let's go see the chickens!

Nanowrimo is going pretty well. I'm clocked in at over 6,000 words right now, averaging about 3 pages a day. Now, that's nowhere near what I need to be writing to hit 50,000 words by the end of the month but I'm not really stressed about that. Writing this much this consistently isn't something I usually manage. Sometimes I'll have a day where I write ten pages but it's usually dry spells in between and it's learning to write through those times that this month is really helping me with. Hitting the 50,000 words would be cool, but there are other lessons and habits that I can pick up regardless of what my final word count is for the month.

That being said, for the most part writing has been pretty smooth sailing thus far. I had a pretty good idea of where things were going and what was happening next but now I've exhausted that [and my notebook along with it] and I've hit a slow period where not much is going on. I realized this rather abruptly on Tuesday and the question has been sitting in my brain since then: what do we do? My characters are stuck in a mandatory waiting period which could ultimately work well for pacing purposes or it might be best to do a literary "five weeks later" [did anyone else hear that in the SpongeBob narrator voice?] and jump to when things start happening again. The latter may be what I go with in revisions, who knows, but with the context of the quote I shared from Neil Gaiman last week I'm pushing forward to see what might become of this slower time. I'm trying to figure out what could be meaningful about it for the two characters who are currently able to do more than lie in bed.

Last night I decided to go see the chickens. The dialogue seemed to be stalling within the group so I thought, let's take a tour, and the first place we're going is to see the chickens. It's not the most exciting thing, though one has already scared the living daylights out of Kamdon - he may be scarred for life - but you have to start somewhere before your characters can tell you what they want to do. I think I might keep "let's go see the chickens" as my little mantra for situations like this where I have a sense of where the story is going, long-term, but not in the immediate present. It's just weird and funny enough for me to remember what it means and remember to loosen up a little in my planning.

Speaking of planning, flights have been rescheduled and Emily [from high school - I'm not referring to myself in third person] is coming out on the second week of December! I'm excited to hang out during the holiday season. It'll be cold, but hopefully pretty!

I've been watching Gilmore Girls for the first time since the whole thing is now available on Netflix. So, in closing, I will leave you with possibly my favorite scene thus far. The dialogue from this show plus cats? You can't lose.

a change in plans

Daylight Savings went into effect this week and now it's entirely too bright in my bedroom in the morning. I'm sure it was this bright over the summer but that's something you get used to as the sun gradually comes up earlier and earlier every day. In the last few weeks we were waking up to dim light that has been replaced with what feels like a glowing neon rectangle. I really need to invest in some blackout curtains but I waffle on that idea because they're kind of expensive and we live in an apartment where installing such things would probably be against our contract or something. I saw another apartment that had taped construction paper to their kid's window, presumably so they can take naps during the day. Necessity is truly the mother of invention.

I know I said I wouldn't be posting this week but due to a sudden dental emergency, my friend was unable to fly out to stay with us this week. We're working on rescheduling but the week goes on regardless.

This has freed up some time for writing, which, honestly, I haven't done very much of this week. Yesterday I got a bit sidetracked making a "cover" for my novel along with actually creating the look of the marks that are so central to the story. [The official NaNoWriMo website claims that authors with "covers" are 60% more likely to reach their word count. This may have backfired a little as I spent all of last night working on this and didn't get any writing done.] There aren't that many simple character languages out there so I've Frankenstein-ed a few together. I'm not sure if I'll ever actually use the marks as illustrations in the book but it's good for me to have a reference for descriptive purposes.

Marked is my working title. 

It gets pretty annoying to constantly refer to a story as "the novel."

The original drawing is actually flipped horizontally. 

I had to change it because Mona's Malmark is on her left wrist. 

*face-palm* 

Despite my slow start to NaNoWriMo my notebook is getting heavier, a tactile indication of progress that might be my favorite thing about writing stories long-hand. The difference in weight between a blank notebook and one that's been filled is much greater than I'd think a little ink would account for. I think the stories themselves make them heavier.

I follow Neil Gaiman on tumblr and he's been getting a lot of questions about NaNoWriMo but this has been my favorite response so far.

Writing the "boring bits" is something I this most writers have a hard time with and I'm right there with them. The pacing of a story is so important and writing a "slower" scene freaks me out sometimes because I worry that it's boring and bland and this is the point where people will put the book down and never finish it because it's awful. I've seen a lot of opinions that books should never have these "boring bits" in them, that your exposition should always be action packed and engaging. I get that we should avoid writing essays in our novels but I love that Neil points out that you don't have to add explosions to scenes like these. It's about finding the meaning in a scene and bringing it out through dialogue or someone a character does. It doesn't have to be big, it just needs to mean something. Most authors lose around a third of the text from a first draft in revisions. You cut the things that don't mean anything, that aren't important, and you're left with fewer, but more powerful words. If we try to create that kind of power even in a first draft, imagine how much better a concentrated final draft would be. Power in stories comes in action scenes, dramatic moments, but also in little conversations, small acts. So we write those "boring" scenes and we make them mean something.

hallow's eve

Hey guys! I'm sorry about the radio silence. I've been so busy writing and getting things ready for my friend's visit next week that I haven't had much of interest to talk about these last few weeks. That and I kept forgetting it was Thursday until it was Friday.

I've still got a nice list of things to do before Monday but last night I checked off cleaning my shower which took a good two hours. I cannot fully express how much I hate having hard water. I'm going to start dreaming about water softeners pretty soon.

So, tomorrow is Halloween! I've had everything for my work costume for a few weeks now and I was just waiting on the necklace I'd ordered at the end of September. That turned into a whole fiasco with it getting lost in the mail and many phone calls to USPS. Thankfully, I was working with a very understanding seller who refunded my purchase and sent me another necklace which arrived last week! Hopefully I'll have a picture to share next week.

I'm going to be taking the first week of November off from NaNoWriMo and I probably wont post either but I'm excited for a new month, though I still can't believe October's disappeared on me. I've figured some important plot and character points out this month that will be big helps as I move forward. When I first committed to writing this whole thing out, back in August, I gave myself the liberty of skipping sections that I wasn't prepared to write just yet with the plan of going back. I have yet to do that but I'm trying now to write everything out as I go, no skipping. This has been a bit frustrating at times and I go through pages that I'm not in love with but getting through to the other side is rather rewarding.

Okay, my brain is being a bit spazzy right now so I'll leave you with this video my husband shared with me this morning. I cannot get over the giant's expression at the end :]

nanowrimo - do you dare?

Hello! It's been a pleasant fall week here so far. It smells like leaves outside and the trees on the mountains are taking on fall colors in earnest. On my way home from work on Tuesday there were only those wispy clouds in the sky but some of them must have lined up just right with the sun because there was one spot of rainbow in the sky. I'm adding that to my list of funky weather/light happenings I've seen along with the moon-bow I saw once. [I've dubbed moon-bows the unicorns of rainbows]

Apples out here are ridiculously expensive and always the most costly part of making pies or apple-crisp. I wanted to make some of the latter this week so I jumped on a produce bag sale my grocery store was having [fill the bag with certain produce for $10 total] and good heavens I'm glad they had that because the apples I got were originally $2/lb and I ended up getting at least 4lbs plus bell peppers, cantaloupe, and carrots. I would buy apples way more often just to have for lunch and things if seeing the prices didn't make me want to faint every time. I miss the ease and value of getting apples on the east coast.

If you're a writer or you know someone who writes you've probably heard of NaNoWriMo or started to see the promotional things that are coming out now. For those who are unfamiliar, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month which is an event that takes place over the course of November every year. The challenge is to write an entire novel [just the first draft, mind]/50,000 words in one month. It's a daunting task but one most veterans laud as a wonderful way to just bust your way through a first draft or just as a general exercise in time and task management as you have to write the equivalent of just over 1,667 words a day to meet the goal. [it is an option to set up your own word goal if you don't feel up to 50,000 words or you know you can't dedicate that amount of time]. There's an official website where you can sign up, create and track your goals, get advice and ideas, and become a part of the writer community that participates [currently over 700,000 writers]. They also have shirts and other fun things you can buy but my favorite thing in their store is the 2GB USB bracelet:

I don't write on a computer but I think this is a super cool idea, especially for NaNoWriMo, to be able to have your story with you all the time - to keep track of it and be able to work on it whenever you can.

I've heard about NaNoWriMo since high school but I've never tried it, being the queen of cop-outs and rationalization. Setting and completing goals has always been a tricky hit-or-miss thing for me so I hesitate to commit to something that just seems so vast. This morning though, I was toying with the idea of trying it this year. The initial obstacle is that I write long-hand so there's no convenient word counter at the bottom of my page as I work. So I took some time to get a rough estimate of how many words per page I typically crank out [230]. The other excuse is that I have a friend coming to stay with us for the first week of the month so I don't think I'll be using that time to write which would push the word count due from those days onto the rest of the month. Also, Thanksgiving. See? I'm good at finding excuses.

But I did the math, subtracting a whole week for good measure, and, if I base reaching 50,000 words on a page count [because, let's be honest, I'm not going to spend an hour every day going back and counting each word] I'll have to write about five pages a day [front and back. because it sounds less intimidating than saying ten pages a day]. Maybe I'm just feeling overly optimistic today, but that sounds feasible to me. It will be more than I've ever written before as a daily pace but I have the time and I think it'll really help me bang out my current project.

Committing to do this will mean starting work now so I'm as prepared as I can be when it starts. Which means I'll probably spend most of this month working up a chapter outline as well as my regular writing. I've never really done an outline before because I usually change my mind so often but, as with learning to be okay with an imperfect first draft, I suppose it's high time for me to learn how to use an outline as a guide without feeling like it's set in stone. I have a feeling there's a lot of learning coming my way this November.

thank goodness for fall

I cannot tell you how happy I am that it's October! I've never had a particular connection with this month aside from the season it's associated with here in the northern hemisphere but I'm developing a growing appreciation. Mostly because it's not September.

This September harked back to the same time last year in a bad way. Last September was the first time in 17 years that I wasn't going back to school and I had yet to find a job. I think life shortly after graduation is something that throws most people for a loop. For me, that loop took the form of a month of depression. Up until I started at my current job I was not in a good place and I had no idea what to do. Getting a job in October pulled me out of it and got me to feeling more like myself again. I've been looking back on that month as one of the most confusing and difficult times of my life that I would make every effort to avoid in the future. I suppose some decisions aren't ours to make.

This last month felt almost like a mirror image of last year, except that I had a job, and I couldn't figure out why. I'm still not sure what caused the sudden onset of melancholy and the struggle to care about or act on anything. In a sense it felt like life just stopped, but only for me. It didn't make sense. I've been out of school for over a year, I have a job, I have my writing projects and other things to focus on. So what's the problem? My husband's suggestion is the only thing that makes any sense, though I don't have a formal diagnosis - seasonal depression.

I'm an east coast girl through and through so living in Utah can be a struggle for me at times. I do love it here - there is breathtaking beauty in all parts of the world - but the winters can feel unbearable and this year I felt dread instead of my usual joy when people started talking about the coming autumn. Because it meant that winter was coming too.

I suppose it's ironic then, that this week has seen the coldest temperatures we've had since spring and I love it. As September ended I've been feeling better and I'm trying to hold onto the two weeks of fall we get here for as long as I can. I'm feeling excited about my writing again and my energy is coming back so hopefully I'll be more regular here with more to share.

A silver lining about having times like these is that I seem to par my priorities down to a very basic level and what I'm left with helps me to reorient and reorganize parts of me and my life that need it when the sky starts to clear. Sometimes we learn what's valuable in our lives when something comes in and suddenly changes it. Other times, we learn what we need through its absence, even if its brief, and its return will only cement that surety.

So I don't know about you, but I'm glad fall is here. The next three months will probably be insanity with holidays, having a friend to visit, and other family events unfolding but I'm looking forward to it.

in which i ramble and fuss

As I haven't posted in two weeks I was surprised to see that there was a spike in page views last Saturday. It seems that someone in France and someone in Romania may have read through the majority of the posts I've written this year. If you're reading this, I'm not sure how you came across my blog but hello!

I've ordered two of the three things I need to complete my Halloween costume and one of them shipped today so I'm pretty stoked. I really enjoy dressing up for Halloween but I'm not terribly social so I generally end up wearing my costumes while watching tv in my apartment. When I started this job I found out that my office encourages staff to dress up for the occasion but I only had a week's warning last year so I wasn't able to do much. This year though, I had a plan months out and I'm excited to see things coming together. I'll have to share a picture when I'm done with everything.

I gave blood on Tuesday for the first time in four years. Why the long break? Well, to put it simply, I hate needles. A lot. My courage was rewarded, however, with a noticeable lack of bruising. I also learned that the stinging you feel for about 30 seconds after being stuck isn't from the needle. It's from the small amount of iodine that gets into your blood from the scrub they do to sanitize your arm. And here I had thought it was just my body's reaction to having a pointy piece of metal shoved inside it. I'm not sure if this particular piece of information will ever be relevant to anything I write but it has made me more comfortable with the idea of giving again in the future for some reason.

I read a quote recently, advice from a published writer to those aspiring to be, that encouraged people to focus on feeling emotions deeply in the interest of being able to better portray emotion in writing. I consider this to be good advice in general, though I might try to focus more on being able to describe how I'm feeling rather than perhaps feeding an emotion until it's reached it's greatest depth - for two reasons. One - because if we can't describe even the most surface emotion then having gone to lengths to feel it is worthless in relation to our craft. Two - I think the suggestion to embrace and experience all kinds of emotion runs the chance of encountering the same issues found in method acting. Namely, that the pursuit of a certain mentality or emotion, especially inherently destructive ones like depression or rage, can easily have damaging consequences. A lot of people have spoken out against the idea that artists need to be depressed in order to create their best work. It's fairly easy to see the problem with such an idea but the danger here is much the same as that of indulging in anger and selfishness. Our characters will hopefully experience some of these emotions as well as more positive ones if we write them well, but I don't believe that we need to personally experience a murderous rage in order to write one any more than we need to be orphaned to convincingly write a character who has been. It's easy enough as it is for us all to give in to feeding anger, self-pity, and sadness as it is - and if you choose to pursue those things, it might turn out that no one is ever able to read that story you were writing. I want to read your stories. There are people out there who will need your stories. It might be the psychology major in me that gets me so wrapped up in topics like this but please everyone be safe. There is a difference between dedication to your work and disregard for your health.

learning from writing

I didn't learn everything I need to know in school and there were some specific lessons I know I missed - not because I was bad at school, but because I was good at it.

School came easily for me. I'm a good test-taker and I had a natural aptitude for most subjects which meant I enjoyed good grades and a high class standing all throughout my education. These are things I think most parents want for their kids and achievement in education is a great thing but for me, like so many other people for whom school was largely a breeze, the ease with which I passed classes left me with certain deficits. Having been praised all my life for my intelligence, as I grew I shied away from things that I wasn't immediately successful at because the idea of not doing well or, heaven forbid, failure, was foreign and intimidating. So while I graduated Salutatorian of my class, in a lot of ways I had never been challenged or challenged myself before I went to college where I quickly discovered that I didn't really know how to study and struggled to make new interests stick when I found that doing so took effort.

That sounds pathetic, doesn't it? Well, confessions of a straight-A student  : P
I have found that my experience is not entirely unique - a rant for a different day about the consequences of how we praise children. This week, though, I've been thinking about ways in which I've begun to catch up on those lessons I missed in my younger years about perseverance and being okay with giving your best even if it's not the best. As you may have gathered already, these are lessons I'm learning as I write.

I've been writing off and on since elementary school, mostly off as I consistently struggled to make it a daily habit - which any writer will tell you in necessary to be successful in it. Forming this habit has been a struggle because I'm so easily persuaded by my own rationalizations of being "too tired" or "too busy" or "just not in the mood" that I'd write for a day or two in a row but once something came up I'd let it fall by the wayside. I've mentioned several times in the last two months that I've been doing really well with writing every day so what changed?

For one, I made the decision that I was going to stop letting myself cop out. We all have internal voices and a lot of us are really familiar with those that criticize us or excuse our behavior at times. I decided that I was going to give my no-nonsense-coach voice more prominence. That decision is a first step, but for me, it wasn't enough.

Fear of failure or even mediocrity has been one of my constant companions, especially when I approach writing. Expecting perfection from a first draft, first sentence is absolutely crippling and would leave me staring at the page, pen in hand, without writing a word for hours. Let me tell you, having those stories and ideas crammed up in your head without being able to get them out on paper is a supremely frustrating experience. But how do you break that barrier? The simple, and true, answer is "you write."

Write is the fundamental answer to basically all writing problems but knowing the answer doesn't always make fixing the problem easier. I don't remember where I read it, but about two months ago I read a post that addressed this sort of problem and the suggestion it gave was to try writing for 10 minutes - time yourself so you know when you're done - but just write for that 10 minutes. It doesn't have to be a story, or part of anything you're working on, and, most importantly, it doesn't have to be good. Whatever you come up with at the end of that 10 minutes can be the crappiest thing you've ever written but that's just fine. So I tried it. For the first time in longer than I can remember I let myself write without judging what I was writing and it felt amazing. No, those 10 minutes didn't give me a masterpiece, but that was okay. And for the next two weeks or so I had to continue timing myself, at varying lengths, in order to access that judgement free space in my mind, but the feeling of just writing was so wonderful that I kept doing it. I haven't timed myself in weeks, though it's a strategy I know I can fall back on if I need it. And no, I'm not a perfect writer. There are still days where all I get out is a single sentence and that's okay. I'm pushing through scenes that I'm not satisfied with and that's alright because I keep writing. I resist the urge to go back and pick apart what I've written, looking for mistakes and things to nit-pick over, and I write.

Writing is teaching and reminding me that it's okay not to do something really well, let alone perfectly, the first time around - that developing good habits and things I'm interested in may not always be easy but it is worth it - and that some days, it's totally okay to just write one sentence and let it go. I can't say what I would have done differently if I had learned these things when I was younger and "if-onlys" and "what-ifs" are pointless. I'm just glad that most lessons can be learned outside of a classroom and it's never too late to start.

So, is there a story you want to tell? Then write.