Category: On Writing

Binding off…?

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I’m willing to admit I kinda sorta know how Theadia is going to end? Maybe? It’s very much like how I finally finished The Balance of Light a few years after stalling: I have a handful of chapters to go with an extremely vague idea of how it will all wrap up, but it’s the getting there that’s eluding me at the moment. And thankfully unlike that novel, it won’t take me another four years to finish.

If anything, my use of knitting references all over the novel kind of comes into play in a stereotypical way: everything that’s gone on is a part of something bigger. I’ve woven all these other patterns (read: character arcs) together and now I need to ensure that they all fit together in a coherent fashion. That’s one of the big themes of this novel: we’re all in it together. As long as I keep that in mind, I should be alright.

Anyway, I’m being hard on myself right now because I’m worried that I’m going to get to the end and have loose and miscounted stitches everywhere and it’ll be a big knotted mess that I’ll have to rip apart and start over. That may or may not happen, but we’ll see.

I guess I just need to have a bit more confidence in myself and in this novel. It’ll get there eventually.

Too Darn Hot

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It’s been uncomfortably hot here in San Francisco the last couple of weeks, seeing record temperatures and ridiculously clear skies. Thankfully I work in a place where temperature regulation is kind of important, so I’m spending most of the day inside where it hovers somewhere at a comfortable sixty degrees or so.

Unfortunately, Spare Oom has been a bit of a sauna at times, meaning I can’t always get a lot of work done until it cools off in the evening. Which means revision work on Theadia is falling a bit behind, but I’m not too worried about it. It’ll get there when it gets there.

It did remind me of my Boston days, especially when I lived in the Shoebox, which could get unbearably hot and stuffy during the summer even when the window wide open. The Allston apartment was a bit better, given that it was a north-facing apartment and thus never got direct sunlight, but without any AC it could still get uncomfortable. Those days I’d usually hang out elsewhere, like at a library or a record store until sunset, then stay up far too late enjoying the cool of the evening. And of course there were the summers in the Belfry…I’d often start my writing sessions after dinner when it was already cooling off.

Mind you, this is not normal weather for San Francisco. We’re more known for being firmly stuck in the upper fifties and low sixties on the good days, with the addition of consistent fog cover out here in the Richmond District. From what I hear, the weather will be dropping back down soon enough, then I’ll feel comfortable back here again.

Knowing enough to fake it

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Working on this go-round of Theadia, I still feel the occasional worry that readers are going to see certain scenes and think oh dear lord, he has no idea what he’s going on about, does he? In particular, it comes up whenever I have a scene with our two goofballs Althea and Claudia doing their magic as programmers.

I mean, I’ll totally cop to the fact that I know enough about certain kinds of programming. I get what coding is supposed to do. And because of my years working e-payables at the bank, I definitely know enough about what happens if that coding is screwed up, and how a code that runs perfectly fine in test mode can just as easily fail spectacularly in live mode. [Oh, BOY do I know how that is. Reading about BofA’s recent systems kerflooey a few days ago gave me some not so fun flashbacks.]

And that’s what I lean on in this story. I have no reason to get into the nitty-gritty and explain in Doctorow-level detail what the characters are trying to do, because that’s not an important part of the story. What is important is why they’re doing what they’re doing, and knowing full well how it’ll end up because of that. There are a few moments of handwavium, sure, but it’s never a plot point that will disintegrate because of that.

What’s important here is not showing off the two women’s mad skillz, but that they know how to navigate the grey area between compliance and hacking. What these moments do hinge on is them not bringing attention to themselves while tweaking a few things here and there while everyone’s distracted.

As long as I make it believable enough, that’s good enough for me.

Passing the time

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So, how is my little experiment with passing the time at work going?

Well, it could be going better to be honest. I’m still finding too many excuses (and they are excuses) not to pull out my phone and screw around on Threads for the short amount of time I have for breaks. I mean, fine, it’s downtime and there’s nothing inherently wrong with using said time to mindlessly scroll social media…but like I said, I don’t want to do it anymore, and I’m trying my damnedest to get OUT of that habit.

I’m just not trying hard enough, really.

On the plus side, though…I have been doing a damn fine job of maintaining a level of Zen while at work. For a little while there I was letting myself get too frustrated and/or distracted and reactive to situations, just like I would do in the past, but that doesn’t happen nearly as much these days. Sure, I’ll get a bit snippy or grumble to myself in certain situations, but I’ll let it go very soon after and not continue to dwell on it.

And creativity-wise? I’ve scaled back the prep work, so to speak. For a while there I was carrying a small but bulky notebook in my jacket pocket, which did get its use, but I’m back to the old-school ways again, using my trusty back-pocket pad. Why? Because it provides lower expectations. I’m not writing anything big there, but I am starting to write down more lines of lyrics/poetry and the occasional WIP note. And that’s all I really need right now.

Bringing a bag…?

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I’ve been toying with the idea of bringing my satchel to work. Right now the only thing I usually bring is my coffee thermos and my lunch bag, but I’ve been thinking lately about bringing just a few things more.

The main reason, to be honest, is to change some habits.

I’m really getting sick of spending my entire breaks staring at my phone and reading social media. I mean, there’s no real harm in it as I curate my feeds pretty thoroughly these days, but I’m kind of getting bored by it, to be honest. Not the feeds themselves, mind you. Just the habit of doing it every single flipping moment that I have a break. I don’t really enjoy it anymore, to be honest. I’ll check my emails or any texts I get from A, but not much else.

I’ve been thinking about it: bring in a few things I will definitely interact with: my moleskine personal journal, a word search magazine, that sort of thing. Preferably something not electric if I can get away with it. Perhaps bring in one of my empty spiral-bound notebooks for some longhand work.

And yes, that’s another reason: getting out of the habit of passive scrolling and into the habit of fun creativity at work. I’m not aiming to write a novel here (not just yet, anyway), but I think I would benefit from using downtime for things I enjoy. The tricky part here is that our break room is tiny, so I’d either need to find a spot outside (in the car if I’m driving, for instance) or on the roof. But I’ll figure that out when it comes to it.

Either way, I’m up for a change. I’m due for a change, at any rate.

Going deep again…?

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Whenever I think about the Bridgetown Trilogy and the Mendaihu Universe, I almost always wonder if I’ll ever get around to writing something with that level of worldbuilding. Theadia certainly comes close, but that project’s a different beast altogether. While it certainly has an ensemble cast and multiple worlds, it doesn’t have its own conlang or its own highly detailed mythos. It’s a big story, but it’s not a part of a bigger universe like the MU is.

The MU is still alive and kicking somewhere in the back of my thoughts, and I still want to write more stories in that universe, but I’ve come to the realization that if I’m going to do it right, I’m going to have to go in deep once more. And I’m perfectly willing to do that once I allow myself to take that dive again. [And I will not complain one bit if that includes the music side of things, mixtapes and all. That was one of the best parts of the project!]

As you may remember, I deliberately chose to bounce away from that kind of thing because, up to 2015, that’s pretty much all I knew in terms of novel writing projects. Everything had to be a full-immersion, years-long intensity, and I needed not to do that for a while. I needed to know how to write something standalone and concise. Partly to prove to myself that I could do it, and partly because I knew that not all of my newer story ideas would translate well into that long of a format.

I knew I’d come back to the longer form sooner or later. I’ve often said it’s a format I truly enjoy writing. But in the several attempts in writing the temporarily-titled-MU4 novel, each time felt like I wasn’t doing it justice. The deep immersion wasn’t there, only a reflection of the past style. I wasn’t allowing myself that level of focus and, let’s face it, obsession. So it kept getting pushed to the back burner.

This will all eventually change, I hope. I’m not sure when, and I’m not sure how. Perhaps it’ll be a change in my writing schedule, better and more creative use of my break times at work, or perhaps it’ll be something else altogether. Who knows? I may even start a new extended universe instead…?

Not lazy, just languid

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I’ve gotten so used to my slightly unconventional two-days-on/one-day-off/three-days-on variations of my work schedule that working five days in a row at the Day Job over the last couple of weeks has thrown me for a loop a bit. [There’s also the fact that last Sunday we did some major gardening, after which I did three loads of laundry, which didn’t give me much of a day off.] I’m trying not to overdo it, so I’m allowing myself the occasional day where I do nothing much of importance.

It’s also that the weather’s been its usual weird westside SF self lately: overcast, foggy, extremely humid, and stuck somewhere in the mid-50s…plus it’s allergy season, occasionally leaving me sniffly and migrainey. On those days I’ve learned it’s best to just slow down a little bit and let nature take its course.

I am working on Theadia, just not on a daily basis and not at intense levels, so at least that’s still moving forward!

Hopefully things will be a bit less languid in the coming days….thanks for your patience!

Making it believable

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So one of the things about Theadia is that the Day Job for the two main characters is that of coding. Althea works on system translators and special projects, and Claudia works on transportation and communication hardware. So suffice it to say, they know a bit about how things work under the hood, and that becomes their superpower as the story progresses. I based my approach towards their Day Jobs on my own position at my Former Day Job, in which I’d learned what’s under the hood in e-commerce banking. In effect, their story isn’t just about the technology but also compliance, safety and just plain making sure it doesn’t explode in your face.

Thing is, I’d decided early on that what I didn’t want was for the novel to be one large technology infodump. Some people like that kind of thing — and Cory Doctorow does it really well, perhaps overly so — but I knew I wouldn’t. That wasn’t the kind of story I wanted to write. I’d decided that I’d infodump only when absolutely necessary, and so far that’s only been in a few very important scenes. I wanted to make it digestible to the normal reader who might not want that tech deep dive. That also came from the Former Day Job: having to explain tech to someone who doesn’t have the mind for it.

There’s also the fact that not everyone is a technological genius in their field. Sure, there are those out there who are absolutely brilliant at what they do, but there are also those out there whose approach is more of a ‘crossing-fingers-and-hoping-it-works’. And if I’ve learned anything from the Former Day Job, that’s not from a lack of knowledge but more from the reality that, as I’ve said numerous times over the years, systems are only as smart as those who program them. It’s often a LOT uglier under the hood than you’d imagine. Legacy systems that won’t talk to each other unless they’re linked by translators, coding languages that are so old they probably predate some employees, intellectual properties that refuse to work in tandem, platforms whose navigation feels counterintuitive, and so on. But hey, if they still work, why change ’em, right?

That’s how I make the tech world of Theadia believable. It’s not about the fancy and nerdy hacking but knowing and understanding what’s under that hood…and how to manipulate it when necessary.

Okay, moving on…

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I’ve spent way too long trying to make that chapter work and I’ve been getting nowhere. I know something needs to go there but it’s just not coming to me, so I’ve called it, placed a WRITE THIS LATER on the page, and moved on. Maybe I’ll come back to it, or maybe I’ll come up with something altogether different. Or maybe I won’t need it after all? Who knows?

Either way, I’m now working on another revision chapter — one I’ve already written and want to polish up — and I probably won’t return to this problem scene for quite some time. I’ll have it playing in the back of my head, sure, but I most likely won’t actually do any writing for it until I get the rest of the novel done. I actually did this with Diwa & Kaffi — chapter eleven, where Diwa is making rolls with his mother and talking about his dad, was the last thing I wrote for that novel before prepping it for publication. By the time I wrote it, I had a much better idea of what was needed and it came to me much quicker and easier.

It’s not a process I do all that often, but sometimes it’s necessary to move on instead of wasting so much time focusing on something that refuses to budge.

Sometimes it takes a while

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Some days the words come thick and fast. Some days I’m able to fly through a scene with relative ease. Some days I know exactly what I want to write, and how to write it, and all I need to do is the work.

This chapter is not one of those days, dang it.

During a slow moment at work the other day I managed to figure out what I was doing wrong with the first attempt at this scene, and made a few personal notes on what needed to happen so I could write it at a later time. Which is all well and good, because over the last couple of days I have not been able to do it.

Whether it’s writer’s block, the don’t wannas or just exhaustion and overthinking, that doesn’t matter. I’ll get there sooner or later.

I just need to remind myself now and again that some days it takes a while for it to unfold.