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Novella Diary, Claw, Day Three

PETERMBALL Works in Progress May 3, 2013All Things Aster, Claw, Process Notes, Word Counting, Writing Diary

The big plan for today: finish Chapter One and nail the sucker down. This’ll mean a lot of focus on the final scene in the chapter, plus some whole-of-chapter revision once that’s done to knock off the worst of the rough edges, take out the narrative tics that creep in (my characters spend a lot of time shrugging), and plug in any missing sensory/setting information.

This is so not the way you’re meant to write, according to all the conventional wisdom, but my process is what it is. I’ve learned the hard way, over the years, that the words-at-any-cost, you-can-edit-later isn’t the best approach for me. I do not edit well. Once I stop working on a draft, I cease carrying the story around in my head.

I remember seeing an old interview with Douglas Adams where he talked about the creation of the random improbability drive, which came about based on the judo principle on using an attacker’s momentum against them. After writing himself into a corner where every solution seemed improbable, he came up with a solution that attacked that head-on.

I can respect the elegance of that, and I keep looking at it as the perfect metaphor for the way this novella wants to start. *Everything* that I found vaguely frightening has found its way in. Anything I found myself struggling with has become the central focus. It may work. It may not. I won’t know that ’til I finish at the end of the month and give the manuscript out to some beta-readers.

Session 3.1 (9:11 PM – 9:37 AM)
Word Count: 581

Not a typo. Despite my best intentions, today has been one lazy-ass day on the writing front. Our neighbours were being somewhat raucous last night, so I stayed up later than normal. Which meant I more-or-less ignored the alarm and didn’t end up writing before I did a couple of hours of work-from-home stuff for the day-job (my trade-off, in general, for starting a half-hour later on the days I go into office).

My writing routine is like a house of cards that’s waiting to fall down if the smallest thing goes wrong. If I don’t write early in the day, even if it’s just a handful of words, things just keep distracting me. Today I got distracted by sourdough donuts, thinking about last night’s Mutants and Masterminds game, and re-reading my flatmate’s run of Invincible comics (I meant to read three and stop; I failed).

In some ways, tracking the word counts for this project has made my not-writing tendency even worse. Knowing I can cram a lot of words into twenty or thirty minutes only makes it easier to delay getting to the keyboard.

On the other hand, the same knowledge also made it easier to drag myself over to Odin the Desktop. Even if I’m revising plans and acknowledging the first chapter won’t get done: scenes have started stretching on me, getting longer as the characters settle into the story.

Plus, when I get to the end of Chapter One, somebody is going to die. I’m kinda…savouring that knowledge a little.

Session 3.2 (10:20 PM – 10:40)
Word Count: 260

Two scenes down for the first chapter, which is getting kinda long at this point. Once scene left to right, so I’m giving myself an early mark and coming at it fresh tomorrow. There’s also some minor editing/addition to things I’ve written earlier, which will probably mean that the total Manuscript Word Count below will cease being an exact match to things listed in the diary.

Session 3.3 (10:45 – 10:49)
Word Count: 158

Started typing this entry up. Realised I was only a couple of hundred words from achieving my 1k a day goal. Figured, what the hell, and wrote the opening of the next scene. Chapter is now, officially, running slightly longer than I’d intended.

Total Daily Writing Time: 50 minutes
Daily Word Count Total: 999

Total Manuscript Writing Time: 4 hours, 14 minutes
Total Manuscript Word Count: 3,615

Novella Diary, Claw, Day Two

PETERMBALL Works in Progress May 2, 2013All Things Aster, Claw, Process Notes, Word Counting, Writing Diary

Here is my morning routine on days that I am heading to the day-job: the alarm goes off at 7:00 AM. I check my email and social media on my phone, go through my morning ablutions, shower, and breakfast. Ordinarily I’m front of a writing computer by 8:00 AM, which gives me an hour of writing time before I have to jump in the car and drive to the State Library of Queensland where the QWC offices are housed.

I like this routine. Kicking the day off with writing – particularly if that’s not what I’m going to be doing for the majority of my day – is good for my psyche.

Today is not a day-job day, so that routine goes out the window. Its 7:46 AM when I sat down to start writing this and I am not yet out of bed. The odds of me being at the non-internet computer by 8:00 AM are pretty slim. Partially this is ’cause today isn’t actually a full-fledged non-work day – it’s a TOIL day, picked up as a result of working a lot of weekends in the last few weeks. My body-clock is all confused. I feel like I should be heading for work, and it feels sinfully luxurious to hang out in bed.

There are not many things in my life that qualify as sinfully luxurious, so I indulge them when I can.

Session 2.1 (9:00 AM – 9:23 AM)
Word count: 474

Late start. Had I not been reporting here, it probably would have been even later, as the cleaner has just arrived and my first instinct is *get the hell out of the house*. Instead I’ve locked myself in the study with Shift Silas the Laptop and Odin the Internet Free Desktop and my phone.

The first thing I did when I sat down at Odin to start work? Tried to open a web-browser.

I’m telling you, that shit is Pavlovian for me.

More dialogue. More set-up. Wrote my way into a scene beat and hit pause, ’cause I need to figure out what happens next. This is traditionally the point where I’d go get a coffee and think things through, or check email. And so we see the pattern forming: Twenty minute writing bursts.

Session 2.2 (11:25 AM – 11:53 AM)
Word count: 444

So, the things that take place between writing? Trip to the shops to pick up some dry-cleaning (my jacket came back from Conflux smelling suspiciously like a burrito); breakfast kebab (I forgot to eat); groceries; some quality time on the internet, jawing with people via facebook and twitter; checking in on some wrestling forums, ’cause I’m a big ol’ wrestling nerd; Making note of a few things I really need to get done today and tomorrow, including between-workshop notes for Year of the Author Platform at QWC and some minor edits to the Six Lies, One Truth presentation about getting published that I’m delivering at a library on Saturday.

Found myself looping back this session, messing with the older scene. Adding in a character who needs to be there, ’cause I realised something important about the books plot, and it doesn’t work unless the character is there. A lot of the stuff I’ve written prior to this now becomes part of Chapter Two.

Session 2.3 (2:11 PM – 2:50 PM)
Word Count: 660

Two hours away from the computer, where I did three things: read bits of a Cliff Hardy novel by Peter Corris (after something like thirty-odd Hardy novels, Corris is the fucking king of dropping back-story seamlessly into the narrative and I’m looking at his work to figure out how he does it); watched Kiss of Death staring Victor Mature; paced around the house while I worked out the shape of the first chapter a little more.

I managed a comparatively big burst of wordage/focus this time round, which I attribute to two things. First, I really enjoy writing scenes full of people attempting to flirt in awkward ways, and we’ve hit the point of the chapter where that happens (for certain values of awkward and flirting). Secondly, I know the end-point of the chapter now, and the major beats that will lead to it, so it’s easier to get down the framework.

In theory, I have cleared my 1,000 words/day goal for May by a couple of hundred words. In practice, I’ll be rather surprised if this comes in at 30,000 words exactly, so it’s not like this is advantageous.

Signing off now to go watch a bunch of Ben 10 episodes and do some prep work ahead of running tonight’s Mutants and Masterminds game (first game in weeks; very excited). May or may not return for another writing stint once the game is done.

Total Daily Writing Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Daily Word Count Total: 1,578

Total Manuscript Writing Time: 3 hours, 24 minutes
Total Manuscript Word Count: 2,613

Sunday

PETERMBALL Journal, Works in Progress July 24, 2011All Things Aster, Claw, Modern technology hates me, Random acts of Ranting, Wearing my rant pants, writing

It’s generally a bad sign when the cleanest room in my flat is the study, but it appears I’ve reached that point. I predict a day of epic tidying and cleaning in my future, but right now I’ll settle for getting the washing up done and putting away the clean laundry.

That’s next hour’s problem, though. Right now there is coffee and bloggery and answering some emails. Possibly some toast while I try to work out whether the toaster is really broken, or just bitching about the cold. It feels like that kind of afternoon.

Every now and then I come across people who really, really like the idea of creativity. It drives me crazy. Otherwise ordinary conversations are derailed by statements like “writing? Wow, it must be nice to be so creative” or “I’m a writer and creativity is one of my strengths,” mostly because I then froth at the mouth and stomp around until someone gives me a cup of tea and tells me to have a lie down.

Creativity is one of the most ill-defined words in our culture, with a myriad of different meanings that all rely on understanding the context in which it’s used. And unlike other context-driven words – like, say, love – you can never be entirely sure which context people are using when they deploy creativity. It’s too bound up in myths about muses and inspiration and the idea that somehow creativity is automatically a transcendent thing.

Near as I can tell, creativity is just training yourself to see the connections between things sooner than other people. Or doing it naturally, in an “inspiration” driven rush, and never questioning how it is you just did what you did.

Everything after that is process, actually sitting down and making things, and once you’re at that point there’s very little creativity can do to help you.

Toast with ginger marmalade for breakfast, confirming that the toaster is either on its last legs or simply unable to cope with winter. Even turned up to its highest setting, the best it seems to manage is “lightly browned”.

It seems to be the month for appliances going wrong around these parts. My mobile phone is starting to develop some of those hiccups that occur when you’ve owned a mobile phone for a a while. Not enough to be unusable, but enough to be occasionally annoying.

Here is a thing I’ve discovered this week: the version of Claw in my head no longer resembles the (unfinished) draft version of Claw I was writing before my dad’s illness last year.

This isn’t a huge surprise. The news of my dad’s heart attack basically hit like a depth charge to the subconscious, blowing apart the various stories and projects under construction, and it’s only recently that I’ve had the brain-space to go back and start trying to fit things together. But the opening scene for Claw that I wrote this week looks more like one of the closing scenes I’d planned for the first draft, a couple of sub-plots have been dropped away, and the book seems to be drifting towards the darker side again.

Still not sure whether it has a happy ending or not. I’m not even sure if the new beginning is right, but it feels more like the beginning of the book than the older one did.

And it’s becoming a fun book to write again, which is a good sign because, for a while there, I thought it was unlikely I’d ever find Aster stories fun to write again. At some point tomorrow I’m going to get to the first corpse in the book, and I’m unexpected excited about figuring out how to put the scene together.