i forgot to mention that the fortchoming review of Witness from bookfetish.org has been delayed over the weekend, so it won’t show until monday. no worries, though, as apparently the review will be in the primary section of the site, rather than a sidebar, and be up for a 3-4 weeks. no complaints, here!
okay, back to it.
following my weak start to this week, i got back on track yesterday and today, getting more than 2500 words yesterday morning, and 2000 so far today, and it’s only just after lunch. in opposition to monday and tuesday, though, yesterday and today have both had less than a full day available to write, yet i am still at least matching the output of those days. what’s different?
focus. yes, in hindsight, this should probably be #1, or maybe #2; and yes, this is one more of those ‘well, duh’ rules that every writer certainly experiences, but hey, i can be a little slow on the uptake from time to time.
anyway, this is one of those things that is both as simple as and as hard as it sounds. stay focused. of course. i want to write this book, so if i just sit down and do it, stay focused on it, then i can keep cranking it out. bad days, good days, whatever. as long as i keep my eye on where i want to be, and why i’m doing what i’m doing, everything else works out.
in such times, i can say no to any frivolous or tempting distractions and i can do some pretty good writing. even when i’m not feeling as confident about the writing, i know that if i stay focused, i will get through the difficult or awkward patch and on to firmer ground. this way, i can reach the end without getting bogged down in the middle, because i can always come back and revisit/revise/erase/develop that section at a later time. it is many times harder for me to start the momentum than it is to keep it going.
on the other hand, when i let myself wander despite my better judgement, there is no upside. i waste time in front of the computer or television, and any writing i do manage is protracted, difficult, and draining.
the worst part of all this? i know full well this is what i’m doing. i can look myself in the mirror and say, ‘you really ought to be writing,’ but when i’m out of focus, i can just nod, agree wholeheartedly, and go back to the computer.
pretty pathetic.
i have to take one piece i said above back. there is one upside to falling down like this, and that’s getting back up with renewed vigor. not unlike regaining health after a sickness, i have a renewed appreciation for the way things should be.
one more thing: staying focused doesn’t mean spending 10 hours a day in front of my desk above the garage scribbling away like a madman. my back can’t take all that hunching over (talk about sounding like an old man…). no, it means writing while the writing works. not just while it’s easy, but while it feels like it’s productive. there isn’t a clear sign that it is or it isn’t, though, so this is a bit of fuzzy logic, but it’s the best i can come up with so far. once i’ve hit that point, i need to walk away, do something else.
there are also times when i need to plan to be away, such as the fabulous afternoon my wife and i spent yesterday picking blueberries (twenty pounds!) at our favorite u-pick spot, Libby & Son. i probably could have gotten three or four more pages written that afternoon, but does that really compare to spending a gorgeous, late summer afternoon on a mountainside with my wife, who took a half day from her extremely busy pre-beginning of school schedule just to be with me?
well, duh.
yesterday and the day before should have been banner writing days. beautiful breeze, whole day free. alas, i allowed myself to fall into distraction. as a result, i achieved only good results (5 written pages) on monday, and barely passing results (3 pages written) yesterday, including roughly one page which this morning revealed itself in need of immediate jettisoning. a poor showing indeed.
but, as my wife regularly does her best to remind me, i must push forward. so, i take heart that i have crossed the 200 page mark, and i put my best pencil forward this morning.
today was another good day. not as good as i’d hoped, as i let myself start a little later than expected, but i got a good 5 pages written. i’m pretty sure there’s some bloat in this bit, but that’s okay for now. i’m enjoying how the flow is working.
i’ve been trying to update the word/page counts in the sidebar daily, and i pulled the chapter count, as it’s totally irrelevant at this point. i’m identifying better chapter demarcations regularly, and looking ahead i can see that the last several chapters are actually a series of smaller scenes in a single chapter, or something to that effect. it’s also the least relevant marker, so dropping it is okay.
i also spent the afternoon with a good friend i haven’t seen in at least 5 years. she found me here in the last six months, and we finally managed to meet up again. it was great to see her, and it was one of those blessed situations where we just slipped back into conversation without so much as a pause. i say again, i am a very fortunate person.
of course, she’s read the book, and while she maintains her differences of opinion, it was great to hear her talk about what worked and didn’t work for her and how excited she was about it. not only for the obvious ego boost, but also for the ability to have a face to face conversation about several aspects of the book. it brings up an interesting question about how much to say about the book and how much to leave un-’answered’ (which assumes that, as i’m the author, i have the answers, which i sometimes wonder about). but that is a topic for another day.
and no, i tried not to monopolize our first meeting with talk about my book (though you’ll have to ask her about the truth of that).
oh, and the last bit of news is that i learned last evening that Witness will be reviewed under the Alternate Worlds spotlight section of bookfetish.org (whose motto, i believe, used to be: ‘gagging on bad prose, so you don’t have to’, which was both disturbing and hilarious at the same time – the newer taglines are good, though, and easier to…swallow?) next friday, august 29th! it’s a good site with a growing focus on the underdogs, the less popular authors, the diamonds in the rough, if you will. as for the review itself, i don’t know much more than they seemed to like it very much, so i’m excited for the 29th, as well! be sure to check them out at the link above. i’ve already picked out a few books to check out, myself, from their reviews.
a most excellent day of writing, today. we slept in all the way to 6:15 (well, after letting the dog out and feeding her at 5:30, anyway) and the weather was dark and gray, followed by some rather heavy rains until about late-morning, at which point it blew through and by mid-day you’d never have known it had rained (aside from all the water on the ground, off course, but even that dried up and blew off by the afternoon). brilliant blue skies, brisk air, breezy. absolutely perfect fall weather.
except it’s the middle of august.
anyway, great output today. managed to get 7.5 pages written, helping catch up from yesterday’s lackluster 2.5 pages. i got past the second major action sequence, roughly in the center of the book, and am poised for a good start again tomorrow.
however, as i am trying to write through the afternoons, while i still have the free time (school is coming!), i haven’t been as up on my typing. my last effort was a measly 1000+ words. so, in order to keep a status on things, i’ve replaced the stock counter with some text, which will be both more and less accurate.
more, because it will indicate pages and chapters, as well as words.
less, because all numbers (except chapters) will be based on estimates, following the numbers i came up with at the end of the first week. this will also allow me to be a bit more regular in the updates, even if i am using fuzzy math.
so, as of today, i’ve passed the halfway point in words and pages, which is a good thing, but the chapter count is noticeably off. i’ve realized that my chapter distinctions in the outline are less than consistent, so that will be something i work on in the future. still, i’m going to keep the count up just for my own amusement.
at this rate, then, i’m no longer certain of my ability to by labor day. it’s actually quite doubtful, given only two weeks. but hey, i love a challenge.
the current word count of 32521, or 40%, is as of last friday. the weekends are now off limits, to make this more sustainable as an endeavor, and because we had a family gathering in western mass all day saturday, and we’ve got friends visiting all this weekend. anyway, that’s the total for 3 weeks of writing, and i’m not complaining; that’s about 140 pages, typed and doublespaced. i was worrying about my pace earlier this week, but with the latest work, i think i’m still on target to reach a finished first draft before school starts.
so enough chatting.
so i wrote.
and after the week i’ve had, beating my useless brains against the wall to get through a couple seemingly tiny obstacles, it was brilliant. i mentioned last week that my wife helped me through an obstacle i was having; well, she did it again in the middle of this week, and gave me a run of seven and a half pages that day, plus several pages of notes. it made up for the tuesday of absolutely zilch, despite hours on end. i just wasn’t putting more than a few words together at a time. painful anyway, wednesday was great, got me caught up, then yesterday i had another problem [it bears repeating that this is the section i assumed would be easy to write, so i left it bare in the outline].
however, it wasn’t until after mary left for work, so i was stuck. i tried free-writing. i tried more outlining. i tried a line of writing that worked, but is for a section several chapters from now. i tried talking to the dog about it. i tried walking away. i tried forcing it. i tried faking it. i tried caffeine. i tried candy. i tried reading a book(Robinson Crusoe, which i don’t think i’ve read all the way through, before). i tried housework and walking the dog (twice).
the thing of it was, it was always just a few words away. the answer was just maddeningly out of reach. i considered spending time on the internet or catching up on Morrowind (yes, the Game of the Year for 2002; I’m that far behind), but i resisted, knowing the vacuum those can be, especially when i’m having trouble writing.
so i stuck with it. and at 4:30 in the afternoon, i cracked it, and made my quota.
and by 5:30 this morning, i was already halfway to my quota. a good day coming.
like today. 8.5 pages written. awesome. and why? two reasons. first, because i saw the problem and pushed myself through it. second, because i talked my last obstacle out with mary this morning on our walk before breakfast and discovered my answer even as i was speaking. the spoken word. amazing. talking to myself doesn’t seem to have the same effect.
anyway, i’m thrilled with the pages today. i spent the morning working out the last of the sub outline (3 pages, itself) for this scene, and then flew through the writing. it was a great feeling. of course, now i can’t get my back to straighten up because i’ve been hunched over so long, but that’s what yoga is for.
i’m conflicted about how to count all this, though. as i mentioned, a couple pages from monday’s extra pages were largely crap (i salvaged about half a page), and all of tuesday’s work was useless. that said, i wrote the pages, even if i have since junked them. do i count them or not?
well, i think i’m going to count them toward my daily requirement, but won’t count them toward my word count total. that makes sense. so, today’s work catches me up with yesterday’s genuine lack of any real writing and thus my daily requirements are covered. also, today’s work will keep my word count pretty close to on target for the week, too.
yep, that works.
and that’s okay.
at least, that’s what i have to tell myself right now. i was cruising along and taking names, as previously discussed, right through monday. it felt awesome.
tuesday – pffzzt.
today – pfiffle.
to be fair, i wrote probably 3 pages on tuesday.
to be honest, every one of them was crap. truly.
worse, still, a couple of monday’s pages turned out to be misdirected and therefore unusable, too.
i hit a place in the story where my outline was much more shallow than it should have been. looking back, i remember feeling very positive about being able to fill it in on the fly.
ha. ha. ha.
the last couple of days were a lot of driving (appointments, previous engagements, interviews, visiting my grandmother for the first time in far too long [hi gram! and please don't check this blog for grammar!]), but i took the paper and pencil with me and sat in the car in between times and forced myself through the block. i hated it, and all the words felt like sludge being dragged out of the bottom of an ancient carburetor (okay, i don’t know what a carburetor is, does, or whether it can have sludge or not, but too bad). i lost all the wind of the last two weeks of smooth sailing. i was dead in the water, paddling in place.
not a happy time.
the forced writing continued, and eventually became less aimless doodling and more actual words, and from there evolved back into a more detailed sub-outline, which is where i should have been in the first place. it wasn’t quite there yet, but before i slipped back into brooding self-pity, i put myself in front of the computer with the remaining handwritten pages. typing them in brought me back to the place where the energy was, where things felt good, and where i believed in the story, in the characters, and in my ability to do it justice (and even without typing them all up, i have 95 pages, or nearly 1/3 done!). the truth of whether i succeeded or not, obviously, lies in the hands of potential readers some time from now, but for the moment, for today, it put my mind back in the right place, and i can’t wait for tomorrow morning after a good night’s sleep.
on reflection, i had to know this was going to happen at some point. it’s rather like being sick. i don’t actually enjoy being sick (truly sick, i mean), but whenever i am sick, i always look forward to that moment when i wake up, breathe deep and feel alive again. if i were never sick, how would i know what it felt like to be healthy? how could i know to be thankful?
following, sort of, on the thread of a comment from my previous post, i started yesterday with typing up my previous day’s posts (and for the record, i did manage to get the 5 pages done on wednesday to make up for tuesday’s moving trip, so that was cool).
this was all fine and good an idea to start with, to get myself caught up on the typing. if only. not only did i have more than 10 handwritten pages to type up, but i let myself slip into some revision, which i’ve been expressly trying to avoid. thus, three hours later, i still hadn’t started the day’s quota, and my wife had to remind me, though so subtly that it took three attempts because i can be rather overwhelmingly oblivious sometimes, that she was on her last vacation days before at least mid-terms and wouldn’t it be great if we spent some time together.
i did finally get three and half pages just before dinner, but it threw my momentum off and i was starting to get a little panicky about not making it.
so, lesson learned: writing before typing. do the new work before going back to the old.