I'm Getting Published!

Merry day!  Fire up the blog again at long last!  What?  It's Ash Wednesday?  Well, okay, we can keep the bacchanalia a bit more solemn and austere, if that'll help.

I just found out yesterday that my short story, "ROSEBANK NNL," got accepted as part of a collection that's tentatively being titled Boroughs of the Dead, Volume II.  It's a bunch of NYC-set ghost stories, and the theme inspired me to take a mental visit back to Staten Island.  It was the first story I ever submitted for publication, so I fully expect to get a big head and start lording it over all my friends now (except for the ones who have already been published, including my wife).

Seriously though, this is certainly some great fuel for inspiring me to write more often again.  I've already started on another story for a different anthology.  It may be too weird to ever go anywhere, but at the very least I can use the practice.  I've also still been plugging away at Suckers, my way-too-long-in-gestation vampire novel, although it's been hard to get my momentum back since NaNoWriMo.  I think it may help to give my latest draft a complete read-through, to get me firmly back in the world of the story.

There's still a ways to go before I'm actually, literally (ha ha) published.  The folks behind the anthology are going to send me a line edited version of the story, which I'll then have to approve and sign the contract for.  Then there's the wait until the thing actually goes to print, and possibly another wait until I actually get paid and get a copy of the book.  I remember how long that took in my wife's case, so I'm expecting there to be at least a few months until I can fully consider myself the barest definition of an author.  Nevertheless, I'm excited to see how all of these steps play out.  More news to come as everything progresses!

Thoughts from a Binge-Writing Hangover

I'm back!  November's over, so I don't have my NaNo writing anymore as an excuse not to post here.  (Not that I wasn't finding plenty of excuses before that---this place has been a ghost town over the past few months)  I'm actually happy to be back to writing these entries: I started to miss writing as soon as I finished National Novel Writing Month (NaNo) this year, oddly enough.

Not that I wrote a story so amazing that it inspired me to have tons of confidence in my abilities, mind you.  I finally got all of Songs from Town (my NaNo novel for this year) that I could think of squeezed out of my system, and it had its moments, but I really had to push myself some days.  I ended up on surprisingly few rants, and there was only one major break from reality, so that's a good sign.  Writing did come easier to me this year, I must admit.  I even managed to get ahead of pace on Thanksgiving, which led to a rare lack of panic going into the home stretch.  It certainly helped that my novel this year was disjointed by design, going off to join new groups of characters at will.  I hardly found any characters that I wanted to stick with for more than a single chapter, though, which is unusual for me.  Normally it's the characters that drive my writing, but here they were often just cocktail napkin sketches in comparison to what I'm used to.  And many of them were horrible, horrible people.  I did, surprisingly, manage to tie up quite a few hanging plot strands in the last few chapters, albeit not in very organic or satisfying ways.  To expect that kind of result given how little I'd planned though, would be like betting on a miracle.

My wife was neck and neck with me all through this month, and for the first time I actually managed to validate ahead of her!  I ended up having to write an extra thousand words though, since a whole bunch of the ones I did write were stolen away from me by the validator.  I think it was my predilection for em-dashes that did me in---the words that they connected were counted as separate words in NeoOffice, as they should have been, but in the validator the fact that I didn't put spaces in there came back to bite me in the ass.  Still, I cranked those extra words out without too much trouble.  (I think I'll go back to Scrivener next year though: trying to find older scenes for reference in a ninety-some-page document was a major headache)

It's always a painful process for me to get back into writing after a long time away.  I always vow that I'm going to not take as long before I start again each year, but each year I end up losing track of that vow in the same doldrums that eat up a whole bunch of New Year's resolutions.  At least this past year I got a whole bunch of revising done (though I'm still only halfway through Suckers, the novel I was doing it for), and I started a promising new novel called Delta OUTSIDE of NaNo, which is unheard of for me.  Songs from Town was actually supposed to be a prequel to Delta (which still only has a few chapters to it after I got hung up on where to go next), but it ended up becoming its own creature, with only a hasty, eye-rolling tie-in at the end.  The bits of it that I had before November started were with me long before Delta came around though, so that makes sense.

Now I need to get back to revising.  The holidays are going to distract me all over the place, but I've got a good story with real potential, and I'm not going to let it flounder just because there are so many new and exciting things I could be doing otherwise.  The NaNo folks say that getting that Shitty First Draft (SFD) out of the way is the hardest part, and on some level it might be, but going back through that draft with a fine-toothed comb and taking out the shitty parts can be nearly as difficult, if not more so.  When you actually have to look at your own work with a critical eye again it can be deflating, and I think that in many ways I'm my own worst critic.  That's a good thing to be in the long run, I think, but there can be times of despairing, of thinking that I'll never be more than a talentless hack doomed to obscurity, can be hard to take sometimes.  (Granted, I may at least be doomed to obscurity anyways, but I'm never going to get anywhere unless I at least make peace with that eventuality)  Thank god I have such an amazing wife to get me through all this.  Her confidence in me begins where my own confidence in myself ends, and I always strive to be just as supportive to her.  And she's actually getting results!  The anthology that accepted her short story is supposed to finally be coming out sometime this month, and I'm over the moon for her success.  She's my inspiration and my rock, and together we'll at least get one or two of all our crazy dreams realized.

A Full Life?

My life is full right now.  Full of commitments, full of surprises, full of love.  I can't stand to add anything else to my plate, and I don't want to start anything new until I get something good and firmly accomplished.  There's a bit of a problem with that, because a lot of the things I'm working on right now don't have very near-term goals, or even clearly-defined endpoints.  They all have milestones, of course, but there's always another carrot to chase after the current one's been caught.

Take the Philadelphia Marathon, for instance.  I just started my training for it earlier this week, but it's not my first marathon, and I have no intention of making it my last.  I had a good workout today on that front, too---five and a half miles, averaging an 8:20 pace.  That's just about the best I've ever done in this kind of weather.

I ran from my office, which was something I've never tried before.  I'd originally planned to wake up early, but I was writing so much last night that I got to bed late, and there was no way I was going to turn an already-pushing-it seven hours of sleep into six if I could help it.  So I brought my running clothes into work, thinking I might run at the end of the day.  Looking at the forecast though, it seemed more and more likely that it was going to rain later in the day, so I decided to run right when I got there.  Even that early in the day there was a bit of a drizzle, but it was a good drizzle---more refreshing than soaking.  I ran from DUMBO down to Red Hook along the waterfront.  The route's an interesting mix of parks, heavy industry, and hipsterdom.  When I came back I felt accomplished and ready to start the day.  (I stayed an hour later at the end than I usually did to make up the time---I'm not trying to goof off here or anything)

As far as the writing goes, I set a goal at the beginning of July to revise 15,500 words of my novel by the end of the month (using Camp NaNoWriMo), and I hit that goal exactly at midnight last night.  Now I'm a bit more than halfway through the whole thing, although I still have plenty of work ahead of me (some of the bits that are in most dire need of revising are still to come).

On top of all that, my wife and I are currently trying to introduce a kitten to our household.  She started life as a stray, and she's still trying to adapt to life among humans, so that's one hurdle.  She also faces the prospect of making friends with our existing cat, which currently is feeling like more of a challenge from Existing Cat's side than it is from Kitten's side.  It's only been five days so far though, and we still have plenty of tricks up our sleeves.  Kitten's starting to get more and more affectionate, and she's started playing with her jingle balls all on her own (although she could have chosen a better time than the crack of dawn this morning to reveal that to us).

Work has been keeping me awfully busy as well, with a project that could have a huge benefit to my career going live in two weeks, ready or not.  Right now it's looking a bit too much like "not", for reasons that are beyond my team's control, but we're pushing as hard as we can, and we're still a long ways from giving up hope.

I've let some things slide in the midst of all this.  I've managed to keep up with my progress using Duolingo relearn all the Italian I forgot from high school, but my Japanese lessons on Rosetta Stone have slowed to more of a crawl than I'd like.  I've been neglecting the piano and guitar lately as well.  Most significantly, however, I haven't been keeping up with my share of the housecleaning---that's the one I feel worst about.  It's funny: I generally consider myself a clean, meticulous person, but when I'm focused on a project I still find it all too easy to let that kind of thing slide.  My wife's convinced that she's been a bad influence on me in that respect, but even when I was living alone I never managed to develop much of a passion for keeping everything tidy.  We've used a maid service from time to time, but there's a weird psychology around that: you can start feeling that your home is too messy to invite a stranger into it, even if that stranger's job is to clean the place.  Part of the problem is the clutter.  When there's stuff lying around that you'll lose track of if somebody else rearranges it, you want to deal with that first before getting to the more sanitation-related stuff.  When you don't get around to putting those things away though...

Still, we're making progress even on that front.  We've vowed to have the place in a state fit for company by Sunday, so with a firm goal in mind we've got a fire lit under our ass to accomplish it.  Then it's on to the fifty million other things we want to do with our lives...

The Unbearable Awkwardness of Being

Listening to Dan Harmon's Harmontown podcast today really got me thinking about the nature of creative minds, and how to care for them.  He was reading from the old journals he kept as a teenager on the show, and they had a certain pretention in them that he openly acknowledged, and which I immediately recognized from my own past writings, which I've often winced at (and still do with some of my recent stuff).  There was also a segment near the end where he was talking to a guy in the audience who'd deferred his creative dreams in order to pursue a more practical line of work, and again I saw echoes of my own life choices.

The most important advice Harmon had to give was to keep writing, and that you're probably going to write a whole ton of shitty words to get to the good ones.  That's advice I keep reminding myself about, and it's advice that I've tried to put into practice with my daily entries on 750 Words.  I've written nearly 150,000 words there so far, which is the equivalent of nearly three years of National Novel Writing Month.  Granted, the vast majority of what I've written there hasn't been fiction, but there's a certain level at which it's all just expository writing, and I feel that we could all stand to develop a solid narrative voice even when describing our own lives.  I think that voice is still a work in progress for me, and maybe it'll always be that, but I know that I'm not wincing now as much as I once did.

I've also noticed that creativity, my case included, often runs hand in hand with obsessive behavior.  Sometimes I can use this obsessive behavior for good, like when I apply it to running, or writing, or cleaning.  Other times it drags me down, like when I become obsessed with a video game, or checking social media for updates.  I can't always control where my obsessions head (especially when I'm feeling tired and/or depressed), but I think I'm finally starting to understand this behavior better.  I think it's what makes creative people so prone to addiction.  Thank god I haven't had to deal with that in my own life, but it's something I keep at the back of my mind.

I think having other people in my life to support me---especially my wife, whom I can never thank enough for that---has really helped me keep my obsessions on the positive side.  That's not to say I don't still slip up every now and then, but the cycles are shorter and less frequent now.  I even feel that I'm being more productive at work, although it helps to have a job where I finally feel like I'm part of a highly capable team on that front.

It's funny---I was always somewhat of a loner growing up.  I always thought I was better off on my own, and that other people didn't understand me well enough to be my friends.  I was focusing, though, on the things that I couldn't change (i.e. other people's reactions to me) instead of the things that I could (my behavior).  Granted, when I finally did learn how to be a fully functioning social creature, there was a lot of trial and error.  That's what often scared me off from it when I was younger---I was an incredibly easily embarrassed boy, and kids my own age could be especially cruel when dealing with my weirdness.  Through it all though, I always regretted the times I didn't try reaching out to people more than the times I did.  I even managed to get over my all-time most awkward moments eventually (though perhaps that may have something to do with the passage of time making them less vivid).

There was one particular event that haunted me for ages.  Tim Robbins went to the same high school as me, and while I was there he came in to give a speech at the auditorium.  There was a Q & A session afterwards, and I got it into my head that this was my big chance to ask a celebrity a question.  The only question I managed to come up with, however, when I raised my hand and the kid with the microphone came over, was whether the veteran actor/director had heard any good dirty jokes from Walter Matthau on the set of I.Q.  The response he gave was a polite demurral, which is probably what I would have done in the same situation, but good lord did it ever take me a long time to live that down---and nobody had even made fun of me for it!  Even that, though, is finally something I can look back on and... well maybe not laugh about yet, but I'm getting there.

Thoughts on an Impending NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo keeps getting closer, and I still haven't decided on a story.  I know it's going to be slow going if I just start writing off the top of my head without planning scenes ahead of time, so I'd better decide which story I'm going to go with over this weekend.  It's not that I have to have all my scenes planned out, but I need enough to at least get me through the current day's writing, so that I can take a breather and plan further scenes after it.  I think my issue is that I haven't particularly latched on to any of the characters I've been thinking of for my stories yet, so there isn't a particular story that jumps out at me.  Every so often I'll be seized by the notion to jump off and write something completely different---a prospect both dangerous and exciting.  I'm less worried about getting to 50,000 words this year than I ever have been before, but I have to be careful not to get cocky and just take it for granted that I'll finish on time.  I think in my fourth year I ended up going about ten thousand words over (and was still only about two-thirds of the way through the story, which I STILL haven't finished), but all the other years it came pretty close to the wire, and the story started to run out just as the 50,000 word mark became tantalizingly close.

Let me go over again what I've got so far: there's my coming of age story of a New York kid transplanted to Iowa, my fictional dystopian city anthology, my one about the struggles about an oddball Staten Island family, and (running a distant fourth) the tale of the world's last moviegoer, whose largesse supports the entire remaining industry.  They're all premises that I feel I could write at least a few chapters of at this point, but I don't know whether they'll peter out after that or inspire me to keep going.  I guess I could always start with one and switch to another if the situation becomes truly dire, but finding the momentum to start up an entirely different plot after the first one fails can be difficult given how fraught with discouragement that predicament is.

At the very least I'll have the opportunity to write with my friends again, and I'm looking forward to that in and of itself.  There's so much more creative energy in a room full of other writers than there is when I'm just alone with the blank page.  Granted the blank page doesn't terrify me like it used to, but other people's determination working towards the same goal is like a drug that there's just no substitute for.  Even after five years of NaNoWriMo I hardly ever write new work outside of November.  If I can find the time for my marathon training I'm sure I could find the time for writing, but then there's that question of momentum again...

At least I've been doing my daily writing pretty consistently (even if I only rarely work up the nerve to post it to the public).  I can write 750 words in 20 minutes pretty consistently now, which is something I never thought I'd be able to do before.  I'm sure it'd take me considerably longer if I was writing this all down longhand.  My penmanship was never the greatest, and I fear it's gone downhill significantly since the days I used to regularly practice it while taking notes in college.  I think I still have those notebooks somewhere in my parents' house, but lord knows what I'd ever do with them...  I just hope that I can keep this kind of speed (or anything resembling it) when I switch over from fact to fiction next week.

Marathon Training: Week 9 (And the Writing it Eclipses)

Last night I started on Week 9 of my marathon training.  I've now run 300 miles over the course of 47 hours in the last two months.  It gives me pause to contemplate that.  Two whole days out of that time were spent running.  That's five percent of my waking life.  It's definitely shown results.  Last night I ran over six 8:20 miles and felt great; my miles were about a minute longer than that back when I started.  There was also the half marathon the other weekend, where I kept running faster and faster as it went along until I began to wonder whether I'd been holding back too much, and yet it was still the fastest pace I've officially run anything more than 5 miles at.

On the other hand I haven't been writing very much.  (Or at least I haven't been writing very much fiction---my daily writing has kept up fairly well, but it's been mostly journal stuff)  My piano and guitar playing has been pretty sparse too.  If I had those two days back, would I have devoted them to creative pursuits?  There's no guarantee of that, so I need to tell myself that the important thing is I used them for something productive.  No sense beating myself up when I've actually been accomplishing some of my goals.  The creative ones are always the hardest to satisfy, too, since I can't just hunker down and be creative whenever I feel like it.  If I made writing my job of course I'd devote more time to it, but I find that I need a large chunk of time to ease into a good rhythm.  With running I can accomplish a good day's progress in half an hour anywhere there's a road, but when I write I need at least a full hour, devoid of distractions.  Hopefully I'll get some good work done at the write-in this Thursday, but last time I found myself drawn into conversations too much.  Maybe I should go find a place off by myself if that happens again; it's nice to meet with friends, but if they're not being productive around me it's hard to do it myself.

One of the biggest boons to my running lately has been my discovery of the marvelous effects that wearing a compression shirt can have on cooling me down.  Sweating waterfalls in high humidity has always been a problem for me, and the new compression shirts I got just suck all that sweat right through them, where it runs right off their slick surfaces.  On top of that they also help me better feel the cool breeze that my running creates.  I almost never feel a long and/or hard run in my legs; it's always been the heat in my face and chest that's hit me first.  With that problem gone I think I've been able to shave at least good thirty seconds off my pace.

I wish that there were some similar tool that would help me crank out a couple more hundred words per hour.  Writing every day certainly helps, but there's nothing in the way of purchases that really has an effect on the level of the compression shirts.  NaNoWriMo is coming up again soon, and I don't think I'll have my novel revised before it starts.  I'll have to make my peace with that.  I just wish there was a realistic schedule I could get into and stick with; something similar to my marathon training program, except with words.  I guess I could always devise a schedule of my own, but I don't know what goals would be realistic.  I suppose it's hard to devise a universal system for this sort of process---writers are very different from each other in terms of how much they can produce and how consistently they can produce it.  Plus, I don't know how realistic it would be to lay two rigorous schedules on top of each other and stick to both of them.  I already spend little enough time with my wife between my running and her long hours at work, and I'd feel terrible about cutting into that time any more.  As it is the night seems to fly by once the cooking, cleaning, and eating of dinner starts.  Things should cool down once the marathon and NaNoWriMo are over, but should I really put it off for that long?  Won't other appointments and obligations start to creep in then and fill up my calendar?  I need to devise a more systematic approach, but for the time being it continues to elude me...

I Really Like to Think and Stuff

One of the nicest things about 750 Words is the list of my most commonly used words that it gives me at the bottom of my stats every day.  It's been very instructive to learn what terms I overuse, like "really", "like", "though", "think", and others.  It's helped me cut down on qualifiers, as I've seen certain offending words disappear over time.  We actually had a discussion about qualifiers in Writers Group this past Saturday, and it really made me think about how often I use them in my own writing.  For example, I often talk about how I "think" something is the case, even when I don't have any strong doubts about it.  I'm not entirely sure how I use "like" the most---whether it's through similes, giving examples, or talking about preferences.  Maybe it's a combination of the three.  I know that I don't use it as an interjection in print, because lord knows how irritating that would get.  At any rate it's a weak word, and I should cut down on it.  Of course the point of these entries isn't to write perfectly, it's just to write.  I shouldn't stop myself for word choice during NaNo, since the whole point of it is to quickly produce a rough draft that I can then revise with better word choices (and possibly better plot and character choices, depending on how seriously I go off track).  If I don't catch myself now though, I'll never be able to hone my instincts to make the correct choices sooner.  After all, I don't always have the time to proofread what I write, and I'd like to know that there's a good possibility that I got things right the first time.

One particularly troublesome word I've been trying to strike from my commonly used list is "thing".  It's one of the most vague nouns in the world, and as a result it suggests itself all the time.  Often there's a better word waiting right around the corner if I give it an extra moment's thought, but sometimes I'm dealing with a category so broad that I'd need to completely redefine my argument in order to bring a more specific term to the surface, and I'm not always prepared to do that.

Something else I've noticed in the statistics of my daily entries is that I'm a lot more introspective on the days when I'm thinking of posting my entry to my blog.  I don't talk about my recent activities as much, and I try not to be as judgmental of others, which often leads to me not talking about others at all.  Does that really make an entry more worthy of being shared with other people?  I mean, I'm not naive: I know that there can be real, damaging consequences to the wrong person reading an opinion that I should have just kept to myself in the first place, and I don't want to overstep the bounds of my confidentiality agreement when I talk about my job.  There's a layer of self consciousness to it too though, and I need to try and peel that back as much as I can.  Not that I have any obligations to anybody, but there are a lot of parts of my life that could benefit from me being more open and honest (as long as I choose my words carefully, at least).

The More Things Change...

Today at work I went to a "speed networking" event, where a bunch of us formed into two lines and then had two minutes to introduce ourselves to each other before moving down to the next person.  It was kind of chaotic, but it was a nice way to get to know a few more people there.  Granted, there are still hundreds of other people in that office alone that I haven't met and may never meet, but it's always good to have a few more familiar faces out there.  Even having the chance to practice my small talk was nice.  It's the kind of event that I'd never have been able to force myself to go to ten years ago, but I feel like I've changed dramatically since then.

I have NaNoWriMo to thank for that mostly, I think.  I'd known nerds before I did NaNo, but I'd never known a group of such GREGARIOUS nerds before.  I was used to folks who were mostly quiet and kept to themselves; the type of guys (and they were almost always guys) who, even when they talked, were almost inaudible.  Now I have more female friends than I ever had before in my life, and even if a crowd is still not my favorite place to be I'm at least up for diving into one for a while.  In fact, my social calendar's gotten to the point that I'm starting to miss my old solitary stretches a bit.  But then when I finally do get some time to myself I usually grow lonely surprisingly quickly unless I have a task to keep myself focused on.  My video games are gathering dust, and it seems that the more I read and write, the more those hackneyed plots suffer by comparison.

The downside of not having those quiet times is that I feel like I'm not creating enough.  I mean, I'm writing these blog entries, and the daily entries beyond them, but I'm not really telling stories or making music of my own.  Not that the world doesn't have enough stories or music, but I still feel like I have something to say that's unique to me.  Otherwise I'd be more than happy to just consume the great works of the world and just be a programmer for the rest of my life.  But every so often I'll get a song stuck in my head, and know that I can't pull it up on iTunes because it's never been written or performed.  Or I'll get an idea for a character or a plot in my head, and I desperately don't want it to die there.  I think that's what I fear the most about death: dying with ideas in my head that I'll never be able to share with anybody.  Now maybe nobody'll be interested in hearing at least some of those ideas, but there has to be something worthwhile in that great clattering heap of thoughts that keeps me up at night and taunts me when I'm least able to write things down.  I've gotten some good feedback on some of the stuff I've written, and I'd like to go further with it.

I'm definitely planning on getting back to revising my novel this weekend.  The longer I spend on it, the easier it'll be to keep going, so I want to really plug away at it when I get the chance.  I'm looking at a big stretch of Sunday afternoon in particular that should be able to get me off to a good start.  I've taken a few passes before, but the only time I've had the momentum to go all the way through it was when I was getting my revised sections critiqued by friends.  The story still needed another draft at that point, but the fact that I committed myself to a series of deadlines really helped me stay motivated.  Maybe I should set a schedule for my revising, but I don't know what kind of pace would be realistic for me to meet without falling behind and getting discouraged.  That's even more of a question mark because I'm about to officially start my marathon training next week.  Now THERE'S something that has a set schedule I need to stick to.  But then again running is something that's much easier to break down into discrete units of achievement, since there isn't any creativity involved.  There's a psychological aspect to it, but it's not on the same level as creating a whole world and making sure that everything in it fits organically.  That's no excuse though.  If I'm going to get this revising done, a schedule is the only way I know to make it work.  Now I just need to find the time to create one...

Writing vs. Running

I ran a 10K this morning up in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens.  It wasn't my best race, given that even by 8am in the morning when the race started the temperature was already at 86 degrees, and I'm one hell of a sweater.  Granted, I'm not sure anybody ran their best race today, since I finished pretty well in the pack.  It's actually my fastest 10K so far, unless you count any given 10 kilometers from the 15K I ran back in April when the temperature was actually reasonable and my miles went by 30 seconds faster.  (It feels weird to be measuring distance in miles when a race is in kilometers, but that's how we do things in this country, apparently)

Like I mentioned last time, running's been taking up a lot of my time in the past few years, and that's time that I could be spending writing and revising novels or short stories or anything else that I might be able to find a publisher for.  Sometimes it feels kind of selfish, since running (or at least running in races) is really something that I'll only ever really be doing for myself (unless I volunteer for a charity like Team for Kids, which is something I've been meaning to look into for a while now).  My writing is a hobby that I do in the hopes of someday reaching an audience, which might not be the most noble or useful cause in the world, but I'd certainly feel good about making somebody else's day a little more interesting.

So am I going to have to choose between the two, or sacrifice running in order to have enough time to focus on my writing?  No, I don't think I'm gonna do that.  I can already see me forcing myself to stare at a blank page endlessly during a dry period, trying to will creatures to life that just won't come.  Couldn't I spend that time better by running?  I mean, it's not like I'm constantly thinking up story ideas when I'm out jogging around the neighborhood, but I don't listen to music while I do it, either, and I think that ends up having a pretty calming effect on my mind.  I need that calmness: that break from the responsibilities of my job and my household and my family.  I mean, I enjoy all three of those parts of my life, but sometimes I'm seized with an anxiety that I can't quite quantify when I'm surrounded by them for too long at a time.  There may be medications for such a feeling, but I've always worried about the effect that psychology-altering drugs might have on my creativity and my personality.  As long as I can run though, or go lift some weights, or bang away at the piano, I have an immediate outlet for that anxiety.  Writing provides that sometimes, but the effect isn't always immediate, and there's often some higher-level problem solving involved.  I need things in my life that I can just do, finish, and then look back on and say, "I did this!" without feeling like I'm wasting my time (which may be part of the reason I've drifted away from video games over the years...  That's a story for another time though).

So I'll keep running, and I'll keep writing.  The writing may come more slowly, but at least I have my daily entries to give me something under my belt pretty often.  In fact, I just signed up for the monthly challenge for July on 750 Words, where I need to write the titular number of words every day of the month in order to win.  Gamification has worked out well for me in the past (thanks, Fitocracy), so I'm hoping it'll work for my writing as well.  Granted, I've tried and failed at one of these challenges before, but I've been on a good streak lately (with the exception of one very busy day), and I'm hoping to continue it for a good while longer.  There are badges on 750 words for as many as 365 consecutive days, but I'm not gonna hold myself to a mountain quite that tall just yet.  I'm just going to take this one day at a time, and see how far it gets me.

I'm a better runner than I was last year, and I think I'm a better writer than I was a year ago too, although obviously the second of these claims is a lot harder to quantify.  In both cases I'm pretty sure that I can get better if I just keep plugging away at it.

On Writing, not Writing, then Writing Again

Last night I was thinking about getting back into blogging, and maybe even blogging about writing, in order to get myself to write more, even if it's just writing about writing.  So I go to my long-neglected blog, and what do I find?  I had exactly the same idea almost exactly a year ago, and I never followed up on it.  At all.  Also, I'm cringing reading those words, wondering how this stranger from the past ever could have thought what he was doing was witty, or original.  Maybe that's too harsh, but that's how I felt skimming those words, unable to read more than a few at a time.  Maybe it's the hopefulness of it all that bothers me the most, knowing how little has been accomplished since then, like that statue of Ozymandias lying in ruins amid the endless desert.

It's not exactly like I've been idle since then, though.  I've moved to Brooklyn, run another marathon, changed jobs, GOTTEN MARRIED...  All those things too a lot of time and attention, and it's shown in how little I've watched TV or played video games over the past years.  It still doesn't feel like things have entirely settled down (there's another marathon coming up in November, after all), but I don't think I have quite so many major milestones ahead of me at the moment.

So should I try this crazy experiment again?  Will it end up the same way?  Yes, and god I hope not.  Why have I started to feel hopeful again?  Well, a lot of it has to do with the fact that a friend of mine introduced me to a site called 750 Words a few months ago, and it's given me an excuse to start writing again in a non-NaNo capacity.  I was given extra incentive by a writing course I took back in the spring that introduced me to the concept of "morning pages", where you write at three pages worth of whatever comes into your head first every day, just to keep yourself writing.  So far I've written over 40,000 words on it during about 50 not-all-consecutive days, although I can't say I'll be sharing those words with the world at large anytime soon.  I've been writing words more to get them out of my system than to speak to any particular audience, so I've spent many of them going on and on about topics too quotidian or inane to be worth anybody else's time, and in some cases I've written out thoughts too personal and/or specific for me to feel like letting loose on the world at large (where they'll immediately be swallowed up by the din of another million voices aching to be heard, but still...).

The only problem is, if I'm going to start writing for an audience again, it's going to slow my writing down, making these entries take longer to write and lowering the chances that I'll actually follow through with them.  I'm not going to force myself to vomit every single entry onto my blog, but there are a number of topics that have been swirling around my head that I'd like to work through on the page, including some thoughts on stories past and present that would do me some good to address.

It feels good to get all this out onto a page, and I'd definitely recommend morning pages in general and 750 words in particular (they have badges, too!) to anyone who may be reading this who's also writing-inclined.  And if you'd like to follow along with my little experiment, be warned: I haven't turned my inner editor off completely (I find that downright impossible, and I think it's made my rewrites less painful), but I'm not going to be going through everything I write with a fine-toothed comb to make sure it's actually worth reading or even grammatically correct.  (Granted, I don't suppose many bloggers do this anyways, but I digress)  I'll try to excise anything that's obviously me just trying to fill words, so not every published entry may make it all the way to 750, which is probably for the best.  And if you are reading, please feel free to go ahead and comment!  It always helps to know that I'm not just hurling all these words into the abyss.  Even so, the abyss is still better than keeping my ideas in my head, where they'll quickly fester and fade.  When they're on the page they have a way of multiplying, regardless of who ever actually sees that page.

On Writing

I'm thinking of becoming a writer.

"But dude," you might ask, if 'dude' is a term that you favor, "how can you hope to make a career out of the written word when you haven't update your blog in a year and a half?  Surely this does not bode well."

That is quite an astute observation!  Rest assured, I'm making no plans whatsoever to leave my day job behind and spend my days concocting vast reams of prose.  I'm going to stay a programmer just as long as they'll let me, because I'm not an irresponsible idiot.  (Although there are persuasive arguments against that... (Um, not the part about me being an irresponsible idiot))  When they stop letting me program for my current company, though---and god knows that's not unheard of, given these uncertain economic times, my company's history in particular, and my experience with my last job---all bets are off (except for the whole "needing money to live" part).

Good lord, just looking at all the parentheticals in that last paragraph makes me cringe; am I really cut out to be a storyteller?  In a way, writing's always been my job, since I already spend my days in front of a computer, creating worlds of the words, not-quite-words, numbers, and odd punctuation that constitute my Java code.  I'd argue that every program is a story, though usually not a linear one, and often not an interesting one.  The world of code has its good writers and its bad writers; I'd like to think that I'm one of the better ones, although I don't think that fact particularly qualifies me to write anything else.

No, I got into writing through NaNoWriMo, and as a result I now have over two hundred thousand words of (mostly rushed, non-publishable) fiction to my name.  I recently finished workshopping about a quarter of those words (heavily revised from their original form) with some of my best and most critical friends, and the results of the experience were encouraging enough to make me believe that I can turn the words into something resembling a book.  It's a tale of vampires versus zombies, so no, I certainly don't have any lofty artistic pretensions here, but it may actually be something that a good chunk of people will enjoy reading, even given how played-out both those races of creatures have become at this point.

Now the question is how quickly I can muster up the energy to revise the story at least one more time, fix a few awkward elements, and find a way to make it about 50% longer.  No big deal, right?  Now please excuse me while I go hyperventilate in that corner over there...

Doin' Time on LittleBigPlanet

So the other night I finally set up the PlayStation 3 that I'd been using as a carrot to get me to finish NaNoWriMo (see my last post; yay, my slacker vampire vs. zombies story is complete!). After giving the controllers an extra day to charge, last night I finally jumped into the first of the two games that came with the thing: LittleBigPlanet (LBP).

My first two thoughts:

1. Maaan I wish I had as much time for playing video games as I did in the good old days.
2. Nintendo systems have been spoiling me with how fast they let me get into a game.

Okay, maybe that second point could stand a little explanation. Before I could start playing LBP, I was forced to download three updates for LBP. Now granted, this isn't something that's gonna happen every time I boot the game up, but geez... I'm somebody who grew up with cartridges, where you had to make damned sure that a game was 100% before it shipped and oh god I sound like an old geezer now I'll just shut up.

So I was a bit miffed, but when the plummy narration kicked in I started feeling all warm and fuzzy inside again. I love all the personality they crammed into these little "sackboy" characters, and the first level was a pretty refreshing way to get the credits sequence taken care of. Just one thing, guys: ease up a little on telling me how wonderful and creative your game world is. That's my job, okay? I'll get around to creating my own levels later; just let me explore a little first.

I customize my guy as a little penguin-mozarthair-mustache dude, and I'm off to the races. Ooh, pretty colors! I get to enact violence upon Humpty Dumpty for extra points! The tutorial stuff comes in a little hot and heavy (I'd like to play around with the concepts they teach me for a little while longer before learning new ones), but I can see how other people might be more impatient to get past the learning phase and into the wider world.

Oh, and there's stuff to collect! Lots of stuff! And it lets you customize stuff more! And... wow... that's quite a bit of stuff I've collected there already... It reminds me of Animal Crossing; I hope I don't end up with "stuff fatigue" like I did with that game.

I'm still getting the hang of the controls. Moving between the foreground and the background is an interesting twist, but having three different "depths" may have been a bit of a stretch: sometimes I move between them without meaning to, and it's hard to tell how far back some of the things floating in the air are.

All in all it's been a fun experience so far, although I wish there was a bit more of a story to keep the momentum going from one level to the next. I understand why that's not a huge priority, given that the whole "build your own level" aspect is one of the game's big selling points, but it would've been nice.

Next up: Fallout 3, which promises to eat up hundreds of hours of my time if I let it.

Shouting Infinity?

I want to try a fairly ridiculous stunt this fall for NaNoWriMo, but first I want to talk about it in a way that should show if it's worth doing or not. My plan would shut out that popular fifth symbol that's so hard to work around, but I want to do it in a way that won't look as though I'm doing a bunch of cocky grammatical gymnastics to avoid it. Fifty thousand words is a damn gigantic goal to start with, but to do it this way runs toward downright insanity. How am I going to stop it all from sounding as though I'm straining to sound normal, and how am I going to do that for fifty thousand words if I'm not a particularly fast typist to start with?

I'm studying what I'm going up against right now, and it turns out that what I'm trying to do is known as a lipogram. A book known as Gadsby is what I'm trying to outdo with this particular kind of lipogram; it's also fifty thousand words long, but it it took far upwards of my thirty days to finish. So what I'd do would still qualify as a fairly significant thing.

But I don't know... It's taking a lot of work just to wrap my brain around what I'm doing right now, with this blog post, and this is just a microscopic dot of what I'd find my sorry ass staring down if I bound my hands this way for a full month of quick typing. Could it possibly work? Could I find a story that would sound okay in this format? Writing this way isn't as much fun as I thought, but I'm still just finding my way. It could smooth out if I just plug away at it for days and days, couldn't it? I still don't know if I can summon up that kind of gumption, though. What do you think? Is it worth it?