Progress and small sips

Yesterday's Word Count - Blog 368, Fiction 779, Total 1147.

Challenge Total 3910

Yesterday was a long day. Full day a the job, then took Meg to physical therapy. I usually read on my phone while I wait the hour in the car, but I didn't sleep well the night before, so instead I took a half-hour nap. 

I'd intended on the full hour, but I was woken by a text from work. They were having issues they couldn't resolve. In the end, I had to go back and spend forty minutes getting things straight while Meg took her turn waiting in the car.

All that resolved around 7pm, which mean a very late dinner and a bad jump on any writing. I'd only gotten yesterday's blog done in the morning, and when Meg turned on the Yankee game, I was hard pressed to do anything but sit back with my feet up and watch Aaron Judge and crew dismantle the Phillies.

I did just that for the first inning and a half, then decided I wasn't going to bed two days in a row without getting some fiction words done. I grabbed my laptop and lap desk, sat back in my comfy chair, the chair where I spend most of my evenings reading or watching a little TV, sipped my tea, and started working on Catpocalypse Meow. 

Over the next hour, I filled out the prologue a bit, adding about 300 words of depth, which I'd characteristically left out. I have a weird habit of not describing what I see in my head when I write unless I make a conscious effort to do so. 

It's not difficult, but I spent a good part of that year of intense writing learning how to make sure I put everything on the page and left nothing in my head. As a result, two disembodied voices turned into two characters talking in a setting-rich place. 

I considered tossing it in at that point. I was tired and wanted to read a little before bed. But I thought I should at least start Chapter One, so when I picked up today, I'd be in the middle of something. I've found the old adage that's it's easier to pick up writing in the middle of a sentence or scene to be true. It's difficult to start from the beginning. It's the equivalent of a blank page.

I got almost 500 words in the next half hour, setting the scene a bit and getting things moving, and decided that I'd flexed my brain enough for one day. i let the pups outside for their bedtime relief, grabbed the book I'm reading, and went to bed. Managed about 20 pages before I nodded off, which is no comment on the quality of "The Sentinel," by Lee and Andrew Child. I'm enjoying the story - I was just dead tired.

Today should be a bit better, and I'll push myself with the fiction tonight. I have nothing to do after work, though I do have an even fuller day, 10 hours versus 8.5 yesterday. Still, I'll be home plenty early to sit down in the chair, enjoy a couple of cups of tea, and get in at least a couple thousand words.

I'm trying to be flexible here as I establish the habit. Things will happen, and it's very easy to blow off the writing when they do. I'm trying to not do that. Even if I only write a little bit some days, the momentum will build and the word count will add up. 300 words is better than 0.

Breakfast time. See you tomorrow.

A new Oscar and Midge novel coming soon

Yesterday's Word Count - Blog 1017, Fiction 0, Total 1017

I got wrapped up in my own head yesterday and by evening realized I'd been avoiding writing all day. Not sure why, other than that old anxiety of not being good enough. Probably spending two days in a row writing about how much time this was going to require put me there. 

It's pretty easy to start seeing all that time as work, especially when starting out. It even feels like work, since I haven't gotten back in the habit of writing every day yet. So perfectly normal, but something to be aware of before I let it get out of hand.

Instead of talking about the words, today I want to tell you a little about what I'm working on.

The short novel I began yesterday is the climax to the Oscar and Midge stories I've been writing. In comic book terms, you might describe it as an Annual issue, where major storylines are wrapped up before the new year of stories begins. In episodic terms, it's the last episode of a season.

I love writing the Oscar and Midge stories. They are light-hearted and fun, but occasionally delve into surprisingly emotional depth, and I can go pretty much anywhere I want with them. And for this season-ender, I definitely have.

The novel is called "Catpocalypse Meow," and wraps up the Snowy storyline that's been carried through the first two short story collections and even the Oscar and Midge holiday novel, "The Dogs of Christmas Past."

Hoping to gain speed on the writing over the next couple of weeks, and my goal is to have this new Oscar and Midge adventure available by the end of May.

I'm also working on getting everything I've written so far available everywhere - three novels and six short story collections, plus a number of stand-alone short stories. That' probably going to take me the rest of the year. I'll announce them as they become available. Right now you can get everything digitally through Amazon.

Anyway, it's Monday, so I have to get ready for the day job. See you tomorrow with a nice fiction word count from this evening's writing.

The first steps - getting started and building a writing routine

Yesterdays Word Count: Blog - 947, Fiction - 799, Total 1,746.

I started back writing yesterday, both blog and fiction. It's going to take me a little while to ramp up my production to the point where I can compete with the word count I'm looking for - about 4000 total words a day. Assuming I write at about 1000 words an hour, that's four hours a day of writing.

I probably write the blog a lot faster than that, because its mostly train of thought. Closer to 2000 words an hour, I'd guess. So figure the blog will take me anywhere from 15 to 35 minutes a day. Let's call it a half hour. My plan is to write the blog every day after walking the dogs. Routine, remember? That's how I'm going to get all of this done. 

The other 3000-3500 words of fiction? Well, that's a little harder to predict.

Which is why I'd better figure it out now.

Carving three hours out of the day sounds hard, but it's probably not, especially if I treat it like three separate hours, or even six half-hour chunks. Three hours all at once is hard to come by, unless I write off my entire evening after work to writing, but I know from experience that plan doesn't work. Evenings after work are when I run into the most friction.

It's pretty normal to spend time with family and friends in the evening, so there will always be things that come up after work, and fighting that is a losing proposition unless I'm willing to become an antisocial hermit. I'm not, despite what some people may think. I enjoy my social time, and look forward to time hanging out with friends and family. Even though I'm an introvert and often need time to recharge, I still look forward to spending time and doing things with people.

If I can't reliably spend my entire evening writing for three hours, what then? Well, that's where breaking it up into manageable chunks comes in.

First off, I need to get an hour (1000 words) done in the morning before anything else. If I do that and the blog before I leave for work, I'm halfway to my daily goal. That means I need to structure my morning and wake up a little earlier. I've been getting up around 5:30 every day, and besides walking the dogs and eating breakfast, I haven't done much else besides reading or scrolling on social media. I probably already have a good bit of time available - I just need to retcon it for writing.

That still leaves 2000 words, or two hours. 

I'd love to say I can write 500 words on lunch, but I can't. I don't even reliably get lunch, depending on how the day is going. I suppose I could force it into an earlier slot, but even when I'm at lunch, I'm often interrupted by people who need me for something quick. Not a productive environment for writing. I'm better off trying to enjoy some reading then, or maybe having a notebook and doing some rough poetry or idea work or something.

Which brings me back to evenings. 2000 words still outstanding.

Let's start by saying I'll find an hour before bed to bang out the last 1000 words. That's probably doable, and I can make it part of my routine easily enough by coupling it with tea time. A good cup of tea, three or four cookies, and 1000 words before heading to bed seems like a good time, honestly, and a good way to wrap up my day.

Still, there's 1000 words hanging around unwritten.

It's tempting to leave them for the weekends. I mean, 1000 words a day Monday through Friday means 5000 words extra on the weekends, when I should theoretically have more time. But that means instilling a ton of discipline on days when I am most likely to have other things to do. 

Not just plans with friends and family, either. The yard needs maintenance. Chores tend to slip to weekends. All very manageable until you add 3-4 hours of writing to each day, at which point they are still manageable. But that's the normal expectation now.

Add another 5000 words to the weekend means I'm either spending six-7 hours a day writing on both Saturday and Sunday, or I'm spending 10 hours on Sunday parked at the writing desk. No to mention, I work a half-day at the job some Saturdays.

Yeah, that just won't work.

So either I write less, or I split the words between morning and evening.

I'm not writing less. In fact, the plan is to slowly ramp up and write as much as humanly possible.

So it looks like I'm getting up even earlier, and maybe staying up a half hour later. 

Not perfect, but not that big a deal, either. Once I get past the feeling that I'm missing out on things and get to the point where I look forward to the habit of writing, to the feeling of getting lost in the story, I'll probably get aggravated when I have something to do other than write.

This is a lot of process, I know, but I believe it's important. If I don't take an account of my time and how I spend it, it would be very easy to say I simply don't have enough time to write.

Lots of people say just that.

But I don't want to let my dreams wither and die while I spend time I could use for writing scrolling through memes on social media, or even consuming other people's stories. How sad would that be?

So, despite the tension I feel right now, it's time to get disciplined and consistent. The tension will ease in time, as it does with all new habits.

I mean, if I can give 50 hours of my life up every week for a paycheck, I can find another 25-30 to pursue my dream, right?

Don't settle, folks. Life is too short. Figure it out and make it work.

I'm doing my best.

Back from a life-break: The Dean Challenge

 It's been almost two years since I posted on this blog, and the other blog I did for the year after that has vanished. Maybe I'll be able to find and recover the content, but I didn't want to spend any time on that this morning. It was more important to get back to putting the words down.

So what happened in those twenty-three months of inactivity? Well, I had a really productive year as a writer, and then I had a year of not writing a word.

During the writing year, which spanned April 2021 through April 2022, I wrote a lot. I completed more than fifty short stories and three short novels. I also blogged pretty regularly on the other blog, which was part of my now defunct website. All told, I wrote about 350,000 words, which is around 1000 words a day on average.

But that's not how the words came out.

They came out in abrupt spurts, mostly on weekends and vacations. There were several Sundays where I wrote in excess of 10,000 words, and one weekend when I wrote more than 20,000 words on both Saturday AND Sunday, almost 45,000 words in one weekend.

Productive for sure, but I never established a real writing routine, unless frantic panic-writing is what you want out of your writing routine.

I did that largely because I put my money where my mouth was and signed up for three challenges with prolific writer and mentor to many, Dean Wesley Smith. The challenges were to write a short story every week, a novel every two months, and to publish a major book every month, all for a whole year. 

I got through the short story challenge, halfway through the novel challenge, and nine months into the publishing challenge, Then, the wheels came off and I stopped writing dead in my tracks.

The first reason has already been stated. A routine is necessary, and you can only panic-write for so long until something goes wrong. I don't remember exactly what derailed me, but somewhere around the end of April 2022, I didn't leave myself enough time to get all the writing and publishing done, and instead got none of it done. It was like I'd run into a wall.

Second reason is I decided to take a promotion at work because we needed the money. I'd stepped back from the job six months before the writing streak and challenges started because I wanted to have the time and energy to focus on writing, and that plan worked. Right up until it didn't.

I didn't set our finances up for success, and made the mistake of thinking I could force them into shape through a combination of extreme discipline, gig work, and luck. 

Yeah, no.

So I took the promotion, and within three weeks I was completely swamped and focused on the job, and when I did have time to myself, I didn't want to spend it wrestling with the writing. I was exhausted, planning (and paying for!) a wedding on top of everything else, and my desire to write had been relegated to the back burner by poor choices and necessity.

That's lasted until the past couple of weeks. I've tried to restart a few times in the past several months, but other things kept popping up and taking priority. My wife hurt herself badly on out honeymoon, and has just now returned to work six months later. I took a transfer-promotion at work that was another mild upheaval, though it did put me significantly closer to home, and any time I tried to interrupt myself and establish a fresh routine that included writing, I found myself failing at launch.

So here I am, a year removed from any kind of creative writing, and I'm restarting today. The wife is back to work and feeling a lot better. The finances have been wrestled into order and a modicum of discipline and routine have been established. I'm still in the new job, but I've got in under control and mostly contained within the confines of a 50 hour work week. My friends are all too busy to make any kind of regular plans, and we've fallen off everyone's radar anyway, what with the injury and all.

And Dean Wesley Smith has started the Dean Challenge. 

Dean's been away from the writing a few months himself due to some eye issues, so he's getting himself going again now that he's healthy by offering this challenge: from April 1 through the end of the year, he wants to write at Pulp Speed One, as he calls it, which means one million consumable words a year. Anyone who wants to can try to beat his word count, and if you succeed, you get a lifetime subscription to one of five different teaching programs for writers that he and his wife, Kristine Katherine Rusch, teach on Teachable.

They are both great writers, but also fantastic teachers. In fact, Kris's Freelancer's Survival Guide series is one of the most important resources around for writers trying to understand how now to make all the mistakes I did last year. Especially the financial and time-management mistakes!

So I've jumped into the challenge. I mean, I wrote almost 400,000 words in a year once. How hard can it be to beat a professional writer with like 300 novels and more than a thousand short stories under his belt?

Hey, at least blogging counts. So expect to see one of these every day. And if you don't, hit me up and ask me where today's blog is, okay?

I'm going to need all the help I can get.

A kick in the butt

 So obviously, I stalled on streaking, again...

It was probably silly to start the streak the week I was getting my first Covid-19 vaccination, but I'm an eternal optimist, right? Anyway, I let that derail me mostly out of anxiety more than any actual side effects or inability to sit down and write. That's a relief in that I had no discernable side effects other than fatigue, but it's a disappointment that I continue to let life dictate and derail my writing.

I've come to realize that my entire life is governed by emotional responses to what might happen. Rather than being resolute, I make a lot of decisions based on my own projections and fears. Rather than take control, I worry and let the endless possible bad outcomes alter my thinking and actions. In writing, that's called critical voice, but the truth is, we all have a little nagging voice that worries and tries to keep us safe. 

What if it's hot? What if I fail? What if I die? 

That voice in our head is there for a reason, and the reason is, our brain prefers as little stress as possible. It guides us towards the path of least resistance if we let it. Unfortunately, that voice is in direct opposition to our own growth potential as humans. If we listen to it too much, we stop growing entirely.

Yeah, I listen to it way too much.

Despite that, though, I keep coming back and trying. 

I signed up for a workshop with a writer I admire, Dean Wesley Smith, about a month ago, and just completed the week three coursework. The workshop has definitely made me think about why I have so much trouble staying consistent with writing, and has made me realize that there are many more ways for the Critical Voice inside me to keep me out of the writing chair and full of worry and doubt than I could have imagined. In essence, what people call writer's block is just their critical voice being hyperactive, an winning the battle against actually writing. I even see now why folks like George R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss have had a terrible time finishing (starting?) the books that everyone is waiting for!

Anyway, the workshop, combined with my recent entry to the NYCMidnight Short Story Contest, helped me see something clearly - I write well under pressure, which is to say, with a deadline. I don't mean the quality of my writing improves. What I mean is, I have an easier time getting in the chair when I'm under the influence of some outside accountability. In the case of the Contest, I had clear deadlines, and I met them. Just like handing in my homework, I always found ways to make the time to do the work and get it in on time.

So, I decided to take matters out of my own hands and signed up for three distinct challenge workshops that happen to coincide with what I want out of my writing for the next twelve months. Starting in May, I've signed up for both the Great Short Story Challenge and the Great Novel Challenge over at WMG Publishing. Then, in June, I signed up for the Great Publishing Challenge.

What does all that mean?

Every week, I have to write a short story and turn it in by Sunday at midnight.

Every two months, I have to write a novel and turn it in by the end of the second month.

And, starting in June, every month I have to publish something, either a novel, or a collection of five or more short stories, and send in the link. In addition, I get better rewards if I send in a print copy of the book, which I plan on doing once I figure out how.

So basically, for the next twelve months, I have to act the part of a professional writer. I have to write a lot, I have to learn how to publish what I write (formatting, covers, sales copy, learning copyright, learning how to get my books in online stores, learning how to get my books in print and into book stores, etc.), and I have to learn how not to stop. Ever.

The reward for that is a lifetime subscription to pretty much every course WMG publishing offers, which is a lot and a huge continuing education for any writer. 

But the bigger reward is that at the end of the twelve month period, I'll have written at least 52 short stories, at least six novels, and published at least twelve books. I plan on publishing everything, and hopefully writing even more than that, but even if all I do is meet the bare minimums, I'll have had an incredibly productive year as a writer, have a ton of my work out in the word and for sale earning money, and will have learned more in twelve months than I have in the last forty years about writing for a living.

All while keeping my day job.

It's going to be tough, but I know it will be worth it.

Alright, breakfast is getting cold.

See you tomorrow.

Quick streak update before bed

 Good evening. Just a short entry to follow up on this morning's goal setting. I had a drag of a day at work, came home tired, had some dinner, watched some of the Yankee game, and thought the whole time about the writing streak. Finally, at just after 9 p.m., I sat down, opened up my laptop, put on my headphones, and started writing the new story. An hour later, I have just over 1100 words done and am on my way.

So the streak stands at 2 days of writing, 2 days of blogging. Technically, I've written creatively four days in a row now, since I wrote the contest story Friday night and wrote the first assignment for the Killing the Critical Voice class I'm taking with dean Wesley Smith, but that wasn't really a story, so I won't count it as a streak from Friday. Two days.

It's a start.

See you tomorrow.

A morning blog for a change - time to get streaky!

I'm sitting here at the writing desk thinking about the short story I want to start, and I'm struggling. My brain is telling me to relax and read this morning, and save the writing for tonight after work. It's an age-old struggle, man versus himself, and this morning my procrastination voice is particularly strong. 

I'd guess that's because I spent three hours last night writing the contest story, and my "free time" monitor is going haywire. There's this part of my brain that resents anything that resembles work when I'm on my own time. It's a terrible influence on me, and if I let it get the best of me it will be three months before I know what happened and I'll be back here posting another restart blog. I'm tired of doing that, so instead of giving in to the lazy bastard that lives in my brain, I figured I'd jump on a different task - blogging.

I very much want to start both a blogging streak and a creative writing streak. Yesterday would be day one for both, so I'm going to openly setting my goal here.

Goal: Starting yesterday, I will write and post a blog every day, write at least 1000 words creatively every day, and count the streak for both.

There, goal set. I'll use the blog to record the streak and keep myself accountable. I've tried this before, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't try again. Try, try, until you succeed, right?

Meanwhile, I have a whole new critical voice issue to deal with - submitting for publication, or just publishing stuff myself.

I'm actually writing and finishing stories, and I'm not feeling the need to edit them to death, which is good. I've taken to what Dean Wesley Smith and others call "cycling," which means going back through your writing as you write it and making small corrections and adjustments. Here's how that works.

I'll write until I start to feel fatigued. Now, in the past, that would mean I'd be done for the day, but the contest has me on deadlines, so that wasn't possible. Turns out, that's a good thing. Instead of walking away and doing something else, I take a short break, refresh whatever I'm drinking, and then go back to read the last session's writing, usually about a thousand words, maybe a little more. I fix typos, maybe adjust a sentence or two that doesn't sound right, and within ten minutes or less I'm back to where I left off and ready to resume writing another thousand words or so.

It's a good feeling, and when I'm done with a story, the copy is very clean. I do go back over the whole thing once more, mostly for typos. Last night, the contest story took me about a half hour to do the final run  through, but that was because I had to cut 200 words. Normally, it seems to take me about twice my normal reading speed, so no more than ten minutes per thousand words.

For whatever it's worth, the cutting was not a good feeling, but it probably made the story stronger. Because I was writing to a word limit, there was stuff in the first half of the story that I wanted to use in the second half, but word count limitations dictated otherwise, so most of the words that I cut were things that ended up not being important to the final version. Without the word count limit, it's hard to say if cutting those words would have made sense. There were probably a few spots where I could have tightened up the sentences, but because I felt the word limit crunch towards the end of the story, I left out a lot and stayed strictly on a single conflict resolution. 

I suppose in a short story, narrowing the scope makes the story stronger. It's good practice, and maybe that's why so many writers start learning the craft with short fiction. Being able to only write what is pertinent to the story is a skill in an of itself, and one more easily learned through short fiction, I'd guess.

Anyway, the point is, I'm doing a better job following Heinlein's Rules 2 & 3, "You must finish what you write," and, "You must not edit except to editorial order." I never liked line edits much, anyway. I always prefer to write it well the first time and then cut for clarity, but some old college writing courses had me thinking a line-by-line edit was the most important part of writing the story. There are plenty of authors who spend years editing a single novel. 

No thanks. That's not fun, nor do I feel like it's necessary if you are trying to write well from the get go. If anything, cutting the story down last night felt like I was trying to make it sound like someone else had written it. I was removing parts of what make the story sound like I wrote it, which is to say I was removing my voice in spots purely to meet word count. 

That's probably a bit of an exaggeration, but imagine if you spent twice as much time editing something as you did writing it! You'd be trying to make it so clean that any shred of your voice would be gone almost entirely, which might leave a decent story, but it would sound like anyone could have written it. No thanks. I enjoy the authors I enjoy not because of the plot or even the resolutions they have, but because of the way they develop their characters and the way their writing feels and sounds. You know when you are reading Stephen King or Dean Wesley Smith or J.R.R. Tolkien because they have distinct styles, and editing a story to be "clean" can remove much of that style. I'll pass.

Granted, my style is still developing. I need to focus on Heinlein's Rule #1: "You must write." That's what the streak goal I set today is for. But I also have to start working on Rules # 4 & 5: "You must put your work on the market," and, "You must keep it on the market until it sells."

But first, let me get through a seven day writing and blogging streak. Once that is done, this weekend I will sort out my submission and publication process.

Well, I'm awake now. Time for some coffee and breakfast, followed by a shower. At that point, I'll have an hour or so before I have to leave for work, nd I'll sit down and start this short story that I've false started more times than I can count. By tomorrow, I hope to have the story written and out of my system at last.

Have a good day. See you later.