Category: Personal

Finding a writing process

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[NOTE: The below is mostly from my 750Words entry from yesterday, but I felt it worth sharing here.]

We were talking the other day about Your Name — one of my all time favorite movies — and how, when we went to see it in the theater in Japantown awhile back, I was reminded of just how perfect a movie it was. Every part of the story has meaning, is there for a reason, and is woven into a rich tapestry. It’s a perfect example of what I like to call ‘they’ve done their homework’. There are very few movies, books, and music that resonate with me that deeply (The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity is a current one, of course) but as I’d said to A yesterday, I always saw that movie as a benchmark for me to achieve with my own writing. I doubt I’ll ever reach the levels of Makoto Shinkai, but it gives me a firm goal to work towards.

I think that’s close to where I reached with the Bridgetown Trilogy, and especially with The Persistence of Memories. It wasn’t just a perfect storm of positive personal life, great music and a wave of unbridled creativity. Those things of course fueled it, but it wasn’t entirely borne out of it, now that I think about it.

I’d gone into the trilogy with a few things on my mind:
–This would be the end result of a long-simmering project dating back to 1993, so I did not want to do a half-assed job of it.
–I had such a deep well of ideas for this created universe dating back to the same time, and I did not want to waste any of it.
–I was at a day job at a warehouse where I didn’t have to waste much-needed brain power problem solving (the most pressing things I had to think about were building pallets neatly and correctly, where to stage them, and how to get them to fit onto the truck), which meant that I could spend most all of my waking hours focused on my writing.
–I knew that if I stopped and ‘took a few days off’ I’d get lazy and miss even more writing days, which was part of my undiagnosed ADHD issues, so I purposely drove myself to hyperfocus on the writing instead…while also ensuring that I kept it fun for myself. It was a balance between wanting to reach word count and becoming super excited about wanting to keep this story alive.

And to tie in with what I was saying above: this was a story where ‘I did my homework’. The further along I went with it, the deeper and richer it became. And the wild thing is that most of this happened in my head, because I was really not that much of an outliner! Like I’ve said numerous times, the most I ever planned out with the trilogy was maybe three or four scenes ahead, or maybe one or two chapters ahead, and even then it was less an outline than a vague list of beats to hit as I came up with them.

All the while, I was keeping multiple character threads going in my head. Caren and Poe were focusing on two things: balancing their own spiritual awakening while protecting Denni; Anton knew he wasn’t in charge but had to make it look like he was; Natianos believed he was pulling the strings but didn’t expect Denni and Saisshalé to take over; Nehalé was going through a crisis of faith; and so on and so on. This is why the scenes are set up as they are: they focus mostly on the important character in that particular scene, fully and with deep immersion. The other characters might have been in the scene as well, yet I would only focus on their reaction (or non-reaction) in a later scene. Everything and everyone was interwoven into this story, but I had to see the separate threads going.

Looking back on it, it’s kind of amazing that I did that with my first professional novels. I did it to a much lesser extent with the standalones, but that’s because they didn’t need that much intensity. It was a process I came up with on my own, one that worked for me, and one I still use to some degree. In fact, I’ve been contemplating following my own example with another attempt at rewriting Theadia. The only reason I’d stepped away from that process was because the Trilogy had been such an incredibly long project that I needed to try something small and compact — both to give myself a mental break and to see if I could pull it off.

Like I said, I don’t expect to hit Shinkai levels of perfection, but I remain inspired to at least ‘do my homework’ and write the best work I can.

Jumpstart, restart

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I’m still feeling a bit frustrated with the Theadia project, but the plus side is that I’m finally making an effort to put more work into it after a month or so of being stalled.

One thing that’s been bothering me for a while now is that there are several characters and side plots that are integral yet I’m not giving them enough stage time. This in turn has had a cascading effect in that I can’t quite finish the story because there’s too much of it still missing. This is why I’ve been taking the time to think about how I want to approach this project going forward. I’m still interested in it, and I think it’s worth the work, but clearly it’s going to take a lot more than powering through and filling in the gaps later on.

This is why I initially realized this project was going to be a duology. At least two books, at any rate. I had to stop thinking of it as a standalone and more as a multi-book story, like the Bridgetown Trilogy. Even though it centers on its two main characters, I still need to tell the stories of the other characters they interact with, because theirs is just as important.

This is also why I’ve been thinking about doing a second rewrite. I admit the first rewrite was less of one and more of an extremely detailed reread/major edit hybrid, which did help the story a little bit but in the end didn’t help it enough. [I also admit that part of the reason that happened was my inability to follow through was due to Real Life things going on at the time that needed more attention.] I’m still planning on taking a page from the Belfry Years when I took The Phoenix Effect and rewrote it as the trilogy, only this time I’m going to take it much more seriously.

And ultimately, this is why I’ve been spending the last week or so giving my creative outlets a much needed jumpstart. In order to give enough attention to this, couldn’t just force myself to start over again. I had to return to exercising those creative muscles, getting them back into working order. Thus the return to the 750 Words site, the return to journaling and blogging.

I still have a long way to go, but I’m at least in a much better position to take the right steps to get there.

Fly-by: brb, dealing with allergies

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This time I’m not so much stuffed up as my sinuses are congested and waking me up at night. I’m just tired enough to feel like I’m running on an almost empty tank the last few days. I’ve been taking the occasional Benadryl in hopes that it goes away, but this is what happens when you live right down the street from a Big Famous Park full of blooming and pollenating things. Alas, this means my brain isn’t quite braining enough to word correctly without considerable effort, so I’m going to take it easy.

Hopefully this will be over soon!

Adjust as necessary

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I’ve just come up with an idea that could possibly help me with my creative outlets, and it’s not about bringing the whiteboard schedule back. I’ll admit it worked for me quite well in the past, but over the last couple of years it’s lost its appeal and felt more like a deadline than a guideline. And the more I missed those deadlines (whether due to Real Life Stuff or Day Job schedule or something else), the more frustrated I started to feel.

As you can see, I’m trying to get back into my regular blogging schedule. It’s one that’s worked well for ages and doesn’t use up too much of my time, as long as I’m not writing the entries at the last minute. And I’m hesitantly trying to get back into my daily words at 750Words, which I’d also put aside for a couple of months. I’m not exactly daily yet with that, but I’m getting there. I’ve turned the morning notifications back on in the hopes that it’ll help inspire me to return there more often.

Right now I only have two calendars, as I’ve retired the whiteboard. One is my Zen-a-Day that’s on my desk, which essentially serves its intended purpose as something to think about during the day. The other is the monthly calendar that’s hanging just above my PC tower. In the past I used to put my day job hours on it, along with any other events A and I would be going to. Right now it’s pretty empty.

But while working on today’s 750Words, I thought (and wrote): How about this: on Sunday, when I’m doing my PC cleaning and house errands, why not plan out the rest of the week? Make some time for some creative outlets. Instead of a schedule, at the start of each week I can say something like “hey, let’s work on a comic on Thursday since I have that day off”. I have Sundays off for the most part and do in fact use that day as a ‘cleaning and errand day’, so I think that would be a perfect time to block out an hour or two without it being rigid or repetitive. This would give me more flexibility for anything that might arise scheduled or not, and I can work around other things that might be going on. And most importantly, it gives me a positive thing to look forward to.

Whether this will work out will of course depend on how much energy and dedication I put into it. The whole point is to build up those creative muscles again yet still retain the ability to adjust as necessary.

A year later

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We’ve been here at our new home for a little over a year now, and it still seems like we just moved in. We all settled in quickly, even the cats, making a few adjustments and creative additions along the way, and it’s become a home of our own. My desk still sits against the wall in the office, with the black bookcase squeezed into the corner, full with music, reference books, toys and stuffed animals, art supplies, and yes, even snacks. Up on the wall are a few prints by the always amazing Ukiyo-e Heroes, who I highly recommend. When I’m home, Cali likes to interrupt my work by jumping up onto the desk and sitting right there in front of the main monitor, demanding attention. (Juli tends to be more demure, sitting on the floor next to me and plaintively poking at me with her paw in hopes that I’ll take the felt ribbon toy out of the desk.)

The view out the big window to my left isn’t as grand as Spare Oom’s was, but instead I get a great view of the surrounding neighborhood, and on a clear day I can even see Mount Tamalpais poking up in the distance. I get to hear the whoops and hollers of the little kids during recess at the elementary school across the way. Both cats love looking out those windows and watching the cars and pedestrians, and they really love it when the crows and ravens fly by.

We might not be as close to retail and coffee shops as we used to be, but we’re still within walking distance. We’re also close to the Big Famous Park, which we visit a lot more now than we used to. And I’m still a short work commute away that gets me there and back in about ten minutes. It’s a much quieter neighborhood, but it isn’t remote, and it’s still in my favorite part of the city. We’ve been here in San Francisco for twenty years and change and we have no plans on going anywhere else anytime soon.

I still remember that day in 2002 when my mom told me about a travel show segment about the city, and thinking man, I would love to visit someday. Little did I know that three short years later I’d be flying out of SFO after a few days of apartment hunting, and looking out the window at the city’s skyline and thinking yeah…this is going to be my home.

Owning a home is definitely a new thing for me; I was absolutely certain we’d be forever renting. For the first couple of months I would get this sense of urgency that I really needed to write and mail out that rent check, only to remind myself that it was a mortgage payment now. That sense of permanence is not something a lot of us Gen-Xers got to experience throughout our years to this level, and we’d gotten used to it to the point that it was just another thing to grudgingly accept. It’s made me rethink a lot of personal things in my life, and it’s also made me learn how to fix and adjust things on my own instead of calling the building owner. [One funny side note: I never realized how many quarters I spent on laundry until we owned our own washer/dryer unit — one of only two must-haves on my want list, the other being a garage — and all those coins just started piling up instead of being used.]

In a way, this office has become to me what the Belfry used to be at my parents’ house: it’s where I clock in for an hour or two to work on my creative endeavors. Whether it’s writing, playing a bit of guitar, journaling or even doodling, it’s the one place in our home that’s completely dedicated to that and not much else (other than curating my music collection of course). I can focus here, despite the occasional distractions (cat and otherwise). I can also keep my creative work in here, leaving the other rooms for other things in my life.

I’m still getting used to this place being ours in the ownership sense, but I’m glad we made the decision to make it happen.

The Decline and Fall of Western Massachusetts

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This is a project that’s been floating around since my high school days in the late 80s. It’s gone under different names over the years (Belief in Fate is the one I’ve mentioned the most, dating back to 1988-89) but Decline and Fall was the title I came up with in late 1995 after the dreaded move home from Boston. It’s a title that maintains a certain Gen-X flair: it’s a riff on Penelope Spheeris’ documentary series about rock and roll excesses, The Decline of Western Civilization — itself a riff on Edward Gibbons’ The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — but it’s also a riff on the frustration and ennui of growing up in a run-down small town that one desperately wants to escape. It’s not that I hated my hometown, I’d just outgrown it yet had to wait my turn to leave. It’s jaded humor because that’s what we Gen-Xers do best.

Mind you, this was never a project like Isaac Fitzgerald’s 2022 memoir Dirtbag, Massachusetts — interestingly a book about my same hometown, though I’ve never read it — as that is not the kind of book I want this to be. It was never going to be about partying and taking drugs and underage drinking because there’s fuck-all else to do. Sure, that definitely existed then as now, but that wasn’t my life. I did my best to avoid that because I’d seen firsthand where that road led and I was just too damned stubborn to give into it. It’s a big reason why I latched on so tightly to college radio and writing at that age; if I needed that escape, music and creativity was where I went. The depression and confusion and frustration ended up on the page, always with a soundtrack.

Decline and Fall might have started out gloomy, but as I got older and wiser — and calmer and happier — I started realizing that this story would benefit not as a dire memoir or a gloomy roman à clef focusing only on all that bad stuff (which it originally did during its Belief in Fate phase), but as a story about finding a way out of all that. Thus it’s about that brief time when I discovered college radio (and myself) and found friends that changed my life considerably. [Come to think of it, this might explain my current obsession with the manga The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity which has a similar plot, in which Rintaro’s life is changed for the better when he finds his own solace of love and friendship.]

I bring this up because I’ve been thinking about finally taking it off the back burner to give it another go. Hell, I’ve even made multiple playlists for it recently! It’s become somewhat of a companion piece to Walk in Silence the book project which focuses on the ‘college radio’ music of the mid to late 80s. It’s a story idea that’s never quite completely left my mind, even despite being trunked a few times. That tells me that this isn’t merely an obsession with a half-baked idea, but an idea that needed a lot of time and distance (and maturity) between now and the time it took place. It’s no longer just a story based on vibes but one that speaks of a deeply personal moment in time.

Now, I’m hoping that it doesn’t stall again, but I’m going to be optimistic.

Theadia update…?

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I’m still floating in a stasis on this project, mainly because I’m having an issue with these final scenes of the book. Rereading the novel-so-far is feeling more like a distraction than a help. I’m almost thinking that perhaps I should start in on another project in the meantime, just to take my mind off it for a bit, and come back to it when I feel more refreshed and ready to approach it.

However, the other day I was also revisiting those perhaps this is actually a duology thoughts I’d had off and on throughout this project. While this could conceivably be a standalone, at the rate I’m going it feels like I’m rushing the ending, or alternately I’m tying up all the plot threads a little too cleanly. And it occurred to me: if I stop where I am now in this book and follow through with said thoughts about a duology, that would give me the space and the breathing room to work on the rest of the project. And it’s a perfect cliffhanger at that.

To be honest, this is close to how I’d decided to finish A Division of Souls back in the day. That book is different in that I’d already decided it would be a series and not a standalone, but all the same, by the time I got to that final scene, I actually had a much better sense of where I actually was in the entire trilogy’s layout. Souls was all about Denni coming to terms with being the One of All Sacred, and her final ritual in that book was her acceptance. That meant that the next two books had to be about what she had to do next and how she had to bring it all to completion.

So, back to Theadia: I’ve said before that this book is indeed about taking responsibility when it’s needed, even when it goes against the rules. But it’s also about a bigger story as well: what happens when one’s way of life is threatened for the most dangerous (and frustrating) of reasons. And in the context of this story, I don’t think it’s one that I can successfully tell within the confines of one book. There’s a much bigger story being told in the background, and that is the story that needs more room to breathe.

Perhaps it’s time to make this duology idea happen.

Vacationing

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I mean, anything to avoid finishing this dang novel, right? Heh.

Seriously though…we’ll be taking this week off from the Day Jobs to relax a bit, see a few local sights, do some shopping, do a bit of long-needed cleaning and other house errands, visit the dentist to fix a cap (which I am doing this morning), and catch up on some much-needed sleep. And somewhere in there, I will try to make a concerted effort to plan out the rest of Theadia.

I’ve accepted that I am now at the very same point I was at with The Balance of Light: I need to finish this novel once and for all, I just need to figure out how to do it. Which means that I’ll have to spend an afternoon or two here in the office working out a planned outline, just as I did with that previous novel. I’ve got a vague idea of how it should end, but the getting there is eluding me. Well, maybe not eluding, perhaps I’m really just playing the old avoidance game. Whether that’s because I’m worried that I’ll duff the ending or that I’m already itching to move onto something else, the fact remains: I need to finish this damn thing!

I have also made it a point to start working on a few non-writing projects and catching up on some long-delayed house-related things as well. I have a few pieces of framed art that are still sitting in the office that need hanging. I have a garage storage room that needs rearranging. I have several bins of writing that have been sitting in said garage for a year that really should be more organized considering I’d stuffed them in there with no real organization other than ‘get it packed because we’re moving soon’. And I have a few art notebooks (both digital and non) that are gathering dust on my desk that I want to crack open.

Oh, and there are also all these books in my TBR pile that keep getting ignored due to my nightly ingestion of online manga (not that I’m wasting time with that, just that I’m leaving no time for reading anything else in the process). I’m going to need work on that a bit. I should also do another book purge…not that I have a ton of them like I used to (I got rid of a TON just before our move), but there are some titles I’m willing to part with and donate to one of the few sidewalk book libraries in our neighborhood. Perhaps I need to create a Read This NOW pile — not just ones I’ll get rid of afterwards, but ones I’ve been wanting to read as well — and get cracking.

But most importantly…? It’s my vacation. Time to slow down and enjoy it while it lasts.

Slow going

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I admit I am a bit frustrated that it’s taking me forever to finish Theadia. My writing sessions lately have been sluggish and not all that productive, getting only maybe a few hundred words at most, and often quite less. Right now I’m stuck on a scene that’s taking me forever to get through, mainly because I have only the vaguest of ideas of what I want to do with it. [There’s also the fact that I’ve been dealing with spring allergies lately, which have been leaving me with less energy than I usually have.]

As always, the only thing I can do right now is power through.

Meanwhile, what else is happening on the creative front? Well, not all that much at the moment, sadly. I’ve been kind of delaying that more than I really should. Perhaps it’s a mix of not wanting to force myself into anything else at the moment and the fact that I’m still getting used to my recent job transfer. Not that it’s harder or more stressful, quite the opposite; it’s actually that it’s taking time for me to get used to not stress-working through multiple responsibilities (each with constantly shifting priority levels). This change in stress levels means that my body is responding in kind, suddenly realizing wait, you mean I can finally relax? SWEET! I’m sure it’ll balance out eventually and I’ll be back to normal soon.

I remember this happening when I left the Former Day Job six years ago. I had no idea how flipping exhausted I was then, and it took quite a few months for everything to go back to normal. I don’t expect it to take nearly as long this time of course, but I’m still a bit impatient about it.

Like I said, powering through.

Unplugging

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So here I am listening to the new album by London dreampop/shoegaze band deary, and it got me thinking about how waaaaaaaay back in the day, I used to listen to Cocteau Twins to allow myself a bit of a dive into another world. This kind of musical genre, with its heavy wall of reverb guitars, slow dreamlike melodies and otherworldly vocals, always brings up the same sort of imagery in my head: the sound of walking deep in the woods, far away from any other sign of civilization. Sometimes it’s dark, sometimes it’s overcast. There’s always that hint of desolation, but not necessarily in a bad way; it’s more like finding a personal moment of Zen peace.

At least that’s what used to happen back then, well before I plugged myself into the internet in the late 90s. Since then I’ve been pretending that I keep the internets and my offline brain separate, but we all know that hasn’t been happening for ages now. My brain just loves that dopamine hit, especially when it’s getting drunk on constant music listening, socializing and constant movement of thought with nary a moment’s peace. Where does the real end and the cybernetics begin at this point?

Anyway, this is not so much about unplugging as it is another chapter in me Getting Older and finally deciding to detach myself from the multiple races my head is trying to keep running. Don’t get me wrong: it wasn’t all terrible, you know. I’ve met all kinds of neat people over all those years, some brief acquaintances and some long-lasting friendships. Learned a lot of really cool things, discovered all kinds of awesome music, been inspired to write stories.

But somewhere along the line my brain rewired itself when I wasn’t paying attention and I was too lax about backing away when it became too much. Instead I did what I often did during those same teen years when I listened to that same dreamlike music: I spiraled instead. I dove in to see just how far and how long I could keep taking it all in. And I had one hell of a voracious mental appetite.

So here I am, older and (hopefully) wiser, finally deciding it’s time to unplug from all that nonsense. It’s been an interesting run, but it was full of mental and emotional exhaustion. I’m not completely disconnecting from the world, of course. Just no longer spending every waking moment at top volume. I’ve distanced myself from a lot of things over the last couple of years already, so this is nothing new. It’s just deciding to go a bit further and relocating that mental and emotional Zen peace, and making that the new norm.