A Case of Bleh

You know, I read all those cool writer quotes and they just sound so understanding of a writer's struggles. Some are really funny and some very serious. Some chide you into making plans and plots and charts and appointments with yourself. I mean, with all that stuff on Pinterest, how can you not find inspiration and encouragement to write. 

Beats me.

I started in January working on my novel, the one I've been working on for ... too long. I love the story that has evolved and continues to evolve. Since I began this year's mission, I've been very excited by what I've been able to accomplish. I mean, I actually developed a timeline.. well, I started it. I haven't got the whole timeline done but it seems to be going along very well. Except when it doesn't and I have to reset it to a different day, three times. But I got past that. Until I had to reset some of the scenes. But since I'm trying to reorder and fill in the blanks, that's going to happen. Apparently, a lot. 

I'd just like to get past the halfway point in the story. There isn't enough story yet but the halfway point teases me. I mean, I think I'm going to get there only to find this gaping hole in the road, so to speak. Or maybe it it more like this huge piece of the trail missing... at 15,000 feet... and they did not install the hand rails this high up. I just write it and move across but in the next section... it falls down. Now I'm stuck on the wrong side, at the wrong time. I move some stuff, write some stuff, and now the trail is as good as new. Until I reach that curve where the whole thing is just gone. I'll deal with that later. I'm going to rest for a bit. Maybe have lunch. And dinner.

Still, things have been moving at a fairly steady pace. I've met my goals nearly every week. Until February. I've been sick with some of the worst pain I've had in a long time. If this winter gets much worse, I don't know if I can handle it. I'm ready to move to Arizona. I have a contact there. Maybe I should have him looking for a shack in the desert for me. Never mind. I'm not crazy about desert wildlife. 

Anyway, the pain in my joints was bad but I have to say, the pain in my neck has been beyond endurance. I'm not sure.. no I'm positive I have no words to tell you how bad it hurts. I had swelling in the left side of my neck that caused pain and numbness in my neck and jaw. I was unable to turn my head in any direction without shooting pains. I expected to see sparks fly out my ears from the current that appeared to be coursing through the tendons and muscles in my neck. They've (doctors) done nothing about it. No advice, no suggestions, no meds. I've awakened in the middle of the night screaming as some electric current shoots through my neck and I dream of hot blue cords in there. The pain is agonizing. I get up in the morning nearly dead from a bad night's sleep. I can only sit in a firm chair, straight up, looking straight ahead. I'm dying I think. If I'm not, I might consider it. This is hell. No really, it is hell and devils are sticking me with hot forks. I'm nearly done.

Still I tried to write. But finally, when the pain made it impossible to sit up or lie down I gave up. So, for at least two weeks, virtually no writing has happened. I've sought comfortable positions everywhere. Nothing last long. As of Sunday, three weeks after this started, I began to feel a slight improvement. I'm still having the numb spot on my left jawbone. I'm pretty sure there are some nerves being pinched all around my neck. But it is a bit more bearable. Today.

Tonight I actually got 300 words down! Wow, I'm elated. Not. I hate when the pain gets so bad it robs me of an ability to function, to create anything. And the exhaustion that has resulted from dealing with unrelenting, intense pain takes whatever initiative I have left. I get a hot towel, wrap it around my neck, lock it into place with a next pillow, and grab a blanket. I get as comfortable as possible. I might be good for 15 minutes before I have to reheat the towel to about 100 degrees.. not sure about that. Must measure it. Very, very hot. My neck turns red. Sometimes I have to put a cloth between me and the towel. 

So, here we be, we three. Me, my pain, and my frustration. My novel is somewhere around here. Maybe in that case of Bleh. 

January in Review -WRoE

Text View

 I finished January better than I anticipated. I just did the calculation of the total words written on my Primary Project and, although I would have liked to have done more, I'm happy with the outcome. For January I wrote 5,798 new words in The Dream Stealer. My challenge with my friend, Doug, seems to be working but he's way ahead in terms of words written. 

From the beginning, Doug's goal was to just write, daily. Mine was to write at least 500 words three days a week and edit a chapter. So, I wasn't just writing new material, I was editing old material. Scrivener doesn't count that. If you delete a word and add two new ones, you've only added one word to the work. A couple of times I was down 100 words! I started redlining words I was going to delete and that solved my deficit problem. 

I was thinking in terms of finishing a "chapter" a week but quickly realized this might not work. I don't have chapters. I have a bunch of scenes, lots of them. And many of them are out of sequence in the document. There's a post somewhere, either here or on Life on the Ledge about how that came about. Anyway, I decided to stick with the concept of three scenes to a chapter. Scrivener is awesome the way I write. 

I set up folders for my theoretical chapters and started sorting my scenes. Another problem presented itself. I was still having to read each one to find out where it fell in the order. This is tedious, especially if you have "Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, etc. You'll understand in a minute.

corkboard view

There is a great corkboard feature in Scrivener that lets me see index cards with details about each scene or chapter, not both at once. So, if you're looking at chapters and there are three scenes, you only see the chapter descriptions in one view. If you go to text/scene view you only see the scenes in a single chapter. And sorting the myriad scenes in a chronological order was giving me a headache of global proportions. This was the wall I'd been coming up against for several years. 

Outline View

The outline view is astounding once you fill out the synopsis cards. With color coded file labels and synopsis cards filled in you can use outline view to get an idea of the flow and if something is out of place, you can see it pretty quickly. Wonderful. But totally impractical when you're still getting things in the right order. 

Chapter/scene headings

See, you have to move the stuff around. And yes, I could do that but it wasn't working for me for two reasons. Remember those titles? Yeah, you have to re-order them and type the correct chapter number every time you move something. I learned that a while back and stopped putting chapter numbers and went with character names. Equally as annoying since you may have 20 Simon scenes and 20 Cameron scenes and you have no idea what is in them! Yes, Scrivener can number and probably reorder for you but I am a control freak. 

Chapter/Scene headings in Text/scene view

The second reason was that I also write things that are missing while I'm sorting. For example, I might have three "chapters" in order but as I read over them, I realize some are missing some pieces or are not clear. So, I stop and write that bit. In outline mode, that's just a hassle for me. I have to switch views and I would have to switch views every time I changed chapters or needed to write something. You might find it ok but I didn't like it. I need to be in text mode to write and rearrange sections/chapters as needed.

About the third week of January, I stumbled on an idea. I decided that my problem was time. In this story, things are happening in a relatively short span of time and there are four very vocal characters who are doing things at the same time in different places. I have always known that this was a problem with the story but I simply couldn't find a work around without creating this elaborate time line and keeping it handy to refer to every time I wrote something, moved something, or deleted something! Look, I didn't choose to use four POVs. Who'd do that? But they just won't shut up. And yes I know it is insane but you write your story and ...well... we'll write ours. Anyway, I knew I had to nail down the timeline if I was ever going to get this mess sorted. 

Note: time has replaced "chapter" headings. 

So, I had this idea. Really, an epiphany. I would use the day and the time of the events as chapter and scene headings, breaking it down to minutes if I wanted. I began to go through each scene and establish when it was happening. I had several things going on at once but once begun, everything began to fall into place and it was like someone turned on the light. 

I was astounded how I began to get ideas and could actually move stuff out that either was in the wrong time frame or didn't even belong in this story. I was deleting more stuff and writing new stuff. All because I now had a time line in place to tell me where someone needed to be and when! It occurred to me that this should have been obvious sooner because the MC, Simon, is such a control freak he'd never go anywhere without some sort of calendar, either on his phone or in his head. And so would his former friend, Cameron. 

The best part is that the chapter/scene headings can remain in the final draft as "chapter" divisions.  I won't have to rewrite names over and over. Although, early in the process of establishing times, I've had to move things backward. By that I mean, I originally started the story on a Friday. You can see I've since pushed it back in the week. I've also moved some things back on the clock here and there. I may have to change heading if something needs to be moved on the timeline but that's still easier that the way I was doing it. 

At our last meeting, I told Doug that time was really arbitrary. It doesn't really matter when it happened as long as, from that point on, it is consistent. And day and time is much easier than reordering a bunch of numerically ordered chapters. 

So, there you have a review of what I did in January. In hindsight I can see I've done a lot. I've broken a rule here in that I've written about writing rather than writing the story. But I wanted to put something positive up that I could review when I get down on myself about how much I've accomplished. 

No Matter Where

We traveled to Mena, Arkansas on Friday to be at my youngest son's wedding. I have to tell you, that's the longest trip by car I've had in a long time. I carried my laptop because my WRoE requires that I make time to write, no matter what. We were to go down on Friday and come back on Sunday. I knew there would possibly be a time I could just sit down with it for a few minutes. It was a good thing I did.

We left at 7 a.m. and a 9 hour trip took 12 hours due to an accident on the highway that detoured us over an hour around noon and we finally got to stop and eat around 2 p.m. Around 5 p.m. I opened my laptop and started working. I was able to get +400 new words in the work I'm editing. I was kind of elated. My oldest son, Mike, drove all the way there and back. So, since I had a full charge on the laptop, I had no excuse at all. I didn't need light as my keyboard is back-lit. I found I actually like writing in the car. I carried a lap tray and my car is roomy enough I had room in the passenger seat.

The wedding was Saturday and was rather hectic but later that night, when we got back to the house and everyone was gone, I sat down and did some more editing. I was pretty tired and managed to only edit a chapter. I'm not finished with it and because I was so tired, I want to go back over it.

Today, since I'm home, I'm going to attempt to get in a lot more done on the editing. My writing buddy, Doug, is really cranking out the words and says just writing seems to be helping. I think that's always true and even I've finding it easier to just stick to it. The editing makes me want to write but I know if I stop to do that, the edits will never get done. The goal is to finish a work.

So, no matter where I am I probably can find a way to write if the time is there.

WRoE: Working on the Goals

My writing buddy, Doug and I met online on Thursday and set up an accountability plan. We met for two hours! I didn't think it would take more than an hour but we really had a lot of ideas to share and things to discuss. 

We set our goals and decided we will initially meet once a week to see how it is going. The meetings are to share updates, address any problems we're having, present any excuses, and probably chastise one another for making excuses and set new goals. We set up calendar to post goals and progress. Google is great for this because you can share the calendar with your partner and both of you can update, make changes and post progress reports. 

He's doing better than I am so far at meeting his goals. His was simply to write 500 words five days a week. He did +1000 on Friday. My goal is that three days a week I will write at least 500 words and to revise one chapter. I was sick on Friday evening and did not get started but I spent most of Saturday editing Chapter 3 in The End of Winter. 

The story is my 2008 NaNoWriMo novel. I use Scrivener to do my writing these days and I realized that rewriting was going to be a bit different. I mean, once you delete it, it's gone, right? In addition to revising, for accountability purposes I have to keep a word count. Scrivener has a word count feature but it isn't exactly designed for what I'm doing. The document word count is set and was met during that NaNo. So, I can't reset it.  However, the session word count is flexible. I can start typing and when I'm done I can see how many words I've written. 

The next problem I faced was that if I typed 20 words and deleted 20 words, the session count went to zero, effectively canceling my word count. I had to find a work around. Although I might, in fact, remove huge amounts of text, I still need to track exactly how much new text I'm typing. 

My solution was what you see here. Any text I wanted to delete, I scored through and changed to red. It isn't really gone and it isn't counted in the session count. I can remove it later if necessary. It is a bit more labor intensive but, this way, the session counter keeps an accurate count of new words typed. I still delete at times, usually things I added that I changed my mind about or that I know won't be kept for any reason. 

So far, it seems to work great. This chapter is full of junk and I'll have to divide it into more than one scene but at least I've solved the problem of keeping track of my word count. Now if I could just get better prose. Reading some of the text above I see more that needs to be fixed. I hate rewriting, revising, and editing my own work. When I go back and read it everything sounds wrong. I know it isn't all bad but I find fault with all of it. 

Still, I've made this pact and it is one of my goals for the coming year to get one whole novel finished and revised. 

Did you make any writing goals this year? Are you working on them? What are they and what are you doing to help you meet those goals?

Plotting the Plan

I've been doing some writing today. Not a lot on my primary project, The End of Winter, but I'm OK with it for now. I'm a bit under the weather and depressed so writing anything is a major effort.

In the spirit of planning, today I tracked down the calendar I've used for the previous two years to help me plan my writing time. It actually helps if I stick to it. I'm going to give it another try. It can be downloaded here:  http://www.writing-world.com/year/index.shtml

I usually print it out but right now the Amazon price is reasonable and much cheaper than if you print it yourself. And it has a lovely cover on the purchased version.

The site is really a great place for all kinds of ideas. For example, in light of the new year and setting goals, here's a article that is filled with lots of ideas: http://www.writing-world.com/basics/goals.shtml

Hope you can find a use for these. As for me, I'm getting back to my writing.

Rules of Engagement

In December 2011 I started something called Writers' Rules of Engagement, aka WRoE. I set up a personal challenge to write according to a series of rules I created and posted them on a Facebook group page. I invited any writer friend who wanted to try it to tag along. 

A few joined but soon, folks were wanting to change the rules to suit themselves. It wasn't designed for that. I did pretty good at sticking with it for the first six months in 2012. But the challenge to the group fell apart and I  lost sight of my own goals. The group continued meeting online and while I found I was talking about writing a lot, I wasn't writing a lot. 

In November 2012 my NaNo novel took a nose dive because I simply had no interest in the story but I recognized that some of my inertia was because I had stopped writing and the desire to write had waned. That scared me.

I got very sick in February 2013. It took me six months to recover enough to think straight. During that time I realized I was wasting time talking about writing. This was not acceptable. 

Lesson 1. Talking about writing isn't writing. Reading about writing isn't writing.

With that thought in mind I virtually smacked my head and went looking for my guidelines. Yes, I'd actually written guidelines. I couldn't find them anywhere. The Facebook site was long gone and they'd been posted there. The new group site, well, I hadn't bothered because no one was actually interested.  So, I'd abandoned them. 

Lesson 2. Never abandon your ideas just because others don't share you vision.

A couple of times in the following year I searched for a copy of the guidelines. As November approached, I forgot about them in the hectic time that is NaNoWriMo. After NaNo was over, my friend, Doug and I were chatting.  We both won NaNo this year and amid our congratulations, we commiserated over our inability to be more productive at other times of the year. Doug is a talented guy but his writing life is filled with challenges: a job and a family with four teenagers. I think he has some hobbies in there, too. We discussed ways we could improve our writing the rest of the year. We decided to start a plan to hold each other accountable. 

As we talked I knew it was going to be hard for both of us. We decided to set a goal and then meet online once a month to check in and we'd give an account of how the past month had gone. We would discuss problems and how to resolve them. We'd try and limit the discussion to one hour.

When I I finished NaNo four days early I'd begun to revise an old novel. It was amazing how writing actually made me want to write. It was far more effective than talking about writing. It energized me. A month of NaNo had pumped up my desire to actually write.

Tonight WRoE came to mind again. As I looked again for my guidelines, I had this light go off. I Googled my email and there it was, attached to an email I'd sent to someone. Probably someone else who didn't like them. 

I pulled down the guidelines and reread them. I was surprised to find that I still liked them. However, over the course of the last two years I've learned somethings about myself and my writing. I recognized the need to revise. So, I set to it. 

Lesson 3. Always review your writing and revise as needed.

I realized what the biggest problem is with WRoE. It is hard to do because it requires real commitment. That wasn't going to change. Still I revised. While the core of the plan remains the same, the excessive wordiness has been trimmed down. I reordered the rules to flow better. I suspect I'll cut some more of the chaff eventually but for now, I'm satisfied with my restructured plan. It is still hard and not for the faint of heart.

Still, I'm ready. I'm going to start over. I've got my guidelines in hand and I'm doing it. I'm setting goals and scheduling time to write. I'm going to work on a single project and make every attempt to finish it in 2014. 

Lesson 4: Challenges are by nature hard. If they weren't, they wouldn't be a challenge.

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