Tag: 750 Words

Year End Review – positives

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[Picture source: Neon Stargzing by Zerahoc from DeviantArt]

Yes, even despite my newish PC being out of commission for a bit, things have been good here in Spare Oom and elsewhere. I’ve used this time to detox for a little bit; shutting things down, taking a breather, whatever it takes to be where I need to be.

I’ve received notice from Lenovo that said PC has been fixed and will be on its way back to me with a projected return of Just Before Christmas.

I’ve initiated the eventual closedown of my Twitter account (I won’t deactivate, but will merely have it in lockdown with the occasional ‘you can find me elsewhere’ post) and have started showing up on Threads and BlueSky with the commitment to being more vigilant about curating my feeds.

I haven’t obsessed over my music library — including these last few New Release Fridays — with the reminder that they’ll still be there when I get my PC back, and I don’t necessarily have to have it on drop date.

I’m still sliding into a few old distractions, but I’m doing so willingly, whether it’s watching a few goofy videos on YouTube or whatever, but I’m backing away at the first twitch of okay, that’s enough, time to get back to work. And that length of time is so much shorter than it used to be.

I’m actively not reading the internets during breaks at work, instead writing notes in a small notebook I carry around, or working through a few games in the crossword puzzle magazine I’d bought recently.

Today I tried an outtake of my future project Sheila Take a Bow that came out a hell of a lot better than I’d expected it to, so I don’t feel as tense about starting that at 750Words come the new year.

I’ve also chosen to to do a ‘soft restart’ of Queen Ophelia’s War because it’s better to attack these problem spots now instead of down the line, that way I’ll have less to worry about in the near future once it’s done and ready to see release.

So yeah, I’d like to think that things are positive for me right now while getting ready for 2024, so I’m happy about that.

Year End Review – Where I Am, Where I’m Not

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This past year has been a bit different than the past few on multiple levels. I went through a wave of not reading much of anything at all besides manga, graphic novels, and my own works in progress. I put considerable distance between myself and social media. I put a lot of projects aside to let myself focus on the one that needed the most attention. And of course I put my blogs on temporary hiatus.

Not that any of this was particularly a bad thing. In fact they were good things. I needed a mental and emotional vacation to put myself on stable ground once more. I wanted to give myself some time to relax without several looming deadlines, while simultaneously balancing them with the Day Job and its stable yet occasionally fluctuating schedule. I wanted to readjust my life and take it day to day instead of several events and things at once. And most of all, I wanted to get rid of all those distractions so I could remember what I needed to do to focus on said works in progress. Both Theadia and Queen Ophelia’s War are all but done rough-draftwise (they’re missing their endings but I know what to put there), so I disconnected from nearly everything else to focus solely on their revisions.

On a more personal level, I suppose I’d been needing to do a disconnect for some time, considering how many distractions I’d been dealing with. A lot of them were of my own making, whether they were of the ooh shiny or the don’t wanna variety, and given how easily I can fall into both, it was a matter of returning to the old mantra that has yet to prove me wrong: just shut the f*ck up and DO it already. It’s not the dislike of the project or the action, it’s the avoidance of getting started. Once I do start, it’s smooth sailing, simple as that. [Okay, maybe not that smooth and simple, but you get my drift.]

So to answer the entry’s title: where I am, (and) where I’m not?

I am writing and/or revising daily these days, and the output fluctuates. Sometimes it’s a full chapter and other times it’s a few paragraphs, and either one is just fine by me. I’ve been doing some personal writing on the 750Words site to help push me in the right direction. I am about a quarter of the way through revising Queen Ophelia’s War, which is not bad for about a month’s consistent work. I am planning on picking up Theadia once this one is done, or close to done. I am thinking of doing a bit of social media culling and reimagining in the new year. And I am happy where I am in my personal life and writing career!

I am not trying to push myself by doing too many things at once, which can sometimes lead to the return of the don’t wannas. I am not forcing myself to write on demand like I may have in the past, though I am also not sitting here doing nothing while waiting for inspiration to strike, either. I am not letting the Day Job interfere with my writing time, and I am quite proud of that fact. And I am not giving up writing any time soon.

There are other more personal things I am and am not doing, but that’s for another entry!

More on Rereading…and Transcribing

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All this rereading of my finished novels, WIPs and backburner projects has also kicked off more rereading, this time of my early longhand writing. Right now I’m going through some of my old chapbook poetry and lyrics, transcribing some of them and making personal notes. Why? Well, why not?

One of the reasons for doing this now is that I’m conducting a writing experiment. I’m assigning myself to work on something every day, without fail. I’m assigning myself simple things like doing some fun Walk in Silence (the book) work on 750Words and this poetry transcription. Easy writing that would take less than an hour out of my day. That was the impetus: I wanted to see if I could do a full month in a row. I started on June 1, kept on going, and I haven’t missed a day yet, so that’s nearly two months right there. Not bad at all, really. I see no reason why I should stop now.

I’ve mentioned before that I’d assigned myself a transcription project back in the summer of 1995 and into spring of 1996. I’d done it then as I’d finally had access to a computer and wanted a digital copy of my juvenilia for safe-keeping as well as for easier access. [There was also the fact that I’d done it as a distraction to avoid falling into a self-loathing spiral due to my failure at staying in Boston, but that’s another story.] That was the last time I’d done it to any considerable extent. This has become a bit of a problem in the present time, because a lot of that work was written using the MS Write program which no longer exists, and WRI files don’t translate well at all to Word or Notepad. I have the printouts…but I’d really like to have the digital versions once more.

Why am I doing this instead of writing novels, you ask? Well, I’m getting there. The rereads of the current work are preparing me for the novel projects. Refreshing my memory of the novel projects I’d like to work on next. And I still have a ways to go before I’m fully ready. It’s prep work.

It’s also interesting to read words I’ve written that I haven’t reread to any serious extent for nearly three decades. While there’s a lot in there at my most inexperienced, there are also smaller gems: unique ideas and impressive passages that merely needed the work of a much better writer. I had to start somewhere, and I wasn’t afraid to start at the bottom just like everyone else. I’m also finding elements of myself then that explain who I am now.

That’s what’s making it worthwhile: looking back in order to move forward.

Keeping Up

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I’ve actually been pretty good with the 750 Words these days! Once again, it’s mainly because I’m using it for a specific single purpose instead of trying to write something new every day. [In this case, I’m low-key doing a bit of ongoing personal writing tied in with a not-quite-trunked, still-on-the-backburner project, but y’all probably know what it is anyway.] I’m lucking out because the writing I’m doing for it is super easy, and I can hit the numbers I want in about twenty minutes, leaving me with a perfect amount of time for the blogging and work on MU4.

Speaking of MU4, the day after I posted Monday’s entry here, I came to the conclusion that the only way I’d be able to break this low-stakes mindset is to do a complete one-eighty. My first thought was: you want tension? I’ll give you some f***ing tension. I realized I couldn’t just build up to it: I had to make it happen, and make it happen now. An ultimate oh shit moment. And I ran with it.

And it worked! This was exactly the push I needed to get this novel back on track, to give it the boost it so desperately needed. I already know I’m going to need to do some heavy revision of the previous six chapters at some future point to make it work, but that’s par for the course anyway. The important thing here is that I’m right where I need to be again. Now all I have to do is keep it going!

Writing inspiration: John Lennon

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I picked up John Lennon’s Skywriting By Word of Mouth not that long after it came out in the mid-80s, probably sometime around the start of my junior year in high school. It was a collection of his post-Beatle writings mainly composed during his five-year hiatus in the late 70s. Some of it was autobiographical, but a considerable part of it (such as the above) was in his classic absurdist style, and I was immediately drawn to that. I was a kid that loved puns and wordplay, and I was immediately drawn to its stream of conscious humor and weirdness. I loved the idea of utterly random phrases woven together by shared words and homophones.

This in turn inspired me to write such things in a similar vein, my own versions written on the school computers (we had Apple IIcs in the computer lab, where I wrote this sort of stuff when I wasn’t playing Lemonade Stand or Jungle Hunt when I should have been doing homework). I think part of it was the need to find another creative avenue after multiple years stuck in the Infamous War Novel, and a need to just have fun. My version of this nonsense verse was heavy with music references (“sunshine in the shade and drink their lemonade when the sun shine my shoestring on my guitar”) and written under the nom de plume Johannes Brezhnev, with the title Oy Vay. [I don’t entirely remember why I latched onto that Yiddish phrase, though it may have been used in a then-recent Bloom County strip, of which I was a huge fan.]

I still have the original printouts! I haven’t read them in years, so I’m sure some of them have not aged very well at all — after all, this is part of my juvenilia pile — but every now and again I bring back that style just for funsies. When I’m a hundred or so words short doing my 750 Words and have nothing of import to write, I’ll bring the style back out (I now refer to them as “wibblies” because why not).

It’s nonsense verse and serves no purpose, but it’s a lot of fun to write!

Hmm.

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I’m feeling a bit bored with my blogs as of late. Don’t get me wrong, I love talking about writing here…but I’ve been repeating myself for a while now. I feel like I’ve been using the same subjects, hitting Random Shuffle and posting something not-quite-the-same-but-similar.

I need to shake things up a bit.

So.

I’ve decided I’m going to spend all of next month (and maybe July as well) going a bit off schedule. I’d like to share some of my outtakes, poetry, and other bits and bobs that I’ve written over the last several years. You’ve read more than enough about my thoughts on the process, why not finally share some of the end results?

Hope you enjoy.

Did I write this? Or someone else?

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There’s a classic story behind the Beatles’ song “Yesterday” in which the hit song pops into Paul McCartney’s head in a dream one night at Jane Asher’s place in Wimpole Street. Upon waking, he dashes to the family piano and writes the bulk of it that morning before he forgets it. Soon after, however, he is plagued by this weird feeling that he’d just nicked the entire song from somewhere else entirely — it was a melody so simple yet so brilliant, so classic that it’s an immediate standard, he was absolutely convinced his subconscious had heard it somewhere before. He kept it back for a while, noodling with it and occasionally asking his bandmates and other musicians if they recognized it, and finally after a few weeks, the Beatles laid it down as the final track of their Help! album. It would be released as a single in the US as one of the band’s most long-lasting, best-remembered, and most loved songs. (It would even hit a Guinness World Record in 1986 as the most covered song in the world.)

*

Meanwhile, I’ve been going through some of my old 750Words entries, and recently I came across a piece of microfiction that I do not remember writing at all. It’s dated the 7th of November, 2018, and it sounds nothing like what I normally write. It actually sounds better than anything I’ve ever done, especially for something that was quite possibly dashed off one afternoon while distracted from the Day Job. It’s a simple 867-word story but it’s tight and concise to a level I’m often not used to. There’s no meandering, no riffing, trying to figure it out as I go. It sounds extremely confident. And the subject matter is quite unlike me as well. It has no relation to any of my other projects. I don’t even know what inspired it, to tell the truth. If I’ve written anything similar before or since that time, I’m not yet aware of it.

When I reread it about two weeks ago, I was absolutely convinced I’d nicked it, or that I was deliberately copying someone else’s style. There’s no way I could have possibly come up with this on my own.

Now, however, it’s gotten me super excited to the point that I think I need to submit it somewhere. It’s also made me think I need to do a deeper dive into these 750Words sessions and see what else might be buried in there. I’ve done a lot of ‘dialogue-only’ microfiction over the years (the first one arrived around 2014, I believe) which I find a hell of a lot of fun to write. I’ve written shorts related to my longer work — I have two Christmas-themed stories set in the Bridgetown Trilogy universe that were written for fun, for instance — that in retrospect I think could be used for submission, or maybe collected and self-published. And I have years of poetry that’s never been released except on one of my blogs.

It also made me realize that maybe I should rethink how I look at my writing as a whole. Some days I’m so caught up in the process that I don’t always realize when I’m going off the deep end, or if I’m losing the plot entirely (pun intended). Other days I’m so blocked that I’m convinced I’m not blocked and just being lazy or distracted. Looking back on these outtakes makes me realize that I’ve written more, a lot more, than I think I have over the last twenty-plus years, and sometimes I don’t give it the full attention it needs. Instead I’ll be too focused on gotta get my daily words done today or I need to get this revision done before the end of the season that I don’t always realize what I’ve got in front of me, or what I’ve got stashed away.

When something like this pops up from a forgotten corner of my writing life, I can’t help but be happy to find it again. It reminds me that maybe I’m doing a lot better than I think I am.

Numbers

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I’ve always tried not to focus too much on hitting a specific word count, though it doesn’t always work out that way.

Back in my Belfry days, I’d assigned myself a daily word count of 500, if only to ensure that I wasn’t just turning on the computer, typing a paragraph, and spending the rest of the time playing FreeCell and faffing about with my music library. Once I got into the groove, however, the daily word count goal shifted to 1000. This was around the time I was writing The Persistence of Memories and I knew that with the schedule I had, I could hit it easily.

The downside to that run, which lasted until 2004 while writing The Balance of Light, was that hitting word count started becoming a sport. I’d been so excited by that incessant creative drive that I was pushing 1200 on a daily basis, even weekends. So when the Day Job was getting to me mentally and physically (not to mention a budding long-distance relationship that would soon change my life significantly), I was burning out. And that caused my productivity to suffer.

Nowadays I keep tabs on my word count, but I no longer see it as a sport. I see it more a series of small achievements, like the KonMari cleaning system: a little at a time adds up to quality work as a whole. I keep tabs on the numbers in a little calendar notebook, purely for reference and curiosity. Between the 750 Words site, revision work, and new words for new projects over the course of a day, it adds up. I could hit a few thousand pretty easily on any given day, but I rarely think about it.

For a while I used to take these numbers and crunch them on a spreadsheet, but I soon realized that the actual numbers didn’t interest me in that format. While it was interesting to see how productive I could get during various parts of the year, I’d also get frustrated because I knew I wouldn’t be able to hit the same numbers during a heavy fourth quarter. Besides, I’d completely forget to update the spreadsheet for months on end, so I figured…maybe recording metrics is not what’s needed here.

I just want to write, and enjoy the process. I love having a busy and extremely productive day, especially when I finish off a chapter or a major scene. Adding metrics to my productivity only causes me to think maybe I’m not doing enough. [The Former Day Job may also have something to do with that.] It’s not how my brain works, because numbers don’t mean all that much to me in that context. I’m more focused on schedules anyway. It’s why I have my whiteboard, why I have those ‘assignments’ I hit every day. It all adds up to the same productivity goal I want to hit.

I don’t focus on the solid numbers; I just focus on getting it done.

Starting off on a positive note

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Wishes for 2021 courtesy of a sidewalk artist in our neighborhood.

I’ve been doing pretty good for the last few months, even despite the pandemic, the news, and everything else. I’ve learned to establish my own personal boundaries and stick to them, and know when to push myself when needed. It’s by no means a perfect setup, but it’s what works for me and keeps me sane.

I suppose I could post what my 2021 plans are here, but to be honest, I don’t have too many right now. At least none that I think are worth posting on Day One, at any rate; some of them can wait until I’m good and ready. What I do plan on doing in 2021 is to be more outwardly positive. It’s still far too easy for me to let the latest news affect me, still too easy for me to fall into cynicism. If it tires me to hear myself go on about it, I imagine it would annoy the hell out of everyone else even more.

I didn’t make any major updates on the whiteboard schedule, instead keeping with the one I’d created when I started writing again some months ago. It still works well for me, so there’s no need to change it up just yet:

Sunday: blog post for Dreamwidth, music practice
Monday: 750 Words, art practice, blog post for Welcome to Bridgetown
Tuesday: 750 Words, art practice, blog post for Walk in Silence
Wednesday: 750 Words, art practice, music practice
Thursday: 750 Words, art practice, Walk in Silence
Friday: 750 Words, art practice, Welcome to Bridgetown
Saturday: poetry, music practice

Right now the “music practice” and “art practice” consist of mere basics: guitar and bass noodling, and simple storyboarding for my novels. At this point it’s more about consistency and getting used to the processes again, and not worrying too much about perfection. I’ve ignored those two for far too long, so it’s time for me to pick them up again.

As for the 750, I don’t have any specific projects I’m working on with them, so instead I’m using it to get back into the habit of ‘writing for fun’. It’s been a while since I opened up that site to just write microfiction or expand on vague ideas, none of which happen to relate to any major project I might be working on. Besides, I sometimes come up with neat ideas for future projects that way!

Anyway…it’s a new year, I’m starting off on a positive note, and I plan on keeping it that way as much as I can.

Forgotten outtakes

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The downside to using 750Words for my daily* writing exercise platform is that I don’t always get around to making offline copies of them. And I’ve been using the site for quite a few years, so I’m not entirely sure what I have out there right now.

[* It hasn’t actually been daily for a while now due to other projects and responsibilities that I’ve been working on. But hopefully I can get back into the habit soon enough.]

Last night I read a temporary project I did save was something I’d called The Hurleys. It was an idea in the Mendaihu Universe that took place in the current day instead of far into the future; its central characters were three adult siblings living in midwestern Massachusetts (go with what you know) who are some of the very few who are awakened to the fact that they’re connected to the Mendaihu. I didn’t get too far with it other than maybe five or six entries, but I gave it enough life and detail that it’s something I could possibly expand on.

I know I’ve written quite a few of these over the years I’ve used 750Words. My last three novels all grew out of these. And now I’m curious as to how many others are out there on my account, just waiting to be picked up and expanded upon. Thankfully it’s an easy enough thing to do, as the site keeps everything no matter how old, and I’m the only one who can access it.

Perhaps within the next month or so I’ll take a bit of time and do a deep dive. Maybe I’ll find my next novel idea!