Category Archives: Writing

Burning the Midnight Oil

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2013-05-18 01.54.58

A post! On a Saturday! What the whaaaa? Sure, I try to keep it regular but I just had an idea, as it is 5:05 am, I’m messing around on Facebook, prepping blog posts, and writing. I don’t know if it is necessarily healthy to burn the midnight oil, day in and day out. I had a couple drinks (see phone on the right), I worked on a summer schedule (not done with it), I wrote a pretty interesting story that explores the same damn theme I always explore (Junot Diaz does that but, well, he’s Junot Diaz. He’s allowed) but in a different way, messed around on Facebook (this is not good. I just scroll the newsfeed like a zombie. This MUST stop). I need to stop this. I just had a milestone birthday. I am getting older (not 40. No. Not that). I run around like a chicken with my head cut off, I stay up really late, a lot, doing nothing but browsing the web and reading articles I find. I am not 25 (even though when I was 25 what I do now was not possible). Burning the midnight oil isn’t a healthy thing to do but I have always been drawn to the night, for a very long time at least.

I write my best at night. When I get up during the day I am on a sleep med hangover and don’t do anything. It is almost like I am frozen during the day. I just pace my apartment or browse social sites on my phone (I’m looking at YOU Reddit). I’ve got to switch this around, for my health, for my sanity. I love the romanticism of the fevered writer in the night, pounding keys, writing works of brilliance. But it is wearing on me. I sleep after going to bed at 4 am and get up at 3 pm and I feel like shit. Then I don’t do anything until the night arrives.

So this weekend it is about setting the clock right. This evening I will finish my summer schedule, go to bed by 10 (I am going on a photo walk at 9:15 am) get up at 7 and and get back to basics. The night writer romanticism is so yesterday.

 

Writing Extremely Flawed, Mentally Ill Characters

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MEDION DIGITAL CAMERAIs hard. There is no way around that. Even if you, yourself suffer from severe mental illness, getting into the head of people in the throes of illness is difficult. What motivates “normal” people to do what they do, trying to figure that out, in the vise of everyday life, is terribly hard, so imagine when those motivations are complicated by hallucinations, traumatic events, social awkwardness, and being young and away from everything you’ve known into some place that makes you feel less than human? My girls and guys are real people so it was a struggle for me to paint them with a careful hand without tainting their motivations with my opinions of them. Of course, that isn’t fully possible; I have some unresolved issues with these folks, if I didn’t I wouldn’t have written it.

I let a woman who we will call Minx DeLovely read an alpha/beta of my novel. She loved it, suggested edits, and let me know that she didn’t like my main character but that my main character was extremely real and that kept her reading. That was what I was aiming for- no character should be perfect, and Amber, my main character is tragic and isn’t certain she will survive her youth to heal from her past. She really doesn’t want to, but forges on anyway.

And I guess that’s what makes her relatable, if not likable, the fact that despite the pain and anguish and feeble attempts at stopping everything, she moves forward, unhinged, unaware, but desperate. Desperation makes people survive during the most harrowing times.

My antagonist, is the opposite. Sure, she isn’t too keen on life but she thrives on the attention she receives and stops at nothing to continue receiving it, no matter who it hurts. That’s the basis of Histrionic Personality Disorder and it is etched in every fiber of her being. She cannot stop, for if she does, she stops feeling, being. A holy hot mess. She, too, is unlikable but she is real, not just in the sense that she really exist but because sometimes the bullshit stops long enough for her to emote and when she emotes you can connect with her, try to see from the edges of her world. At least I hope that comes through. She isn’t evil, she’s troubled, just like every kid in the novel.

So. Plenty of mentally ill characters out there but I hope to have distinguished mine from the pack by making them real and relatable. Stay tuned!

 

No Writer Pals? No Problem.

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Took a break for Thanksgiving writer pals. Went to the Holiday Inn to eat at their Thanksgiving all day buffet. The food was okay and as a vegan I had very little choice. Family was entertaining, the 50+ crowd played cards for chump change (as my mother would say) at my Aunt’s house and I checked up on social media on my Aunt’s aging Vista computer. Good times, indeed.

So. If you’re anything like me and live in a small town with very little to offer you culturally, with very little substance and lots of idiosyncracies that end up on the news 10 times a night, then you long for a place to share your passion for writing, art, photography, etc; to talk about the joys of writing your first draft, the pain of getting rejected time and time again. You can always talk to your friends and family, who if they’re anything like mine and most people are, will just give you a loving nod and pretend to be interested. Very few people get the need and fervent passion a writer feels when in the moment and after.

One good thing to do is get to a writing group. I found one in Pittsburgh will I will be moving because ultimately that should be your first choice. Nothing like making friends with people in the here and now.

But say you’re in my current situation. No one really cares about writing and if they do and they meet the groups are hardly sustained and fall by the wayside quickly. Such is small town life. If you’re in need of encouragement, commiseration, or a swift kick and the pants, then Absolute Write Water Cooler is your place. I don’t go there often because school and the move have limited my time in the forums I’m in (I know I know, “I don’t have time” is the adult equivalent of “my dog ate my homework”) but when I’ve gone the camaraderie is unmatched. I have lamented over having nice rejections! and have gotten encouragement and also the swift kick my whiny butt needed. You can show them your work in the Write 1 Sub 1 board, talk off topic in some of the other boards, there are boards for every major genre (even mine, literary, whatever that means), just passionate writers of all levels and of a wide range of publishing credits, from novels, to freelancing, to flash fiction, it’s all there at The Water Cooler as us hep cats in the know call it.

With every forum and board system there are some drawbacks. Trolls, being the number one problem, flared tempers when the critique you’ve given is misinterpreted as a personal attack (and sometimes it is but more than likely not), etc but this is an ailment of every forum. MacAllister Stone who runs the forum does a good job of putting the smack down on trolls and the moderators do a fantastic job or cooling flare ups and assessing egos. It’s my favorite site on the web pertaining to writing. Period.

There are over 50,000 people and growing at The Water Cooler. If you’re feeling brave and need a place to go to get out your frustrations or just want laughs, sign up. We don’t bite. :-)

 

NaNoWriMo Two Weeks Later: The Pros and Cons

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I love NaNoWriMo, which if you are a writer and have been living under a rock stands for National Novel Writing Month, which was started way back in 1999 as a way for some ambitious 20 somethings to write with “literary abandon”- 50,000 words in 30 days. Crazy, right? A few people is now 300,000. And growing.

I’ve done it and won. You get a nice little certificate and a halo around your name in the WriMo site. You also get crazy discounts on software, such as Scrivener, the best writing software known to man (on Windows and Mac). But more than that, you get a sense of community, crazy introverts striving for one common goal- writing a 50,000 word novel, 1667 words a day for 30 days.

If you’re regularly trolling the internet, in writing forums, writing blogs, and podcasts, there are tons of opinions on NaNo ranging from the, “it primes you to write a big heaping pile of shit you turn into agents and we (agents, publishers) don’t want/can’t handle your arrogant writer shit heaps (or something like that)” to, “OMG! Are you going to NaNo? It’s the greatest thing EVAR!! You binge on coffee and Red Bull, stay up past 3 am and word battle with other brave writers all over the world!! What’s not to like?”

Both takes on it are true, however hyperbolic I made them. You do produce a heaping pile of shit. It is a great community. But sorting through all the negativity and downright saccharine affection for it can be daunting.

So here they are! The Pros and Cons of NaNoWriMo as I see them, someone who would definitely be willing to participate again when I get to grad school and writing is all I’ll be doing.

Pros

1. Community. It’s one of the best communities on the internet next to Absolute Write Water Cooler (a post on them will soon follow). All of you know the sorrow and joy and crankiness of trying to pump out words in 30 days. It’s a shame it only lasts for 30 days (a little longer for the forums but not too much longer). Take advantage of it, if you choose.

2. Structure. I needed that to finish my novel. I started writing a novel I had been planning for two whole years and used the time off school and NaNoWriMo to get it done. If you are committed, it teaches you about deadlines, commitment, and sacrifice, which are some of the things the most successful writers have a handle on.

3. Practice. The only way one gets better is to write. All the time, write. It can be crapola. It doesn’t matter. Write it down, go over it, see what you can do to get better. Erin Morgenstern’s NaNo novel got sold with that caveat that she put a shit ton of editing behind it. Maybe yours can too.

 

Cons

1. You write a shitty novel….that you submit right away, without any editing. New writers are prone to this. I remember being a young(er) writer than I am now and feeling that if I had to revise my work, I had no real genius at all. It took a beating of my ego to turn me into the proper direction. Whatever you do young writers, don’t. Do. That. Revise.

2. Family, friends, coworkers are generally ignored for a whole month. While this isn’t a really bad thing it can be. It’s part of the writing life, writers know this. But sometimes it takes a while to soothe bruised feelings

These are a few of my pros and cons. Come up with your own if you’re doing it, in the comments. Love to hear from you.

 

Do You Believe in What You Write?

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I was thinking about this a bit a couple months ago. I was thinking about how noble a thing writing literary fiction is, or less sensationally, what a noble thing me writing literary fiction is. Noble seems a strong word, and it is, but I can’t find another word to describe what I was feeling at that moment.

I had really never read literary fiction until I took a creative writing class. My professor knew I had lit scholar potential and encouraged me to read a few books of literary short stories and books. I picked up Best American Short Stories 2008 and was blown away by the quality of the writing and themes. I had never written like that but knew it was worth a shot.

So I picked up more and more literary novels. I didn’t always “get” what I was reading or understand the themes and techniques but the more classes I took, the better I got at writing and reading literary fiction.

There was a moment not too long ago, a moment of life introspection where I realized that I had a morality outside of being a Christian or religious person (staunch atheist, proud of it) and I felt like I could move people beyond their clandestine lives and into the stratosphere of introspection and effect change. Change a life. That’s all I really felt I had.

So the noble thing to do was write serious fiction because only serious fiction can help, can change a life.

But then after talking to a few writers, who write all genres, I thought about it some more. At the end of the day, if you can write something so well that it transports someone to another time and place, and they are safe in that moment, outside of their reality because their reality is wrought with abuse, sadness, or just stress, then as a writer you’ve done your job. It doesn’t matter, really, what genre it is. You’ve just helped that person off of the ledge. And that is all anyone of us, as writers, can really ask of ourselves. To believe enough in what we are doing that we write it well enough, transfer our intentions to the page, light an emotion inside our reader, takes them away, or in my case, takes them away and makes them think, challenges them. Whatever you write, you have to believe you are doing something worthwhile, regardless of if you’re the next Twilight or the next The Road, because if you don’t, the reader will know it and your book will fail and fall flat on that nice dust jacket from the bookshelf.

Are you confident in what you write or are you wishy washy and timid? I am both at times, and that’s okay. Just don’t stay stuck on the wishy washy part of it. That can kill a career dead. :-)

 

Since Last Post I Bombarded You With Apps…Day One

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Okay! I’m going to let you Droid users know the skinny on apps. This will be a two day post linking to my most used and favorite apps on the Android platform (I am an addict, no denial here. :-) that all writers on the Droid platform should not be without, especially during NaNo. The list will have bullets and be linked with a little description. And for the artsy folks I will have links to my fave photography and camera apps (no, Android does not have Instagram ( :-( )

  1. Gmail- who doesn’t have a gmail address? Don’t take this off of your phone. It comes standard. It works a lot better than previous versions and has colored. Labels. So why not?
  2. Dropbox- Cloud storage is very, very important. You can backup all your photos, docs, videos, etc on the cloud, which is just another way of saying your info is on a server on a website. But because some of these servers don’t use redundancy, which in essence is keeping your info available by looping it through several different servers just in case one server goes down, it is good to have your data on several cloud servers. Dropbox offers 2gb for free and then there is a nominal fee for 50gb, I think $10 but if you are only storing docs, 2gb should be enough. These other apps are also cloud apps that I use for my own redundancy: Box.net  or Boxroid for Box.net (5gb free but if you login using an iOS device like an iTouch you get 50gb free!!) SugarSync (5gb free) HiDrive (really secure but I can’t get it to work on my phone right now, 5gb free), Google Docs or GDocs (It is free for 1gb but it costs $5 a YEAR, a YEAR! for 20gb of space or $20 a year for 100gb of space across all of your Google services)
  3. FolderSync- Don’t want to manually sync your files from your Android device? Use FolderSync to set up folder pairs for automatic background sync. For use with Dropbox, SugarSync, HiDrive and Box.net!
  4. Maildroid Pro- Now this is the best, most functional email client on the Android platform but, it is pricey ($17.99). I would not use anything else, but if you can find an alternative app for cheaper then go for it. But I’ve tried them all and this one is a keeper. Not only does it work like and better than Outlook with Rules, Identities, signatures, IMAP and POP3, it is beautiful and handles the push and pull of your mail accounts with ease. (Wait for the update on 10/26/11. The current update is not good. Having trouble with a scrolling issue. The dev is super responsive and has tested and put through a test run with the non pro users so that he is certain this version works. Gotta love devs like Joe. :-) UPDATE: Since the first draft of this post, Joe has updated Maildroid and it is blazing fast. Get it now!
  5. Evernote- Remember everything. That’s their motto. And it fits. Snap photos of passages in a book or of things you see on the street, store them in Evernote. Record audio, make check lists and store them as notes in Evernote. Create notebook heirarchies, tags, and attibutes. Download the web clipper for your browser on your computer and clip whole web pages and store them in Evernote. Evernote stores your notes on their site (cloud). It is free for 500mb a month note capacity and something like 120 web clips. If you want offline notebooks it is $5 a mo or $45 a year.
  6. Business Calendar- Um, no offense Google but this is what Android’s calendar should have been. This is, by far, the best calendar I’ve used on either iOS, PC, or Android. It is $4.99 and worth every penny. You can sync your Facebook events, all your Google calendar accounts, Toodledo tasks, you name it. Gearing up for NaNo and sticking to your schedule is a cinch with this app. Go on now and get it!

Writing Specific apps

  1. My Writing Spot- This is a neat little app that can sync with the website My Writing Spot for online access to your files. It is essentially a novel or short story writing app that you can arrange the way you’d like, chapters, scenes, etc. Then you can go online and sync and download your file as a Word document etc. If you use novel writing software, you can import the file into your novel writing software with a little bit of file savvy. It is a simply neat little app to have, as you can use it as your primary novel writing software and you’ll always have a backup in the cloud. It is $2.99. Pretty good price for such a nice app.
  2. Documents to Go ver 3.0- This is my Word Processing app of choice to look at my Word docs, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations but there are other apps that do the same thing that might work best for you. Quick Office Pro has integration with Google Docs, Box.net, SugarSync, and Dropbox, therefore negating the need for the official apps but Quick Office does not render files properly, not quite like Docs2Go. Just Office for Android. Plain and simple. To edit documents you must buy a key and at $14.99 it is the cheapest in the Market. You can find it here.

This is Android apps for writers day one. Stay tuned for other great, essential apps, most of which are free. :-)

To see what I’m using, here are some screenshots of my HTC. Enjoy!

 

What’s Your NaNo Schedule?

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Ok. I admit. Last year my NaNo effort was a complete failure. But I had a reason. My apartment building was being sold to be made into dorms and I had three papers and four tests to write and prepare for. I got 1000 words maybe a little more.

But this year? I am currently paying back spring semester (my aid didn’t go through and it was on them for letting me go, not me) so I couldn’t register for this semester. I’ve been sitting here busting my ass promoting and writing here and there and looking for a reason to write this novel religiously, as I had planned this summer…and now summer is gone and fall is being depleted of her faint warmth and the cool air is coming in. I’ve got to get this first draft written before January. If you look at the progress bar in the right hand side bar, you’ll see where I’m at.

So what’s the first step in getting the words down if you can’t with ample time already? Commitment. Scheduling and sticking to it. I am a horribly nice person. I do not say no. And when friends are over or I go out I resent the fact that I am not writing and I loathe myself for that fact. So do I isolate myself for one month? No, because Turkey is calling at the end of the month (LOVE my mom’s Thanksgivings) and I do not want to be a social pariah or anything like that. So what do you do?

First, it starts with Google Calendar and my Business Calendar app on my Android phone. Put the blocks of time when I’ll be working on the novel in the calendar. Make some days more flexible than others. When I do go out, use the My Writing Spot app to get some words down. Then when I get home, I can visit the My Writing Spot website, download the file and import it into my novel writing software. I can take my Nook Color with me (I usually do anyway) and make notations in Evernote or jot down quotes in a formal document on my phone’s Docs2Go app, a fully functional Microsoft Office app that reads Office files and writes to them IF you buy it. (Yes, I’ve linked to all my tools. A lot of them can be used with Apple products or have their own Apple counterparts. Find the tool that works for you). I will totally get it in, write like a fiend when I’m home or away.

Next, it’s keeping accountable. I have found Habit apps on Android I’ve used everyday to keep track of my good and bad habits and tasks. I will know when I am not doing well with the click of an app. You can also use the NaNo website as motivation.

Next, it is getting up and going to bed at a reasonable hour. I tend to keep late hours (It is 2:30am on the East Coast as I’m writing this) and this cannot happen if I am to do this NaNo thing. When my friend comes over to hang out, which he does a lot but less often than usual, I’ve got to lay down the law. We must get to bed by 12am and I, at least, have to get up by 10 am.

My life, though, is not really as hectic as most people’s now. A few months back I was scrambling to breathe. Now I can coast through this with a little discipline and determination. What’s your NaNo schedule looking like? What tools will you use to get through it?