NaNo Friday! November 1, 2013

The lapse in posts is one of the drawbacks of having an office with no wifi.

Yes, I've actually been using my office! And being productive again has revived me. It really has. I'm a pretty ambitious person by nature, so when I'm moving and shaking, I'm happy.

Speaking of giggling, I'm still 19 lbs. down despite having pizza for Halloween along with an inch of a KitKat bar and two whoppers. Apparently the world didn't end, since I'm still here, but I don't think that's going to be a temptation again.

I have realized that all my eating--every bite I put in my mouth for the past ten+years, has been driven by emotion. Nothing about the joy of food. All about my entitlement to it.

And now, I'm working toward being entitled to go to Scotland, entitled to wear jeans, entitled to feel good. And boy, do I feel good. Percentage of body weight-wise, 19 lbs. isn't much. But it was an important benchmark. Lots of things have changed. And my energy is AT LEAST ten times what it was.

Since Tuesday, I've gotten two major projects off my to-do list. One project is off to my agent so she can send it on to some interested editors. That has been a dark cloud over my head for two months. Cloud gone.

I have another project I have to finish tonight by midnight and get sent off to an editor. That's what I'll be doing today instead of getting started on NaNo. And, speaking of NaNo, I'll be getting my 1666 words per day written on a new project on top of what I have scheduled for editing. And I'm going to use my dragon to do it. 1666 words can be done in about 45 minutes tops.

Having a NaNo write-in at my house on Saturday. So far, I've got 18 writers coming. If you're interested, let me know. We're in Utah.

I don't know if it's the New Moon coming or what, but Supe has been bitten by the ambition bug again and we're gearing up for another uber productive month like last August was. We're done talking and analyzing. It's time to shut up and get this stuff written. Great stories, buried in one's subconscious, do no one any good. After all, I don't get to read them either--not until they come out of my fingers.

So.
Let's play Michelangelo.
Let's get our chisels and hammers and get to work, setting these works of art free.  Slow does not equal beauty. Let's take advantage of the NaNo energy that's out there, whether or not you're technically participating, and move some earth.

I CAN SEE!! October 7, 2013

I can't believe I'm about to admit this, but after five days without sugar, I can SEE.

No, I have no vision impairment other than a little bit of dry-eye from my lasik surgery. But apparently I've had a little bit of a brain impairment from my mega doses of sugar.

But every writer has their magic snacks, right? Lots of writers do well on a sugar high. I know of one who must have chocolate covered cinnamon bears when writing new words. I know another who, like me, has to line her M&M's up in rows according to color. I personally need those rows ordered as they would appear in a rainbow. For a while, I was nuking those dark chocolate pomegranate thingees. But no more. I can't handle the hard stuff anymore.

Like everything else, though, the snacking is just a procrastination tool. So now that I've been tough for five days and the headaches are proving it's just about out of my system, I'm going to treat snacking as a procrastination tool and avoid it all I can. Of course a little ritual can go a long way to getting your head in the game, but we can come up with rituals that don't include food, right?

Let me tell you what I can see today that I don't think I've been able to see for a long time...

I can see my characters a little clearer. I can see where I need a lot more emotion, a little more setting. I can see my own words like someone else wrote them and I can see FLAWS. I feel like I did the day I had my eyes done. I could see the pine trees on the mountains! Individual pine trees. And I feel like I haven't been seeing the individual trees in my projects.

Of course this might all be due to the fact I set those stories aside to write a few more before getting back to the editing desk and looking at them again. Time gives you a fresh perspective, yes, but it's never been this fresh before.

And so, with that enthusiasm that is not unlike donning a fresh pair of contacts, I have attacked my Isobelle script with a vengeance. I am determined to make it memorable. I expect to have draft two done by the end of the weekend, even though I'll be at the conference. Drafts three and four should be done by the end of October.

So, writers, are you seeing your material clearly?
Maybe you should take a look at your snackage.

I AM A WRITER! October 4, 2013

Oh my gosh!

Thank goodness I actually got something done today. I was beginning to worry I was never really going to be a writer ever again. Ever.

I forced myself to open up the document and start reading. Editing just kind of kicks in, doesn't it? It's like a florist walking past a vase of disorderly roses--you can't just keep walking. And we can't just ignore the bad sentence that begs to be fixed, not when it's in our power to fix it, right?

So. How to get the editing done: sit down, open the doc, start reading. Following Supe's advice for the week, I did not take the time to do any research on missing information. That can happen in the last version. But for now, I'm just trying to shape the thing into what it's going to be. I did take the time to look up a synonym or two. After all, I might miss that awkward word in the next run through. Best to fix it when I can see it. Terms that need more research I just turned red and moved on.

Six pages. Yep. That's all I got done, but at least I actually DID something for a change instead of just talking about it. It wasn't the twenty pages I was hoping for, but I'm unable to stay up late anymore thanks to my son's new day program that starts at 9 three days a week. And I'm an all or nothing kind of gal. I even had a nap today and it didn't help me stay up later. I'm just going to have to face the fact I'm a morning person now.

Oy. Somewhere, a world might be coming to an end. It might even be this one.

Lots of stuff going on tomorrow. I'm going to make sure editing is part of that stuff.

How did you do?

New Moon Phase--Time for new goals. October 2, 2013

Perhaps, like me, you did not hit your writing goals for the month of September. And perhaps, like me, you hope to do better in October. Maybe you think lowering your goals is the best course of action if you hope to have any success.

But what if you're wrong?

What if there is some magic in the air in the month of October? Don't you want to take advantage?

And don't forget about football.
When it's third-and-five, you pick a play and hope for the best. After all, you can always punt if you fall short of first down.
But when it's third-and-forty, with only enough time on the clock for two more plays, you throw a Hail Mary. Maybe a Flee-flicker, and if that fails, THEN a Hail Mary.

The point is, we're in the last quarter of the year. With the holidays coming, we're getting down to the wire here. If we're going to accomplish great things, we need to get them done now. We're going to have to get tricky. We're going to have to put our weight into it. Not one or the other. We're going to have to do both.

So lets take the energy the crowd is offering and go for it.

Nothing to lose, but the game, maybe the season.

And since this championship game won't require too much physical exertion, I'm all in, baby. I'm asking myself to put a lot of energy into a sit-down job. How hard can that be, really?

I'm going to look around and find the goal post--the end zone for me is to get these five projects up like I had planned to do before.

I'm playing against a lot of big players--my family obligations (caring for my recovering daughter, etc.), some house remodeling, upcoming holidays, excellent TV programs, an overworked husband, etc. And the ringer here is my sudden lack of private office space at home. IN OTHER WORDS, the typical forms of resistance faced by nearly every other writer on any given day.

I refuse to let the opposing team intimidate me. I'm going to keep my eye on the game clock--about a month and a half--and I'm going to face the ugly truth: It's time to stop analyzing and line up for the kick-off.

Tomorrow, I'm going to carve out five hours from my day and edit my brains out. Five hours. Even if I have to take five separate hours, I will make it happen. And by tomorrow night, I'm going to feel like a writer again.

So invite yourself to a bowl game and get on the field. Let me know how it goes.

August 9, 2013

My mind has been anywhere but on the project today.
I had nearly forgotten I had writing to do until the Rock turned off the TV, announced he was going to bed early, and that I was going to write.
Write? Oh, yeah. I do that sometimes. I write.
Then I remembered this blog and my mind instantly started scanning possible excuses. I was NOT in the mood, or the mode, and I just knew you all would understand.

Then I imagined you out there, forcing yourselves to sit down at your keyboards and try.
And I felt like a worm. So I decided I'm going to try too. It's the least I can do. I got you into this. I can't just call in sick when we need all hands on deck to sail this difficult sea of writing. So here I am.

This is what is keeping me from feeling like I'm drowning in goals right now. Maybe it will help you.

I have a friend, we'll call her Superwriter. Supe and I check in with each other nearly every day to keep each other moving in the right direction. I know her excuses. She knows mine. And we don't let each other get away with much. (If you don't have a friend like Supe, get one. Get one now.)
Anyway, Supe was telling me the other day that she was feeling pretty overwhelmed with the huge goals we're working on. She is trying to get another book finished, like we always are, and she was getting frustrated with the stress of it all, like we always do. So she changed her goal...

But not really. Let me explain.

In our quest for THE END, we always think of our measurable goals in terms of word count. We know, roughly, where we hope to end the book. We know how many words it will take to get there. Sometimes we set a goal of days, but we're always dividing the probable word count by those days and aim for that word count.

Here is what she changed.
Instead of having a word count goal, Supe decided to have a scenes-written goal. She knows, roughly, how many scenes she'll need to finish before she can type THE END. She can also decide which day she wants to finish, and divides those scenes by that many days.

The goal is no different.
The way of looking at it is.
Instead of saying "I plan to write 4000 words today," I can say I plan to write 8 scenes today. Will it be the same number of words/pages? Probably.

So what difference does it make?
A helluva lot. My brain is simple. It sees 4000 things to do vs. 8 things to do. My brain is happy to choose the smaller number, even if it ends up being the same amount of words. It's funny like that. Simple like that. Trickable like that.

And I'm sorry to have to break it to you, but we are all about tricking our minds here. We trick it into working harder than it wants. It tricks us into thinking we're really in 15th century Venice for a while. It's a dance we dance. And we both end up happier when the music stops.

So. I've got 8 things to do. 8 dances on my card. 8 little movies to watch and write down as I'm watching them.
What little impressive things did you get done today? And if the answer was less than one, don't go to bed just yet...

UPDATE:
In  less than an hour, I got a scene finished. Then when I was halfway through the next one, Supe called. Not like her to call at 11:30, but she had a plan. She wanted me to join her for an early writing marathon--write our brains out until 3 pm. On Saturday, the Rock can man the battlements. So I jumped on it. Of course that meant I had to go to bed earlier than planned. *cough cough*
So. 1 1/2 scenes for Friday. Not great. Saturday should make up for that.