Category: ramblings

lightning rods are good

especially if you live in a tall house at the top of one of the only hills in the area, during a lightning storm.

this past sunday night, we had a pretty cracking storm cruise through overnight, filled with lightning flashes and that deep, grumbly, boulder-cracking thunder. woke me up at 3am* and lit the bedroom. cool to watch, being all snuggled and safe in bed.

turns out, the house got struck, blowing our Dog Watch hidden fence unit across the garage, and frying our garage door opener, my desktop computer, our television, an outlet and lights in the bathroom, our phone (and internet) and our cable TV line.

frustrating and confusing as this might have been, it was all completely counterbalanced by not having to have a conversation with the Fire Dept while they hosed down the ashes of our entire home.

our house is 100 years old with 4 lightning rods on the 2 roofs and those things certainly saved us; so much so that we didn’t even know about the bulk of the stuff until the next night, because we were busy enjoying our planned activities in the garden and working in the house on other stuff. never bothered to turn on the tv or computer or even pick up the phone.

needless to say, though, there hasn’t been much on the writing front. however, i’m reading a very cool book right now that has me feverishly jotting notes in prep of a story idea i hatched back during my Viable Paradise week, which is getting me very excited.

oh, and i finished the draft of another short this past weekend, currently titled “The Aesthetician”. i had many different stops and start on this one, but this finally came out.

so, yeah, lightning rods are good.

*impressive, given that i’ve slept through fire engines hosing down a housefire across the street

**leant to me by a future biochemistry scientist of some reknown (and my sister-in-law)

catching up

i’ve been bad at posting the last couple weeks, but i’ll blame end-of-semester grading and other work for that.

however, i have been writing and such:

  • RoE’s latest draft is being left to cool for a month or two*
  • i’ve just finished the third draft of a new short story that i can’t figure out a title for yet. the story is the result of a kick/challenge i was given in a conversation some weeks ago, for which i am deeply grateful, as it was a lot of fun. it’s currently out to beta readers**
  • i’m finding myself thinking more and more about the YA novel I’d outlined some months ago (currently called Darkstar, for lack of anything more interesting), so that might be next
  • or one of a couple other shorts that are kicking around
  • rejections have almost stopped, which means its time to reshuffle the deck and get my recent stories out to a new batch of markets

i’ve also been hemming and hawing over the purchase of the new ASUS EP121, and not just as a toy. it boggles my mind that the idea of a slim, pen-based tablet capable of viewing a full page of text has taken so long to appear. it seems like a sure-fire win for the education sector. i’m expecting to use it for essay grading to drastically descrease my time and, hopefully, increase the value to my students. yes, it’s more expensive than an iPad, etc., but it seems quite worth it for the much greater functionality.

did i just convince myself?

 

 

* actually, it was my brain that needed cooling over all the changes i’d made and have still to make

**want to be one? let me know.

sick.

“and tired.”

one of my favorite lines from Bill Cosby’s ‘Himself’ recording.

not so much fun when it’s an accurate description of my present state; nonetheless, as unpleasant as being sick is*, it always serves to remind me of how fortunate i am to have my health as much as i do.

so there’s that.

* unable to concentrate for extended periods, getting way behind on homework, not writing or typing anything of consequence, filling every trash basket i pass with a handful of dirty tissues . . .

april fools! (or, spring in Maine)

this video is why i live here.

embedded by Embedded Video

seriously. in know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and i’ll admit to being fairly done with winter, but a late-breaking, heavy winter storm on April 1 just makes me happy.

and the shoveling doubled as today’s exercise, so there’s that . . .

and for fun, here’s a couple pics of our trusty mailbox surviving the winter with a little help:

Audrey.d1.day1 – yep, here we go again.

the more i run from something, the faster it catches me.

i tried to get some space from writing in general after finishing Running on Empty earlier this week. no dice. every spare moment (and plenty that were otherwise occupied) found me returning to it in my mind, whether it was getting Running on Empty typed up, or getting on with a new short story, or the steady and admittedly depressing filter of agent rejections, i couldn’t stop thinking about it.

unfortunately for my better half, these thoughts often spilled out of my mouth as well, leading to more than a few circular conversations (doubt > frustration > determination > excitement > uncertainty > doubt > etc.).

after much discussion, though, she suggested i try a more radical shift in gears. i was resistant at first, though i can’t honestly give you a good reason why. it was something i had been expecting to tackle at some point, so why not now?

another couple days of rumination and discussion brought me to the truth: i was avoiding this idea because i feared failure, and that’s simply a lousy reason not to try.

so this evening, after several days of no writing to speak of, i sent myself up over the garage for 45 minutes, to at least write something and see what came of it. i had mixed feelings, going into it: low expectations weighing down high hopes.

an hour and a half later, i had nearly 3 pages and i felt . . . moved. i don’t want to say it’s a better feeling than what i feel for the other pieces i’ve written, but i’ve decided to take on something more personal this time, though with some caveats from my normal process:

  1. it’s not really my story (this will make sense later)
  2. i haven’t outlined anything (and don’t really plan to)
  3. it’s contemporary fiction (a first, at book-length, for me)

what’s it about? well, i’m going to hold onto that for a bit. i’ve given it the placeholder title of Audrey, for now, and i probably won’t keep posting about it as i go, until i’m ready to divulge more. this feels like something not to be piece-mealed, but presented fully-formed.

this feels a bit like jumping off a cliff.

RoE.d1.day68-77 – the power of distraction (or remembering how to see by looking away)

okay, so it’s actually been a bit more than a few days since i last posted progress on “Running on Empty”.* i have not been idle, however. while it’s true that the aforementioned query work essentially consumed the last few days, i was actually quite productive prior to that, though i had let the blogging slide.

today, with the queries out and the college on spring break, i was able to get back to RoE, starting with a couple strong pages after my morning run, followed by a few more pages later on.

unfortunately, the last couple pages are filled with more cross-outs and scribbles than actual writing.** i was against a wall. the end is mere pages away and yet i couldn’t seem to get the words out. over and over i tried to approach the scene, but over and over i ground to a halt because i was forcing the characters or getting lost on tangents or some such other problem.

why? because i didn’t plan the ending. my outline reached all the way up to, but did not include, the final scene. i knew essentially what had to happen and who would be involved, but i hadn’t been able to identify the particulars despite all my outlining. finally, i just started writing and decided to take the risk.

well, here i was, 241 pages and 77 writing days later, and i still hadn’t figured it out.

i’d managed to pick up a number of pieces along the way, most of which i could not have planned if i wanted to. still, the whole was incomplete. after wrestling with it for probably too long, i realized that it came down to the fact that i was stuck between two possibilities:

  • ending the story where it was, where i had initially thought it was going to end, though i was still unsatisfied with the anti-climactic-feeling scene that currently existed, in hopes that i would discover what was not quite right about it during revision, or
  • letting the story run along one of the unexpected tangents i’d started, which opened the door on a further series of events that held the promise of a more exciting ending

try as i might, i truly couldn’t figure out which was the better course.

when my wife came home, i was still no better off and i harangued her, as usual, with my plight. she listened patiently until i had spun myself out, then proposed a distraction.

i tell it to my students all the time: when you’re stuck, walk away, get some exercise, work in the garden***, whatever, just do something else entirely and let your subconscious do the heavy lifting for a while.

it is quite humbling to be reminded to take one’s own advice, and the more valuable for it.

because after i finally stopped looking or the answer, i found it. what’s more, my instincts had been right; i had reached the end and the tangent was a mirage, nothing more. there are a couple of key changes to make, of course, but i had been looking so hard for what was wrong, that i wasn’t seeing what was right.

* 10, to be exact

** okay, yes, my so-called ‘actual writing’ is not terribly distinguishable from scribbling, but that’s not the point.

*** i love winter, but it’s spring, right? somewhere?

ah, the ‘business’ of the un-published

i haven’t blogged in a few days, and i’m about 5 pages behind in Running on Empty, which is rather hard to take because i’m right at the end, now, but i made a decision to take care of something that was cluttering my mind to a distracting degree.

specifically: query letters.

*gasp* horror!

and yet, i’m getting better at them. at least from a subjective point of view. i haven’t actually had any responses from agents or publishers that would validate this*, but i’m feeling like the stress is less in the writing of the query letter itself than in the dogged search for the proper audience.**

ah, well. complaining won’t solve anything.

doing will, though.

back to RoE!

* and their absence seems to actively invalidate this, but i’m not going to dwell on that.

** that said, i cannot but thank my wife yet again for her tireless assistance in this endeavor, as in all other things.

RoE.d1.day65 – have i mentioned i like backstory?

i know, i know, it’s really hard to move forward with a story when i move backward in time, but this one works. not only did it flow naturally (and entirely unexpectedly) from the scene as i wrote, but it also brought up a motif i’ve been hoping to weave back in, though i haven’t seen a good way to do so.

until this evening.

which, by the way, i had no high hopes for. after a full day at school, i wasn’t feeling the mojo really. however, after dinner, sweeping out the water in the basement (ah, winter rain), stoking the fire (supposed to be colder than cold overnight) and sending some more query-and-related emails (no responses means no rejections, right?), i decided to have a go, anyway.

can there be too much said for persistence? probably, but it’s a hard sell, especially after a great night like this: 5 pages, good backstory to enhance story depth, and ending with another kick to the seat of the pants!

RoE.d1.day63 – the problem with possibilities . . .

. . . is that there are so many of them.

as i caught up from yesterday’s deficit, it occurred to me that the buzzing in my head was the sound of several possible outcomes of the scene i’ve been working on, all competing for existence because i hadn’t chosen one. as such, i waffled back and forth between the options, trying to get the best parts of all of them.

and not really succeeding.

not surprising, of course. that’s going to be a tough revision section.

still, lesson learned.* i got through it today and am making definite headway toward the climactic scene, which is shaping up to be both very big and very small, if i can pull it off.

* probably a new rule in there somewhere.

RoE.d1.day58 – what would Uncle Jim say, she asked

after catching up (plus some) on the writing today, i went snowshoeing with my wife, during which time i marred the otherwise pristine beauty and peace of the post-snow storm landscape with incessant talk regarding my worries over the direction, pace, characterization, plotting, and just about everything else of Running on Empty.

my wife listened patiently until i’d finally run myself out, then she asked me what Uncle Jim would say about this.

she knew the answer*, of course, and so did i, but i guess i just needed to be reminded.

i am so damn lucky.

 

*first, get to the end. everything else can wait.