About Time

Hi, I’m known as Malfunction, and I think I have a problem. I haven’t written in earnest for a good few months. A writer who doesn’t write is just a person who scribbles sometimes. It’s been bugging me for a while, and I think I've finally figured out why the heck I’m not writing. Part of it has to do with life… but only part of it.

In the last few months, I found a new job, and the commuting time is significantly longer than I was used to. I’m now one of those fools who get to commute into town, so I've been swimming ever slower in traffic. In order to skip anything from 30-50 minutes off my commute, I've been trying to get up earlier. Each week, I've been pushing the alarm clock forward another 20 minutes until I’m getting up at “are-you-freaking-kidding-me?” o’clock. I am not a morning person at the best of times, but I’m going to make it work. Somehow. In addition I need to do what I’ll charitably call ‘homework’. It’s part of the learning experience for the new job. While I have understanding, knowledge and skill, I’m not what you’d call a productive member of my team right now. That weighs on me. I can’t leave the feeling at work. I’m not going forward as fast as I need to, so the way to deal with it is to hit it head-on. I haven’t done that so far, so that’s part of my new plan. Do my day job. It pays for everything else. Now it’s the everything else I have to think about. And I have a plan.

In order to do this, I’m now going to start up a writing schedule. Again.I've lost all ability to write. Again. Not going to lie, it's really frustrating. It’s even more annoying when I realise that the only reason that I have to start again is because I stop. I’m the one who stops. Now I’m the one who has to find a way to grind out 300 words a day every two days. That’s all I’m going to start with. That’s what I’m going to hold myself accountable for. After two weeks, I’ll bump that up to 300 words every day. In addition, I've put my writing time so it’s the first thing I’ll do when I get home. If I’m hungry regularly, I’ll have to find a way to have something ready for when I come in.

I’m not planning more than that. I want the habit back. I want that feeling back. I want that ability to scratch my itch, and I want that constant itch back. 45 minutes in the evenings. It isn’t a huge amount. I can do this. I really can. And that means you can too.

We can just… start.

Back again

Luckily, nobody noticed. On the internet, nobody can hear you scream. So I took a year out. There were a couple of reasons, and the whole time I was doing it, all I could think of is that I was giving myself yet another excuse not to write. It was hard. I still don’t know whether it was the right thing to do, but it’s done now.

I had finished my first book. After five drafts, it was as complete as it was going to get without me tweaking it to death. The next step was to get a book cover and get it up. I worked with one person, and then another, trying to come of up with a cover that made the right promises to the reader.

Actually, no, I didn’t. Let me take a step back. I do the language of graphics like King Kong does flower arranging. It’s possible, but you probably didn’t want to see the results. Not pretty. I was trying to find a way to show what the story was about, and I couldn’t do it. I had two tries. Both sets of people - friends who were great at art and drawing - who made covers for me were amazing. And then… real life happened. It’s a thing. The covers weren’t quite finished.

I realised that I needed to find a way to contract out creating my cover. I found out about a person who did developmental editing. A developmental editor? I didn’t even know they existed. It was yet another of the lessons I’d picked up over the last few of those lost months. What about book formatting? I could learn, sure. I need to learn. That isn’t a thing in doubt.

To cut this short, I needed a better job to pay for the incidentals that self-publishing a book (or even multiple books) entail. There wasn’t a sensible way for me to go forward. And that was when I made the conscious and extremely frustrating decision to give it up for a year and concentrate on getting a pay rise, no matter how. So - things happened. I pretty much went all out and somehow it paid off. I have a new role and I don’t need to rob from Peter to pay Paul as the saying goes.

Winter of my discontent

And now, this new year, I get to pick up where I left off. A little wiser, but without the writing habit that I built up over time. I get to do it all over again. This time, I have a plan (no, I am not a cylon). I aim to shoot for actually publishing two books a year this year and next. Then I will aim for putting out four books a year for the next four years. And after that, six books a year for the next six years. For me, who hasn’t even properly managed to get even one book out to the public, that’s a bit of an insane unhinged ambitious aim.

Even I have to back up and pause. I haven’t completed one, and I’m going to do two a year? Oh, and I’m not allowed to count the thing I already did. They’re already done.

The good news (I don’t have any way of scribing this to acceptably convey the amount of sarcasm) is that there are any number of unfinished stories that need to get got. I chose to do a follow-up to my existing story, in the equally implausible hope that people will want to buy and read the first story. If it takes off, then hoorah and all that jazz. If not, so be it. I will have completed the journey of my heroine.

For my second story, I chose something in a different genre that I started some time ago. Yes, I will cringe when I go back to read it and remember the ebb, flow, sentence structure and way of thinking that created it. Kinda looking forward to that bit of stress. I really am. I mean - to be able to pick up one of my older scribblings, wrangle the rest of the story out of the murky firmament that sits somewhere on the shores of purgatory, damnation and what-the-hell-was-I-thinking, and slap a coat of spit on it, only to slap it on its flank and send it onward is going to be… well, I was about to say the word fun. Now I begin to think about it, maybe it should be a phrase that describes being drowning by kissing the sea gods so well that your toes curl, and your hair spontaneously changes colour. Or color.

In any case, I thought the story was somewhere near three-fifths done. I haven’t gone back yet to be able to see it with older eyes, to review the skeleton of a plot that I pray hope think I must have done. Of course, I did. Definitely. This was obviously the right time to check, and the story is currently at 20 000 words. After tapping furiously on my calculator and trying to remember which one carries where, I think I need to do another 16 000.

Oh. Gee. That puts the story at something around 33 and a third thousand words, and that’s a perfect number for…  aww, dang. That’s like wonderfully straight in-between a short story and a novelette. A whutnow!? I mean, that’s like at that stage when you had a growth spurt over the summer, and all of a sudden the boys were looking at you and you start to bump into everything, which makes it even worse, because all the boys keep putting their eyes all over you and they’re stupid.

This is not a good size for a book. Even an ebook. I mean, heck.

So also, the plot I have is now going to be revised. It’s one story. There isn’t going to be a part two, or any other part, section or addendum, sequel, prequel. No more “-uels” on this thing.

Once again, I am filled with joy.

Right, let’s get to that planning then. I've scheduled doing all of it to be done and dusted in January.

That’s right, I’m baaaaack!

Itchy fingers

It’s half past I should be asleep already and my head is buzzing. I've got itchy fingers and I think I recognise the symptoms well enough to know that if I don’t at least do a little writing today, then this anti-tiredness factor is going to drive me insane.

I have the an unformed craving to write something new; to put my fingers across the keyboard and see what comes out of this fey restless mood. I usually like what comes, even if I can’t use it immediately. Some of my best stories have come from that. This time… This time, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to go back to the story I’m writing and see what happens if I concentrate on that with this mood.

Whether it works or not is not important - the way I figure it, I’m going to win either way, because I’m doing more writing than I have in the last couple of days, and I’m doing it in the right place for the right reasons. Because putting the words down is more important than whether I get the feeling of being in the rhythm of things, I’m not going to tell you if I succeed in going into the writing zone. That’s not the important part. The important part is that I’m taking this half-insomnaic (may have made that word up too) state and done something useful with it for once.

If I’m not using the spare minutes I have during the day to write, I’ll take the  minutes I could be grabbing some gamma/alpha/whatever sleep cycles.

I need to write now.

Almost bursting

This post has been a little while in coming. When I first wrote it, the starting sentence was “It’s been a little while since since I've written anything on here.” That’s how long it’s been, way back in the tail end of December.

I generally hate looking back. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of personal or ‘professional’ progression in 6 months, a year, two years. However - and this is a biggie for me - I want to look back in six months time and see that I've finished a second book, and I want to count the number of short stories and know that there was real movement from point A to point here-I-am.

*opens the curtain*

It’s been a little while since since I've written anything on here.

There have been some good reasons for not having done so, but none of them are the main reason… one acceptable reason is that I spent so long in editing mode, and then in ‘putter along’ mode that it feels like a bit of a revival to get back into actual writing mode. This is the part where the fingers hit the keyboard, and something gets put down. It may not be the best (it really isn’t right now), but it’s something. I need something. I need to have the passage of these days count for something when I look back and only see the failures. It may not be a supreme amount of words (it isn’t that either), but I did some words yesterday, and I’m in the middle of doing some today, and I’m going to do some tomorrow. I can’t go further than that because consistency is still a problem. What I’ve decided is that yesterday and today is not a pattern. Tomorrow is an acceptable thing that I can commit to, and after that, we shall see. I know pretty much kinda what I’m going to write, even if it isn’t bursting into my brain like a full-blown thing.

That’s cool though, it’s enough for me to get to another stage, which is the first tiny beginnings of a habit. Three days does not make a writing chain. Three days makes a barely-statistical bump in the Quest For A Good Habit. But it’s a start. Sometimes that’s exactly what it’s all about. Starting something and working on it. Sometimes it’s keeping going and doing your best, because when all’s said and done, that’s all you can do. There’ll be hard days and bad days, weird days and frustrating days, and days where you seriously wonder why you’re doing this writing stuff in the first place. It’s days like that when you just have to remember that at one time, this was fun. The part you’re on, or the thing you’re working on may not be fun at the moment. So what? The fun will come back. You will at some point finish and put it away, or polish it and review and work on it, and something will happen. You’ll find you like what you have. The more you work on creating your habit, the more you do this writing regularly thing, the better you’ll get at it. Like anything else.

And like most things, if you keep working on it, you will get better. Fraction by impossibly small fraction, you will get better. I don’t just say it, I believe it. I have to. Otherwise, why else would I want to keep doing this all the time, and for all the time I have?

Go write some stuff. It’s fun. Then do it again. And again.

First times

I wrote this a while ago, I think back in last April. I never realised that this had never been posted. So I thought - why not? This was both an odd and a familiar feeling when I started to read, and hopefully it will be good for me to look back when I finish up. Have I gotten any better at doing this whole regular writing thing in a year? Maybe. I'll read this again and decide later.

In case you were wondering, my money is on that I have possibly wasted a lot of time that I could have been a little more productive. As I said, I'll read and have a think on it. We shall see.

Kick it

For the last month (and some), I've been trying to focus on a single story that I started some time ago. I've mentioned it more than once, because at first it was just another story to be finished at some point, and then it was because I was having real trouble trying to get back into it.

So I mapped the bigger sections out. I managed to break it down into chapters. I had a list of what, who, when, where, that sort of thing, but I made sure I left enough… ambiguity, leeway, blank parts in the story so it would still like I was making a story and not painting by numbers. I can’t think of a better way to kill a story than to have everything pre-thought out and half scripted. It kills the joy.

Which is an odd thing to say, because I wasn’t finding very much joy in being able to write this idiot story. I’d ended on a particular part, and couldn’t find an intelligent way to move forward. It didn’t flow. I think I’ve started this next chapter maybe twenty different times, and still no dice. It wasn’t working. Maybe I should have decided to do something different, like pick the story up from a different place and backfill later. Maybe I should have written the parts that came easier and slowly fill in the gaps/chapters at a later time.

I didn’t do that. I kept pushing, kept trying new things and generally tried to bull through. It’s just words, gosh-darn it, and they should go down in a form that I like and suits with the story.

Finally it happened. I sweated, swore, bullied, threatened and ordered a bunch of semi-coherent words to get down on the page, and by Freya’s pigtails, they came! I did a quick word count to see how much I actually managed to barf out. Six-hundred-and-some words! I know it isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things, but they were six hundred (and some) words that hadn’t been there for the last however-long.

It isn’t a big win when you consider the story is currently at 19k words and feels like it isn’t anywhere close to being done. But it is a big win for me. I’ll take it.

Short changed

I've been working on a couple of short stories recently, as it seems a good way to fail fast and try out new things. I don’t know if short stories are actually publishable, but they’re good practise, they’re a great challenge and they spark my imagination in a way that I know is time limited. Short stories get into the myriad ideas on your mind, and allow you to put them down on paper where they’re locked down for the time being and out of your brain.

Short stories also perform another function for me: they get me writing. I don’t need to do many of them, but sometimes they are a great way to get something off my chest if I have some emotion buzzing around, or if I’m not feeling in the mood. Most importantly right now, they seem to prime me. My fingers are typing, and my ‘writing brain’ gets switched on, or gets back in the groove and I can go back to my main story.

The idea, and it seems to work more often than not, is that I’m kind of jump-starting my fingers-on-keyboard mode. I’ll get to the typing and not worry about getting it right the first time, or a perfect start, or finding the best way to segue from where I've left something (chapter/page/line) to where I want it to go.

I’m also working on a book series at the moment… at least the planning of one. It’s in a type of genre that I’m not used to doing, but it feels like it’s going to be a fun project and I intend for it to be pretty much ebook only.

In fact it isn’t just in one new genre for me, it’s in two genre’s. Why? Because I've written short stories on those genre’s and I think it’ll be fun to mix to two of them. The story won’t be a comedy or a pastiche. I’m really going for broke on these. The funnest thing is that I want them to be relatively quick reads. I want them to be fun for the reader, and I want them to be in the 45-50k range. So yeah, I have some specifics.

At this point in time, there isn’t a lot of meat on the bones. Heck, there isn’t even a lot of bone on the frame. But the genre means that I have to start from the end of the story and work backward to make sure everything fits in. That’s a challenge I haven’t encountered before. I’m looking forward to understanding how the series fit together (loosely planned at 6 books), and then getting down to things and working out how the first book fits together.

This is a completely backward way for me. I usually start with a premise, or most often find myself writing what seems to be some part of the middle of the book and I keep going until I stop and need to figure things out. The ‘why’, ‘what’ ‘who’ and a lot of the time the ‘who’ question pops up. It isn’t a logical way to proceed either. I am aware of this. Sometimes I’ll start with an actual beginning which is quite nice.

But starting from the end? That’s weird. It’s another skill that I know will come in useful on my other stories, but right now its necessary. The series will be way too much work and stress to try to do it any other way. There are a couple of more firsts involved with this, including that this is the first thing that I’ll have written something purely for the ebook audience. If it somehow gets picked up by a publisher, then so much the better, but then again I may win the lottery. It’s probably along the same odds of probability. I’m cool with that.

This isn’t about worrying about finding an agent and shopping around and dealing with contracts. Heck, for a first time author, if I even get a $5000 dollar advance, it would be a minor miracle. I figure that if the book does halfway ok, I’ll be doing ok on the first book and better on the second, etc etc. Nobody jumps into book 3 without checking out books 1 and 2 first. And if they like book 1 enough, they’ll probably give the second book a chance. Hopefully I’ll have learned enough by book 2 that it’ll be a better story. We’ll see how that goes.

I’m not too worried. I still have to finish the story I’m working on, and then I have to leave it alone for a while to be able to come back to it with fresh eyes. The way I figure, the difference between the book I’m working on and the series I’m planning will be enough of a change to feel like something completely now.

It will be something completely new. It will be stretching my wings. It will be longer than a series of short stories, but it won’t be some big horrid saga stretching millions of pages. I’m not ready to go through that again. I need to get better with using fewer words.

And like the Cylons, I have a plan. The first three books will be written, edited, proof-read, covered and everything else before I put the first one up. I want the first draft of book four done and in the bag before I even consider talking about book one getting out there. If I can get the first three ready, and if book 1 takes off, and if by some type of improbable set of cosmic circumstances people notice it, buy it, and want to read more whilst telling their friends, then I need to be ready to serve them more. That’s the plan.

'Gotta long way to go.