1,000 Words a Day: January Breakdown

After starting this 1,000 Words* a Day experiment, I thought I’d see how many words I’ve written since December 31st (I started a day early so I wouldn’t forget) – then break them down between the various stories I’ve worked on, to see where I’ve made the most progress.

TOTAL: 46,163 (?!?!? Was not expecting that number!)

NIHILISM: 11,689
EDGE: 4,450
SHADOW’S VOICE: 4,830
THE THIRTEENTH HOUR: 140
WAKING MAGIC: 2,545
SWITCH: 1,694
ICARUS BURNING: 7,141
GESTALT: 8,212
GEAS: 4,097

Summing up the stories doesn’t reflect the total, because there have been times when I counted words for a day only to erase them the next day and start over from scratch – and some of these are only the amount I wrote on the story in the past month, not the length of the stories overall.

Still…it’s pretty telling, don’t you think? It’s sure as hell indicative of what I need to fix in my writing workflow.

I have enough words written for half a novel, but I don’t have half a novel. I have fragments of several novels.

Which is what I expected out of the first month – and while it’s good to know I can write half a novel in a month (without the reckless lack of premeditation that characterizes NaNoWriMo), this demonstrates more than anything a need for consistency. But that’s why I’m doing this. This an exercise in building discipline, making a habit out of writing every day as a professional should; I may be a pantser, but even pantsers have to have discipline and dedication. That discipline comes in stages: first conditioning to write every day, then conditioning to write decently every day instead of page-vomiting to get to the word count, then conditioning to stay with one story and see it through rather than just waiting for one to strike inspiration and hold my attention long enough to finish. I’d say I’m fairly well along on the first two, and getting close to the third. I’ve told myself I’m going to finish NIHILISM, and that’s that.

So let’s see if I can get a good 30,000 words on NIHILISM in February, ne?

Tangent: Last night I finally saw Avatar. In 3D. Yes, I know I’m late. And while I enjoyed it a hell of a lot, I remembered why I don’t do 3D movies: my eyes hate me for a full 24 hours after. Last night I spent wandering around with my eyes terribly strained, struggling to restore depth perception in a truly three-dimensional world after two and a half hours spent viewing recorded images projected in multiple layered depths of field. I bumped into a lot of things. And this morning my eyes are just sleepy and sore, with a little difficulty focusing on things beyond a certain distance. I came away better than Hikaru, though. By the time we were even halfway through the film, he had a migraine so bad he could barely enjoy the movie.

As for the movie itself: it’s pretty much what I’d heard. Beautifully rendered visuals (slight disconnect between real and CGI, more obvious than people say it is), plot a mashup of about five or six other already-good movies, with your classic “white savior learns the old ways**/plight of the natives” storyline with some heavy-handed Earth Mother / environmentalist / corporate fatcat stuff thrown in.

It was still a damned fun film, with engaging characters and heartfelt emotion. And some damned awesome action. Just because I recognize it for what it is doesn’t mean I didn’t love the hell out of it. (And enjoyed that we ended up rooting for the aliens, not the humans, just like in District 9.) I’d like to see it again, actually.

…just…not in 3D.

Final note: I’m not saying much about the Amazon / MacMillan debacle. Others have already said it far better; just hit Google and you’ll see. But I will say that I was one paycheck away from buying a Kindle, and now I’ve started shopping for a Sony Reader because of this. And I’m not the only one. One consumer’s voice often makes no difference. But anger enough consumers, especially when those consumers are both writers and avid readers…and you’ve basically screwed yourself.

 

 

*I can’t type that without thinking of the “1,000 Words” song from FFX-2, and now it’s stuck in my bloody head.

**That’s the one thing I try not to think too hard about, as it would ruin my enjoyment of the movie since it’s a pet peeve. It wouldn’t make me as touchy as films like Last of the Mohicans and The Last Samurai, but that could be because oh, hey, I’m not part blue cat-person. But still. From the perspective of a non-white person, those movies can be a little insulting. And I’m sticking my fingers in my ears and saying LALALALA because dammit I LIKED Avatar and I want to keep liking it.

Crossroads.

As I always do after finishing a major project, I find myself standing at a crossroads with a dozen options stretching in all directions, unsure which way I want to go. I’ve had my downtime, remembered that I do have other fun interests beyond writing (“Make it so!”), and now that I’m refreshed and relaxed I’d like to get back to work.

But on what?

Rewrite’s done; so is the synopsis and the tweaked version of the query letter, and on January 4th (when the publishing industry wakes up again) I’ll likely start querying again. I could start revamping the sequel to go with the new storyline, but why? There’s no point until I’m sure the first will sell. So I have a few choices:

1. Waking Magic, also known as the crackfic. Fun, but probably a little too crazy to ever see the light of day. Plus I hit a wall, though I need to work past it sooner or later.
2. Icarus Burning, the sci-fi YA story about Gabriel.
3. The YA paranormal romance that’s puttering around the back of my mind, avoiding the light of day out of shame for what it is.
4. The YA otherworldly fantasy (not quite high fantasy, but kind of a tech-fantasy thing, non-Earth) that’s been playing at the edges of my imagination for a few days.
5. Darkling, a little middle-grade pile of cuteness that I’ve posted about on LJ but never talked about here.
6. Kowloon / Hak Nam.

Yes, there are a ton of other options, half-finished stories I’ve let stagnate over the years, concepts that ran themselves into the ground or that just never played out properly, things that were interesting at the time but are a little too dated now (like The Practical Guide to Being a Vampire – it’s funny, but I’m so tired of vampires and so is everyone else, to the point where even a mocking story playing on current tropes is still too much). But these are the ones at the front of my mind, whirling around like a merry-go-round and waiting for me to catch the ring.

I’ll figure it out. I’m probably going to reread what I have written for all of them, find the one that captures my imagination most and has the most potential, and then run with it from there.

Sometimes, though, I wish I had extra hands and extra brains so I could write four or five stories at once.

To end this on a less wistful, blah-blah-blah oh-god-not-more-pointless-talk-about-writing note, a conversation with someone in WoW the other day:

“You know, Adri, you really do have a poet’s soul.”
“Dear lord, I should hope not.”
“What? Why not?”
“What in bloody blue hell would I do with something as useless as that?”

Also, my neighbors will no longer be treated to me screeching “Jesus Christ donkeyballs!” when the broken hot water heater runs out mid-shower; landlord’s sending in the repairmen today. I’m sure parents are tired of explaining to their children what a donkey’s cojones have to do with their messiah.

Hybrid.

This crackfic shouldn’t be so fun to write. I almost wish it was one of my “serious” projects; if only they all came this easily. Then again I often think if it’s easy, I’m doing something wrong. Part of the fun is the work; writing is one of those things where I enjoy the struggle. I enjoy driving myself batshit, glaring at things, stomping around muttering under my breath and cursing like a sailor, ranting and railing and chasing Hikaru into the office with my frothing until I finally rip an answer to my problem out of my skull (along with a few clumps of hair). Writing can be damned hard, but it’s the effort that makes it so satisfying.

But it’s also satisfying to relax, take a break, and write some sheerly stupid crackfic. I don’t need my brain for this; while I work on this, my brain cells are off recharging. It’s like Gatorade for the grey matter; crackfic even comes with electrolytes. A friend’s read it and said it’s not as fluffy-silly as I think it is, though. It’s taken on a darker overtone: post-apocalyptic sci-fi with a touch of fey magic and a little Shinto animism. It actually reminds me a little of Spirited Away, though the environments are totally different. Maybe Spirited Away meets Bladerunner meets David the Gnome meets the Kowloon Walled City.

Insert some random line here about four things meeting to becoming a crossroads, juncture, etc. Who cares. It’s crack. It’s pixie stix snorted up the nose until you’re dizzy and singing “Jingle Bells” in some obscure Pushtu dialect. I love it.

I may post excerpts here. Not sure.

Pondering entering ABNA next year. I really don’t know. There were some bad snafus on Amazon’s part this year, only escalated by Amazon personnel handling it very poorly. Many people ended up disgruntled, disenchanted, and insulted. Part of me says I should shun the contest on principle. Part of me can’t help but wonder if I’d have a better chance this year, as now rather than one $25,000 prize/contract there are two $15,000 prizes/contracts: one in Adult fiction, one in Young Adult. Part of me wonders when I started having Principles (note the oh-so-illustrious capital P).

We’ll see. I’ll think about it. Still holding off on a lot of decisions, waiting for certain things. I should know by the end of the year what I want to do, and how I plan to do it.

Christmas is coming soon. I’m not really all that down with the jingle, but y’know, I wouldn’t say no to a pet Spock wrapped up in a nice little bow.

On a more personal note:

A few months ago I ran into my ex-boyfriend from a very long time ago; I first met him during what was basically my second childhood, when I escaped the restrictions of family’s censure to go a little wild with the wannabe-goth image and pranced around flaunting my long hair and black nail polish and all those other things that are just too much of a pain to bother with now. I wanted to be dark, I wanted to be dangerous, I wanted to be badass, and I apparently enjoyed taking three hours to get dressed. So did he, so we fit each other. We fueled each others’ youthful daydreams, and for a while, all was good.

Naturally we broke up, things being the way they are. The inconstancy of youth and the impermanence of relationships based on mental retardation, etc. So when we ran into each other again, it was a bit of a surprise. A pleasant one; it was nice to know he was all right. In the many years since the demise of our relationship, I’ve outgrown the kind of overdramatic idiocy we used to indulge in. I no longer need to slink around trying to look dark, I no longer care who thinks I’m a beautiful boy or not, and I’ve had enough boyfriends confess their “true vampiric nature” to me that I’ve seriously pondered staking them just to get them to shut up. I don’t find it edgy to make everything about sex anymore; I find it dull, immature, tedious, and a bit crass. I’m still an idiot, but I’m not that kind of idiot anymore. I’ve matured – at least, I hope. I assumed my ex had, as well…that with adulthood, he’d grown past childish fancies to achieve stability and adult graces while retaining his creativity.

I was wrong. I’m not going to bash him by detailing how I was wrong; suffice to say Dramatic Things Happened that led to a nasty, shocking realization:

He’s no different than he was 8-9 years ago.

He’s still the Rebel Without a Clue, who thinks it makes him cool to not be able to hold down a retail job because of his authority issues. He’s the Eric Cartman who flips the middle finger when asked to bag groceries. He thinks he’s badass because he can’t keep friends; they “just don’t get him” (or why he’s sitting at McDonald’s filing his fingernails to points and talking about his dark hungers – the desperate desire for hot, juicy meat, the need to stalk his terrified prey: the McGriddle). He constantly talks about how dark and twisted he is, with a kind of pride that borders on desperate grasping because he doesn’t have anything else. Even while trying to talk big…he jumps to obey his current boyfriend and do the housework with an almost slavish obedience, because without the current boyfriend he’d be out on the street. You go, Lestat. Scrub that bathtub. Make sure you get in the corners of the grout; vampires hate mildew.

When I look at him I ask myself, “What happened? How can he still live in this altered version of reality and think it’s in any way viable? Why hasn’t he grown up? Was he dropped on his head as a baby? Or last week?”

And right now you may be asking yourself: Why the hell am I blathering about this on my writing blog?

Before you answer anything to do with LSD, it’s mainly because I can’t help but see the differences in us now – both of us in our late twenties, me a pragmatic, cynical writer who’s vaguely flailing around in the adult end of the pool, him a stifled man-child splashing in the kiddie pool with vampire bats stencil-painted onto his rubber floaties. It’s like the Lewis Black of the literary world meeting Gary Oldman’s rendition of Dracula cast as an unemployed mid-twenties loser. I shiver a little when I look at him and think, if not for the fact that I started writing, that could’ve been me. Well…maybe not. He and I are entirely different personalities, and even back then I found him a little ludicrous.

Who am I kidding, anyone who stretches their sibilants to sound like a snake is a frickin’ idiot.

But the point is…I channeled all my daydreams into stories. I separated them from myself, consigned them to fiction, and grew up while still having an outlet for all the silly, fantastical things I used to wish for as a boy. I think in some ways the time I spent with the ex helped to shape me as a writer, because he gave me an outlet to explore my creativity. But it was just that: an outlet and an exploration, not the foundation for a way of life that would end up ultimately crippling me because I believed my own fantasies.

I think a key thing to learn as a writer is how to separate your fantasies from reality – not just so you don’t end up a stunted man-child, but so you can edit yourself, improve your craft, and avoid a vacation in the psych ward. If you’re too in love with the fantasies you’ve written, if you want too much for them to be real, then you won’t be able to stand being as brutal as you need to be to shape those fantasies from self-fulfilling drek into a story with real plot and purpose. It’s sort of the same as being able to separate your fantasies from real life to shape yourself into a mature adult with goals, responsibilities, and common sense. Self-editing doesn’t just apply to writing; it applies to life, and to learning appropriate behavior in a society that requires some form of cooperation for it – and you – to survive. Individualism is one thing, something to be encouraged and applauded…but blatant immaturity, also known as “special snowflake syndrome,” is just stupid.

Eh. This is just meandering without much point or purpose, and no real end goal in mind. I’ve spilled my troubled thoughts, and now I’m off to find a good movie, curl up, and relax. To sum up:

Don’t be a damned Mary Sue. Not in your stories, and not in your life.

It should be illegal to wake up this early.

Finished the rewrite a few days ago (yes, in between reading the Dictionary of Phrase & Fable; the etymology involved is entrancing). From 100k down to 82k; not a bad shave. I’m letting it sit for at least a week; I need a bit of distance from it so I can go back and read it with more objectivity. It’s easy to see a style and flow that aren’t there when it’s pacing along with what I imagined, and my brain is filling in the blanks. I need to approach it as something new, or at least less familiar, so I have a better hope of spotting any problems.

In the meantime I’m playing around with other ideas, just so I don’t fall into a non-writing slump that could stretch months. Right now I’m looking at Waking Magic; I don’t remember how much of that I’ve mentioned here. Vice, the pissy male warrior-fairy; Veronica, the human librarian who dies and is resurrected as something of an ethereal warrior, given a new life by your standard magical Powers That Be as compensation for the fact that it was Vice’s fault she died.

The thing is, the story doesn’t quite work. The central villain’s motives were simple enough: find a source of magic strong enough for him to rule Earth and the magical world as the only human sorcerer, as magic doesn’t exist in our world. That was part of the problem: generic villain wants to rule the world. Another part was the premise of the world was too convoluted. There was a reason for separating the two worlds, and a reason why joining them again would be bad. It was messy and didn’t quite make sense. The overall rules of their existence were too tangled and overdone; complexity is fine, but this wasn’t complex. Just bogged-down.

And then there’s Veronica, who really doesn’t work well as a central protagonist. She’s a paper doll; no real personality of her own. Just something the reader can drape themselves over as a vehicle to place themselves in the story. While you need a character that the reader can see themselves in, one they can follow and empathize with, I’m not a big fan of the type of stories where the entire world and supporting cast are fleshed-out, but the central character is just a placeholder for perspective. They need to have their own personalities, their own lives, individual strengths and weaknesses. They need to be people we can care about or hate.

On that note, I’ve been thinking of changing Veronica to Harvey, Vee for short. And if I do, Vee will be my first gay central protagonist.

It actually means something to me that I don’t write only gay protagonists, despite my sexuality. I write characters who are who they are, and if they turn out to be gay, great. If not, no biggie. This actually ties in to my previous rant over the article commending the “writer of color” for choosing to write mainstream (white) characters so they’ll have greater appeal; I have a feeling that the author in question didn’t really choose to write the character that way for those reasons. He probably just let the character develop as they would, and they just happened to be white. I tend to prefer that method of character development, honestly. It feels more natural, rather than a contrived way to build a character who has a theme, conveys a message, or fulfills a fantasy.

So far, none of my MCs have been down with the rainbow swirl, but Vee seems to be shaping up that way. Here’s where it tends towards crackfic, though: Vice and Vee, in their immortal/magical forms, are both invisible to humans. They have mortal forms that let them interact with humans; one of the other problems I’m struggling with, actually, is why Vee might need or choose to stay in his mortal form when he doesn’t have to. But the crackfic portion of it is that Vee is going to end up in the mortal body of a tiny Chinese girl, reverting back to male only when he switches to what’s basically his true form. It’s something that could be a lot of fun to write, if I can ever stop worrying over these problems long enough to write it. It’ll never be anything serious, though I think on the side it could be an interesting exploration of gender identity vs. sexual identity – basically demonstrating that homosexuality is not a desire to be or fill the role of a member of the opposite sex. Vee is very much not going to like being in this girl’s body; he likes men, yes, but he has no desire to be a woman.

I don’t know. I’m rambling; sometimes that’s what I do here. With any luck getting all this off my brain will help me work out the plot problems. Or I’ll decide I don’t have the skill to write this well, and move on to something else. After work, of course…because I have resumes to write.

Ciao.

Hrm.

It always weirds me out when my Sitemeter tells me that people get here by Googling my name. I don’t know why it weirds me out; it just does.

Finished chapter one of Waking Magic yesterday; I was starting to think I’d never get to a closing point, and I think I might have forced this one – but it was over 5,000 words long, and that was stretching it. Granted, it’ll trim down quite a bit, especially since I was waffling a bit as I tried to establish Veronica’s character and parcel out details without infodumping. Still.

When did I start treating this story like a serious project?