Process Notes

One day I’ll make things easy on myself…

PETERMBALL Works in Progress ,

Today I’m having a running conversation with my brain where I say “time to work now, buddy” and the brain says “dude, you’ve taken industrial strength antihistamines, why don’t you just sod off and let me sleep, yeah?” Fortunately I once spent three or four years living with a girlfriend who had cats, so I know exactly how well I can work while living on industrial strength antihistamines. The brain gets no free passes, there will be work.

The real problem, of course, has nothing to do with the brain-clouding chemicals that are currently allowing me to cohabitate with two felines without, you know, dying. No, the real problem is that rewriting the opening of Black Candyis hard, and that I’ve made a hash of it several times prior to this. Part of it is the world-building, since I’m trying to jam together a bunch of concepts that don’t quite fit together, and the rest is a familiar problem.

One of these days I will learn: not everything I write needs a tangled back-story. One day I may even introduce a character to someone they don’t know.

Almost Done

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , ,

I’ve been writing a sequel to Horn, one way or another, since February 6 of 2009. I suspect I’d started even earlier than that with ideas scribbled down in notebooks and such, but Feb 6 is the first time it migrated to a computer file that’s usually the start of my writing process. Since then I’ve voluntarily scrapped an entire novella draft, rewritten the plan for how I thought a series of Miriam Aster books should progress, and written a second novella to fit the new concept that was about 75% longer than projected.

Some days I dispaired that I’d ever actually see the end of the process – what started as twenty-thousand words about Aster and a talking cat ended up in a very different place. Trying to get there scared the shit out of me more than once; I have a comfort zone as a writer, and this was well outside it.

But it appears it’s very close to being done. I came home from my D&D game tonight to an e-mail containing edits from TPP and they contain the phrase “mostly line edits with a few comments.” After months of stressing over plot holes and backstory-wrangling, those words are freakin’ magical. It means at some point in the future I can stop thinking about the novella and it can go off and be a book. The curse of seeing this news at eleven o’clock at night is that there’s no-one to call and say “holy freaking shit, its almost done,” so I’ll say it here instead:

Holy freakin’ shit, it’s almost done.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to drink a glass of scotch and collapse into the most relaxing night of sleep I’ll have had since…I dunno…probably January.

State of Play

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , ,

Last night I braved the outside world and joined Trent Jamieson and Chris Lynch to talk about SF as part of the QUT Informational Professionals Alumni Chapter’s Bookclub, which was an enormous amount of fun given the books we were discussing (the fact that I’m a nerdy bibliophile who rather enjoys chatting about books didn’t hurt, nor did the fact that Trent and Chris are lovely blokes to share a panel with).

Today I started tackling May’s to-do list from hell. It’s a long list, and its terrible, and there were at least two things on there with a deadline of “May 31st”. The first of these is done (short story submission, although given the length my stories are when I’m finishing them these days they may not deserve the title short); the second of these is daunting (going through the fourth rewrite of Cold Cases in preparation for May 31st, when I hand it back to TPP). The rest of the list has a little more leeway when it comes to getting things done, but it’s still extensive and needs some time focused on it. To that end, I’m experimenting with kitchen timers.

Now I’ve used kitchen timers a lot in in the past, but usually as a short-term “I’m going to spend the next fifteen minutes/half-hour/hour writing” kind of measure. This week I’m going to be pushing that out a little – at the beginning of the day I put nine hours on the counter and set it counting down, pausing it every time I stepped away from the computer or stopped working on jobs attached to the to-do list. The goal is to ensure I spend a solid days work in on the writing-and-productive-activities* front, which is something I tend to be bad at unless I’m in a regular routine, and eventually clock up a sixty-hour writing week.

Of course, there are flaws to this plan. I mean, I started today around 11 am and I’ve still got four and a half hours left to clock up before I go to sleep, but I figure I’ll get better at it as the week goes on.

*translate “productive activities” as “find paid work,” since I really do need to find a job in the very near future.