Blue October

I will drive so fucking far away
that I never cross your mind.
Do whatever it takes in your heart
to leave me behind.
-- Blue October, "Hurt Me" (from the album "Foiled")

Sunder: Day 18

Nothing new today.  Pushed too hard and was up way too late last night so I let the jets cool a bit for today.  The most I did was transfer the notes I made a Word document for later refinement.  I'll let the synopsis sit until Monday night when I'll start it up again.  What I managed to get done so far makes good sense though.

Sunder: Day 17

Much work done on the overall framework for "Sunder". I spent the night jotting down notes about alternating storylines for Charlotte Hudson and Colbrit Niemeier.  Until now I had been winging it improv-style with a general idea about where I wanted the story to go, but the major events broke loose tonight and have unfolded for me.  This is very exciting in ways that only a writer can understand.

I have never been one to make plans for the stories I write and that's probably why most of them lose their way and fail.  It's not that I disagree on principal with planning them because I can see the worth of doing that kind of work, it's just that I've always gotten impatient and just started writing the story.  I don't know what happened tonight to make this sudden leap forward, but I appreciate it (if you're listening, Writing Gods). 

Essentially what I'm writing is a synopsis.  Each paragraph describes a major chunk or movement of the story and the movements alternate between Charlotte and Colbrit.  I'm going to try to finish the synopsis tomorrow then I'll let it sit for a couple days and work on a few other things (more notes about the settings, the characters, etc.) then return to it and try to refine it a bit. 

After that I will try to plan out each movement into at least 2-3 chapters with the aim of fleshing out the sections into more detail.  I will try to write at least one healthy paragraph describing the action in each chapter.  The goal of this is to zoom in on parts of the story at closer and closer magnification.  That part of the work might take longer to do but I think it will be worth it as a planning exercise.

Sunder: Day 16

Got a bit of work done, but I'm calling it quits early tonight because I'm too tired to write.  I can't seem to get down on the screen what's in my head.  If I get some sleep and come back to it tomorrow night I might be able to make up what I am unable to do tonight.  (Honestly, I'm so tired right now, even writing this is a challenge.)

Wasting Time

"The time that we spend wasting, will forever seal our fate."
-- Cashman

Sunder: Day 15

Much work done on Colbrit Niemeier's crisis of conscience that has ended in his fall from grace.  I had been writing him for two weeks with little more than a vague notion of the personal torment that fuels him.  Now I am able put my finger on the moment that things went south for him and trace that event backwards through time to his own actions years previous that set the whole terrible series of events in motion.  No word count for tonight since I was working solely in my notebook, but everything that came to the surface will find its way into "Sunder".

This breakthrough with Colbrit came out of a small exercise I was doing trying to understand the larger setting of his world.  It shows once again that the imagination works in wonderful ways.  If you're stuck, let it develop ideas at its own pace (not the one you want to set for it) and you might be surprised at the results. 

Sunder: Day 14

Lacklustre session last night, but tonight was much better. Wrote a few new words, but spent most of my time rearranging things to help the flow and the tone. 

Most important: added two very good hooks to Colbrit for his story's future development.  Feels good to have accomplished something.

Knowing If You're a Writer

"If somebody is truly a writer, he will find it out and he will understand that if there is any romance attached to the vocation, it is balanced by a number of unromantic circumstances, for the biographies of writers make it clear what a tough and enduring breed they are.  There have been writers who have burst upon the world, to its astonishment and delight, but most writers have to establish a reputation over a period of time.  That is where the toughness comes in; early discouragement  is the rule, and much work is done before important lessons are learned."
-- Robertson Davies, Reading & Writing, pg. 36 (University of Utah Press)


Please, God...help me be tough.

Human Limits

"There are moments when we all, in one way or another, have to go to a place that we have never seen, and do what we have never done before."
-- Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, pg. 3 (Knopf Canada)

"You cannot be a hero unless you are prepared to give up everything; there is no ascent to the heights without a prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death."
-- Karen Armstrong, A Shrot History of Myth, pg. 37 (Knopf Canada)

Sunder: Day 13

Didn't get much writing done, I'm afraid.  Spent most of the day cleaning the apartment in increasingly hot and humid conditions.  By noon the apartment was a sweltering 28.9 C (84 F) at nearly 51% humidity.  Might not sound like a lot to people south of the border, but coming out of a long, frigid Canadian winter, believe me...I felt like Frosty on a hot Spring day. 


I broke down and arranged to go back to Cornwall tomorrow morning to pick up my air conditioner from storage at my parents' house.  When I told Dad I wanted the A/C, he laughed and said, "Ha ha!  You are the weakest link."  (He thinks his jokes have gotten funnier since he retired.)


It's almost nine and I am beat.  My brain is a sponge.  I showed up to work tonight, but I didn't get much done at all.  May be tomorrow.

Writer's Rule #1: "New Material Only"

I've been writing as a hobby pretty much all my life, ever since that day in Grade 6 when something I wrote captured the imagination of my classmates.  The biggest difficulty I currently face is maintaining forward momentum on a project.  I would get excited about an idea, start writing, but lose steam somewhere about a third of the way through the project.  I didn't realize until recently that part of the problem had to do with my work habits.  I would write a chapter then revise it.  Sometimes I would start revising before the chapter was finished.  Sometimes I would start revising the minute I sat down at the keyboard.  Revision is important, but it's clear to me now that I was spending far to much time worrying about getting the tiny details perfect when I should have concerned myself with completing the larger framework of the project.

I'm taking a different approach with Sunder.  From my extensive experience of starting novels and failing to complete them, I have decided that my own personal work habit should begin with this first rule: "New material only."  The premise is very simple: almost all the effort invested in a writing session should be spent on generating new material.  I've stuck to this rule over the last two weeks with favourable results.  Not only is the word count stacking up, but ideas seem to be coming more regularly to the forefront.  Instead of finishing a writing session and wondering what I'm going to work on next, more and more often I complete session with one or two new ideas for the next one. 

Every writer will tell you that it is impossible not to revise a little as you write, so here's the "exception to the rule" section.  Sometimes a great idea will come that has to be sandwiched into work you've already done.  Ideas that come up mid-stream often require rework to make everything fit properly.  I don't consider that to be a true revision (hence a waste of writing time) since I am making an allowance for more new material.  I'm all right with taking some time to complete that revision work, but I try to get through it as quickly as possible in order to get back to the leading edge of the story and renew the forward momentum. 

As one of my best friends once said, " 'Done' is the engine of 'More'."  The focus on "new material only" seems to bear that out and if I can maintain this pace, I should have a good sized stack of pages on my desk in six to eight months with a nearly complete novel.  After that will come "stage two" which will focus on taking a closer look at the raw draft and reworking the large and small details.

Sunder: Day 12

I prefer not to write on the weekends, but since I played hooky on Friday I needed to make up the time.  Wrote for a couple hours in the morning, but it was a stop-start effort, sputtering along like a car with water in its gas.  After lunch I watched the season finale of Fringe and then had a nap (read: I slept like a fallen log.) and got back to writing after supper with much better results--1747 words.

Work injected itself into my long weekend.  About half an hour after I finished writing, R.V. sent me a message.  "Are you there?"  Should have ignored him and gone to bed.  Better yet, should have set my Messenger status to Away or Appear offline (even better).  We spent two hours testing and retesting the deposit requirement calculation on customer Move-In service orders.  We were both remotely logged into the Ottawa office, he from his home in Gatineau and me from my parents' home in Cornwall, both of us sending status updates and testing results through MSN messenger.  Telecommuting at its finest.  We made some progress so it was a worthwhile exercise, but I'm going to ignore work messages for the rest of the long weekend.

Sunder: Day 11

Word count: 0

No new material tonight.  The long drive back home spend time with my parents over Victoria Day weekend has taken the starch out of me.  I showed up at the keyboard to work tonight , but I am just too tired.  It would seem that working a full time job then writing 3-4 hours per night, five nights a week has the side effect of pushing you to explore new depths of exhaustion.

Will strike the iron again tomorrow.

Sunder: Day 10

"That wasn't violence, Crane, you piss." Colbrit shook dust off his hand. Blood trickled down warm and sticky between his fingers from torn skin across his knuckles. He balled his fist again. "That was preamble."
-- Colbrit Niemeier, "Sunder"

Left tonight's session with a deep feeling of accomplishment and an excellent sense for where to begin Chapter 2--or restart it, depending how you look at it.  This is not to say last night's work was a waste of time (I can still use the vast majority of it), just that what I did tonight has given me better material.  I continue to feel excited about what I'm doing.  It's like drawing in a chain: one link leads to the next, leads to the next and so on.  Consistency seems to be making it easier and easier to get into the zone and really produce worthwhile writing.

One more night and I can take a few nights off.

Sunder: Day 9

"We were dealing with 'ordinary' before you showed up. Things are 'tense' now. By an order of magnitude."
-- Det. Sgt. Ross Malmburgh from "Sunder"

Another good night.  I managed to get down 1230 words.  It was a struggle to get that many and I didn't finish the segment cleanly, but it was a happy struggle since the new material is quite rich.  I'm content to wrestle with the work as long I'm not wrestling to actually produce something which doesn't seem to be a problem right now.  The scene I'm working on Colbrit and Malmburgh, Huto and Shaoule is fully formed and I've watched it unfold in my head a dozen times over the course of the night; it's just a matter of finding the right words to capture it.

 

Sunder: Day 8

What happened to Day 7?  My day job got in the way.  I showed up last night, ready to work on "Sunder", but one of the developers was still here after hours and I only managed to get about 517 words written before he came to talk to me about a crisis that was brewing with our customers.  Dealing with that and talking with him about it took up a good two hours of my time.

Made up for last night's low productivity, though.  Wrote 1700+ words tonight.  Rich ideas continue to rise to the surface. (Must have been the beef and stilton pot pie at lunch with my parents.)  This is the most productive I've been since "the time of sorrow" over two (nearly three) whole years ago.  Consistency and blind determination seems to be paying off.

Sunder: Day 6

Another productive few hours. To look at the word count (850+) you wouldn't think so but those were hard-fought words.

This new arrangement--using the Sales office after hours--is working out.  After eight it is so quiet here.  Generally the cleaning staff have finished their work and the late shift Support staff have gone home and it's just me.  It puts me in mind of how I used to write at the public library five, six years ago.  That was a very productive time for me, but the office is even quieter.  I can really focus here.

Well, it's been a long week and now it's time for bed.

Sunder: Day 5

AMAZING night of work. 2300+ words. I'm really pleased with the scene I just wrote for Detective Sergeant Colbrit Niemeier. Got to hear a little bit about the fallen detective's former glory from his partner's mouth.
Getting a haircut tomorrow after work and that will put my schedule off by an hour and a half (rush hour traffic to and from the barber shop), then dinner then driving back here to the office.  I may be behind schedule by a couple hours, but I will show up and put in as much time as possible.

Sunder: Day 4

Another long night. Exhausted, but happy with the revisions and new material. Chapter 1 is up to 12 pages.  I'll be cutting out some stuff to speed up the action a bit, but I have a good idea for the next major scene.

Sunder: Day 3

Worked on "Sunder" again, but started late so fatigue got the better of me early. Didn't get to produce very much.

Sunder: Day 2

Wrote well. 1200+ words tonight. Slightly less than last night, but the material is good. Time to call it a night.

Sunder: Day 1

Wrote well tonight. Struggled at first but managed to blacken a few pages to tune of 1670 words.