Maybe I Need Some New Music to Listen to

I haven't been writing nearly as much as I should be, or want to be. Although I didn't sign up for NaNo, I had thought it'd be a good time to jump-start one of the half-dozen story ideas that have been floating around in my head.

Halfway through the month and I've reread, and edited just slightly, the first page and a half of the sequel to the book for which I'm at the querying stage. [Some agents say mention if your book is part of a series, some don't want to know, but the generaly consensus, if there ever is one, seems to be that if you have a sequel planned, it doesn't hurt to work on it while querying the first one.] I've also bought new mini cassettes for my tape recorder, left a few notes on a different steampunky story there, and written a bit more in my Not Another Teen Vamp Story (where the male protag's first encounter with a vampire is nothing romantic and mysterious--I have no idea where it will go, because I want it to be a bit on the violent side, not gratuitously, though, and possibly by the time I'm done with it and have a publisher, YA vamps will be completely off the trend, but they say don't write to trends, and this is what I want to write, so if nothing else, it's practice).

Oy, that got really rather rambly there, didn't it? [Yay alliteration?]

The point is, while I've glanced over some stories and waved hello to them at a distance, I honestly can't say I have any word count to show for the past two weeks. I worked out the numbers and if I want to reach 50,000 by November 30, I should write about 3,333 words every day, which is just over 555 words per hour if I focus on writing for six hours. (Certainly not the entire time I'm at the computer, but a good chunk of time and more realistic than 8-10 hours per day.) 550 looks a lot more manageable than 3,300 words.

The title of this post was a passing thought--maybe some new music might jolt me into a creative spur. But why blame the music? I've completed three novel-length stories since 2006, so I know I can do it. I can have the self-discipline to write for 5+ hours straight. I just need to convince myself to get off my butt and do it. So I make that resolution now. I want to write 50,000 words before December 1.

To do that, I'll probably have to significantly cut down on my blog reading, which has already decreased (I swear, I probably have over a hundred writer, agent and editor blogs bookmarked under my favorites, I could never read them all in a day), but I'll probably disappear from updating CoffeeQuill, LJ, and my facebook as well (the FB games, oh, those time-eaters!). I'd say I'll be back December 1, and you might find me occasionally, but I'll be getting crafty this holiday season, which will also be time-consuming. Let's just call it January, and anything before then is bonus!

All right then, I'm off to try and get some word counts in for today. Any good music recommendations?

Breathing through both nostrils

A short, kind of silly post today. Maggie Stiefvater (author of 'Shiver') posted about numbers.

Number of emails received, comments replied to, harp strings she strung by hand, and randomly, the number of nostrils one breathes through at any one time. The answer is one, which I knew (trivia heard from someone sometime in the past, those pieces of info which you're never quite sure where they came from). But she noted that it's connected to which side of the brain is dominant. Left brain, right nostril, right brain, left nostril. Of course, as she knew readers would, I checked to see which nostril I was breathing.

Apparently my left brain is hard at work right now. [Or at least, it was when I first checked.] So I was thinking, despite my desire to post on this blog, or edit my synopsis, or work on book 2, I had no motivation to do any of it. Perhaps because my creative brain was chillin' at the time. Then I read that and thought I'd post about that.

...Which I didn't do for a while. I still wasn't in the right frame of mind to write anything. I check again, as I finally start writing, and I'm breathing through my left nostril now (right brain woke up).

heh. Just some fun facts/coincidences. Apparently it also goes through two- to four-hour schedules, shifting from one to the other. Maybe I should check throughout the day, whenever I'm breathing through my left nostril, rush to open a Word doc. ;)

Honest, I didn't mean to disappear so soon for so long

I thought, "My self-imposed 'blog once a day for a month' is over, I'll take a few days off. Why, the first is even a Sunday, when I'm rarely on the computer anyway.' Five days later...

I ended up hitting one of those ugly walls of uncertainty, questioning a lot of things and generally feeling kind of junk. I opened up in more detail on my personal journal, and was reminded how great some of my friends are. I received some wonderful lines from a fellow writer, and an artist friend pointed me to this YouTube video:

Ira Glass on Storytelling

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE

(Sorry, I'm trying to copy and paste the embedding link, but it doesn't want to cooperate.)

This was a great motivator.

And then I revisited Jeffrey Thomas' Portfolio, with the twisted Disney Princesses, such as a creepy Sleeping Beauty. Just the look of it just makes me want to write about a serial killer who kills in their sleep. (Not like a sleepwalker, but cursed or somehow self-induced, so people think there's no way it's Person X, they're always asleep during the murder.')

Isn't that a great painting? Super creepy. And some of the details on these are interesting (the books next to Alice, for one, but I won't say more because I like the thrill of discovery and hope you do, too). Seeing these, coupled with the encourgagement of friends, just makes me excited to write. It doesn't matter how discouraged I can get, I'll never stop writing.

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween, writers of the internets.

This is the second post for October 31, 2009, making up for a skipped post this past Sunday, and the last in my daily blog posting for a full month. Don't worry, I don't plan to disappear for a month or more, but I'll probably go back to taking the weekends end off, for sure.

Funnily enough, I never wrote that post on writer's block that I was intending to do, so expect that at some point in November.

Tomorrow is All Saints' Day, and November 2 is All Souls' Day, but today, the veil is thin, ghosts are coming through, and goblins prowl the streets wearing the faces of children.

Tonight might seem like a normal night in front of the television and the computer, clacking away on the keyboard in between channel surfing, but silent things drift past closed windows, rustle curtains through tightly locked panes of glass, and they can see you much better than you can see them.

All you hear are a few bars of old, tinny, music, a deep whisper behind your ear. There's a chill in the late summer air, too close to the equator to be autumn. And tonight is a full moon, so many more than the dead hunt in the shadows, in packs, looking for the lone costumed one, warmly safe in the thought that bad things don't happen to them.

Bad things happen to everyone.

Happy Halloween.

Happy writing.

~Sabrina

His Name is Normand

(I was thinking Norman and Normandy at the same time, I guess. I like it.)

This is my plot bunny.

Last night I joined my sister on an outing. She's also a writer, but is more successful finishing short stories, whereas I am much more comfortable with long pieces. As a challenge for herself, she joined NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. Last night was the first meeting/get-together of the Hawaii writers who signed up. People were able to adopt their very own plot bunnies.

It was mostly an informational, get to know others, here's what NaNo is about, kind of meeting. At the end, they had plenty of plot bunnies left, so I grabbed my own. My sister suggested naming him Gerald, but I refused, just to contrary. ;)

I have not signed up for NaNo yet. I don't know if I will. But they seemed open to people coming to the write-ins and other events, even if you aren't official, so I joined my sister.

NaNo is interesting for me, because they emphasized that, not only did it not matter how good the draft was of your 50,000 story, but you shouldn't delete anything. If you write a scene and there are two options, start writing one, and if it peters out, skip a line and write option 2. I guess that makes sense--you can certainly learn something through trying out both and rereading them to see which works better. Plus you don't lose thousands of words. But they also said don't bother with grammar or spelling mistakes (which I'd be incapable of ignoring). And some people throw in whole paragraphs of poetry or song lyrics. 'It's all counts as words.' I don't know how I feel about that.

I think it's because I can't imagine writing a story with complete disregard for the story, only thinking about the numbers. I see NaNo as a device to help writers finish what they start, or get farther than a few pages, at the very least. And that is a great thing. 'But shouldn't you still try to write a coherent story?' I ask myself. ~shrugs~ I still think this is a great oportunity for people like my sister, who can't seem to finish longer pieces of writing, but I don't know that it would work for me. Much as writers have different processes and writing styles, so do writers improve through different challenges (I hope that makes sense). I do like Normand, though. And I think, for Normand's sake, I will try to write 50,000 words over the course of a month. Not for the sake of a word-count, but to jump-start a new story, while querying with my urban fantasy.

For all of you who are registered and ready with the kernel of a story: Let NaNoWriMo begin!

Happy writing!

(And if this posts without the handy paragraph breaks, I did include them. Adding pictures sometimes makes the space between paragraphs all wonky. Go figure.)

The Classics

It's really hot today. Yesterday was vog (volcanic ash from the Big Island which blows down and creates a fog-like haze in the air), but today is just flat-out hot. I had errands. As I walked down the street, I can feel the sweat trickling down my back, and the AC of the Ross' is not enough to get rid of that feeling. But I wander through the aisles and find my favorite area: notebooks, cards and random decorative boxes.

To my delight, I see a bunch of faux books--open the cover to reveal an empty box. One is titled War and Peace, another says Lady with an Ermine on the spine, with a reproduction of Da Vinci's painting on the "cover." There was also Treasure Island and a few others.

It started me thinking about my favorite classics. I've read a good number of them, but there are only a few from those long-dead authors that I either kept or bought my own copy, and would reread (given the time, the never-read books take precedence).

What immediately comes to mind: Frankenstein, both the more common 1831 version, and the earlier 1818 edition. The differences don't jump to mind (something about Elizabeth is different, I recall), but I loved seeing how the story changed in those years. I even did a project on it for a class on the Wordsworths and Shelleys.

I'm also a fan of Dante's Inferno and Paradise Lost, although the latter was sort of dense to get through when I read it (for high school, which I don't think many people can say--we had to read both books over the summer). Edgar Allen Pow's The Tell-Tale Heart, Coleridge's The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. I love John Keats' poetry (I have another blogspot from a project a year back). Beowulf I love, especially after translating it. Native Son, although it was sort of dark (I wrote down the page number every time I saw a reference to African-Americans as 'dark' or animal-like, far too many), as was Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I also like The Odyssey, but I always have a hard time reading it through to the end (I skip around or just don't finish, don't tell my professors from six years ago).

Any absolute favorite classics of yours?

More on my Battle with Short Stories

But first: I love steampunk. I love it oh so much. The visuals are intriguing and amazing. I only hope that I can make my image of steampunk fit with the idea I have (because this idea already comes with distinct imagery, which I have to work past any time I write about it, here I'll need to mingle the two cohesively). Maybe I should actually draw it out, characters wearing clothes with both elements, as a visual focus for that mingling. Hmm.

Anyway, to the topic at hand. After yesterday's post, I was thinking about what is it that makes it more difficult for me to write short stories rather than novels.

One idea, the issue most writers encounter: the middle of the book slump. In a novel, I read that, or at least the first wave of it, around page 50 or 80. Then again two-thirds through the book, usually. But a short story. I've had time to muddle through not quuiite knowing where I'm going until I come to a halt. But I can rework things and plow through it. I have enough to work with at that point.

In a short story, though, there's usually a lengh limitation. In 1,000, even 5,000, there isn't much time muddle through 'here's a cool character, let's see what they do next.' So I need to know more about where the story is going (how it begins and ends, a little of the middle) when it's short, than when it's novel-length. If I don't know what's supposed to happen, I've wasted the rest of my words on meandering. To avoid that, then, I take much longer to write what length-wise I could finish in a day, because I need to think everything through before writing it down.

Example: The Halloween story. I started with an idea, an image, a problem with the neighborhood cats disappearing every year in October. Then I figured out my protagonist, and I start thinking out how that one night will proceed. Do I end it on a scary note, am I skilled enough to make it scary, or should I add some humor, or a twist, or just it ambiguous? Right now, I think I know enough to get to that point, but I almost don't want to write it before I can answer that question. Thus, I am stuck in what is approximately the middle, because it's a short-short story (I try to reason, if I aim for 500, I won't go over 1,000--we'll see).

I suppose that's my cue to end here, though, and start working through that middle slump.

I'm off!

Happy writing everyone,

Sabrina

*Photo is from Lisa Snellings' blog Slaughterhouse Studios . It's a detail of one of her sculptures, Grim Reading. I love her work, and whenever I want a creepy or intriguing atmosphere for writing, I go there to get in the mood.

Birds and Short Stories

I was chatting with a new friend about the birds I can see outside my room. Just half an hour ago, the more common visiting black cat chased away the newly visiting gray one. Then the waxbills came out (I'm sure that's what they are now, I really didn't know before). There's about half a dozen birds that flutter around from twig to twig and on the ground between me and the straggly bush.

The waxbills and Japanese white-eyes quickly jump from one branch to another to the ground to a flower pot. The bulbuls come in quick then fly off. The doves mosey, strut around on the concrete and show off to the ladies. They all have their different personalities.

Different personalities and when you want to photograph them, it requires different approaches. Cats and swift birds need to be snuck up on, you have to be ready at any moment, but if you move too fast, they get away an all you have is a tiny, blurry sasquatch. The slower birds need patience because they'll sit with their butt to you for a while, then just get up and leave.

I think sometimes dealing with stories is like this. Not every story is the same (shouldn't be, IMO, despite finding unintentional similar themes or motifs on occasion). Every writer finds the process that works for them, but I think that process doesn't always work with every story.

I think, for me, there's a big difference in how I write short stories compared to novels. I'm trying, on the whole, to have a better idea where a story is going, rather than just starting with an idea and running with it. But when it comes to short stories, this is even more important. I need to know how it begins and ends, and I need some idea of the middle (compared to knowing the beginning, some of the middle and a vague sense of where events need to end up for my novels), unless it's a short story with no set word limit. If I don't know the ending scene of a short story, it's just a blurry cat photo. >_<

Each short story is also slightly different. Some need every detail planned out, others need two or three strong images and I get through it. The halloween story I'm working my way through is actually trippingme up, because it's a small, flightly bird story--I caught an idea and it stuck around, but if I sneak up too fast, it's slips out of my grasp and hops out of reach, taunting me. I have to turn it around, view it from all angles, and slowly come up to it, until we're face to face.

Happy writing, everyone,

Sabrina

Muse musings

When I was younger, about 13 or so, I believed in a muse. It wasn't a serious belief, but the day-dreaming belief of a burgeoning writer. He had a name, and when I was keeping a hand-written journal (years before I joined LJ, and at a time when I couldn't maintain a journal for more than a few weeks) consistently for months, I trailed off from writing about my day-to-day life, to writing a story. I'd decided to write it as if my muse were telling the story.

Nowadays, a muse seems almost synonymous (in my own mind) with some of the other topics I've been writing about lately: inspiration and ideas. It's a motivating force; it helps when you get stuck in one scene, so you can move forward or jump ahead; it's there to offer ideas; it has some unquantifiable quality that helps you write.

It's a nice thought. Maybe I'm just in a cynical mood, but I don't quite see how the concept of a muse helps a writer, other than to say 'I couldn't write because my muse abandoned me.' I visit Sherwood Smith's LJ fairly regularly, and she linked to a great post about one's muse, and its fickle nature. I really enjoyed the post, but instead of equaling "Godfrey" with muse, I filled in the name with Writing. Writing was sometimes hard to come by, when I'd open a new Word doc but the words wouldn't come. It was an idea, or inspiration that slipped by me, or it was just that I failed myself and wasn't trying hard enough, perhaps.

I'm not saying the idea of a muse is wrong or useless, far be it, it's not my place to comment on others' beliefs, but I don't know that it works for me anymore. I think even at 13, my muse was more a character, a wizard, mature but young, sitting in a well-made, but old robe and telling this story about a princess and a unicorn with attitude. I like the thought that my writing comes from me, it's my accomplishment. My failures, yes, but also my successes.

~shrugs~ I suppose this is just one of those meandering, thinking out loud posts. I still need to make up a post, and I do have some topics simmering. We'll see how tomorrow goes.

In random writing news: I finally found a Halloween story idea that's staying with me. I've started writing and I mostly know where it's going. (I just need to decide how I want it to end, I'm thinking more mysterious than gruesome. We'll see.)

Happy writing everyone,

Sabrina

*Painting of the Greek Muses with Apollo on Mt. Helio, by Claude Lorrain

Pretend the Date says Sunday

I'm a day behind. I ended up not going to the ghost tour. Although I had an offer from someone to drive me there, I didn;t have a ride home, and the buses don't run from town to here at 10 pm. Plus, two of the four friends who were going seemed to hav stayed home as well, and that strikes me as a great event for a group to go to. It'd be more fun than going alone.

Instead, I stayed home, watched recorded copies of last Monday's How I Met Your Mother and Big Bang Theory ("Wheaton!" heh), and watched the new episode of Amazing Race, during which I nearly threw up. The nausea lasted through the rest of the night and a good chunk of today, so that was not fun, and I don't really know what caused it.

Anyway, I've been off the computer today. But I have been reading--Skin Deep by Mark del Franco. It's the first book in a new series, but set in the same world as his three previous books (which I've mentioned here: Unshapely Things, Unquiet Dreams, and Unfallen Dead). Until today, I was only reading a few pages here and there, because my attention was occupied by other things. Today, focusing on resting and not moving suddenly and thus throwing up, I lay very still and really got into it. Good book.

All right, I'm off to rest for the rest of the evening.[That was sadly redundant.] I will leave you all with the best emoticon I've ever seen, shown to me, and I believe created by, my friend.

Klingon emoticon: (}}:->

hee