Writing in Public: Day 1

Ok, I need some accountability. I've switched schedules... again. Now I'm trying working after the kids go to bed and staying up until midnight, catching up on sleep with naps whenever I can get them. It's not working out. No schedule seems to work out. I'm tired. All the freaking time. It takes me an hour just to warm up to the idea of doing more thinking after a day of thinking and then trying my hardest to be patient while looking after children and being sleep deprived. Drained is an understatement. Ugh.

I really like Dean Wesley Smith's idea of "writing in public" Basically, he posts what he does every day. I had considered writing my daily successes into an agenda (because there are more things to capture than word counts), but I have a bias against analog. I hate the idea of something not being backed up somehow. So I'll try this blog. We'll see.

So today I am coming off last night's attempt to recover from burn-out (my medicine was 5 episodes of "Lie to Me" on Netflix). I actually find the show a good resource for my writing, and it inspired me to pick up a few books on nonverbal communication which have really enriched my writing. I plan to review them. Eventually. Some day. Because time.

So, long story short, I only got 5 hours of sleep. Still managed to get 841 words in though. I'd really like to get up to 2k/day, but 1k/day is already a stretch with the way I'm going. 10k a week would be more awesome than awesomeness. Since today is Thursday, I'll aim for 5k this week.

I'm starting to realize that my book is going to be long. Act 1 is 25k, and I'm well into Act 2a and it's going to be much longer. Might have to consider making my transition from Act 1-2 a midpoint, and cluing up the book at the end of what I had originally envisioned as the true midpoint. Would make a good cliffhanger, but would still probably weigh in at 50-60k, which is novel length. At least then I can get a book out sooner!

Book 1:
Day   1 ............    840 words
Total .............. 38,881 words

Migraine delays

This week I had Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday available for working on my writing. Monday I got up at 5:00 AM, had a shower, everything was going perfect, and then I got a migraine that knocked me out for the rest of the day. My migraines are nauseating affairs that start with blindness, followed by scintillating aura, and then pain and vomiting. Unpleasant. While I could keep it at bay in the afternoon with painkillers and gravol, on migraine days I can't really use screens. On the plus side, it was a beautiful day and I went on a ninety minute hike with my family.

Today, I still had a pretty killer headache and wasn't feeling very creative. While the kids were at school, the hubby and I finally gave in to their pleads for bunkbeds and combined their rooms, making one a bedroom and the other a playroom filled with books. They were very excited! My oldest said he was disappointed at first because his bookcase was no longer in his bedroom, but as the night wore on he was saying how excited he was to be able to sneak into the other room and play. He even emptied one of our bookshelf cubes to put his "most favorite of the favorites" books in there, so he could read them in the morning :) I really want to make a secret hole in the closet in the bunkbed room that connects to this room so that they can feel like they're sneaking in :)

In addition to this, I also ran for loads of laundry. As a person who puts off doing laundry as long as possible, I'm pretty pleased with this.

Productivity analysis

Well, April didn't go exactly as planned. Between making a final exam for my students, holding tutorials, giving said exam, and then spending hours and hours marking it for all 225 students, I didn't get much done on my work in progress. The good news is that since the last time I posted I've written something, even if it's only 3500 words. As of now book one stands at 30,861 (and yes, that final word is counted!).

I find it difficult to focus unless I know that I am working at optimal efficiency. It doesn't escape my notice that if I just spent more time writing, and less time optimizing, that I'd have a lot more words written by now. My problem is that I just can't do anything halfway; when I want to analyze something, I analyze it.

And so, with a little bit of excitement, but also knowing that the following may be taken as evidence of my idiosyncrasies, I present to you my productivity analysis:



Isn't it beautiful in its bland grayness? Bear with me.

If you have been reading this blog (I can't imagine why you would be, but lets pretend), you will note that I track on awful lot of things. The above chart was made from four months of tracking data. Every time I sat down to write, I recorded the time of day, how I was feeling (in the zone, just okay, tired, or groggy), and my average words per hour, amongst other things.

Why you may ask? To be honest, I've read a lot about people being productive in the morning, but my angry, murder-esque tendencies tend to come out at that time of day, when I am loath to meet the day star. In the nighttime, I am a zombie waiting to breathe my final breath before falling into my pillows. In short, the ends of my days are miserable no matter which one I choose, but when you have a day job and children, that's all you've got to work with. So if I'm going to be miserable, I damn well want to be efficiently and optimally miserable.

The bars above indicate my writing speed, using the axis on the left, while the line represents my level of cognitive unfuzziness, represented by the axis on the right. I thought I'd see more of a correlation between writing speed and when I thought I was "in the zone," but this doesn't seem to be the case. I think my writing output has less to do with how awake I'm feeling, and more to do with how much creative juice I have left to give.

My two options are really only the 4:30-6:30 am time slot, or the 8:30-10:30 pm timeslot. The cognitive unfuzziness levels of these timeslots are similar (63% vs. 67%), but the output is drastically different -- 407 wph vs. 255 wph. Needless to say, I am not pleased with these results, but I'm glad I wasted a few hours looking into it, because I was just about to commit to staying up late instead of getting up early.

So there you have it, a night owl whose efficiency patterns follow those of the lark. But the data doesn't lie, and I'm sure as hell not going to collect another four months of it looking for a different answer.

How will I get out of bed, and not fall to the trap of going back to sleep after the one-week honeymoon period runs out? Well, my husband has a very bright halogen work lamp, and I have a programmable outlet timer. Those two are about to get acquainted.

Three month plan: GAME ON!

I've just finished my first round of taxes as a business. Complicated. I don't have any revenue yet, but I'm claiming my craft/marketing books and training programs. Still have to figure out how to bring my personal library into a partnership. Fun times.

I'm also trying to plan out my next three months. I've negotiated having Tuesdays and Thursdays off at work from late Feb - July. February and March will be taken up with my second job (teaching as an adjunct), but I've got from March 29 - July 7 to make something happen (the last 3 weeks of July will be taken up with family activities, since the kids are off school).

So that gives me 14-15 weeks, or about 29 full work days plus whatever additional time I can steal from evenings and weekends (with my family responsibilities, it won't be much).

I've edited down Act I of my WIP, and a bit of Act II, and I'm at 27,300 words. Good words! I think I've gotten into a groove now in terms of style and voice.

Each Act looks like it will be 24,000 words after editing. I'm a taker-outer rather than a putter-inner, so I have to learn to write in the leaner style I've developed while editing. In any case, this would make each book 96,000 words, and I want 3 books ready to go for launch, so 288,000 words less the 27,300 equals 260,700. That means I have to write 17,380 words/week.

Holy crapola!

Assuming I can get 7 hours in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and an hour in on every other day, I'll get 19 hours a week. Let's make it 20 to have round numbers. That means I need to write 869 words per hour. My top speed was about half that. Let's hope I'll be a bit quicker now that I'm more practices in my protagonist's voice; yikes!

I'm going to make my goal 17 k/wk, 1100 words on MWFSS, and 6000 words on TR.

For the next two weeks, I'll focus on doing scene-by-scene outlines of the three books. I've got a 9600 word narrative of where I want Book 1 to go, and another 3400 of ideas of the overall series, but I need to flesh out the nuts and bolts of how I'm going to translate that into scenes, and need to work on Books 2 and 3. I've got about 18 hours in the next two weeks to make that happen.

GAME ON!

Motivation

So much of the battle to become an established self-published offer boils down to motivation. When I plan out my schedule, it looks like I can get in 10 to 15 hours a week to work on this business, but when reality knocks I'm exhausted, the kids want attention (and to be honest they should be getting more), and it seems impossible to work constantly without having some down time to read, watch a movie, or otherwise unwind.

Readers of this blog will know that I've waffled between getting up early or staying up late to get things done. Alarms don't seem to work for me for longer than a one week period – no matter how much sleep I get it, even if it is 9 or 10 hours, I despise getting up in the morning. Conversely, if I stay up late my creative juices have run dry, extracted in the masticator that is my day job.

I've tried many ways to get around this conundrum. Since waking up to an alarm is so difficult, I have instead started setting an alarm to remind me to go to bed at a reasonable hour, and since my faculties are usually not as compromised in the evenings, this is easier to stick to. My latest is to set an alarm to remind myself to get ready for bed at 8:30 pm, and when I inevitably awake at night, if the clock says 4:30 or later, I get up. There's a bit of science around this. If you wake up naturally, you are usually at the end of the sleep cycle, and thus even if you have had less sleep, you will be significantly less drowsy. This was how I managed to get up this morning. Let's see how it goes.

I've also upped my game when it comes to cues, particularly after reading Heidi Grant Halverson's book Succeed. I've made some very specific goals (related to my novel, healthy eating, exercise, and family), printed up some Don't-Break-the-Chains, and have written some goal statements on the whiteboard that I pass every morning on my way to the shower:

"When my alarm sounds, I will finish whatever I am doing as quickly as possible and go to bed."

"If I get up early, focus, and avoid distraction, I will develop my indie career and make steps toward being my own boss."

Next week, I will once again request to go down to working 3 days a week at my day job, instead of 5. This will be the third year that I have reduced my workload in an effort to make this indie career work. In the first year, I continued to work 5 days a week, but got off a few hours earlier each day. That didn't work out because no one else seemed to respect the fact that my workday ended earlier, and where I am management I don't get paid overtime, so essentially I was working normal hours for less pay. I learned from this when the second year rolled around, and asked to work just 3 days week. This time I was sabotaged by my need to take on a teaching job that consumed the other 2 days more than I had anticipated. By the time that job ended I was burnt out, but did manage to put in about 25,000 words, so there's that. This year I will again go for the 3 days a week, but unfortunately I do have another teaching job. I've taken the last 2 weeks off from my main job to try to do all of my lecture prep in advance so that the month of March isn't a complete wash. Looking good so far, but only time will tell.

Book review: Sometimes the Magic Works, by Terry Brooks

4/5 stars

"In Sometimes the Magic Works, New York Times bestselling author Terry Brooks shares his secrets for creating unusual, memorable fiction. Spanning topics from the importance of daydreaming to the necessity of writing an outline, from the fine art of showing instead of merely telling to creating believable characters who make readers care what happens to them, Brooks draws upon his own experiences, hard lessons learned, and delightful discoveries made in creating the beloved Shannara and Magic Kingdom of Landover series, The Word and The Void trilogy, and the bestselling Star Wars novel The Phantom Menace.

In addition to being a writing guide, Sometimes the Magic Works is Terry Brooks’s self-portrait of the artist. “If you don’t think there is magic in writing, you probably won’t write anything magical,” says Brooks. This book offers a rare opportunity to peer into the mind of (and learn a trick or two from) one of fantasy fiction’s preeminent magicians." -- Amazon blurb.

I really enjoyed this book; I love reading about how successful authors started their career. The majority of this book focuses on Brooks' journey: how his success was launched by a perfect storm at the start of Del Rey books, how he stumbled along the way, and how the mind of a continual, lifetime storyteller works. I found his discussion of how his imagination has interfered with his everyday life illuminating, and especially enjoyed his two chapters about playing and exploring with his grandson Hunter. His style made me feel like I was sitting down and hearing him reminisce with a good friend.

His comments on craft are interspersed throughout the book. There is a section on outlining, the importance of letting your mind wander, and some traditional advice on writing engaging fiction (show don't tell, start and end strong, etc.) If you're a fan of Brooks' style of fiction and were hoping for an in-depth look at his craft, this book isn't it. It is more of a endearing and meandering conversation, where old nuggets of wisdom are professionally spit-shined so that even the most well-read could appreciate a thing or two.

I loved the "show don't tell" example on pages 125-126:

Telling: "Maud was eighty-one years of age with piercing dark eyes and s tiff, squared-away stance that suggested aching joints. Gray hair hung in a single braid down her back, tied at the end with a ribbon. Deep age lines marked her strong, plain face. She was missing her right arm, the sleeve of her cotton dress pinned against the breast and neatly folded at the elbow. For any years, she had worked in a bookstore, and before that, as a CIA operative. She loved cats and had two old toms at present named Kibbles and Bits. But while cats were welcome in her home, birds were not. She hated birds because as a child she had always been afraid of their beady, quick eyes and sharp little beaks."

Showing (I particular liked the underlined sentences): "Maud moved gingerly today, the result of another twenty-four hours added to her eighty-one years. Oddly enough, she felt the same as always, although her dark eyes might give her away to someone looking closely enough. Ignoring her stiffness and the ache in her joints, she brushed lightly at her braided gray hair and smiled at the sunlight streaming through her cabin window. The smile gave her lined face a warm and reassuring cast, the sort that always suggested to those she encountered that she had a good heart. Kibbles, the better half of Bits, trotted up to her, and she picked up the old tom and held him in the cradle of her good left arm. She glanced down at the empty right sleeve of her dress, checking her appearance the way she had been taught to do during her years with the CIA. Government agent never forgot their training. Or maybe it was booksellers who never forgot, she couldn't remember. She laughed silently at herself, able to push back the years and the past. On a day like this, she could even feel kindly toward birds, and that was rare indeed."

I also enjoyed reading the chapter "On the Trail of Tolkien" where Brooks talks about what he feels the greatest similarity is between them. In my own writing, I want to keep this chapter firmly in mind. Here's my favourite part, from page 190: "It was Tolkien's genius to reinvent the traditional epic fantasy by making the central character neither God nor hero, but a simple man in search of a way to do the right thing... Ordinary men placed in extraordinary circumstances are far more interesting."

I would strongly recommend this book to someone who enjoys author biographies, but in terms of a craft book I think there are better ones out there. Regardless, if you are considering writing Fantasy, this is a great book to pick up.

Book Review: The Giver, by Lois Lowry

2/5 stars

"The Giver, the 1994 Newbery Medal winner, has become one of the most influential novels of our time. The haunting story centers on twelve-year-old Jonas, who lives in a seemingly ideal, if colorless, world of conformity and contentment. Not until he is given his life assignment as the Receiver of Memory does he begin to understand the dark, complex secrets behind his fragile community. Lois Lowry has written three companion novels to The Giver, including Gathering Blue, Messenger, and Son." -- Amazon

I've had "The Giver" on my to-read list for some time, and eventually bought a very nice hard cover edition of the quartet some time ago (beautiful book; love it when they have the ribbon bookmarks in the hard covers). The book has since languished on my shelf. Then the other night I found myself too exhausted to read, yet too worn out from the day to go to sleep and face another after a long blink, and so I combed through the offerings on Netflix looking for some easy to absorb escapism. Then I saw that they had made a movie of The Giver in 2014. I looked up the trailer on YouTube and was intrigued. But of course, I can't watch the movie before reading the book. So what did I do at 9:15 pm when I had to wake up the next morning at 6:30 am?

I decided that I would finish the book then and there.

Although I read about a page a minute, and the book is slim, it still took me 3 hours. The next workday was rough, let me tell you. And to be honest, I don't think it was worth it.

After the first few pages I was really interested; I felt that Veronica Roth of Divergent fame must have read this book at some point. But then the story failed to launch for me. Granted, this is an old book, and perhaps the "science of the art" of commercial fiction wasn't as prominent back then, but I felt it was a slow, slow launch into the story. And then, just as things were getting started, it was over. The midpoint felt like it should have been an inciting incident, and the ending felt like it would have been a great midpoint, where the protagonist finally switches from being reactive to being proactive. Yet the book just ENDS! And it ends AMBIGUOUSLY!

I am not a fan of non-endings. I thought to myself, "Surely the next book will pick up where this left off. Maybe I'll just read a chapter or two." But the next book had completely different characters. Frustrating.

I understand that Lowry won a Newbery for this. I understand that 83% of readers on Amazon give this 4-5 stars. But I just didn't like it. As I was reading I had this strange feeling that I was reading a literary novel wrapped in genre paper, but the literary side wasn't true literary, and the genre side wasn't real either. I dunno. It just wasn't for me.

That said, the ending did pull at my heart strings; I loved the relationship between Jonas and Gabe. So after throwing the book on my night stand in a huff, I proceeded to spend 20 minutes surfing the internet in an effort to find out if the ending was just a hypothermic hallucination or the real deal (while trying not to ruin the remaining books in the series). Thankfully I did find out, but learned that I would have to read all four books to have this resolved.

I'm not sure if I'm willing to make that commitment.