My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?
Just a quick "brunch" post this morning to announce the results of our second semifinal round for Best Modern Science fiction book or series. (I'm hoping to get a mailbox up later today, but it might be next week before our current Update Schedule comes completely online.)
Well, our poll will be a little bigger (again) since the Atwood/Leckie tie was never resolved. I was sorry to see several of the titles that won't be going on fare so poorly, but honestly I don't think there were a lot of bad choices on this poll.
The final round will go up tomorrow!
Ready Player One - Cline2516.89%16.89%
Honor Harrington Series - Webber2114.19%14.19%
Snow Crash - Stephenson2013.51%13.51%
Old Man's War - Scalzi138.78%8.78%
The MaddAddam Trilogy -Atwood128.11%8.11%
Ancillary Series - Leckie128.11%8.11%
Use Of Weapons - Banks117.43%7.43%
Consider Phlebas - Banks106.76%6.76%
This Alien Shore -Friedman106.76%6.76%
Never Let Me Go- Ishiguro96.08%6.08%
Commonwealth Saga -Hamilton53.38%3.38%
What is the best modern science fiction book or series?
Things are pretty tight and currently also pretty close right around the cut off point for the final round. Just a super quickie to remind you not to forget to vote on our semifinal for best modern science fiction. Results will be posted for "brunch" TOMORROW (and the final poll will go up for "brunch" on Friday), so this is your last chance to decide which title will go on to the final round.
If you want to know the details of this poll, the original post is here.
Writing About Writing will post something every weekday. We will also try to put something up most weekends and occasionally a second post on weekdays. However, Writing About Writing also consists chiefly of one guy with lots of fake people running around behind his eyeballs (he takes care of a 2 1/2 year old, teaches two nights a week, is writing a novel, and sometimes even does really wacky shit like try to go on a date or something). and will periodically fail–perhaps even spectacularly– at this goal.
Sometimes the post in question might be little more a few inspirational quotes or a great Youtube video about writing, or just a picture of me screaming from the stress. I will even attempt to schedule a little something during vacations. It's not that I think my regular readers are twisted into coils of stress and hydrochloric acid, waiting for any possible update. It's just that in the world of blogging, content is king.
I can't promise that nothing will ever go wrong, what with all the intergalactic invasions and evil mystery hackers and such that W.A.W. fields in a typical week.
I also invoke the Anything Can Happen™ real world excuse. I have moved out from the family I stayed with, but a lot of the situations are still in progress. Health complications might crop up suddenly and have me needing to do a sudden unexpected several-hour shift or even an overnight...or maybe even more.
There is a monthly schedule I follow where I try to rotate in and out through the various running segments here on Writing About Writing. Even in a given month, you aren't likely to see something from each category, but it keeps me from doing fifteen listicles in a row and not writing a prompt for months on. I was going to post that schedule here but it'll be better to keep it in my head since I tend to go off schedule about ten seconds before the ink even dries on writing it.
Though we are ramping back up to the full fury of this schedule over the next couple of weeks, this is what you can expect once we get going.
Mon-Novel word count progress report and personal update.
Tues- Our guest posts will be moving to Tuesday! We have a small handful of regular guest bloggers (who unfortunately have their own life circumstances), but are always on the lookout for one shot guest bloggers or a new regular. Let me know if you'd like to join their ranks! If we have no guest post lined up, we'll still post a little something, but it'll definitely be filler-ish. Wed- I have to teach on Wednesday night, and often have a tag in prior to leaving. If I do a podcast for the week, it'll go up on Wednesday, but they actually take more time than just the final recorded take (almost as much as a post of the same length after prep and rehearsal are accounted for), and they won't go up every week. Wednesday is also when a lot of polls, plot posts, and such go up. Thurs- Mailbox! Fri- A major article will go up each Friday.
Brunch posts- I can't promise brunch posts these days–not even one or two a week. However, if the planets align and I happen to get a surplus of writing time, you may see a day here and there where more than one post goes up. Poll turn arounds in a single day, plot arc posts, "quickies," and various other things (which in the past would have gone up on the weekend) will sometimes show up in addition to a "main post."
Of course if you really want to hedge your bets for a good run of articles in a given week, a groupie threesome the weekend before will almost certainly motivate me to write for hours on end, and inspire a week of exceptional productivity.
No?
Fair enough. Catch as catch can then.
If there's been a run of extra toddler wrangling shifts or my weekend involved the words,"I'll just play this Fallout game for an hour or two...." the week might involve shorter articles or jazz fingers.
Articles? How about these amazing JAZZFINGERS!!
Saturdays: I write several other blogs and even try to do some shorter fiction. Since Writing About Writing will always be the place to find all my published work, each Saturday, I will put anything I publish other places, continue my menu tour, or revise old articles.
Sundays: We're going to keep taking Sundays off while we're writing a novel. It's been a long run of daily content–usually with more tears than smiles–but I would rather knock it out of the park once a week, have weekends (not really) off to focus on my work in progress and give you all the best of me on a working schedule. Weekend numbers are depressing (especially on Sunday) so I'm not really going to waste a good article tossing it up when no one is going to look at it.
We may still post occasionally on a Sunday. It is a good time to drop articles that are not chic, sexy, or topical, but which might have a good "slow burn" factor on Google, fiction, or just things that I don't have space for in a given week.
MORE?? If you like what I do, stuff a few dollars into that "tip jar" at the top left. I have bills to pay like any other starving artist, and I'm working three day jobs to make ends meet. I would love to do less of that and write more. I've already cut my hours as donations have stacked up. I'll do it again, but I am over forty and have had a "real job" for exactly two years of my life, so I can't afford to be as Bohemian-carefree as my twenties about saving up for retirement or health care.
For months I've been looking across the hellscape off my life and schedule toward this time–this time way off in the distance–when I would really have time to dig into writing like Scrooge McDuck swan diving into his money. Even though I still write during my slumps, for literally years now, I've been looking ahead to this time when things were actually going to clear up and I would have time to write. Real time to really write, in hours long chunks of fevered creativity instead of stolen hours dug out from deep, hidden crevasses or plucked with meek apologies from needful fingers. But every time I felt like I was actually getting close to a schedule that actually facilitated writing, something (like a baby or a health crisis or a pair of back to back moves during a relationship upheaval) popped up like the monster in the last ten fifteen minutes of an eighties horror flick and the time to write behaved distressingly like the dolly zoom hallway in Poltergeist.
Come back here writing time!
Image description: Hallway seeming to get longer from Poltergeist 1982
But I finally made it. I actually, really, truly, finally made it.
This is the page turn. Right now. Literally today. September 19th, 2016 marks the new chapter of my life. Baring some unforeseeable horror that somehow extends some of this shit, I will look back on everything before today as the three-year-long slump and talk about that as my "Meh period." And everything after it as "That year I worked like Neve Campbell and Antonio Banderas in the late nineties.....combined."
Yes, my readers, now it's time for you to see the "serious shit" that I've been promising, swearing, and threatening for months (and even years) now.
Let's fucking do this thing!
GIF description: Back to the future clip of car time traveling. Back to the Future 1985
Tomorrow I'm going to put out a new schedule for Writing About Writing. One that isn't "I'll get whatever shit up that I have time to write when I have time to write it, OKAY???" The new schedule will include a dedicated weekly day for the Mailbox again, weekend posts, occasional brunch posts, writing for other blogs, at least two "meaty" articles a week.
And of course the no-big-deal job of writing a book.
Totally not panicking.
Gif description: Beeker Muppet....panicking.
On that note, every Monday for the next year will be a word count tracker and meta-novel experience in addition to my return to Monday personal updates. Monday is a long work day for me at both of my part time jobs (nanny and teaching), so a blog post that's a little easier to splurt out will be in order.
This will serve two functions:
Number one, it will keep a measure of transparency. To myself of course, but also to folks who generously contributed to the Kickstarter. A year might seem like a long time, but for a project as involved as "Write a book" (from draft, through draft 2, through revision, through more revision, through alpha reading, through editing, through beta reading, through more editing, through final editing, through galley proofing, through publishing) it is actually going to be a pretty slammin' pace. The normal timeline for a book is between two and five years for a first time author who really sits down with some grim determination and has no research to do, and turning around in 12 months from draft to publication is a pace even an established working writer would be proud of. Posting word counts (and revision word counts) will keep me on my toes and all-too-aware of my charge to everyone who pitched in so that I could work only part time for a year.
The more writing is seen as a job that you just DO, the easier it is to slog through the parts that aren't unicorn farts and pixie spew–which, ironically, gets you back to those magically delicious parts all the faster. And I intend to be accountable.
If I get behind, you'll know the reason why (and it won't be because I was checking Facebook). So none of you will have to dramatically arm yourselves as you say "...or I'll know the reason why!" Folks paid to give me a year to work, and if I get hung up in the publication process or there is something that goes over like a depleted uranium balloon with the alpha readers and sends me back to the drawing board, it'll be clear and obvious what happened, and never that I just wasn't working. Number two, it will continue the ongoing mission of W.A.W. to not only be advice about writing, but also a real-time, meta blog showing you all the time, energy, and ceaseless dedication it takes to chase the ever elusive "be a writer." For those who think writing a book is a November's work, or even an easy year's work, you will soon see how difficult it can be and how many hours of long, hard WORK go into such an endeavor.
Note: I don't really have zero words written. I'm actually on page 37 or so, but today is the first day of dedicated pacing.
You know you love lists. Why fight it? Why not just find some good ones about writing?
Soon there will be a new name to add to the great Listers of our culture. Ima will join their ranks. I will not only redeem myself for the egregious error they made on my birth certificate when they misspelled Ira, but I will continue the illustrious Lister tradition.
I'm pretty sure this is the exact moment I realized that the
flatulence was not a thrice off event, but was going to be a thing.
Image description:Writer on a plane,
between two people, looking uncomfortable.
Currently I'm on a plane. I'm sitting between two people, both asleep, and near someone who is either having unconscionable gastrointestinal issues or cares nothing for the etiquette of farting prodigiously into a closed air system. I'm trying to pull myself inward to occupy as little space as possible as I write this on my laptop. It's seven in the morning, and I had to be out the door by 4:50 after five hours of sleep. I am hurtling east in a metal tube with nothing but peanuts to sustain me. In a chair that is literally designed to be so uncomfortable that people will pay to upgrade it.
And I'm writing.
Not making excuses about how I need to be in the mood or I can't write well if I'm not in a good space. Writing.
This year I've been at my lowest productivity since I started Really For Real™ Writing. Fluff posts. Missed days. Weekends off. Sometimes I don't even get you all some cute excuse involving velociraptors with lasers. Some days I look up and think "No way. Not today. I just can't! Fuck!"
Without exaggeration or hyperbole, this has been the worst year of my life. (There is a non-zero chance that the coming year might involve The Salmon Mousse and be even worse, but let's not talk about that.) A loved one with cancer and then supporting them through chemo, a relationship separation, a major lifestyle downgrade and move. All to the background hum of a two-year-old living up to his Contrarian moniker. ("Do you want to go to the library?" "NO!" Do you want to go to Disneyland?" "NO!" "Do you want to go to Toddlertopia?" "NO!" [I'm in big trouble the day he pauses and says..."yes."]) My productivity has been in the toilet, and even though I'm gearing up for the most ambitious project of my life and a period of epic output starting Monday, it's going to be 96 hours of catch-as-catch-can (yet again) before I can begin.
However, though I claim no extraordinary output among writers, and am probably actually on the low side of average, I would like to unpack this a bit. Most people haven't noticed or haven't mentioned my productivity, and in fact stick to asking me how to "make it" as a writer themselves. For the most part I am only desperately hard on myself and my TV-evangelist-levels of hypocrisy exist cheifly in my own mind. Still, this blog continues its mission to be a real-time example of how to achieve some measure of success with writing. The Nelson schadenfreude "HaHa!"ers and the sincere writers and my dear, sweet Patreons deserve no less.
Writers can't always write as much as they want, and sometimes they don't always want to write as much as they know they should. There isn't always time when life gets turned up to eleven and decides to start making sure you know who's whose butt monkey. And even when there is time, it's hard to sit and make a hilarious as fuck listicle when you just got told you needed to move out.
But let's take a quick inventory of a "bad time" down at the Brecheen writing mill.
I write every single day. For at least an hour. It might be a stream of consciousness journal if I don't have the bandwidth for drafting and revising a blog post, and on some really tough days it might be an e-mail and a couple of Facebook posts, but some kind of writing happens daily.
I read for at least two or three hours a day. Again it might be a lot of articles and blogs I find through social media if my blocked time or mental fortitude isn't up for digging into a novel, but it is still a minimum.
I get a blog post of some kind up every weekday. Even if it's just fluff. In excess of 7-10 pages a week of material.
I write about a page a day on my current work in progress (right now that's the book that I kickstarted).
I am usually drafting or revising some form of short fiction, even if that work is glacial when I'm overwhelmed.
I write at least one "crunchy" article a week. And if I'm not currently in crisis, it's usually two.
Though I may bottom out at an hour of writing, my daily average is more like three.
I have written on buses, planes, trains, on the floor of a room with no bed, in hospitals, restaurants, and in a stairwell while waiting for an appointment. I have written during spare moments of as little as 10 minutes while I waited for a bathroom to be free. I have written longhand when my computer battery died.
That's me being unproductive. That's me in the worst slump of my life. I don't say this to brag and certainly not to do the Bruce Lee coup-de-grâce kidney twist on anyone who dares impugn me for asking, but as a yardstick for folks who are wondering what a paid-but-still-mostly-day-jobbed writer puts out when their life is doing its very best trashcan fire impersonation.
And when I talk to other professional writers (or as-of-yet-unpublished-but-hardcore-about-their-craft writers) about their dry spells, I often find pretty much the same thing. "Slow" output for them is one to three pages a day (or about a thousand pages a year aggregate) instead of more like 5-10. They may have a hard time focusing on a major project, but they still poke at it–and work on side projects or keep up with a journal or something. They keep their craft from getting dull. Or when they lose the time, they'd like to be writing because of some life-shattering crisis, they still carve out just as much as they possibly can and spackle in the empty spots if they have to.
So keep perspective in mind when you see writers going into a slump. Their "slumps" often look like some other people's crunch times.
Now....I'm off to D.C., and in literally four days I'll be upshifting to a writing schedule that more closely mirrors working writers, and going full throttle on writing a novel over the next year, but as I transition out of this long twilight period of my writing life, remember that part of the reason people are saying "But Chris, how do you pay half your bills with writing?" or "But Chris, how are you ready by over a thousand readers a day?" is entirely because even through this epic-level life fuckery, I have never stopped writing....a lot.
Reminder: today's post will be tomorrow. Tomorrow's post should have been a guest post but we don't have one this week. And this shell game of posting should stop next week when the obligatory good-son trip is over, all moves made, and I'm back in front of my computer for good.
