Recently in a writer's life Category

Alas, I'm not referring to the electricity that tingles through you when you've grabbed onto the tail of an awesome story and it's dragging you through the wilderness at top speed. All I'm going to say is that if you're traveling and plan to write on your laptop, and your laptop's power adapter has a grounded plug (three prongs) and the country you're going to uses a different voltage and you do have a voltage transformer but said transformer only proffers ungrounded outlets...local hardware stores probably won't be able to help you. That's all.

However, I did find out that I'm able to write a nibble of a story with characters in a previously written story (a discovery made just days before deadline, of course). I thought it fitting to offer an autumn-themed story that was tied in to Summer-set, and so you'll be able to find "Fall, Falling, Fallen" at samhellion.com later this month. Here's the start of it:

On the day the prince was to arrive, all the women were aflutter because it was said he sought a bride. Melea was too busy to care — she was looking for a dog that had strayed. "Misbegotten cur," she sighed as she made her way through the browning grasses outside the city, although of course it wasn't. Shiri, the missing dog, was of faultless pedigree — Melea had chosen the parents herself, and Shiri's bloodline was nearly as noble as her own.

I'm running around like a decapitated chicken, trying to get things organized for my vacation, especially since work's breathing down my neck with two deadlines. I also have this ridiculous preference for returning to a home that's spotless, which has led to my scrubbing the toilet at 2 in the morning on past vacation departure dates. I'm hoping to avoid that this time around. But anyway, there's been a lot of literary planning going on as well:

I've given myself writing homework over the next week: polish "Gutter-wing" and finish an autumn-themed short story. Extra credit: play with ideas for a longer piece to work on during NaNoWriMo. I'm still not sure I'll be participating, but having a novel idea all prepped can't be a bad thing.

My destination is also the home of my favorite stationery store. I am picky about my longhand implements; the notebooks and pens I've found in the US just don't cut it. So I'll be stocking up on those.

I also have a nice mix of sf and romance paperbacks to read in the airport. It was a little odd, limiting my reading in the last couple of weeks to hardcovers only (since those are heavier and take up more luggage space), but whatever a girl's gotta do, yeah?

Note how I've gotten all of the above settled, but the toilet still needs cleaning...

So I'm headed for a lovely weekend in wine country. I agreed to go without much thought — I mean, it's a expenses-paid trip with alcohol involved — but as departure time got closer, I started worrying. Should I take my laptop, so that I could write? I would be leaving straight from work, so maybe I could just take my work laptop? But it seemed wrong to use it for non-work purposes. Notebook and pen, then, but would my companions give me time to write? What if they asked what I was writing and I was in the middle of a steamy sex scene?

I also chatted with someone else who had run a half-marathon, and we began contemplating a full marathon together. I had no social life while training for 13.1 miles, so imagine what it's going to be like when working up to 26.2. It's going to be negative free time.

But I imagine saying, "I can't, I have to write," and I just cringe. Writing is something I should be able to fit in no matter what else I'm doing. And denying myself fun would be a great way to start resenting writing.

So I'm off to enjoy myself. And if I'm lying by the pool, seeming to sunbathe, I'll actually be brainstorming for the story, I promise.

There are writers for whom writing everyday is key. I used to have spreadsheets that would use my daily word count to calculate what percentage of the story was finished, or how far I was lagging behind my goals. I gave that up for a much simpler system: I have a Google Calendar where I mark the total words for any stories I worked on that day. It's easy to glance at the last week and see how diligent I've been in carving out some writing time. Or I can flip ahead and gauge how much time I've got left before an anthology deadline. It's just the right amount of visual cue I need, without getting obsessed.

If I'm feeling particularly sadistic, I flip back and see how quickly I wrote the last quarter of Summer-set. The best person to pace yourself against is yourself, since you know that rate is feasible if you've already done it once.

I'm contemplating NaNoWriMo this year, and instead of slaving away on 1,667 words a day, I think I'll try focusing on writing on each of those 30 days. Then I'll see how the final accounting goes.

I feel like a runner in training, working on both endurance and speed. When I trained for my half-marathon, I remember it being mostly a mental battle, one of convincing myself that I could do it, and of discipline.

I ended up crossing the finish line so much earlier than my predicted time that my friend who was picking me up after arrived after the fact, even when she came early.

I'm spending my Friday night writing performance reviews for work. Joy!

On the other hand, this is surprisingly useful practice. Our reviews are transparent, which means that the recipients can read them and know who wrote them. It's incentive for tactful wording, particularly in the "areas for development" section.

Sound familiar? Yup, it's rather like giving critiques to a writer.

Also, while no character of mine is going to be lauded as attentive to end users' needs (I work at a dot-com), it's still a familiar place to be, thinking about what people's strengths and weaknesses are, and how they play off each other. And how every person has some of each.

We're also supposed to provide specific examples for every trait we point out. The company calls this a data-driven approach. I rather think of it as showing instead of telling.

The parallels probably end there, except that I've often stayed up late, bleary-eyed and desperately paging through old pages/emails for inspiration, for both. Back to writing...performance reviews.

The bread of a writer is the actual writing itself. But I think almost all writers crave feedback to go along with it.

I've been turning to the Internet with increasing frequency to find out about the authors whose books I love — to hunt down their other works, find out what they're working on, and just be curious in general. But it never really occurred to me that this meant I could probably email them while I was at it, instead of the previous cumbersome process of finding the mailing address of their publisher and writing an actual letter, which adds gravity to the process. You wouldn't write an actual letter just to say, "Hey, that was a pretty cool book," right?

Anyway, recently I actually took the time to send notes to a couple of authors who are electronically published, and thus eminently reachable by email. I was in correspondence with one anyway (more on her story another day), and the other wrote a great article on the passive voice that I passed on to someone else in lieu of my own impatient explanation. The latter also has one of those lyrical writing styles that I am obsessed with (I found the article by looking for more of her stories), and I decided that good nonfiction and fiction deserved acknowledgment.

(The funny thing is that I'm up to my armpits in critiques to do, so I nearly started making critterly remarks on their works. I settled for more generalized glowing comments.)

I'm only pleased when someone likes one of my stories, so I'm hoping other authors feel the same way. I think from now own I'll make the effort to reach out and tell them about their works that I've enjoyed.

I usually don't care overmuch about the environment I write in — I insist on ergonomic workspaces, but mentally I can do fine with music or silence, people around or not, beverage at the ready or snackless.

But in the corner above my desk there is a spider, and that is seriously throwing me off. Do not be surprised if a monster arachnid appears in my current story. Even though there's no place for spiders in an angel/demon novella.

It's been interesting, pulling from the Bible for the mythological basis. I wonder if religious folks will be offended, or if anyone will point out "inaccuracies" where I deliberately took liberties in the worldbuilding.

And what was supposed to be an intimate little love story has suddenly turned into a tale of the apocalypse. Maybe this is my way of working toward writing a post-apocalyptic work, a genre I'm absurdly fond of.

If I go too long without running, I start feeling restless. Work has been insane enough to keep me from either trail or gym as of late, and it's getting to me.

Worse, though, has been the lack of time for writing.

Someone once gave the advice to aspiring writers: If you don't have to write, then don't, and spare yourself the agony. I once went for a few of years without really writing, so perhaps I belong in that category. But I came back to it when life hit a really rough patch.

The writing itch really hits me when I'm stressed, and I think that says something. It's not that I find writing relaxing — far rom it — but that even the agonies of writing are preferable to any other kind of misery. I don't think I ever would have stopped writing if I hadn't known that I could come back to it anytime.

I'm hoping for a breather this weekend, and a couple thousand words.

I'm writing up some technical documentation for work, and it's draining the fiction writing drive right out of me. No doubt this is also due to the fact that I brought my work home with me and have been laboring away on it past 10 pm, with an early morning meeting tomorrow.

In the meditation class I took, the instructor taught us a technique that, when some people tried it, caused them to fall asleep. These people admitted to being short on sleep, and being so relaxed for the first time that day allowed them start napping. The instructor noted that in such a case, it's more important to address your sleep deprivation than to worry about perfecting a meditation technique.

I know that if I truly loved writing, blah blah, I would make time for it every day, yeah, yeah. But there's still life to deal with, and poor health from lack of sleep or exercise isn't going to make me a better writer.

Good night.

NFL pre-season's starting.

Which means that the NFL season is coming up.

Also around the corner? The utter languishment of my writing career. (In the distance, a bell tolls...)

Okay, so I exaggerate. But there were, in the past, entire weekends where I camped out at the local sports bar. The bar owner learned my favorite teams and started advising me on where to sit as soon as I walked in the door.

Now imagine me in a bar, pint glass in one hand and pen in the other, one eye on the television and the other on my notebook... Yeah, I can't, either.

Yeah, we're going to have to work out some priorities in the coming months.