Sunder: Day 41

More character notes.  Also worked on some background material.

Sunder: Day 40

Workin' on a Saturday again.  Too Friday night off to watch Adam play hockey.  It was a loss and we were all crushed (his girlfriend and I) but there was an exciting fight which is not something you see in rec league hockey.  Came home to visit my parents and take advantage of the free laundry here and while my jeans and shirts were doing the laundry mambo, I wrote up some character notes about Charlotte.  May do some more work tonight, depending on how well the Senators do in their match against the Maple Leafs.  If they tank, I may end up doing some more work before bed. 

Character notes are not something I concerned myself with in the past, but I can see the utility of them, especially when working on a long term project like a novel.  If there is any truth to the saying that details are everything in fiction, then it is in characters where the most important details must lie and collecting notes about the characters can be a critical exercise.  It helps maintain consistency because it can be tough to keep all the details of an individual character straight in the mind, much less an entire cast of characters.  It can also uncover some really interesting background information that provides depth and texture, making individual characters more memorable, lovable or hateful. 

Adversity is Alive

"Adveristy is alive and when it seeks you out, it's looking for a worthy opponent.  A win or a loss--it doesn't care.  It just likes to fight."
-- Cee Lo Green

Sunder: Day 39

I love it and I hate it when revising something over and over reveals flaws in the logic.  On one hand, it feels great to have caught it yourself and not by someone else (who enjoys that?), but on the other hand, the error is sometimes a big one and it means a lot of material that you produced has to be changed.  That's what happened tonight.  Found a few wrinkles in some background material and even though correcting them led to plot points that were more believable, fixing things took up most of the night and I had wanted to write all new stuff.  Progress on Sunder is agonizingly slow, but it is progress.

As Mick Jagger once said, "You cain't...ahlwees git...wotchu wah-ount...you git wotchu nee-eed."

Sunder: Day 38

This was a horrible night for writing. 

I hate it when personal bullshit gets in the way of my productivity.  I have a hard enough time keeping it up without all the "insanity" derailing my focus.

In all honesty, it's my own fault for letting my previous relationship intrude on writing night and I should really be more strict with myself when the warning signs appear, signs which are as clear as the sender's name on an email.  "Thoughts" was the subject line.  Jesus.  (Sorry, Jesus, but man...!)  I should have let that thing lie until the weekend, or better yet delete it, but I opened it and got caught up in some residual relationship goo that I thought I was well past now. 

On one level it's kind of funny, but on another level it's kind of sad and frustrating.  The hyper-condensed version is that I didn't go to a party where I knew my ex-girlfriend would be and now she has blown it up inside her mind that I am an emotional cripple and she his the cause.  The worst, the absolute worst thing about all that is that she thinks that I need her advice and her perspective to put my life back on track.  Please.  Things are on track for me just fine, honey.  They're not turning out the way you might approve, but you lost that right the day you gave up on me.

There's so much I could get into here but I don't want to dilute the purpose of this place.  I come here to talk about writing and maybe a few unrelated yet important matters.  What I don't want it to become another little soapbox on the web where someone whines about their day.  There's enough of that crap on the internet as it is.  It's one thing to feel stuff deeply, but it's wholly another let yourself drown in it which is something I have all too much experience in.  A man cannot wallow in self-reproach, guilt, unrequited love, lost love, abandonment or loneliness.  He must let these things pass through him, not get trapped inside.  If they get trapped inside him, he gets too full and he sinks. 

I am through bailing water.

Sunder: Day 37

Worked at the office for two hours tonight.  Rene was here and we chatted briefly as I set up in the Sales Office.  I'm not sure what he thinks of me coming in here like this night after night.  I know he's curious about my writing, but he hasn't pressed me like some people do.  Like last night I got off to a late start because I had laundry to do when I got home and that takes some time.  But it's just as well because it gave me time to actually cook some supper (pan-seared pork chops with roasted vegetables--yum!) as opposed to microwaving something out of a bag or pouring boiling water over Raman noodles.

Still working on fine-tuning the events of the murder and subsequent investigation I've been discussing for the last a few days.  I'm going to stop giving estimates on when this will be done because clearly I have no idea when that will be.  I don't feel like I'm spinning my wheels, though, so that's a good thing.  Important forward progress is being made which is an indication that a milestone is coming up sometime in the near future.

When your hobby stops being your hobby and starts becoming your passion, you can very easily get lost in the fine details.  At this point, the fine details fascinate me.  I have never had to think this deeply about a piece of background material before.  The feeling is new, like I'm breaking new ground, cutting new paths.  Not sure if they're the right paths, but then, as Roberson Davies said, "much work is done before hard lessons are learned."  Maybe this is the hard lesson I was meant to learn.

Physio went well today.  The therapist gave me a few new exercises to do at home, but I sense the end of our time together is coming fast.  Maybe another two or three visits before he'll declare me fit for duty again.  I can't wait.  I've gained so much weight not being able to properly exercise (more than I usually carry) that it's getting frustrating.

It's 10 PM now and I have an early day ahead of me so I will pack up for now and get back to it again tomorrow night.  We'll see what unfolds for Niemeier and Malmburgh then.

Sunder: Day 36

Not much to report tonight.  I worked on some biographical notes for a few of the characters and that was about it.  Unfortunately, I got off to a late start tonight because I got a hair cut after work and then I had to do my physio stretching and strength training.  I am calling it an early night because I have to be at the Sports Therapy Clinic for a 7AM appointment with my physio-therapist.  I've been getting to bed late these last few nights and I'd like to get some decent sleep tonight.  If I leave now I can be home for around 10PM.

More work tomorrow night.

Sunder: Day 35

More work refining some of the background materials for Sunder, specifically the last investigation that Det. Sgt. Niemeier participated in before losing his homicide rating.  I keep saying that I'll finish it up soon, but every night that I work on it I find something new to add, revise or correct.  The good news is that I am definitely closing in on finishing this phase of the work.  Tonight I started adding a few details about how Niemeier and Malmburgh set about identifying the body they found.  Iron out a few more wrinkles in the details of their investigation over the next couple nights and I can get back to the synposis, at which point some new plot point that needs explaining will reveal itself. 

Not much happened today.  Listened to some Black Keys and The Fumes.  Bought some groceries, shower soap and shampoo this afternoon, had a nap for a few hours, then headed back to the office (the quiet, quiet office) to do some writing. 

Early to bed tonight so I can get an early start tomorrow.

Sunder: Day 34

Finished up some contextual notes about lodgings for temporary labourers.  Also managed to get down some additional details about the murder I spoke of in the last few posts.  I was never much for writing murder mysteries so I had no idea how many details I needed to consider in answering the question: "How does Solis get rid of the body?" I should be able to wrap this up by tomorrow evening and then start thinking about what rash thing Niemeier does to sabotage the trial and complicate his life more than it already is.


I don't normally write on the weekends because I try to write nearly every night of the week, but I made an exception this weekend because I missed part of one night and all of last night.  I was out for a few drinks and pub grub with a friend of mine at a place called Pub Italia on Preston Street.  It's a really nice place if you love different beers because they have over 200 varieties--36 of them on tap.  EP has never been much of a beer drinker (to my knowledge) but he discovered a few new varieties that he liked over on the Quebec side a few months ago and now he's trying everything.  Well, he tried a little too much last night and he paid for it today.  His first words to me over Messenger this morning were "No more beer".

Sunder: Day 33

I put in another 3 hours of thinking and crafting for Sunder, but there is little noteworthy to report tonight.  Just the usual leg work.

Sunder: Day 32

Productivity was down a touch tonight because I picked up my new laptop after work and I had to install a few big things before I could get going.  Microsoft Office 2010 was the most important and took the longest.  After that, I had some trouble finding a wireless network I could connect to.  The password to the office wireless network didn't work the first two times I tried it even though I entered the password correctly.  Third time was the charm, I guess.  Then I needed to update Messenger and that took another ten minutes.  Then a colleague working the late shift in Support came by and chatted me up for a while.  By the time I got myself settled and ready to write, it was almost eight o'clock.

I did manage to write a couple paragraphs each about a murderer and his victim that I mentioned in yesterday's post.  I was also able to get down a few facts about the setting--a corporate space station.  I jotted down ideas about where the victim lived so I would have a sense of the larger community within the station and how people live in that environment.  For instance,  an individual could get ward-style, semi-private or private accommodations depending on the corporado he or she works for and the kind of work they are hire to perform. 

Going to finish up these notes tomorrow night and then get back to work on polishing the synopsis.

Sunder: Day 31

Wrestling with Sunder is like wrestling a crocodile.  Truth be told, I've never wrestled an crocodile.  The closest one has ever come to me arrived on a plate with a side of rice and roasted veggies.  (Actually, that was alligator, but who's counting?)  I've seen Steve Irwin wrestle crocodiles on TV and it looked a lot like what I went through tonight: a tough roll in the mud and only one of you enjoys it. 

Caring about the end result of these labours means I must be meticulous, but during my breaks away from the keyboard I often forget just how meticulous one has to be.  In some cases it's not enough to simply come up with an idea to set up or flesh out a crucial aspect of a character.  In cases where an event has an impact on the trajectory of a major character's life, the heft of such an idea will translate into the story as questions about the events surrounding the idea.  The more questions the author poses to himself about that idea, the more important and integral it is.  The more integral the idea, the more care the author has to take in shaping it, even if it is never directly revealed to the reader.  The world that fictional characters live in is just as real to those characters as our own world is to us and if an author's intention to convey the true grit and texture of that world is serious then he or she must make an effort to understand something of what is going on there.  The web of circumstances that a character dangles in is as dense and interwoven as that in which we often (always?) find ourselves. 

What I am resigned to is spending more time than I had anticipated trying to set in my mind a crucial event--a murder--that occurred just prior to the opening of the novel.  The aftermath of investigating that murder and attempting to bring it to trial has a very serious impact on the life of one of the main characters, but the more I think about how that character is impacted, the more it becomes clear to me that I don't know enough about the events surrounding the murder.  I'm playing the How did he get here? game.  Who was murdered?  Was it a man or a woman?  Who is the killer?  Why was the victim targeted?  How was the victim killed?  How did the murderer attempt to cover up the crime?  "How did Solis get rid of the body?"  I've pondered that question for the better part of an hour without coming up with an answer that satisfies me.  The questions lead further and further back until I can feel the "shape" of the event, but I need answers to dress up the frame.  I'm impatient to get past this, to finish revising the synopsis proper and get on with the real story.   

In other news, I recently bought a new laptop so I am mobile once again.  Though the noise situation in my apartment has drastically improved over the years, it is sometimes not quiet enough for me to write and so I end up going to the library or the office, more often the latter.  I also need a machine that I can take with me when I visit my parents or when I visit my writing partner.  My old laptop has gotten so slow as to be practically useless to me as a writing tool.  My new machine is an Asus (the same company that manufactured the motherboard in my new desktop PC) and has an Intel Core i3 chip in it.  All I know about it is that it's "wicked fast" and it will stand me in good stead for at least three or four years.

Sunder: Day 30

This was my first full night of writing in more than two months--maybe even three months. 

After having been out of the game for so long it felt good to be back at the keyboard with my imagination rolling.  I worked on some background material for a court scene that appears early in Sunder's First Movement.  Friday night I struggled to outline that scene and its outcome in the synopsis, going over it again and again with dissatisfying results.  I let it sit for the weekend and came back to it tonight.  It became clear to me that I couldn't describe the court scene for the synopsis without understanding the murder and some of the associated investigation, handled by Niemeier and Malmburgh.  I spent most of this evening writing out a summary of the murder and a brief, step-by-step outline of how Niemeier and Malmburgh brought the case to trial. 

Now I have a stage on which to let Niemeier's personal problems complicate matters and land him in hot water with his partner, his supervisors and the Office of the General Prosecutor.

Learning to Walk

My "career" as a writer proceeds in short, brief stages of intense creativity followed by long periods of hibernation.  Even cursory review of this blog can attest to that. 

Writing is shaky everytime I start up again.  The major idea is planted firmly in my head.  I can see it before me; the trouble my imagination has after so long in the mothballs is teasing out the details then capturing them in words.  Tonight I started up again with a NaNoWriMo project I am tentatively calling Possession.  The goal of the NaNoWriMo contest is to challenge yourself to write a 50,000 word novel in the space of a month--a project that requires, if the rules are any indication, pacing more than anything, even an idea it would seem.  I have my idea, such as it is, and tonight I produced 1529 words which is not too bad, but it took some doing to get those words.  When you consider that I am nine days behind the rest of the pack and coming off a long period of creative drought, it is clear that I have a long, steep climb ahead of me. 

So early to bed tonight and early to rise tomorrow.  Maybe I can haul myself out of bed and put down another 1500 words before work.

In Other News...
Had my second physio appointment today.  Right now my shoulder is tender.  It's from all the manhandling that Tony "Soprano" Regert, my therapist, put me through today.  The guy gave me new exercises to do and he even applied electrodes to my shoulder.  What a weird sensation!  It felt like a series of hard, rapid taps deep inside the muscle tissues.  The device would fire a 15 second burst followed by a 15 second break and it kept this up for a good 10 or 12 minutes.  What's he got in store for me next week?

NaNoWriMo 2010

It's been weeks and weeks since I sat down to write anything for Sunder, mostly due to overtime at the office and various non-work-related intrusions.  The biggest of those being the shoulder injury I suffered.  It's only in the last few days that the ligaments in my shoulder have felt strong enough that I could sit and type at my home computer for any length of time without aching.  Even though I've been thinking about my writing projects and talking them through with my writing partner KM, in all this time I haven't had a proper outlet and I've felt my creative self drying up into a little brown raisin.

On the way home tonight I realized that the month of November is also NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month.  Even though I'm behind by a whole week, I thought I might give the contest a shot anyway as an exercise to try and blow out the dust and the cobwebs in my brain before I go back to putting in serious work on Sunder.  It's a lot less gruelling than the 3 Day Novel Contest so I can pace myself while I get back into writing shape.

I don't have a title for my novel yet, but I know that it's going to be an attempt at an espionage novel.  When I say "attempt", that is exactly what I mean.  I have no clue what I'm doing in that genre and I'm sure that no self-respecting agent or publisher will want to touch this project, but John Buchan and Robert Ludlum will look down on my earnest endeavour and smile with all the benevolence of mentors.

So far tonight I've managed to plot out the first third of the novel.  It involves a young woman named Isabell Griffin who is asked by her elderly neighbour, Edward Nolan, to hold onto a locked strongbox for him while he visits his brother.  Three days later, Mr. Nolan's body is discovered in a rail yard, badly beaten and shot in the head.  News reports identify Mr. Nolan as the disgraced, former deputy director of the NSA and the police and the FBI plead for the public's help with any information they may have about Mr. Nolan. 

Almost immediately, a man calling himself Daniel Broussard arrives at Isabell's condo claiming to be Nolan's nephew.  He asks for the strongbox, indicating that Nolan had willed it to him, but Isabell refuses to turn it over to him.  Instead she contacts the FBI, but just as they are taking her to a field station for an interview Broussard runs them off the road.  A gun fight ensues and Broussard kills one of the agents.  Broussard himself is wounded, but manages to escape with Isabell.

I have to end here because I have a very early date with my physio therapist tomorrow morning and I don't want to risk oversleeping.  Suffice to say, though, I feel like I accomplished something tonight--much more than I have in the last two or three months. 

Back to work tomorrow!

I've been following the directions of my doctor and my physio-therapist for the recuperation of my shoulder.  I've been diligent about doing the stretching and the strengthening exercises they prescribed for me and I've noticed a little bit of improvement in the last week.  It has been enough to encourage me to test my limits a bit and in every instance my shoulder has responded predictably: it aches for about half an hour and then gets better.  It would seem, though, I am more likely to re-injure myself doing something simple, something that comes naturally, something that requires no premeditation.

Like putting on socks.

I did something to my shoulder this morning as I was sitting on the edge of my bed putting on my socks.  In fact, I had put the socks on with no difficulties, but when I stood up I moved my arm in such a way that it aggravated some still-tender ligament and send a shock of pain down the back of my arm with all the flash and intensity of a bolt of lightning.  Christ, it hurt.  Turned my entire arm to jelly.  Later, I reached into the fridge for some orange juice and it happened again.  Then again putting the orange juice back, even though I moved slowly and carefully.

After an injury like mine, you learn the limits and you do not exceed them.  I haven't lifted anything heavy anywhere close to shoulder height with that arm, let alone over my head.  You move cautiously as you approach those limits, but you think nothing of moving freely within them.  Whatever I did this morning as I stood up from bed--whether I shrugged to adjust my shirt or simply swung my arm as I took a step--it reminded me that that joint is still delicate, it is still made of glass and it can be cracked or even shattered at the slightest over-provocation.

The recuperation phase is going to be the worst phase for me. And yet, in other ways, it's going to be the best phase for me.  On the one hand, I want full mobility now.  I want all my strength back now.  I want unrestricted range of motion now.  Yet I can't have them now.  I have to put in the work.  Dues must be paid.  At then end of this stretch of road, my patience will be as strong as my shoulder.