Since I’ve been back from the coast, I’ve been pretty steadily focused down on keeping all my novels and short stories in the mail. One rejection comes back, one query or story goes out. I’m having to move from a more nebulous tracking system to something more systematic, like a spreadsheet, for the first time ever. I pronounce this a good development.
I did run myself into a wall of busy and have taken a few days off my regular writing. It’s time to get back to it. I have the start of a strange western hybrid, a sort of Firefly-flavored bounty hunter story. Since as usual I have no clue what’s going to happen yet, I’m excited to see where it will go.
I’m also neck-deep in reading for the upcoming Mystery workshop in May. My bookmark is somewhere around page 155 of Michael Connelly’s The Black Echo, which I’m enjoying the hell out of.
Other, non-reading happinesses:
1. The new season of In Plain Sight. This show hooked me half way through last season and hasn’t let go yet. Witness Protection marshals, you rock.
2. King Arthur Flour’s new gluten-free cake mixes. I’ll be making a couple of these in the next week for birthdays — mine and several folks in my immediate family (a ton of April birthdays).
3. The catalog that came with the King Arthur Flour cake mixes, from which I’m going to choose some really frivolous seeming birthday gift. Fun! In the kitchen!
4. The new Runaways movie opens in my town this weekend, and Sunday is popcorn in the dark with Joan Jett day. I can hardly wait.
Happiness!
I’m working on a short story this week. The idea came to me in a dream — exceedingly rare for me, that sort of thing — and I surrendered to the idea of waking up long enough to write it down on my bedside pad o’ paper.
The story is a mad wrangle. My critical voice, having been kicked out of my office for months upon months, storms the castle at least once every writing session, sometimes twice. Can we say annoying?
I can only come the conclusion that there’s something important trying to be expressed here (and by important, I don’t mean that I have or have not committed literature or an excuse for an award nomination, just that there’s something deep and imperative for me to express). In this case, important = dangerous.
As it happens, I’ve come across a link a few times in the past day or two on Facebook that leads to a letter David Mamet wrote to the writers of The Unit. The letter is specifically about writing for the screen, but IMO the text is a great refocusser no matter what medium you’re writing for. It’s certainly helping me with my current wrangle all of a sudden.
Thanks to my friend Thorn for sending the link directly to me so’s I could finally read it.
Here it is for your enjoyment and edification.
How did it get to be February?
January was a whirlwind of travel and writing — the travel to Austin twice for long weekends with friends and the writing mostly running through draft number two of The Heart of the World in preparation for workshopping at this month’s novel workshop on the Oregon coast. First Reader loved it and had such good comments. The book is so much better for them.
There has also been short story writing — the first assignment for the other workshop I’m attending in Lincoln City. The theme was loads of fun and the writing a continuation of the one scene at a time, focus on the emotion experiment. I’m very happy with the story, and happy it’s done and turned in on time.
Now there’s an enormous amount of reading to do — proposal packages from the novel workshop and one full novel, then the anticipation of a slew of short stories next week. And somewhere in there I’ll be on an airplane heading northwest.
In anticipation, I give you the Inn at Spanish Head’s sky cam, which updates every 7 minutes. Live, from the Oregon coast!
On Sunday afternoon, after a last push of 20,500 words, I finished the first draft of The Heart of the World with those happiest of finishing words: The End.
I was astounded that the experiment I undertook at the start held all the way through — focusing only on one scene at a time, focusing on the emotion in the scene. 120,000 words is a *lot* of scenes. A lot of emotion. I made a concerted effort to keep my critical brain out of my writing office during all of this, too, giving full reign to my creative brain and allowing my subconscious to be the boss.
The result was as I’d been told it would be but hardly believed. My bossy subconscious planted all the right clues at the right times without my having ever been aware of them.
Those threads of clues shone like gold all the way through without my ever having attempted to engineer them. Until I began to actually write the end sections of the book, I had no conscious idea as to how on earth I’d resolve the story. I mean, I had conscious general ideas, but I wasn’t married to them. The funny thing was, even my general ideas didn’t hold a candle to the ones my subconscious came up with. Twists and turns and where-the-hell-did-that-come-from. Those oh-so-important story points feel much more powerful and meaningful because of all that.
The book is now in my first reader’s hands. Then it’ll be workshopped on the coast in February and out into the world it will fly. The next story is on the horizon, and I plan to continue the experiment until it becomes not just an experiment but as natural as breathing.
Meanwhile, I give you some slam-bang motivation posts from the writer who started me down this particular road. This is number one. Read it and the next. And the next one after that. Great stuff.
Happy New Year!
If you’re not reading Dean Wesley Smith’s posts on motivation in writing, you should be.
