Weekend Warrior
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Writing Report, January 2019 + Goals
Writing As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.
This month I had incentive to write beyond just wanting to write. I belong to an online writers discussion forum called Codex Writers. Each year beginning the first full Friday-Sunday weekend in January, we have something called Weekend Warrior. I’ve talked about it before, but rather than giving you a link and making you go elsewhere, I’ll just explain it here, again. On Friday night, we’re given six prompts. By Sunday night, we write a 750-word (or less) flash story using one or more of the prompts and upload it anonymously to the site. Once the deadline has passed, participants download all the stories in our divisions (no one can read all the stories, so we’re divided into smaller subgroups randomly, to make the task easier and more enjoyable), read them for critique, rate them (again, anonymously), make a short comment explaining our rating, and upload those ratings by Friday evening . . . at which point the next week’s prompts go up and we start all over again. It’s like a slush pile, only better because you get comments. :)
The prize at the end? Five new stories, assuming you participate each week. And the knowledge that you can write a story to spec in just over two days. And the completely anonymous feedback from a plethora of readers — who are also writers — some of whom loved your story and some of whom . . . didn’t. But now you know why they did or didn’t.
So far, we’re in week four, which means I’ve written four flash stories in January. Two of those have already been turned into longer stories and one of those (now 4700 words) has been taken to my Tuesday night critique group for a more thorough examination. It needs some editing based on what my group said, and then I’ll put it through one more round of critiques before obsessively editing it for a couple more weeks and then, finally, sending it out into the world even though I hate it, now, every syllable. Such is writing. :)
The way I do Weekend Warrior, now, is to get the prompts and just do a free-association on each one, seeing what sticks and what doesn’t, until something gets past the part of my brain that filters out bad ideas and starts to tickle the creamy center. Then I elaborate on that one (or those ones) until I can’t think of anything else. That’s all on Friday night. By Saturday, I probably have an idea what I’m writing, but sometimes I don’t write it at all, but continue to freely associate. I like to let it marinate and dry-age in my brain until Sunday, at which point I start writing the actual story . . . and find out that the story I have in my head is not what comes out of my fingers onto the screen at. all. but is usually better in some ways. I then submit it sometime after 10 pm and spend the next couple of hours obsessively proofreading and tweaking it to get it Perfect™. So for a single 750-word story, I can generate a couple thousand words over a three-day period before it gets submitted. Which is awesome from a word-count and consistency point of view. :)
In between writing for Weekend Warrior, I’ve continued to work on my novel. It’s a giant, swirling, incoherent mess that I hope to clean up into a coherent, slightly less swirling . . . neater-thing that . . . is readable. <gestures vaguely>
I also noticed something that started to really bug me. I use Goodreads to put in all my books. In past years, I’ve read a lot of books in a given year. But in the last couple of years, I’ve read less and less as I listen to more and more audio and watch more YouTube. This is bad. I love reading, but I’ve let it slip away. So I made another sheet in my spreadsheet for time spent reading, come up with my own formulae for levels and points and such, and am now tracking that. It’s helping me to incentivize reading something every day, whether that is a single short story, part of a novel, or something non-fiction. I also count audiobooks, because regardless what anyone says, I count that as reading. Is it exactly the same thing? No. But I still absorb the story. My comprehension is still high. I remember where I left off just like I do with dead-tree or dead-electron books. So it counts as reading, for me. Your mileage may vary.
I also thought it might be informative if I made another spreadsheet with all of the stories I have in various stages of completion, regardless of length, subject, or whatever.
there are over ninety
Twenty-six of those are the Alphabet series I wrote. Another 30+ are from Weekend Warrior.
Also? I love making spreadsheets. So there’s that. :)
For January, 2019, my stats are
- Words: 31,362
- Daily average words: 1,012
- Time: 1,645 minutes (27 hours, 25 minutes)
- Daily average time: 53 min
- Average words/hour: 1,143
- Chain: 123 days
- Level: 5 as of 21 January
- Quota: 400 words per day until 20 December, then 450 words/day
For January, 2019, my Reading stats are
- Minutes: 2,148 (35 hours, 48 minutes)
- Daily average minutes: 77
- Days on which I read:
- Audiobook: 7
- Short Story: 12
- Novel: 9
- Non-Fiction: 7
- Chain: 13 days (I missed 3 days; 13 was the longest chain, of which there were 3)
- Level: 1
- Quota: 20 minutes per day
Goals
Yeah. I’m not big on ‘goals’ because they sound too much like ‘resolutions,’ but here’s some vagueness.
- I want to finish this damned novel and finally have something for my novel-writing group to read. I’m the only one who hasn’t had at least one novel put through the group, and some are working on a third. So I’m behind. By April 1, I want the rough draft done. The one no one will ever see. The one that gets turned into the alpha and beta versions.
- I have ideas for three more novels unrelated to the urban fantasy series for which the current WIP is book 1. It’d be nice to at least start outlining those.
- I’m attending one writing-related fun-thing this year, in May in Baltimore. Since I pay myself minimum wage for writing and I’m now writing every day, I have enough put aside to indulge one trip.
- I want to read at least forty books/audiobooks this year.
- I know this is a vague, non-SMART goal, but here it is anyway: submit, dammit. Stop self-rejecting.
- For each contest on Codex — and there are quite a few — ‘anonymous’ is achieved by selecting what we call a nom de guerre, which is used instead of our real names, so you may be reading a story by “George, Absolute Prefect of Saturn” and find out later that it was <insert famous author’s name here> and you never knew. Or you may find out that you absolutely love the writing of “Lulu, Queen of the Zorgs” and find out it’s someone whose name you’re unfamiliar with, but now you know to look for it in all the publications.
- Words: 31,362
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On Scheduling . . .
So, yeah.
I’m not what you’d call great at scheduling and planning. I’m pretty god-awful at it, in fact. I go through my time and make nice little charts (I’m great at charts) showing my work time, commute time, sleep time, etc., and color-code for when I can write . . .
And then, generally speaking, I waste that time on Facebook, YouTube, or listening to podcasts. And to be frank, I don’t consider those complete wastes of time, per-sé. They are entertainment, and entertainment is important to me. But I tend to let them take up time that I should be spending doing . . . more productive things. Like writing.
In mid-August, I’d finally had enough of it. I’d had The Idea™ earlier that week. The one that made all the pieces in my novel fall together, and tie loose ends in a bow, and make my characters make sense and fit in the world . . . it was mind-blowin’, I tells ya. I’d come home from work every day planning that tonight, by gum, I’d get that down on ‘paper’!
And then it would be midnight or 1 AM and I would have nothing to show for the evening. As usual. But hey, I’d get it tomorrow
One of my problems is perseverance. I have firefly enthusiasm for a project for a few nights . . . and then a favorite creator on YouTube releases a new video, or there’s a new Steven Universe episode . . . And then, of course, I’ve broken the chain. So the next night, it’s easier to say, “Well, I’ll just start again fresh next week.”
Only next week comes . . . and I don’t start.
Another problem is lack of accountability. I may write anywhere from 250 to 5000 words in a session, but I don’t keep track. Nor do I keep track of how much time I spend writing. It would be nice to have that information. But no one was making me do that, and, sure, it’s information that’s nice to have, but is it really required? Nnnoooo . . .
The only two things that have ever worked for me, in fact, are NaNoWriMo and Weekend Warrior.
Why do those work? Analysis time! (Charts may be my favorite, but lists are easily #2!)
NaNoWriMo
- has a strict start and end time (November 1 – 30)
- has a strict word-count (50,000+)
- has a daily component (1666 words per day)
- is self-reported until the final day
- is uploaded for verification on the final day
- is during the second worst month possible because of the holiday at the end (in the US)
- requires extensive planning beforehand if there’s any hope of getting anything that resembles a coherent story at the end
Weekend Warrior
- has a strict start and end time (Friday 9 pm to midnight Sunday)
- has a participation requirement of reading and flash-critiquing anywhere from a dozen to two-dozen 750-word stories each week for five weeks
- stories are rated on a (totally subjective) 1-10 scale and there’s a ‘winner’ per team each week and for each team for the entire contest
- has a strict word-count (750 words or less per weekend)
- is anonymously uploaded for word-count verification and distribution to other participants
- has prompts that are given on Friday night
- stories “must” spring forth from one or more prompts, even if they’ve been edited out of the final version
- stories should be a story — beginning, middle, end, character, conflict, resolution — in 750 words
- stories are expected to be (very broadly) science fiction, fantasy, or horror
And boy, can I do it when I get into that mindset. I’ve gotten anywhere from 53,000 to over 122,000 words written in November for NaNoWriMo. I’ve completed a story for almost every week of Weekend Warrior for four or five years running. I can do it. I just don’t
In short, I need structure. Deadline. Planning. Mindset. Goal. Accountability. Statistics.
There’s a Google Doc spreadsheet that Tony Pisculli created a few years ago, called the Magic Spreadsheet. He came up with many formulae to gamify writing. You write words each day, and you get extra points for longer chains and consistency. You level up based on those points, and each level requires that you write a higher base number of words per day in order to count it as part of the chain.
I thought this was what I wanted: the game aspect. Competing against other people and myself.
But I hated having to go to the site and find my lines and put the info in. And it was, frankly, disheartening to go there on a day when I’d written 250 words and struggled to get them out, only to see others with 6000, 7000, 8000 words for that same day.
So I did what any Excel-groupie would do: I downloaded a copy of the sheet for my private use. I studied it in detail so I could figure out what he did. And I tweaked it and made it my own in a few ways that he either didn’t think of or didn’t want to do. I added a time component to it. I added calculations for average words per hour and such. I even had a couple of friends ask me for their very own copy of the spreadsheet, which I happily provided.
That would work for about a week, maybe two . . . and then I noticed that I was writing at 1 AM or 2 AM, right before bed, as a “Oh, right, I need to write something before bed or I’ll break my chain!” thing.
Not ideal.
So I took a suggestion from . . . I think it must have been either Mur Lafferty or some other writer who podcasts: if my problem is podcasts, Facebook, and YouTube, the obvious answer is: those have to go.
But I have zero self-control. I think this post proves that beyond any shadow of a doubt. :)
I needed a third party to impose that self-control. Short of deleting my account off Facebook, unsubscribing from every channel I subscribe to on YouTube, and forsaking all my podcasts, I didn’t see a way through.
And again, words of wisdom from someone on some podcast, probably again with Mur Lafferty because she’s awesome: there are apps that cut off your Internet. Or limit your use of it in very specific ways.
I located browser extensions for all my computers (Windows 10 work, Windows 10 home, Macbook Pro) for each browser (I know me: if there’s a browser that has the extension and one that doesn’t, I’ll use the one that doesn’t) that turns off my access to certain sites during a range of time. And for my phone (iPhone 7 Plus), it conveniently just updated to iOS 12 with Screen Time, which permits me to shut off apps during a time span. Now, at 10 pm, if I’m still watching YouTube, using Facebook, or listening to podcasts, it abruptly kicks me off and says, “Shouldn’t you be working?” (I had to tell it my workday starts at 10 pm and runs until 7 AM in order to get this to work.)
WasteNoTime I’m happy to report that this has actually worked. Quite well, in fact. I’m typing this slightly before 10 PM, in fact. In the next week or two, I might edge that time from 10 PM down to 9 PM, or even 8 PM. I’ve unsubscribed from some YouTube channels that I deemed to actually be a waste of my time and not very entertaining.
Since August 18th, when I randomly decided to start this, I’ve written nearly 50,000 (48,633, not counting this post) words. Most of these have been for the novel I’ve been trying to find my way through for a long time. I plowed through almost two weeks of world-building, just typing away as fast as I could think. Ignoring spelling and grammar errors. What I wrote is an atrocious mess of stream of consciousness, but it forced me to confront the issues that I kept avoiding before. My characters’ flaws. Their backgrounds. Their motivations. How magic actually works in my universe. What the antagonist is up to and why. Side characters. Societal implications of the sudden appearance of magic.
And then, after all that, I wrote an 11,000(ish)-word outline for the novel. From cover to cover, mostly in order. Took me seven days.
And I don’t hate it. I can’t emphasize this enough. I have written things out before, but I hated them, because I couldn’t figure out some stuff, and I’d give up in frustration. But without the shiny-shiny lure of Facebook and YouTube and podcasts . . . I basically had to write or go to bed, and who wants to do that at 10 PM? (The last time I went to bed at 10 PM regularly I was in grade school and being forced to do so by my parents.) Have I mentioned I’m a creature of the night?
As soon as the outline was done, I took a two-night break to write a flash piece, then jumped right into the book and started fleshing out the outline. I use Scrivener, so this was fairly easy.
I’m deep in Chapter 2 of my novel, and paused again to write a short story that popped into my head one night after I went up to bed, because it was knocking on the inside of my skull wanting out.
Tonight, this blog post is my words. You’ll see the edited version, but the unedited version will probably be something around 2,400 words, and that definitely puts me over my Level 2 limit of 300 required words for the day on the Magic Spreadsheet.
For the first time in a long, long while, I feel like I’m enjoying writing. It doesn’t hurt that I got The Idea™ just before deciding to embark on this little adventure. It also doesn’t hurt that a friend of mine gave me an awesome idea at dinner the other night which I will unabashedly incorporate into my world and make it my own. (Thanks, Steve!)
I’m also using an app on my phone to track my writing time. It’s for freelancers / contractors, so I defined a job called “Writing” and set the pay to minimum wage for the US. The final step of this was to actually set up a bank account and transfer money from my main checking account into it for any time I spend writing. Thirty minutes? Sure. Three hours? Better. My eventual goal for this is to use this money and only this money to attend writing-related events, such as WorldCon or Paradise Lost or anything else that comes up. If I haven’t written enough to “afford” it, then I have no business doing it.
Yes, this is going to severely curtail fun things like WorldCon. But after a year in which I traveled to Texas, Massachusetts, and freakin’ Finland for writing-related events and had to fork out a lot for car issues . . . not going to WorldCon in San José this year, or Dublin next year, or New Zealand the year after that should leave me with a surplus for whatever comes up in 2021. And I’m (mostly) okay with that. (Mostly.) It’s time, as they say, to shit or get off the pot. And this includes submitting stuff. But I’ll get to that in another post. I have some more goal-setting to do.
I’m fully aware that this post makes me sound like something of a Loony Toon, having to trick myself into doing a thing I supposedly like instead of other things I apparently like more, but maybe there are other people out there for whom this is also a problem. And maybe those people will see this and feel motivated by it. Weirder things have happened. The single most-visited page on my blog is the one where I reviewed a tiny little site called 750Words, which was another in a long line of attempts to find that magic something that worked to make me write daily.
This blog post was written on my fortieth uninterrupted day of writing at least 250 (Level 1) or 300 (Level 2) words — new words — every single night. I do not think I have ever written consistently for forty days straight. I’ve even begun to start writing early and not waiting until I’m kicked off sites or have my phone’s apps go dark.
They say that if you do anything for 21 days it becomes a habit. For me, that’s not true. It’s more like 60 days. :) So give me another month at this and maybe I’ll only use Facebook and YouTube after I get my words down for the day. Weirder things have happened!
- Weekend Warrior is an annual contest that takes place over five consecutive weekends beginning in January of each new year. I explain it a little in the text after this footnote. It’s on CodexWriters.com, but you have to be a member of Codex to get to it, and to get into Codex, there are requirements.
- It is called WasteNoTime.
- Right now, it’s set to Facebook and YouTube. I may include others if I start to notice myself hanging out on something else too much.
- Edited it — the most time-consuming part, thanks to formatting and links and dealing with WordPress’s new damned editor — and am finishing up at right around 12:15 AM.
- It’s called HoursTracker.
- Writers tend to think in terms of cents-per-word. A professional level market will pay $0.06/word and up for stories of Novelette length and below, often with a reduced rate or wordcount limit for novellas. Semi-pro and fanzines are below that. Novels will get — on average — around $2500 to $5000 for a beginner, and going up — or down, alas — from there. Expect to sell around 250 copies if you’re lucky; more if you’re a fantastic marketer. You don’t go into traditional publishing to get rich. You can do better selling independently if you write very fast, publish ebooks only, put out multiple novels per year, and have avid fans who like your writing and will buy whatever you put out and demand more. People are making hundreds of thousands per year doing this. More power to them. I’m not there, yet. :) Not sure I ever will be.
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Whistle While You Work
In my two experiences with Weekend Warrior — the contest on Codex Writers where participants are given prompts for five weeks and have approximately 54 hours to write a 750-word flash piece inspired by one of the prompts — I’ve received a good bit of very terse feedback, one particular recurring phrase of which I had taken to be a negative, because I honestly had no idea what it meant, but it sounded bad. Weekend Warrior critiques are just a few words, with no space or time for in-depth commentary.
<digression> From a reader’s perspective, it may sound like I’m completely obsessed with Weekend Warrior and with critiques and that I spend all my waking time dwelling on it. I don’t. This blog is about writing, so if something occurs to me that clarifies my writing or reading patterns, I may write about it. But there are many other things that occupy my time, and I have spent no more time dwelling on Weekend Warrior or the critiques therefrom than any of you have spent worrying about whether Kim Kardashian . . . uh, I have nowhere to go after that, because I couldn’t care less. But that’s my point. I go weeks without thinking about it, and then a little whisper in the recesses of my frontal lobe surfaces: “‘Workmanlike language’: what does that even mean?” So bear with me, and please don’t go away with the impression that I’m obsessed. :) Now, back to my blog post, already in progress.</digression>
So, the other day, I saw the same phrase used on some forum . . . and it was quite obviously a compliment. So I asked a friend of mine, Terra LeMay, who recently acquired an agent for her novel and for whom I could not be more excited, “What does ‘workmanlike language’ mean to you?” I explained in what contexts I’d heard it.
Her answer not only surprised me, but has given me quite a bit of insight to my own writing and why I inexplicably don’t like some stories / books that are otherwise well-written.
‘Workmanlike language’ basically means that the words that tell the story don’t stand out. Don’t draw attention to themselves. There are no turns of phrase that make you stop reading and say, “Wow! That was beautiful!” and then read it again and again, with the words rolling off your (figurative or literal) tongue. In other words, to quote William Shakespeare out of context, “The play’s the thing.” (Actually, quoting Shakespeare, here, who is quite well-known for his beautiful, often lyrical and surprising turns of phrase was probably not a good choice. Nevertheless, I’m going to go with it.). The words stay out of the way, letting the story — the millieu, ideas, characters, and events — be the star.
And it dawned on me: this is not a negative remark (although it’s possible some people might have meant it that way): it’s positive, for me.
Because this is what I strive to do. It is also what I look for in the things I read.
My feeling about writing and reading is that if you’re paying attention to the words, you’re not giving enough attention to what they’re saying. My characters don’t enunciate with mellifluous melismatic ease . . . they talk. Or perhaps speak.
Now, I can look back on some very good books that . . . I’ve just been kind of ‘meh’ about. Because, as Gloria Estéfan might say, “the words get in the way.”
I like some of them in spite of the flowery language (and I don’t mean ‘flowery’ as an insult, much in the same way that ‘workmanlike’ is not an insult now that I know what it means) because they have the other elements that I want in equal measure. So I can read a novel or story with flowery, expressive language that draws attention to itself, but as long as the story itself holds my interest, I’m fine. I might even pause over a particularly well-put-together sentence and marvel at it and wish I’d written it.
A recent example is Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, which I read as part of a reading group I belong to. Most everyone else seemed to like it, but it just left me high and dry. They were all talking about the beautiful, poetic language while I was saying, “All the absurd stuff lost me.”1 I was focusing on the story; they were focusing on the language, and the stuff behind the language.
It also dawns on me as I type this blog post that this very issue is probably the problem I have with most poetry. In poetry, the words are key, and the beautiful turn of phrase is the point.
Since we’re already talking about Shakespeare, compare these two side-by-side excerpts from Hamlet, Act III, scene 1, in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are telling Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, and Ophelia about their encounter with Hamlet:
GUILDENSTERN
Nor do we find him forward to be sounded
But with a crafty madness keeps aloof
When we would bring him on to some confession
Of his true state.“And he’s not exactly eager to be interrogated. He’s very sly and dances around our questions when we try to get him to talk about how he feels,” Guildenstern said. GERTRUDE
Did he receive you well?“Did he treat you well when you saw him?” asked Gertrude. [Note: Text on left is public domain. The modern English explication on the right is taken from the No Fear Shakespeare website and used entirely without permission, but I’m pretty sure it falls under fair use. I merely added the quotes and attribution, like you’d see in dialogue in a novel.]
Shakespeare’s original language is beautiful. It’s in iambic pentameter, it rhymes, and each word is carefully chosen to convey meaning and still remain faithful to the form. The right-hand text is ‘workmanlike prose.’ It’s more like what I would write in a story, and far closer to what I would rather read. The meaning is conveyed, but while I might quote Shakespeare, I will only remember the meaning conveyed by the words on the right.
Of course, certain caveats apply here: Shakespeare was writing a play in a strict form requiring rhyme and meter and a certain flair for a turn of phase. He even made words up when existing ones didn’t suffice. But if I were reading a modern adaptation of Hamlet in the form of a novel, I would expect to see language much more consistent with what’s on the right. Because people actually speak that way. The words and their arrangement don’t obfuscate what is being said. The prose form doesn’t require that normal sentence structure be subverted to fit a rhyme or meter.
So I guess what I’m trying to get around to saying2 is this: each individual writer (and reader) uses language that not only makes them comfortable, but excites them and is appropriate for the work itself.
And for me, that is often “workmanlike language.” :)
- The very point at which it lost me was when his wife came to visit him in prison and brought all the household belongings, members of her family, the cat, etc, and spent the entire time talking to everyone but him, as he basically cowered in his crowded cell speaking to no one. I did get that there were a number of metaphors and a lot of symbolism going on, but it was at that point that I just stopped caring and said, ‘This is too far out in Absurdland for me to even see the way home.’
- I often have a point, and I sometimes actually get around to making it. :)
