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On Themes…
New Theme! Certain things stopped working on my old theme, Structure. Probably because it was from 2009. I mean…color me surprised, but apparently software — including WordPress themes! — does update from time to time, and if you don’t apply those updates, things stop working. Who knew? So my menus have been not working for . . . a long time. And I was too busy to worry about it, and finally today I just made time and dealt with it. Not that I didn’t like Structure. I loved it. I even had several people comment on it and say that they really liked the “simplicity” of it. And that was what drew me to it. But they wanted . . . a considerable amount of money to update it, because to do that I had to go to the pro version, and . . . well . . . not enough people read this blog for me to spend that kind of money. :) I’m already paying for six domains, and that’s more than enough.
Hopefully, this will be a theme I like, and can be better about keeping up with updates. Assuming they don’t want to charge me to update.
I’m still learning all the bits and pieces of the new theme. Seems that there are many new features of themes since the last time I spent any time playing with it, and I’m still trying to figure out how to get the footnote numbers to start over with each post on the main page, so until I figure that out, well . . . it’ll be easier to click on a title and go read the individual page instead of reading them from the main page. The whole menu situation is still not ironed out because there’s a ton of setup and I just need to figure out how menus work in this new decade of WordPress and just deal with it. For now, there is one menu, “About,” and the sub-pages associated with that. I’ve updated my Podcasts I Listen To page quite a bit, because I finally got the personal project I’ve been working on in my spare time working well enough to want to get it to output pre-formatted content for that page.
Sure, I could make a comment, here, about the whole ‘gosh, it’s been over two years since I updated my blog’ thing, and ‘gosh, what a year 2020 was, huh?’ thing, or even the ‘writing? was that the thing with the blank pages that I’m supposed to fill up with words?’ thing. But that would be calling attention to the fact that it’s been over two years since I updated my blog and offering excuses, which I’m absolutely not going to do; that 2020 was a global hellscape of awful, which everyone already knows; and that I haven’t written substantially since early 2020, but no one but me and my writers group really cares about that, so I’ll not bore you with it.
Suffice it to say, things happened, situations changed, priorities altered. We move forward.
I have been writing, but not on a regular basis. I’m getting back to some stories I started and never finished, and I hope to Get Right On That™ Real Soon Now™ I have lots of ideas for stories and for changes to my neverending novel.
With any luck, I’ll have more to share soon. I’m working on getting my home office set up and usable because as it turns out, I’m now permanently working from home, so there’s that. Once that’s done, I’ll have a dedicated place other than my dining room table and living room easy chair in which to dedicate time to working / writing.
Watch this space. Or don’t. I don’t control you.
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Writing Report, April 2019
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.
April didn’t go quite as intended.
On the one hand, I did cross another milestone: I wrote “The End” at the end(?) of my novel(?). Use use the (?)s because . . . well . . . it was the logical “end” of the story, although it does leave things in a rather prickly situation. Which is great if you know there’s going to be a book 2. Not so much if it’s supposed to be stand-alone. But I’ve never envisioned this as a stand-alone. And only once I get it rearranged and retooled will it be a novel. But as it stands as I write this between projects at work on April 30th, it is not a novel. “Novel” implies a sort of structure. A beginning, a middle, and an end. Character arcs. Coherent . . . ness. As it stands, it is 110,000+ words of . . . loosely related anecdotes involving the same characters and in the same universe.
So, yeah, it is not a novel. There are threads left dangling, characters mentioned once and never brought up again, a suddenly appearing thirteen-year-old son of a secondary character who was convenient to use as a hostage in the final confrontation scene . . . Kid doesn’t even have a name. I called him [HAL’S SON].
I discovery-wrote my way into some cool stuff, including finding the perfect location in which to set much of my action (and causing a huge difference in the different parts of the story as I have three locations. The final one is a place that is very Atlanta, which is what I want. If my story could take place anywhere, then what’s the point of setting it in Atlanta other than convenience? Most Atlantans will recognize the location I’ve chosen if they have ever driven through Spaghetti Junction, and those who aren’t in Atlanta can google the location and see the structure I’m describing. So it works out.
Last month, I said, naïvely, that I wanted to finish the thing in April, “so that I can start on the rewrite.”
Yeah.
About that . . .
No. :)
What had happened was . . . I kept coming up with things to change the plot, not augment it. New ideas about how my magic system works. Who can do what and why. (More of) What my adversary’s reasons are for doing what he’s doing. Etc. So I work through those by free-writing them, and then I also have other ideas for stories, and I’ve written those down with enough notes to help me remember everything without inflicting another Skullcosm on myself.
Because that was all infinitely more interesting than continuing to attempt to revise and submit some of my finished stories. I mean, I did spruce up one called “C Is for Clowns that Creep Through the Yard” (alt title: “Coulromisia”) and submitted that as my work to be critiqued for Write Here, Write Now, which starts day after tomorrow (as I type this). It’s one of the darker things I’ve written. We’ll see what the critters have to say. :) But that is the only story I did anything with in April. I didn’t even submit the rejected story from March to another market because, frankly, I forgot. <sigh>
Here’s my report.
April 2019 Writing Report Goal Progress
Finish This Damned Novel– Yay!Rewrite This Damned Novel – . . .
Three More Novel Outlines– Did that as one of my free-writing. So I have enough on all three to participate on a plot break on any or all of them. I think. We shall see which one I pick. :) The problems I have with all three is that they’re too similar to things that already exist, and I need more. Or maybe abandon the ideas if I can’t make them into anything coherent.Write Here, Write Now – I leave tomorrow (as I type this; May 1, 2019)
Read Forty Books – Meh. Maybe if they’re really short books, I can catch up? I have read a lot of short stories and reference stuff. But those don’t count on Goodreads. Well, except the reference books. I have one on autopsies, one on blood spatter, and one on crime scene investigation. You know, a little light reading. :)
Submit Things To Places – May. May is a good month to send Things out. To Places.
- The word I was fishing around for was ‘cohesion.’
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Writing Report, March 2019
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.
March was pretty decent. I crossed a milestone I haven’t crossed in quite a while: I wrote 100,000 words on a “novel.” I use quotes because although I did pass 100,000 words in the Scrivener project where I’m writing my novel, many of those words are not . . . good words. They are, in fact, crappy words. Words that I will end up deleting and rewriting because although they seemed the thing to write at the time, they no longer actually make sense in the full novel as I’ve come to understand it. Scenes I don’t need, repetitions of things I’ve already said, exposition that’s more for me than any reader it might eventually have. And I’m nearing the “end” of the “novel,” as well. I wrote the Big Climactic Scene™ — two of them, actually — and only have a the Final Confrontation with Evil™ where the Hero Triumphs™ but at Great Cost™ and then all that cleanup stuff. You know the ‘Bilbo and Sam go back to the Shire and it’s not the same place they left’ part that has to be written but whether or not I’ll keep it all is up for debate.
I look forward to bringing this sucker to a close in April so that I can start on the rewrite. After I confiscate one of the big white-boards at work after hours and really make myself understand the different plot threads and how they all weave together. I know there are things I introduced that I never came back to. Characters I introduced and then forgot. Characters that I may not even need. And just tonight, I realized that a character I already introduced has a role to fill that cleans up a rather tidy piece of backstory that was bugging me. And would probably stand out instantly to any reader, as well, so that’s good.
Another thing I did in March was to start looking at some of my older stories with an eye toward making them publishable. I got a rejection on a story from a market I want to eventually make it into. The story I sent wasn’t really in their wheelhouse, but it also wasn’t really out of it, either. So it was a gamble, and it didn’t pay off. I’ll be submitting that story to the next market on my list in April, and hopefully getting a second one ready for submission so I can have two out. And then three. And then four. And then . . .
I did really well on writing from a consistency standpoint this month. Reading . . . slightly less so. But I read almost every day. When I visited my mother, I didn’t get any reading done, but I also missed a day or two later in the month because of various other reasons. It means it’ll take a little longer to “level up,” but I’ll get there eventually.
Another thing I did this month was the create yet another spreadsheet (Have I mentioned how much I love Excel? Because I love it a lot.) that will “pretty-print” my little progress table. I tried going from Excel to HTML and it did . . . some odd things. So I abandoned that path and just took a screen shot of the ‘pretty-print’ for March and this is it, right here.
March 2019 Writing Report Goal Progress
Finish This Damned Novel – So. Close. Probably another 7500 to 10,000 words, and I”ll be done. And then the real fun of rewriting will begin.
Three More Novel Outlines – Some of it happened? I have . . . things that resemble outlines of part of two of them. I have thirty-three more days to get something that resembles an outline for at least one of them written before . . .
Write Here, Write Now – I can almost taste Baltimore. It tastes . . . like mouthwash.
Read Forty Books – It was probably not a great idea to pick Jenn Lyons‘ epic 560-page tome The Ruin of Kings as the next book I read, but OMG YOU GUYS IT’S SO DAMNED GOOD AND YOU NEED TO BE READING IT RIGHT NOW. There are seventeen chapters of it up on Tor’s site for you to read for free. I linked to it up there! Go! Click! You can get hooked like I did! I’m sure I’ll catch up after I’m done with it and read lots of shorter things. :)
Submit Things To Places – April. April is a good month to send Things out. To Places.
- I do not say this to ‘shame’ my mother, who will read this. I say it because I genuinely would rather spend time with her than read. And I did read some while I was at her house, but it was mostly web pages, and those are hard for me to track. :)
- Ten Internet Points to anyone who actually gets this. You can spend them precisely nowhere! But they’ll be yours to keep and be proud of for literally minutes to come!
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Writing Report, February 2019
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.
February was productive, but it wasn’t as productive as previous months. I wrote, but not a lot. But I did write every single day, rain or shine, in the mood or not, tired or perky, and made progress on short stories and my novel. I even <gasp> liked some of what I wrote! I KNOW! It’s so not me. I even submitted one of my older stories to another market in the hopes that it’ll find a home. Yes, I should submit more stories and more often. Working on that. Maybe an addition to my spreadsheet . . .
In addition to writing, I gave myself the goal of reading every day, as well. I added another spreadsheet (because who doesn’t love spreadsheets?) and started tracking minutes of reading, using a level system similar to the one I use for the writing, and also rewarding myself for reading more than one type of thing. My categories are “Audiobook,” “Short Story,” “Novel,” and “Non-Fiction.” Any reading I have to do for work or if I read a long article on a website, that goes in “non-fiction.” Anything shorter than a “novel” falls in the “short story” category, even if it’s ~40,000 words. I may add another section for ‘gaming’ because I find myself now playing Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition online with friends biweekly, and there’s a lot of reading involved. But it’s not really a novel or a short story or audiobook, and it’s certainly not non-fiction.
I have daily issues of Daily Science Fiction going back many years. I’ve made an actual dent in that since I read quite a few of them per day, now. I also have issues of Clarkesworld that have been collecting, as well as Crossed Genres and I just became a patron of Flash Fiction Online, so my short-stories itch is being scratched! My friend Jenn Lyons also just had her book The Ruin of Kings come out, and it’s next on my list! I was going to read the e-book version, but the footnotes plays havoc with the e-format, so I’m just gonna have to go old-style and read the dead-tree version. :) As a note, I attended Jenn’s book launch party at Eagle Eye Book Shop here in the Atlanta area, and she had the most amazing cake. Red velvet with raspberry filling. To. Die. For. And it was a 3-D rendering of her book cover.
For February, 2019, my stats are
- Words: 22,608
- Daily average words: 807
- Time: 1,250 minutes (20 hours, 50 minutes)
- Daily average time: 45 min
- Average words/hour: 1,085
- Chain: 151 days
- Level: 6 as of 22 February
- Quota: 450 words per day until 21 February, then 500 words/day
For February, 2019, my Reading stats are
- Minutes: 1,495 (24 hours, 55 minutes)
- Daily average minutes: 53
- Days on which I read:
- Audiobook: 0
- Short Story: 23
- Novel: 5
- Non-Fiction: 3
- Chain: 40 days
- Level: 2 as of 22 February
- Quota: 20 minutes per day through 21 February, 25 minutes per day thereafter
Goal Progress
Finish This Damned Novel – I’m writing the first pass at the first really huge scene where the protagonist and antagonist meet and there are fireworks. Now I have to figure out what happens after that, and what he tells his companions. Not everything is something he’s proud of or wants to admit.
Three More Novel Outlines – I wrote down a bunch of thoughts on one of them the other day, in preparation for the next item on my list. I’d like to do a plot break on it, and for that to happen, I have to have . . . you know, some kind of vague idea of what happens in the story.
Write Here, Write Now – I’m getting excited about seeing a bunch of friends I haven’t seen in a while and be in a room for several days with other writers talking writing and playing a lot — a lot — of Cards Against Humanity. And Werewolves. And maybe other stuff. But also writing.
Read Forty Books – I’m behind, but at least I already have read several books. Better than last year. :)
Submit Things To Places – I sent one out! So. Many. More. To go.
- Words: 22,608
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Writing Report, December 2018 + Year-End Wrap-Up
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.
December was a fairly decent month. In spite of a somewhat major holiday and spending quite a bit of time with my mother both at her house and on a vacation trip to south Georgia, I managed to write at least the minimum number of words every day, even when I had Internet speeds that reminded me of 110-Baud modems.
I had some interesting revelations about a couple of my characters and made copious notes to go back and add some conflict between my two main characters to set up something that happens about halfway through the novel.
I also finally managed to figure out exactly what my antagonist is doing and why. Like, the details of it. I know that seems silly that I have an outline and am writing on the novel and only just now figured that out. I had the gist of it — with the understanding that it would probably come to me during the writing, which it did — but not the reasoning behind it or the exact order of events. Once I figured out some stuff about the magic in my universe and how it’s used by different mages (and therefore what my antagonist is doing), I was able to make that leap. My notes are in-line in the document itself, so it’s not like I’m going to lose it. :)
The whole Safari issue is really frustrating. My self-control has never been good, so knowing that I can get to Facebook on Safari means I might as well not block it on my other browsers. I hope they fix that issue (which is a feature they added). Many is the night I’ve gotten my writing for the day done at 3:00 AM because I procrastinated.
Maybe I can make that part of the ‘game.’ If I go to Facebook after 8 PM, it’s some sort of penalty. Hmm. I’ll work on it.
For December, 2018, my stats are
- Words: 27,492
- Daily average words: 887
- Time: 1461 minutes (24 hours, 21 minutes)
- Daily average time: 47:08 min
- Average words/hour: 1129
- Chain: 92 days
- Level: 4 as of 18 December
- Quota: 350 words per day until 18 December, then 400 words/day
Yearly Wrap-Up
For 2018, my stats are
- Words: 127,701. That’s well over a novel’s worth.
- Daily average words: 946
- Time: 9356 minutes (6 days, 11 hours, 56 minutes)
- Daily average time: 58:29 min
- Average words/hour: 819
- Longest Chain: 92 days
- Number of chains: 2
- Total Writing Days: 160
- Level: 4 as of 31 December
- Points: 5472 as of 31 December
There were days prior to August that I wrote and recorded my time, but not the number of words (Really, past me?), so the totals above include that writing time, which is why the words per hour are probably a bit off. In 2019, I will count words and time each time I write, so those numbers won’t get “off” by too much.
My best (most productive) month was September, with a grand total of 37,243 words written. My worst month was August with only 15,649, but I was only writing for 13 days in August, so that could probably be prorated, but I’ll let it stand. :)
The most time I spent writing was in September, as well, with 2048 minutes, total, but a surprise is that January was second with 1546 minutes, total, but I didn’t record the number of words I wrote. I suspect a good bit of it was while Weekend Warrior was going on. This was well before I rediscovered the magic writing spreadsheet and started using it daily, but I was using the time-tracking app and kept track of how long I wrote, because that makes sense.
I plan to keep this going for 2019. I have a good chunk of a rough draft of a novel that I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to write since 2008. It has gone through a number of massive changes as I’ve learned things about writing and revised my characters and my world and figured out a plot that I hope makes sense. Well over half of the total 127,701 words were on short stories, blog posts, the outline, and free-writing to get to something outline-like. Right now, the ‘novel’ is a hopeless mess that needs a lot of help before I would consider letting eyes other than mine see it. I hope that by . . . let’s say April? . . . I might have something resembling a rough draft. <crosses fingers>
Oh, and you bet your sweet bippy this blog post is going towards my words for 1/1/2019. :) Let’s get the new year off to a decent start with some extra words!
Magic Writing Spreadsheet 2018, complete As a final bonus, if you’re at all interested in what the spreadsheet looks like, here is a screen shot of the 2018 worksheet. You can’t read it as is, but if you click on the image, then click on it again to get the magnified version, you can see every cell, should you feel the desire to do so. :)
If anyone is interested in obtaining a copy of the sheet . . . well, I could be persuaded to share a blanked-out version. Probably. ;) Alternatively, you could use the one I link to way back in another post, the truly shared one that exists as a Google Doc where you can see everyone else’s progress as well.
Just know that I found and corrected a major bug in it today as I was preparing the 2019 sheet for the first entry (this blog post), and that extended to the 2020 sheet. If I give you a copy, you’d be on your own for fixing stuff like that.
- Words: 27,492
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Writing Report, November 2018
Writing Full disclosure: I’ve written this post after-the-fact. In December, 2018, but later than it looks like it was posted. But I decided to take a cue from podcaster Chris Lester and sort of do a ‘writing update’ thing. And why let a little thing like ‘it was a month ago’ stand in my way?
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.
Disaster struck! Apple, in its wisdom, updated Safari, and they broke the extension that kills Facebook after a certain time. <shakes fist at sky> Why? Why?
There were two days when I had to write a bunch of documentation at work, and it sapped my desire to write fun words, and so I counted that as my writing for the day. Not emails, mind you: actual documentation for QA so they could test my code and know what to expect. So I count it. It’s not creative (although QA might take an opposing view on that . . .), but it was words on ‘paper,’ and I counted it. So there.
I did not do NaNoWriMo this year. I added the capability to my spreadsheet, because it was there and needed to be done (for certain values of ‘needed’). So in 2019 or 2020 (or going forward), if I decide to do NaNoWriMo, I have a mechanism in place to calculate, for each day of November, how many words per day I must achieve to meet the 50,000 word goal, and a switch to flip to turn NaNoWriMo Mode on or off. If it’s off, it just goes with the number of words required for the current level. And, even though I drove a grand total of sixteen hours over Thanksgiving weekend and visited friends and family in four different towns in Alabama, I by-God still managed to write some words every day. Yes, I did just pat myself on the back, because I freakin’ deserve it. :)
As a note: I have completed NaNoWriMo a number of times, and don’t need to prove to myself that I can write 50,000 words in 30 days. I wrote 122,400+ words one November. I think I deserve a pass if I choose not to participate. :)
For November, 2018, my stats are
- Words: 27,142
- Daily average words: 905
- Time: 1443 minutes (24 hours, 3 minutes)
- Daily average time: 48:06 min
- Average words/hour: 1,128
- Chain: 61 days
- Level: 3, on the 10th
- Quota: 350 words/day beginning on the 10th
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- Words: 27,142
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Writing Report, October 2018
Writing Full disclosure: I’ve written this post very after-the-fact. In December, 2018. But I decided to take a cue from podcaster Chris Lester and sort of do a ‘writing update’ thing. And why let a little thing like ‘it was two months ago’ stand in my way?
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.
I had a really hard time with several scenes in my novel, and several days of struggling before I realized I didn’t have to write sequentially and started skipping around. I wasn’t feeling it as much in October as in September, but I persevered. On several days when I couldn’t be bothered to write in the novel, I wrote something else. Anything else. Journal entries about why I was struggling to write, etc. But I kept at it every day, at least. And don’t think I didn’t count the words I wrote on two blog posts (one, two). ;)
For October, 2018, my stats are
- Words: 20,175
- Daily average words: 651
- Time: 1268 minutes (21 hours, 8 minutes)
- Daily average time: 40:54 min
- Average words/hour: 954
- Chain: 31 days
- Level: 2
- Quota: 300 words/day
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- Words: 20,175
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Writing Report, September 2018
Writing Full disclosure: I’ve written this post very after-the-fact. In December, 2018. But I decided to take a cue from podcaster Chris Lester and sort of do a ‘writing update’ thing. And why let a little thing like ‘it was three months ago’ stand in my way?
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.
I missed a day, and broke my chain. :( I had 43 days of straight writing — the most I’ve ever managed — and I visited my mother for her birthday at the end of the month and got sick, and then got home so late from that weekend that I was just exhausted and could literally not stay up long enough to write even 300 words unless it had been “All work and no play make Gary a dull boy” 30 times. Which was tempting, but no. :) I hated to break the chain, but it was unavoidable. So, I start over in October with a fresh new chain at 1, and it’ll take me a lot longer to get to level 3. Bummer, but I’m not going to beat myself up over it.
I also hit a milestone! On the first, I realized that I’d free-written enough material to start organizing it into a bona-fide outline! So on the 1st through the 7th, I broke down my brain-dump into chunks and created a scene-by-scene rough outline of the entire novel, from start to finish. Very rough. :) On the 8th, I actually started writing the novel itself. Chapter 1, scene 1. And immediately had to start adding scenes to the outline! :)
For September, 2018, my stats are
- Words: 37,243
- Daily average words: 1284
- Time: 2048 minutes (34 hours, 8 minutes)
- Daily average time: 70:37 min
- Average words/hour: 1,091
- Chain: 43 days
- Level: 2 on the 16th
- Quota: 300 words/day as of the 16th
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- Words: 37,243
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On Broken Chains . . .
Last week, I posted about scheduling. As of the time of my post, I had written every day for forty days without breaking my chain. (You will begin to get a sense of foreboding, here, based on the title of this blog post.) Two days after I posted that, I came down with an illness. I had gone home to visit my mother for her birthday, and that night, I started feeling really unwell. Recognizing it as the early stages of a recurring illness that I haven’t had to deal with for almost three years(!), I quickly got in touch with my doctor via his web portal and requested an ’emergency prescription’ of the usual antibiotics be sent to my mother’s local pharmacy. His office isn’t open on weekends, but I gambled that he’s like most doctors: unable to leave work at work.
My gamble paid off. :) He came through, and the next morning, I had antibiotics waiting for me at a pharmacy near my mother. Antibiotics that have . . . certain side effects. Not the least of which, in the first day or two, is extreme drowsiness. But even with that, I managed to get my words in even through the pain and discomfort on Friday night and through pain, discomfort, and nausea on Saturday. And then came Sunday.
I had to drive several hours and remember to take my antibiotics, one of which causes nausea (and, being an antibiotic, doesn’t permit me to take antacids with calcium) and causes my mouth to taste like I’ve been sucking on a moldy penny. And the other of which causes a couple of other interesting bodily side effects I won’t go into. LET’S JUST SAY that by the time I arrived home around midnight, I was just not having any of it, for all values of ‘it’ that didn’t involve my immediately going to bed and sleeping. I did try to write. I really did. But all I could think of was how much I hurt and how awful the taste of antibiotic is and how tired I was and how much I didn’t want to go to work on Monday . . .
So I broke my chain after day 43.
But! I didn’t let that get in my way. I felt immensely better (by several metrics, if not by all of them) on Monday (on which I did not go to work), and on Tuesday (on which I also did not go to work, nor to my weekly critique session), so I was able to get some words in. I also have a couple more sites to add to my ‘turn it off at 10 pm’ list. I told you: I know me. :)
So, this is day three of my current chain. Which, if I don’t break it again before then, will reach 43 days on November 13th. By which time, I hope to finally be out of chapter 2 (this chapter . . . OMG) and on to later sections of the novel.
I had one of those ‘really comfortable in bed, just before sleep’ ideas last night, and, luckily (knowing myself as I do), I did not listen to the little voice in my head that whispered, “Oh, just drift off to sleeeeeep. You don’t have to write it doooooowwwwwwn. I’ll remember it fooooooor yooooouuuuuuu.” Uh-huh. Liar.
I believe this is the voice responsible for Skullcosm ‘Nough said.
So I got up and, through bleary eyes fogged by ointment, wrote down the idea, with some thoughts on how it might play out in the novel.
And lo! when I arose this morning, it was mostly coherent (mostly) and still good, so I will incorporate it wholly into my novel.
And there was much rejoicing.
(yaaaaay)
- I suppose I could have just written, “I’m sick and tired and my mouth tastes like dead weasel and I want to go to bed and sleep forever,” 15 times, but it seemed like cheating.
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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.
