Writing about Whining and Whining about Writing

Part I

Where have all the writers gone? Gone to Facebook, every one. I think they've given up on the social aspect, the groupthink. Remember the camaraderie we used to share? The wit? Gone. A writer hooking up into Facebook and all its games and article-sharing is like a mathematician on a daily dose of sloe gin. Was blogging not as bad? Was it a shot of caffeine, or just thin hot chocolate? It did provide a challenge. The challenge was to produce some quality every few days. Few ever met it. Most everyone seems to have given up.

A few still write. Away from the crowd, as perhaps it should be done. NaNo should be that way. I will go to coffee shop meetups because I need social interaction, to feel a part of things. But writing is essentially solitary.

I'm guessing the bloggers decided either they would ride the Facebook to nowhere or would just get their writing done and quit talking about it. I hope so. Writing is all I want to do when it comes to brain-work.

I want NaNoWriMo to start and the rest of the world to end.

Part II

Writing is all I want to do when it comes to brain-work. I falter at my job (or so it feels sometimes) because it requires studying technical stuff and collaboration with other people on technical stuff. But when I light the fires under my brain it doesn't lean that way. No, it wanders off in search of dreams to mold, and characters to build, and vibrant language. It's a daily chore to switch the train over onto the right track and chug it up to speed. Today, that didn't happen. All my train did was crawl out of the shed, take a slow turn around the yard, and idle at the back edge, leaking steam.

And it's no secret and I don't care who knows it. My old brain is just plain tired of trying to fit. That engine wants to get lifted out of the old iron frame that hauls freight around on rails and settle into something light and buoyant and start tracing words and music into the ripples of a trackless sea.

This is a bad attitude. I want my boys to get through college without any financial hitches and so crank away, crank away, crank away is what I need to do just like everyone else. Just like everyone else. It's funny: Part of me is still the youngest child who thinks he is special and unique and can get away with relative poverty because no one needs to depend on him. The major portion is of course a man engaged with the world in some productive way who knows we are all in the same boat together and thus holds the deliberately unproductive (this includes lazy and/or under-talented writers) in low esteem. This tension won't go away.

And yet, still I want NaNoWriMo to start and the rest of the world to end. Except for music. Music can stay. And food. Music and food and warm autumn sunsets. The rest of it, begone. Begone, I say! People with nice smiles can stay. Nice people, food, music, sunsets, and the sound of rain or of a distant train passing. All that can stay. But the rest of it: End! Begone. We gots writing to do, doesn't we?

Okay. Next?

Didn't get much done yesterday and there's way too much to do to mess with this anymore. So this morning I madly wrote vaguely related test paragraphs and lots of notes. Since it turned into one of those adventures where all the little clues finally make sense at the very end, it needs more careful plotting and less ad hoc. Hence the note-writing. Of course, no amount of note-writing and fifth-quarter revisiting can change the fact it's an ad hoc hack through and through but that doesn't matter now. 'Tis the season to stress over a lot of other stuff and I can't wait any longer to get started. Wee hoo hah!

47k

For the first time all month I'm actually ahead of the linear wordcount to 50k. Time to break and leave the coffee shop and cross town and see how the undefeated high school football team is doing in its playoff game up the street from our house. Yippee! Maybe I'll buy me a hamburger. Hot dawg!

F O R D*

This cost me a few thousand words.


* -
Fix Or Repair Daily
Found On Road Dead
Fucked Over Rated Dog

Take your pick.

Stuff to Post While I Gear Up To Write Some More II

An amplified voice and roaring cheers hit the glass. I open the window to let them in. The football game everyone but me has gone to is underway. Cheers and whistles, game calls, the band brass drifting over trees and houses. Somewhere a dog barks, and in between a motorcycle goes buzzing by. I love the sounds of America.

We built our house in an open lot in the middle of the block, far from the roads but just an almond orchard away from the high school. The location has served us very well. We can walk up to the school for meetings and events (the children always drive). Parents like letting their kids stay here, because we're so near the school. Post-game fireworks can be watched from our driveway.

The football team went 10-0 and is now in Sac-Joaquin Section Division III playoffs against a team from way down in Vallejo, over an hour's drive. No idea how it's going. Tempted to take my Burning Man bike and turn all the colorful lights on and ride up to see. All the cool kids are up there.

That's a difference from my hometown. Not that I knew the cool kids, or even who they were, but I never heard about them going to the football games. I only did when we had a pep band. That was fun. We were good, too. At an away game once we were so dismissive of the opposing band the eight of us marched around to their side of the field and played the Mickey Mouse theme song. Got in trouble for that.

* * *

My kid Skzx started a club at school. It's all about camping. Tomorrow early they're going to Dillon Beach for a couple nights. Parents too. The 19 year old, Sk8r, and I will have the house to ourselves. Might not see each other much, or at all.

I've got four days' writing to catch up on. That means six to do -- ten thousand words -- by Sunday. I'm not a fast writer. I don't want to spend the whole damn weekend at it. But a goal is a goal and frankly, my kids will take me for a weenie if I don't make it.

* * *

Another writing place. My other grandfather's old desk. Backed up to the headboard (bed's not against any walls). Can see the TV from there, and open a curtain to the outside, and have tea and ice cream, and stack books. Doesn't work out as well as the typewriter table upstairs.


Progress chart, kind of showing my behindness.

Stuff to Post While I Gear Up To Write Some More

High keening and whining sounds from outside. I open the window. It's from down in the creek bed, along with yip yip yips and a rough dysphonius barking. The gang is passing through. I wonder what ever became of our beautiful cat Jet, Lucky's mother, who walked away one year. Used to see her hiding in the weeds now and then.

* * *

I was sitting comfortably in the men's room today when someone dashed into the next stall and made unhappy sounds while dumping about three buckets' worth of leftovers into the toilet. And then did it again. Didn't bother me at all. I am so glad I raised children.

* * *

One of my writing locations.

The table is my fave. It was my grandfather's typewriter table. He kept it out in his office when he was foreman on a farm during the Depression. Before the crash he was a newspaperman -- maybe that's where he got it, I don't know.


Zooming in on the nifty sticker a NaNoWriMo Municipal Liaison gave me ...

21825

Not knowing how I managed to write over 2.5k today. Worked until 6:30, went to a coffee shop meetup close by, gurgled my empty tummy with a frapp, typed in concert with other typers. Heard via cell phone our high school was whomping butt in their last game (closed the reg. football season 10-0). Went home, wrote some more, hot tub, wrote again. Stopped when I surpassed yesterday's goal (50k*13/30=21666), not a bad start to the weekend. 'Cept it's to be a busy weekend, may not get aheader. Whatev. The story grows tendrils within itself, gels, will become a living thing if not let starve too soon or too long.

15004

An all-day slog. Some of it was enjoyable creativity, some of it just work. Sometimes you get to paint the model, sometimes you have to work on the background. Twice this weekend I went to meet other afflicted souls at local coffee shops, group meetings arranged through the website forum. Shared tables, drank mocha (my fave cause I've no pretension to maturity), made humorous cracks as appropriate. They were nice folks and to be in the company of people typing madly away was helpful for my focus and attention issues. All right, my shitty discipline, if you don't like me trying to sound all clinical about it.

How goes it? The plot thickens. It's terrible because I've neither read about nor experienced the situation I'm creating, but so what. A more realistic cast can be cast in when folded and refried later. Meanwhile I am exactly on schedule, which means I'll be way behind by the weekend. Par for the course.

So Then What

I haven't had a lot of time but that isn't really my excuse for falling behind. I was wondering why I am so unable to go forward and then suddenly I realized: My story idea, the thing I'm trying to write, bores me. To death. I'm just not interested. So I guess the trick is to make a change so that I get interested. Nothing comes to mind. (Reading bores me too. Everything does. I know the problem but this blog is not the place for explicating the truth.)

NaNoMoment 7279

At 7,279 I was about at about 40% through yesterday's pace when I fled for bed. Tonight is opening night for each of my sons, in different theaters in different towns. So we are going to one tonight and the other tomorrow. I expect to be significantly behind the pace by the time Saturday affords me the chance to catch up. Such is this crazy thing.

Plotwise I have the big picture but must fill it in with lots of little pictures. I am so out of practice and mentally distracted by work that I have a hard time picturing it. That makes it a struggle. My thought processes are visual. I'm not good at remembering intangibles or processes or flows of relationship from my life such that I can inform fiction. All I really have to work with is pictures. Probably my outlet should be music and video rather than writing, I don't know. Not an acceptable excuse this month.

Was all excited when a good subplot occurred to me with which I could move things forward. Shortly I realized this highlighted the fact I never studied literature, else I wouldn't have felt like I thought of it myself. Also I would have thought of it sooner and more often.

No time to read. I feel as though I should have read a LOT more books in my life. I don't even have a favorite author. The few I've read enough to form an opinion of all have some major flaw or other, and I don't remember the rest.

When you write, can you get lost in it, and then translate that alternate reality through your fingers, across the screen and into storage? When I was a child, writing gave me the opportunity to get lost in fantasy. For awhile I felt if I tried hard enough, my fantasy world would become more real than the world I wanted to escape. So I wrote and wrote and wrote. It didn't work: reality remained real. Eventually I had to make concessions to reality -- dropped in and out of college, had jobs, started getting acquainted with other human beings -- and over time lost that ability to get lost in the fantasy.

But good writers probably don't get lost in it either. It's a matter of marshaling mental resources and discipline and productivity -- like a job. But a job flexible and free, at least, for the luckier ones.

So this struggle with writing productively without being able to get lost in it is part of the growth needed to become a writer. I get that. I get that the inability to escape is inescapable.

But does that have to make it so hard? :-)

PuDaNaNoDiMo II

Finally. And I’m going to do this EVER DAY for a MONTH? Ack.

I’ll need to get more sleep. We partied with our Burn buds last night and got home about five PDT. Kind of appreciated the extra hour when I woke up in PST. Now it’s all a blur of rain and multicolored flame and cookies and beer and whisky and gin and loud music and inappropriate costumes and walking on stilts and hot chicks french-kissing and fireside guitar-playing and naked people in a hot tub. Not just another night on the left coast, though it sounds like it, huh. [3,362]

PuDaNaNoDiMo

It's explained elsewhere. I won't be doing the Da part.

So, like, I've written zero today. Actually whining about it to the whole wide web rather than just to everyone within hearing is intended to force my motor to start. I had no ideas but I did do something interesting this year and decided what the hell, I'll just write about that but change the names. So now I'm embarking on a sort of Lethal Attraction at Burning Man kind of idea. It shouldn't be impossible, either in the twelfth draft or in the hands of a competent writer, to give Black Rock City a sinister cast. It is, after all, dark and full of hiding places and absolutely built out of anonymity. But the story can't get dark for a long time. Right now I'm just sort of remembering it in fictional form, and already I've noticed how cleverly my conversations reveal the tensions between the middle-aged protagonist and his wife. I'm inventive like that. :P

Thing that stops me is, fictionalizing memory is fine, but what pulls the reader? What's the point of Scene II, if I've already established who's who in Scene I? What's going to happen, what little snippet of information, that will be enormously important later, is going to be revealed while banging the virgin gong at the gate? And now

*slap* *slap*

Wake up, you fool! It's National Novel Writing Month! You don't try to write well! You don't waste any time having it make sense! Just write the fucking thing!

But

*slap*

1717

I find it a total struggle: Writing is so often like pulling teeth. Even here on Day Number One, when a million people are streaming words by the thousand, far from their mid-month wall, I find myself stuck. Stopped. I wonder if it's the calcification of my imagination, which is neither so flexible nor so fearless as it used to be; or maybe I'm just distracted by aspects of life that can't yet be dealt with. Whatever: It's nothing a million other people don't deal with, even if we add the inevitable doubts, doubts inspired by the fact that the back of my mind continues to arrange Beatles songs for a capella quartet, that I'm annoyed at how ramshackle I've let the chicken coop become, that now could be a really good time to catch up on work. And not even those doubts about what I really should spend my time doing, what was I really put on this Earth to do, set me apart from any other writer. No indeed. Work ethic, focus, discipline, fundamental ability -- these may set me apart, but I know the doubts do not.

One Point Two Five Percent

I thought about going to a kickoff party and thought about not going, and going, and not going, and didn't go because my Miz started watching a scary movie on FX and I couldn't leave her like that in a big empty house and anyway I wanted to see how it turned out. I didn't know anyone at the party I didn't go to. Someone threw his house open to the internet in honor of NaNoWriMo and I thought, why not, maybe it would be inspiring. Or an off the cuff social exercise. Something. But moot, now.

At midnight my son and I were browsing university web sites but then he went to bed and I looked at my laptop and it looked at me and we agreed I hadn't given any serious thought at all to this thing. But that doesn't really matter. In most novels you just follow someone around doing their life and things happen and because it's a novel they are novel things and off you go. So I just did a little of that and can now go to bed where I freaking belong. [625]

p.s. - The blue widget is supposed to have my NaNo username where it says "Participant" and my wordcount where it says "0". Web technology bah.

Everlasting Fame

NaNoWriMo compelled me to ...

Read the rest of my gripping NaNoWriMo True-Life Tale!

Happy Thanksgiving and all that

A beautiful day outside, bright and cool, leaves aflame. Very quiet. No one coming but my mom, who has to drive up from the Bay Area and is probably stuck in traffic right now. Wasn't supposed to be this quiet.

Mother in law lives in Idaho, was going to come down and bring her ten-year-old grandson. We were going to take him to the train museum and stuff, really looking forward to it. But when she found that out, and that we needed to go through some stuff she left in our closet, she freaked. Couldn't handle being faced with reminders of her husband, who died over five years ago. Yelled and screamed. Hung up and canceled the plane tickets. So my sons' only first cousin doesn't get to come visit after all.

The kid's dad can't stand her either, so she'll spend the day by herself. Kid'll go off with his mom's family and have a good day. Down here, just my mom, not that other one, so lots of peace and quiet. Looking forward to it.

Meanwhile I tie myself to the desktop, trying to finish the video, and write while the video editing software and the old computer crank slowly, slo-o-owly away. I'm nine days behind in NaNo, but that doesn't mean I quit. There's a still a story to write, a story I need to learn how to write, what viewpoints to use for what part of the story, what revelations of fact and motive, etc. So. A good day for all that.

A good day to all!

The Book Stops Here

Not quite yet. But Friday I was three days behind with no chance to work on it, and with Thanksgiving looming I knew I needed to work double-time over the weekend so I could get back on track. Two to three thousand words per day was about what I needed to do. Two to three thousand words each day exploring an off-the-cuff mystery story that, against all odds, was starting to gel. Not necessarily on paper, but in my mind. Characters evolved, story elements and twists emerged, alternate beginnings were envisioned, solutions came to mind for certain problems with plotting that were caused by the need to be realistic, etc. etc. The value of the exercise is included in these discoveries. All I had to do was sit my ass down and write more and write it faster.

So I went backpacking on Angel Island.

Now I'm six days behind with way too much to do in real life to worry about catching up. Not done writing, though. Too much cool stuff thought of to just let it lie, arbitrary internet deadlines or no. The hard part will be continuing it in January.

Angel Island is a national treasure. If it hadn't been turned into a military reservation during the Civil War (when Confederate ships coming in and bottling up the flow of gold were a real worry), and then kept by the Army for various reasons until recent times, it would not now be a wildlife preserve but instead some sort of enclave for the wealthy. Not that there's anything wrong with that but I like it as it is. The views of San Francisco, of the ocean seen through the Golden Gate and its Bridge, of mountainous Marin County, of Richmond, Berkeley and Oakland, of the Bay Bridge, of Alcatraz, they are all unparalleled. You can even see the neighborhood I grew up in if you have some good binoculars (which I didn't).

Hiking, Bay Area style (no, not us!)



A view from the top (Mt. Tam etc.)



Easy camping, long-closed Fort MacDowell and the Bay down beyond



Ghost buildings, a century old





The old Nike base (and yes, I have been down through that hatch, but that is rather another story ... )



A nice view from the ferry, the top of a Golden Gate Bridge tower just visible in the fog



Me and the real reason I do this stuff (or almost anything, really)

Comforting Snippet

If you are arrested in China, the U.S. Embassy is a friend indeed.

In cases of lengthy incarceration, we visit American prisoners at least every 30 to 60 days to ensure that American citizens receive treatment no worse than that accorded citizens of the PRC. -- U.S. Consulate Website

Well! No worries, then.

Trending Down

Not to bitch or anything, but there's a lot to do and probably I won't get back into a reasonably productive groove until next week sometime. Now, I've managed to squeak along. And now that I've hinted at doing worse I'll probably actually do better. Still, if you extrapolate from this, I'm going to have a lot of catching up to do the week I find out who gets laid off and who doesn't. [18,856]

I love the smell of jet fuel in the morning

Smells like … a long day. It’s dark and cold at five thirty in the morning, the stars softened by mist and the air redolent of the fuel trickling through an idling set of jet turbines. It still amazes me that it costs the company less to lease an Embraer 135 and run it back and forth than to pay for as many commercial air tickets and rented cars as the people here in this little private terminal would otherwise need to use. Probably there are additional considerations, large ones, strategic matters I can’t grasp, but whatever. I love this stuff. Meanwhile, the WIP whips along painfully, this scene and that aborted for lack of any real fire. That may be a typical symptom of the second week, so I’ll just keep trying. Somehow, I’m still only about a day behind, and that’s pretty good. [16,870]