By the time I finish writing this post, it will be 2PM on Wednesday of the first full work week in 2015 and I won’t have written a word of story that I’ve wanted to keep at the end of the day. That is not good.

Back in November, I had all sorts of ideas about where this story was going. Over the past few weeks, they all seem to have disappeared, like fog burning off in the midday sun. Wisps of scenes linger, but they’re just wisps. Why were they at the bed and breakfast? What was that character’s role supposed to be? Why is it that my characters only seem to want to have conversations and not do anything?

I stare at the file and try to solve the single problem in front of me — is Dillon trapped or not? how much detail do I need to set up the problem? — but I wind up playing with the individual words, arranging and rearranging the same sentences, the same phrases, the same actions. It is getting really damn annoying.

I know all the ways to overcome writer’s block. Most of them boil down to “sit down in the chair and stare at the page and do not leave the chair until words are written.” But sometimes it does help — me, at least! — to warm up the fingers and write words, any words, any thing, dumb or not, just to shut off the critic in my head and remind myself that this is how the process works. So this is me, doing that, and now I’m going to go back to staring at my file and shuffling around the deck chairs.

The one good idea I had today, though, was to treat my two interweaving stories as separate stories for now. Write the scenes that belong to Grace and Noah, and then the scenes that belong to Dillon and Rose (or vice versa) and worry about how they flow together later. The problem with that approach — which I realized as soon as I opened up the file — is that setting is important and I can’t know where the ghosts are unless I know where the humans are. Perhaps I will head into Powerpoint — an old favorite workflow tool — and start noodling around with the various scenes that I know I have in mind and see if I can fit them together. Instead of words leading to structure, I can see if some structure can lead me to words.

And if not… well, there’s always taxes to do. Or insurance paperwork. Writing ought to be more important than either of those things (at the moment — I’m not exactly worried about deadlines yet), but at least it would be getting something done.

Edited to add: instead I went off and checked out my RSS feed and this post from Patricia Wrede was both timely and relevant.

R gave me a book for Christmas, The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss. As soon as I saw the wrapped present under the tree, I knew what it was. I showed great self restraint, IMO, in not unwrapping it while he was out, reading it, and wrapping it back up again, because it was a short book that I really wanted to read and I could easily have read the whole thing while he was out to dinner with a friend. However, I did show said self-restraint, opened it happily on Christmas morning, and on the evening of Christmas Day, post- much good food and movie watching, I lit some candles in the bathroom and settled into the tub with my new book. (And a chocolate martini. It was that kind of day. 🙂 )

On page 2, Auri grins.

If you haven’t read his previous books that won’t mean anything to you, but Auri is a mysterious, mystical waif of a girl who lives in the sewers (more or less). A delicate wisp, dancing to her own beat, fragile, living a precarious life, fey and maybe even insane. Or at least that’s how I remembered her.

But she grins?

It struck me as incongruous. A grin is such a jovial expression. Grins belong to flirtatious boys, amused storekeepers, practical jokers, even maybe the bullies in a high school setting when delivered with a hint of malice. But Auri?

I shrugged it off and kept reading. Maybe Auri really is a grinner. She’d already smiled once so maybe this grin is just measuring her delight — a way of saying that she’s not just happy, but really, really happy. I can live with that.

On page 5, she grins at herself in her mirror. Okay. Apparently she’s very satisfied with how she looks. Not just pleased, but ever-so-pleased. But I paused and wondered — like a Halloween pumpkin grin? Like a smile so wide it could break her face grin? A grin is a big expression.

But who really notices a grin? Words like grin, smile, look, shrug, frown, said — they’re background words. Your eyes fly over them as if they weren’t there and if it weren’t for the fact that Auri just didn’t feel like a grinner to me, I’m sure I wouldn’t even have noticed that she was doing it again.

On page 9, she grins again. Three times. She grins and snatches up a bottle. She grins and kisses the bottle. She grins and shivers a little. On 10, she does it again. On 11, she grins in the very first line. And then she does it a second time only a few paragraphs later!

Needless to say, she keeps grinning. I didn’t keep count and I didn’t track pages, but I noticed every single one of those grins like it was a flat key in an otherwise charming melody. By the last paragraph of the book, which is six sentences long, one of them being, “She grinned.” I was ready to shout “I know!” and throw the book across the room.

But here’s what I learned from it. Words like grin are shorthand. Sometimes that’s just what we need. If all I want is to make it clear who’s speaking, using “said” is the simplest way to do so and using, ‘Luke grinned at her. “Are you sure?”‘ is about the second simplest option. There’s nothing wrong with the occasional grin.

The emphasis has to be on occasional, though. And that’s not easy. Authors learn to watch out for word repetitions, but sometimes it seems impossible. It feels essential to describe an action, to put some bit of stage business onto the page, to give the reader something to see, and as a result, we write lines like “she frowned” and “she shrugged” and yes, “she grinned”. Still, looking at this book as an editor (and frankly, Pat Rothfuss’s copy-editor was seriously asleep at the wheel), almost all of those grins are unnecessary or could be replaced with more interesting phrases.

Furthermore, “she grins” is distancing language. It’s us, looking at her, from the outside. Instead, we as readers could be inside the character. What is she smelling, what is she feeling, what is she hearing, what is she seeing? The best parts of this book do exactly that. When Auri loses something important to her, she could have frowned. Instead, Rothfuss wrote, “The thought of leaving Foxen in the dark was enough to put a fine, thin crack straight through her heart. To lose him after all this time…”

Resolution for my own writing: fewer grins, more fine, thin cracks.

500 words yesterday, as well as two blog posts and lots of emails. Today, too much thinking about writing, but two blog posts totaling over 1500 words, still on top of the email, about to go out to dinner to celebrate my son’s birthday, and I at least tweaked some stuff in my yWriter file. And it will get easier when R goes back to school and I can have my real bedroom back!

I opened up my file to write today — it’s a Monday morning, the start of a new week, time to get professional again — and I didn’t even read a sentence before I was clicking on my internet browser icon to escape. Win for me, I suppose, in that I forced myself to come straight to a blog and start to write something as opposed to drifting off into news or social media or silly little quizzes, but it’s still not a good sign.

I’ve been thinking lately, but not writing. I want to give myself lots of excuses — it’s the holidays, my schedule is disrupted, I’m over-tired and in need of sleep, etc. — but none of them are very good excuses. The harsh judge in the back of my head rolls her eyes at all of them and reminds me that when I was writing Eureka fanfiction, nothing could keep me away. I stole moments late at night, after R was already asleep, and plotted constantly. Walking the dog was an exercise in dreaming out my next words. I love that part of writing and I’m just not in that sort of space right now. But I know from past experience that the only way to get back into that space is to actually do the writing. The longer I can force myself to sit with the blank page, to hammer out word by painful word like individual nails in scratchy roofing shingles, the better the chance that someday I’ll sit up and discover I have a roof over my head. Funny how literal that metaphor is, especially when what I was thinking of was not the concrete realities, but the abstract joy of writing. Is worry about the metaphorical roof-over-my-head getting in my way? Maybe.

But not entirely. In a way, that worry might be good for me. I’m at a place where it feels as if it would be easy to walk away, to decide that as a business, writing is still more work than it’s worth, and as a hobby, it stopped being fun when I started worrying about paying bills. I’ve read several blog posts recently about the death of the indie author. (Not a literal metaphor this time.) A couple were from authors, acknowledging that they hadn’t found the success they wanted. Mark Coker from Smashwords wrote about how the business has gotten tougher and he’s hearing authors talking about quitting. And Kristine Rusch wrote a lengthy summary calling 2014 “The Year of the Quitter.” In it, she talks about people losing the joy and trying to reclaim it by leaving the business.

Here’s the thing, though: in all my years of working, I’ve never had a job that provided me with joy on a regular basis. Never. Occasional moments of fun, sure. The satisfaction of working hard, completing projects, knowing I had done well, absolutely. Loads of those. Pleasant interactions with smart people, a sociable-ish life, yep, had that. But joy? Who expects joy from a job? And yet we do the work anyway.

Being able to find joy in writing is the bonus part of the job, not the nitty-gritty of it. The nitty-gritty is the nails. And it’s time for me to hammer some nails.

Endings and beginnings — it’s the beginning of the week and the ending of the year. I’m not going to make any New Year’s resolutions this year. But I am going to hammer one nail at a time, one word at a time, one page, and I am going to persist. 2014 may be the year of the quitter but it’s not the year that I’m going to quit.

So I took a week (and a bit) off from the blogging every day routine. I pretty much took it off from the writing every day routine, too. Oh, I think I opened up the file most days, but I can guarantee I didn’t get any thousand word days. I’m not sure why the pressure of NaNo gets to me the way it does, but it is definitely not meant for the way I work. It’s like there’s some little rebellious streak in the creative side of me that screeches to a halt when it feels pushed. When I was an editor — and really in every other area of my life — I am obsessively perfect about deadlines. If the work needs to be done on a given day, it will be done, end of story. But writer me just turns my back on the whole thing and pretends it doesn’t exist.

One day this summer… oh, bah, that’s a long story, and I don’t know that I want to spend the time to write it all out. But long story made very short — a long-distance healer told me that she thought I was more than one person. Another thing she said was that I felt to her like someone who was in a loop of “never enough”. I felt like the right answer to both those things was simply to acknowledge and accept, the “yep, this is me” response, but I think I would like to break out of the “never enough” habit.

So yesterday — 400 words. And they were enough. Also a ridiculous amount of time spent researching dogs to find out what kind of dog Rose might have owned when she was a girl. A beagle turns out to be the answer. Good Florida country dog, good 1950’s dog, and a good dog to be named Blue (because there’s a type of beagle called a blue tick beagle) which was the line I wrote without conscious planning and then had to spend hours pondering.

And today? There will be some more words. Enough to make me happy, I hope!

NaNoWriMo ends today. I guess I should call it NaBlogMo? I did blog every day. But word count hovers at about 12K, nowhere near the 50K that would have been a “win.”

That said, I like what I wrote and I’m not going to stop writing tomorrow, just because it’s December 1st. I’m not sure what I got out of NaNoWriMo. It feels like nothing, except this year I did manage to keep writing. And maybe I learned some stuff about my process along the way.

Whenever I read about word counts, about people writing thousands of words a day, every day, I feel like there’s some secret that I’m missing. Why can I never seem to make that happen? But I think maybe instead of being annoyed at my slow pace, I need to think of myself as a turtle. Slow and steady, I’ll get there in the end.

Oops!

Nearly forgot entirely. It’s after 9 and I was just thinking about maybe going to sleep soon, with one dog on my lap and the other two on either side of my legs. Then I remembered that not only did I not write a single word–nor even open up the file–I also hadn’t written a blog post.

So there, blog post written. Sort of.

More tomorrow, of course!

Big Hero Six today. R and I were in mutual harmony as we walked out of the movie theater rewriting the ending to one that would have been more satisfying to the two of us while C rolled her eyes at us. Perhaps most people don’t rewrite the endings of movies as they leave? But that said, it was a great movie, totally worth watching. It made me yearn to see Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service and Howl’s Moving Castle — which, alas, are not available online. I suppose that’s why I’ve managed to sneak in a blog post, because I’m not watching movies instead.

Totally paying for all the food cheats. Allergic and achy and tired — I put away some dishes today and went to the movies and it feels like I deserve to rest for the next three. Needed a nap this afternoon and could go to bed now at barely dinner time. I might, in fact. But tomorrow I go back to the crazy diet and I’m almost looking forward to it. It was nice to drink wine and eat goat cheese and pecans and potato chips, but I’d rather feel energetic.

Words today? None. But Netflix isn’t working so maybe I’ll open the file and stare at it a little before going to sleep!

Thanksgiving day.

The menu went:

Beef and bacon pate topped with blueberry jelly on baguette rounds
Cranberry salsa on cream cheese with crackers
An artichoke spinach dip with gluten-free crackers (brought by guests)

Roasted turkey (Trader Joe’s, pre-brined, never frozen)
Mashed potatoes (made with cream cheese, half & half and butter)
Sweet potato rounds topped with goat cheese, pecan, cranberry salad
Roasted sweet potatoes and apples
Classic cranberry sauce with oranges and pecans
Dressing, either plain or with mushrooms, sausage and wild rice (brought by guests)
Gravy

Pumpkin pie
Bread pudding

Words? What are those again? I didn’t write any today, nor am I going to. NaNoWriMo is a fail for me — I’m also not going to try to write 20K words in the next three days, because I’m going to be busy going to the movies with R and maybe driving him back to college, and maybe recovering from three days of eating all the wrong foods.

But right now I’m going to pour myself another glass of wine and either watch television for an hour or maybe take a hot bath. Ah, the delights of not caring about NaNoWriMo. 🙂

I hope that your Thanksgivings were wonderful!

Good words yesterday. I’m not sure how many of them overall, because there was (alas) deleting of some old words that stopped working. But over a thousand, I’m sure of that. And better, I found the story again. The words were a little bit of a muddle — it was a lot of dialog, so there was a lot of ordering and re-ordering the conversation to try to find the way in which it flowed best — but I’m looking forward to working on them again today.

Favorite line(s) from yesterday:
“I’m going to kiss him,” Rose announced. Was that a flicker of his eyelashes, a look of surprise?
“Hey, what?” Dillon protested.
“You are?” Joe and Nadira said at the same moment, in very different tones.
“I am,” Rose repeated. She leaned in a little closer to Cam and said, in her most seductive, most southern voice, “A really good kiss. A kiss like only a southern girl can kiss, long and slow and sweet and…”

And looking that up made me realize that there were fewer words than I thought. But that’s okay, I’m still pleased with what I got done. Today — more words! Also some yoga, some grocery shopping, and maybe the start of some cooking. I thought of a nice Christmas present for my dad (involving cooking) so I have to decide if I want to do that before Thanksgiving. Maybe. It’d be nice for R, too, if I did, and he comes home on Wednesday, yay!

Good luck to all who are writing this week! You can do it!

I wrote yesterday. Not a ton of words, not enough words, but good words. I also did laundry, including the folding of my laundry, which is often where I fail, made a couple good meals with plenty of leftovers for later, ate healthy food, made my bed, bought tablecloths for my Thanksgiving dinner tables… and took a two hour long candlelit bath with a Nora Roberts that was on sale.

So it was a productive day and also a very pleasant day. For today, words, words, more words. I realized that posting the story as I wrote it on fictionpress was part of why I was getting stuck — the need for it to be good enough for other people to see is inhibiting, even though I’ve always found that a helpful way to backup my files, motivate myself, and keep my scenes focused. So for the next week, I’m not going to post on fp. Come December–or whenever–I’ll start revising and posting and then maybe those scenes will go fast.

I also realized yesterday that three days off and too much revision really was making life a lot more difficult. I kept having to refresh my memory about what had happened because I’d written bits that I’d then deleted and I’d changed stuff around. Had he talked about hope yet? Nope, that was gone, so good, I could put that in here. Had she found out about his past yet? Nope, decided to do that and then pushed it off to later. Oops, and wait, where did Rose go? Drat, losing track of a character is never any good. And all of that — well, both contributed to the not-very-many-words word count — but also was a direct result of not writing every day and not staying fresh in the story. It’s a good reminder to me of why writing every day is so useful.

All that said, this week is Thanksgiving. R will come home on Wednesday, yay, and the chance that I’ll get much writing done on Thursday is pretty small. I also am tempted to do some seriously crazy cooking over the next few days — some fun appetizer possibilities, maybe some baking for early Christmas presents — fun, but not conducive to the thousands of words I’d like to be writing. But I’m not going to worry about that now. For today — words, words, and more words.