300+ words this morning and then I got stuck. A cute little plot device suddenly had a gaping hole in it, a solution that would be immediately obvious to all involved. Ouch. I hate that.

I wound up shutting down the computer and spending a couple hours napping amidst my flock of dogs, and doing house things. (Side note: I can’t believe I ever thought the bed was crowded with two dogs. Organizing them all so that there’s room for me to take a nap is on an entirely different plane of crowded.) I think I resolved it and it was definitely good story plotting time. I had an… event… planned for later in the book that I hadn’t quite decided how to work and I got a nice solid idea for how to make it happen gracefully.

Now I’m off to do a little more research–I need to invent some terminology, but my translation program would translate it into something that Fen could understand, so I need to figure out what that would be. But I plan on getting back to that document and getting at least a few more words written before I shut down again.

12:15 already. I’m hungry and I haven’t written a word. I haven’t even opened up the file! Time zooms by sometimes. But I’m not beating myself up, because a) the day has plenty of hours left in it, and b) I’m through all my email, a phone call that I’ve been dreading, all the dogs are walked and fed and behaving, and I did a grocery store run. So yeah, it’s not as if I’ve been lounging in bed all morning.

Yesterday the writing didn’t go well. Probably more to the point, it didn’t happen. I wound up backing up and re-reading a bunch of ALM, trying to get back into my sense of the world and remember specific details. I did a ton of entertaining research on some useful and not-so-useful things. And my one fun edit of the day was that I changed a line where Cyntha threatened bread & water as a punishment to sea slug paste & water. I probably spent an hour making that change, but hey, it’s world-building and it amused me.

Today, I’m definitely going to get more done. In my spare moments, the characters are starting to chat in my head again. I wish I’d caught a conversation that they had yesterday while I was swimming–I can’t even remember what it was now. But it was fun while I was imagining it and I’m looking forward to having fun again.

Today’s goal: 500+ words. I’m going to work my way back up to 1000 a day. Today I’m still in the dreaming stage.

Breakfast this morning: citrus-glazed bison meatballs, with a salad of mixed greens, avocado, and a dressing of lemon balsamic vinegar and lime juice.

Yeah, I know this isn’t my food blog. But I don’t feel like posting the whole recipe, so my blogs are blending together for the moment.

I wrote 1000 words by midnight last night, but they wound up being words where I was thinking out what I wanted to do. Some of them related to the story, some of them didn’t, and by the time I finally finished, I had concluded that I’m putting Ghosts of Belize back on hold. I think this story has a lot of potential. Some of the parts that I’ve written are really fun. But the pieces aren’t fitting together into a whole. Despite all of the many days that I’ve spent on this story, it’s not working. One approach would be to keep pushing through with it, keep trying–I’ve spent over a year coming back to it and then leaving it again. I started it literally last spring, I think. (And not the kind of literally where you really mean not literally at all.) But I think I’m going to try to let it percolate some more instead. When I finish my next project, I’ll come back to Belize and try again. Ironically, I have a really pretty cover ready for it. Once I write it, it’ll be practically good to go. But I’m tired of beating my head against the wall that is that story.

So today’s plan–pick up A Precarious Balance where I left off a couple of months ago and get moving on it. First, though, I have to take the dogs to the vet and discover that at least one has an expensive ear infection. Better one than two, I tell myself, so fingers crossed that it’s not both of them.

Edited to add: Three out of four ears infected. Ugh. That’s still better than four out of four, right? Sometimes thinking positive is harder than other times.

1:23 and I haven’t written a real word yet. Not off to a good September start! But I’m setting a goal right now and making it official: 1000 words before I go to bed tonight, with at least three writing sprints of either 20/10s or 45/15s. (The latter being better, of course, but I’m not going to ask for miracles from myself.)

And just because beating myself up is not a good mental health strategy, I’m going to remind myself that I invested some hours in learning more about ebook formatting this morning, swam and played with the dogs, ate two super-healthy meals, and started a load of laundry. I am being productive and now I’m going to go off and be more productive. 1000 words. I will do it.

The words today were few and far between. It’s almost 9:30, and I’d say my total count was around 200, but my end of the day count is more like 20. I’m writing a conversation and I don’t know what happens in it. And playing it by ear is simply not working. It felt like wrong direction after wrong direction after wrong direction today and I kept writing a few sentences and deleting and then wandering around.

There was a lot of wandering away.

But I also did good things today. House-cleaning stuff, business-y stuff, left the house twice, cooked elaborate food, played with the dogs, swam–and so I’m forgiving myself and moving on. I wish the writing had been better but I’m already yawning and it’s not going to happen.

Tomorrow, though, I have nothing important happening until my niece arrives at 5:30 and I am determined to write words. They don’t have to be good words as long as they’re words.

I pretend on a regular basis that I’m going to get my life organized. Hyperbole and a Half’s “Clean All The Things!” resonates with me. I don’t do the guilt spiral anymore. I suppose that’s my symptom of adulthood–I never manage to be as organized as I aspire to be but I seldom beat myself up about it. But still, on a regular basis, I jump into Clean ALL the things mode, and part of that, for me, is scheduling my time. Today, my smug schedule is tea, walk the dogs, feed the dogs, twenty minutes on a chore (organizing paperwork), eat healthy breakfast, organize food for the rest of the day (checking the menus and shopping list), one-hour writing time, yoga, lunch, grocery shopping, three-hours writing time, swim, cook healthy dinner.

So far, so good. I’ve made it through the first six items on my list.

I’m in a ten minute window before the one-hour writing time starts, so writing goal for today: another 1000 words and some more exploration of this conflict between Akira and Zane. And a strong reminder to myself–it’s a first draft and it’s okay if the words suck.

I’m at 842 words and not stopping for the day until I hit 1000–and those words do not include the many emails I answered, go, me. I also walked the dog, went to yoga, swam a little, and ate healthy meals that followed my crazy diet. Repeat the go me.

Most importantly, though, I figured out the core issue with my Belize story. The conflict is all external. The plot is fine, but the problem with it, the reason that I’m finding it boring, is that it’s all external danger, not internal danger. It’s meant to be just a little short story, but it’s not what I write. Fortunately, that realization came attached to a scene where my two lovely main characters get into their first fight as a married couple. Yay!

So back to working on it. I started this blog post hours ago and a multitude of distractions–all starting with dogs–dragged me away, but I am determined to get that last 160 words in.

I edit as I write. If I let the words flow without any polishing, I wind up wallowing in the depths of self-loathing. Well, or writing-loathing. My self-talk becomes all about what a terrible writer I am and how bad the words are and how stupid what I’ve written is and how no one could ever enjoy reading it. I know everything can be fixed in editing, but if I don’t do some self-editing along the way, I get stuck.

What sorts of edits do I mean? Mostly tightening and smoothing–changes that harken back to one of the fundamental rules of The Elements of Style, “omit needless words.” For example, the above paragraph began life as:

I do a lot of editing as I write, although I wish I wouldn’t. But I’ve definitely discovered that for me, if I simply let the words flow without doing any polishing of them at all, I wind wallowing in the depths of self-loathing. Well, or writing-loathing. The loathing state where my self-talk is all about what a terrible writer I am and how bad the words are and how stupid what I’ve written is and how no one could ever possibly enjoy reading it. I know that we’re supposed to remember that everything can be fixed in editing, but if I don’t do some self-editing along the way,

I stopped when I began to start editing it, cut-and-pasted, then finished editing the original paragraph and ended it. And then, I have to admit, I went back and made a few more edits. I actually try not to edit my blog posts because a blog post for me is just an exercise in getting my fingers moving. My goal with these posts is to kick my brain into gear and my fingers into motion, so that I start the writing that matters to me, my fiction, ready to move, not agonize over each word. It’s a warm-up, a practice session. Despite that, I still edit, because I can’t stop myself.

Unlike the post-draft editing–in which I’m systematic and rigid–my in-draft editing is mostly intuitive. My natural writing is wordy and meandering. Often I write around an idea, trying to understand what I’m trying to say even as I type it. I’ll write a paragraph or three, and then immediately go back and clean it up, deleting words that don’t add value, tightening, getting rid of adverbs, adding stronger verbs, fixing passive constructions. And then I move on. Obviously, I also fix typos! My “first” drafts often appear to have very few mistakes, but that’s because every paragraph has already been gone over two or three times, at minimum.

If you don’t write that way, good for you. Don’t start. It’s slow and time-consuming and undoubtedly a major reason why it takes me so long to finish a manuscript. But I’ll be using examples in this series of posts from my own work, so do bear in mind that all of my “first” drafts have been edited along the way.

On my next post, I’ll talk about my first edit round: the big picture edit.

*****

Meanwhile, today I’m going to work on writing a Eureka fanfiction. I have one unfinished story that I started three years ago, and I’ve made it my goal to finish writing it this week. It’s been surprisingly challenging in really fun ways–over the course of the year that I wrote Eureka fanfiction obsessively, I wrote multiple versions of the characters. This story returned to the canon characters, but it turns out that some of the versions of the characters I wrote are more real to me than the show’s versions. I wrote an AU (alternate universe) story in which two characters changed positions, and I have to keep fighting not to let those characters take over the story I’m writing now. That probably doesn’t make any sense, but I probably can’t explain it any better without getting deep into the nitty-gritty of what happened and who the characters were. Suffice to say, I’m enjoying digging deep into these characters again.

I’m also loving my technological inventions. The most fun part of my Eureka stories were the crazy science & gadgets I invented. In this case, one of characters created an invisibility worm that she sent viral. No digital media–which is all just bits and bytes–records her existence. Or rather computers delete her image whenever it appears in their databanks. It couldn’t really be done without vastly superior recognition technology than we have today and the side-effects from errors would probably be dazzling, since individuals aren’t so easily differentiated, but it’s fun nonetheless. I loved making up crazy technology and mixing ideas.

I got an incredibly lovely message from a former colleague yesterday in which she told me that I was “truly gifted as writer, storyteller, imaginer,” and I so, so loved the last word in her list. I know spell-check is saying that it’s wrong, but it makes me happy!

Okay, over 800 words of babble. The fingers are warmed up. Away I go.