lizvogel

I really should post more about Narrativity here. It was excellent again this year, as always. Some behind-the-scenes drama made it far more stressful and exhausting for me that it needed to be, but that got resolved pretty smoothly once I could address it in person, and it didn't spill over into anyone's enjoyment of the con. (And please ghod, we should be done with that particular flavor of drama from now on. A group of people all pulling together in the same direction is a beautiful thing.) I'm always too tired once I get home to do more than scrawl a few brief lines, if that, and by the time I recover it's been long enough that the con-impetus is past. But I'll see what I can do here:

As usual, the best part was the people, both old friends and new. One of the new folks was a long-time friend of the con who was finally able to attend, and turned out to be even awesomer in person than he was in email; another was a serendipitous find in the "smoking lounge" (aka the hotel parking lot) who turned out to be very much One Of Us and was promptly sucked into the rest of the con. And many other nifty new faces who I'm hoping to see next year, along with the standard crowd.

Probably my favorite moment was hanging out in the hotel lobby... some evening... (I was a bear of even less brain than usual this year)... with S and L and K (one of the nifty newbies) discussing my "weird clown story", which turns out to not have at all the problem I thought it did, but some other problem entirely that was expertly mimicking the first kind, and branching off into visual vs. non-visual readers and kinetic vs. visual understanding of one's location in space, and all kinds of brains-are-neat-and-also-weird stuff. This, my friends, is what Narrativity is for.

I also tested a theory. I have talked many times, here and elsewhere, about needing to learn how to Do Plot. (This is different than understanding plotting in general; I chose those words deliberately.) Well, one of our panels was "Help Steve Write A Book", which sounded an awful lot like what I'm talking about when I talk about plot. And... it wasn't, quite, because he comes at a book, or at least this book, in a very different way than I do, but the process was similar enough in principle that I could apply it to my own struggles. And yes, that. That is what I'm looking for: something that functions the same way a big room full of people all focused on helping figure out how to make this particular story go the way the author wants it to does.

IOW, I need a writers group. Which sucks, because I've been trying to find/build one of those for long enough that I've pretty much given up on ever getting what I need, but it's good to identify, at least.

Writers need other writers. The stereotype of the hermit writer in their attic churning out pages may exist in a few, isolated cases, but for most writers, some like-minded folks to bounce ideas off of is somewhere between incredibly helpful and vitally necessary.

And one of the things Narrativity does is help people make those connections. That's pretty fabulous.

In follow-up to this, I just realized: OMG, Wile E. Coyote is the patron animal of writers.

I have written a 3600-word story in six days, 1600 of it yesterday. That is very nearly unprecedented for me -- despite the story fighting me every step of the way.

And despite my having referred to it as a "flaccid lump of story" at one point, I ended up with something I'm actually pretty happy with. My alpha reader laughed in the right places, which is always a good sign. The key seemed to be when the main character made a play on words and suddenly developed a rudimentary personality, which he'd been utterly refusing to do until that point. (This never happens to me.) And then the words I'd consciously crafted because they weren't coming any other way suddenly took on a different cast, and it all pretty much worked. So thanks, front-brain; it's not normally your job, but it's nice to know you're there to pick up the slack when the back-brain, I dunno, decides to skip off to Aruba or something. /*glares at back of own head*/

Dinner last night ended up being a hazelnut mocha and some Doritos, whilst hunched over the keyboard. I meant to eat something better, but sort of forgot. I got the story formatted and sent off with all of twenty minutes to spare, then stayed up another hour or two playing solitaire before I processed that I should just go to bed, dammit. Thus is the glamorous life of a writer.

One of the problems with me not writing -- which I haven't been much, lately -- is that my brain takes all the energy and creativity that should be going toward creating fiction and applies it to anxiety dreams. Really vivid, detailed anxiety dreams. Yeah.

This morning's was something about being inundated with junk texts, which kept stealing focus every time I tried to get to something to block them. I don't remember the details, and it being a dream they probably didn't make sense anyway, but I awoke in the kind of incandescent rage that only a recalcitrant electronic device can inspire.

So then I had to spend an hour reading someone else's book to calm down, instead of working on my own. I really need to do something about the writing laptop situation, not to mention the various other situations.

I have cleaned up the area around the old desktop machine a bit, to make it more congenial for writing and increase the odds that when I sit down to write, I will not get distracted by some other task before I finish getting my butt into the chair. This involved less completing of tasks than I would have liked, and more finding somewhere else to stack things, but we work with what we have.

A particularly aggravating aspect of the writing-laptop situation is that if I had access to a spare ThinkPad 2647 system board, I think I could talk myself into trying to franken-puter this one -- something that I've become largely allergic to doing, as a general rule. The screen is good (which is usually what goes first on these old machines, IME), the keyboard is usable, the floppy drive's good, the hard drive's good if this nonsense hasn't corrupted it -- the motherboard is actually one of the more approachable undertakings, if only I had the parts.

Part of me is tempted to build my own portable system from scratch, with a lovely hand-crafted wooden case. The rest of me looks at the fact that I haven't even gotten around to fixing the leg on my desk chair, and tells the first part of me to STFU.


(Spell-check suggestions for "ThinkPad" include Kneecapped and Unequipped. Let it never be said that technology doesn't have a sense of humor.)

I've been contemplating time management lately. Or rather, I've been thinking that I need to contemplate time management, but I don't have time to do it.

Finding time to write is always a challenge for writers. The only way I've ever found to get significant writing done is to make writing the top priority, and let everything else go. All right, except feeding the cats. But everything else. This works. It works really well, as far as the writing goes. Then one day you wake up and you can't get out of bed because of the mountain of laundry, and you're in serious danger of having to bulldoze the house due to all the minor repairs that have been left to turn into major problems, and everything around you is chaos sheathed in dust. And you have to start digging yourself out, and it takes far longer than just keeping up on it all would have in the first place.

So I've compromised by taking some days and declaring them Writing Days, where nothing else is allowed to claim priority. (Except, of course, the cats.) And other days are House Project Days, or Day Job days, or whatever. This works... less well, though it staggers along. I've never met a house project that didn't extend far beyond the time allotted. The nascent organization I've ended up in charge of doesn't demand much time, except when it suddenly does, and then it can eat days without even a burp. And so on. And suddenly it's been a week since I've had a Writing Day, and that's no way to get writing done.

And it's not just that. If I take a day for writing, is it for actual writing? Or is it for querying, or submitting short stories? The actual writing is inarguably vital to this whole being-a-writer thing. But querying's important too; it doesn't matter how finished the novel is if nobody ever sees it. The same goes for short stories. Researching markets is a huge time-sink, and researching agents can demolish hours in what feels like seconds; it's like web-surfing with justification to keep going.

So I've been trying to time-share days. I can only write for so long; when I've wrung the word-reservoir dry, I can work on that house project, or mow the lawn, or maybe even clean something. (Or maybe not.) But some house projects need an all-day commitment. Or I'll try to tuck the other thing in first, for the sense of accomplishment or to get it out of the way so it doesn't loom distractingly, and suddenly the day's gone and I haven't even turned on the laptop yet. The Day Job has its merits, but it's physically exhausting; not a lot's going to happen after I get home from work. (I try to squeeze exercising in before work, and it sort of works, but it's not the greatest combination with a demanding shift and I'm perpetually running late.) Querying and writing require very different mind-sets, and I find it extremely difficult to switch from one to the other in the same day. And splitting days up like that courts the constant feeling that whatever I'm doing, I should be doing something else.

And that's just the current load. There are things I'd really like to do, but the idea of taking on another obligation has about as much appeal as grabbing a hot stove element. I keep plotting ideas for starting a writers group. I'd really like to get back to regular martial arts training. But I Don't. Have. Time.

So I'm looking for time management suggestions, though I know going in that nothing's going to give me the ten days a week I feel like I need. And it's 2:30 in the morning as I type this, so I'm going to save it to post later and FFS get some sleep.

So there's this thing going around the internet, as things do, about whether one should be calling oneself a professional writer. Having a certain interest in such matters, I had a go.


First, Lisa Morton's quiz, which seems to be the thing that kicked it all off. According to her, you're only a professional writer if you can answer yes to at least 80%.

1. Is your home/work place messy because that time you’d put into cleaning it is better spent writing?

No. I mean, it's messy, but that's not the reason. ;-) It makes a great excuse, though.

2. Do you routinely turn down evenings out with friends because you need to be home writing instead?

It's been known to happen.

3. Do you turn off the television in order to write?

TV is the mind-killer... no, wait. I love me some good audio-visual entertainment, actually. But it comes with an off switch for a reason, so, yes.

4. Would you rather receive useful criticism than praise?

Ghods, yes.

5. Do you plan vacations around writing opportunites (either research or networking potential)?

My "vacation" photos include pictures of the trash can placements at Brookfield Zoo. It was a plot point. Need I say more?

6. Would you rather be chatting about the business of writing with another writer than exchanging small talk with a good friend?

Guilty as charged.

7. Have you ever taken a day job that paid less money because it would give you more time/energy/material to write?

Livin' the dream, baby!

8. Are you willing to give up the nice home you know you could have if you devoted that time you spend writing to a more lucrative career?

This seems kind of redundant with the previous one. If I was in this for the conspicuous consumption, I'd be in something else entirely.

9. Have you done all these things for at least five years?

I forgot to mark on my calendar the day I decided to take this writing thing seriously, but yeah, probably.

10. Are you willing to live knowing that you will likely never meet your ambitions, but you hold to those ambitions nonetheless?

Screw that noise. I damned well am going to meet my ambitions, and anybody who doesn't go into this game irrationally convinced of that may as well become a stockbroker.


As one might imagine, there's been a certain... response to this. I like Chuck Wendig's:

Do you write?

Yes, yes I do.

If yes, do you get paid to write?

Not yet....


The funny thing is, I count as a "professional" according to Morton's quiz, but not according to Wendig's much more lenient one. Which I think says something about the validity of Morton's questions, given that I've never (yet!) been paid a dime for my writing. Now, I have a certain amount of sympathy for Morton's evident frustration; I've got a rant of my own pending about wannabees who call themselves writers without doing any of that tricky actual writing stuff. But there's no getting around the fact that any meaningful definition of "professional" has to at least acknowledge making some money from the thing -- and any definition that's more about process than results is really just prescriptivism about process dressed up in "professional" clothing.