Happy St Patrick’s Day! To celebrate, here’s a shot I took while on a walk yesterday, of a tree that has decided, equinox or no equinox, it is Spring, dammit:

Also worth celebrating: I’m almost done with the first round of novel edits ✍️🎉

Only two chapters left to go! I’m aiming to get those wrapped up this weekend. Then plan out the next batch of changes. The book’s grown to 86,000 words now; I’m thinking it might top out at 90k when all these edits are done.

So what’s left to do? In no particular order:

• Add three more scenes, one that I completely forgot to write (but wrote like I’d already written it) and two that came up in feedback as needed to explain an antagonist’s actions
• Completely revise the MacGuffin subplot to make it more believable and explained in greater detail
• Rip out one of the twists, because there’s only so much far-flung tech you can shove in an otherwise “grounded” story before it breaks
• Deepen the characterization for another one of the antagonists
• Patch a couple plot holes
• Fill out character physical descriptions, add more details to their thought processes, etc

…ok, seeing it all typed out like that is a little intimidating 😅 Thank goodness I’m not working to any external deadline!

Still, I intend to get through these edits by the summer, and be down to final line edits and getting feedback from beta readers. With a bit of luck 🍀, I’ll be ready to submit it to agents (well, to query agents about it) by the end of the year.

How about you? As we head into Spring, how are your own writing goals coming along?

Happy Friday! It’s the end of my first full week at the new job. It’s also the first week where I’ve been able to work on the novel every day after work.

Those first few weeks were like resuming an exercise routine in January after taking the holidays off. In a word: rough 😅 Each day was good , mind you — the team I’ve joined is a great one, and the work’s interesting — but being slightly out of practice meant I finished each one ready to sink into my comfy chair and turn my brain off for a good while.

This week I turned the corner. I’ve been finishing out the day with more energy, enough so that I can carve out an hour (or two) after dinner to work on the novel edits. After dinner being the very important thing there; having dinner first (and watching/reading something) gives me some mental space from work, and a physical boost to let me focus on the words without rushing.

As a result, I’m now two-thirds of the way through these edits. The novel’s grown from 79K words to 85K and counting 😳 At this rate, I might end up with less of a 60s-style short novel and more of a regular 21st century tome. Which is great! It’s like I’ve discovered a whole section of my book that was missing, and am gradually adding it back in.

All thanks to the critique group, of course. They’ve been simply incredible with their patience and their feedback, pushing on to keep reading even in the face of missing physical descriptions, missing setting info, even missing scenes!

I hope wherever you are, you’ve found a group of writers to help and support you in your work (and that you support them in turn). It’s a lonely art we practice; fellow travellers are a must 😊

Started the new job this week! Which means I’m suddenly wondering how in the world I ever had time to write while working full-time 😅

I’ve made it about halfway through the first editing pass on the novel. Well, I made it halfway as of Monday, but the rest of the week I’ve wrapped work feeling simultaneously too drained to be creative and too stuffed full of facts and process (from the company onboarding) to get anything done.

It doesn’t help that said onboarding consists of four hours of back-to-back meetings, which is hard on this introvert. I’ve not had the Zoomies in a while, and this is definitely it 😬

I’m telling myself to be patient, though, rather than beating myself up about not making daily progress. The onboarding will finish, the meetings will drop away, and I’ll eventually work those extrovert muscles enough to handle a 9-to-5 again (and be able to write after the work day is done). Plus, there’s always the weekend. And there’s a long one coming up, so I can carve out some time (and spoons) to play catch-up.

Wish me luck!

As you can imagine from my last post (and lack of posting through Nov, Dec, or Jan), absolutely nothing went as planned, writing-wise, over the last three months.

NaNoWriMo? Sure, I got 16,000 words into it before crashing and burning. Now I have two incomplete novels sitting on my laptop, waiting for me to pick them back up 😬

The TCF? Dropped it. Okay, I delayed it first, then dropped it. There was simply too much else going on, between racing to get to the PR finish line and interviewing for a new job. And the holidays. I’m still studying French, mind, but I’ve had to let go of the idea of getting tested on it, for now.

Ditto the Clarion West classes. I attended a few sessions of the mystery-writing one, but the homework (a new story every week) overwhelmed me, and the lectures + feedback turned out to be less valuable than I thought. So I backed out of the other classes, too, freeing up time in my schedule to deal with everything else that was happening.

I did get two new stories out of the class, though. True, one of them I didn’t finish until January, and then only by ignoring the parameters of the original assignment. But still. One of them I think might be a trunk story, but the other (the January one) I’m really rather fond of, and plan to polish up for submission…later 😅

On the good news front, I did keep up with my critique group (bless them for putting up with me), and we’re almost to the end of the prison-break-in-space novel I wrote a few years ago (fourth novel completed, second sci-fi book, prior to the two unfinished novels were started). So I’ve gone back through their feedback up to this point, distilled it to a set of edits to make, and have started in on actually making those edits.

I know, this is what you’re supposed to do with novels, yes? Write a first draft for yourself, do a second draft for others to read, and then edit, edit, edit based on feedback and your own reads before sending it out to agents.

Well, I’ve got the first part down — four novels in first draft stage — and I’ve done the second (for this book, anyway), but I’ve never gone past that point. Always started a new book rather than revise the last one.

But not this time! I’m going through the thing, chapter by chapter, editing as I go. Most of the feedback I received concerned physical descriptions and layout, so that’s what I’m working on first. Which means, oddly enough, adding material instead of chipping things away. So the book’s getting longer, not shorter, as I work on this revision.

If all goes well 🤞I think I’ll have the edits wrapped by May. Which is not that far away, all things considered! Then it’ll be time to compile a list of possible agents, and start shipping out query letters.

What about you? If you did NaNoWriMo, how did it go? If you didn’t, have you made any writing goals for 2023, and how are they coming along so far?

So I signed up for NaNoWriMo this year.

“But,” I hear you say, “you’re already studying for the TCF in December, trying to put together the last pieces for your permanent residence application, taking three classes from Clarion West online, and supposed to be finishing those short stories you started over the summer. How are you going to also write 50,000 words in a new novel?”

And, well…I have no idea.

But! I want to try, for three reasons:

1. I’ve noticed lately my writing output has slowed. A lot. Used to be I could crank out 500 words a day, no problem. Now I’m struggling to get even a hundred words down. I need something to kick me back into gear. NaNoWriMo can act as that something.
2. The short story I’ve been working on — the sci-fi story that started as flash and then grew to 8,000 words in a second draft — has grown even more. I don’t know what the word count is, because I’ve been writing it out by hand. But when I stepped back and wrote up an outline, it looked very much like one of my novels. Not a short story. And if I’m going to be writing a new book anyway to finish this out, what better way to get it started than during NaNoWriMo?
3. Failure is an option. All of this is voluntary, with the exception of the PR application (fingers crossed I get invited soon, and can get my paperwork together in time). I can drop out of the Clarion West classes without any hassle. And if I don’t hit 50,000 words this month on the novel, so what? So long as I push towards it, spend more time writing, and make progress on a new book, that’s enough.

Number 3 there is really important to me. I don’t want this to become a source of stress. I want it to be motivating; a challenge, not a directive. So I’m letting myself be okay with flubbing the first two days, when I only cranked out 400 or so words. Last night I put in over a thousand, and it felt great (I rewarded myself with some leftover Halloween candy). If I can keep that pace up, and do a little extra on the weekends, I’ll make the goal. And if not? Well, at least I’ll have a solid start to the next book.

If you want to follow along with my stumbling progress, my username is mindbat and my project is here. Hit me up, and let’s be writing buddies!

Finished typing up the first draft of the new story over the long weekend. Even found time to create a new Ulysses export style based on the Shunn Manuscript Format (the standard for most of the markets I submit to) so I don’t have to manually fix up the margins, etc when exporting to Word (there are existing Styles that claim to be standard format, but are all missing one or more essential pieces).

Not that the story is ready to submit, mind. I typed it dutifully, and edited as I went to make it the best version of this draft I could. But the tonal shifts are still too big to handle in a short story, and the ending doesn’t land with near enough force.

So over the past week I’ve taken a page from literary agent Donald Maass’ workbook, which I’ve used before to edit novels. One of the big points the workbook drives home is the need to look for connections in the story: between plots, between characters, between locations, everything. Strengthening connections can both tighten and deepen the story, making the stakes feel larger because there’s more history — more connection — between the events and characters.

For this story, I had a set of three characters loosely connected. One was the main character, who worked for one of the other characters, and had hired the protagonist to work on a case for the third. There was no prior history, no relationship between the characters other than the business one. As a result, the conflicts were mainly business conflicts: Can the protagonist get the assignment done (extracting a secret from the client)? Will she rebel against it when she finds out what it really entails? Etc. Not bad, but certainly not world-shattering, either.

But what if the three characters were more connected? What if the client was the protagonist’s father? And the person hiring her to dig into his past was her mother?

Now things get more interesting. Why would the mother pit the daughter against the father? What marriage would have that level of conflict? Why would the daughter agree to go along, at least first? And what might possibly change her mind?

This one shift generated a whole new slew of ideas for me, so much that yesterday when I sat down to work on the story, I started writing out — longhand, again — an entirely new draft. New starting scene, new tense, new voice, even (it’s now in first-person).

I’m already happier with the new draft. It feels more assured, like a train engine already running under full steam. I’m looking forward to exploring what the characters do in this new situation, with these new connections between them.

I never could have gotten there, though, without that first draft. And I’m still going to crib plot and structure from it, even if they end up squeezed into new shapes.

What about you? Have you ever done a complete rewrite of a story, and were you glad you did?

Draft is done! Long live the draft!

Finished the first, very messy, draft of the new short story this week. I already kind of hate it, even after writing the last scene like the previous one didn’t happen. Both those scenes, I think, are going to see heavy edits in the next draft.

For now, though, I’m simply typing it up. Yes, typing: I wrote the first draft longhand, in a little notebook, after reading the advice in Chavez’s book on anti-racist workshopping. Her take was that making her students write out the first draft by hand made them more willing to experiment, to scratch things out and rewrite on the fly, without their inner editor getting in the way. And for the most part, I’ve found that to be true; I’ve got scenes that are out of order on the page, with squiggly lines connecting the pieces to each other in the right sequence. And knowing that I would type it all later — and “fix it in post” — made it easier to finish writing the scenes that I knew, even while writing them, that I was going to have to change.

(she also said that writing longhand got her students more in tune with their bodies, but being over-40 myself, I mostly got in tune with how quickly my hand starts to cramp up)

I am making changes as I type. Fixing a phrase here, adding some blocking (e.g., “she sat back and crossed her arms”) there. Discovering I wrote an entire scene in the wrong tense (!), or used the wrong character’s name in places.

But I’m holding off from making any big changes till I’ve finished typing it. I want to go through the whole thing once more, reading and typing, getting a better feel for how it might all fit together. I’m taking notes as I go, on things I want to change (or simply try differently, to see how it reads), so I can come back after this and do a second draft.

My intent — my hope — is to have the characters and basic plot nailed down during the second draft. (oh, you thought I’d have that set by the time I started the first draft? welcome to pantsing) From there, it’ll be much easier to iterate on revisions, including at least one pass where I’ll print it out and then go through it.

Given my current pace, I might have something to show beta readers by the end of the month? Fingers crossed.

Ever write a scene, and immediately regret it?

This week I’ve been focusing on finishing one, just one, of the story first draft I’m in the middle of. I carefully plotted out what scenes were left at the start of the week, and spent each day’s writing session chugging along, setting them down.

Only when I got to the second-to-last scene, I made it halfway through before coming to a screeching halt. Despite all my well-laid plans, I was suddenly out of track, for two reasons.

One, I’d decided to have the main character expose her boss as a fake, by flipping open the many file boxes her boss has strewn around and showing them all to be empty. Very dramatic, fun scene, in my head. Only I forgot to come up with a reason why the boxes were empty.

So when I got to the part where she opened them up, and I needed to show her boss’ reaction, I had nothing. No idea. Nothing to see here folks, the muse has gone home for the day.

Two, even once I’d spent some time brainstorming ideas for the boxes, and started back in on the scene, I realized the tone was completely wrong. I’d started the story off as a meditation on memory and purpose, with a protagonist gradually realizing she wants to do something else with her life.

Emphasis on gradually. Not big-d Dramatically, or in some blaze of glory, but over time, like the tide receding from a beach. And here I had this high-volume scene right towards the end of the story. It doesn’t wok, and I knew it wouldn’t work as I was writing it.

But I finished the scene anyway. I’ve been told too many times, by too many authors more experienced and skilled than me, that stopping to edit in the middle of a draft is an excellent way to never get anything finished.

And once again, they’ve turned out to be right! Because in finishing the scene, and chewing it over once I’d done it, I realized moving the scene earlier in the story — with some tweaks — will give it all the things it was missing before: a ticking clock, a purpose behind the boss’ actions, a push for the protagonist to make her life-altering decision.

I’ve got one more scene left to write in this draft, so I’m going to take another page out of their advice, and write it like I’ve already made the change I’m thinking of doing in the next draft. That way, when I actually write that draft, this final scene won’t need as many edits (and I’ll have a completed draft, which is an accomplishment on its own).

What about you? Have you ever had a scene (or a story) that you thought you’d need to throw away, and instead it became the spark that set off something even better?

Earlier this week I decided to take a survey of what stage my various stories are, since I lost track of them over the course of Covid July.

Here's what I came up with:

• Flash pieces needing final revision before submittal: 2
• Short stories needing significant drafting: 2
• Stories needing a complete first draft: 3

That's seven stories in various stages, none of which are ready to go out to beta readers or submitted to markets! My original list only had five stories; I woke up the next morning and realized I'd left two off the list entirely.

I seem to be replicating a pattern from my day-job, where I commonly work on multiple projects at once, pushing each forward until I hit a blocker (or a stopping point) and then switching to the next. I've apparently started doing the same thing with my writing, starting a story and then switching to another if I feel any resistance to working on the first one.

So now I've got four months of story work, and basically nothing to show for it (to anyone else, anyway). At this point, my inner Paul McCartney is going "We need a system!"

But is that the case? Is it wrong of me to borrow this working pattern from my day job?

I'm not sure. I don't have any deadlines to meet. No editors or publishers waiting for my words (those these are problems I'd like to have, someday!). I've only got myself, and so long as I'm happy working on several things at once, who's to say I need to stop?

Except. The danger -- as I found in July -- is that I lose the thread of the story, or many stories, in trying to work on too many at once. Or end up repeating and re-using elements across them, instead of letting each story grow into its own unique self.

Maybe the answer is compromise: Don't start another first draft until the current one is finished. Always come back and edit the previous story's draft before doing the next one. And so on. So I can still work on multiple pieces at once, so long as I only have one or two in the revision queue at the same time.

What about you? Do you work on one story at a time, all the way through from draft to final edit? Or do you bounce between multiple pieces at the same time, working on whichever one strikes your Muse as the one for the day?

Yesterday was my first time fiction writing since I got sick.

That's three weeks of not making any progress. Of not being able to make progress, because even once the fever and the chills and the wracking cough subsided, I couldn't focus long enough to read a story, let alone create a new one.

I confess I worried I might not be able to, even now. I've heard so much about a lingering "brain fog" after getting Covid to make me anxious that I would try to write again and fail, that I wouldn't be able to pick up the stories I'd been working on, or find myself writing only in clichés and bad dialog.

Well. I won't speak to the quality of the draft I worked on yesterday, but I did work on it, and I did make progress. In fact, the rest of the story is coalescing in my head now, and I can see the path to finishing it.

This draft, anyway. There'll be edits to do afterward, of course.

But at least I know I can keep working. I still get fatigued more easily than I used to; back-to-back meetings at work leave me not just mentally but physically drained now. And when I tried walking last weekend, I made it just a few kilometers out before turning back for home, where I promptly fell into a nap.

And yet. My brain keeps on ticking, and I can work around the fatigue till it passes. So that's one worry resolved, for now, at least.

Hope you're able to write through your own worries, and find ways to make progress no matter what stands in your way.

This week I've mostly been focused on typing up the mix of notes, scenes, and outline from my notebook for the now expanded, gender-flipped, sidekick-to-protagonist science fiction story (whew!).

I'm having to do a bit of expansion and interweaving as I go. I didn't write the scenes in order, to begin with, and then I've also been blending it with what I wrote in the second (typed straight to laptop) draft, so that hopefully the whole thing is coherent.

I'm nearing the ending, which I haven't written yet, but I've got such a strong image for that I think I can just type it out when I get there. Also I've got to lay the path for it, so to speak, by weaving in elements in these earlier scenes so the final one feels like a proper payoff, rather than an abrupt turn (though there is a turn, I just don't want it to jolt a reader out of the story).

One thing I want to pay particular attention to, and change if I can't get it right, is the (now) main character's ethnicity. In my mental storyboards, she's a second-generation Asian-American, and that's how I've presented her in terms of name, etc. But in reading books like Craft in the Real World and The Girl at the Baggage Claim, and novels like Earthlings and The Woman in the Purple Skirt, I'm starting to doubt whether I can properly portray such a character. I've been thinking I can use my experience as an internal (and now international) immigrant as a bridge to their worldview, but I think now that that's not enough. There's the pervasive racism experienced by minorities in the States, and on top of that the misogyny that uniquely harms Asian-American women (I say harms, not harmed, because it keeps happening: witness the one character in "The Boys" who is introduced as completely feral and whose voice is silenced is the one Asian woman in the cast). And that's before we get into differing family relationships, unique cultural touchstones, etc.

So I'm not sure if I should change the POV character's ethnicity or not. I think that during these handwritten drafts I've found an approach that can be both representative and respectful. And I don't want to be the kind of white writer that only writes white people (any more than I want to be the kind of male writer that only writes men). The world is diverse, and I want to represent that in my fiction. But I want to do it well, which means more than just changing a character's name or skin color.

We'll see how the draft comes out. And what my sensitivity readers say when they review it.

I think my writing brain is telling me to move on from the short stories.

I've kept up with the notebook writing this week, jotting down scenes and brainstorming directions for the plots of both short stories (the shorter mystery and the longer sci-fi one). But on Monday my fingers refused to write anything for either story, instead choosing to talk about the summer weather (which became my last blog post). And yesterday, when I reached for my notebook, I had a spark of an idea that turned into a plot for an entire rom-com novel.

It's like my subconscious is telling me it's bored of drafting the short stories, and wants to move on, to something different. Before I can do that, though, I need to actually type up what I've written freehand, and try to edit it into a coherent piece.

So that's what I'll be working on this weekend and next week. Typing, editing, and revising both stories, till the ideas in my notebook have been fitted into place. Hopefully that'll be enough to keep my writing brain engaged and happy; it's different work, after all, from drafting, and uses different muscles.

And then...maybe I'll give this rom-com a shot? Or maybe it's a thriller. It really depends on the ending, you see, and...

Well. We'll see.

I've been reading Craft in the Real World and The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, two books that both approach the issue of how the traditional writing workshop in the US -- silent author, readers and teacher judging the work, comparison to an all-white literary canon -- was constructed less to promote healthy writing communities and more to reinforce white supremacy in the States.

I confess it's been hard reading, sometimes. Being confronted with the way I've been taught -- and taught to teach others -- about writing and being shown its racist underpinnings does not make for comfortable reading. But I'm pushing past that white fragility of mine, and interrogating it, and each time what I find at the root is simply fear. Fear that I'll be the one erased, in the kind of workshop these authors describe. Fear that I'll become the marginalized. Because the one thing all white people know, even when we don't want to admit it, is that being in the minority in the Western caste system sucks.

When I face that fear, and name it, I'm able to move past it, and see the workshops they're presenting as what they really are: places where everyone can take center stage for a time, where each author is empowered with the tools and the confidence to better their craft. Those tools are there for me, too, if I'm willing to listen, and use them.

So I'm testing them out, so to speak. I don't have a formal writing workshop to go to, but I am trying a new approach with the feedback I give to the other writers in my writing circle. I'm aiming my feedback less at "I liked this" or "I don't like this character" and more towards highlighting the choices I see them making. Like asking how scenes might play out differently if X were changed, or querying about the symbolism behind the repetition of a certain element. I don't know if I'm succeeding, just yet, but I'm striving for the kind of centering of the author as an actively participating artist that Salesses and Chavez encourage.

I'm also borrowing some of their practices for my own writing. For this new short story I'm writing, I've taken to writing out the new draft by hand, in a notebook. Chavez says she insists her students write by hand, as a way to silence the inner editor and let the words flow onto the page. And so far, it's working; writing it out has helped me get out of my own way, and make progress on the draft, when staring at the computer screen would feel like too much pressure. Chavez is right: Something about using hand and pen and paper is liberating, making me feel less like every word needs to be perfect and more like the story in my head needs to be written down right now.

As a result, the new draft is taking shape. It's going to be longer and more complicated than I originally thought, with POV shifts and an expanded world. The side character that I had in the first draft and then gender-flipped has now become the protagonist (!) with all the changes that entails. But where I initially approached this new draft with trepidation, now I'm excited to see it come together.

What techniques do you use, to quiet your inner editor and feel free to write the stories you most want to tell?

Gender-flipping one of the characters in my new short story turns out to be the best decision I could have made. Whole new story possibilities have opened up, and I'm following through on them as best I can.

Which is to say, I haven't made any progress on the horror story I started last week.

I'm basically back to draft zero on the sci-fi piece (now gender-flipped). The story's going to need to get longer, much longer, in order to capture these new ideas. Somehow I'm going to need to pull off switching POVs inside the short story form, which is usually a no-no.

And it might still be! But I won't know for sure until I try it out. Maybe switching POV between scenes will be a disaster. Maybe I'll read the new draft through and find it's a horrible mess. But then again, maybe I won't.

So I'm trying to give myself the freedom to explore. I'm still forcing myself to sit down at least 15 minutes a day and work on a story, any story. But I'm not judging the output of those fifteen minutes. If it's character sketches, great! If it's brainstorming possible plot twists, also fine. Just so long as it's effort spent on the story, in whatever form that takes.

This weekend I'm hoping to carve out some time to do some drafting based on the notes I've put together over the week. It'd be nice to have a finished draft together, however messy, that I can start editing next week.

Hope your own writing is going well, and that you're avoiding the trap of judging your work by anyone else's standards.

Started the first draft of the new horror story this week, but just barely. Managed to bang out a single scene before my brain came to a screeching halt.

At first I was scared, thinking my writer's block had come back. But after a day to calm down, I figured it out: I still needed to edit the flash pieces I banged out last month. My writing brain -- who commutes between my subconscious and Tír na nÓg, I call them Fred -- wasn't ready to move on to a new story just yet. Outline, sure, but draft? No way. Edits first.

So I've mostly been editing. Two of the flash pieces I wrote are ready to go. A third is on its second draft, but I think it needs a third major one before any fine-tuning passes. I had an idea for gender-flipping one of the characters that I think will make the dialog more interesting (because it'll bring out more of each character's personality) and easier to follow (because the dialog tags will be different).

I've also been (kind of) editing my prison break novel. As I mentioned before, I've joined a writing group, so I'm using it as my submission -- 2,500 words at a time -- for each session. We're using Google Docs for sharing, which I thought would be annoying (ok, it is annoying) but has given me a chance to edit each section before I copy/paste it into the shared doc. It's mostly cleanup edits: Fixing a typo here, reworking a bit of dialog there. But it's making the draft stronger, and they're giving me some very useful feedback on it (like catching that a character didn't bother to put on a pressure suit before heading out an airlock!).

It'll take us (as a group) a while to get through it all, but I'm hoping at the end of it I'll have a firm sense of what needs to be updated in one more editing pass before I can start sending it out to agents. Then maybe I'll start (finally) editing the novel previous to that one, and so on and so forth, till they're all edited and all out on sub. Meanwhile, I can keep churning out short stories, and work to find each of them a publishing home.

Wish me luck!

This week I finally started submitting stories to markets again.

I've been holding off, because of the writer's block, and all the work that went into the move, but also because I was afraid. I'm afraid not just of rejection, but of being judged for what I've written. Afraid that even if a story does make it to an editor's desk for reading, they'll be put off by it, and never want to see anything by me again.

Intellectually, I know, no one thinks about me that much. My stories go in, and they get rejected, and the editors and first readers never think about me again. They've got lives of their own, after all.

And yet. Fear of judgement has kept me holding my stories back, worried not about how the story will be received, but how I'll be seen for having written it. At one point, I even tried to convince myself that I didn't want to get published, that the writing was enough for me, that making money at it didn't matter. That delusion lasted perhaps a week before my normal ambition re-asserted itself.

All of it -- the fear of judgement, the lying to myself -- is a silly thing, and I know it's silly, but it's taken me a few months to get past it.

Thank goodness for The Submission Grinder, which (for free!) not only keeps track of what pieces I have ready to go and which markets I've already been rejected from, but can run a search across markets that are open to subs for each piece. That is, it knows the word count and genre, and so narrows its results down to markets that accept stories of that length and subject. It's help me discover markets I'd never have heard of otherwise, and contests that would have closed before I had a chance to submit.

So, by the numbers:

• 3 pieces went out last week.
• 1 has already been rejected, and needs to go back out this weekend
• 1 new flash piece (from last month) is ready to go
• 3 older pieces need to be sent to new markets
• 1 new short story needs a final editing pass (it's currently on its second draft) before being sent out
• 2 new flash pieces need first editing passes this weekend

...and I want to start the first draft of the new horror story. Whew!

Hope your own writing is going well, and you're hitting your goals, whatever they may be.

Writing slowed this week, but didn’t stop. I got through “Draft 1.5” of the new short story, which brought it to a healthy 2k words, inching out of flash territory.

I already have three areas I want to touch up next. The ending, in particular, I think needs to pack more punch. But these will be smaller changes, so I’m letting the story cool on the shelf, so to speak, before coming back to make them.

Meanwhile, I joined a critique group! After a meeting of the Victoria Creative Writing Group, one of the other new members put out a call for folks to join in critiquing each other’s writing on a regular basis. We had our first meeting last night, and I think it went really well :) It’s a small group (there’s just four of us total) but that means we each get plenty of time to give and get feedback. At the end of this first session, we even had time to do a 15 minute writing exercise, and I got another flash piece out of it!

I feel so lucky to have been accepted into the group. Many thanks to the organizer, and to the VCWG for bringing us all together.

Written with: Ulysses

Under the influence of: “Never Let Me Go,” Placebo

Time to start these up again, as well.

Other than Monday’s blog post, though, I haven’t written anything this week. I wake up tired, having slept fitfully the night before. I stumble into the shower and then into my work chair, only to stagger out eight hours later wondering if I can justify taking a nap before dinner. I never do, though; I just catch up on personal chores (one thing they don’t tell you about immigrating is how much friggin’ paperwork you’re going to be doing, constantly, forever), shovel food into my mouth, and then slink off to bed.

Rinse, repeat.

Tried to break the routine last night by going to an online meeting of the Victoria Creative Writers’ Group. Thought meeting some local fellow writers would be a nice one-two punch, both getting me out of lonely shell here and giving me a bit of inspiration.

It’s worked in the past. Every time I’ve come out of a Writers’ Coffeehouse session — run by Jonathan Maberry — I’ve felt pumped up, ready to write for hours.

But something must be truly wrong with me, because it didn’t happen this time. Felt like dropping the call multiple times, and turned my camera off so I could cry. It made me feel more isolated, more lonely, not less.

Because here were a dozen or so folks who were settled into Canadian life. Two were teachers. One was a nurse. There was one person who had moved here from Alberta, but otherwise no recent transplants like me.

And I thought: What am I doing? I had a network back in San Diego. I had writer friends, and meetings. Encouragement given and received. How could I hope to insert myself here? With every word out of my mouth I prove that I don’t fit in.

I know I’m being overdramatic. Canada is not yet so culturally far from the US. And yet.

So I’m going to look for inspiration elsewhere. Planning on taking a hike this weekend, either to Thetis Lake or just around Beacon Hill Park (neither of which I’ve seen), depending on the weather. I’ll walk among the trees, take some photos, and try to clear this melancholy from my head.

Wish me luck.

Written with: Ulysses

Under the Influence of: “Sorry for the Late Reply,” Sløtface

I've finally made it to the other side of my writer's block. I'm back to working on the novel, hitting my word count every day.

Thank goodness.

It wasn't any one thing that got me through it, either.

i started reading again, sprinting through two novels that'd been sitting on the To Be Read pile for a good while. They were both excellent, they were both slightly outside my normal genre, and they were both kindling to re-light the writing fire inside me.

I leaned into my schedule disruption, which meant calling a halt to my exercise routine for a week. I know, you're not supposed to do that; it's the exact opposite of the advice most folks give about writer's block ("take a walk", "clear your head", etc). But it helped me to relax, to feel like I had all the time in the world to write, which made it that much easier to find my flow.

And I read a few chapters in the new Pocket Workshop book by the Clarion West Writer's Workshop. Specifically, Eileen Gunn's chapter on writer's block calmed me down significantly. It reminded me that blockages happen, and pushed me to interrogate it, rather than ignore it.

By forcing me to really look at why I was blocked, to listen to what the block was trying to tell me, I found my way forward. I realized that the novel section I was working on wasn't working, really, and that's why I was blocked on it. It was too passive, for one. Where the previous flashback section was very much driven entirely by the narrator's actions, the current section was one where a lot just happened to her. Or where she stumbled across things, and reacted to them. It wasn't compelling, and my subconscious knew it, but my conscious mind wanted to carry on like nothing was wrong.

So my subconscious went on strike. Writer's block.

I spent a few days brainstorming ways to change the section, to make it driven by the narrator. And suddenly my writing brain kicked back into gear, generating conversations and visualizing scenes again. Not all of them lined up, but that's ok, that's part of the process.

In the end, I decided to trash the 5,000 words I'd written for the current section of the book. Goodbye, gone.

And started over.

But now, this time, the words are coming much more easily. I can sit down in the morning and get my word count in, without worrying about being blocked, or not knowing where I'm going. The narrator -- the protagonist of this section -- is back firmly in control of things, and that's how it should be.

Instead of somehow wandering from Central Asia to Europe, she's fleeing there, from the consequences of her own actions. Instead of stumbling on a town with a dragon problem, she's seeking it out, because it's the only way she can keep a powerful curse at bay.

She still faces constraints, of course. But the way she overcomes her challenges within those constraints is her choice, no one else's. And that...that makes it a lot easier to write down her story.

What about you? Have you had a period of serious writer's block, that you then worked through? How did you overcome it?

I'm...well, I'm blocked.

Written perhaps 300 words on the novel in the last two weeks. No work on any short stories, no editing...nothing else.

I did finish the outline of the section I'm working on. It's just when I sat down to start writing it, I just...didn't. Couldn't find my way back into the story.

Part of it is time; my morning schedule's been chopped to bits, lately, and my afternoon schedule is gone because I've been working later (and as soon as I get off work it's time to start making supper). And at lunch, well...at lunch I just want to turn my brain off for a while.

Part of it, too, is I'm just tired all the time. I wake up tired, I exercise tired, I sleepwalk through making dinner and fall into bed at the end of the day. My jammed finger from August still hasn't healed -- I have to pop it back into place every morning so I can bend it -- my right thigh is sore every time I stand, and that foot will just give out without warning, sending me flailing for the nearest chair or counter to grab hold of for support.

Mentally, too, I'm worn out. It's like the part of me that makes decisions is just done, completely finished, and refuses to make a single new one. Decide what to wear? Nope, grab whatever's on top of the pile. Decide what to eat? Nope, get the same thing every day. Decide how this scene is going to play out? Nuh-uh, try again. Decide what other writing project to work on to get around the block? Hahaha, not a chance.

What's really frustrating is that I want to work on the novel. I want to finish editing my short stories, and send them out, and then write the exciting scenes I've planned out for the book, and maybe start a new short story, and...so much. But I reach the end of each day, and nope, nothing.

I'm...not used to feeling this way. Used to feeling lost in the book, sure, given my tendency to write my way through it rather than outline. But not used to knowing where I want to go, and how to get there, but not having any fuel in my mental tank to get there.

Not sure how to get that fuel back. Maybe read more? I took a break after reading the last two books, and maybe that was a mistake. Maybe my horror movie binge for October needs to be a horror novel binge? Or something completely different, maybe I need to read nothing but cozy mysteries for a while.

What I fear is that this means I need to put the novel away for a while. I've heard of other writers doing that, hitting a blockage and setting the work aside for a year or two, before picking it back up again. I've also heard of writers that set something aside and never pick it up. The latter's what I'm afraid of. I want to finish this book. Finishing things...it's part of my identity. Letting that go would be very, very hard.

Which is maybe why I'm blocked? Too afraid to let go, but too tired to go on? sighs We'll see.

Zero words written on the novel this week.

The little parts I was writing last week, based on the outlining I did, ran out of steam. Turns out a single day of outlining isn't enough for a section that's probably going to end up being 30,000 words!

So this week I hit pause on drafting. Instead, I've spent each day's writing time on outlining and research, trying to build a path forward.

Eh, that's not quite right, either...More like, I started out the week with an idea of the beats this part needs to hit. Character X needs to meet Character Y in Town Z. There's a Guild-sponsored dragon hunt, which both compete in. Something something something, they become friends.

Which is not a lot to go on! So this week I've been drilling into the "why" and "how" of things: Why is Character Y in Town Z? Why does anyone in the Town care about dragons? Why this Guild in particular? How does Character X find out about the competition? How do they meet Character Y?

That, in turn, has pushed me to do some more research into the history of the region, looking for answers about government structure, merchant shipping, relations between nobles and peasants, etc etc etc.

And it's working! I stumbled upon an historic event that fits exactly with my generational timeline, and explains why Character Y is in town (and why they might join in a dragon hunt). It's settled a lot of other questions I've had about the book -- like when precisely in history everything is taking place -- and even adds extra depth and drama to some later events.

So, am I ready to get back to drafting? Not yet. I've only got the first third or so of this section outlined so far. I need to work through the hunt itself, and its consequences, before I'll feel comfortable putting fingers to keys again.

Hopefully that'll be sometime next week. Wish me luck!

Did I say I'd spend time outlining last weekend? How naive I was! No, last weekend was all house chores, with a single break -- a fantastic break -- to celebrate a friend's new job.

So I did the outlining on Monday, and wrote Tuesday, and Wednesday was...a lost day...and went back to writing yesterday. And now it's Friday, and I've only hit half my word count for the week. I've got some catching up to do.

And editing -- that second flash piece I wrote last month needs another draft -- and story submitting. It's a lot to juggle!

But I've got today off, thank goodness, so there's a good chance I'll get some of it done before the weekend. And who knows? I might sneak some work in on Saturday or Sunday as well.

Meanwhile, the approach of fall has me feeling the need to be in a class again, leveling up my craft. I recently discovered Cat Rambo's Academy for Wayward Writers, and its set of self-paced classes looks like just the ticket. I think I'll start with the one on editing (since knowing when to stop editing is something I struggle with) and go from there.

Steady progress on the novel this week, even though the plot of this section is getting away from me.

I had an outline for this part, I swear. But that outline’s nearly a year old now. The characters have shifted, both in my head and on the page.

As a result, they’re doing and saying things that are blowing holes in my outline large enough for the Ever Given to sail through. A single representative of a merchant guild has become an entire squabbling panel. An orderly interview morphed into an impromptu witch trial. Three characters that were supposed to be at cross-purposes are now joining up to hunt dragons on the sea (!).

I’ve managed to wing it, so far this week. But I’d like to have some time this weekend to rework my outline, and plot out the new sequence of events, given how much has changed.

I could keep winging it, I suppose. But experience has taught me that without an outline, or some kind of guide, this first draft will end up being even rougher than normal. And it's already going to be intimidating enough to revise a novel this long. I don't want to be creating more work for myself down the line.

So: an outline there will be, if not this weekend, then first thing next week. After all, you don't want to go sailing in search of Baltic dragons without a map!

Novel broke through 60,000 words this week!

I'm back to working on it every day, so far. Picked up my brush, so to speak, and went back to filling in different pieces of the section I'm on. I'm still jumping around a lot, as different things occur to me (and as mental blocks come up for any one piece), but that's just how this book is going, I suppose.

I am starting to get tugs to go work on other stories, though. Had solutions to two big problems with my first novel just drop into my head the other day, which made me want to pick that back up and edit it. Also there's a short story I've been noodling on for several months, that I figured out how to tell just last week.

But I'm trying to hold to the novel for now, at least till this section of it is done. I know if I pull away for too long -- longer than two weeks, say -- the chances are I won't come back and finish.

Which doesn't sound like me, but...it's just so dang big, this book, both in scope and in final word count, that I'm still intimidated by it. Some days I wonder if it's worth it to finish, if I have it in me to pull something like this off. Not to mention concerns with getting all these different cultures and time periods right, in terms of representation. I'm far outside my comfort zone, here, and it's hard not to look back at the cozy interiors of a smaller story and wonder if I should just go back inside.

But not yet. I want -- I need -- to get this draft done first. I think taking breaks, to work on shorter stuff, is good, and I'll keep doing it. Work that into my mental schedule, so to speak, so that I let myself work on something else after each big chunk of the book is done.

But I'm going to finish, even if it takes me another year to do it. After all, I've got no deadlines, no publisher waiting on this. When am I ever going to get the chance to do something this risky again?

Back to work this week, both day-job and writing. As expected, it's been hard to get back into the groove, for both; I arrive at the end of each work day ready not to write, but to lay down on the couch and nap. Doesn't help that I got two story rejections, one after another, this week, both stories and markets I had high hopes for.

That knocked me sideways for a bit. I started to wonder if I should maybe switch to self-publishing, just give up on submitting to markets. Or maybe give up on publishing altogether; just write the things, share them with friends, and that's it.

But then I read this piece by Tobias S Buckell on the SFWA blog. It's from 2013 -- a blast from a better past? -- but it hit home for me yesterday. I urge you to read the whole thing, but this is the passage that struck my heart like a bell:

I’m thinking of this because I recently sold a short story that had been rejected 18 times before. It has been going out for 13 years, making the rounds steadily for all this time. It’s one of three stories that I haven’t trunked b/c I still like them. It still has a spark of something that keeps my belief in it alive.

None of my stories, even the ones I've been sending out for a few years, have near that number of rejections yet. And here I am wondering if they'll ever find a home! But my despair is linked directly to my belief; they still have that "spark of something" he mentions that makes me still like them.

So I'm going to keep sending them out. And as for the two new stories I started earlier this month: I've edited one of them, and finished the first draft of the second. They'll soon join the flock of stories winging their way onto editor's desks, looking for a home.

Not much to update this week. I've taken the week off from writing altogether, in order to make our staycation feel more like a real vacation 😎

Hope your own writing is going well, and that you also give yourself a break every now and then, to recharge and regroup ❤️

Wife and I are doing a bit of stay-cation now that she's back from Arkansas, and thank goodness. It's a chance for us to re-connect, but also relax after having to each carry a (separate) household on our own.

And it's also a chance for me to spend a little more time writing than usual 😀

As a result, I've drafted a new short story, gotten mid-way through a first draft of a second, and still written over 600 words on the novel. Both the stories are very short; one's 800 words -- so would qualify as flash in most markets -- and the other's currently at 1,300 words, so will likely finish around 3k. They're both a little darker than usual (maybe too dark), so I'm not certain they'd be sellable, but they've been fun to write, so 🤷‍♂️

They've also been a nice break from the novel, which has let my brain go from "I have no idea how to write this section" to "Ok, here's the map, I'll make up the rest." I've taken the outline I wrote up last week and started filling it out, using the "dabs of paint" method that has become my go-to for this book.

I've always heard from other authors that you have to learn to write each book anew, and in this case it's true; my only way forward has been to completely change my technique, from one where I write the whole thing through front-to-back, to one where I write little pieces as they come to me, and then slowly fill in all the gaps till everything meets up and the section is done. I end up doing more editing of the draft early on, in order to make everything line up, but doing it this way frees me from worrying too much about getting everything "right" in this first draft (which would be impossible).

What about you? Do you find yourself radically altering your writing process for each book? Or is it more of a slow refinement over time?

I've not written a single word for the novel, this week.

It's been a mad scramble to get everything lined up at work before I go on vacation for the next two weeks. Plus my wife's coming home after a month away tomorrow, so I've been getting the house back into presentable shape 😅

So this week has been a bad one for words on the page. I haven't been entirely idle on the writing front, though. Two of the four short stories I wanted to edit are done, and I've sent them both out to different markets (one got rejected 48 hours later, so I need to send that one back out, but still). I've also stolen some time to plot out the current flashback sequence in the novel, discovering some things along the way about the main character and her experiences.

And I've been putting together my short book reviews post for last month. Slowly. But steadily.

I'm hoping to catch up on my actual word count today, as the first day of my PTO. If I can get my chores done first, of course 😬

One short story down, three to go.

I managed to get the final edits done last weekend for one of the four short stories I'm working on. Submitted it to a market, too, who promptly rejected it three days later 😅

So I need to send it on to the next market. And use this weekend to edit the next short story, so I can start sending it out, too.

My goal is to get at least one done every weekend, so by the end of August I’ll have all four circulating to different markets.

Meanwhile, I’ve been pushing the novel forward. Wrapped up the bridging chapter I’ve been working on these past few weeks, and finally started on the second of the three big flashbacks.

The sequence of events for this flashback's still a little vague in my head. May take some time this weekend to outline it out, try to make it all clearer. Always a bit easier to get through each day’s writing when I know where I’m going!

Novel's hit 57,665 words!

I've finally had a week where I've hit my word goal every day (so far). I've had to trick myself into doing it -- thinking "just write 50 words, and if that's it, that's fine" to start -- but it's worked.

I'm wrapping up the "bridging" chapter I've been working on, one that advances the main plot while setting up the second of three flashbacks. This chapter started out as just a scattering of dialog, much of it out of order (as it turned out). Over the past few weeks I've been layering in blocking, then descriptions, then thoughts, as well as stitching the different pieces together (via more dialog, blocking, etc). I confess I wasn't sure until yesterday that I could actually get the beginning and the middle conversations to link up, but somehow it's all come together.

At least, in a first draft sense. This whole thing might have to be trashed and re-done for the second draft, who knows? But I can't get to that second draft without finishing the first one.

It's good that I've been hitting my word count for the novel already this week, because I need to spend the weekend working on my short stories. I did a count recently and discovered I have four that are just one more draft away from being ready to submit to magazines. Considering I currently I have nothing on submission, it's time to polish those stories up and start sending them out. Maybe rename one or two (like everything else, my first passes at titles are...terrible). And there's that previous novel sitting in the corner, waiting for its third draft.

Too much to do. But thank goodness I don't have any hard deadlines. I'll get to the stories, and the third novel draft, and finish this current book. All in good time (but seriously I need to wrap these up so I can get to some of the new ideas I've been having...)

I'm back to something of a normal writing schedule, finally. I'm not always getting my writing done in the morning, like I'd prefer. Often having to squeeze it in over my lunch break, or between getting off work and cooking dinner. But I am getting it done, thank goodness.

Weekends are still my best option, though. Having a long block of unbroken time lets me tackle things that require more focus, like editing a short story (which I got done this weekend, and started sending out to beta readers). If only weekends were longer, eh?

The best thing that's started happening recently, though, is that I'm getting ideas again.

Before the pandemic, I'd stumble across an idea for a story (short or novel) multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day. i'd capture it in whatever notes software I was using at the time (I've been through several, don't judge me). Starting a new project was a matter of rifling through those ideas to find the one that resonated with me the most, while telling myself I'd get to the others "someday."

That all dried up in 2020. It's like that part of my brain went to sleep, waiting for a time when I wasn't worried about surviving the week.

It makes sense that it would, but I missed it. Even though I thought I knew why it was gone, I wondered if it would ever come back. If I would ever be an idea-generator again.

But thankfully, it has! Over the last week or so, I've been coming up with story ideas -- most of them novels -- every other day. Bits of dialog come to me, or a scenario that I'd thought about before suddenly clicks with something I read, and the seed of a story is made.

Some of them are about novels I've already written. I may have mentioned the four novels I have in draft form (3 first, 1 second), a, um, embarrassing habit of mine that I intend to correct soon. I'd thought that all but the last would end up trunk novels, but lately I've been getting ideas on how to tighten up the others, things to trim and change to make them better. And you know what? I might just pull them out of the trunk after all.

I mean, in the end it's my body of work, and I can do with it what I please, right? Maybe they won't sell, even if I edit them all, but editing them will be good practice. Especially if I do it deliberately, getting better each time. So eventually I will draft and edit a novel that'll sell.

...you know, if I can just find the time for all of that 😅

Anyway, I'm happy to be generating ideas again, even if they sometimes distract me from the novel I'm currently drafting. Welcome back, formerly missing part of my brain!

This week has been a bad one for writing.

It started out well enough, mind you. Got a blog post written and some plotting done on Monday, and actual words down on Tuesday.

But the rest of the week has been a wash. Wednesday was a blur, between work, getting the dogs to the boarding people, and prepping the house for having the power shut off on Thursday. Yesterday I got up early, packed, drove out to the hotel I was going to work from, and rushed right back home as soon as the power was off.

And no, spending all day working in a hotel where no one else was masking was not conducive to being creative 😬

So here I am, end of the week arriving and only 271 words written. I've got a lot of catch-up to do this weekend.

Wish me luck.

Novel’s crossed 54,000 words!

I’m back to writing it in a scatter-shot way. Skipping up and down a chapter, scribbling down dialog or blocking or scene descriptions as they come to me.

The current chapter's proving particularly difficult to write in anything like a linear fashion. There's just so much for me to cover, to bridge the time between one lengthy flashback and the next. I've got to deepen the two main character's relationship, continue to express one character's coming to terms with their recent debilitating injuries, and set things up for the next bridge after the second flashback.

It's a lot, and as a result, the draft of this chapter is a jumbled mess. I've got dialog for one line of conversation scattered across three different scenes, and none of it ties together. Yet.

I keep telling myself the first draft is supposed to be messy, but this is just...the most confused thing I've ever written, so far. How am I going to pull together a coherent chapter from this?

Speaking of coherence, I'm also trying to edit the short story I drafted last month. And at some point I do need to start in on a third draft of the novel I was working on most of last year. I've not yet gotten a novel through enough drafts to be ready to send it out to agents, and it's high time I finally did.

But time...time is the problem. If I'm working on the new novel, I'm not editing the short story. If I'm editing the short story, I'm not editing the novel. And if I'm editing the previous novel, I'm not making progress on the current one.

How can I square this circle? How can I find the time to not just work on, but finish, all these projects?

Screw it, I'm putting more magic in my fantasy novel.

Up to this point I've been careful to keep it magic-lite. I wanted to make things as close to historical as possible. Did -- and continue to do -- my research, mixed in my own experiences with the locations involved, and restrained myself to just the one change (dragons!) and nothing else.

But now, 50,000 words in, that's boring me. So I'm letting it go.

Mind you, I’m not going all-out. I’m not suddenly dropping in some fireball-throwing wizards or wisecracking elves (though fireball-throwing, wisecracking elves does sound like my cup of tea 🤔)

I’m taking the fantastical elements of the book, and strengthening them. Taking what had been a vague psychic connection, and making it both stronger and more specific. Like turning up a dial in the sound mix.

That’ll give it a more prominent role in the story, and provide another tool I can use to complicate things for my characters. rubs hands together It’s going to be fun.

What about you? Have you ever gone into a story with a set of self-imposed constraints, only to shatter them later?

Got another short story rejection today. This one was personal, at least; not a form letter, but a description of an historical error that threw the editor out of the story.

It hurts a little less, I guess? To know I got close enough to being accepted that the magazine's editor read the story, and rejected it themselves. But it's also frustrating, to have such high hopes for a story, only to see it constantly fail to get published.

And now, of course, I'm diving into more historical research, and thinking of ways to fix the error they called out, while keeping the heart of the story intact. Yet another revision to make before sending it back out.

Or perhaps it's time to let this one go. Sometimes I think I need to take these rejections less personally. To treat them as less of a challenge, and more like little slips of paper slipped under my door while I'm working. So long as I'm producing more stories to send out, does it matter that much if one of them doesn't work as well as I'd like? Or to flip it around: If I'm happy with a story, does it matter so much that any particular editor isn't?

Of course I'm never completely happy with a story. There's always something to change, some phrase to tweak or scene to re-think.

That's the thing: I'm always ready to revise. I crave feedback, and once I get it I honor it by making changes. But is that the best way to improve as a writer? Am I making things better, or just delaying working on something new, something to which I can apply all of my lessons learned afresh?

What about you? When you get a rejection, does it spur you to keeping editing? Or do you march on to the next project?

I finished the eternal section!

Finally laid down all the connective text it needed. Final word count: 34,089 words, for just that one part of the book (!).

It's a huge milestone. Means not only that I can move on to the next part of the book, a shorter interlude before the next large chunk, but I'm about 1/3 of the way through the book as a whole: 49,594 words. I said this was going to be a door-stopper, right?

I feel like I need to take a moment and look back at where I started. Not to brag, but just to survey the view from this part of the summit, so to speak. Because otherwise the moment's going to be lost, mixed in with all the others spent putting one word in front of the others, trudging up the slope.

When I started out on this book, last November, I had a plan in a very loose sense of the word. I knew the beats I wanted to hit, and the general shape of the story, but that was it. I didn't really know who these characters were, or what could motivate them through these events. I also didn't know if I could even write this kind of historical novel, where I leap from the shores of the Baltic Sea to the Central Asian steppe and back again.

But I have. I can. It might be junk, but the first draft of the steppe sequence is done. I conjured up a whole family from scratch! I worked out how to track a dragon across the plains. And discovered how a pre-teen could summon her inner strength to strike back at that dragon for her father's death.

That's not nothing! Again, it's just the first draft, and I can already see that it'll need a lot of edits. But after months of grinding away at it, wondering if I'd ever see real progress, wondering if I should just stop and spend my time doing something else, I can take heart in knowing that this piece, at least, is done. And if I can finish one section, I can finish the others. One word at a time.

So take heart, if you've been feeling like me! Like the work is never-ending. Afraid that none of it will be worthwhile.

Because eventually you'll summit that mountain. And you'll look back at where you started, and wonder how the hell you've come so far.

So I didn't quit. Not this week, at least :)

Only 686 words written so far, though, so I'll need to play catch-up today and tomorrow, once again. I seem to end up skipping my writing for the day at least once a week, so a Friday writing marathon might end up being a regular habit. Which is fine with me, actually...wrapping up my writing in a final burst feels like a good way to roll into the weekend.

And I've finally got enough distance from the horror story I drafted -- about two weeks -- that I can go back and start revising it now. Which'll be a nice break from the novel (again), because ye gods I'm tired of the section I've been working on. Writing in skip-around mode works for getting me past blockages, but makes sewing up all those missing parts kind of a drag. And it makes that connecting process a skip-around of its own, but an involuntary one, so just as I get in the flow for one area, I hit the words I've already written, and need to skip ahead to the next missing piece.

It's tedious, and tedium makes it hard to push myself to get the writing done. Because it needs to be done, those missing pieces need to be filled in, lest I end up with something of a half-told story.

But it's not very fun. The fun parts I've already written! That was the good thing about skipping around. Now I'm in the bad part, which is...well, something I've got to grit my teeth and get through.

On the other side of the tunnel of tedium is the next chapter though, where I've got to write about bodily trauma and some inner psychological horror as changes take hold in the point-of-view character. That'll be fun...so long as I can convince myself I know what I'm doing when writing about this kind of physical trauma 😬 I might want to set aside a day or two for some research...

It's been a rough week for my writing.

The company I work for has had a series of cross-company events this week, and since we've got folks working all over the globe, they were held at a time that was convenient for basically no one. For my part, that meant getting up at 4am so I could be awake, showered, and coherent for what some days was five hours of continuous Zoom meetings.

Not conducive to writing, to say the least. I managed to throw down some words on Tuesday after work, but otherwise my brain has just been much at the end of the day. So I've only written 269 words on the novel this week.

The meetings are over, so I'm hoping to be able to play catch-up today and tomorrow. Reach my goal of at least 1,250 words before the sun sets on Sunday. But the shift in my schedule meant other errands have also been put off all week, and now I've got to juggle all of it together.

And process the short-story rejection I got on Wednesday.

This one hit me harder than I thought it would. Possibly because they'd had it for a couple months, which -- once again -- gave me hope that it might make it through the gauntlet this time. The form rejection I received -- word-for-word the same letter I've gotten from the magazine before, despite a change in editors -- was a bit of gut-punch, then. I guess it didn't make it through any part of the gauntlet, after all; folks were just too busy to have even read my story (and then immediately reject it) until now.

So I'm a bit low, and questioning once again why I bother. isn't it enough to have one job? Why am I trying to have another? Why don't I just give it a rest, and go do something else with my time? And I don't have any good answers this go-round.

What do you do, when you think of quitting? How do you keep putting words on the page? Or push yourself to send that story out to one more market?

I finished the rough draft of the short story!

It topped out at 5,157 words, which is a little longer than I'd like. Most of the markets I want to try to sell into have a cap of around 5k. But I should be able to trim it down enough during editing that it'll squeeze under the limit.

So I'm setting that aside for a couple of weeks, to get some distance on the story before I try to revise it. I'm picking the novel back up, meanwhile, trying to finish the same interminable section i was working on when I pivoted to the short story.

I say interminable because it seems I keep finding gaps in the story that I have to fill in now. I'll be scrolling along, watching a continuous flow of words, when there's a break in the narrative. And I have to stop, scroll back up, get back into the "mood" of the particular scene, and then spin a bridge across to the next one.

It's a little tedious, but only in the sense that I can't believe I left so many holes in the story. I'm filling them just fine, the words are flowing, thank goodness. But I'm already judging past me: Why didn't you just keep writing the story? Did you really need to skip over writing these three paragraphs that I just put down?

The answer, of course, is that yes, I did need to skip them. At the time, I needed to leap over them in order to discover my destination. But that still means poor present-day me has to trundle along behind, paving over the potholes in the semi-paved story road.

What about you? Ever make a judgement call during drafting that you later regret, either in the same draft or later?

In the spirit of being more flexible, I decided to take a break from the novel this week. Instead, I've been putting my word count towards the short story, pushing to get a first draft done before the week is out.

And so far, so good! I've written 1,076 words of my 1,250 word goal (so I've got to do a session today to finish out strong), and I'm currently writing the last scene in the story.

It's a horror story, so I'm trying to use all the techniques I've been learning about from Writing in the Dark and all the horror novels I've been bingeing. Focusing on the character's reactions to events, rather than relying on the events themselves. Sticking close to one character's point of view, to pull the reader into the situation. Using more senses than just sight and hearing to convey the world.

And I'm leaning on the drafting techniques I've picked up while writing the novel. Like jotting down dialog first, or skipping around in a scene to work around a temporary block. Or working on a scene in layers, doing multiple passes to put in all the elements I want to have in a scene (dialog, thoughts, physical blocking, environment).

I feel like it's producing a stronger first draft. One I'll have an easier time revising later on. Not that I'm trying to be super-careful about word choice -- it's a trash draft after all -- but I think the bones of the story will hold up more, when it comes time to edit. So hopefully I'll be able to focus more on language and less on "do I need to completely rewrite this to make it more interesting?"

What about you? Do you feel like your first drafts have gotten better over time? Or have you found better ways to revise? Maybe both?

Novel's at 44,600 words! I'm still wrapping up the section I've been working on for weeks now, filling in the gaps in the narrative I left behind when I jumped around to write the bigger moments in it.

Wife and I brainstormed different reward methods over the weekend, and she liked the idea of a vacation savings account. So that's what I've done: Setup a new, separate account, where I'll deposit a little bit of money each week, but only if I hit my word count goal. Then -- as the pandemic lifts -- we'll use that money for travel.

I've also shifted my morning routine a little to give myself more time to write (an hour instead of just thirty minutes). I don't necessarily spend all that time writing, but having that time lets me relax and get into that state of flow that both helps me get the words down and takes me out of my languishing head for a while.

So far, it's working; I missed my daily writing on Wednesday because of some food poisoning, but I was able to make it up on Thursday by using more of my hour than normal. Combined with the mini-sprint I ended up doing on Tuesday, I've already hit my writing goal for the week! Looking forward to making that first deposit on Saturday morning :)

Speaking of the weekend, I'm hoping to get back to the short story draft. I'd like to finish it, even; it's close to being done, if I can just nail down the visuals for the last bit. Ok, I say done, but...it'd be just the first draft. Still, gotta have the first draft before I can edit it into the second.

How about you? Made any recent changes to your writing habits, good or bad? Hit a milestone you're proud of?

Found this article in the New York Times (I know) that rather perfectly captures where I've been, these past few weeks, and where I still am: Not depressed, exactly, but languishing.

I link to the article not because it's got a pop-culture ready mental diagnosis, but because it also talks about practical ways to cope with it. Small goals, like finishing another level in Duolingo. And any task that takes you out of yourself and into a mental state of flow, whether it's bingeing Netflix or playing a game with friends.

Sounds a bit like writing, eh? At least, writing in small chunks, giving myself enough time to enter a flow mental state.

I think it's that last part that I've been missing, in terms of my daily writing. I've been trying to squeeze it in, sometimes just in 15 minutes at the end of the day. Which is one day to make sure I always hit my 250 words, but is no way to let myself fall into the story, to lose myself in the writing.

So I'm going to try altering my routine a bit. Give myself at least an hour to write. No distractions, no time limits. And no pressure to increase my word count, either. If I give myself time to really focus on the story, that'll be enough.

I'm also going to start rewarding myself, again, for hitting that daily work goal. Not sure what to use as a reward (I'm already eating plenty of chocolate). Maybe money put into a savings account, like Jonathan Maberry does? Or maybe a new game at the end of the week, if I've written my total words?

What do you use, if you reward yourself for getting your writing done?

I got my second shot!

Wasn't quite as easy as getting my first. Yesterday was the first day of general vaccine eligibility in California, so even though I got there around 30 minutes early, I spent most of that time waiting in a socially-distanced line. But the folks there were all still friendly and efficient, and I made it through and out without incident.

I could feel a difference in this shot; felt like more material getting pushed into my shoulder. And about ten minutes after I started feeling light-headed. Had to put my head between my knees and breathe till it passed.

It did pass, though, and I went back to work that day. My left arm (where I got the shot) was -- and continues to be -- basically useless, too sore to raise up higher than mid-line. Other than that, I had the same wave of fatigue hit me as last time, shortly after I wrapped up work yesterday. Which is why I missed my daily word count for the first time in two months 😬

I might be able to make it up today; we'll see. I feel mostly fine, though I've got some of the symptoms of my asthma being triggered: stuffy nose, lungs can't quite get a full deep breath (it doesn't hurt exactly, but it definitely feels like something I shouldn't do too often). I don't think I have a fever, which is good.

Will probably still spend most of the day in bed, just in case. Better to take it easy, I think. That doesn't stop my from having my laptop in bed with me, though (as you can see). Hopefully I can get some writing done in-between doses of tea and naps.

I hope that wherever you are, the vaccine rollout continues, and if you haven't yet been able to get it, that you soon will be. We need to kick this virus, so we can spend more of our time and energy building a better world than the one we lost in the pandemic.

Writing this past week has been...well, difficult is too small a word for it. When my motivation for even getting out of bed has been snuffed out, it's impossible to convince myself that the words I'm setting down are worth anything.

And yet they must be written. Because who knows how long this funk will last, and in the meantime the novel needs to be completed. Need to get this draft done, this junk draft, so that I'll have something to edit later. Not that I'm looking forward to later, exactly, but I know it's coming.

Thank goodness I stopped being an inspiration writer -- that is, someone who writes only when inspired to -- a good while ago. Because at the moment, inspiration isn't just hard to summon for me, it's completely gone. I'm writing like someone re-learning how to walk: laying down one word at a time, till a sentence is formed, and then moving on to the next. Word by word, line by line. Till my daily word count is reached, and I close the laptop.

I'm not blocked. I'm not afraid of the scene I'm working on. I'm just depressed.

I'm trying different things to lighten my mood, of course. I started walking in the mornings again, and I can now vouch for the runner's high as a way to trick my body's chemistry into lifting the sadness for a bit. It's doesn't last, but for a little while I feel...not normal, but I stop feeling like crying all the time.

Crying is a constant danger at the moment. Anytime I'm left with my thoughts for too long, I start to tear up. Which makes writing dangerous, in a way; I've got to think to put these words together, but every time I start to imagine the scene before me, my thoughts will veer into taking an inventory of all the reasons I'm worthless and unneeded, and I break down again. I know it's my brain inventing reasons for my sadness, but still. It's surprisingly good at it!

And trying to do the opposite -- take inventory of all the things I have to be happy about -- doesn't help, either, because it just gives me a list of reasons I'm an ungrateful wretch for daring to be sad.

There's no winning here. There's just endurance, and a hope that it will pass. I've had dark moods before -- never this bad, but still -- and they've all come and gone like clouds in a thunderstorm. This one will, too, given time. I hope.

I feel like I've been to a horror workshop this past week.

It started with reading Tim Waggoner's Writing in the Dark, effectively a textbook (complete with exercises!) for writing better horror stories. He breaks down the different sub-genres, he explores what distinguishes horror from other types of fiction, and he pulls back the curtain on different techniques to use in horror to produce different effects.

I've read other writing books before -- and will read more, I'll take advice wherever I can find it -- and always come away with at least one or two changes to make to the way I write. Writing in the Dark was no different in that respect, but it went one step further: It changed the way I read.

Shortly after finishing it, I picked up a copy of Salem's Lot. I realized I haven't been reading much horror lately, so I thought going back to one of the classics would be a good way to dive in.

And I was right, but not in the way I'd intended. Because instead of just noticing things like the parallels in the story to the original Dracula, or getting sucked into the story -- both of which happened, it's still a damn fine book -- I started noticing things about the way King wrote it. Places where he was writing in a more literary voice, versus genre. Places where he slowed time down by writing everything out in minute detail, to ramp up tension. Places where he shifted point of view. How in the more "horror" chapters, he wrote in a perspective that clung tightly to one character's train of thought, to show their reactions to what was happening, which is where dread lives. Often those chapters had very little happen in them at all, but the characters reacted to them as if they were scared out of their wits, and thus carried the reader with them.

It was like Waggoner was standing over my shoulder as I read, pointing to passages and remarking on the techniques being used in each. I could still appreciate the story King was telling, still feel the chill of being hunted by an ancient vampire in a New England fall. But I could also see how he was telling the story, and think about how I could use those techniques in my own fiction.

Next I read Stephen Graham Jones' The Only Good Indians, a horror novel which came out just last year. I had the same experience with it, though -- at least for me -- the seams were less visible in this one. That is, it was harder for me to pull myself out of it, and see how it was built. But it was still possible, and I noticed both some of the same techniques King used and others being brought to bear, techniques more commonly used for monster books, which Jones' is (and King's wasn't).

I'm now reading Seanan McGuire's Middlegame, and having much the same experience. Loving the story, falling into the book, but on the way, paying attention to the way she's telling the tale, from sentence length to parenthetical remarks to event ordering (no spoilers, you'll need to pick up a copy and read it). It's another finely constructed book, and I feel I'm appreciating it on a whole different level (and learning from it).

All of which is to say: I've started drafting a new horror story (finally).

It's the one I've been outlining forever, afraid to commit it to (electronic) paper. This week I took the plunge, working on it after my words for the novel were done for the day. I'm drafting it in much the same way as the novel, working scatter-shot, drawing up bits of dialog before anything else, and then stitching it all together.

But this time, I'm consciously thinking about the different horror techniques I've seen, and looking for ways to apply them. So after finishing the dialog and blocking for one section, I went back and added in the main character's thoughts, feelings, and reactions, to pull the perspective tighter in on them. I'm also not shying away from characters in conflict, or physically fighting; taking the time to block the sequences in my head and then setting them down. Because in this story, at least, there will be pain, and there will be blood. And if my protagonist is not going to flinch, neither can I.

It's still the first draft, so it's going to need a lot of editing, but I'm already feeling better about it. More confident. Like I'm writing in a more deliberate mode, more aware of what I'm doing, and why. Here's hoping my confidence is justified, once it's done.

Novel's at 38,160 words. The snippets I'm working on are starting to spill over into the next chapter; I'm already scoping out the reactions of the characters to the events of the section I'm working on.

Meanwhile, this section is winding down. And I'm getting the feeling that much of it -- most of it, even -- might be cut in the next draft. I mean, do I really need to describe how a character makes their camp dinner in such detail? And yet, if I don't do it, I won't know that they keep flour in this jar over there, and that they constantly gather firewood as they travel, so they have a stock of it ready to go when needed. Details like that would be completely lost, if I didn't make a hash out of describing every little action right now. So I keep doing it, knowing that what I'm writing now will likely be cut, but that doesn't mean it won't be used.

I'm also...well, I'm debating whether to let one of my characters give A Speech at the end of this chapter. They have the words for it -- I've already written the points they want to hammer home -- they have the audience, they have the space and the time. But does the book have the tone for it?

I usually shy away from having characters make big speeches, or monologues. Blame part of it on a Gen-X thing: I treat displays of sincere emotion with suspicion. Blame another part on my preacher of a father, whose pompous, hypocritical sermons turned me off to religion altogether.

So I'm always pushing my characters to speak more naturally, to take any Great Wisdom they want to lay down and either show it through their actions or weave it into their dialog some other way.

But this time...this time I might let them just say what they want to say. Certainly the situation calls for it: a young girl is about to be pushed into an apprenticeship that will change her life, take her away from the family and the place she's always known and send her criss-crossing the world with her mentor. And all because of a decision she made to pursue vengeance for her father's death, that led to a near-deadly encounter with a dragon, and now this. Such sweeping changes, they call for a little more weight to the dialog, yes?

Oof, I'm uncertain. I'll write the speech, I think, and see how it plays. I can always change it later, right?

Ye gods, the Daylight Savings Time switch walloped me this week. It's like I was finally adapting to 2021 -- working on the novel, editing short stories, plotting out a new story -- and then DST yanks an hour out from under me, robbing me of just enough energy that I've been struggling just to hit my daily word count.

I've basically been slow-motion jet-lagged all week. I really wish we would stop doing this to ourselves.

The good news is that (thanks to beta readers) I now have not one, but two stories under submission. Just waiting for their little pink slips of rejection to come back 😅

I kid, but really, it feels good to have them out there. Statistically, they will get rejected from each magazine I send them to, which is how I steel myself for it. But I like these stories. I believe in these stories. There's a market for them, somewhere, and the only way I can find it is by sending them out.

Meanwhile, the novel's climbed to 36,789 words. I'm starting to connect up the snippets of dialog I've written for the ending scenes of this section, which means I'm having to actually worry about things like "How would they have treated this wound in this time period?" and "How badly injured is the protagonist, anyway?"

I am definitely getting some of these details wrong. I do not know enough about wounds, or medical care on the Central Asian steppe in the 18th century, or early modern firearms, or...really, so much. But I know enough to write something down, something I can come back and fix later, so that's what I'm doing.

It helps for me to think of this not as the first draft, but as the trash draft. The draft I know I'm going to mess up on, and revise extensively later. No one's going to see this draft but me. I'm going to finish it, and then do the research needed to get each section right. Hell, some of these scenes I'm flubbing might not even be needed, and so they'll get cut. Which would make taking the time to get them exactly right now a waste.

So it's onward! Screwing up as I go, laying down the raw material I'll shape into something better via editing.

I don't think I'm good at coming up with story titles. Mine tend to end up either very much on the nose -- my first published story, "Wishr," is named for the company at which it takes place -- or become horrible puns, like "There Will Be Bugs" (I know).

So in trying to come up with a new title for the story I've been editing, I wanted to branch out from my usual process. Started brainstorming, just listing out things as they came into my head.

At first, most of them were more of the same (I really am fond of puns). But then I thought back to short stories I've read and liked recently, and their titles, and realized: The ones I liked the best (titles, not stories) were ones that fit the story, but where I didn't understand how they fit until after I finished reading the piece.

So I shifted my brainstorm, away from trying to convince a reader to read the story (by telling them what's inside it) and towards giving readers a new insight into the story after it's been read. And voilà! I found my new title.

I've got some beta reader feedback to process (on the story as a whole) this weekend, and then the story will be ready for submission, shiny title and all.

Meanwhile, I keep moving ahead with the novel, which is sitting at 35,380 words. I'm past the big climactic scene, and into the aftermath, where the consequences of the protagonist's actions come due, and her life changes forever.

This part introduces a new character who becomes a major part of the protag's life. So after filling in the rest of the climactic scene, I'm back to sketching what comes next, setting down fragments of conversation and description as they come to me.

I'm trying to consciously develop a different voice for this character, a distinct way of looking at the world, so it's obvious she comes from a different part of it than the protagonist. Which means I'm focusing on dialog first, nailing down the back-and-forth between her and the protag before handling any action.

I'm also getting close to the end of this section of the book. 21,000 words and counting to cover just a few days in the protagonist's life. Important days, to be sure: You only get one first encounter with a dragon! Even once I read the end of this section, though, I've still got some gaps left in the earlier parts of it that I'll need to close, stitching everything together.

And once that's done? On to the next big section, which will leap years ahead in time, and thousands of miles across the Earth's surface. Let's hope I don't get lost along the way!

Novel's still chugging along, currently at 33,884 words. I've pushed through the first big scene, and am well into the second.

There's...well, there's individual pieces of the sequence that are still missing, some connective tissue that I have yet to write. The technique I've been using, of skipping around to write those scenes (or sometimes fragments of scenes) that I feel like adding, has a that cost. Eventually I have to go back and write in everything I skipped.

But for now, it's all big scene all the time, and no connective tissue...yet.

However, the big news this week is that I've finally cracked open a story I've been working on for nearly four years now. That one started out as just a character and a situation, a piece of backstory for the novel I wanted to write. But it never worked quite as well as I wanted it to, so I've kept tinkering with it (and submitting it while tinkering with it, which is a habit I need to break).

Tim Waggoner, during his 15-minute (!) workshop back in January, pointed me to the central problem that was holding up everything else: the motivation for my main character wasn't strong enough. So on weekends I've been brainstorming different ways to go, different versions of the character that would have a stronger push for their actions.

I finally hit on one this weekend that I liked, and in the process of editing the story to match, everything fell into place. I ended up cutting away about half of the story's word-count, focusing in on just three scenes. But in those scenes I not only lay out the main character's motivation, I fill in the secondary characters, giving them more life and depth. And I shifted the ending, so it's now both more complete (in the sense that the current narrative arc ends) and more open-ended (in that the world's evolution past the story is implied).

I'm going to do one more editing pass this weekend, to clean up language and make sure it all fits together properly. I'd like to have it ready to submit in time for Nightmare Magazine re-opening to submissions later this month.

I need a new title, though; the old one doesn't fit anymore. Anyone have any tips or tricks for choosing a title you can share in the comments?

Novel's up to 32,300 words!

It's been easier to write this week. My wife's recovered from her vaccine ordeal, and is well on her way to hitting her two-week full-strength-protection mark. Neither of us have picked up anything in the meantime, so -- touches wood -- we should be ok to ride out the rest of the pandemic.

I also got back in the habit of writing in the mornings, which seems to help. Something about trying to switch gears one more time, at the end of the day, makes it that much harder to focus on the story. Harder to think about where it's going, and what I want to describe along the way.

Finally, I think it helps that I'm facing down the two scenes in this sequence that scare me the most to write. They're both action scenes, which I consider a weakness of mine. And they're both emotionally fraught for the main character. In one of them, she winds up losing an animal companion she's had since she was a little girl. In the second, she's seeking -- but not necessarily finding -- vengeance for her father's death.

These are big, tentpole scenes. I need them to move quickly, to feel realistic, and also to hit readers right in the feels. Which means on top of my normal first-draft anxiety, I'm worried about building up to scenes that fall completely flat. Or scenes that are laughably implausible. Or scenes that make it all seem too easy on the protagonist.

Even success, in a sense, is rough. Writing scenes like these -- where the emotional stakes are high for the characters, and it can end in a broken heart -- are hard on me, too. Because I live through everything they experience; I have to, in order to put it down on the page. So I feel the knot in my chest when their father dies. My own tears well up when they have to put down one of their closest friends.

So I've been putting them off. Writing around the scenes, so to speak. And there's been plenty of other things to cover! But now I've got to write them, so I can move ahead with the story.

And somehow, once I'm in the scene, writing it, it becomes easier. Easier to picture what's happening, and easier to describe it. Easier to say what the impact of it all is. So I end up writing more, and more quickly, than before.

It's almost like my fear of the thing is worse than the thing itself?

Of course, this is still just the first draft. It might feel easier to write it once I'm in it, but it could still all be terrible writing. I won't know till it's done.

How about you? Are there particular types of scenes that you put off writing, for whatever reason? How do you overcome your hesitation?

Writing each day's words this week has been like extracting teeth using a slippy pair of old tweezers.

I had a...let's say rough...ending to last week. Several things came together at once to make work stressful, which bled into the early part of this week.

Also my wife got her second vaccine shot, which on the one hand is awesome, but on the other required her to suffer through being harassed by a cop and yelled at (in close proximity) by the staff working there. And a few hours after she got the shot, she came down with alternating chills and sweats, shaking uncontrollably. She didn't leave the bedroom for three days.

The icing on the stress cake was some maintenance that we needed done on the house, that could only be done by people entering the house. Which meant shutting off the heat, opening all the windows, and locking myself in my office while they were here.

My body, being slightly over four decades old now, doesn't react well to such compounding stresses. And it's gotten creative, so the manifestation of the stress differs every time, by type of stress and how much I'm going through.

Big speech coming up? Probably going to break out in fever blisters.

Mother-in-law had a pulmonary embolism requiring you to give up all your pets, sell your car and your house, and move back to Arkansas to take care of her? Prepare for root canal failure.

This time, I started clenching my jaw so tight that I woke myself up with muscle cramps. Felt like someone was reaching from my neck through my jaw to tug at a tooth. I got maybe four hours of sleep over two days.

So...yeah, focusing on the novel's been difficult.

It's during times like these that I'm glad I set my writing goal so low. 250 words is something I can hit in about 20 minutes, on a good day. So on days that are not good, I try to give myself an hour to hit it, dropping other housework to carve out the time. And it's working, so far.

All the same, I hope next week is more relaxing.

This book may end up being much longer than I thought.

It's currently at 29,122 words, which is almost half of the 70K or so I thought it would end up being. The trouble is, I'm not even close to being halfway done.

The section I'm working on now, just by itself, is 16,000 words long. And it's not near done, either. I'm maybe....halfway? through the story I want to tell in this part of the book. And this section is only meant to be about one-fourth of the whole, so that would put the final word count at around 120,000 words (!)

That would make it a third longer than the longest thing I've ever written in my life.

I swear, I'm not eating up word count spinning needless metaphors or having characters do a lot of navel-gazing. It just turns out that yes, when writing a novel that moves from the lakes and forests of northern Sweden to the neverending sky of the Central Asian steppe, there's a lot of, um, ground to cover. Who knew? (Narrator: He did. Or should have).

Granted, a lot of what I'm writing now might be cut out. Some of it is no doubt redundant, or can be compacted so that the events of a few pages get covered in a few paragraphs. But even lopping off 20,000 words of filler would make this a 100K book.

100K is about 400 pages, which...well, that's a commitment, isn't it? For reader and writer alike.

So much for being done with the first draft before April. This might end up taking me the rest of the year.

Maybe it's time to look at bumping my daily word count? Trying to squeeze in a second writing session in each day? Or I could start writing on the weekends again. Just two extra days of my regular word count would be an extra 500 words a week.

Or perhaps it's best to be patient. Work on this draft during the week, like I have been, and use the weekend to edit other stories (and that previous novel, which needs a tune-up before going out).

What about you? What do you do, when a story you're working on starts to look like it'll be much longer than you anticipated?

I'm not sure I could keep doing this writing thing, without the support of my friends.

Just this week, one of them pinged me, to ask if I'd heard anything back about a short story he'd recently beta-read for me. And I felt a prick of shame, because I hadn't submitted the story, even after incorporating his feedback, and declaring that was my intent.

But that shame is becoming action. I've promised to send it off this weekend, and asked him to penalize me (via drinks owed) if I don't.

The funny thing is, I love the short story in question. I think it's the best thing I've written to date. But it's already been rejected, in previous draft form, by half a dozen different magazines. So I'm terrified of submitting it again, and having it rejected again...and then discovering later that there's one small thing missing that makes it perfect.

Because I only get one shot at each magazine for this story. They all have policies in place that won't let you re-submit a story, even after editing. Which is their right, of course; they get inundated with submissions as it is. But it raises the stakes for me. Makes me hesitate to send the story in. Because being told "this isn't good enough" is fine with me. It's not being able to fix it and then try again.

In an odd way, I feel like I'm failing the story when it gets rejected. Like it's my job to make it the best it can be, and then go find it a home. And when I edit after getting rejections, and those edits make the story shine brighter, I feel like I let the story down by sending it out too soon.

And yet, how would I know to keep editing, without those rejections?

All of which is to say: I've got another short story I'm sending out this weekend. And another friend to feel thankful for.

'Tis the season of the writer's conference.

Had the Apex Magazine 15-minute workshop on Monday, which may have permanently changed the way I approach my writing. I'm on the alert now for some of my bad writing habits, and am currently going through two different stories to eliminate them.

Today, I'm attending Clarion West's workshop on How to Write Science Fiction in a Post-Colonial World, part of their series of single-day online workshops. Similar to the Apex one, I'm not sure what to expect. I hope it'll help me with the novel I'm writing right now (and future works), where one of my main characters is from the steppes of Central Asia. I don't want to appropriate anyone's culture, but I do want to showcase the diversity of the world, particularly in the time period I'm setting this story (the 18th century), which American writers tend to whitewash.

And I'm considering signing up for the Southern California Writers Conference, which is in two weeks (and also online). It was the first writers conference I attended, back when we could safely congregate inside. I got a lot out of it: I wrote two stories, got tips on plot structure, and met some great people. And now one of my fellow Writers Coffeehouse alumni (Dennis K Crosby) is one of the special guest speakers! I could use that kind of shot in the arm again (vaccine connotation very much intended).

Not that I'm currently having trouble producing, thank goodness. Novel's at 26,099 words. I've patched up the seams in the scenes I've written so far, and moved on to the "meat" of the chapter: the POV character's close encounter with a dragon.

I'm still writing it in bits and pieces, moving up and down the page as ideas come to me and I figure things out. It keeps me from getting hung up on any one part of the book, or worry too much about how I'm going to get from Point A to Point B. I can always make something up :)

And after the Apex workshop, and re-examining some of my past short stories, I'm starting to think about the connective tissue between scenes differently. As in, maybe I don't need it, after all.

That's not quite right. I think I, the writer, need it. I need to have written it, in order to fully understand my story. But I don't necessarily need to show that to the reader.

Same thing with exposition. I need to know everything about my world. I need to know what the sunlight looks like in springtime. I need to know how the birds sound in the morning. I need to know which cars are driving by at the end of the day (if this world has cars). So these are all things I need to set down, to fix in my mind by fixing them in text. But I don't need to relay those details to the reader, unless something stands out to the POV character, and affects their decisions.

It's advice I've heard before, but not really felt in my bones until now. I'd always assumed my readers were lost unless I held their hand, and relied on my brevity to make the explanations palatable.

I think now I can trust the reader more. I still plan to write all the exposition, so I have it straight in my own head. But when editing I'm going to start taking it all out, and only putting things back in if a beta reader complains of being lost. Otherwise, I'm going to lean on actions and dialog to convey everything.

What about you? Is there a piece of classic writing advice that took you a while to fully understand?

It feels good to have a competent President again. A President with some dignity, who doesn't spend his time tweeting out misinformation. Whose Press Secretary thanked reporters after her first press briefing, who doesn't see journalists as the enemy. A President who made news this week because of the raft of actions he took to kick off a national response to the coronavirus pandemic, not the lies he told.

The day after the inauguration, I sat down to write after a long day at work, and when I looked up I'd written twice my daily word count, smooth as butter.

I could get used to this. I want to get used to this. Not in the sense of taking it for granted, but in the sense of it happening, over and over and over again.

There's much to be done, politically. Too many Americans are locked up in prisons. Too many Americans fear the loss of their job so much they're willing to endure urinating into bottles and absurdly low wages, while their bosses complain about not knowing how to spend all the money they're making.

But it'll be easier, collectively, to tackle such things, if we don't all have to worry about the President, too, coming after us. If we have the headspace to write, and call, and paint, and march, and sing, and petition, without wondering, every day, which shoe the executive is going to drop on us that day. What painstaking progress the administration rolled back with callous ease this morning.

It'll be good to feel like we have an ally in the White House. Not perfect, by any means. But not actively trying to set us back.

Novel's at 24,580 words. More by the end of the day, since I haven't yet done my daily words. Back to the rhythm of 2,000 words per week.

I'm at the point where I'm stitching together the pieces I've written for the current sequence, before pressing on. I'm having to shift some paragraphs around, moving them either earlier in the chapter or later, so I can keep them without interrupting the flow of things.

I can already see parts I'm going to have to revise. Conversations that don't go anywhere (currently), descriptions of daily life that will need to be rewritten according to the research I'm doing.

I'm...uncertain, whether to fix those, or just press on. The advice I've gotten from the Writer's Coffeehouse says to move on, to just make a note of it, so it'll be easy to come back to, but to keep forward momentum going. Finish the draft, then go back and patch things up.

And it's good advice! Only...if I already know how things need to change, shouldn't I change them? Or worse, if I know things need to change, but I'm not sure exactly how, isn't it better to find out the more stable form for them now, so I can keep writing the book with that in mind?

I suppose the advice is meant to keep me from getting bogged down in revisions, instead of finishing out the draft. And I definitely do not want to do that. And it'll probably be easier to make the changes I need once the book's done, and I can see the whole story, rather than now, when I'm still mapping it out.

So I suppose I will press on. Still going to make notes about revisions to the scenes, though, so I don't forget them when it's time to edit.

But to have something to edit, I've got to finish this draft.
Onward!

What a week, eh?

Trump's been impeached for a second time (finally). The insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol are being rounded up (thank goodness). And tech platforms are waking up to their complicity in the planning of the attack, and as a result, dropping right wing extremists so fast it reveals how much they were dragging their feet about it before.

Not that my family back home believes any of that, of course. I mean that quite literally: they don't think Trump has been impeached, they think "antifa" (insert eyeroll here) caused the riot, they think the First Amendment requires their favorite BBS to let them post anything they want.

It's...amazing, to me, to see the people that wrap themselves in the flag and "Blue Lives Matter" defend folks that invaded the Capitol with the intent of halting a Constitutional process (and perhaps grabbing a hostage or two) and beat the cops that tried to stop them.

What happened to the party of law and order? The party of civics, of wear-your-tie-to-school and don't-you-know-how-the-government-works, hippie? Was it always a smokescreen?

So...yeah, I've been a little distracted. Writing-wise.

But I'm still hitting my 250-words-a-day target! Not always when I'm supposed to (in the morning), and not always in a single session (10 minutes at lunch, 20 minutes after work, 15 minutes before bed...), but I am getting them done, every day.

Not much more than the minimum, I'm afraid. Which is why the novel's only at 22,894 words. But it's progress, all the same.

Taking weekends off is still helping. Relives the pressure for a bit. Lets me do some of the research I need to do to properly write the section I'm on, which can soak up a lot of time (can you believe it's hard to find an English-language book on 17th-century Central Asian history and culture?). Also gives me a chance to reflect on where things stand so far, and where I'd like to novel to go next.

What about you? How is your writing going, two weeks into the new year?

Oof, 2021 started out well, didn't it?

I mean even with the spike in Covid-19 patients, and the continued lies spread by the President and his allies about the election, I had a feeling on New Year's Day that we'd escaped the awfulness of 2020. That we'd turned a corner, the case numbers would be coming down soon, President Biden would be in office in just a few weeks, and we could start the work of rebuilding everything the Republican Party has destroyed over the last four years.

Even the Georgia elections (!) gave me hope. My fellow citizens in GA turned out in such numbers that they put the two Dems over the top, putting an end to the use of the Senate as just a roadblock to legislation. Exciting times!

And then came the coup.

I know, I know. Attempted coup. Or riot. Maybe insurrection, if you're a journalist and you're feeling spicy.

And suddenly all of the mental habits I'd tried to shed from 2020 were back. Reflexively checking the news every five minutes. Doomscrolling on Twitter. Cognitive dissonance from looking out my window, seeing a bright January day in SoCal, and then hearing reports of shots fired in the Capitol building.

Texting friends living in DC, to see if they're okay during the madness.

I called my brand-new freshman-clean House Rep yesterday, not just to urge her to impeach Trump, but also to check in and see if they were safe.

What a country.

Difficult to think in such times. Difficult to write.

But so far, I've managed to do it. Each day, closed out Twitter, stared at the screen, reading over the previous days' work until I sink back into the story.

And it is sinking. It is an escape, for me. A needed one, in this case.

So I've pushed the novel up to 21,348 words. I'm almost done with the scenes I've been working on, patch-work-style. I move up and down the page, writing sections as they come to me, completely out of order. I leave visual gaps in-between them, extra newlines, to show that these are fragments. Then go back in and fill the gaps later, stitching together all the pieces until they read like a continuous whole.

It's not how I've written other novels. Not even how I usually write stories, either. But it's the only thing that's working for me, right now. So I'm using it.

Hope wherever you are, that you're safe, that you can still put yourself in the headspace to write, even if it's just a few words.

Hang in there.

We made it to a new year!

In the past, I've taken that for granted. One year rolled into the next, I got older, and the world kept turning.

Not this year. This year, reaching January feels like an escape, like ducking under a closing door just before it seals itself shut.

So a sincere Happy New Year to us all!

Novel's at 19,864 words. I'm still butt in chair every morning, forcing myself to stay there until I hit my word count goal. Some mornings it's easier, some it's harder, but...I'm always making progress.

I'm actually starting to run out of runway on the research I've already done about the setting. Which means I'm having to make more things up out of thin air, and thus getting more things wrong. I've already had to revise a few scenes based on new reading I've done. That'll happen more and more, I expect, until I can catch up.

I know that ultimately, I'll need to do some heavy editing of this draft, once it's complete. Not just to fix some inconsistencies, but also to ensure the things that are consistent are historically accurate. Or at least, as accurate as a non-specialist like me can get them in a fictional tale.

But since I know I'll need to do it, it doesn't scare me to get things wrong now. What's important now, I think, is to get the emotional beats of the story right. If I can nail down the characters, and how they react to the things that happen to them, I can fix the details later. Even if those details mean I need changes to the events of the plot, that's fine. So long as the emotional arc of things is right.

That's my theory, at least.

I want to thank those of those you who've been reading me regularly through this hell year. You give me hope that someday, these novels I grind away at will see the light of publication.

And for my fellow writers, I offer a hope and a blessing: May your writing be a joy and comfort to you. May your inner editor take a vacation when you're drafting. And may all your tales be true.

Onward to 2021!

When my wife and I moved into our new house back in February, we thought that would be the most stressful thing we did this year.

When I backed out of working a booth at a conference in early March because some Covid-19 cases had been reported in California, we thought I was being overly cautious.

When I had my birthday party on Zoom in April, with cases raging both here and back east, we thought that would be the low point.

When May came, and protests exploded across the country, we thought it wasn't safe to join them because of the potential for the virus to spread, never imagining that the police would be the biggest threat.

And then...and then the year is a blur for me, truly. Protests, and cops run riot, and record wildfires, punctuated by two camping trips taken in desperation, to get out of the house, to get somewhere, away from people, only to find that those spaces were crowded, too, and it seemed that no one, young or old, thought wearing a mask or keeping their distance or traveling with just their families was important.

I remember October, because for Halloween we turned out the lights and huddled indoors and hoped no one stopped by to ask for anything, for fear of them bringing the virus with them.

I remember November, because the election dragged on and on and on, and the Trump Regime launched an attack on the legitimacy of the results that failed in the courts but convinced my entire family back home that Biden is an illegitimate President.

Oddly enough, November is when I was first able to mentally breathe again.

It's also when I started writing the novel I'm currently working on, jumping into NaNoWriMo with both feet and falling on my face, as is the 2020 way.

But I picked myself back up, and I'm still working on the book. I like it more and more, as I write it and figure out new things about it. It's going to be different from anything else I've written: a fantasy with very little magic, a historical book with a diverse cast across two continents, a novel told in third-person with entire chapters written in first.

I have no idea what I'm doing. I have no idea if anyone will want to read this thing once it's done. It's scary, but also....a little liberating?

I think that's something I want to take into 2021 with me. An attitude, of not quite "fuck it," but close. More like "you have no idea what's going to happen in the world, and no control over it, so you should write what you want and worry about selling it later."

Which is not to say that I've held back from writing the stories I'd like to. More that, when writing them, I've aimed to write something sellable, something I think the market will buy. It's a...pressure, I guess, that I put on myself. To put some elements in and not others, to shy away from tackling anything too big or too strange.

This novel is one step along the path of letting that go. It's a weird structure. It's about a time and place(s) that no one (in the US) writes about. Its main character is disabled.

It'll probably go nowhere, even if I manage to pull it off, craft-wise. I'm writing it anyway.

So thank you, 2020, for teaching me this much: Writing is hard, so you should write what you love.

See you all in 2021.

Happy Holidays!

I'm finally back in my office. All the house work we've had done for the last three months -- while we lived, worked, ate, and slept sealed-off in the guest room -- is over. Taking down the barrier between the guest room and the rest of the house was like opening a huge present; we were grinning like kids the whole time.

And the work all looks fantastic, and a little unreal. Like we've stumbled into someone else's house. But no, it's ours! And we can once again use it all.

So I'm back to watching the sun come up over the mountains just east of the city, hammering out words before the work of the day begins.

Speaking of which, the novel's up to 18,000 words. So I'm putting out about 2,000 words a week, which is not bad, but does mean this draft won't be done until looks away, does mental math sometime in June (?!).

Which is...fine, I suppose. That's still a novel draft in less than a year. But if I only work on one project at a time, that means it'll be six months before I get back to editing my last novel. I've gotten some excellent feedback from my beta readers, and I'd like to incorporate it all before sending it out to agents.

Maybe I can keep working on the new draft during the week, and edit the other novel on the weekends? That's technically not taking the weekend off, but it is taking a break from the current draft. And editing's the kind of work that's hard for me to track, in the sense of how many words I've covered. These editing passes I'll need to jump around in the narrative, adding a bit of dialog here, changing a description there. It's not linear work.

What about you? Do you work only one project at a time, even if that delays things? Or do you find a way to juggle multiple pieces at once?

Anyway, as we wind down 2020, I hope you and yours are coming through the pandemic safe. I hope the vaccine gets rolled out to where-ever you are soon, and that enough folks get it for the danger to pass.

Good riddance to 2020. I'll see you all in 2021!

Novel's at around 16,400 words. I haven't done today's writing session, though, so I should finish out the week closer to 17K.

The deal is working, so far. Holding myself hostage, unable to go for my morning job or take a shower or have breakfast or anything until my writing's done for the day, has been rather effective.

And I'm looking forward to the weekend again, when I can daydream and doodle and research and not have to worry about hitting a word count. That recharge time is proving important, for my mental health and for my writing.

Funny, I think I started this year by throwing away word count goals and the idea of penalizing myself for not meeting them. Here I am at the end of the year, once again setting daily word count goals and forcing myself to meet them. It seems not only do different techniques work for different people, different things can work for the same person at different times.

What about you? What previous writing habit have you brought back this year, if any? Or maybe there's an old trick you've dropped?

Novel crossed 15,000 words today!

My pace has slowed since NaNoWriMo, but I'm still managing about 2,000 words a week, which is pretty good for me. Puts me on track to finish this draft sometime early next year.

I've changed up my writing routine a bit, both to give myself more time to write, and to have a chance to recharge.

So I've made a deal with myself: I have to write in the morning, first thing, as soon as I get up. No news, no twitter, no email. Just writing, until the day's words (at least 250) are done. I can take however long I want to set those 250 words down, but I can't do anything else until I do.

Most days, I end up going beyond those 250. Once the pump is primed, the words keep flowing.

In exchange for this early-morning discipline, I only have to write on week days. Monday through Friday. Saturday and Sunday are days off, now, just like they would be (I hope) if I were a full-time writer. If I did write full-time, I'd still need vacations. Still need days off. But I'd have no one to tell me when to take them, and I'd probably feel guilty if I did.

So I've made this deal. Treat writing like job, get it done first thing in the morning, and in return, I can take the weekends off.

Sunday was the first day I've deliberately taken off (from writing) in...months. I still did some research for the current book, digging up images and articles on Swedish manors built or renovated in the 18th century. I sketched some notes for future scenes. But I didn't write anything, didn't have to produce any words.

It was...incredibly relaxing. It was glorious.

And I came into Monday's writing session recharged. Ready and eager to go.

This is the first full week I've been working under this self-made bargain. I'm looking forward to the weekend, having met my word count goal every day this week, first thing upon waking.

What about you? Do you ever take days off from writing? Do you feel guilty when you do, and if so, how do you handle it?

So I didn't win NaNoWriMo this year. It wasn't even close.

But I'm not quitting on the novel. I've come too far not to see it through.

And NaNoWriMo has got me flexing my writing muscles again. After today's writing session, I'll have churned out almost 2,000 words in a single week. That's not novel in a month pace, sure, but it's a novel-in-a-few-months-pace, which is better than I've been able to achieve since the pandemic began.

Even so, I still feel pressed for writing time. I want to brainstorm for a bit, every day, before working on a scene. Or after finishing a scene, reflect on what might be missing from it, what I'll need to add the next day. And that's hard to do, when I've only got thirty minutes or so free to spend on the novel.

It's good that I've got some vacation coming up at the end of the month, then. That'll certainly give me more time in which to work.

But I want -- I need -- to carve out more time during a regular work day. Which might mean dropping some of my other hobbies (I've been brushing up my French, and learning Swedish) in order to make that time. Or maybe I'll get up even earlier, so I can make that time at the start of the day.

Not sure what's best. Gotta figure something out, though.

What about you? What do you do, when you feel like you're not getting enough writing time?

Did I say I could write at least half a day this week, free from distraction?

turns to self from last week: Oh my sweet summer child.

I've been able to put in a full day of writing just once. Once

Every other day, I've had my water shut off and construction going on in both the room right next to my temporary office (I'm currently working in the dining room) and above it. They're grinding, sawing, singing, at random intervals, throughout the day.

It's...impossible to concentrate.

Still, I've managed to squeeze some words out. Crossed the 11,000 word mark on the novel yesterday, which felt good.

But I'm nowhere near close to hitting 50K by the end of the month. According to NaNoWriMo, at my current pace, I'll be lucky to finish by end of February 2021 (!).

So while I'm bummed about not "winning" NaNoWriMo this year, I'm still glad I did it, for two reasons.

First, because I was doing it, I was able to convince a friend to take the plunge, and try his hand at his first novel. And he's won! He's well past 50K at this point, and is on track to wrap up the first draft of his first novel. I'm jealous of his word-count, true, but I'm also overjoyed that he got it done. Can't wait to read it, when (if) he's ready for beta readers.

Second, because the time pressure for word count did push me to stop using outlining as an excuse, and just start writing. I was terrified of getting lost, of not being able to write it if I didn't know where I was going.

I forgot that I've written all of my other novels without an outline. All of them. Short stories, as well.

I'm not a full-on pantser, but I do discover things while I'm writing that I don't seem to think of when simply outlining. I need a plan to get started -- characters, situation, possible ending -- but once I'm in it, the plan gets altered so much that a detailed outline would be pretty much trashed by the time I'm 5,000 words in.

Outlining, for me, comes later. Once the first draft is done, and I've mapped out all the place I want to go, all the things about the world I want to see. Then I can pull together a detailed outline, find the weaknesses in the story, and use an updated outline to produce the second draft.

So I've learned a bit about my own process. It takes longer, this way, I feel, but at least it happens. Better to charge ahead and produce a draft that can be edited, then to spin my wheels creating an outline that's going to get thrown out once ink hits the page.

And what about you? If you did NaNoWriMo this year, what did it teach you about your own writing process? Do you write better in the morning or evening? Do you need to outline it, or do you need to wing it? Can you write through distractions, or do you need a calm place in which to work?

Slow but steady.

I'm at a little more than 7,000 words on the new novel so far this month. Behind where I need to be to finish NaNoWriMo, but further than I was a few weeks ago. That's got to count for something, right?

Writing during the week has been difficult. Work has been...stressful, and I've needed to come in early and stay late, just to keep up. That's obviously cut into my writing time, but it's also drained my batteries before I even have a chance to sit down at the keyboard for the day's words.

As a result, while on the weekend I built up to around a thousand words a day, during the week I've fallen back to a few hundred. Sometimes. If I'm lucky.

There's light at the end of this tunnel, though. I've got a week of vacation coming up. A full week, when I can write at least half the day, before house and family obligations pull me away.

It might not be enough time, even then, for me to catch up to where I need to be to reach 50K by November 30th.

But I'm going to try for it, nevertheless.

Hope your own writing is going well, and if you're trying NaNoWriMo, that you're slaying each day's word count, day by day.

Onward!

Work on the novel has been slow but steady this week.

I’m not getting down more than a few hundred words a day. But I am getting them down.

The slow pace feels like a lack of time, for me. As in, I don’t seem to have enough time to gather together my thoughts about where the story should go, and then set them down. Like I have just enough time to do one, but not the other.

And for NaNoWriMo, I need to do both.

Hoping to be able to make up some lost time this weekend. Wish me luck!

I thought writing during a pandemic was hard.

Turns out, writing during a tight election where one of the candidates has spent the last several months shouting "Fraud!" at the top of his lungs whenever someone mentions mail-in voting (while casting his own votes via mail) is even harder.

So I did start working on a new novel this week, for NaNoWriMo. And I have worked on it each day.

But I've made very little progress. Only 1,424 words to date.

I'm trying not to stress about it. I have enough to worry about already, from work happening on the house to day-job deadlines looming next week to the pandemic getting worse in my city to trying to help my wife convince her mother that no, in fact, Biden will not come personally to her house to confiscate the guns she doesn't have and disband the police department.

It's a lot.

But I want to tell this story. I've been thinking over these characters for a few months now, and I want to see where they go. I want to show you their world.

I just have to build it first.

What about you? If you're doing NaNoWriMo, how is it going?

So I found a cure for the distractions last week: Stop reading the news.

I'm serious. Before last week, I'd check three different news sites in the morning, first thing, before sitting down to write. I felt informed, sure, but I also used up time in the morning that I could have spent writing.

So now I'm...not doing that anymore. I wake up and write, for about an hour, before doing anything else.

I still read the news, of course. I just do it after my writing is done, not before.

And so far, it's working! I've been able to churn out anywhere from 800 to 1,200 words a day, doing things this way.

Which is good, because NaNoWriMo starts on Sunday, and I've signed up for it again.

I know, I know. There's too much going on. I've already got a novel I need to doing additional editing passes on. And what about that series of short stories that I wanted to do, based on those horror writing prompts?

The thing is, I logged into my NaNoWriMo account last week, just to blow the dust off it, and I realized that every novel I've ever written started out as a NaNoWriMo project.

Even if I didn't finish the novel during that November, I got enough of a start that I eventually finished that draft.

So I signed up. I think the previous short story idea I had, about a woman in the eighteenth century who fights to protect an endangered species -- dragons -- has enough there to be longer than a short story. I already put off starting it once, because the more I worked on it, the longer it grew.

Well, if I just call it a novel off the bat, the length's fine, isn't it?

As training, I'm working through Lisa Cron's Story Genius. It's got a series of exercises for drilling into the bedrock of your story and figuring out what really makes it tick, so (presumably) writing the novel itself becomes easier. For example, writing a full scene from your main character's past that shows the origin of the internal issue they're going to work through (in the course of the novel).

I'm doing it for the horror short story, for now, not the novel (not yet). First because, well, doing it on the novel would be cheating. Second because I've not used this book before, so I wanted to try it out on something small to see if it works for me. And third, because I was kind of flailing on the short story. I hoped some structure would push me forward.

And it has, so far. As I mentioned, I've been churning out backstory scenes, working through my main character's personal issues so I know just what situation will push them out of their comfort zone (and into the plot).

I'm hoping to have enough worked through before Sunday that I can at least write a first draft of the story, and get it out of the way before I need to focus on the novel.

But if not...Oof. I'm not sure what I'll do. Start the novel, I suppose, in order to keep up with the NaNoWriMo pace? And pick up the short story on the other side, in December.

If any of you are doing NaNoWriMo this year, look me up! My user name's mindbat , let's be writing buddies, and help keep each other's spirits up!

Distractions piling up this week.

First, there's the upcoming election, which has my stomach in knots. We need to kick out the current regime in the US, but even if voted out, will they go? Even if they leave, what will they destroy on their way out?

Second, we're having some work on the main bathroom in the house. Which has meant days where the water's shut off. Days where the workers pounding on the floor right above my makeshift office feels like they're hammering directly into my skull.

Third, the short stories I've been sending out, including the one that I feel is the best thing I've written to date, are getting rejected, one by one. I know I'm not supposed to take that personally, but they make me question myself.

I mean, what am I doing, really? Building a writing career out of fifteen minutes here, thirty minutes there? Who am I fooling?

The writers whose stories I know, the ones that have made it, all have spent more time on it. More time writing, more time editing, more...time, in general. I don't know if it's a constant source of tension with their families, but...I can't take that kind of time.

So I'm down and doubting, dear reader. Unsure of myself, and this thing that I'm doing.

I don't want to quit, but...if all my writing has is a weird half-life, scraped together from minutes in the day, is it something I'll ever be good enough at? And if all I'm doing is doodling on scraps of paper that might end up on the fridge if I'm lucky, why am I doing it?

Did I say five new flash stories last week?

At my current pace, I'll be lucky to finish one.

Apparently, I forgot how hard a first draft can be.

I am working on one, though. It's a sweet little story about a group of kids who turn cannibal.

...did I not mention it was horror?

I'm sketching it out, 100 words at a time. I say sketching because I'm writing it in patches, jumping from place to place in the narrative instead of writing it straight through. It's a way for me to get past any block I have writing a certain section. I can skip ahead, or go back to a previous scene, and come back to the part that's giving me trouble later.

It's working, because I'm already eight hundred words in. That also means this is likely not going to be a flash piece, unless I trim it way down after. Which is fine, but once again shows I'm not a great judge of how big the story will be based on the idea I have. Maybe that's something that will develop over time, as I write more pieces of various sizes?

Meanwhile, the novel's heading out to beta readers. And I've got some time now to pay attention to where my short stories are going, and start submitting them again.

Which means I'll start getting rejections rolling in again. Each one still stings, but...really, there's no other choice. Write, Finish, Submit: The last step there is as crucial as the others.

Hope where-ever you are, you're able to keep writing, eight months into this pandemic. Using whatever tricks you can to keep your creativity alive.

It’s done! The edits are done!

Well, this round of edits, anyway...There’ll be more, down the line.

But the third draft of the novel is finished!

This is the first draft that I feel can be seen, so I’m sending it out to beta readers, hoping to get some good (meaning: useful and thorough, not merely positive) feedback.

I’ll also need to send it to sensitivity readers, because some of the characters are from ethnic groups outside my own. I think I’ve done them justice, but I know I’m not the best judge of that. So I’ll ask some friends of mine to be additional readers, letting me know if I’ve messed anything up.

While I wait (and lean into my reading, to unwind a bit), I'm going to work on a short story or three.

Or five.

I found a horror anthology that’s accepting flash fiction on five different subjects through December. The topics are broad enough that I’ve brainstormed a few different story ideas for each.

Since they’re flash pieces, I thought I’d write one up for each topic, and submit them all (which they allow). Five little stories for my brain to chew on while I take a break between editing passes.

What about you? What do you do, between revisions of a longer work? Or do you take any sort of breathing room between them, at all?

I've been having incredibly vivid dreams.

Dreams that fade from memory when I wake up.

Parts of them linger, though. An accusation that was hurled at me. A song someone else was singing.

I think it means my unconscious mind is...bored? I haven't worked on anything new in a while, since I decided to focus on the novel edits. And as I near the end of the novel, those edits are becoming more re-phrasing and less re-writing. Less work for my imagination to do.

So I wonder if that's why my dreams have suddenly become full-color 3D rousing soundtrack level productions. It's my unconscious saying "give me something new to work on!" while I keep saying "not yet."

Because I do lean on my unconscious mind a lot when writing. Drafting or outlining, I'll often hit a wall, a place in the story where I'm not sure where to go, and I'll stop there for the day. Literally sleep on the problem, and come back the next day.

Usually, by the time I return to the work, I've got a solution. My unconscious has chewed on the problem all night, and delivers it up to me when I need it.

After...well, years...of working together like that, I'm wondering if my unconscious misses it. Even in the midst of a pandemic, even when I think (consciously) that I can't work on two things at once, it's saying "let's give it a shot."

So I guess I will! I'll pick up the new story again, wrap up its outline, and start drafting.

Or maybe even just dive into the drafting part, who knows? The outline's mostly done, and it's the writing itself that works out my unconscious the most.

What about you? Do you rely on your unconscious mind for help in your writing? Has it ever sent you a message, like it seems to be doing to me?

I can't believe Breonna Taylor's killers are going to walk free.

I mean, I can believe it, in the sense that racism is real and cops are killers and they're killers because they kill and get away with it in this country.

But it's just...hard to grasp that after all we've been through, these United States, in 2020, a group of people could decide it's just fine to charge into the home of one of their fellow citizens and murder them, so long as the murderers are wearing badges.

It's also hard for me to wrap my head around the President of the United States saying for months that the only election he could lose is a fraudulent one, and there's no howls of indignation from his side of the aisle. No Senators lining up to condemn his words and ask that the House open a new impeachment investigation.

Nothing. Not a fucking peep.

Meanwhile in my state, in supposedly progressive California, we still use inmates as firefighters, paying them perhaps a dollar a day, which is slave labor by any other name. And once they've served their time, if they happened to have been born somewhere else, we hand them over to ICE for deportation.

Oh, and there's still a pandemic on, so walking around outside to enjoy the air newly-cleared of smoke and ash means constantly dodging people who aren't wearing masks.

So it's all I can do right now, when I'm not doomscrolling, to keep editing the novel. One chapter at a time.

I feel like I should be making more progress. Editing more than one chapter a day. Maybe even racing to the finish line.

Or picking up the story I was outlining a few months ago, and starting to actually put words to paper.

But I can't.

I just...can't.

The writing spirit is very willing, but the writing flesh, the meaty brain and hands that would summon words from the void, are quite busy right now.

So I press on, one chapter at a time. I'm not stopping, but I'm not able to move any faster right now.

Because this book's become even more important to me, lately.

It's about prisons. It's about all the different kinds of people that get locked up, and why. It's about exploitation, and greed, and how it's all kept going by the people that look the other way. The ones that hold their noses so they can benefit.

It's also about forgiveness, and change. About making yourself vulnerable again, after holding onto a hurt for so long.

I want to finish it. I need to finish, to have this story told. To share it.

There's not much else I can do, so I'm doing this.

Voting. Donating. Speaking up.

And writing.

I'm turning the editing corner, into the final third of the book.

I'm a little nervous about this section. The middle edits were smooth sailing, but the closer I get to the end, the more things need to line up perfectly. I need to make sure threads are getting wrapped up, that I haven't skipped any scenes, that everything makes sense.

I need to keep the whole novel in my head at this point, basically, in order to keep it all consistent through the end.

And the end, of course, is the most complicated part of the book. It's where the main conflict gets resolved, via multiple timelines and a perspective shift.

I hope it works. I hope I can hold it all together.

Because if I can, if I do, then this round of edits will be finished. And I can start sending it out to beta readers, to finally get feedback from another pair of eyeballs than mine.

And maybe, just maybe, have their reviews back in time to make final adjustments, and have it ready to send to agents by the end of the year.

It is...a tight deadline. But we live in hope, don't we?

It struck me this morning that the pace at which I come up with new story ideas has slowed down.

Time was I couldn't go a day without being struck by some story idea, and having to write it down.

These days, I feel like all of my ideas are about the book or the story I'm currently working on. Nothing new, no bolts of lightning, just new ways of looking at the characters or the situation I'm already creating.

And that made me nervous. Like, what if the well's run dry? What if once I finish these stories, that's it? Nothing else comes?

To banish those thoughts, I remind myself of two things.

First, it's a pandemic. Not to mention my state is currently on fire (the evidence of which is clearly visible in the sky outside my window). I'm allowed to feel a bit more stressed, and that means my brain isn't functioning at 100%.

Second, it's okay to not be constantly throwing out new ideas. In fact, it's a good thing. Plowing my creative energy into what I'm working on, rather than dreaming up new work to take on, is exactly what I should be doing. The fact that my brain doesn't feel the need to go wandering for a new story to work on means this story's interesting and deep enough to keep it occupied.

It's a positive sign, not a negative one. And it should be embraced.

As for the novel itself, work continues. I'm still going through a chapter a day, giving myself the time to really look at each scene and fix the things that need fixing. A line of dialog that doesn't work. Some blocking that no longer makes sense.

Okay, not everything. Some things I'm leaving for another pass.

Like in the last chapter I edited, there's a shift in one character's dialog. They go from speaking somewhat formal English to a less-formal syntax. It's subtle, and it still sounds like the character, but it's there.

I like the shift, and I think it's appropriate for the situation in that chapter. But in order to keep it, I need to go through and make sure that shift happens every time that situation comes up, so it feels deliberate, and not like a mistake.

Alternatively, I could go through and make the character's dialog pattern the same everywhere. That might be easier, but I think there's something that will be lost if I do that. There's information encoded in the way they shift their speech according to who they're speaking to, and I'd hate to lose that.

So yes, even as I go through this pass, I know I'm going to need to do another. But that next pass will be more focused, and thus faster, than this one. At least, that's the intent.

What about you? When you do your editing, do you tackle everything in each pass? Or do you break it up into different read-throughs?

Is it bad to enjoy reading your own book?

I'm still working on the novel, still plugging away at editing one chapter a day. It's about all I can do, given my schedule constraints.

And so far, it's...not that bad?

I mean, I'm probably filling in gaps that are there because I know the characters, I know the setting. But I was trying to write the equivalent of an action movie, and while I think I failed at that (there's not nearly enough stunts or fights in it to qualify), I think I did manage to produce a fast-paced, sci-fi, thriller.

Each of the chapters are short -- the longest is maybe ten pages -- which makes them easier to edit, but also easier to read.

And I've kept the language pretty tight, as well. Not always tight enough, hence the need for edits. And sometimes I wander off into describing a character's thoughts from the outside, inside of rendering them from the inside (it's a shift in point of view that I'm still learning how to handle properly). But overall, each scene starts, flows, and then ends without a lot of fat to trim.

Which worries me, of course. What am I missing? What am I not seeing, that I need to fix?

It reminds me of something the write C Robert Cargill tweets about a lot: That when you look at your work, and hate it, part of it is because of the difference between your skills and your taste. Your taste is likely far more sophisticated than your skills, starting out. You enjoy reading writers far better than you. And that's good! Your sophisticated taste is what lets you see the problems in your own work, which you can then fix.

So I have to wonder: Has my taste declined? Have I been slacking in feeding it new works, so I can be critical of my own?

Or am I just still too close to this book?

Either way, I'm not upset at these chapters. They're not so horrible that I wouldn't want to show them to someone else.

Which perhaps is good? And maybe the point of doing all these editing passes and rewrites. To get the book to a point where I think it's ready to be seen by other people.

Flawed still, probably, yes. But good enough to go out to beta readers, and eventually (after more edits) agents. That should be the goal, right?

And if I'm getting there, I should feel good about it. Not dread.

Note to self: Stop feeling dread.

Made it through the intro chapters of the novel!

I'm past the inciting event now, and heading into the chapters of the long middle.

Most of the edits for these chapters, so far, have been small things. Removing some extra words here, adjusting the blocking of some characters there. I'm editing more to make things consistent than anything else. Haven't had to knocks wood do any major re-working of these.

And thank goodness, because just as I turned the corner of the inciting event, I started to only have fifteen minutes a day to work on it.

It's stress, more than anything else, but I've had some schedule shifts as well that have thrown me off. Made it hard to concentrate, to sink into the novel and see what's missing with what I've written.

But the only way out is through, right? So I'm chugging along, working on it when I can, and trying to be patient. The work stress will pass, my schedule will get sorted, and I'll get back to spending more time on it each day.

That's the hope, anyway.

I seem to always discover new things about the story while I'm writing it.

It shouldn't surprise me anymore, but it does. Somehow, no matter how much time I spend thinking about and planning a scene, simply by writing it out, my brain will come up with new ideas and connections to other parts of the story.

It's all good stuff, and I'm grateful, but it'd be a touch more convenient if I could think of these things while I'm outlining. That way, I wouldn't have to go back and revise other parts of the book to match the new things I've come up with while writing a scene.

Don't get me wrong: the fact that I can come up with anything at all, instead of just staring at the screen like a deer caught in a truck's headlights, is fantastic.

It's also just a tad bit annoying, sometimes.

Which is to say: I’m making progress on the novel edits.

Looping, patchwork, scattered progress, but progress all the same.

Right now I’m trying to nail down the intro chapters, the first five or so. I want them to do quite a lot: Introduce the main character, and their (normal-day) problems, lay the ground work for a mystery that pops up later, orient the reader in the setting, introduce some antagonists, and make all that interesting enough so the inciting incident is worth sticking around for.

Oh, and they’ve also got to setup the stakes for the inciting incident, have the incident itself, and then pave the way for those consequences to play out.

It’s a heavy responsibility for those first chapters to carry. And before I started making these changes, they weren't quite up to it.

But I think they can be! So long as I make the right changes.

So that's what I've been working on this week, and will likely keep working on into next week.

I feel a bit like a director on a movie, making changes to the set design between each take (and also changing the script. and the blocking. the actors hate me). I go in and add a machine there, change the readout on a display there, redirect the lighting over there, and then let the scene play out again. Or scratch a scene entirely and replace it with something new, in a new location.

It's slow going, but it's fun! Kind of. Makes me grateful no one's had to read the earlier drafts. This one's going to be bad enough.

I'm rather upset with past me.

Finally dove into editing the novel this week. Stopped procrastinating and worrying about the right way to do it, and just started doing it. Figured I'd look for inconsistencies, and touch up language or dialog along the way.

And at first it worked! I chugged along, making small changes, trimming sentences here and there, for four whole chapters.

But then I noticed something: The chapters I'd written (and edited, now for the third time) were all too short.

I'd left out physical descriptions of the characters, so the reader had no guidance on what they looked like.

I'd left out descriptions of the locations they were moving through, so the reader had no way to orient themselves in space.

And I'd left out any discussion of how the characters should react to a crisis, so the reader had no idea of the alternatives, or how bad the crisis really was.

I could tell all this, for the first time, because the reader was me.

I don't mean that I was literally lost in my own novel. Thank goodness, no, I still knew where everything was, and what everything looks like.

But I'd had enough time off from the book to approach it like a reader. And I've recently read some books that had a quick pace and an interesting plot but never gave me enough time to get oriented in the world, so I always felt a little confused.

Both things that let me recognize it when it started happening in my own book.

So this editing pass -- draft number three, for those keeping score at home -- is turning out to be a "filling in the gaps" pass. Expanding conversations so each character's whole train of thought is present (or at least enough for the reader to make the tiny leaps required). Spending more time in a space before the plot pushes us out of it, so I can give the reader something to visualize.

Thankfully I've been thinking about all of these things for two years now (or three? is it three years?) so I can fill in the gaps when I spot them. But even as I fill in the gaps, I know I'm creating more work for myself. Because each of those filled gaps is now a first draft, and will need to be revised again (and again) before it's ready to go out.

So thanks, past me. You keep the plot humming along, but you forgot to lay down all the sign posts along the way.

I need to get back to working on the novel.

I've let it sit these past few weeks, untouched, while I finished getting one short story into shape and started plotting a new one.

But if I'm going to meet my personal deadline of having the novel ready to submit to agents by December 1st, I'm going to need to edit this second draft.

To be honest, I'm intimidated. I've never edited anything this long before.

How do I even do it? Read it all through, and then go back and edit passages? That sounds...like it'll take forever.

Or do I work chapter by chapter, editing each one until it's done, and then moving on? That sounds like an easy way to lose sight of inconsistencies (or to having to go back and edit previous chapters anyway, as inconsistencies show up).

I think what I'm going to do is a series of editing passes. Pick one thing to look for -- like the consistency of a single character's dialog -- and edit all instances of that. Then pick something else -- the descriptions of a ship, say -- and edit all of those.

I'm hoping this will give me a structure in which to do multiple reads over the book, without getting lost in the weeds of any individual chapter. And it should broaden my perspective so I can stitch the book together, so to speak, with these edits. Make it more coherent, more whole.

But what do I do with the short story I've been outlining? I don't want to lose momentum on that. And I worry that the novel, once I start editing it, will take up all the room in my brain for narrative.

I want to work on both. Use the story as a break from the novel, and use the novel as a break from the story. They're different enough -- one's near-future sci-fi, the other is early modern period fantasy -- that I should be able to keep them separate in my head. And editing is different enough from drafting that I'll be exercising different writing muscles with each.

What about you? What do you do, when you've got a longer piece to edit and a shorter one to draft? Do you alternate working days? Finish the shorter piece before editing the longer? How do you handle two stories that both need your attention?

I feel like I'm telling this story to myself, over and over again, with each outline. New details get filled in, new connections appear, with each telling.

And each day I get up and tell it to myself another time, adding more pieces.

I so much want to just write, just set the words down on the page and let them fall where they may.

But then I'll be plotting out the second third of the story, and I'll have an idea that ripples all the way back to the beginning. And it makes me glad I haven't started writing anything more than snippets of dialog just yet. Because all of those snippets will likely need to change.

This story...It's more complicated than other short stories I've written. Less straightforward.

It's a five-part structure. One part setup, followed by three parts flashbacks (taking place over years and across continents), followed by a climax. And it all needs to hang together like a coherent whole, present flowing to flashbacks and then returning to the present.

I'm not sure I can pull it off, to be honest. I'll have to do a good bit of research for each flashback, just to ground them in reality. Then there's the problem of each flashback needing to be its own story, complete with character arc, while feeding into the larger narrative.

It's like writing four stories at once, really, with them nested inside each other.

Will it all make sense, in the end? Will the flashbacks prove to be too long, and need culling? Will my framing device be so transparent that it's boring? Will the conclusion be a big enough payoff?

Who knows?

All I can do is tell myself the story, piece by piece, over and over again, until I can see it all clearly.

I've never written a short-story this way before.

I'm coming at it more like a novel. I'm outlining, then researching things like character names and historical towns to model the setting off of, then revising the outline, rinse, repeat.

So I've written very little of it, so far. And what I have written -- snippets of dialog and description -- might get thrown out later, as the outline changes.

I'm not sure it's better, this way. I feel frustrated at times, like I want to just write the thing and get it over with.

But I know -- well, I feel -- that that will result in a story that's not as good as it could have been. Like eating grapes before they've ripened on the vine.

And I do keep coming up with more connections between the various pieces of the story, more ways to tie it all together. Each one is an improvement. Each one makes the story stronger.

Perhaps that's how I'll know when to stop outlining, and start writing? When I literally can't think of any way to make the story itself better?

How about you? How do you know when it's time to write a story, and when it needs to sit in your mind a little while longer?

Started drafting a new short story this week.

I'm taking a different approach, this time. For short stories, I usually just sit down and write it out, all in one go. At least for the first draft.

For this story, I'm doing a mix of outlining and writing. I jot down lines of dialog as they come to me, or -- in one case -- the whole opening scene came in flash, so I typed it up.

But the majority of the story is still vague to me, so I'm trying to fill it in via brainstorming and daydreaming. Sketching a map of where it’s taking place, thinking through why the town it’s set in exists, what it’s known for. Drafting histories for the main characters.

It’s fun, so it’s also hard to convince myself that it’s work. Necessary work, at that.

Because my guilty writer conscience wants to see words on the page. No matter that I’m not ready, the ideas only half-formed. For it, it’s sentences or nothing.

So I’m pushing back by reading a book specifically about short story techniques, using the authority of another writer to argue (with my guilt) that it’s okay to pause and think. That progress can mean no words save a character bio. That every story needs a good foundation, and that’s what I’m trying to build.

It’s working, so far. My guilt does listen, just not always to me.

What about you? How do you balance the need to feel productive with the background work that every story requires?

Missed last week's Keeping Score, but for a good reason: I was wrapping up the second draft of the novel!

I set down the final words in the last chapter later that weekend. It's done!

Or rather, the current draft is done. I've still got some editing passes to do: for consistency, for character dialog, for general polish.

But this draft, which started out as minor edits and grew to become pretty much a rewrite, is finished. As part of that rewrite, it's grown, from 70K to 80K.

Ditto the rewrite I was doing for the short story, which I also wrapped up last week. The story's grown from a 3,000-word piece to something north of 8,000 words! Some of those might get cut away in editing, but it'll still end up more than twice as long as it was before. I had no idea there was so much story left to tell with that one, until I tried to tell it.

With two project drafts done, I've mostly taken this week off. I need the space for the novel to cool off so I can approach the edits with an objective eye. I might leave that one untouched for a month or so, just to get some distance.

For the short story, I think I'll start editing it this week. At least an initial pass for consistency and word choice, before sending it off to beta readers. Once I get their feedback, I'll make further edits, to get it into shape for submission.

Meanwhile, I've started brainstorming a short story idea I had a while back. Everything's still vague now, but it's about dragons, and mentors, and loss. I'm excited to see how it shapes up!

It's been a struggle to write this week.

My uncle -- who because of age and circumstances was more like my grandfather, so I called him Pop -- died on Father's Day. And I've been living and working under a shadow ever since.

Hard enough to lose him. Harder still, because I couldn't make the trip out to Texas for his funeral, because of the pandemic.

He's gone, but I didn't get to say goodbye.

So I've been soldiering on. Writing a paragraph or two, at least, every day.

But each word is a struggle. And if I stop and think about anything for too long, my mind drifts back to losing Pop, and I come undone for a while.

Stay safe out there, folks. Wear your masks. Wash your hands.

Write what you can, when you can.

This week, I've been chasing the dragon of a finished draft.

I'm so close to being done with the short story revisions that I've been working on them every day, instead of alternating with the novel. It's like at a certain point, I can only hold one or the other in my head, and I've been holding the short story.

I'm still following the one-inch-frame method, jumping from scene to scene and writing a few paragraphs here, a page there, then coming back and joining them up later.

It feels like a cheat, sometimes, like I'm putting off doing my homework and playing video games instead. And I suppose I am, in a way, holding off from writing the parts that feel difficult in the moment and writing the ones that come easily.

But so far, I always end up coming back to the hard stuff, and finding that either a) It doesn't seem hard anymore, or b) It's not even needed.

The latter still worries me. How could this piece that I thought was essential not even need to be written? Am I not just procrastinating on my homework, but refusing to do it altogether?

I try to reassure myself with the knowledge that this is just a draft, one of many, and everything can be revised later. Nothing is permanent.

So here's hoping I can wrap up this draft over the weekend, and then push through the last scenes of the novel! Would be nice to end June with two projects completely drafted, ready to sit on the back-burner for a bit so I can come back and revise them properly.

How about you? When you're closing in on a finished draft, do you find you have little room in your head for anything else?

How does one write, in times like these?

I feel guilty for not being at the protests (my wife and I are both at high-risk for covid-19). For not being and doing more, both now and in the past.

I can make changes going forward. Donate to Black Lives Matter and to Bailout Funds. Push locally for police reform. Vote for candidates that will hold our police accountable.

But where does writing fit into that? How can I justify spending time...just, writing stories?

Because I have kept writing, even as the police have tear-gassed my old neighborhood. As helicopters fly overhead, towards the next showdown between the people and the "heroes" that are supposed to keep them safe.

On the one hand, I write because writing is my escape. A way for me to tune out the world for a bit, and come back to it ready to rejoin the struggle.

On the other hand, I write because writing is a form of activism.

When we read, we can enter the mind of a character completely. See the world entirely through their lives. Cry with them, when the world throws them down. Shout with joy when they triumph over those who would hold them back.

We can build empathy with people and situations we never thought we could. We can also see the dark sides of our own selves, when thoughts and habits of our own are cast in a different light, or shown to us from someone else's perspective.

So I write to escape, yes. But also to create something that can change someone's mind.

It's not as fast as signing a petition, true. Or joining a protest. Or calling a government official pressuring them to be better. Which is why I will continue to do all those other things.

But I will also write.

Earlier this week, I was on a Zoom call with some fellow writers. We were discussing how our writing output was doing during the pandemic: whether it was fine or (for most of us) had gone down.

And I realized: I've basically retooled my entire process during these last few months.

I used to write mostly on evenings and weekends, but now I do it in the morning, before the day even starts.

I used to write in blocks of a few hours at a time.

Now I do it in short thirty-minute bites.

I used to write a scene or a story straight through, from start to finish.

Now I jump around, filling in sections a little bit at a time, and then join them up later.

And the biggest change of all: I used to mostly pants my stories, but now I'm doing a lot of plotting and outlining before I set anything down.

Will it last once we're able to leave our homes safely? Who knows?

I might go back to the old way of writing. I might never be able to write that way again.

But it amazes me all the same, that little by little, my process has changed so much, in so short a time.

What about you? Has your process stayed the same through the pandemic? Or have you had to re-learn how to make your art, in order to keep working?

After two good weeks in a row, it was time for a rough one.

Had to shift my schedule up by three hours this week, for work. Well, I say shift my schedule, but...there's no way I'm going through my normal morning routine (writing, walking) at 4:30 in the morning.

So it's more like I abandoned my schedule, and then jet-lagged myself (while staying at home!).

As you can imagine, my writing output has suffered.

But it hasn't ground to a halt! I've managed to keep the writing streak alive, carving out time after work (thank the gods for afternoon naps) to make progress on both the novel and the short story, again on altering days.

Not always much progress, mind you. Several days "just get one sentence down" wasn't just a trick to get me to write, it was all I could get down.

But I did it, and I'm through to the other side, and can catch-up on sleep and (writing) work this weekend.

And reading. Surprisingly hard to read when your body is in the wrong timezone.

What about you? Have you settled into a new routine, and managed to keep with it? Or have the re-openings, patchwork as they are, disrupted the schedule you built during lockdown?

Current writing streak: 64 days.

Finally reached the part of the novel where I'm back to editing, instead of writing new chapters. It's made things easier going, on that front. Less intimidating to sit down with words already on the page, and know I've just got to make them consistent with everything else.

There's a few chapters at the very end where I'll need to be drafting from scratch again, but for now, at least, it's smoother sailing.

Of course, this won't be the end of my editing passes. I'll need to do at least one more of what I'm thinking of as "consistency passes" to check all the new material against what's already there. Then I'm planning on doing a dialog pass for each main character, to ensure they speak consistently throughout. Finally I'll do a phrase and copy-editing pass, looking for awkward wording or cliché description.

So still plenty to do.

I've also continued to work on the short story on alternate days this week. I wasn't sure I was ready to start writing the new section of that work, to be honest, but by focusing on just one little detail at a time -- Anne Lamott's one-inch frame technique -- I've managed to add ~1,000 words to the draft. If I keep this up, I might actually have the draft done (and ready to set aside, for later editing) next week.

Which would be...amazing. I wasn't sure I could ever get back to some sort of functioning writing schedule during the pandemic. Or get back to writing more than just a sentence or two a day. But something's happened recently, like a mental fog has lifted. I'm able to brainstorm again, and hold both of these storylines (the story and the novel) in my head again, and write a page a day again.

It may not last. I'm going to appreciate it while it does, though. I know not everyone has been as relatively fortunate as I have through this pandemic.

So I'm grateful, for the work I can do, while I can do it.

How about you? Have you felt like you've turned a corner lately? Or are things still too much in the air for your writing brain to settle into some kind of routine?

The streak's alive! I've managed at least 30 minutes of writing for 57 days straight now.

Alternating the days I work on the novel with the days I work on the short story seems to help, too.

I've even started tracking my daily word count again, when working on the novel. I don't let myself stop writing until I hit 250 words.

As a result, I've made notable progress on it. Finished three new chapters, and I'm ready to start editing down the next few.

And for the short story, I'm gathering notes on my research and getting plot points nailed down. This weekend (or early next week) I think I'll be ready to start writing some dialog, and then gradually fill in the rest.

Oh, and I have three other pieces submitted to paying markets. Keeping in the habit of sending them right back out a few days after a rejection comes in.

So this week has been good, relatively speaking. Still not operating at 100%, creatively, but I'm finding a new normal, a new pace of working to make a habit.

What about you?

Current writing streak: 50 days.

50 days! That's 50 consecutive days of working, bit by bit, on the novel, several short stories, and essays for the blog.

50 days of laying bricks, one at a time. Of sending out stories and getting rejections. Of wrestling with file formats, and Scrivener settings, all to conform to the particular submission guidelines of each market (sometimes "always follow the directions" is hard advice to hold to).

50 days of shoving the pandemic out of my mind for at least thirty minutes, each day, to go visit somewhere else in my imagination. A dearly needed mental vacation.

So, what's new this week?

I've taken up the habit of alternating days in which I'm working on the novel with days where I work on something else. It's a way of giving me a break from the general slog of the book without going too long without thinking about it. And it lets me make progress on some other projects.

Like the short story I started submitting to markets...two weeks ago? One of the rejections I got resonated with me. It took a while, but eventually that resonation joined up with some things my beta readers said, and crystallized this week into me thinking up a different ending for it.

The new ending changes the meaning of the piece. Shifts its emphasis. But I think it's stronger, and more cohesive with the rest of the story. And it adds a little bit of just desserts for one of the characters.

So I'm going to give it a shot.

I say "give it a shot" quite deliberately. It might flop. It might make the story worse, not better. I might fail to execute properly. Any of which would mean I'd go back to sending it out with the original ending.

But I'd like to try, so I've been using my alternate days this week to brainstorm and outline the new ending. Sketch out scenes, decide sticky plot points, nail down questions that arise as I think it through.

It's a different way of working for me -- usually I just throw down the short story, outline be damned -- and it's slower, but I'd like to be more deliberate in the way I craft things. I feel like the more plot holes I can fill during the outlining, the smoother the actual writing process will go. It should let me focus on the writing itself, because I've thought through the action and character beats already.

We'll see. Wish me luck.

Still on target, if just barely: 2,256 words written last week.

I’ve reached the “ye gods, when will it be over” stage of writing this book. I know I’m close to the end, and I know basically where I’m going, but it feels like a slog to get there. Doesn’t help that I changed how to get to the ending a while back, adding another 10-20,000 words to the story.

Thanks, past me.

So I’m blowing things up. Shoving obstacles in front of my characters left and right. Tweaking personalities of minor characters to make them more interesting (with notes to go back and make them consistent later). In general, just merrily running a drill through the story until I get to the ending.

Who knows? Maybe all these changes will end up being cut. Or maybe I’ll end up twisting the rest of the story so they fit.

I’ll only know once it’s done.

1,761 words written this week.

Whew.

Really glad I went to the Writers Coffeehouse last Sunday. Between the holiday, my wife and I closing on our new house (!), and the struggles I was having with the current novel, I might not have gotten anything done this week. But the group gave me a great solution to my problem (to keep writing as if I’d made the changes to earlier scenes that I’m planning, but without stopping to make those changes right now), and inspired me to keep pushing through.

I feel a little freer to experiment with this draft, now. Like I can try something out to make things more interesting or dramatic, without worrying that it matches up exactly to what came before. I know it’ll create a mess of a draft for me to clean up in later edits, but at least I’ll finish it. Easier to see the shape of the story once I’ve written it.

Made the new word-count goal for a second week, thank the gods: 2,478 words.

Again, most of those are short-story edits. I basically didn’t touch the current novel this week, which has turned out to be a good thing. I’ve had time to think through some of the problem areas, plot threads that weren’t quite matching up. When I do go back to working on that draft, I’ll have some revisions to make that’ll strengthen the story before I finish.

In the meantime, I’ve submitted one of the stories I revised last week. I’ve also got two more stories ready to submit after this week’s work, for a total of five.

Here’s hoping they all find good homes.