Playing with Numbers

Things are about to get interesting.

At least, for me personally. (I don’t doubt it will be as boring as cleaning out your tea-maker to read, but hey!)

I am a day short of doing a nine-day stretch on the phones and a shift change. After several of us affected pointed out that nine days straight of talking to customers might be a stress situation we could do without, most of us (I’m assuming) got a day off in there. The Sunday, no less, of the Canadian Thanksgiving holiday. So I have three days of my old schedule, a day off that will be mostly taken up with pie-making, paint-ball, and turkey, in that order, and then five days at my shiny new 11:30 am to 8:00 pm shift with weekends off. (!!!)

Now, the down-side is that I won’t be cooking for the majority of the week. And I can’t live off of cold sandwiches for dinner. It’s going to be … complicated … trying to manage what I eat and when. The upside is weekends off, meaning that we can properly clean the house together and even go on the odd road-trip. Luxury!

But the real upside, the one I’m actually excited about?

I have weekday mornings to write, uninterrupted, for the next month and a half. If I can get myself organized and ready by 8:30 am, I can write from then to 11:00 am and then be out the door and at work for 11:30 am. And with NaNoWriMo right around the corner, this is perfect.

I have three weeks on this schedule before November 1st rolls around. I’ve also had allowances made for my weekly writing group meeting every Thursday. While I won’t make it out to most of the weekday NaNo events, I can make the weekend ones. So that’s three weeks of, let’s say, 2 hours a day, five days a week to get Spirit Cat/Last Witch finished — that’s 30 hours of writing, not including any time I write on weekends or at the weekly meetings. I’m going to play with the math, today, plan out what I think the last bits of the book will take, and then figure out my schedule.

And as for NaNoWriMo, that would be 40 hours, not including weekends. That will be trickier, but I can squeeze more time for it; it’s NaNoWriMo after all, and Todd won’t begrudge me that.

As for me, time to scoot! I do have to work today, but tonight, writing and cheese and tea and good talk.

Playing with Numbers

Things are about to get interesting.

At least, for me personally. (I don’t doubt it will be as boring as cleaning out your tea-maker to read, but hey!)

I am a day short of doing a nine-day stretch on the phones and a shift change. After several of us affected pointed out that nine days straight of talking to customers might be a stress situation we could do without, most of us (I’m assuming) got a day off in there. The Sunday, no less, of the Canadian Thanksgiving holiday. So I have three days of my old schedule, a day off that will be mostly taken up with pie-making, paint-ball, and turkey, in that order, and then five days at my shiny new 11:30 am to 8:00 pm shift with weekends off. (!!!)

Now, the down-side is that I won’t be cooking for the majority of the week. And I can’t live off of cold sandwiches for dinner. It’s going to be … complicated … trying to manage what I eat and when. The upside is weekends off, meaning that we can properly clean the house together and even go on the odd road-trip. Luxury!

But the real upside, the one I’m actually excited about?

I have weekday mornings to write, uninterrupted, for the next month and a half. If I can get myself organized and ready by 8:30 am, I can write from then to 11:00 am and then be out the door and at work for 11:30 am. And with NaNoWriMo right around the corner, this is perfect.

I have three weeks on this schedule before November 1st rolls around. I’ve also had allowances made for my weekly writing group meeting every Thursday. While I won’t make it out to most of the weekday NaNo events, I can make the weekend ones. So that’s three weeks of, let’s say, 2 hours a day, five days a week to get Spirit Cat/Last Witch finished — that’s 30 hours of writing, not including any time I write on weekends or at the weekly meetings. I’m going to play with the math, today, plan out what I think the last bits of the book will take, and then figure out my schedule.

And as for NaNoWriMo, that would be 40 hours, not including weekends. That will be trickier, but I can squeeze more time for it; it’s NaNoWriMo after all, and Todd won’t begrudge me that.

As for me, time to scoot! I do have to work today, but tonight, writing and cheese and tea and good talk.

January 2009 – What Worked, What Didn’t

I’m a few days late on this but, as seems to be increasingly typical, I am not getting to my computer at night after work.  More on that later ’cause I expect that I will be slightly spammier with my blog posts over the next few days. Anyway, here’s my review of my progress so far:

What Worked?

The daily quota has worked better than I hoped.  Including my one-off writing day early in the month before I set the daily word count goal (around 1,250 words), my total for the month was a tidy 8,500 words.  (I don’t know why it worked out to such a nice round number – it was weird and pleasing, all at once.)  For the time period where the daily quota was in effect?  7,250 over the course of twenty-two days.

Way more than December, way more than the erratic output before NaNoWriMo in November.  There were a couple of days when it was exceptionally hard to get them in – due to illness or social obligations.  Two nights were spent with my yellow legal pad and Sharpie pen under the covers, Todd snorgling beside me, while Attack of the Show or the Daily Show played in the background on the TV – but the words were written.

Occasionally, I would let the words written longhand build up, and would have to type two or three pages in at once.  But when I did, I found that in the middle of editing here and there I added new words.  Often I would get my day’s required word count just by typing in the old material.

More importantly, after getting my words in I was, overall, happier about the rest of my day.  I could read, watch a show, go out at night with Todd, and not feel like I’d wasted the day, that I should have written something.  It felt really good.

What Didn’t?

What I noticed was that I was more than happy to just stop after I reached the 250 words, especially if I was writing it longhand while at work.  Whilst in the beginning I would rush home and type in my words, never having had the 250 words written entirely at work, as soon as I started hitting the 250 word mark at work I would just close up the writing shop for the day.  Then pages started accumulating, in need of a type-in.  Now I have another five pages of hand-written notes to enter, my largest in a while, making it feel like more of a chore than it actually is.     

I think it’s close to the time where I either need to increase the word count (to 275, perhaps) and/or make it also mandatory that I type in the words more frequently (like every other night).

What Else?

I restructured Spirit Cat in Scrivener.   I ripped apart the then-chapter designations and broken them into new chapters.  I still need to integrate the remaining story cards into the list, but that’s on today’s to-do.  

I also started working on a short story.  The last five days I’ve not worked on Spirit Cat.  I got to work on Friday, my ‘Monday’, and had one of the worst days at work in a long while.  It set the tone for the rest of my work week.  I didn’t get to sit down and start my words first thing, and when I tried, Spirit Cat would not come.  I’d left off there at the beginning of the next scene/chapter after realizing that I had miss-stepped in my scene planning, something I have to correct later, not now.  I know this, but I couldn’t get past it in my head.  As the day wore on, I started to panic about it, worried I’d get nothing at all.  So I started the introduction of a short story I’d thought of in the last year, thinking it no more than a piece of free-writing.  

And then I worked on it the next day.

And the next day.

And now I’m about 1,250+ words into it.  

So, a mixed bag – I still made progress, but not on the main project.  Still, the short story has been really fun to write and I think I may use it as my first testing-the-waters post on OWW.  Gentlewoman is still in the words.  That same Friday I had a bit of an emotional break – upset, teary, unable to focus – and went to Chapters to self-medicate.  Two slim moleskines, a funky pen and a new writing book cheered me up immensely.

How can a book titled Naming The World not get your engines firing?

(Edited for clarity’s and embarrassment’s sakes.  One paragraph above fundamentally re-written.  I really aught to sit on these before hitting the publish button!)

Testing My Resolve

I’ve barely touched my computer since my work-week started. Work fills up the daylight and at night it’s been one social event after another.

The Hypergraphics met Friday night, where we chatted up about Ad Astra (a definate go!), our goals for the past two weeks and our goals moving forward. A timed writing exercise that most of us read aloud afterwards. Ran into a high school chum (she happened to be there for unrelated reasons), too.

Then a Saturday night of supportive bowling – supportive in that we were there to be emotional backup for one of Todd’s buddies. I hadn’t been to the bowling alley in, what, ten years? They’ve gone from ten pins, where by virtue of their sheer numbers I’m guaranteed to hit something, to five pins with a ball small enough to pass between them, and installed black lighting throughout.

And last night a birthday dinner. I swear, tomorrow I’m coming home and getting into pajamas and locking the door.

While it’s been fun going out, I’m tired and haven’t been on the computer for three days. All my writing has been done by hand and I almost didn’t get my words in yesterday. I had to switch computers in the morning during the slow part of the morning, busy the rest of the day, then had to come home and cook a quick dinner before bowling. We didn’t get home until close to 11:00 pm and I was so tempted to just not do it, just let it slip one day. I’d done so well up until then!

But I sat there in bed with pen and paper and scraped 250 words out of my brain and turned off the light at 12:20 am.

Course, now I have four pages of material to type in, which means I have to keep writing by hand until I can type it all in – not until Tuesday night at the earliest. Oh well. Nothing really to complain about. Much better to be behind in typing in words than to not have the words at all!

And my friend is trying to get me hooked on eBooks. More on that to come.

(Typed this in my WordPress iPhone App – I blame any spelling, grammatical or bizarro errors on the medium, not the message! Hee!)

Lest Ye Think I’ve Missed A Day

I haven’t.

Yesterday I got all my words in while at work, taking the somewhat sleepy first hour on the phones to get the bulk of my words done and then rounding it out here and there before the end of the day.  It was the first time I finished my words before I got home that night.  321 all told, all long hand.

Today I started again long hand but we were too busy.  I only wrote down about three small paragraphs, mostly dialogue, and knew I would have to make up for it tonight.  And even then I put it off, cooking a really nice dinner and  watching the recorded program of Battlestar Galactica (yay!) before coming upstairs.

I began typing in yesterday’s words, and ended up adding about 73.  Then I typed in what I’d started today and just kept going until I reached the end of the scene and the chapter.  By the time I was done, today’s efforts, not counting yesterday’s, was 603 words.

I’ve written eight days straight, pleasurably, without having a big chunk of time set aside to write. I’m building the daily habit without the pressure of NaNoWriMo’s huge word count goals looming over me, threatening to burn me out.  So far, I like this, and today’s output pleases me the most so far.

Meanwhile, in writing-related news, I’ve picked up a larger binder for my Spirit Cat notes, which I plan to transfer over tonight or tomorrow, and I have started reading All The Windwracked Stars by Elizabeth Bear.  Lovin’ it!

Three Day’s Running

So far, so good.

I’m on day three of the new routine.  Each day I’ve done more than my basic words.  I’m keeping track in my paper journal but I need to figure out a way to keep track in a spread sheet.  Yet another program I have to tinker with – Numbers, with iWork ‘08 (got it for Christmas two weeks before they announce the ‘09 version … *sigh*).

Tonight all my powers of procrastination bucked and whinnied and tried their best to make sure I didn’t write.  I didn’t want to work on the scene I’d left off in, but I need my 25o words and I didn’t want to waste them on a free-writing session.  So I sat there a while, distracting myself here and there, but decided to scene-skip and write a little from the funeral scene about a third of the novel away.  Got my words:  382.

I’ve also been posting on the new bullitin board for the SHS.  Looks like we’re set to do a run to Ad Astra in late March and there is work afoot to get a like-minded group down to World Con.  I’m feeling very up beat about everything today:  I’ve a plan for the week of write goals, I’ve hopes to attend two conventions this year, I’ve just finished The Creative Habit and my books from Amazon.ca arrived.

Just a nice little rosey glow on everything right now and I’m going to enjoy it for a bit.

The New Rules

A very invigorating meeting last night.  And with it a discussion, among many, of what our personal goals should be.

I’ve always struggled with goals.  Patterns of setting goals, letting them slip away, feeling guilty, starting all over.  The web is often filled with help tips about goal-setting this time of year, so I thought I’d try applying some of their suggestions this year to get me on track.

A common tip is that when you are setting goals for yourself, you should make sure they are a) specific (applicable to all sorts of goals) and b) something that doesn’t rely on others to be accomplished (weirdly applicable to writers, among others).

An example of a poorly worded goal would be, “I want to lose weight this year.”  A better goal would be, “I want to lose 10 pounds.”  General to specific means a better chance of reaching those goals because there a definitive destination instead of a vague hope.

An example of a goal that depends on others would be, “I want to get something published.”  It relies on other people to accomplish, so there is a chance, no matter how hard you try or how good you are, you won’t get published.  Better would be, “I want to submit to 50 markets.”

But I digress.  I plan neither to lose weight (though I should) nor get anything published (since I don’t think I’m ready).  This year will be the year of writing, of improving, of critiquing and of crafting.  2010 can be the year of submitting and whatever else.  2009 will be my year of writing.  I will attack it as obsessively as I did cooking school.  I will live-eat-breath writing.

And to do that, I must build a routine.  One that I can’t cheat.

So, the new plan:  Every day, 250 words.  No gaming the system, either.  (This is what I would do.)  If I write more than 250 words, fantastic, but it doesn’t count towards the next day’s word count, nor can I put off words to write until tomorrow.  This is how I self-sabotaged NaNoWriMo – I was so confident that I could make up words I put it off, day after day, and that doesn’t build a habit!

And no blogging until I’ve earned my words.

I can say with confidence that I got my words today.  A teeny little 340 words, but over my 25o none the less.  After two weeks of steady output, I will raise it 50 words, and keep doing so, every two weeks, until I hit a comfortable stride.  The real kicker is that I cannot possibly not write 250 words in a day.  That’s a page.  Hand-written even.  No excuse, no illness, no lethargy, no time-crunch can possibly excuse not writing 250 words.

2009 will be a different, a better, sort of year.

Skull Scarves

I’m wearing it now, black with cute little pirate skulls.   I can say cute because the graphic is all rounded, inoffensive.  I wear it and I think not only of goths but of little old ladies with delicate scarves flapping in the wind as they peal out of town on a big black Harley.    It’s like I can’t make my mind up about it, so it becomes possible of anything.

Perfect for writing.

I realize this is skipping deeply into the bizarre, but humor me.  I’m alone in the house, I have my podcasts playing but soon it will be blaring, heart-pounding pop that I can mangle with my own voice at the top of my lungs.

I’ve skipped out on the coffee thing – I like my tea.  I’ve been having a cup with Todd in the morning, and found it quite perki-fying, but prefer my flavored brews.  I do have some scented wax melting away, filling my room with scents of mango and starfruit, the dog has been walked and I feel good.  Really good.

I will be no where near my hope of getting my 10,000 words for Friday’s meeting at The Fromagerie, but I’ll have something done.  I will be late for the meeting, as I only get off work at 6:00pm.  Which means I’ll miss the cheese.  And dinner.  I dunno, maybe I’ll ask them to buy me a plate.

Even though I will be no where near my mark, I feel better about Spirit Cat than I did all December.  Failing at NaNoWriMo doesn’t matter so much anymore, especially since it was a soft failure anyways as I still managed a decent output of words, more than I am doing now.

But I also realize that having routine is very important to me.  I like knowing how to plan, what to anticipate.   And work changes, I find myself paralyzed, like a kitten plucked from its mother and stuck on the couch having no real clue what’s just happened or where the hell I am.   December sent me into training and in January the schedule changed again when we got onto the production floor.  It will change again come February with the new shift bid that’s coming in the next few weeks.  How do I plan for this?  Will I be working days or nights?  Should I start a habit now or wait until I know my schedule?  Will I even be able to keep going to the Sudbury Hypergraphic Meetings, or anything else, if I get stuck working later?   It’s not use telling me not to worry about it – it’s just what I do.

The only answer to “When will I write?” is then a) ‘Weekends’ (whenever they may be for me) and b) Mornings.  Those are the only options.    Hmm.  Maybe I just figured out my answers.  Pondering.  Pondering.

(That’s why I like this blog o’mine – even if no one is reading, at least the illusion of me talking to another person helps me figure out what I probably already know already but haven’t articulated.)

Now, to writing.  “Arrrrr!”

PS:  Ad Astra is shaping up quite nicely.  Must go!  Must find buddies to go!  *squee*  http://www.ad-astra.org/

The Ritual and The Box

Got myself all worked up last night, reading.

Todd and I were watching The Stand being broadcast in a marathon session on the Scream Network, nestled in bed.  I had my book, the one I wrote about yesterday, and I was taking my time with it, reading piece by piece by piece and thinking it over.  Around 11:00pm or so I took out one of my notebooks and just started writing down my thoughts.

I made a list of good choices, the alternatives to actual writing sessions when it feels like I don’t have time to write.  I did say feel because I know that 99% I do have the time and choose not to, or make excuses to choose not to.  This whole thing is to trick my feeble mind enough times until I realize that each of these excuses is a choice and that I can be productive in short snatches of time.

Two things in particular got me really excited, to the point where I sat in bed thinking, still watching The Stand, unable to sleep.

One, about rituals.  Most every writing book you come across will tell you not to build up your writing with rituals.  rituals, they say, can become a trap.  If you don’t have your special pencil, your drink on ice, your lucky socks, you won’t write at all.  But Tharp approaches it from the other angle.  We have our rituals for nearly everything else in our life, even work, so why should creativity be the sole exception?

The point of the ritual isn’t to set a list of criteria to meet before any writing can be done, becoming yet another excuse. The purpose is to calm the mind and body and prepare it for work, in this case creative work.   Just like you have your morning ritual to prepare for the work day – the order in which you get ready, head to work, settle in – tells you, okay, it’s time to get to it.  I think I need that.

And the idea itself is fun.  That appeals to me.

Today while exchanging some clothes at the store, I came across this scarf.  My mother made a face at it but I love it to pieces – a gauzy shawl, black with white skulls.  It’s become my writing scarf.  It, along with lighting one thing on fire, be it candle or incense, and a cup of coffee will be my writing ritual for when I go to my office and write.  I don’t think I need it when I am out and about; by being out of the house I’m already focused.  But for my day’s off, this is what I will do.  “Arr, matey, drink your black gold and light your candle.  It’s time to write!”

The other idea that kept me awake far too late last night was the idea of a box for every project.

Considering how much I haven’t written, I still manage to accumulate an aweful amount of stuff for each of my projects.  Tharp writes about starting a box for each project and how it can help ground you in the beginning, in the middle and in the end.  You start by putting in the original sparks and your goals for the project and build it up.  It becomes the fertile ground for what you’re growing.  If you get a little lost on the way, you can go back to it, see where you started from and what you wanted to do.   And when you’re done, it becomes a bit of creative history, one that you can go back to when you need to see where you’ve been.

I get a bizarre joy out of looking at my old journals and notebooks.  The color of the ink I used.   How loose or how tight the scrawl is.   Did I doodle in the corners?  What interested me at the time?  Maybe it’s narcissism, but at the same time I get the same keen enjoyment when I see how other writers work – their offices, their drafts, what they collect and how they organize it.

So the thought of a box for every project, where all my notes and pictures and music and books and drafts would be in one place?  My nifty-radar went gonzo.  Now I have four boxes that will be put to work tonight while I pull out my major projects and move them into their new homes.  The question of where I’m going to actually put those boxes is something I haven’t thought too much about.

My geeky glee is the only answer I need right now.  I’ll trust in it.  “Arr!”

PS:  I haven’t yet posted to OWW.  I haven’t decided what I’m going to post.  I only have two completed short stories, one more polished than the other.  The submission process is complicated, requiring a lot of formatting.    I’m also several thousand words short of my goal for the next Hypergraphic Society meeting, but that’s okay.  I have one week to do both – and I will.

New Year, New Choices

Hopefully, the adjective that I will use to describe both will be ‘good’.

Heck, I’ll even take ‘better’.

The day started late and will end early.  After rolling in around 2:00 am this morning, and sleeping in late, I had only a few hours this afternoon before heading to my parents for another family gathering.  I did walk the dog during that down time, something Ginger was terribly excited about, but the rest was spent in a muddled haze of sinus headache and light snatches of reading.

I have a pot of tea on right now, genmaicha, and will settle in with it and with The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp, the dancer and choreographer.  I sampled a chapter of it elseweb and decided it merited a purchase.  It’s been very interesting reading so far; so many of the non-fiction books meant to help my writing are written either by writers or expressly for writers, while this one takes a step back and looks at the act of creation itself without regard to the form it takes.  She asks very interesting, thoughful questions, ones that make me stop reading, slow down and really chew over.

I want 2009 to be a very different year for me.  I want it to be productive, to be experimental, to be brave.  I need to set out my goals, break them into manageable chunks, but for now and for the next few weeks, my daily goal is to make one good choice every day when it comes to writing.

Heck, I’m hoping that after a few tries, I’ll get into the habit of making the better choice.

To all you and yours, may the best of years lie ahead.   Here’s to 2009!