Page Turn/A Lifelong Dream Realized/And Away We Go (Personal Update)

The Yrarbil is a great place to get work done.
Image description: Writer who didn't
flip the image in front of a Library.

Raw unfettered shit- 82,098 

Slightly polished turd-80,042 

Superpolishedfragileshitstick- 44,754    

These numbers have not changed from my last update, or if they have it is not by enough that I need to "count" it. I know I got a couple of sessions in there between being sick and starting summer school, and  However, it's going to start being part of a regular Monday personal update posts again. Accountability and all.


I'm sitting in the Lafayette library typing this. Around me a dozen people are working on laptops and an old guy is reading the paper. Outside on a "reading deck" a guy with a cup of coffee looks like he's taking a break from whatever he's doing on his laptop every few minutes to breathe deep and look at the sky as if he's in a Grape Nuts commercial.

I woke up early, got ready, got all of my non serious Facebooking out of the way, dressed like I was going to work (for I was), bagged up my laptop and was standing at the door to the library when they open (10am). And I will work at least six hours, although now that my Monday evening plans have been cancelled, I might just work until the library closes.

Someday I may get to take advantage of the fact that I have a job where one can clock a full day without ever putting on pants, but not until I've established some good habits first.

I am a full time writer now.

*pauses*

*looks at that sentence*

*writes it again, in disbelief*

I am a full time writer now.

Holy shit.

The Badish News

For those wondering the results of the last six weeks of Patreon "fundraiser," we did not hit our goal. It is a tragical story of tragic tragedy. Do not even attempt to contain your tears.

I'm sorry you didn't hit your goals. I'm so sorry.

We gained a number of smaller donors, which was absolutely top among the goals of running the "pledge drive" in the first place, but it was like that "Good news/Bad news" kid's story and we actually lost a bigger donor.  Illustrating (with a bit of cutting irony) precisely why sometimes a lot of little donors makes for a less vulnerable support structure for a content creator.

If I thought it would help. I would die this episode.
Heck, why don't I do it anyway.

In the end we only got 73% the way to the goal. And given that we started at 65% six weeks ago, that is a touch on the disappointing side. Lots of wonderful people and lots of smaller donations that I cherish, but we fell pretty short.

I will cry until I can't breathe!

So when it was all over, and even during that last week when it was very clear that there wasn't going to be a trope effect like a slow clap (except with one dollar donations culminating in a stadium roar of money being thrown at me), I had myself a bit of an emotional moment.

Know those feels, Chris. Like this one time.....

But at least I didn't star in Batman vs. Superman or something.

I hate everyone. But you most of all Chris.

HOWEVER......


The Unequivocated Good News

There was a second number. A "back up" goal if you will. Not my dream or target goals, but the "safety" goal. A number I was keeping close track of as a sort of fallback position if (as became increasingly obvious we wouldn't) we didn't make our primary goal.

And we reached that one.

By four dollars.

All the best smiling Gifs are evil.

That number is unsustainable in the long-term. More nanny hours will dry up next year, and I can only put off contributing to a retirement fund for so long. But for now–for the next few months– it can provide juuuuuuuust enough that with the pet sitting I do, and the limited nanny hours I get each week, I can keep from needing to dip into the Kickstarter funds and watch myself slowly, inexorably run out of time that I don't need to go get a job waiting tables or something. There's not much wiggle room, and I'm fucked if the side gigs go pear shaped for some reason, but still, I can't underscore how unbelievable that is: Surviving off of writing.

I couldn't believe it when I looked at the calculator. I had to add it up three times and triple check my expenses.

I guess I'm a full-time working writer now.

So what does that mean for the blog?

It means we can postpone the question of ads on Writing About Writing for probably about another year, and we'll see where we are then. I am torn between not wanting to having ads and the income they would bring in, but a lot can happen in a year–and hopefully not like the lemur thing that happened this last year.

Lastly....thank you all so much.

I couldn't do this without you. In a very real, non-hyperbolic sense, everything set up here is because of your small (and sometimes not-at-all-small) donations. I will continue to work hard to get you the content you crave. 

My Latest Viral Article (Personal Update)

Raw unfettered shit- 82,098 (Last update 80,042) [Just this update- 2056]     

Slightly polished turd-80,042 (Last update 59, 956)  [Just this update- 20,086] 

Superpolishedfragileshitstick- 44,754   

It's not great, but I'm back on the move. I poured a lot of energy into blogging last week, and I'm going to do the same for most of this week. I'm about to transition into a difficult phase of the year–the six weeks when I teach summer school. It's only a three day, three hour schedule, but that is stacked on top of other jobs. I'd like to kind of fall into that month and a half of terrible jazz hands with a track record of ass kicking. That way people keep thinking "I know there's more to him than this!" as I post my fifth straight week of "Music that helps me write" or "Posts from last month that people liked" post.


Now, whip out your mouth harps because it's time for me to lay down some home spun wisdom.

You never know what's going to stick. You just never know.

Once upon a time I couldn't figure out what to write for the day, and I had been watching a few people on Facebook toss around a meme taking a shit on English teachers (of which I am one, by the way) in a sort of all-teachers-are-ignorant-trash/no-English-teacher-ever-knew-what-they-were-talking-about sort of way. And maybe my thoughts that day were shaped more by the commentary I was seeing going along with the meme, but I decided that would be my post for the day.

I popped off a short little listicle about five reasons I hated that meme. Suddenly, people I didn't even think were reading my blog were chiming in with comments. Good, thoughtful comments too! A robust discussion happened. They challenged my position, made salient points.  I reconsidered several points and tried to better explain the ones I stood by. More discussion happened.

That wasn't the last time that post got lots of attention either. Every night that I remember, I put up a rerun from the archives of Writing About Writing over on the Facebook page of the same name. Usually it gets a little boost and a few more pageviews land. Each time this particular post comes up, it generates massive response, both from those who agree and those who don't as well as from people who came to understand a lot more from the article about why an English teacher might teach a particular symbol and folks who want to telescope the issue out to an indictment of the American education system. This last week it came around in the rerun rotation again, and promptly proceeded to pick up forty thousand pageviews, becoming my number four article of all time.

It's always a stressful post to put up. Even though people get more hateful about their replies to my thoughts on Nanowrimo or MFA's, it's this post that stirs people to be more thoughtful--that goes viral, that generates comments (both dismissive and unkind and incredibly thoughtful–agreeing, disagreeing, and with nuanced middle roads). The angry dillholes I've learned to ignore–roll my eyes, ban the ones who can't say it without hate speech, and move along. The ones who failed their papers and think their English teacher couldn't handle a different point of view get taken with a grain of salt. (I've given A's for writing and argumentation to enough people I disagreed with and F's to people poorly regurgitating the class lecture to wonder if a grape or three might not be sour.) It's the ones who make a salient point that cause me to question and re-question myself. I've gone back over the post time after time to make sure I believe in what I'm saying and I'm saying it as well as I know how.

And every time this post goes up and generates the feedback it does, I am struck by how insignificant I thought it was when I wrote it. A filler post on a day I couldn't come up with anything else. Fired from the hip (only later to be polished), and a quick flip of the bird to some cruddy meme that seemed to delight in suggesting English teachers are full of shit, and the anti-education impetus that perpetuated it.

And how many other posts have I thought "This is good. People will really like this," where I have gotten a fraction of the traffic? How many have I worked on for days and thought I nailed and even tried to be provocative and as funny as I could that have slipped quietly into the archives with a whisper?

You just never know what's going to stick to the wall when you throw it. And that's important to remember as a writer because it means not only do you want to throw your best every time, but you want to throw a LOT.

There's a Ray Bradbury quote: "Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed." I'm a big fan of this quote not because I trust my writing ideology to any single quote-dropping writer, but rather because I see it merit out so often.

Of course it's inverse is true as well–that people who write a lot tend to achieve "quality" at some point, but what I see merit out the most is the doomed part.  A lot of people spend a lot of time on their One Thing™. And their One Thing™ might even be the best writing they've ever done, but often it is not received in quite the way they imagine.

This older article has taught me a lot of lessons. About how to communicate better, how to stand by my convictions when people are making great points that disagree, and how to thread the nuance with folks who disagree in good faith, but perhaps most of all that I never ever know what's going to grab people and resonate with them, so the best thing to do is keep writing, doing the best I can, being flawed and making mistakes, and learning to do it better.

I'll leave you with something that I've seen lots of places around the net. I'd love it if I could properly attribute it if anyone knows:

"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". 

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

Catch Up Week (Personal Update)

Image description: Writer looking a bit sad.

Raw unfettered shit- 80,042 (Last update 80,042) [Just this update- 0]     

Slightly polished turd-80,042 (Last update 59, 956)  [Just this update- 20,086] 

Superpolishedfragileshitstick- 34,889 

Yep. I know.

I'm looking right at it too.

Scowling at it really.

I don't have a lot of pithy wisdom to offer you today. My pith has suffered a robot uprising and is having its skulls crushed by T-1000's. I'm kind of feeling shitty and impostery and wondering why anyone had any faith at all in me since I'm clearly just selling snake oil, and not a real writer at all. I somehow managed to trick thousands of people and any second now one of them is going to do the Invasion of the Body Snatchers screech at me because they realize I'm a fraud.

If you want some sort of meta-lesson, just realize that sometimes even people who are paying the bills with their wordsmithing hit those moments–moments that it's easy to believe professional artist never has to struggle with. We do. And from the words of those who've hit success bellwethers I still only dream of, it never, ever goes away.

I haven't stopped writing every day, of course but blog posts have been falling behind, were going up last minute for a while, then late, then days late, and everything has been kind of decaying like a piece of fruit in a time lapse video. I also have been very dutifully doing something on this manuscript every day even if it's only to read over it, make a few cosmetic changes, and try to keep the characters in my mind so the whole project doesn't go stale. (Technically I've made a few changes, and there are a couple hundred more words, but I needed to acknowledge that I haven't even touched a new scene.)

I've stalled out and I haven't had the raw time I need to use my myriad of techniques to fire back up. I know I can get back to this, and part of that is because I take morning writing and the floating half hour seriously BECAUSE THEY WORK, and part of that is because Every. Single. Time. my schedule has opened up in the past five years, I end up quickly recovering my motivation and starting to pump out both fiction Work In Progress(WIP) progress and blog posts I'm happier about.

And if you ever think you're feeling guilty about not writing and maybe even realizing that the guilt itself is contributing to emotional and mental maelstrom of shit that's harshing your muse's squee and doing your creativity a heck, just know that it's so, so much worse when there's money involved that you were given in good faith. (An advance or in my case a Kickstarter.)

If you've been paying very, very close attention, or you've used my facebook updates to kind of patchwork together what's going on, you know that the past month has been busy and the past fortnight has been very busy. I think the overarching chaos is about to end–you know, just in time for six weeks of teaching junior high schoolers during the summer because that's not busy at ALL–but definitely this coming week looks blessedly normal. And while it may be telling that I'm nearly in tears at the heavenly sight of a 40 hour week, I am going to use this week to catch up.

I officially declare this week a catch up week. I'm going to catch up on blog posts that are half written, on emails, on guest bloggers who are patiently waiting for my replies, on menu tidying and admin work. (And away from the blog on the momentum of my book, my overdue "Inside Scoop" letter for my patreons, the rewards for the Kickstarter that need to start trickling in, my room that badly needs cleaning, and a pile of paperwork that I'm pretty sure if I don't get to, I'll simultaneously be kicked out of my home, lose health insurance, and start getting monthly cassette tapes from the Columbia Record Club.) It won't mean much to all of you, dear readers, except a wildly unconventional update schedule this week, but know that behind the scenes I am ON FIRE!

Let's see if we can't have a much more positive update in one week.

When You Fall Off the Horse (Personal Update)

Working in a play cafe with T.C.
Image description: Writer looking wild eyed, but determined
(and super cute) in a play cafe

Really Rough Draft  

Raw unfettered shit- 71, 814 (Last update 60, 203) [Just this update- 11,611]     

Slightly polished turd- 55, 716 (Last update 34,809)  [Just this update- 20,907] 

Got a surprise double shift with the kiddo today, so I'm going to do a quick update.

If that number above looks like a decent week instead of something closer to the six weeks it's been since I last updated my word counts, you're not wrong. And probably half of this progress occurred only in the last week.

I don't have a lot of excuses. Of course the end of the semester and holidays are always rough, but that wrapped up a month ago. Then I deal with what I call "life fallout" (as all the things I've ignored while I've been overwhelmed come to collect). This included a couple of overdue visits and some deep cleaning, but that was only about ten days of January. I got sick, but it was only for a few days. Mostly I just dropped the ball. I've gotten a lot of extra hours watching The Contrarian, but not so many that writing should have been impractical. All these factors combined were non-trivial, but I still should have had time to make some slow and steady progress.

No, the real problem wasn't time.

I've not been okay with the election and subsequent fallout. As it got more and more real (and then began to take effect after the inauguration) I felt worse and worse. People I love are already feeling direct and measurable harm in their lives. A friend of mine is probably not going to get to see their husband for at least three months because of the travel ban. I've been able to write (even every day, but it's been very focused on social and political writing on my facebook page.

A blurb on FB (even a pretty long one) might take me about an hour or 90 minutes. That's about how long I can focus right now. I've had trouble getting blogs up but have managed with liberal application of jazz hands. But sitting down and writing fiction has been extra difficult.

Perhaps the greatest indicator of how out of sorts I've been has been the trouble I've had reading. Articles are fine, although I find myself wanting to skim a lot of them after the first couple of paragraphs. I have tried about three times to sit down and read Ancillary Justice and even though it's a very compelling read, I just keep getting distracted.

Though I've been writing every day, my manuscript has gone a bit fallow.

So let me share a little trick I do when times are like this and I can't seem to break out. It's not panacea, and it may not work for you, but it has never let me down when I'm having trouble sitting and working, but I need bolster my word counts something fierce.

I sit down and I force myself to write for only five minutes.

That's it. Five minutes. I don't block off three hours and have major expectations. I just say "I'm going to write for five minutes and then I'm done." Is there anyone who can't spit a few words at the page (even on something they're pretty "meh" about) for five minutes?

At the end of that five minutes, I get to decide whether I want to re-up for another five. It's no different. I'm not signing on to write for an hour. It's just five more minutes. If I'm out of gas by the end of it, I can walk away with honor.  And then at the end of that five minutes.....I see if maybe I want to do five more.  Usually within about twenty minutes, I'm writing at a clip instead of stopping every five to check in. It doesn't always work, but usually those are the longest writing sessions I pull out.

So if you're having some real trouble with your mojo, don't ask yourself if you feel like sitting down and putting in a four hour stint. Just ask yourself if you can do five minutes....

The Holiday Season (Personal Update and Upcoming Shenanigans)

Image description: Writer looking...absolutely totes adorbs.

Really Rough Draft  

Raw unfettered shit- 60, 203 (Last update 68,508) [Just this update- 8305]     

Slightly polished turd- 34, 809 (Last week 34,809)  [Just this week- 0] 

*Reminder slightly polished turd is usually soft revision I've done to help jump start me into the next day's writing. It's no where close to a second draft, but it's a bit more polished than my raw copy. But a blank page is a hard start.

I really wanted to not post my numbers today. Especially since that's two weeks worth of writing. I mean I really, really wanted to just skip it for a few weeks and then when I had punched out some good writing sessions, suddenly say "Oh yeah. It's totally been a while. My bad!" Then with the big days to even out the bad, it would look kind of like a crappy average, but acceptable progress.

But accountability is accountability. This is how the sausage gets made. And this is the season where everything upends.

So that shall be my lesson for the week (cue the twangy mouth harp music):

First of all, when you hit those really shitty periods of uber-busy–and you will because you're human and have to live in the real world with holidays, day jobs, and bills to pay and we can't all be fucking Stephen King with his four to six hours a day (even if you manage to strip your life bare of social life, a job that affords you luxuries like "a studio apartment," and some semblance of work/life balance)–it's more important than ever to keep pounding out a few words whenever you can. Grab what time is left and wring every last syllabic drop out of it. For me that chaotic period is the end always at of the semester and the holidays (and I always get sick at the end of the semester too), and nothing hits quite as hard as the two weeks or so before Christmas when I'm taking the one-two punch from both of those things.

Not just because you've got a bunch of Kickstarter backers wondering what the hell you're doing with their money (or maybe that's just me) but for two reasons.

Number one, those words add up faster than you think. One of the reasons I'm so ambivalent about NaNoWriMo is that it sells this narrative that you sit down and just SPLAT out a book. That's not how it works. That's NEVER how it works. You don't work at the 1776 words a day. Your book comes out of you in fits and starts. Sometimes you struggle with three paragraphs. Sometimes you write for six hours and realize you have to erase every word of it. And sometimes you zone out and find yourself coming out a sweat drenched haze hours later with your heart pounding and your eyes burning and your knuckles sore but there's 20 new pages you can barely remember having written–and it's good shit too.

But if you gut something, even when it's tough, you'll see an inexorable progress. What would have happened if I'd just said "Fuck it. I'm way too busy right now. I'll catch up starting Dec 26." Well, as of this writing (with still 12 days to go) I would be eight thousand words and change behind where I am right now. Books are birthed through strenous labor. They don't slide effortlessly out of us. But there's something we can do to help them along, even between "contractions."

Number two you have to stay inside your Work In Progress (WIP). Stories you're telling yourself are like stories you're reading or shows you're watching. After a couple of days you start to slip out of your characters' minds. They feel stale and unfamiliar. A few more days and you're struggling to remember where you were going, what was happening, even the inner voice of your protagonist. If you put down your pen every time life comes up, you end up spending more time trying to get back into your groove and pace. And if you're not very, VERY careful during your revision, you work will have a patchwork feel. Scene shifts will feel clunky. Resolutions handwaved. Conflicts forgotten. Like it's a quilt sewn together from squares of different emotional touchpoints and even slightly different writers–which of course, in a very real sense, is exactly what has happened.

There's a reason professional writers only let the most outrageous of personal crises pull them from the page for more than a day or three.

This week is going to be all kinds of out of order for blog posting as I try to get you good articles early in the week (in addition to still moving over articles to the Social Justice Bard menu) and get a Star Wars article written to time with the release of Rogue One. But then OG is coming into town this weekend, so anything not written by then is going to have to be jazzhands and superfudge. I can write a little when company is in town, but I sure as hell can't get a whole dedicated blog post written and revised.

Embrace the Messy (Personal Update)

Image description: Author looking just a little too enthusiastic.

Really Rough Draft  

Raw unfettered shit- 60, 203 (Last update 58,227) [Just this update- 1976]     

Slightly polished turd- 34, 809 (Last week 34,809)  [Just this week- 0] 

*Reminder slightly polished turd is usually soft revision I've done to help jump start me into the next day's writing. It's no where close to a second draft, but it's a bit more polished than my raw copy. But a blank page is a hard start.

Looks pretty awful, doesn't it? Like maybe I should have stopped having groupie threesomes for at least a minute and gotten some work done.

It's strange because it's probably one of the best weeks I've had since I started writing this particular story and up there in terms of creative euphoria in general. But let me get into that below.

Personal Update

I got back from L.A. early in the week. There was talk of staying an extra day to go to Disneyland but the crowds had been hellish on Monday–seriously the worst I've ever seen them in 32 years of going an average of two or three times a year. Somehow they figured out how to get so many people inside that the only magic was evil eldritch horror from beyond the plain of suffering.

I also really wanted to get back and write. My plan to go down there, lock myself in a room and write for hours ended up up looking a lot more like grabbing a couple of hours of catch as catch can. I'm not sure how to make that work in the future. Maybe just skip the trip until/unless it is crystal clear that some writing time is non-negotiable.

Pushing outward from my writing time has been difficult lately.  Well actually, that's generally always been true for my entire life. But being on my own has afforded a few unique challenges surrounding it as I worry that if I tell people I can't do things they will never bother inviting me again and I'll die alone. Because obviously that's exactly how things work and what would happen .

After that the week was really busy. Sonic Gal is having her crime fighting time audited (to make sure she's not wasting time) and since she comparably lives about a normal day every fifteen minutes that pass for normals, it's an involved process. I tagged in a lot more with The Contrarian after we got back.

Book Update

Still, I got a lot of good work done, which...I know is not as easy to see based on my word counts. The long and short of it was that I wrote myself into a corner in a scene that wasn't really working at all, and I recognized that I needed to back up and figure out what, if anything, that scene was doing so that I could do it in another way. I started hitting backspace, and didn't stop until I was back to a point before things had gone screwball. If I were strictly doing NaNo, I would still count the 15,000 or so words I cut (because you don't edit during Nano and you count your mistakes, even if they're 20 pages or so), but in terms of novel progress, it clearly doesn't "count."

And yet, I learned something about my main character and his parents in that tangent that is going to game change the arc of his development, I figured out at least three breakthroughs and two other things that were not 100% gelled and have seen a bridge from "here" to "there" in one of my plot points that is going to work really well. I'm humming from the weekend, flying on an artists high, and my heart is pounding. My worst-ever word count week has probably been my best weekend since I decided to write this book and I am FLYING. In terms of work that will make this better, it's probably my best week.

Don't be afraid to scrap the words just because they're yours. (That first draft isn't as brilliant as you think it is anyway.) Don't be afraid to kill your darlings. Don't be afraid to scrap that scene that isn't working. And for The Muse's sake, don't get so attached to your word counts or your page progress that you won't just crumple up a few pages and go back.

This is how it is supposed to be. Divest yourself of the idea that you're going to sit down and write a book from beginning to end; it never works that way. You're going to cut scenes, maybe even characters, and it's going to be a horrible bloody mess. Roll your sleeves up and dig in for some field medic surgery.

Art is messy.

Bring a smock.

Many Thanks (Progress Update)

Manuscript update

Really Rough Draft  

Raw unfettered shit- 50, 852 (Last update 34, 809) [Just this update- 16,043]     

Slightly polished turd- 34, 809 (Last week 29,688)  [Just this week- 5,141] 

*Reminder slightly polished turd is usually soft revision I've done to help jump start me into the next day's writing. It's no where close to a second draft, but it's a bit more polished than my raw copy. But a blank page is a hard start.

If you pay close attention to those numbers, and know when I was ordered to bed by my doctor, you might be able to piece together what I'm kind of trying to do: Nano–at least the word count parts of it. Certainly I'm not starting on the first and I won't be done on the 30th and I care fuck for the website issuing me a certificate of completion, but the ramp up got me a little pumped to try and turn up the juice on my output. I'm a little behind because of the bronchitis–I spent those days in bed and wrote very little. (Doc turned out to be right though. A week of bedrest kicked it's butt and saved me from walking pneumonia.) Catching up to where I should be after a week of days that were only a few hundred words will probably take all month. But I've got a tiny reward lined up if I end up with 50,000 more words by Nov 30th than I had on the first.

Many thanks

Rather than a life update (which would go something like this: "When I started feeling better, I realized that there was two weeks worth of shit to do, and I'm still catching up.") I want to thank folks for these last two weeks.

Thank you so much to my handful of guest bloggers who kept me from having to put up ridiculously "jazz hands" content or simply put the blog on a "sick hiatus" for a few days. Even my mom jumped in with an article to help me pull through there. Heck I blew through all those articles, and I still have one to run tomorrow.

And thank you so much to my readers who stuck with me even though I went way off the usual fare. I know that two more weeks of off-schedule updates may not matter much to most of you, but it was a real hands flung into the air moment for me–to JUST be getting back into the swing of things and to be promising content and literally, that day, to succumb to illness felt very flaky. So I appreciate the patience.

We Interrupt Your Regular Broadcast (Personal Update/Novel Progress)

I'm standing by a table right now!
Image description: TV "Please Stand By" broadcast.

Really Rough Draft  

Raw unfettered shit-  34, 809 (Last week 30,396) [Just this week- 4413]   

Slightly polished turd- 29,688 (Last week18, 242)  [Just this week- 11,246] 

*Reminder slightly polished turd is usually soft revision I've done to help jump start me into the next day's writing. It's no where close to a second draft, but it's a bit more polished than my raw copy. But a blank page is a hard start.

Personal Update

Abysmal word counts this last week (although a strangely high amount of turd polishing–seems I was having a hard time getting going), but at least I've figured out why my word counts have been so these last few weeks.

This week when I went to do my monthly budget for October, I discovered that I didn't need to draw any money from my Kickstarter funds. It should be somewhere around $450. What happened? Well since my teaching never changes, and I didn't get any unexpected donations, somewhere in there I must have watched The Contrarian for an extra 30 hours. It was just an extra shift here or an extra couple of hours there, but apparently it added up. It explains why I felt vaguely busy, addled, and constantly like I didn't have quite enough time to write this whole month.

It also cut pretty hard into my writing time. The bad news is that I'm behind, and I don't want to be behind. Especially since getting a book from draft to finished product in a year is already a pretty fucking tight schedule. The good news is that if I end up going over next year, I'll have the money to keep going for another month.

Upcoming Week

The next week is going to be very different from our usual fare.

First off, Pancreas Man and The Spleen got punched into next week by Timefist. (I mean they LITERALLY got punched into next week.) Sonic Gal has gone to cover some of their patrols while they're in flux. (Literally IN flux.) Uberdude needs some tag ins to help with T.C., so I'm helping out a little extra for the next week.

I also have a number of "business" bits that need to be taken care of. Our first round of Kickstarter rewards are going out and an e-mail list made of the $50 or greater donors so I can put out the first of the "Inside Scoop" mails. I also need to clean up a lot of links and menus here on the blog.

I also just got off the phone with the advice nurse complete with an epic finger wagging that I have to be resting more or my bronchitis is going to turn into walking pneumonia.  I better take that one seriously or it's going to be a lot more weeks of even FEWER word counts.

In an effort to keep my word counts from tanking again (despite the week), I'm going to be running a bunch of guest blogs and shuffling around our regular schedule to keep me as bed resty as I can. You know me though: there will be something going up.

Here's my "lesson" for the week. I want people to really understand that trying to write for income involves a lot of steps that AREN'T WRITING. The idea that an agent will just whisk away your manuscript and replace them with royalty checks while you don't miss a keystroke is not even true for Stephen King or JK Rowling–they give a lot of time to book signings, talks, interviews, and such. So if you decide you want to be a writer for a living, be ready to do a lot of other work that hasn't a damned thing to do with actually writing. Just part of the cost of doing business.

Coughing Those Words Out (Personal Update)

Really Rough Draft  

Raw unfettered shit-  30,396 (Last week 24,262) [Just this week- 6134]  

Slightly polished turd- 18, 242 (Last week 12,402)  [Just this week- 5,840] 

*Reminder slightly polished turd is usually soft revision I've done to help jump start me into the next day's writing. It's no where close to a second draft, but it's a bit more polished than my raw copy. But a blank page is a hard start.

Personal Update

Bronchitis.

Yep. I've been prescribed liquids cough syrup and as much bedrest as I can get, but there's not much they can do except tell me to take it easy and hope that it doesn't develop into walking pneumonia. It hasn't kept me from crawling to the keyboard every day, but it's certainly cut into my word counts.

I also finally finished up a pair of very busy weeks. And I finally got a weekend to relax. Which I don't just need for my health, but actually because it's been too long. I need to start paring down my commitments to make more time for writing. (It's a good thing to be writing so much that one needs to find more time to do so.)

I've got more guest blogs this week than I can shake a cliche at, so I might run them on Tues AND Wed and try to catch up a bit from these last two weeks. So things are looking good even though I spent this morning coughing up a lung.

Those 70s Playgrounds (Personal Update)

Not tired. Nope.
Image description: Writer looking exhausted.

Really Rough Draft  

Raw unfettered shit-  19,084 (Last week 12,785)[Just this week- 6229]  
Slightly polished turd- 10,248 (Last week 1470)  [Just this week- 8778]

So this week I haven't done a lot of raw copy (although I'm still improving–1000 words a day would be about four pages, so I'm still winding UP), but I HAVE gone back and revised much of what I'd already written to incorporate the new vision that inspired the Kickstarter. I'm teasing out a toxic relationship and deepening some dysfunction in echoes of my own childhood, plus if the main character is going to have a meaningful arc of redemption, he can't be so...uninteresting early on. Writing time has gotten pretty After Dark™ around here.

At one point, I said to myself "I'm adding edges to everything," and that phrasing immediately made me think of those macros where it's like "Seventies kids had violently dangerous playgrounds and we LIKED it!"

*[Caveat: Ridiculously safe playgrounds are JUST fine with me now that I have a Bub. Juuuuuust fine. He's going to climb tall trees, bike down impossible hills, break limbs, and flay himself all on his own. I'm okay with the worst thing he has to deal with right now being a fall from four feet onto some wood chips.]

Share this meme if you played on a dangerous playground and survived.
And if you didn't survive....uh......I may have discovered a flaw in this plan.
Image description: Old school playground with a merry-go-round.

I feel like that's me. Adding falls that are just a little TOO high, merry-go-rounds without safety nets that go too fast and throw kids off. See saws that can send kids plummeting fifteen feet to their asses in less than a second if the heavier person leaves. Unforgiving concrete underneath your feet, ready to shred your knees and elbows should you fuck up. Replacing safe, smooth plastic curves on everything with some splintery wood and metal sheeting sharp enough to slice a fingers dragged along it the wrong way.

Oh it's still a playground and I hope people have fun. But let's not make it quite so safe.


Personal Update

This last week was a lot of tag in with The Contrarian, and the Hall of Rectitude is about to have a crime fighting anniversary party this weekend, so there will be more extra tag ins this week. Great for my wallet and for not dipping into Kickstarter funds this week. But it's turning the work weeks into a blur and making it hard to get to those hardcore writing sessions. Even though my productivity is up even from last week when I had a bit more time, I'm hoping it leapfrogs even high after this coming week when scheduling is a little more forgiving.

But this next week is going to involve a lot of stolen moments and fast-as-I-can writing.

There's not a lot going on in my life actually. I'm settling into a pretty boring groove after the move(s), and mostly I'm either writing or working one of the other two jobs. I don't even get to very many video games or fun stuff lately. (Though getting a birthday fuss yesterday at my D&D game certainly did not suck.) At this point I'm trying to keep my edge when my two part time jobs are asking more out of me than normal so that when they ease off, I have the sharp edge to put in the hard hours.

I don't know if I have much of a "lesson" to draw from the last week, but remember when you're working on a long work in progress that life is not going to let every week be nothing but beautiful spiral passes to the wide reciever. Sometimes you have to be happy with working the ball down the field, steady progress and keeping your eyes peeled for an open receiver. But you don't pull hike the ball back and take your time looking for a wide reciever when they're blitzing, and you certainly don't go home because you only gained a couple of yards the last few plays.

If my football metaphor lost you as much as it did me, just remember. 1) I made a hilarious tight end joke. 2) They can't all be 5-8 hour sessions, and some weeks are going to be worse than most. (Most of us don't have the schedule where we have nothing to do but write and then go play canasta with the other members of the Auxiliary Club.) When you can't do the 5 hour sessions, you do the three hour ones. When you can't do the three hour ones, you take the hour where you can get it.

That way you're still in the mindset of your story and your characters when your schedule opens up and your ability to focus hasn't atrophied.

Illness and Internet (13,165/Personal Update)

Image description:
Writer typing with expression that is a little.....TOO happy.

Progress Report 

Really Rough Draft  

Raw unfettered shit- 12,785 (Last week 4232) [Just this week- 8553]
Slightly polished turd- 1470  (Last week 380)  [Just this week- 1110]

In case you're wondering, "slightly polished turd" is something I've done some revision on without necessarily starting a new draft (which will be absolutely necessary.....multiple times....before this process is over). A lot of my writing sessions don't start with me just sitting down and exploding in a flurry of words. Sometimes it's more like an old steam train trying to start going up a hill. I find that it helps me have some forward momentum if I go back a couple of pages and start by cleaning up what is already written. It helps me enter the scene and jump start the mindsets of the characters. There's no way in Apollo's left nipple that this counts as an actual "revision," but it reads a little cleaner than the raw stuff.

Just a quick personal update this week; today started with an extra three hours of kidlet wrangling so my Monday work schedule is 14 hours with the only real "break" being driving in rush hour from nannying in Oakland to Pleasant Hill where I teach. Mostly I've spent the week trying to catch up on sleep and feeling guilty that I was sleeping too much and not writing enough.

I began the week still fighting a cold and lost internet at my house for about 36 hours at the beginning of the weekend, so I've been feeling like I'm struggling against the universe pretty hard this week. Still, despite a rough start, I got a lot of writing done (as you can see) and each day is getting easier and easier to sit down and make more come.

Here comes the weekly didactic-a-thon though: notice that my word counts were higher than last week, but much lower than I would want them to be at a full clip. (Seriously, I need to at least double this, but triple would be better.) Writing this much is a hard-won habit, and it takes a lot of work to break through the inclination NOT to write. Even for me–a writer who blogs every day and makes about half my income from writing–I couldn't just sit down and start hammering out thousands of words a day like it was nothing. It takes some time to build up that level of discipline. Just like doing a couch to 5k...but with writing. (One of my strongest objections to Nano is that it's a lot like standing up and running a marathon without training–including the part where people collapse before they finish and injure themselves.)

Now to keep upping those word counts....

Novel Update Word Count- 4612 (Personal Update)

Image description: Writer typing with expression that is a little.....TOO happy.

Really Rough Draft

Raw unfettered shit- 4232
Slightly polished turd- 380  

Does that seem a little light to you? It does to me. There were several grinding lurching sessions that took literally hours before I was writing at a clip. It's been a long time since I sat down to do something so big and I had to relearn to silence the critic and remember that written is better than good when it comes to drafts. No matter how long you've been at it, that imposter syndrome is one fucking badass brain demon, and is immune to both lightning, fire, and holy spells.  Plus just starting this project involved a lot of scowling at a blank screen. The first few puffs of the old steam engine didn't even turn the wheel.

But even with the slow start, I found three things stood out.

Thing the first- I got sick. I'm actually still sick, but I try to write something unless I'm bed-ridden. But I've actually been nursing a creeping crud of Blerg for about four days now. Not only did I spend last weekend around thousands of people in our nation's capital, I also hopped on my third flight in the span of 9 days. So no doubt I was exposed to all kinds of slimy disease vectors. I'm sure some assholes out there love nothing more than smearing their rhinovirus covered fingers all over the glass case that houses The Constitution. Or maybe someone on the plane decided that other people's health was no reason not to be in a metal tube with recycled air and two hundred people for five hours. Yolo, amirite?

I was also in a vulnerable place. Remember how all that shit and stress was finally ending just last week? I also got some great news this week. And I mean some really great news. If you've been following this blog for a while you know that Sonic Gal had cancer.

Well Sonic Gal doesn't have cancer anymore. She stopped having cancer and was awesome instead.

Her natural superhero resistance to damage allowed her to take the maximum dose of radiation and at the end of it, they found her scans to be all clear.

A few years ago when I was in school, I would get sick at the end of every semester. Every. Single. One. You could have set your watch to it. I'd wrap up the last final. Make some Facebook post about being happy to have a few days off, and be sick within 24 hours. Basically stress and health do a cellblock tango in my body and after I've trashed my body on caffeine and stress for a solid month, my six remaining white blood cells start dancing around and singing "HE HAD IT COMING! HE ONLY HAD HIMSELF TO BLAME!"

So you can imagine the kind of stress relief I had feeling eight months of out-of-my-mind worry start to unspool. I know my situation with my family has experienced great upheaval (hence my move) but I gotta tell you that this was better news than, "Hey Chris I hooked up a threesome and some pharmaceutical MDMA for your birthday." By miles.

Thing the second- I'm still working a lot at my other two jobs: nanny and teacher. As you know, I didn't fund my Kickstarter to get a year "off." I did so to get a year with a lighter schedule. I wasn't able to get one of my nights off from teaching because I found out too late that my Kickstarter funded–we have to commit to our next semester schedule really early, and I couldn't find anyone who wanted to take either night. I'm currently working between the two jobs about 15 hours a week more than I intended to–a non trivial bite out of the time left.

Even though I will almost never say no to more time with The Contrarian (cause he's HELLA cute), next Spring I will be able to drop to one night a week (and maybe teach no classes if they'll let me hold my spot and seniority when I return the following Fall). Whatever pace I start to average for the next two and a half months, it's going to go up.

I'll have to keep my eye on it. It'll be important to schedule writing time in an evening and not just flop over if I've spent six hours nannying or something. However, in the end, the simple fact is that I'm not wasting that time, I'm working. Working means money.  So the worst case scenario is that the book release might get postponed, but it won't be a situation where I've blown through the Kickstarter and have nothing to show for it. I'll just be behind where I want to be.

Now, I don't really want to start talking about getting behind eleven months out, but as I navigate 30-35 hour weeks across two jobs, it occurs to me that those 10-15 hours over what I'd planned might have a thing or two to do with why the word count is flagging a little. So if that is where my productivity bleeds to, I'll work hard to catch up as soon as fall classes are over, and make sure that The Hall of Rectitude isn't contracting out my nanny services for any "fluff" time.

Thing the third- You want to find a "lesson" in today's post? Here it is: You have to be willing to itemize your time expenditures, log them (like you would a food journal or a cigarette journal if you were starting a diet or trying to quit smoking) and see if they match up with your priorities in life. You're going to surprise yourself with what you say is important and what you actually spend most of your time doing.

How many writers who express florid love for writing play video games 40+ hours a week and claim they've no time to write? How many people who are frustrated that writing isn't their day job are actually sitting down to write less than 5-10 hours a week. How many writers with a sincere sense that they would like to write more and an internal narrative that they "don't really watch TV" are binge watching Jessica Jones and Stranger Things for hours longer than they actually spend writing.

Well...I'm one of them. I may get my axe to the grindstone more than some writers, but my priorities and my actual time spent don't match.

Around Thursday I realized I wasn't making the progress I wanted and I started to watch my time and where it was going and came to one overwhelming, inescapable conclusion:

I am absolutely HEMORRHAGING time on Facebook. 

Yep. It's true. It's not just an "hour or so." (Or "An hour or two" when I'm feeling properly introspective.) It's three, four, sometimes five hours a day trading comments on friends' walls or crafting pithy quips. This one is hard to I use FB for promoting my writing, so I can't just "take a month off," deactivate my account, and learn what it means to live again or some inspirational bullshit that ignores how actually real online friends can be. I will have to monitor closely and limit my time spent going down the hole. I know for sure my patrons didn't back my Kickstarter for a year of extra pithy quips.