write.  I actually did have some more time to write today, and I could have forced myself to produce more words, but I knew that they’d just be scrapped as well.

It’s frustrating.  But I know that it won’t last forever.  And if I can’t write, I can still read and be inspired by what others write.

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Do not waste time

Dec 19th, 10 / Comments Off

“Write as if you were dying. At the same time, write as if for an audience consisting only of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something will arise for later, something better. These things fill in from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
“After Michelangelo died, someone found in his studio a piece of paper on which he had written a note to his apprentice, in the handwriting of his old age: ‘Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.’”

- Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

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Where I’ve been going wrong

Dec 3rd, 10 / Comments Off

These last few weeks I’ve been struggling to write.

Some of this is due to a change in meds and a teething baby who has interrupted my sleep.  Some of this is due to normal human suit issues making it difficult for me to concentrate for long.

Last night, while pondering, I figured out what most of it is from.

A while ago, I made the realisation that I was moving from being a pantser to a plotter.  I’ve always traditionally found my story through multiple drafts.  Which has always been fine, when I’ve had the time to spend on drafting and redrafting.

But now?  My time is very limited, and will continue to be so for a long time to come.  And I’ve fallen back into he habit of pantsing.  Which has become very frustrating, since I’m just working on the same thing and feeling like I’m not getting anywhere at all.

And so.  It’s time for me to sit down and do some heavy duty plotting.  Which means that I’m going to be taking things pretty easy for the rest of the year and probably brushing up on some outlining techniques and the like.

This makes me curious about the writers I know – are you a pantser or a plotter?  And how does this relate to how much writing time you have?

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A link for a Saturday morning

Oct 2nd, 10 / Comments Off

An amazing interview with Paolo Bacigalupi

This quote in particular leapt out at me:

For me I actually knew that I had a great deal of talent. I knew that I was a really great writer in high school. My writing teachers were amazing. When I went to college I could write essays and all that stuff—really tight, clean stuff. And having the raw ability…it was meaningless, ultimately. It was the willingness to write four novels and fuck them all up and keep going that was the definer. It wasn’t the ability at all. Yeah, the willingness to accept failure and not let it stop you, and to not let that define you.
And this:

I realized I’d actually been carrying a lot of baggage from people who would make offhand comments like, ‘well, it’s not like you’re working.’

I was still accumulating some sort of psychic pain over it. You know, that all these people really did think I was a loser, and slacking around and doing nothing, basically. And when you’re writing your fifth book, and four of them have already failed, you’re obviously a joke, right?

So I remember when those book sales happened, I remember feeling like I could finally stand up straight and look certain people in the eye and say, Wo the next time you see me sitting around in the coffee shop, or the next time you see me sitting out on the porch, quote, ‘doing nothing,’ it turns out I’m actually working. You motherfuckers.

Yes.  And now I think I really need to move The Windup Girl to the top of my to-be-read mountain.

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