Writing

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.

The Words May be Broken, but My Streak Sure Isn’t

Chris Leave a comment

Today is the day. This is post 365. One year of writing every day and posting to my blog every day ends today. What a fucking journey it has been. The best part is I get a nice little bookending thing with it because I’m completely re-doing the story I wrote for last year’s National Novel Writing Month project for this year’s NaNoWriMo project. I’ll be able to see how I’ve changed and grown by reflecting on how the story has changed. It’ll be a good time! That being said, there’s still plenty of growth I can see immediately!

In the last year, for this blog alone, I have written 349,403 words (including today’s post). Those words were used to create 79 musing posts, 30 posts about mental health, 43 posts about tabletop games or gaming, 40 posts about video games, 42 reviews, 3 descriptive exercises, 55 poems, 39 flash fiction works, 30 posts about National Novel Writing Month, 36 chapters (including the introduction) of a science fiction story, and 3 short stories. If you did the math, that totals up to 400 exactly, but that’s because some of the posts had more than one category (including today’s), which is what I’ve been listing here.

As a result of all of this writing, I’ve grown as a writer. I no longer make the same mistakes my editor would catch when I first started out. She only does the serial story and poetry, which is why I tend to have so many typos in my other blog entries, but they all improved as result of her work and constant patience with my inability to actually get things done along the timelines I lay out for myself. I send her a chapter of Coldheart and Iron for review and she gets it back to me within twenty-four hours, which is great because I’ve probably sent her half the chapters on the day I’m supposed to post them. Same for the poems. She’s a saint, really. I also really hope she reads today’s post so she knows how grateful I am for her constant help. I thank her constantly and do my best to let her know how much I appreciate her help all the time, but that still never feels like enough. She’s helped me grow as a writer just as much as my college creative writing professor did. In a different way, but just as much.

Ideally, I’d like to have a space to thank everyone that got me through this year of posts, but people do stuff for me so constantly and often without drawing attention to it so I’m worried I’d miss out on someone import. So I’m going to do my best. My roommate was a huge help when it came to guns, military stuff, and medical references since he’s an air force medic studying to become a doctor. I have a whole raft of friends who view my blog, but none as regularly as my French friend and I can always tell when she does because she’s my only reader in France, so thanks for reading me more consistently than anyone else! I’d like to thank my Twitter friends, specifically the ones who do Bad Book Idea Duels, Edward Van Winkle and A.M. Hounchell, for making one of the largest time-sucks on the Internet actually fun for me. They’re both incredibly friendly, creative, and wonderful people. Their books are on my review list and I’ll do my best to get to them once National Novel Writing Month is over. I’d like to thank Andrew Bird, though I don’t know if he’ll ever see this post (I sincerely doubt it) since he’s an actually famous musician I’ve never met, because his clever lyrics are a delight to listen to and the way he weaves the vocals and instrumentation together in his music makes me want to sit and just listen to him sing instead of have him on in the background. I also want to just generally thank my friends for not telling me to shut up about my writing or blog. I talk about it constantly and I’m just glad you all are the kind of people who don’t make a habit of being discouraging. I’d also like to issue a special thanks the fiance of one of my friends, who I would now qualify as also being my friend since I finally got to meet her this year, for helping me contextualize social media and marketing myself online when I went semi-viral after asking Writing Twitter for books to review (I SWEAR I’m still working on processing all of those suggestions–here are just so many and I’ve been so busy). I’d also like to thank my boss for letting me take a week off out of the blue when I realized I’d forgotten what it was like to be in a good mood and that I was too burned out to continue how things were going. This isn’t super recent, but I also really want to thank my creative writing teacher from college because I would have given up on writing a long time ago without her help, guidance, and support. She was the first person who convinced me that I was worth believing in and she believed in me enough that I started to as well. She helped me build the foundation on which I’ve since built everything else, so I cannot stress enough how thankful I am. I don’t talk to her much, but I kinda hope she see’s this some day. Or she buys whatever book I first publish because she’ll be named on the dedication page. Whichever, really. I’m not picky.

I probably missed some people, but life is about moving forward so I’m going to try to make sure I recognize what people do for me as they do it and express gratitude immediately. And I’m going to keep writing! I haven’t missed a day in a year, so now let’s see how long I can keep this streak going! New goal is two years of daily writing and blog posts! And this time I’ll also get a proper amount of exercise every day I am physically capable of doing so. I can’t just repeat a challenge, I’ve got to step it up! There’s no point in just doing the same challenge over and over again. There’s no growth! There’s no forward movement! This will still probably be easier than my National Novel Writing Month challenge of writing 50,000 words, a terrible romance novel, and still updating my blog with NaNoWriMo posts and weekly Coldheart and Iron posts. I mean, that’s 90,000-120,000 words in a single freaking month. My current record is 80,000-ish, from last year when I updated my blog every day on top of writing 50,000 words. It feels pretty impossible from where I’m sitting right now. Which means it’s going to feel super kick-ass when I actually do it! Nothing held back! No reservations! All in!

I meant to review my own blog for today’s post. It was going to be witty, poke fun at some of my bad habits that make it into blog posts (such as saying everything with as many words as possible because I just love to slap them all together), and cleverly weaving in my gratitude to the review by mentioning how reliant the author was on his editor at first but how much he has grown since then. I also realized it was going to be as long as a recent Coldheart and Iron post and that is a LOT to ask of random strangers on the internet. I mean, not a lot of people writing 3000-4000 word blog posts. They’re usually quite a bit shorter than that if they’re frequent or about the length of this post if they’re not. Even my love of using all of the words I can couldn’t convince me that it was a good idea. So you get this. A plain, unadorned thank you with some interesting numbers and the knowledge that I’m grateful to you, whoever you are, for reading this post and participating in my journey to grow as a writer. This year has been all about me but I’m greatful I got to share it with you.

Also, shout out to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Twitter account–and the man himself, of course–because getting his unbelievably uplifting “Gmorning and Gnight” tweets has made my days better. You should check them out or buy his book.

 

Saturday Morning Musing

Chris 1 Comment

The best decision I made in the past year was to start writing every day. It was also the dumbest. And the wisest. Probably not the most lucrative but definitely the most valuable. And it’s been nearly a year since I started, even if I’m still a month and a week short of the decision to keep what I started for National Novel Writing Month 2017 going for an entire year. I planned a month of blog updates: thirty posts about writing, what inspires me, and prompts to help people get working on their own National Novel Writing Month projects. This upcoming Wednesday’s review, the one that will go up on October thirty-first, will be the 365th post. I have a hard time believing I’ve almost done it and, at the same time, it doesn’t feel like a big deal.

I literally put everything (well, everything but the bare minimum I need to keep my life going) behind writing and posting to my blog every day. I haven’t played more than a couple of hours of video games a week since early September so I could make sure my blog got updated every day and I wrote every day even when I was working twelve-hour days. Because of this level of dedication over the course of a year, now the idea of not updating my blog or not writing every day feels foreign. I didn’t even stop to consider no longer updating this blog every day once the year was up, I just started planning all of my November blog posts so I could get some of them out of the way ahead of time and put more of my energy toward getting my National Novel Writing Month challenges done.

I have made zero money as a result of this writing, so far, and I doubt I’ll ever make much off this blog, even if I decide to add advertisements. That’s alright, though, because being able to write every day and to have writing projects to work on every day has lent my life an incredibly amount of meaning and satisfaction. The only thing that compares to a day of writing or posting a popular piece that gets a comment or two is what I felt when I played through Breath of the Wild for the first time, in March of 2017. I have gotten more, personally, out of my decision to push my limits like this than out of any other writing project I’ve ever done. It feels really good to have a purpose and a goal every day, even when work is slow or so busy I feel like I’m just being swept along by the tidal wave of work that needs to be done. Something that feels like forward progress when I can’t seem to make any in the other parts of my life.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t handle free time well. I suck at doing nothing and I will probably have a mental breakdown if I’m ever forced to just tend to my house or do small bits of gardening or whatever when I retire. I need projects. I need challenges. I need to feel like I’m growing or improving myself in order to enjoy my day-to-day life. Without that stuff, I start to feel like I’m stagnating or like I’m wasting my time. Most of that comes from my anxiety and isn’t reflective of my actual life in any way, and it would probably be more healthy for me to address the root of why I feel this way rather than fill my time with things to do, but finding projects is easier than analyzing my deepest mental health issues. Plus, I can do both. Analysis takes a long time and constructive projects within reason aren’t a bad coping mechanism. Working myself to the point where I’m too depressed and burned out to feel anything but tired is a bad coping mechanism. It’s also something I do far more frequently than I should. It’s also why I have several days off over the next week, because I pushed myself that far and a couple of friends plus my therapist all agreed that I really need to let myself take a break. Hell, even I agreed I need a break once I started being caught up in my own dumb attempts to convince myself and them that I was doing just fine.

I think I’m going to add a little bit more to my “writing every day – year two edition” challenge. I’m going to try to increase my efficiency so that I still have time for other stuff, like exercising every day and having downtime for stuff like playing video games or spending time with my roommates. Or dating again. Haven’t had time for that in a couple of months. Which is unfortunate because that was around when my desire to date came back following my breakup at the beginning of the summer. I haven’t had the time for a lot of stuff, like dealing with the four stacks of books on my floor, shredding junk mail, or cleaning out my closet. I’ve taken the time to keep all of those things orderly and organized at least, but I am getting a little tired of needing to step carefully through my bedroom door so I don’t accidentally trip on one of the stacks of books and knock over one of my bookshelves on the way down. For the next year, I’m going to take the time to do all that stuff and keep writing. I’m even getting started now! I’ve measure the one bit of open space I’ve got and I’m going to be using my vacation time to go find a shelf that will fit in that space. Maybe get my oil changed or, shit, get a haircut. I haven’t gotten a haircut in two years, as of this week, and I’m getting really sick of the whole “long hair” thing because ponytail headaches are the bane of my existence.

All that aside, I really do believe that writing every day was the best decision I’ve made in years. I feel excited by the prospect of working on all the projects I’ve got tumbling around my head, and I’m ecstatic to see the comments from my editor (whose advice and guidance is responsible for most of my growth as a writer) go from big notes about story structures and character details (especially about female characters) to minor comments about typing “then” instead of “them.” Without her support and assistance, I’d probably have given up on this daily writing thing a long time ago. But here I am. Four posts short of a full year. It’s a good feeling and I’m excited to show what I’ve got in store for my 365th post. You haven’t got long to wait, but I hope you enjoy it as much as I have been.

That is the point, though. Ultimately, anyway. I do this for myself and I’m enjoying the shit out of it, even if I’m so exhausted I dozed off while writing this half a dozen time.

Saturday Afternoon Musing

Chris Leave a comment

National Novel Writing Month is coming up. That’s a bit of big deal for me because I’ve at least participated every year since 2013 and won every year but 2016 when I was applying and interviewing for a new job. I also created a challenge for myself, to raise the stakes, every year since 2014 when I found myself a little bored with just writing 50,000 words again. The year after that, I wrote an entire story in a month (which is big deal for me since I am anything but concise). Last year, I wrote 50,000 words of a new story that wound up being more foresight than fiction, ran a support group for my friends who were trying National Novel Writing Month, and updated my blog every day of the month (which was a part of the support since it was stuff about writing, about what inspires me, and some prompts to help them push through when they feel stuck). This year, though, I’m struggling with what my extra challenge should be.

The support group could be fun to do again, but the only people I know who are doing National Novel Writing Month are people who have been doing it as long as I have been, or longer, and who don’t really need support to write. A space for us to connect and talk about writing is always good, but I won’t really need to actively support them. I still plan to do the blog posts, but that’s just the same thing as last year. There’s nothing new to this challenge, which means it isn’t challenge. It’s just the same thing all over again and that means I’m not actually going to try my best.

I could make the argument that I’ve never been this burned out, worn down, and just all-around-exhausted when starting a National Novel Writing Month before, so it’ll be difficult enough for me to get anything done on time or according to whatever plan I come up with (as evidenced by the fact that half my blog posts are “late” these days, showing up in the afternoon instead of their typical nine or eleven in the morning time). That feels like a cop-out. I dislike cop-outs. It gets to easy to let them slide in the future if you start using them now and I am all about staying firm and focused on my goals. I didn’t get to almost a year of writing every day and posting on my blog every day by letting myself compromise, so doing that literally the day after I hit 365 consecutive posts would feel like I was spitting in the face of my own accomplishment.

One of my friends suggested I write a humorous romance novel and, upon hearing that, the rest of them took up the call. Suggestions from something involving characters from a D&D campaign that ended a while ago to a romance novel about a modern male protagonist trying to live his normal 20-something modern life while his girlfriend is someone out of a highly-sexual romance novel that pokes fun at the sort of contrived situations involved in a lot of cornier (and absolutely amazing sounding) romance novels. Seriously, there’s a whole series about some vampire/angel/insert-monster-template-here brothers who kill vampire demons and are actually immortal vikings who sometimes time travel. How is that not a story you gotta hear? I can’t find the link my friends provided while trying to convince me to write a romance novel, but it was a riot. It would definitely be a challenge since I’ve read only a handful of romance novels and it isn’t something I’m normally interesting in writing. Being able to stay focused and working on a project that isn’t something I’m terribly interested in would be a good skill to have, though, since a lot of good writers wind up writing what the publisher wants rather than strictly what they want. Being able to do “made to order” fiction would be a good skill to work on.

All of my other ideas have something to do with my blog. For instance, I could keep up with daily posts with National Novel Writing Month support and encouragement posts, but also include my serial science fiction story and reviews. Maybe even throw in my flash fiction updates, too. Basically just keep up the popular part of my blog, the fun part of my blog, and the only story I’ll have ever finished if I keep at it. If I keep that up, I’ll probably finish Coldheart and Iron on Christmas Day and post the epilogue on New Years Day, which feels like a damn fine way to start 2019.

Of course, I could also do this regardless of my National Novel Writing Month. If I work my ass off over during the rest of October, I could have all my blog posts written. That’s only 50,000 words in addition to the 14,000 I have to do for this month’s blog posts. Totally possible to do all that in eleven days. I mean, that’s only six thousand words a day! Easy-peasy! No sweat! I could do that in my sleep! I mean, I’ve basically signed up for 50,000 plus 30,000 plus whatever my extra challenge is for next month unless I find a way to work ahead this month. All on top of my normal work hours, my usual obligations, and the fact that I’m going to need to work out or at least go on a long walk every day so I don’t turn into a pile of pudding. I really suck at taking it easy, don’t I?

But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? This isn’t supposed to be easy. I’m supposed to be working on stuff in order to grow as a writer. I want to widen my horizons, improve my skills, and try things I wouldn’t normally try. Fifty thousand words is all well and good, but I’ve done that five times so far. I want to do something new, try to push myself in a new direction, and maybe lose myself in something bigger than my own problems. I’m going to struggle with my mental health, but I always do. I may need to find better ways to cope with what’s going on in my head, but that also means I won’t be able to let it have as much sway as it does on days like today since I won’t be able to spend four hours writing a blog post that’s just over one thousand words.

As I’ve learned throughout my live, and during the past year especially, I work best when I don’t have room for error. Pass or fail scenarios are my jam, even if the chances of passing are small. I’m going to pick some dumb, ridiculously huge goal, try to cram a month’s of writing into eleven days so all my blog posts are written ahead of time, and then I’m going to create a made-to-order romance novel in order to force myself to improve my ability to write things that aren’t necessarily something that thrills me.

To that end, here are my three ideas:

  • Something based on some D&D characters from a really old game (that happens in a D&D world, with quantifiable numbers and stuff, rather than a “typical” fantasy world).
  • Aggressive Romance Novel Woman meets normal 20-something dude and worlds collide. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Astronaut/Werewolf/Demon/Mole-Person man meets Basic “Becky” and falls madly in love, but only during Pumpkin Spice season.
  • Air-Force Pilot/Old-School Vampire/Faerie/Lizard-woman falls in love with a hipster trying to French press his coffee in his yurt in the woods.

Comment your preferred option(s)! You can pick as many as you like.

Saturday Morning Musing

Chris Leave a comment

When this post goes us, I’ll be busy attending to my soul and mental well-being by going on a hike with a small selection of my favorite people. After several weeks of being too tired to do much and a constant lack of days we can all gather, those of us who are available tomorrow are just going to do something regardless of the fact that half our group is missing. It isn’t ideal, I’d rather spend the day with all of them, but I need to get active and to spend time with people who help me forget myself for a while. With all the stress and anxiety that have been building the past three months, I need to ignore my desire to stay home alone to work on processing review suggestions and actually go do something I know I’ll love.

I’ve always enjoyed walking. I like losing myself in my gait as I wander from place to place, maybe listening to music or just taking in the sounds of wherever I’m at. Hiking is a sort of extension of that, because it takes me out of areas that always grate on me, cities with the constant hum of cars and neighborhoods with the quiet noises of people going about their daily lives. If you pick the right hiking location, you can go the entire hike without encountering anyone. You can embrace the quiet of nature and the irritating hum of modern life that most people only notice when it’s gone disappears completely. You can lose yourself in trees and the quiet emerald peace of a nature at its strongest. If you’ve picked a place with some nice elevation changes, there are a ton of great places to stop and admire the world around you. I’ve always enjoyed looking at the horizon and having an unobstructed view of the sky and there’s just something wonderful about getting both of those things as a result of being on top of something that rises above the area around me. Only in hiking trips can I get all of that at once.

Even though I’m going with my friends, I’ll be able to enjoy that. These are all people who know me well enough that there are no awkward silences to fill. I don’t need to worry about how to maintain a conversation or how to segue from one thought to another because they all just get how my mind works enough to not always need an explanation. I can just be myself around them and their presence doesn’t intrude on my sense of peace and quiet. For the past several years, we’ve always done at least a couple of hiking trips every month, though we’ve been doing fewer of those lately because of how busy everyone has been. They’ve been some of my fondest memories and include some of my favorite pictures. All of the background pictures you’ll ever see on my blog are pictures I’ve taken while hiking. If I could, I’d do all my thinking and writing in a spot that overlooks the surrounding area and has an unobstructed view of the entire sky. My dream house idea focuses mostly around a taller tower with what is essentially a glass dome on the top so I can sit up there and read or write as close to the sky as I can get. Heck, the whole thing might just be a tower of some kind. But it would have to be on the side of a mountain or on the top of a tall hill somewhere. That would be amazing.

After hiking, I’m planning to do the Pokemon Go Community day since I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about the game now that I don’t have my ex to give me a reason to keep playing it. I don’t really feel like it “our thing” anymore, thankfully, but I still wonder if I’m just wasting my time on something that isn’t really adding anything to my life since I have a tendency to play the game alone and let it distract me from the main purpose of my frequent walks. It’s so easy to bring alone and leave running in my pocket, but I’m not good at ignoring it when it’s in there and will start to feel anxious if I don’t check it for a while. It works the same way as notifications on my phone do. If I know they’re there, it will always cause me more stress to just ignore them than to skim through them and either open them or dismiss them. In order to save myself from needless stress, I’ve started disabling certain notifications on my phone and setting up hour-long notification silences so I won’t notice when they show up until the hour is over. I’ve also removed most time-waster games from my phone for the same reason. I also repeatedly install and uninstall Imgur as I cycle between just needing something to kill some time and realizing that I’ll just sit on the couch and browse through Imgur for an hour instead of going to bed or starting my writing. Which is why I’m still on the fence about Pokemon Go. I definitely benefit from still having Sudoku on my phone because it often works as a way of doing some mental stretching when I’ll feeling particularly tired or fogged up from how focused I’ve been on my work.

It’s a really nebulous balance and I’m probably going to be working on it my whole life. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to just figure out how much work to do and how much relaxation to put in and when it’s already to simply escape instead of doing something genuinely relaxing. Even though I love writing and reading, they’re still work. Even though I’m super excited to start reading all of the amazing books people have written and mentioned to me on Twitter, there’s still a lot of work to do just to find all the links, titles, and authors. I want to just wake up in the morning and dig right in to my to-do list, but I need to take time to relax and hike and let my to-do list remain undone. I’m still doing at least four hours of writing or book recommendation collation a day, so it’s not like I’m slacking off, I just always feel like it’s hard to justify taking the time to wander through the woods or spend a few hours walking around the city with some friends while we catch Pokemon. I’ve only got so much time, after all. I want to get the most I can out of it and it’s, no matter how long I live, I don’t think it’ll ever be clear how to do that.

 

At End of Day

Chris Leave a comment

When the day is done and the fire’s stoked,
When the night is fresh and the world is cloaked
In star-soft mantle of darkening blue
I still have one last job to do.
I compile the words I have found,
Feeling out their shape and sound
As I sort them into categories
In preparation for all the stories
I haven’t had the chance to tell,
Until the fire’s down to a sullen swell
And the first glimmers of morning sun
Tell me that my work is done.

Lost for Words

Chris Leave a comment

What do you do when you’re a writer and you’re lost for words?
What do you do when every word feels empty and flat:
When your lexicon fails to provide
And your tongue hangs in your mouth, empty, sluggish, and fat?

What do you do when you’re a writer and no word fits?
What do you do when you have a hole in your heart:
When you can’t fill the space
And every single page, paragraph and sentence falls apart?

What do you do when you’re a writer and you can’t explain?
What do you do when you can’t seem to speak:
When the air hangs empty
And yet full enough to make even the strongest person weak?

What do you do when you’re a writer and your tongue is tied?
What do you do when the words are there but cannot escape:
When you know what to say
And yet the words hide inside and refuse to take shape?

What do you do when you’re a writer and you want to quit?
What do you do when the words stop coming:
When you want to work
And thoughts in your head will not stop running?

So what do you do when you’re a writer and you’re lost for words?
When the words are stuck, do you start writing?
Do you stare down an empty page
And, with words that feel like drops of your own blood, keep fighting?