Reflection

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 5 (11/05)

Chris Leave a comment

Well, yesterday was an entirely normal day. I got everything done I was supposed to do for that day. There’s still more I could have done, but given how my weekend went prior to yesterday, “normal” is a damn good accomplishment. Middling productive, only marginally stressful, and entirely too long. Seriously. Daylight Saving Time always screws with my ability to perceive the passage of time so I feel like it is several hours later than the clock tells me. It was worse yesterday because of how terribly I’ve been sleeping lately, and I went to bed a good deal earlier than I normally would.

Today’s going to be a busy day, too. It’s my first day back at work after my break and I’m concerned about how I’m going to write my four thousand or more words in just the time I have after work since I might need to stay late at work on account of the projects I’m trying to wrap up. I also generally have D&D on Monday nights, but I’ve cancelled my participation in it on account of the stuff that happened over the weekend. I’m not going to have fun, nor will I be any fun, so it was best to just stay away for a week while I try to focus on getting my stuff worked out. Plus, it’s going to be difficult to maintain my nightly pace of four thousand words on nights when I have anything else to do. Ideally, I could do all that in about four hours, but the ideal is rarely the case. Planning on six hours is much more likely. And I still want to write the Coldheart and Iron post that’s supposed to go up tomorrow and that’s another two to three and a half thousand words worth of writing that almost always takes a little over an hour per thousand to write since I need to look up stuff and reference past chapters. I tried to get some of it done last night, but I just hit a wall.

I’m still really worn out, despite the sleep. This emotional stuff is taking quite a toll on me. I’m worried I’m entering the loop I took all of last week off to avoid. I’m still technically behind from Saturday’s day of rest, thought I’ve already taken steps toward catching up in almost everything. I’ve gotta confront the reality of whether or not I can actually write three stories at once (What You Know You Need, Spicing Things Up, and Coldheart and Iron) because wanting to do it isn’t going to get me through the nights of lessened sleep it’ll probably require. I’ve already got enough of an extra challenge between National Novel Writing Month blog updates and the romance novel. I don’t need to keep doing weekly updates for a Science Fiction story almost no one reads. Tuesdays are my worst days for views because almost no one cares about the story I’m writing. I know a few people who all say they’ll read it once it’s complete, but those are the people I talk to who are the closest to reading it. I could skip a month of updates, leave the last four chapters for January instead of trying to wrap it up on Christmas thereby saving myself some time and sanity… It’s certainly an appealing thought. It’s not like I don’t have enough other crap to do.

The question just remains to figure out what I really want. More rest and downtown, or to have the story finished on Christmas Day. My initial reaction says the latter, but my common sense says the former. It’s hard to argue with either side since they both have good arguments. Not writing it would be limiting myself. Writing it would be pushing myself toward a vicious cycle of doing nothing but writing and sacrificing sleep on the altar of potential productivity. To make it all worse, I’m still super tired and probably not in the right frame of mind to make a decision since my tired impulse always says “do it anyway” but also “just go to bed and sleep for a long time.”

I mean, I’ve already written over eighteen thousand words. It’s not like I’ve gotten nothing done or I’m not already doing enough. I’m doing plenty. I probably should dial it down a bit. But having time and energy for a little more is easier to allocate when I’ve got projects to switch between with smaller goals rather than “spend the extra time doing an open-ended extra amount of typing in your NaNoWriMo project!” I do most of my extra writing by rounding out word totals to interesting numbers, finishing scenes, or letting the writing carry me along when I find bits that are easy to add. Concrete extra projects and definable goals are my thing.

Anyway, I hope you’re making progress on your goals, whatever they are, and I hope the fifth day of National Novel Writing Month goes well for you! Good luck and know that you’re doing a great job! Keep it up!

 

Daily Prompt

Before your protagonist became a protagonist, they had some kind of life. Maybe they were a sad orphan with no home and nothing but verbal abuse and child labor to fill their formative years, or maybe they lived in the lap of luxury with a silver spoon in their life. Maybe their life was entirely unremarkable before this point aside from a few key traits that set them up for the circumstances of the story. Whatever the reason, it’s important to know who your protagonist was so you can figure out how to turn them into the person they’re supposed to be by the end of the story. Today, write about your protagonist’s past and how it’s relevant to the story you’re telling today.

 

Sharing Inspiration

One of my favorite books that has an amazing character building experience throughout it, is Wake of Vultures by Lila Bowen (Aka, Delilah Dawson). There’s a plot involving the protagonist trying to avenge a murder and bring down some kind of terrible monster in the Old-Time Fantasy Wild West, but most of the book involves the protagonist exploring and developing a sense of self that they find comfortable. Even as the story draws to a close, the protagonist is learning more and more about themselves and their past, which in turn informs the person they’re becoming as they are pushed to the absolute limits of what they are willing to put up with or what they can learn to live with. If you want to read some masterful character development, you really need to check this book out.

 

Helpful Tips

If you’re struggling to focus because you’re tired or you can’t seem to get your brain away from whatever thought it’s been picking at all day, try taking a nap or meditating! A short nap, about fifteen to thirty minutes, should be plenty to get you feeling awake and alert again, unless you’re like me and don’t actually sleep so much as crash as a result of your sleep debt every time you lay down your head. If you’re someone like that, you should probably skip the naps and head straight to the meditation. That’s what I do. A simple guided meditation (plenty of which you can find on YouTube) can go a long way to clearing your head or making you feel more mentally focused and physically relaxed. Naps are good, but meditation is usually better if you’re any good at it.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 4 (11/04)

Chris Leave a comment

Well, I’ve been pretty derailed. Yesterday was not the day I had hoped it would be. A combination of only getting four hours of sleep, from seven to eleven in the morning, set me up for a bad day. My nieghbor’s music was loud and non-stop until four in the morning and then I was too upset and frustrated to go to sleep for three hours. Also, four hours isn’t enough sleep when that’s more or less the amount I’d gotten for each of the two previous nights as well. After that… well, I got the precursor to some bad news right when I woke up, got the bad news half and hour later, and then, around two in the afternoon, finally got the context for the bad news so I could properly appreciate how bad it was.

And that was pretty much it for the day. I was just waking up enough to be able to write at that point and then I got the context for the bad news and I pretty much gave up. I still tried to write, but I packed it in around six and just played video games until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore. The only reason I’m in any kind of shape to write is momentum built up by starting with easy stuff like showering, breakfast, and laundry, along with the eight hours of sleep I got thanks to the start of Daylight Saving Time. I still feel like absolutely crap, but I’ve worked through worse. Maybe. I don’t really know. It’s not like there’s a translation table for “effort required to keep doing stuff” between the various kinds of awful stuff that can happen to people. I’ve felt worse from my own depression and kept writing, but I’ve also been dealing with my depression for over a decade. This… This is new. I’ve experience similar things before, but not this.

I’m not going to go into the specifics of what it was, but I will say that my health and life are just fine. The biggest impact this will have is the negative impact on my mood. And my focus. Right now, I very much do not want to be in my own head and it is incredibly difficult to avoid being in your head while writing. My current strategy revolves around partitioning things and trying to be a little more forgiving when I need to go do something that pulls me out of my head quickly. I’m also leaning heavily on one of my YouTube playlists. It’s full of music that has a calming effect on me and that’s super helpful because it is basically shrinking the size of the stuff I’m trying to avoid in my head which gives me more room for trying to write stuff.

Which I’m still going to do. I cancelled D&D because my heart just isn’t in… well, anything. It isn’t in anything right now and I don’t want to run a game I’m not going to enjoy because I’ve learned that’s a really good way to run a game no one will enjoy. Hell, I won’t even really be able to get into it. I played games all evening yesterday and I kept getting pulled out of it by what’s going on in my head. But I’m still going to try to write today. I owe it to myself to do the best I can to continue working on my goals because those goals haven’t changed, my plans haven’t changed, and my life still needs to continue. I can’t let this stress and emotional turmoil just bring it to a halt. So I’m going to try again today and I’ll hopefully be able to get more done today than I did yesterday. I’ve got all day, still. Twelve hours until Monday. Ten until I should go to bed (since I need more than one night of decent sleep if I’m going to survive the upcoming week). That should be enough to scrap out one thousand six hundred sixty-seven words of main National Novel Writing Month project, one thousand words of romance novel, two blog entries (since I am supposed to write the next day’s post during the last hour of the prior evening and I didn’t do that yesterday), and a bunch of reading. Ideally, I’d also get a draft of Coldheart and Iron: Part 36 done since I still plan to post that on Tuesday, but I’ll take progress on it instead of the whole thing. I’m not picky.

In fact, I’m trying to be realistic. It’s entirely possible I’ll do none of those things at all. Maybe I’ll just do a few hundred words and pack it in for the day because trying to force myself to write right now was too tortuous. Anyway, I hope your National Novel Writing Month is going well and that you had a chance to make some good progress this weekend!

Daily Prompt

Unless you’re Andy Weir, your protagonist needs someone to interact with. A friend to go to for advice, a student to mentor, a foil to highlight their strengths and weaknesses, a rival to compete against, or so on. There’s someone (or multiple someones if you want an “all-of-the-above” situation) in the world of your story who will be the main focus for the protagonist. Maybe they’re part of the reason the protagonist is driving the plot or maybe they’re helping drive the plot so the protagonist can figure out how to solve it. Whyever they’re there, your protagonist needs them to shake up your descriptions with some dialogue. Today, introduce the protagonist’s main source of interaction and give a scene that establishes their relationship with the protagonist.

 

Sharing Inspiration

One of the best stories I’ve experience this year, though it’s not as good as “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing,” was the anime, My Hero Academia. What I thought was going to be just another “people with powers in high school fighting stuff” show turned out to be one the most complex and well-written anime I have ever seen. The only one that compares is Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and that only came together that well because the fans demanded a faithful adaptation of the manga after it was finished. I love the way it tells complex stories using an anime genre that is notorious for simple stories about gaining more power to beat the bad guys. There’s still plenty of that in this anime, but that’s not all there is to it. It constantly defies my expectations and I love any story that can surprise me in a good way.

 

Helpful Tips

Don’t be afraid to take a break if you need one. You can always make up for it in the future or you have probably over-written on a few previous days so you’re not even really missing a full day of progress. The most important thing you can do this month is maintain your mental and physical health. Writing is great, and finishing a story feels great, but none of that matters if you make yourself incredibly sick as a result of pushing yourself too hard. So take breaks, take a day off when you need it, or, at the very least, don’t hold yourself to a word goal for a day. Try to write a little bit and be content with getting anything out instead of being disappointed that you fell short of your goal. Take it from me, building a daily writing habit is more important than writing the same amount every day and keeping yourself from getting sick or over-stressed is more important than both. Figure out what your hierarchy of needs is and make sure to stick to it as well as you can.

 

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 3 (11/03)

Chris Leave a comment

In the grand scheme of things, Yesterday was a decent day. I got plenty done despite staying up super late the night before and forgetting I had a therapy appointment first thing int he morning until it was too late to get more than five hours of sleep. I then caffeinated myself to compensate and pretty much ruined any ability to focus I might have ever possessed so I only got another six thousand words written. Which, you know, it still a crap-ton of words. It’s just also not as many as I wanted to get done. Eight thousand would have been good for today. It’d have gotten me back on track. That being said, if I can do another six thousand tomorrow, I’ll be all caught up since all of the support writing stuff is done except my daily reflections and tips for these posts. It’s hard to write a reflection on a day that hasn’t happened yet, but it’s fine. This is about one thousand words of stuff and I can jam that out in thirty to forty-five minutes these days. The only question is how good my focus is when I write this and, seeing as I’m writing this after midnight again, I can confidently say my focus is crap.

I should probably stop complaining. I wrote six thousand words today and that’s only if I actually go to bed after this is done. If I decide to stay up a little later to get some more work done on the romance novel that’s been sitting at the bottom of my priority list, then that could easily go up. Once I’ve got the opening worked out, stories usually tend to go pretty quickly at first. Thanks to the outlining I did on the first, I’ve already got that part worked out so it should be pretty easy to do one thousand words before I decide to pack it in for the night. Or maybe I’ll just got to bed and get some freaking sleep for once in my freaking life. It’s like I’m allergic to a good night’s rest.

To be fair, the loud music that is coming from my neighbor’s side of the duplex, like it does every goddamn Friday from ten in the evening until two or three in the morning, discourages sleep. It’s a been a bit quieter than usual, lately, mostly after midnight, though. I wonder if one of my roommates complained. I doubt it. They could sleep through a tornado. Maybe the neighbor on the other side complained. There’s an air gap and the exterior walls are thicker than the one separate the two halves of the duplex, so it seems unlikely. Maybe he just decided to stop being an asshole before I lost my temper and called the cops on him. Originally, we were going to ignore it because we can be loud at times and it’s usually best to try to stay on good terms with your neighbors, but this is every Friday like clockwork and we maybe noise late at night once every few months.

Night like tonight are a bit easier. I can turn my fan to the max setting, set up some quiet music I can sleep through (from long practice. This has been my sleep music playlist since I was 13 and had my own room for the first time), and turn on the Rainy Mood app. The calming sound of rain and thunder always helps cover up the shitty bass pounding through the walls. Some days I’m pretty sure it only feels worse. Today, it’s pretty quiet, but I can’t unhear it tonight, no matter what I do, so it’s incredibly grating. I might need to meditate myself to sleep tonight to forcibly get my mind off the frustrating bland club-style music he listens to.

Anyway, that’s probably a good summary of my day. Unfocused, frustrated by petty shit I refuse to address in a constructive manner, and so focused on trying to get more writing done that I’ve ruined any real chance I had at productivity by continuing to try to focus instead of letting myself take a break. Honestly, if I’d just gone and played video games for a few hours this afternoon instead of mindlessly procrastinating on writing Inspiration segments, I’d probably have gotten eight thousand words written and been asleep for an hour by now. Lesson learned. I’ll try again in the morning, once I’ve gotten more than 5 hours of sleep at night. That’ll be a nice feeling.

Good luck today! I hope you’re hitting your targets and making solid progress on your goals!

 

Daily Prompt

Most stories have a star. The Protagonist. In some stories, there are several protagonists. Whoever they are, however many there are, they are the people who the story happens to. They have agency and they use it to push the story forward. No protagonist chooses to lay down and die when it’s that or fight back somehow. If they do, they’re not the protagonist. They might sacrifice themselves, but that’s still their choice. Behind all this, though, they have something that drives them. This is their reason for making decisions, for choosing to act, for resisting whatever is happening. Today, write about what drives your protagonist(s) toward the end of your story. You could work it into their introduction or figure out how or when you want to reveal it later, but it’s important to establish why they do what they do.

 

Sharing Inspiration

In the last year or so of the comic, Order of the Stick, we have seen some amazing developments that have been years in the making. We have seen the resolution of stories that began when I first started reading this comic back during the Azure city sage and we have seen stuff I thought was a throw-away gag come to fruition. Stories that were foreshadowed have come to pass and events long prophesied have finally made their dramatic entrance. Low, have I wondered about the various colors of the gods and now we finally have our answers. This gets me excited about the potential for long-term storytelling available in forms like comics and dungeons and dragons that generally require a big chunk of time to come to an end.

 

Helpful Tips

While National Novel Writing Month prioritizes a word-count goal, you probably shouldn’t focus on that yourself. If you’re constantly checking how many words you’ve written, you’re just going to continuously break your concentration. Instead, try pages. A little bit under three pages using standard fonts and pages in most word processors should be your goal, if you’re writing single-spaced. You can get about get about six hundred words on a page, as long as you’re not constantly breaking onto new lines for a bunch of short lines of back-and-forth dialogue. If it’s double-spaced, you’re at about three hundred fifty words a page and you should aim for five and a half pages.

Really, though, the goal of this thinking is to stop you from focusing on getting enough words written to stop and keep you focused on telling the story. If you focus on sitting down to write every day, you’ll get your words in eventually. Don’t worry about the count, worry about who is going to move the scene along. Stop when you run out of writing time, start to doze off, or otherwise reach a logical end point for the day. If you write more than your daily amount, that’s not a bad thing. I guarantee there will be at least one day where stuff keeps coming up and you barely get anything written. Then you’ll be glad for that extra few hundred words a day you’ve been producing. So don’t mind the word count (and disable it if it’s easily visible anywhere in your word processor), and just focused on the act of spitting out more words for your story.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 2 (11/02)

Chris Leave a comment

Well, Day 1 went pretty well. I got my daily word count in for my NaNoWriMo project and did about three thousand other words of writing. By the time I’m done with this post and whatever else I do before bed, I’ll probably have done about six thousand words today. Which isn’t as much as I’d have liked since that’s a whole day of writing and only 50% more writing than I need to do during my average day if I wind up closer to my maximum word count than my minimum one. Which is going to be my daily goal because I’d hate to get to the end of the month at ninety-five thousand words only to have fallen short of actually finishing the romance novel or updating my blog every day. Plus, it’s usually better to front-load so long as you’re not pushing yourself past the point of sustainability.

To be entirely fair to myself, I didn’t start writing right away. My whole morning was off because I had to deal with the maintenance guy coming to fix the broken garage door motor, feeling loopy and slightly disassociated from tiredness because I slept like crap and stayed up until past three in the morning, and I then had to leave to meet my friend for lunch right away so I didn’t get ANYTHING written until after 4pm. Because I also had to spend some time playing video games with a friend (oh no, poor me) since I’d promised to join him and, honestly, I need to not spend all of my time working on stuff. I did that for a month and a half just recently. I was so burned out that I needed three full days of rest and gaming to recover at all. So I got a lot done yesterday, all things considered. Even if I didn’t make it to bed right when I wanted to last night, I still did better than I expected in total words and in boxes filled-in on my to-do list.

I did outlines for both projects, but I had to do them by story beats rather than chapters because I’m not as firm on my National Novel Writing Month story or the romance novel story as I was on Coldheart and Iron (the story I did my first chapter-by-chapter outline for). I wish I was, but Coldheart and Iron started as a dream and I rarely get to see an entire story unfold like that before I write it down. Even with all that, it changed significantly as I went, with half again as many chapters added in as I went and a lot of shifts to the events of the story to make it fit with how I was writing it. “What You Know You Need,” which is what I’m calling my NaNoWriMo project, is still evolving and solidifying. I know most of the major points of the story and have some ideas about what I’d like to be in there, but nothing is certain yet. I have never written a romance story, so “Spicing Things Up” is still a giant mess of nothing but story beats as well. I mean, I barely even read romance novels so I fully expect this to be a travesty that changes as I write it and read actual romance novels for reference. Neither one of my stories can afford to be pinned down right now.

Finishing up the outlines (well, turning them into outlines instead of plot summaries) was one of my big tasks for yesterday, along with writing as many of the Inspiration posts ahead of time as I could. I’ve got two weeks of them finished and all of the writing prompts already done, so now I’m trying to get the rest finished and start in on daily progress on my novel projects. I also need to think about this month’s four Coldheart and Iron posts since I want to keep those up as well so I can finish it by Christmas Day. Which means I still have plenty to do with my weekends and days off. Today is my last planned day off, so I’m going to do my best to make the most of it. Maybe I can knock out my daily novel projects early and then pump out two big Coldheart and Iron posts. That’d be nearly ten thousand words for the day right there. I’d at least like to get one done. Hopefully two since I’m going to be incredibly busy next weekend. I’ve still got this weekend free, so who knows what all I can get done. Maybe I’ll get all four Coldheart and Iron posts done, get the Tips pre-written as well, and even get a few days ahead in my novel projects.

It’s nice to imagine. I’ll be happy just getting my daily allotment in so long as I can also get some work down on the Coldheart and Iron post. I’m going to be really busy most evenings for the next month.

 

Daily Prompt

Today, think about where your story is happening. Develop a setting. Set a scene. Write a little about the world it takes place in–how it differs or is similar to our world. Maybe just set the stage rather than set a scene. You can always add more detail later or change how “present” the world is, but you the writer need to know a lot about the world that will inform the characters’ actions. These thoughts, this knowledge, doesn’t need to be anything other than notes to yourself that you’ll pull out when you edit it so you can focus on what’s important to your story, but it’ll make your job a lot easier if you write this stuff down somewhere so it doesn’t need to constantly tumble around in your head. Free up some space and just jot it down in the margins.

 

Sharing Inspiration

One of the best books I’ve read this year, if not the best, is “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing” by Hank Green. If you have not read it, you should read it. It appealed to me on a lot of levels and it was one of the first good books I’ve read of what I believe is an emerging genre (which I am also trying to write in for my project this month) of 20-something literature. I see it like a sort of second coming-of-age that is more focused on learning to live in the world we have rather than the world we were promised instead of simply accepting responsibility for oneself or being “an adult.” Beyond that, it also made me feel like a part of something larger than myself as someone who uses the internet. It had a positive effect in that it has reminded me that we can do good and that Human connection is still a goal for the internet.

 

Helpful Tips

Yesterday, you started writing. Or maybe you’re playing catch up today since you were too busy yesterday. Whatever you’re doing, however much you’ve done, remember to cut yourself some slack. No one has ever sat down to start a project and magically produced 40,000 actual words of a story in a single day. You could do that if you copy and pasted a bunch of words, but that’s not even close to the same thing. People like me take years to get to the point where we can sit down for forty-five minutes and write our daily allotment of words. I literally practiced writing every day for a year to get to this point, and that’s not counting all of the words I wrote in my life leading up to the start of that challenge. I have spent literally half my lifetime working on this. So, seriously, cut yourself some slack. Don’t measure your accomplishments against other people, especially not people like me. Measure it against the person you want to be and the person you were before you started this challenge. As long as you’re making progress, then you’re doing a great job! Keep it up! I never would have dreamt of doing something like this when I was starting out. Believe in yourself and take things at your own pace. As long as you work on it every day, you will get there. Persistence is key.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 1 (11/01)

Chris Leave a comment

Well, I feel like I’m not really ready for this. I had all these plans for everything I was going to prepare and I COULD have finished it “yesterday” since I define a “day” as whatever time elapses between periods of sleep (which means I probably would have stayed up until 2 or 3 trying to get everything worked out, but I’ve “pantsed” National Novel Writing Moth before and I’m clearly about to do it again. Which means I’ve just made it all up as I went along rather than planned anything out before. The fact that I have ANY writing prompts and bits of inspiration prepared before today is a friggin’ miracle on its own. Sure, each group wound up being far-fewer words than I expected (about 4000 instead of 8500), but it is still a lot of work to come up with prompts that don’t completely suck. It’s even more work to come up with inspiration since most of mine tends to be little things that happen during a day that give me an idea rather than something I can discreetly isolated and point out.

The thing I’m still going to do, even though I wasn’t able to get it done ahead of time, is outlines for both the stories I’m working on, along with a review of last year’s NaNoWriMo project since I’m re-doing it this year and a bunch of research for the romance novel I’m writing because I’ve never written a romance novel before. I have a lot to learn and think about yet and that all still needs to needs to happen before I can start. I’ve still got all day off of work and another three full days free on top of that, so I’m confident I can still do all of my daily writing and do the research I need to do. I’m confident in a lot of things and, if I’m being honest, I’m also pretty confident I wrote a check I’m not going to be able to cash this year. I’m looking at an estimate of anywhere between ninety-five thousand and one hundred twenty-four thousand words this month. The most I’ve ever done is about eighty thousand and that was with the support of my new girlfriend, a few extra days off spaced throughout, and a great deal of emotional fortitude. This year, I’m short the girlfriend and emotional fortitude, but I’ve also stepped up the game.

Like I said on Saturday, the fact that it feels impossible only means it’s going to feel great when I hit that goal before the end of the month. If I fail, at least I tried. I’ll probably still set a personal best for “most words written in a month,” even if I also set a world record for “most stress contained in a human body” during the same period. It’s going to be a good time. I don’t mean that sarcastically. Flippantly, sure, but the distinction feels fine enough that I can still earnestly try for my goal if I’m flippant instead of sarcastic. Flippant is a defensive mechanism. Sarcasm is defeatist. I believe in my ability to pull of stupidly big stunts and that’s exactly what this is. No more sense in dreading it now, though. I’ve got work to do.

To all of you embarking on a NaNoWriMo journey this month, be it 50,000 words, a smaller personal goal, or some big honkin’ idiotic goal like mine, I wish you the best of luck! Remember, the point is to get writing. Whatever that means for you. Figure out a reasonable goal, something that will be challenging but not impossible, and then shoot for the stars. Even if you don’t believe in yourself, know that I believe in you. You got this. I got this. It’s going to be crazy and difficult, but it’s going to be a good experience. Go for it!

 

Daily Prompt

There is a beginning to everything. For a lot of people when they’re coming up with a story, it starts with an idea. From there, you need to decide where it’s happening. Today, as you start working on your National Novel Writing Month Project, take that initial kernel of an idea and make it bigger. Develop it. Do what you can to spin it out into something bigger. Not the whole story, that’s what the novel is for, but whatever little thought, mental image, lightning bolt of inspiration, or bit of conversation sparked this whole project. Take that and see what else you can get out of it. While your story will likely grow and change as you develop this idea over the month, this initial thought will go a long way toward direction what kind of story you wind up telling.

 

Sharing Inspiration

As one of my favorite songs by my favorite musician, “Take Courage” by Andrew Bird is exactly the song I go to when I’m feeling wiped out and like I can’t keep working. If I stop whatever I’m doing and give it a listen, from beginning to end, I can usually find a way to keep going after that. The slow build, the lyrics, and the beautiful instrumentation mix to create a song that softly picks me up, sets me on my feet, and then lets me choose when to start moving forward again. I can’t promise this will heal your soul and destroy whatever is getting in the way of you writing, but I can promise it’s a good song and it’s worth taking the seven minutes of this song to stop for a while.

 

Helpful Tips

The best advice I’ve ever gotten, that I’ll ever give, and that probably exists in the entire universe when it comes to writing is this: Write. It is that simple and that difficult. Do it bird by bird. Art should serve life, life should not server art. And so on. Just sit down at your desk, on the floor, in the bathroom, at the coffee shop, at the kitchen table. Then write. One word, then a second, then a third, and then go for entire sentences. Once you get those down, aim for paragraphs. After that, try to fill a page. Stare at the empty space that needs to be filled with text and then ruthlessly crush it with as many words as you can. Find the switch and flip it. They don’t need to be good, who cares if they’re bad, just get them out. Put them down. Stop carrying them inside you and store them somewhere else. On a page or in a complicated bit of lightning and processed rock. Don’t make excuses, do your best to avoid thinking, and just get to work. Like I paraphrased from Neil Gaiman above, “This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It’s that easy, and that hard.”

Get on that.

Identity

Chris Leave a comment

I often ask
            myself who
                        I really am
but maybe that
            is the wrong
                        question
I am a thousand
                        different people
            all wearing
                        the same face
though the face
            changes
to reflect which one
                        I am trying to be
maybe I should
            be more concerned
            with who
                        I am
            going to be
I have a thousand
                        masks
            in my collection
                        each with
their own purpose
            and power
                        bound up
            inside the frozen
expression I wore
            when I took
                        it off
            the first time
capturing who I was
            and what I felt
            so I could become
that again later.
                        so I could be
                        someone else
            right then
and move on
            with my life
I have a few
                        I wear
            more than the rest,
but they are no different
            from the others
a decision
                        to act
a certain way
            or to play
a certain role
­            so that other people
­                        can see me
in a way
                        I can understand
they are masks
            all the same
even if they
            feel so real
                        I am transformed
            maybe the question
I should be asking
            is if there’s
                        a me
            who doesn’t wear
                        a mask
is there a person
            beneath it all
swapping masks
            from one moment
                        to the next
or am I
            my entire collection
and I just
            wear masks
to make it easier
                        for me
            to be
a person people understand

 

Saturday Morning Musing

Chris Leave a comment

It is difficult to reconcile the world I was raised to believe existed and the world that actually exists. Like a lot of people in my age category, I was raised to believe that I could do anything I wanted if I worked hard enough and that there was a benevolent being somewhere above us who loved us individually and only wanted what was best for us. A lot of it was reinforced as I grew up because I was constantly told how smart I was, how capable I was when I focused on something I really wanted, and how frequently things just worked out the way I wanted. My home life might have been difficult, I might have had some issues crop up in my family that I’m still dealing with to this day, but I pretty much just walked through my childhood and teen years without ever really being denied anything I tried to obtain. I had pretty low expectations and didn’t try for much, to be fair, but I still managed to get everything I wanted one way or another. It felt pretty believable that I was capable of anything and that there was some force watching out for me.

As I went to college and started to come to terms with what I’d endured growing up, how I felt about my family, and my own limitations, my once-strong faith was the first thing to go. I’d describe myself as agnostic now, but it’s a little more complicated than that. I really want to believe in some higher power, but I feel like higher powers get used to get out of fixing things more frequently than I’m willing to put up with. Religion is frequently used as the justification for a lot of bad things but that doesn’t make religion itself bad. It works really well for a lot of people and it appeals to me because of the frequent focus on forgiveness, love, and respect for others. I just want to focus on doing my best here and now, to help as many people as I can now, because it feels like helping and loving is more important than figuring out which faith is the right one. That always feels like a cop-out to me, but I don’t really know how to explain it any better. I just hope that whatever greater power there is out there, whatever got things going at the start of everything, either doesn’t care or understands that I was just trying to do my best by my fellow humans.

A few years after that, when I got my first permanent, post-college job, I eventually realized that not everything works out. I wasn’t even trying to believe that everything works out well, just that it eventually comes to an end and there is some kind of conclusion. Unfortunately, closure and completion aren’t always guaranteed. Sometimes things just stop and you’re left wondering if they’re over or if there’s maybe more down the line. I’ve had a couple of relationships end like that, a few moves away from jobs, and even a few friendships that abruptly ended, and I can definitely say that that’s almost never the case. Recently mending bridges with one friend is pretty much the only time that’s ever been true and it was for a friendship I thought had concluded. It was one small, simple, enormous step that showed me sometimes things “work themselves out” without really ending. But it’s one thing in a world full of times things are just over and it’s up to me to figure out what to do with the unsatisfying end.

I spent over a year denying that it was time to move on from my old job. I spent more than a few months trying to salvage a relationship that had ended mutually due to distance but blown up afterwards because of immaturity and poor communication. I spent fifteen months trying to work things out with a roommate when I’d already known it was never going to happen. I’m really bad at letting things die when they don’t have a clear-cut end or conclusion. I spend way more time and energy trying to make things work out to what feels like a real end because there’s still a part of me that believes I can do anything if I work hard enough. I know it isn’t true, I know there are real limitations to what people can accomplish based on the factors of their life, and I know that hard work is rarely enough to achieve success, but the idea of working hard is so ingrained in my soul that I usually just double-down and convince myself that all I need to do is work even harder. Then, surely, I will achieve the success I desire.

Nothing in life is guaranteed, though. Life is short and people leave yours all the time. Days are long and you could dash yourself to pieces against the wall you’re trying to break through. You could live a lifetime in two years, full of vows to change the way things had been before and to never make the same mistakes again, only to realize you’ve in a position not that different from where you started. Maybe progress is too slow to really see and you’ll wake up one day to realize everything is different. Maybe You just need a little more time or one last push to finally break through that wall. You never know. Maybe you’re one day, one conversation away from achieving your every dream. Only time will tell if you’ve pushed too hard or if you haven’t yet pushed hard enough.

I don’t think I can achieve anything and everything I put my mind to, not after failing as often and as severely as I have. I don’t think there’s some force out there trying to guide my life down the right path. I want to believe these things, still, but I feel like I’ve got something more important to focus on. I have one thing I want to do, one big goal to spend my life on. I may never be able to achieve it or find the success I want, but I’m willing to live my entire life in pursuit of it. I feel like having that pinpoint focus is a little more valuable to me in the long run than the potentially erroneous belief in my ability to succeed or to be granted the achievement when I follow the plan of some supreme being.

Saturday Morning Musing

Chris Leave a comment

There’s a lot to be said for doing new things. Almost every bit of life advice will include something along the lines of “expand your horizons” or “step outside of your comfort zone.” It is possible to grow if you stay focused on what you’re already good at or interested in, but you can’t really grow in new ways if you never push yourself in a new direction. If you want to meet new people, learn new things, and participate in new experiences, doing new things is your best bet.

There’s also a lot to be said for doing the same things. Only by constant practice can you even approach mastering something. You can’t really master the violin by playing the saxophone. Sure, playing other stringed instruments and listening to music will definitely help your understanding as a whole, but you’ve got to stay at least somewhat close to your chosen instrument if you want to master it. You need discipline and repetition if you want to find the peak of your abilities. If you want the highest level of recognition, mastery over your chosen field, and to transcend your limits, you need to stick to more or less the same thing.

That being said, doing nothing but new things isn’t going to let you really gain experience or enjoy something because you wouldn’t stick with it long enough to really experience it. Doing nothing but the same exact thing is stifling and will only hold you back because small variations and exploring new parts of the same concept or practice is what will eventually achieve a higher level of skill. A mixture of repetition in your new experiences allows you to really experience them on a deeper level and trying new things in your repetition lets you feel out the edges of your ability so you can focus on surpassing them. The key to both is to mix in a little bit of the other.

At least, that’s been my experience. Doing something new is great, but only by doing it a couple of times can I really get a feel for it. It’s like when you buy a new album and enjoy a few of the tracks at first, but grow to enjoy different ones (or more of them) as you listen to the album a few more times. As you listen to the individual songs multiple times, your understanding of the song grows and you notice things that you missed initially. If you only stick to doing the same thing, though, you blind yourself to what might be out there. If you only listen to the same album or the same artist, you’re going to miss out on the rest of the genre you’ve been enjoying.

The first time you do something, you’re so caught up in the newness of the experience that you don’t really have the opportunity to appreciate it. The second time, it is still very new, but you start to notice things beneath the surface. Every time after, you find something new you missed before or get another chance to appreciate something you might have only noticed in passing the first time. If you keep doing it, though, you start to lose appreciation for something you enjoyed. Whatever hidden things intrigued you so much initially become boring and plain. You stop looking for something new in the experience because you think you’ve found it all.

Right now, as I try to get my life back in order after its relatively recent upheaval, I find myself seesawing wildly from one side of the equation to the other. I want to lose myself in something new, to experience something so wholly new that I don’t have any ability to analyze it or to do anything but open myself to the experience, but I also want to lose myself in the comfortable repetition of familiar things that don’t require my participation. I want either nothing but new things or nothing but old things. I want to be able to ignore all thoughts of all the things in my life that have been repetitions of new things and new aspects of old things because they’re tied up with a lot of complex emotions that I can only feel right now. I can’t do anything to them but experience them and wait for them to pass. For someone who wants to be able to control every aspect of their life, it can be a little hard to swallow the fact that there isn’t always something proactive I can do about what I’m feeling.

So I anxiously pick it at in the back of my mind and I wait. Impatiently. Unfortunately, reclaiming my life for myself is easier said than done and it requires a good deal more repetition of new experiences that I anticipated. It is interesting to see just how much of my life changed over the past year. To see how much of it feels like it no longer belongs to me alone. How often I feel as if something important is missing as I do things that I never imagined would belong to anyone but me.

Most of my relationships before this one where in college and the one that wasn’t in college was immediately after college. I didn’t have a life the same way I do now, with little routines, habits, and a set of things I kind of just assume will be a part of my daily life. Back then, everything was fluid, apt to change, and exciting. Now, I struggle to find meaning in the routines and to find purpose in pushing myself out of my comfort zone. People entering and exiting my life felt so natural back then and I never did anything long enough to feel like it belonged to me or to anyone else. Now, I feel like there’s a giant hole in my life and no one has even left it, not really. We’re just different now and that little, enormous shift was enough to throw the orbit of my life out of balance.

I guess I don’t really know what I want my life to be. I don’t want it to be a series of days where I repeat everything in new ways until I achieve mastery of whatever I’m working on. I don’t think I want it to be casual repetition of a string of new things, either. I want to say it should be a mixture of both things, but that feels like a cop-out as I write this. I feel like there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for how I feel, hovering just on the edge of my ability to voice it, but I can’t quite get it to take the one last step I need to be able to put it to words.

I feel like being able to finally understand that thought, to be able to put it precisely to words, would answer a lot of the questions I’ve been asking myself for the past couple years. I don’t think it will solve my problems or fix anything, but I feel like it’s the key to figuring out how to solve some of my problems and fix some of the things that feel broken. Maybe, after enough new experiences and enough honing my craft, I’ll find the right thought and the right expression. Maybe.

Stay on Target

Chris Leave a comment

Today was wonderful. I woke up leisurely, lounged in bed, and only got out of bed to give my friend a ride to his car. He’d wound up staying at another friend’s house after they went out last night and I was up for a drive and some pleasant conversation. Afterwards, I stopped by the local diner for a long breakfast and some reading. When that was done, I opened all the windows and doors in the house to let in the beautiful weather, created a good background music playlist, and lounged while continuing to read the book I started at breakfast and listening to my playlist. A few hours later, my roommate and I cleaned in preparation for the night’s D&D session, did some shopping, and then settled in to wait for our friends to arrive.

D&D was tons of fun, even if it did run a little late, but it finished in time for me to remember that I STILL hadn’t update my blog. AGAIN. I think my change to my normal scheduling is making it difficult for me to remember and/or prioritize updating my blog every morning. I should probably get back to that soon. Not for another week or so, though. I still have a lot of reflecting to do and writing it out is really helping me. I should probably go back and read through all of my old posts again so I can remember everything I’ve thought. There’s just so much I can’t keep it all straight!

A little variety in my life is important. I tend to ignore it in favor of the comfortable and familiar, since I build habits easily and let my obsessive nature take control so I always stick to them. As I’ve written in previous posts, that isn’t always a good idea. It can stress me out and turn something that should be a fun and fulfilling experience into a rote recitation. A spewing of words with no value beyond the fact that they are correct and the words currently in demand. There is no thought to them.

In other words, they’re the exact opposite of what I want to feel when I write and when I post to this blog.

I think I might get my buffer back together this week. Make that my project, since there’s not much else going on right now and all the stress of last week has calmed down to the point where I’ve almost forgotten about it. I haven’t really forgotten about it. I hope I don’t. There was too much important stuff for me to think about. It just isn’t dominating my mind today, thanks to the peace and calm nature of the day. Honestly, just thinking about it now is getting me kind of wound up about it and that’s no good.

I need to find a balance between the sort of absent-minded freedom from responsibility and care that I felt today and the heavy stress and anxiety about the future I felt Friday and Saturday. That’s my goal. All of reflection and meditation is tipping me toward too much stress, even if it’s helping me manage my anxiety. Responding with an entire week away from cleaning the kitchen isn’t really a healthy response to that amount of stress. Ideally, I’d be able to clean the kitchen and maybe cut down on just how much time I spent on reflection. We’ll see how that goes.

I just need to keep myself focused on my goals, reflecting on my thoughts, and asking myself the questions I’ve been writing down that don’t have easy answers. As long as I do that, I should figure out what it is I’m expecting this period of self-reflection to produce. Hopefully.

Time for a Peaceful Afternoon

Chris Leave a comment

Some days, all I want to do is sit on my porch in the shade, drink a cold beer, and enjoy the breezy peace of a warm spring afternoon. Unfortunately, this can be hard to do because I live in a duplex and share a yard with a family that has children who live to loudly play in said yard and who seem to invite all of the neighborhood kids over to do the same. Additionally, there are always bees on the porch, my only porch chair broke last fall (it was a cheap collapsing canvas chair), and lately the weather has been warm enough that going outside for any amount of time means being drenched in sweat.

Instead, I’ve had to find my peace elsewhere. Quiet moments of sitting in the armchair in the library or sitting in my desk chair with my monitors off so I can just gaze out my window at the trees in my front yard while I look for bits of blue sky between the dancing leaves. Occasionally, it is with my friends as we pause in whatever we’re doing to just enjoy the moment, like the silence we shared after reaching an excellent vantage point in our hike over the holiday weekend.

Peace, like silence, is important to me. My head is constantly a riot of thoughts, noise, and emotion so any time I can put all that aside to appreciate the calm feeling of a certain moment is something that helps me feel more in control.

Today, I’m pursuing peace. I’m leaving work early, setting this to go live at 5 pm, and spending the rest of my day in peace and quiet. I have a lot of stuff I need to sort through right now, so I’m going to focus on resting up, finding peace, and then trying to untangle the knots. While I don’t think I’ve made any particular breakthroughs, I do think I’ll be getting back to my regular program of posts soon. I kind of miss it and I’m hitting the point where all of my meditations are thinking a little further on things I’ve already thought about. I’ll probably still do more journal-ish posts, but they’ll definitely be less frequent than they are now.

Soon, things will be somewhat back to normal. I hope. We’ll see.