The New Rudder

Oh hi. Yeah, juuust a little bit of a time gap since my last post. 

I imagine most folks reading this already know why, but just in case -- or for posterity, should this be found by an interested literary agent or a production assistant doing background for a biopic on my life or a post-apocalyptic historian looking for records from The Before Times -- here's what happened: I was moving right along with the second draft of my second manuscript when my fiancee started having health problems. Then those problems became more serious. Then they became "cancer here, there and everywhere and after a second, third and fourth opinion no one knows what kind of cancer this is" serious.

We moved up the wedding date and married over the summer. Needless to say, I put the manuscript and this blog on hold to focus on her treatment. She fought so hard and never gave up, but unfortunately the cancer had other ideas and she passed in November.

I was a mess, no surprise there. And I hadn't written a single word since then.

What is a writer who doesn't write? I'd been asking myself that a lot lately, and haven't been thrilled with the answers. The other weekend someone asked me what I do. I opened my mouth to respond and absolutely nothing came out. What do I do? Tend to the kids, churn through the day job, lose myself in video games and YouTube videos and cocktails and, what? Bide my time til my number is up? That's too rudderless an existence, and too bleak.

I need to start writing again. I want to start writing again, but writing what? The idea of returning to my second manuscript -- which was already a fairly heavy examination on the stages of grief -- was (and remains) ridiculous. No, I needed something simple. Something comforting. 

And then it came to me. So while I'm going to shutter up the House of Nolahn for now, you all can join me at my new rudder.

The Birthday Check-In

 Hey, it's my birthday!

(Note: Okay, my birthday was actually the other day but it was my birthday when I first sat down to write this post. Then the phone rang and I saw something shiny and now it's a couple days later.  Whatever. It's my birthday.)

What better time than to check in with you all on my progress. And yes, I have been making progress:

Hacking away at Book #2

I know I've written vaguely about the mysterious "Book #2" for a while, but I'm at long last hitting the home stretch... of my first draft. Then I'll need to circle back to plug up the holes and give it a proper going-over before it's ready for anyone to read and/or tear apart. But it's getting there, and that's a good feeling.

What the hell is this Book #2, anyway? 

Fair enough. I've been vague and mysterious about it long enough. Also, I've been taking the occasional seminar to help me sell these things to agents (cuz I clearly need the help) and have put together a proper Elevator Pitch for my new story.

"A suicide reunites the surviving members of the Bleecker Street Six, and the childhood friends process the tragic news in different ways -- including one who doesn't think it was a suicide at all."

Wow, that sounds amazing! How are you not burning through your draft like a house on fire?

First, thank you! Second, I ask myself that same thing all the time and have come up with various reasons why, but a seminar I (remotely) attended the other week drive it home for me. 

In her seminar "Getting Your Story on the Page, from Idea to Execution," author Danielle Joseph talked a bit about knowing your book's mood -- the emotion that powers your story. And that's when it clicked, because you know what emotion powers my current story? Grief. Which explains why there have been so many days (weeks, months) when I can't bring myself to dig in and do the work.

Ah. So, are all writing seminars this insightful?

I wish. I did attend a couple of fantastic seminars by Rachelle Gardner over the summer. Then I attended three seminars from other authors after the new year and while Danielle Joseph's was quite good, the others were... not. 

I get that running seminars remotely is an adjustment but we're a year into the pandemic so it's not like the change in format was a surprise. Instead the other seminars were directionless and meandering, which makes for a really hard sit. The speakers often over-analyzed certain things to the point of meaninglessness while glazing over things that would have been interesting to unpack. The worst one was a completely formless session consisting of the speaker asking rhetorical questions, stream of consciousness-style. I bailed after an hour.

Sounds awful. Any good news?

Yes! My writers group has started back up after going dormant for much of the pandemic. The group has been all business, even going so far as to pledge specific goals for the month to hold each other accountable. It's been great.

Hope all is good with you, too. More to come.

What I've Learned (So Far) From Falling Repeatedly On My Face

If you've been following along, you probably have picked up on a pattern: I churn right along, blogging and redoubling my efforts and posting my progress, and then I go silent for a while, only to come back and apologize. And then I do it all over again. 

It's probably tiresome for you to read, but I've come around to the idea that this cycle is a notable piece of the concept behind this blog: What happens when a guy who wrote short non-fiction pieces for about a dozen years suddenly switches gears to long-form fiction?

I've recently come to understand that the answer has less to do with honing new writing techniques and more to do with what I get out of writing. 

When I used to review b-movies, I'd bang out a review in an evening and have it posted within days. And even if I didn't get many comments on that particular review, I had the satisfaction of checking off that box. There were times where it felt like punching a clock, sure, but it was still another movie I could cross off my list. I felt like I accomplished something. 

It's hard to get that feeling of accomplishment when writing long-form. Oh I've tried. The program to write 500 words a day make sense on paper -- it will certainly get you writing on a daily basis -- but many times I'll write 500-something words and look at what I've accomplished and... I've waded a bit further into a chapter? Got halfway through a conversation? There's nothing so tangible to cross off a list. Instead, it's more... well:

 

I almost fell into the same ol' pattern about a week ago: A few things hit me hard and fast all at once, and I felt demoralized and low and asked myself Why bother? So I did what any mature person would do in this day and age: Threw my despair into the Internets and Googled "why keep writing" because Google already knows everything else about me so what the hell. 

Unsurprisingly, I'm not the first writer to fell this way. There are a heap of articles on the subject, though the one that hit me most was Ruthanne Reid's "The Two Most Important Words for Writers" on The Write Place. If you've ever struggled to keep writing, I'd give this a read.

So I need to find a new way to think about my writing progress, a new way to measure my accomplishments (such as they are). I'm still working that out, and that's okay. In the meantime, I've bounced back off the ground much, much faster than normal, and am right back to writing. This book won't write itself, after all, so I got to keep on moving.

 

Second Act Issues (Video Essay)

Happy February! And it is a happy February, if for no other reason than I hate January.

No, that's not right: I HATE January. It's objectionably the worst: Even if you don't like the holidays, there's so much running around and busyness that the time flies by. Christmas is a flurry and then New Year's comes and goes right behind it and then you take down all the decorations and all you're left with is the cold, gray, stark reminder than there's nothing but cold grayness forever and ever... or at least until spring finally decides to show up. Nothing happens in January, and nobody wants to do anything because they're spent from the holidays. January is just a long waiting game, and it's tedious as shit.

You'd think with all that nothing going on, I might have torn through a ton of writing on Book #2. And while I have made some progress... not quite. I still struggle to keep momentum going, and I still question why I can't keep it going.

I did have a realization yesterday of something that has probably been contributing to my difficulties: my "second act" lacked focus.

I know it's a bit odd to frame my novel's story in terms of "acts," but from a story standpoint I find screenwriting video essays to be extremely illuminating (never mind that, to the disbelief of anyone who has ever met me, I've never had any strong desire to write a screenplay). My lightbulb moment came while cleaning the dining room and listening to Tyler Mowery's essay on "Common Mistakes Writers Make and How to Solve Them -- Act Two."

Oh and spoilers for Toy Story, I guess?

There's a lot of great stuff here, from examining escalation and progressive complications to simple breaking down the definition of an act. And it helped me realize that I was trying to blurt through my second act instead of letting the complications and tensions escalate -- good news for me, not so much for my protagonist.

Write On: A Quick Update

I'm gearing up for my annual Mancation, that glorious time of the year where I get together with the guys I grew up with to drink, eat meat, play cards, talk trash, and drink. As I said, glorious.

This will be our eleven Mancation, earning it the tentative title of "Mancation 11: Roman Numerals are Soooo 400 A.D." Admittedly, that's not the most manly of titles, but I just made it up on the spot and I'm not going to change it now, what with all that tap-tap-tapping of the BACKSPACE button? Guh.

Point being, I'll be disappearing for a few days, my location and activities strictly confidential in accordance to the extensive non-disclosure agreements we all signed. But before I go, a quick update on my progress:

My 500 Words

Yes, I am still doing this -- hitting the home stretch, actually. And no, I'm nowhere near the target of 500 words a day. Whatever, I'm still counting this a victory:

• I've just reached the end of Chapter 3 to Book #2, and I'm pretty happy with how it's coming along -- particularly for a first draft
• Since my last update, I've written up an additional 3,718 words
• While I'm not writing every day, I have been hitting around 500 words on the days I do write
• Even if I stop right now, I'll have tripled the length of Book #2
• (I hadn't gotten very far into Book #2 before this past month)

The Agent Hunt

It's now been a year since I first started querying agents. You'd think that would have been a soul-crushing realization. Hell, I thought that would have been a soul-crushing realization. Instead, I'm feeling really upbeat about my progress.

I've jettisoned the remainder of the agent list I put together last year (keeping a record of who I've already queried so as not to annoy them), and -- smarter, wiser -- put together a new list that's better targeted to my novel using other sites I've since discovered such as Manuscript Wish List.


Progress!

By Definition: A My 500 Words/Video Essay Two-Fer

By definition, I'm failing.

On its face, last week's number isn't that bad. I wrote 2,335 words, which is obviously below the 500-a-day goal. Worse, I only wrote on four of those days... and one of them was to write last week's blog post. That technically counts but, c'mon...

On the flip side, I'm really happy with the work I have put in, and I'm starting to clear up the soupiness that is the second act of Book #2. It's not completely ironed out and none of that add to my word count. But still, but definition that's PROGRESS!

Speaking of definitions, I'm featuring this video by Lessons from the Screenplay because it does a great job of calling out the difference between Story Premise versus Story Design as well as the protagonist's Desire versus Need, all things that are easy to get mixed up.

As a bonus, Michael explains what I've long considered one of the great movie mysteries: How did James Cameron pull off the change from the slow-burn horror of Alien to the pulse-pounding action of Aliens?

My 500 Words: Moving Right Along

Okay, okay... At least on paper, it looks like I'm doing well.

Daily target: 500 words
Weekly target: 3,500 words

• Week 1: 2,661 words 
• Week 2: 3,196 words

So that's better, right? At least I'm heading in the right direction. We'll just side-step things such as "I really wrote the lion's share of that amount on two days" and "much of that writing wasn't for Book #2."

Still: I'm keeping in the habit and moving right along! If I can keep this up, I'll have finished the first draft of Book #2 by... (calculator, math, typing, equations, math) February or March?

Lurching Forward

Lurch from "The Addams Family," current mascot of the House of Nolahn

Oh hai there. Just popping in with a quick check-in on how My 500 Words is going, and it's... going.

I'm glad I got that hot start on Day 1, because I haven't been able to maintain that level since:
Day 1 - 1,292 words
Day 2 - 697 words
Day 3 - 174 words
Day 4 - Goose!
Day 5 - 235 words
Day 6 - 263 words

Yeah, not exactly setting the world on fire. That puts me at 2,661 words, and I don't need to be a math whiz to know that does not have me on track for 500 words a day. But, strangely, I'm okay with that.

I'm partially okay with that because that doesn't include anything from today (like this blog post, good for about 240 words), and I should have a solid hour to put towards this later tonight. Those 263 words from yesterday doesn't include the place-setting I did last night to map out the next section or two, so in theory I should be able to get a healthy clip under my belt by the time I call it a night.

The other reason I'm okay with this is that it's still 2,661 words of forward progress, which is the hellova lot better than the past month or so. It's a small (okay, very small) victory, but I'll take it.

Lurch, take us out!

I Suck (an Update)

Bleh!

You already know how this is going to go: Oh, where have I been? So busy, running around, not writing, blah blah excuse salad.

(Though I could cut myself some slack since I did plan a whole haulin' surprise get-away for my Special Lady Friend and now we're engaged. She is my Future Wife!)

So let's skip right past that part, because summer's over, Shakespeare, and I've written bupkis since my last update. That ain't going to cut it if I'd like to complete a draft of Book #2 in my lifetime. Time to roll up my sleeves and do... well, anything.

Fortunately, I had not one but two realizations over the past 12 hours:


#1: I don't need a ton of time.

I've had it in my head for a while now that I need a solid hour in order to really get rolling with my writing. As a result, there have been many, many times where I look at the clock and say "Oh, I only have half an hour before [blank], so there's no point in trying to get any writing done."

Why? Where did that idea come from? Sure, I won't finish a section in under an hour and I may not want to stop once I get into a groove, but that doesn't mean it's not worth even starting if I only have 30-40 minutes. Because even if I only get a couple paragraphs under my belt in that sliver of time, I'm still that much closer to a finished draft.

I am a jackass.


#2: I should have fun with this.

Yeah, here we go, finally to the core of why I think I've been having such a hard time staying motivated with Book #2: I'm not having fun with it.

I've come close to realizing this in the past, and I suppose the lack of fun is understandable since the kernel of Book #2's story came from the death of a friend. But still. Certainly my friend wouldn't want me to force myself through such a glum and dreary exercise. Hell no! He was fun, and I should be having fun with this, too.

I'm having some fun now. I've just knocked out another section of Book #2 which, inexplicably, was inspired by YouTube remixes of fights from Dance Moms.

Did I ever think that was a thing I would write? No, not at all. But there I was, laughing my nuts off over-exaggerated Dance Mom sassatude like it was the second coming of Monty Python, and then I sat down and cranked out almost a thousand words. Go figure.


So, what I have learned from all this? Watch more Dance Moms Time to challenge myself!

Starting today, I'm taking on the My 500 Words challenge. No, don't worry, I won't be challenging any of you with anything. This is a self-imposed challenge for me to write at least 500 words every day for the next 31 days. And if I can do that, I think that would qualify for the "well, anything" I was thinking I needed to do at the top of this post.

The rules:

• Writing for Book #2 counts 
• Blogging counts
• Writing emails does not count
• Editing doesn't count, nor does tinkering with query letters
• I don't have to try and make up for lost days (and there will be a couple near the end of the 31 days)
• Or course, I can write more than 500 words

That last rule is handy, because I'm already at 1292 words and it's only Day 1. Maybe I don't suck after all?