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 Future of 750 Words

I saw this morning that 750 Words is on its way to becoming a pay site.  I'm already paying a monthly donation (one that's slightly larger than what the site's going to cost), so it won't have much of an effect on me, but I do wonder how it's generally going to change the landscape around here.

It would be nice to finally be able to download all my writing in some format for archival purposes, although I don't know exactly what that format would be.  Plus, there's always the argument that I could be doing what I'm doing on this site without using the site at all, but without the site I don't believe I would've gotten this far.  I need a support system, even if it's just an automated one.  If I'm just throwing a bunch of words into a document somewhere it's harder for me to see the value of it, and besides I've grown addicted to seeing my daily stats.

The main reason I've been considering downloading all my work here (regardless of whether it's offered as an option by the site), is that I'd like to be able to search through it all for specific references to events in the past, and I'd also like to have the security of knowing that I have my work backed up in a more permanent form than just having it on this site's servers somewhere, the future of websites being as ephemeral a thing as it is.  Having my own copy would also make it easier to transfer these notes to future generations someday, somehow.  I'd never considered myself the kind of person to have a journal before (other than my few abortive attempts over the years), and 750 Words has changed that for me.  (There are other things I don't usually consider myself to be that I constantly have to keep reminding myself about, such as being an adult, a married man, and a person with facial hair)

I sometimes wonder how long I'll continue writing these entries, and whether I'll just lose my momentum or become too busy for them one of these days.  Momentum certainly doesn't seem to be a problem for me these days---my entries usually flow out in less than twenty minutes, especially when I'm not writing with the intent of posting my work on a blog.

I hope the new pricing plan works out for Buster, the guy who runs 750 Words.  I'm sure there must be a price for hosting such huge quantities of text, and the repository just keeps growing day by day.  I myself have been using the site for just over a year now, and I'm approaching 200,000 words just by myself.  I'm even happy with some of those words!

In other news, I'm thinking of submitting the beginning of my revised manuscript to a grant program for emerging New York City writers.  The deadline is the 15th, and I still have some polishing to do before then, but I at least have finally managed to wrestle Scrivener into compiling my chapters into a format that I'm happy with.  Granted, my vampire story has no illusions of high art, but I think it's fairly solid so far, and the latest feedback I've gotten from my wife (herself a difficult judge to please, especially with regard to writing) has made me feel even better about it.  I have room to fit in one more chapter, which is a new one that I haven't finished writing yet.  (The story is complete, but I'm adding additional episodes along the way to flesh it out more and expand its world)  I may also send a copy to my parents when I'm done, since they've been coming after me for ages to see some of these tens of thousands of words I pour onto pages every November (though it's hard to say just how many of the remaining words were in the first draft I wrote three years ago).

I'm in a good place right now.  My marriage is blissful, my work is steady, the winter hasn't been as cold as some, my marathon training's continuing apace, and, most importantly, I haven't let all that contentment make me lazy in other aspects of my life.  I have a good feeling about this year so far, and this is in February---a notoriously difficult month to stay positive during.  We'll see how things play out in the months to come...

Once upon a Time...

When I look back on the course my life took as a teenager, it's amazing to think that I ever took up running, or writing for that matter (especially writing a blog).

In the case of running I'd always enjoyed sprinting through crowded places like malls, but I never had very much endurance.  This fact was driven home when I joined the "polar bears" in high school, which was a gym program where students ran progressively longer distances outdoors in progressively colder temperatures as fall turned into winter.  I think they topped out in the neighborhood of three or five miles.  For my part, I found just one mile to be a struggle.  I'd push for about a quarter mile, then have to take a long break, then try pushing again.  It was getting so that I wouldn't even be able to complete the class's mileage before we had to go back inside, so eventually I gave up and switched over to the weightlifting class, where I could go at my own pace and stay in relative warmth.  I remember lifting the entire rack on the squat machine in that class, which my young back fortunately survived.

Then there was the writing, which I had a couple of odd experiences with in middle school.  The first was when I took an admissions test for a specialized school and had to write an essay, which was something I'd never done formally in my life.  I had a vague notion that an essay was like a story, so in order to write mine---on the topic of the difference between intelligence and wisdom---I told a clumsy allegory that heavily ripped off a scene from The Princess Bride.  Needless to say, I did not get into that school.

Then a year or two later I took a summer writing course out in the wilds of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  I'd done other courses through the program the two previous summers---in math and computer programming---and had a pretty good time both those years.  Math and computers have always come easily to me, and beyond that I fondly recall setting many a high score on the Star Wars pinball machine in the tiny mall across the road from the college campus where the program took place.  That year it was different though.  I thought I had gone there to write stories, but it turned out that they expected us to write nonfiction.  Nonfiction about our own lives.  I panicked.  What had I ever done that was interesting enough to write about?  I didn't know the first thing about structure, or choosing an event that represented a theme.  And there was so much reading we had to do...  After only a few days I couldn't take it anymore, and went to see my resident advisor about dropping out.  He said that I wouldn't be able to leave unless I was considered a suicide risk, so I went so far as to say that I was seriously thinking about killing myself.  He let me play Doom on his computer that evening while my parents were contacted.  They picked me up the next day, and took me to Action Park (which I've since learned was something of a death trap) to cheer me up.  I recovered, but I never did go back to that program again (though that may not have been my choice to make---my parents kept those kinds of details away from me back then).

Looking back on those experiences, the high school running I can live with, since that was long before I discovered how to breathe steadily and pace myself (which they didn't really give us much help with in the class).  Maybe I'd have been able to accomplish something in track and field on the academic circuit if I started running earlier in my life, but then again that could just be wishful thinking, and at any rate I'm really happy with where I am with it now.

The writing, though...  It bothered me then, and it still bothers me now.  Granted, it came at a time in my life when I was bullied relentlessly, to the point where I developed an instinctive fear of expressing myself.  Even so I wish I'd found a way to stick it out, especially given how dramatic the circumstances of my exit were.  I've learned the most in my life from the situations where I've gone out of my way to make myself uncomfortable---to shake up my routine and try new things.  But even that realization wouldn't come to me until many years later, so maybe I shouldn't be so hard on thirteen-year-old me.  There are only two things I know for sure.  The first is that there's nothing I miss about being that young, naive, selfish, and lost.  The second is that I now have events in my life worth writing about (and probably always did).

Regarding Arrogant Jerkiness

My wife wondered about that "arrogant jerk" comment I made about myself in the last entry I posted to my blog.  When she pressed me for an example of that happening, I couldn't come up with one.  Now I'm starting to wonder whether those perceptions were mostly based on me reading my past writing and thinking what an arrogant jerk the guy who wrote it must have been.  Granted, that persona was trapped in a world of his own mind most of the time, but it grates on me just to know that I used to think that way.  But maybe I didn't even think that way, and was just bad at expressing myself in words.  That certainly explains why I didn't (and still don't) talk too much, even though I don't consider myself to be a shy person.  I'm still trying to find my words.  I can pump out forty a minute now when I do my daily entries, and I've gotten better about just letting them flow instead of getting stuck on trying to find the perfect phrasing for everything.  I still write slower when I think I'm going to post something to the blog though.  I feel I have to be more careful if there's a chance that other people are going to read what I'm writing.  To a certain degree that makes sense, since I know how much grammatical gaffes and inarticulate phrasing bother me when I'm reading, and I wouldn't want to inflict that on anyone else if I could help it.  But it's still a form of self-censorship, and I have to be wary of that.

...And Doggone It, People LIKE Me!

I've been reading a book by Lawrence Block, Write for Your Life, which has had a lot of great advice so far that can be applied not just to writing, but also to a wide variety of other creative pursuits.  It's reintroduced me to the concept of affirmations.  You know what I'm talking about: writing positive statements out repeatedly, or reciting them to yourself in a mirror (calling to mind Al Franken's Stuart Smalley sketches from SNL back in the day).  It seems like a good idea that a lot of people could benefit from, but I haven't gotten around to really trying it myself.  Part of that is just not thinking about it when I have the time to try it, but I think there's also an element of concern in there.

As I look back across my life, I've found that when things go well for me long enough, and my confidence gets raised high enough, I tend to turn into somewhat of an arrogant jerk.  It's not that I mean to put other people down, but there's a point at which I stop paying enough attention to other people's feelings, and that inevitably sets me up for a fall.

So how do I deal with that?  Should I try to temper my feelings, and never become too confident in myself?  There's a part of me that fears affirmations could have a disastrous effect on my ego.  (And there's another part of me that thinks I'd look just plain silly talking to myself in front of a mirror, of course)  But is that the kind of thinking that's holding be back from being successful as a writer?  Should my affirmation be "Success with my writing will not make me a bad person"?  Or would it be arrogant to presume success at this point?  In some ways it feels like saying I'll remember the little people when I win the lottery.  Surely it can't be THAT random, though.  A big part of success comes from desire.  A lot of people aren't successful because they can't find the energy or the self confidence to commit to their goals strongly enough.  There's that "self confidence" thing again.

In a bizarre way, I see Martin Scorsese's movie The King of Comedy as an inspiration.  Sure it's about a madman who resorts to kidnapping in pursuing his dreams of show business success, and sure a lot of the scenes of Robert De Niro pushing himself on people are intensely uncomfortable.  But how many of us have the guts to be so self-assured that we can just walk right up to the people capable of fulfilling our dreams and ask that they do so?  Maybe the character's methods in the movie are highly suspect, but he's still doing more that most of us do.  It all comes down to reinforcing our beliefs enough to take risks, and maybe affirmations could help me and a great many of us to accomplish that.  We just need to be careful not to overreach.  You can't tell when you've gone over the line though until you reach it.  Maybe it's time to think more about just getting to that line in the first place.  Mirror, here I come!  I apologize in advance.

Another Year Over...

The year is almost over, and I suppose it's time to set resolutions again.  It's been a pretty good year for my writing.  I've gotten a ton of great feedback on my blog, and even if it's only read by a couple dozen people who click on my Facebook links to it, they're still people whose opinions I value a great deal, so it's been extremely encouraging.  I've probably done more writing this year than I have in any other one, and I'm hoping to break that record soon.

Looking ahead to resolutions, I want to resolve right here and now that I'm going to finally finish revising a novel for publication this year.  Granted, I've made that resolution before, but I'm doing it now on a (somewhat) public forum, which will give me more incentive not to look like an idiot by failing at it.  I've already gotten a few chapters under my belt, and there's no reason I can't go all the way through with it if I keep myself to a schedule.  Granted, there's always the doubt in my mind that the world doesn't need another book about vampires or vampire-like creatures, and that may well be true, but I really feel that I brought a unique voice to this one, and the feedback I've gotten from some not-easily-impressed friends has kept me determined to see this through.

I'm also going to resolve to run a 3:30 marathon in L.A. this year, although I'm only going to get one chance in that case, so I can't be to hard on myself if lousy weather, or an illness, or injury, or any number of other unexpected variables gets in my way.  There'll be other marathons eventually.  I'm at least going to stick to my training, even if it means doing a lot of long runs in the cold of winter (or boring myself half to death on the treadmill with them if the weather just becomes completely unworkable).

This has been a remarkable year for me, and I'm truly grateful for all the people in my life who made it that way.  I hope you all are heading into the new year ready to meet the challenges it brings, and that you find the determination and support you need to reach whatever goals matter to you the most!

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).

A Quick Run through My Mind

I want to attack a piano right about now, but I'm still at work so I guess I'll just have to get my percussive urge out in another daily entry.  I was actually feeling somewhat listless and unmotivated earlier this afternoon, but then I had a cup of coffee (MEDIUM strength coffee at that), and now I'm bursting at the seams.  I want to create something.  Something spontaneous and awkward and raw and possibly terrible but then again maybe not.  It's like it's there inside of me, bouncing around, not yet fully formed but itching to get out like some kind of horrific demon fetus.  I want to run up and down the rows of cubicles, I want to parkour up the walls and lounge in the little window up by the high ceilings.  I want to do half a dozen things that would probably result in me breaking multiple bones, but I can't do any of them right now so I just need to keep furiously typing away at my laptop.  There's work to be done, and I'll get back to it, but I need my primal moment right now, even if I can't express it with my whole body.  It's the reason I snap my fingers and clap my hands as I go down the hallways.  I'm not sure how many people notice that, but it's an impulse too strong for me to contain.  The fact that it comes out so spastically is part of the reason I've never been able to play an instrument consistently.  My brain's always bouncing from one thing to another, and sometimes it's all I can do to focus for even a minute.  When it's something like writing where I have the luxury of starting and stopping and giving the thoughts time to resolve themselves it usually works well enough, but it's always much harder for me to do that in the moment.  I guess it makes sense, then, that running is my sport of choice: it's built on enough ingrained reflex that I can just keep putting one foot in front of the other while letting my brain take it's occasional wanderings.  I've run far enough in my life that I'm not going to just trip the second I think of something else.  Wait, no, that's not it.  It's more like running is such a physically demanding activity that my brain doesn't have enough oxygen to focus on anything other than making sure I have enough oxygen and don't bump into the people around me.  I actually CAN exhaust myself, instead of having to hold it all in and wait for another time to let loose.  I guess I could theoretically leave the office for a few minutes and run around for a bit outside when I get to feeling like this, but I'd end up coming back drenched in sweat, which would be awkward for a number of reasons.  Maybe it's the city.  Maybe it's the nonstop pace of New York that hooks me like a drug until I have to keep moving constantly or go insane (or both).  Maybe I need more sleep.  For the first time in many days I didn't feel tired when I woke up this morning, but I could still be paying the price from days past.  I have to wake up early tomorrow for a race, so things might not improve soon on that front.  Racing in the heat of summer can be awfully frustrating, since I never run as fast as I do in the cooler weather because I'm inevitably drenched and stifled by the humidity about a mile in.  Even the air feels harder to breathe, like it's too thick to fit into my lungs.  Still, I have to keep in mind that the heat's slowing everybody else down too, so it's not like I'm going to place lower in the rankings (not that I'm anywhere near good enough to actually win anything yet).  Nonetheless it's discouraging to see people passing me left and right and not feel like I can push myself any harder.  Sometimes I envy my wife's almost nonexistent sweating, but on the other hand she also is a lot more susceptible to hot and cold, to a degree that I wouldn't wish on anyone (especially her).  I have to remind myself that I'm still getting faster, slowly but surely, and I just need to keep at it and stay disciplined.  If I had that kind of discipline with playing music I'd probably be a lot better at it by now.  At least with my writing I can do things like this, which is essentially just keeping my head down and pushing until I hit the finish line.

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...

Details, and the Devil therein...

A shaggy, wet-haired man in his early thirties sits on a comfy old couch, a large chrome laptop covering his legs.  He's wearing an indigo t-shirt with a white drawing of Super Mario on it; the shirt used to fit a little better, but he's dropped some weight since those days.  Below his feet the floor pulses with the sound of dance music from his neighbors in the apartment below.  In his own, cluttered apartment, the sound of Patsy Cline starting up "I Fall to Pieces" can be heard from the stereo as his wife waits in the kitchen for the fish to marinate; she's gazing into her own laptop on the granite countertop.  When the man looks over his shoulder at her, she gives him a wry smile and walks towards him, gently chiding him about what he's been writing about her on his blog.

I've noticed that my writing doesn't tend to have a lot of physical detail in it, especially in the first drafts.  Part of that is because setting the scene doesn't usually interest me as much as getting the characters doing stuff and interacting with each other, but part of it because of my limitations: I don't have a great deal of descriptive power, even though Iike to think I have a decent-sized vocabulary (although I've been trying to expand my vocabulary lately by studying SAT words---among other language-related stuff---on a nifty little memorization site called Memrise).  The specific words for things often elude me, or are downright unknown.  Specific articles of clothing, especially women's clothing, and the materials that they're made of, are common offenders, along with architectural features both interior and exterior.  I'm also often stuck when I'm trying to describe a very specific emotion, and that tends to be the trickiest situation of all, since unlike the other cases I'm not always certain that the word I'm looking for actually exists.  It's times like that when I have to resort to evoking the feeling through description, and being evocative is always a tricky business, since signifiers can mean different things to different people when they're not part of an established shorthand.  Now here's the point where I'm supposed to go citing specific examples of this phenomenon, but it turns out that that's something else I'm not terribly good at, especially when I'm trying to write extemporaneously and don't really feel like it's worth the energy of doing research.

I'm also hesitant to put more detail than necessary into my stories for pacing reasons, as I alluded to earlier.  I don't often enjoy hearing long descriptions of clothing or food (I'm looking at you, George R. R. Martin, although you certainly redeem yourself many times over for it), and being too specific about a character's appearance can even make it harder to get the reader into the story, since it'll be that much harder to relate the writer's creations to themselves or people they know (or at least that's been my experience as a reader sometimes).  I've found that, in my favorite stories, a few very particular, well-chosen details can be the most effective of all.  If you see a three-legged dog with a human femur in its mouth, do you necessarily even need to know its breed?

I need to do more exercises like the first paragraph of this entry, drawing from my actual surroundings to practice description.  It's a muscle that can grow stronger in time, but it needs to be used regularly if it's going to develop properly.  Then we get to the issue of finding time again.  I read an interesting blog entry on the New York Times website this morning about people (and New Yorkers in particular) feeling busy all the time, but that busyness being a product of their own ambitions and priorities, not anything born of necessity.  The tone of the article felt like the author was oversimplifying things a bit, but it still gave me pause.  Should I be taking more time to just sit back and enjoy life, instead of rushing from one scheduled task to the next?  I probably have more free time than a lot of people, but there are still so many things that I feel like I don't have enough time to work on, and there are always exciting events going on in the city that I feel like I'm missing out on because I don't have the time or the energy to head out every night to try and catch every single one of them.  All in all, I really can't say that I have many regrets at this point in my life though, and I feel blessed to be surrounded by an abundance of possible things to do.  Having all the time in the world but nothing to do with it would drive me insane (in fact, it's probably at the root of my concept of hell).

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...