Pep Talks to Myself

Lately I've had a hard time writing or getting into anything, really. I've been struggling with being stagnant after graduation. Where do I go from here? Why can't I seem to find a better job? If I go back to school, what should I get my masters in? What does it matter if I write or not?

Well, I gave myself a pep talk the other night that seemed to snap me back to reality, or at least writing. I told myself, J, you can either sit back and stay in this life you hate, or you can fight for a better future. I told myself, you are a fighter and you are going to fight like hell to keep doing the things you love. That means overcoming stagnation, fighting for a position, fighting against your deteriorating health. And it actually worked. I've decided to fight.

Part of that means returning to hope, returning to wishes, returning to dreaming up a better future. What this is means is that I inspire myself to write by thinking about the endgame, what happens after I'm published. I imagine what fans will like or not like, what they will argue with each other about, how they will react. My favorite past-time has always been imagining giving book talks or being interviewed about my books.

If you follow me on tumblr, you've probably noticed I've been in a bit of a tag vomit mood this week. A few of those entries were related to this kind of dreaming, where I imagine how future students looking at my work will imagine me and/or will interpret my books. This comes largely out of the fact that sometimes English majors over-analyze a book and find more meaning in it than the writer originally intended. Anyway, here are the tags, and links to their respective posts.

Part 1: A Response to Leonardo Da Vinci's hand studies
someday if my books are ever published students will study me and my weird (and somewhat macabre) obsession with hands and they will write papers about how I feared nothing but losing them. They will write that I was most fascinated by hands, how they mean losing everything and yet they were the key to creating everything. my hands are my everything. Just kidding. They will write papers about me saying she wrote a lot about hands and potatoes and we're really not sure why. Maybe she secretly wanted to be a farmer

Part 2: A Response to Seamus Heaney's "Digging"
 this is the post all the students who will study my works in the future will cite on their essays saying look Teacher she is obsessed with potatoes just like we said. this poem represents how she wanted to be a farmer just like all the generations of her family before her. both sets of grandparents and her uncle had a farm you know. but she didn't work on a farm so she decided to dig with her pen like Heaney did. as you can see I've done my research and I can find you more evidence of why Layman writes so much about hands and potatoes. She was kind of a weird writer but I guess all writers are weird. except this one didn't drink or take opium or anything. she was just obsessed with potatoes and hands I guess.

TL;DR: dreaming about being famous in the future helps me write my novels, because I feel like I have something to work towards. If you're having trouble, maybe this will help you too. Maybe I'm just delusional.

Updates (Six Month Hiatus Explained)

Well, it's been six months since I was last here. Sorry about that. Here's a few quick updates, then I'll make a second update about what I actually came here to write.

Health: I learned recently that I do not have carpal tunnel, but that I actually have cubital tunnel, which is somewhat similar, but uses the ulnar nerve and runs through the elbow instead. I'm on anti-inflammatories and some light therapy, but I think the thing that really helped it was just knowing the cause and the things to avoid. But more importantly, the pain I've been feeling is not a result of cubital tunnel syndrome, but is in fact a "more serious issue" we're currently trying to determine. I go in on Wednesday for blood tests to determine whether or not I have RA, which is the most likely result.

Zenith: Has a new intro that I rather like, but other than that, has been sitting ignored for a few months. I really need to go through and do final edits, but I just can't seem to find the motivation lately (we'll get to that in a minute).

Inevitable aka the TimeWIP: If you only follow me here, you don't know about the TimeWIP yet. It is my current project, which involves time traveling Historians. Yep, I gave time travel to one of the most boring professions and denied it to everyone else. Basically, the Collective Historical Society has unlocked the key to time travel and they've found a way to limit access to it. Historians are sent back in time to witness important events and collect facts (and occasionally artifacts) on these events. The MC, James, is told when he's 12 that he'll become a Historian, because in the future he's already one and the CHS needs to make sure this happens. There's more to it after that, but that's where I am at the moment. I really enjoy writing about time travel.

NaNoWriMo '11: I will be participating again this year, partially because I want to get back into the habit of writing everyday, partially because I want to challenge myself with something I'm not very good at (realistic fiction), and partially because Casye needs a writing buddy. Originally I thought about using the TimeWIP, but I had already written pieces of it, so that would be cheating. Instead I'm going to write about a bunch of friends from college who get split up after graduation, which will highlight different kinds of LDRs and LDFs.

The Damsel and My Worst Fear

Has it really been six months? My. I'm sorry, folks. I am still alive and I am still writing. Here's what I've been up to since my last post:

• "The Damsel" won first place in the fiction division of the OPUS writing contest. I was unable to make it to the awards ceremony because I had work, but my good friend Bethany was nice enough to accept the award on my behalf. She read the first few pages of the story and from what I've been told, the audience reacted quite well. One of my professors in attendance emailed me to say that the audience laughed and murmured in appreciation. We're printing the story in our school's literary magazine as well, so we're hoping that "The Damsel" might be a draw for students to pick that up once it comes out. It's rather killing me that I wasn't there to read the piece myself and see the reactions with my own eyes. The whole night at work all I could think was, somewhere out there, someone is hearing my story, and I have no idea how they feel about it. I suppose that's something I'm going to have to get used to at some point.
• I graduate in 3 weeks. 3 weeks to the day, actually. I'm quite looking forward to it at this point. This semester has been eating me alive, between 17 credits and two (and later three, sort of) jobs. That's one of the major reasons why I haven't posted here since late November. Soon, though, I will be done with school entirely and I will have time for these sorts of things. Even more importantly, I will have time for finishing Zenith and moving onto my next project (it involves time travel!).
• Another big reason I haven't been around is that I haven't had the strength. I have carpal tunnel and tendonitis in both hands/wrists and it's been really bad this year. Even with a brace, typing is hard and I was only able to do it in short bursts. Most of the time, I had to dedicate that to my homework assignments, and some of those I couldn't even manage. Thankfully, my professors were understanding and gave me extensions on the larger papers, but blogging was absolutely out of the question. So was writing. I was basically starting in on my worst fear: losing my hands. The absolute worst part about it was not that I was in constant pain, but that I couldn't write about it. That was all I wanted, to write about how it felt, and I couldn't. That pain goes so much deeper.

Draft 3, here I come!

November 2009, I sat down at my computer thinking "Okay, I can do this: I can write a novel." As the months wore on, I started to question the validity of that statement. Could I really write a full novel? I knew I could start one, I'd done that dozens of times before, but could I actually finish one? Most days, I wasn't so sure, but I kept at it anyway. Then in February 2010, I did it: I finished...the first draft.

Then a few months later, the second. In July, I sent out copies of my manuscript to a few willing participants who had promised me feedback. One of them responded with notes on the entire novel, another on the first twelve chapters, still another on the first chapter (though, to be fair, this was all she had received).

And now, in November of 2010, a little over a year after I first began this project, I am beginning work on the third draft of Zenith.

I once compared rewriting to surgery:

For years I have heard authors toss around this phrase, that all writing is rewriting. I want to tell them they've got it backwards, that all rewriting is writing. You have a fully formed first draft and suddenly, you are starting from scratch. There is no such thing as a minor edit at this point, this is not plastic surgery. This is orthopedics, the breaking and reforming and placement of bones, the bare skeleton of what you wish to create. This is heart surgery and brain surgery, this is fixing the insides of a story so that it can live and breathe and speak on its own someday. You recreate the story, instead of making it look better. You rewrite it. Re-write. Write again. You essentially write a second novel, by fixing up that first draft. 

 I stand by everything I said then and I am happy to say that my patient is out of the woods and stable these days. No more trauma surgery, no more heart or brain surgery. I now get to move on to the less threatening issues. I can focus on the lacerations and bruises, make sure everything is okay and stable. I get to comb my novel for inconsistencies, make sure my characters and my story get across well enough, and destroy all evidence of typos and grammar faux-pas. This is plastic surgery, the surface reformations and beautification stage. I hope it comes out pretty enough, in the end.

NaNoWriMo '10 - Why are You Participating?

There are many reasons why writers and hopeful writers join in the fun insanity of NaNoWriMo each year, but I thought it would be important to touch on a few of them, for the first year participants especially.

I want to write the Next Great American Novel.
That's awesome! I am all for that and I support you fully...but NaNo is not the place to start. The thing about NaNoWriMo is that you are writing so much on such a short, fairly unrealistic (in terms of a complete novel) deadline, that whatever you write is going to suck. Letting your work suck is the only way you will finish by 30 November, trust me. You will not be able to write an amazing work of Literature during NaNoWriMo, but you can get a start, which brings me to the next reason.

I want to get my ideas down.
This is the much more realistic and sane approach to option A above. Don't worry about specifics or quality, just get your ideas down on the page and get that word count up. 50,000 words of crap may not make a novel, but it makes for one hell of a detailed outline for the Next Great American Novel. Use it as a guide to help you actually write a novel after November has ended and I think you'll find it much easier to navigate your ideas when they are on the page than when they are floating freely in your head.

I want to get into the habit of writing everyday.
This, my friends, is what NaNo was created to do. NaNo is not about writing an amazing novel that you can send off to agents on 1 Dec (note: do not do this. Under any circumstances), it is about writing everyday, getting words out even when you feel like you don't have much to say. When you force yourself into doing it and have a quota to make each day, you are much more likely to write. And as Madeleine L'Engle said, "inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it." Sometimes the hardest part of writing is just sitting down and starting—that's what NaNo is meant to help you with.

NaNo Countdown: 3 hours

NaNoWriMo '10 is about to start and has already started for some of you. Exciting, right? More like terrifying. I just had my first case of Writer's Doubt and Panic and November hasn't even started yet. I'm not entirely sure where my story is going or if I even have an actual plot. Yes, I posted that bit about Caroline, but I don't think it's strong enough to carry the whole story. I've toyed with other ideas, both to improve this story and to pursue other options.

Panic is common, doubt even more so. Getting past that and getting words on the page is what makes you a writer.

NaNoWriMo in Years Past

I mentioned yesterday that this is my 4th year doing NaNoWriMo and since this blog is not old enough for me to have mentioned these before, I thought I'd make a list of the different stories I've attempted and the different issues I've faced in writing them (ie: why I didn't finish).

2006: The Elemental Spell: Fantasy/Humor
Main Idea: An alchemist in a parallel universe accidentally kidnaps two step-siblings from a Ferris wheel in our world when attempting a spell for beef Wellington. The three try to re-open the portal between the worlds to get the children home safely, but another alchemist wants to exploit it because Earth items are the biggest trend. Basically, all alchemists are Earth fanboys. Lots of satire, really stupid jokes, and a dictionary as a spellbook.
Why it Didn't Work: My computer died somewhere around 25k. It was tragic.
What Happened to It: I have since worked on this, but while I love it, I realize it's not entirely worth fixing. Someday I may rewrite it, but for now it would require too much effort to fix all the major faults.

2007: Reconnect: Realistic/YAL/Teen Drama
Main Idea: Two teens who live next door to each other and grew up as friends have grown apart by the time they enter high school and reconnect online. Delilah is sort of a preppy girl with good grades and a booming social life, but she's sometimes pressured into things by her friends that she doesn't want to do. Max(?) is a geeky shy guy who is one of the smartest kids in class, but sticks to the wayside.
Why it Didn't Work: It sucks. Sucks sucks sucks sucks. I gave up on it completely way before the ending and I can't believe I started it. Also, I'm not very good at realistic fiction, tends to bore me.
What Happened to It: About a year later I lost the document completely after a freak file naming accident. I have a few scraps on paper left over and a few pieces from my old writing blog, but for the most part it is gone. Which is good because it sucked, but I also sort of miss it, just because it was a piece of me.

2008: Nothing!


2009: Zenith: Science Fiction (YAL)
Main Idea: Rob's grandfather, Fagan, lives on one of the last true farms in existence, but he's being forced to move soon. Fagan doesn't want to leave his home, but more than that, he's hiding a plane illegally in the barn. Air travel no longer exists, outlawed for "safety reasons" by the government, but this turns out not to be true. After Rob discovers that his new friend Risty is part cyborg, she blackmails him and his grandfather into helping her discover the truth in what's really happening behind the clouds.
Why It Didn't Worked: For one, I got really attached and I loved it. The world was new to me, something I could create, but didn't have to be so far off from our own. But more than that, the characters felt real. They were distinct, but not unheard of, they had stories and faults and heart and I loved them to pieces, even when I disagreed with what they were doing. I had a good idea of who they characters were and what they wanted and where I wanted to go with the story and I went there. I reached a point when I didn't know what was going to happen next, but I kept on writing and well, that's when the good stuff happened.
What Happened to It: I have since finished writing Zenith and gone through a few rounds of edits. It is currently in the beta reading stage and once I have more time on my hands (Christmas break, most likely), I'm going to edit it again and once I feel I've done enough, I'm going to query it to agents.