ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

I have, for the last few hours, been musing about two movies I watched over the weekend. For those doing the maths: yes, that means I get up obscenely early. Yes, I wish it were otherwise. Screw the goddamn apnea. Anyway, the movies.The first, Comet, is a small movie that charts the relationship between two characters over a six-year period, with numerous cuts back-and-forth in time. The second, 28 Hotel Rooms, is a small movie that charts the relationship between a man and a woman having an affair in a succession of hotel rooms, never seeing them outside of that context. I picked them both for the actors involved and because the synopsis sounded vaguely interesting. And they were both…odd. Is odd the right word? I’m not sure. They’re not necessarily movies I enjoyed, but movies I enjoyed watching. Movies where I appreciated the attempt and found the performances engaging, but found myself distracted by other stuff they were doing. This is not surprising. Both films belong to a very specific film genre, where the narrative is driven by two characters talking to one another. The kind of movie one reviewer dubs scenes from a relationship in his review of Comet, while pointing out the essential risk: It takes a certain degree of cinematic courage (or madness) to tell a story that really only has two characters. If your leads don’t have chemistry; if we don’t believe their relationship; if we just find ONE of them unlikable—you’re in serious trouble. One could program an

2016 is looming, as new years tend to do. I’ve been sorting through the options of big, writing-adjacent goal-setting projects I’d be interested in doing to replace the mad dash of the 600k year. Doing nothing was pretty high on the list, but that’s not in my nature. I like having big meta-projects to focus on that are writing-adjacent, even if they’re basically insane and designed to fail. So I went through the list of things I really enjoyed and found useful in 2015 and came up with three words: word count data. I tracked daily word-count pretty obsessively over the last twelve months. And, when I didn’t track words, I tracked daily pages in a notebook, faithfully switching back-and-forth between different coloured pens so I’d be able to see what was written on which day. I’m still tracking my word-count now, updating my excel file after every writing session. First, because it’s become a habit. Second, because I like data. Data is fricken’ awesome. Data means that when I hit the first week of December and start wondering what the hell has gone wrong with my process, I can go back to previous years and see that December is always a goddamn awful month on the writing front. Data lets me know that I only tend to break the 500 words/day barrier about half the days of the month, on average. It lets me know that December is the month where I’m most likely to get a haircut, ’cause the increasing heat

It’s early. My eyes hurt. I have to go to the day-job today, when all I really want is to stay home and tinker with the opening scenes of the novel in progress. Maybe write the ending to one of the hundreds of unfinished short-stories on my hard-drive, that are waiting for me to figure out the endings. In short, welcome to cranky town. Population: me. I have it pretty good. There is a trend, among writers, to ignore the essential privilege of how they do what they do and how they came to do what they do as a semi-regular thing. This frequently means that readers will do the same, since they’re only seeing the process from the outside and filtering it through public statements. And since most writers are also readers, we can get some bat-shit crazy assumptions about the job. Case in point: a writer I know recently posted about his yearly word-count on Facebook. When someone pointed out it was rather a lot, my name came up as a comparison point on account of the fact that I wrote rather a lot myself this year. And yes, it was a joke, but I found myself sitting there thinking no, please, god, don’t do that. My writing life is not like your writing life. My process is not like yours, even if it looks that way on the outside. For one thing, the writer in question had kicked ass on the writing front. For another, there are all sorts of surface

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, last week was pants. Nothing went seriously wrong. Nothing went seriously right. It was just the kind of awful, no-good week that doesn’t really deserve that designation. The kind of week where you huddle up in your house, utterly certain that everything you do is wrong, that your body is falling apart and your mind is no good for anything and you indulge in the dream of no longer having to cope. The kind of week where lack of sleep kills your fine motor skills, and every attempt to rub your weary eyes is accompanied by a small vision of accidentally pressing your eyeball into the back of your skull, even if you know that’s relatively insane. The kind of week where you desperately try to hide the fact that you are a twitchy mess from the world. The kind of week where your focus is utter crap and you feel yourself getting behind on everything. Where writing consists of sitting at a computer for three hours and typing, maybe, two hundred words. By you, of course, I mean me. Last week was pants. This morning I am dancing. David Bowie. Lets Dance. Red shoes and all. David Bowie, Suffragette City. David Bowie, Jean Genie. The Bowie part is mandatory. Right up until I get started on the back catalogue of Roxy Music and Jane’s Addiction, anyway. My gut is all about the self-recrimination at the moment. It looks at the spreadsheet where