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.

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.

Fail fast

I’m going to try something new. More precisely, I’m going to try something that’s new to me, in the hopes it’ll prove worthwhile; it’s my version of Failing Fast.

I’m not a fast typer, I usually find myself reaching for the right word, or retyping a bit of sentence more than once because it’s not quite right. I read a bit, and then get to fiddling because I missed some things out, instead of marking it and moving on. I should have learned all these lessons some time before, as I’ve done NanoWriMo and the only way I could win was to keep pushing forward, and never look back.

Of course, I can also remember being in a coffee-guzzling, sleep-deprived, storyline-obsessed haze for most of the time as well. I remember coming out of it thinking that working at that pace and that regularity wasn’t sustainable. I also remember thinking “Oh my.” Fifty thousand words in 30 days. It was possible, I did it, and I still have no real idea how it happened.

So I’m going to try attacking stories with the same amount of devil-may-care attitude again. I’m going to try to get it down as quickly as possible and fix the problems after the fact. I’m going to try learning how to do significant rewrites, and I’m going to end up learning how to literally tear chunks out of a story. I’ve been writing short pieces of fiction recently to get myself into a habit, and then going back and chopping it down to an arbitrary amount. Hopefully that’ll stand me in good stead.

Part of the reason for doing the shorter stories it to see if I can concentrate on different things for a while. They say that practise makes – well, in my case, less sucky and prone to make idiot mistakes. We shall see. Let me see if I can get my ‘Concentrate and Commit’ rate up bit by bit. At least I’ll be typing something. Otherwise I’m going to admit defeat, leave the story I thought I’d be working on alone, and move on to the other one for a while. If I know me, just as I’m really getting into a groove, I’ll be inspired to go back.

Hey, as long as its typing and moving toward another finished something, I don’t much care right now.

I still don’t have a cover for the finished story. I got so far into having one done and then – life. It happens. And as long as I keep breathing, It’ll probably happen again.

About deadlines

After years of trying to do too many things at the same time and failing at most of them, I've spent the past couple of years trying to do fewer things.

It goes against a lifetime of habits. The one I'm working on right now?

Stop writing new stuff when I haven't finished the thing I'm working on.

I get the bug for doing new stuff. I used to tell myself that it was ok, because at least I was still writing something (of not regularly) and writing anything is better than writing nothing. And while that's true, it also means I have a grand total of one finished story that I've finally amazed to get to the end of the first draft, one epic dark fantasy that is still only two-thirds finished, and a pre-cyberpunk story that I currently guess am about sixty percent done. There was also a series of sci-fi books that are intended to go straight to ebook format that were being mapped out, and the first few chapters of a collaborative work which was intended straight from the get-go to be a series of novels. All of those I want to do. None of them are going to be looked at until I've finished this story right now.

Real life doesn't have neat lines. I understand that. But a grand total of ONE THING COMPLETED isn't what you'd exactly call a substantial back catalogue. 

This is a classic case of griping. It's also a classic case of learning a whole bunch of new things that are now relevant. I'm learning editing. I'm learning to make notes and where to make them, and how to confirm when I've resolved stuff... or not resolved. I'm learning about feedback, how to take it, when to listen to it, how to not argue, or explain, but also when to take what I hear into consideration.
I'm learning about grammar, namely full stops (periods, snicker), and how to do speech marks and commas in speech marks, and how to figure out when a chapter ends, and what makes a section rather than a full chapter and... 

The point is made. In order to finish a story, any given story, it's back to one step at a time. and figuring stuff out as they come up. None of this would be happening unless there was a first draft, however bad or fractured or grammatically mangled it is at the beginning. It's all another beginning. This time, its about beginning something to get to the end of it... of which said end is at the end of May. At least I'm into the second draft, and that's hopefully starting to wrap itself up. There are more plot holes than words on the page. That's ok. One step at a time. Just do the thing I'm doing now, and leave the other stories alone, no matter how much they call out to be played with.