Nanowrimo 2014

Oh boy. It's been two years since I updated this blog and it's a good one. Just to catch you up, I had some financial issues that led to some health issues and logistic problems. I live in San Francisco on a limited SSI income in an SRO - Single Room Occupancy residence hotel. I love this place and the rent is affordable. It's tight though, so rising food costs and other expenses ground me down and I had serious trouble eating till I got onto a hot meals program from the local Salvation Army. Five days a week, minus holidays, I get a good organic hot lunch from them and that closed the gap.

I also used to see a therapist every week on Mondays. From going out maybe once or twice a year in harsher climates, I went up to six times a month on necessary medical appointments with others thrown in as needed - usually by bureaucrats or doctor's demand. In my first six months I had to go to many more because of various things I was doing. I wore myself down. IT takes years to completely deplete my body energy but when I'm living on a cumulative net loss and overexerting myself, it will eventually catch up with me. I wound up shutting down more and more aspects of my life because I didn't have the energy for it. I slept like my cat.

Part of that was a change of therapist. My first one did me a lot of good and helped me like a case manager. Julie even hooked me up with the food program. However, the second one, a good therapist, relied much more on methods that don't work well with my physical disabilities. I gave it a good long try and we explored every possible solution within his skills but had to quit.

The program changed its rules so that long term therapy wasn't supported so we couldn't go on with the method that does work. Talk therapy unraveling past traumas with full understanding of their causes and scars helps and always seems to point to the same thing.

Either my physical disabilities, especially when untreated and undiagnosed, distorted my relationships or the necessary adaptations I made to be able to function at all made me very hard to live with. Many things most people enjoy are difficult or impossible. I limp to a different drummer. I'm not a loner by personality. I'm a sociable, gregarious person who enjoys being around people in any positive situation, but only when I'm physically up to socializing.

In person past a certain level of pain or loss of energy, I'm not fun to be around. I get foggy and confused. Fibromyalgia can reduce me to unintelligible so fast if I get an emotional shock. I had to give up debate in person and eventually altogether.

Now I post my views online just to air them and don't read the discussion that comes after unless some positive comment gets to my inbox. I will be one of those authors who has to pre-filter his reviews or just not read them because it's not worth getting sick over it when my book isn't to someone's eloquently expressed taste.

Crowds are right out of it. I literally can't keep up moving with the crowd. I'm not afraid if I'm up on the podium doing public speaking, because they're not running right at me. I can open up there at my pace and get entertaining. But I will not be in time if I try to sing with a chorus or be able to stay on my feet throughout the song.

I can't live on the clock. I thought I could live on the calendar but if I get sick, a long slow recovery time knocks me off that. I thought I could do deadlines. The only way that works is if I'm already done and that's just a matter of when to release it. There is no way my body will allow me to behave in a professional manner. I am not and never will be business class.

That doesn't mean I won't write or publish. It means that has to come on my schedule and I live on Indian time. It's done when it's done. When it hits print it's done and there will be no more changes unless I decide for my own reasons to make some years later.

Raven Dance is slated for a tightening rewrite, an afterword about real life inspiration and most of all the natural break into two volumes that comes when the timeline has about a year gap from the end of the previous chapter to start of the next. I just sailed into the sequel without realizing it was another book and the structures are complete. If all I did was come up with a book one title and break it, that's the kind of change that can work.

All the rest, old or new, are still unpublished and thus Not Done. I'm working on a rewrite of Chazho, which is book one of my Piarra series. It has a mountain of backstory and over thirty other volumes in that setting.

I still participate in Nanowrimo and I won again this year. For several years I've been doing stand alone books for Nanowrimo with an eye to more varied fare for readers when I start releasing all of them. I still love those, especially Sabertooth. They're cooling for rewrite and what I need to for a successful career is hone my editng process till it's as smooth and familiar as my drafting process.

One problem with this is San Francisco weather. November is one of my worst months here. The start of winter gets rainy and cold. Not snow like the rest of the culture but a bone-aching chill that sucks down my energy into pain and kicks fibromyalgia up into a huge continual flare at every pressure change. I sleep like my cat and can't concentrate in November.

So what I did last year was try a difficult genre I'd never done before - steampunk. I like Victoriana. I like some steampunk novels. The clothes and stuff are cool. I cannot figure out what I don't like about it since it's a style that lends itself to Dickens Revival! I could even tackle economic issues in it well, focusing on the echoes of the Gilded Age in our times. Yet I didn't exactly do that and the book barely got to 50k. I'm not sure if I even wrote the ending or halted in exhaustion on making it past the winner line. It needs more work and hard work to get it right.

This year I thought "Hey, why not Horror?" Wonderful title: Fear This. I picked a classic subject, Serial Killers and then my protagonist became a wonderful antihero who's basically a traditional Female Serial Killer: Vigilante... then the supernatural came in. Whoohoo! Awesome, it's genuinely going to surprise readers, it's myth gone wild, it's true to source as I can get it but breaks some ugly stereotypes. It's a good book.

I also had three to five day gaps between scenes or chapters staying on track. I got to 21,210 at a point I was supposed to be getting close to 30,000 and the freeze set in. I wasn't going to make the numbers on Fear This. 

NaNoWriMo was a cakewalk most years. I've done Three Day Novel Contest officially three times and unofficially most years. I've written a 75,000 word Three Day Novel, a comedy with kids and bed monsters, that came out as a good stand alone book. That's my natural process and speed.

When I tackle a difficult subject during bad weather the result isn't guaranteed. So I realized I should just take Wrimo for what it is and write a bad book that could give me some good ideas or a workable rough draft. I dropped all the pressure that was choking me on Fear This and titled my goof-off project Pure Self Indulgent Tripe just to remind myself what Nanowrimo is for.

You don't get a good book on the first draft. You get a first draft that can become a good book once you polish it and throw out what isn't needed - in my case, sometimes that's one in three sentences to cut it to size. I write like an Impressionist painter. Get an idea, then throw it out there into a file working fast and intuitive. Try to get it down really fast while the idea is hot. Tell the story to myself first and then see how it looks when it's done.

From the first chapter's goofy reminiscing in first person to the second chapter introduction of a character from the old series - or rather from its backstory, he wasn't who he said he was - I was back on Piarra with my Byzantine royal intrigues, complex multi level plots, character driven stories and huge cast. Not all of them got on stage. Enough of them did that I now have a good idea what the characters are actually doing now rather than what they were doing in 2000 on and around Contact Earth.

Whether I retitle, rewrite and publish Tripe as its own book isn't relevant. I could easily treat the whole thing as a character study and world building exercise to get a better look at my series as a whole. But I won Nanowrimo a couple of days ago doing it and that brought back my mojo.

I have to have fun. I can't work on it like I'm trying to do a commission of something I'm not very good at yet. I can let the wordstream flow if I'm sick but only if I am so engaged in the story that I'm lost in it feeling the endorphins of process. If it's hard work, it may come out well but it has to be done more like photorealism - carefully look at this story and pick it out, get it precise, get almost perfectionist about its details to make it work.

That's not a reason not to do it. It's a reason not to do it for Nanowrimo. Wrimo is supposed to be a break, an annual vacation of the mind. Lose myself in a good book by one of my favorite authors, me. I like horror but my daughter brought up something telling about Horror and Fibromyalgia.

"Dad, if you scare yourself you're going to flare and get sick."

Duh. She made sense. So the Horror novel is now a slow back burner project. I might even outline it because writing it was so much less intuitive. It came out just as well outlining as "pantsing" so that may help me complete it. Get the gist of the plot down while I still know it, so I can pick it up later. Sketch and trust the sketch to be reasonably well balanced.

In art, sometimes I just sketch fast and layer color and work before the light changes in pastels. Sometimes I measure carefully and sketch in erasable colored pencils and do a watercolor underpainting neatly setting under layers to each area of tone and color, then layer Prismacolors 20 to 30 times to get a rich glowing realism painting achievable in no other medium. They are different processes, one fast and one slow. If I look at difficult books that way and difficult genres that way, I may succeed in those ambitious projects.

Just as long as there is no deadline for their completion, I'm good.

If you're doing Nanowrimo, don't forget to have fun. That's the moral of the story and what I learned in this year's marathon. Every year I do it, I become a better writer. If you hate the trash you wrote when you got the Winner's Certificate, stuff it in a folder to look at the idea again later or edit when you cool down and see what made it worth doing. My advice on that: don't throw it out. You don't know what your best work is until it's in print and other people say it is. You can't tell what worked or not till you master a skill consciously that you might have been using intuitively. Learning in the arts is lifelong.

What comes out best sometimes hurts most getting it down or takes the most effort because that's challenging your deepest self. Or it comes spilling out casually when you're not thinking about it because you're not choking on fear of failure or fear of success or fear of yourself.

I faced my killer instinct in Fear This and backed off to give that a slow nuanced long look. I have to look back very young to remember what it was like to think killing someone would be cool. I came a long way on nonviolence. Because I did, I looked at the cripple in the mirror at the top of Tripe and blew past that fear fast because he wasn't as ugly as the serial killer I would've been if I took the wrong turn as a child or had a slightly different brain chemistry or just sheer luck of the situation.

A good dose of something I couldn't handle made the other fear an easier leap, coming up with the No Brainer: I hate being sick and I would be very glad if I could get cured of it, especially the fibromyalgia that knocked me from Marginally Functional self employment down to Cannot Work. It may become a very nuanced look at that if I rewrite it and so I'm letting it get long to let that plotline expand, that character growth.

Truth is, a good chiropractor would do me as much good as a good therapist right now. Massage therapy works wonders and chiropracty is a Reset on my skeletal problems. It's palliative but efficient, twice a month getting that when I can afford it is likely to double my working time at everything. I grew up believing every symptom was psychological and in the last couple of good therapists came to understand how much my mind is shaped by my body.

Foods I don't like turn out to be allergies or sensitivities. Activities I hate turn out to have been real dangers or overexertion and injury every time. Even the way I feel about churches boils down to hard pews and ritual calisthenics standing and kneeling and doing things in unison - something that most human beings find spiritually uplifting causes me nothing but pain and grief. I limp to a different drummer. To be a good author I have to also get into the head of people who can get something out of church, run in marathons for fun, feel safe enough to seek thrills to break the boredom.

So I'm getting something out of Nanowrimo and if you haven't tried it, go join and find out what it is. There are other events later in the year, a summer Camp Nanowrimo is an early run that might be very good for me to catch up on difficult projects. April has a script writer thing. There's plenty of ways to participate. If you are doing it, no matter what you got is more writing and more practice than you had. If ou didn't finish your novel you still have some days to do more of it or finish, if you don't win you migt finish later - or just be one step closer to finishing with that much more practice to make you better next year.

It took 20 years to finish Raven Dance's rough draft. After I finished a much shorter comedy I did on the spur of the moment, I was able to go back and finish it right despite terrors it was the worst thing I'd ever created. The highs and lows were both true. It was the best thing I'd ever done. It was also the worst thing I'd ever done, for the same reason, it was the first big novel I ever wrote even if the little quickie hit The End faster.

I'll stop here because I'd go on into technical advice about pantsing, how to write rough drafts fast and easily without looking down. That's an article in its own right and a good topic for my next essay. Thanks for your patience. I'm back now on my feet or at least my wheels and ready to type.

Ideafile

Sorry about my long absence. Most of that has been health reasons. Winter and spring even in San Francisco are seasons that get rough on my chronic conditions. I've been sleeping a lot, putting up with massive pain and also working on some art projects lately. I've been doing more art writing and art blogging without writing about writing because my fiction's been mostly on hold. Funny coincidence, because yesterday was the second time I painted a house recently. This was a paint-along with Johannes Vloothuis, noted Canadian landscape artist. He worked in oils very large, 16" x 20". I adapted it to pastels at 8" x 10" because I'm not someone who can stand at an easel. Most of the painting process, I was staring at the screen and my painting trying to keep up. Making artistic decisions to leave out this and that because I needed to scale it all down to my size and medium. I completely changed the architecture, not understanding his sketch. So the entrance is quite different and came up from the murky depths of my memory - of so many different Northern states, from a gated neighborhood in Minnesota to Westchester, New York.

When I posted it, my responses all had a consistent theme. "It looks like a fairy tale." "It's the cottage in the woods, comfort and warmth near the wild." "I can see gnomes and fairies there." That wasn't what I saw when I was painting it. Unlike the last time when I set out to do an illustration and came up with a Lovecraft story, the painting just happened and all my associations were nonverbal. It makes sense because art is right brained. Your right brain is the source of creativity. The well of inspiration, a place that's essentially wordless. Your left brain understands language, so using language creatively is like riding a bicycle. You need both sides. Nonetheless, after months of writing hiatus, a story idea did creep in. Obvious enough that everyone who saw the picture told me the story. It's like Spiderwyck, the place where the worlds wear thin and all the little legendary people hang out throwing parties in the kitchen or tribal wars in the attic. It's a good place for little people. I asked myself "Do the people in the house know all the other peoples that connect with it?" Sure they do. Yep, that read true. They get on well with them, the humans that own the house are gatekeepers and if some of the paranormals are human sized or magic can deal with scale differences, they may not even be pure humans. A touch of elven blood wouldn't hurt for a family like that. Talking about it with an artist friend, the idea hit me. Bank of America doesn't know that's a gateway between worlds or that the current owners are holding a peace with the supernatural. I read an article about a guy who didn't even have a mortgage getting foreclosed on and spending months and a fortune in lawyers fighting it when his house was paid up, he didn't actually borrow against it! That could happen to the Magic House and if it did, if they carried out the eviction - it wouldn't be that total an eviction. Instead with the gatekeepers gone and the gates left open, perhaps purposely, things would start to go nuts in the neighborhood. I can't imagine gatekeepers to the supernatural actually defaulting on a mortgage or needing one. They usually pay their bills with ancient gold, which in this day and age would mean selling a coin now and then to an antique dealer and depositing the money. But if there was even a minor bank error - whoops, there you go, house in foreclosure despite not having a mortgage on it. Any trouble sorting it out and they could actually get foreclosed on and have to move. That invites the squatters who aren't human and life gets interesting. So what do I do when I get an idea like that? Title of this entry: Ideafile. I set up a new file in my journal folder, titled Ideafile. This one was "Ideafile - Foreclosure." I describe everything I thought of for the idea and store it. Writing it out is a good start to remembering every detail. I'll probably copy out this entry and add it to the Ideafile, which I'll go back to every time the idea comes up again. They're not hard to search for - just search my computer for the keyword Ideafile. This way when I do make time to write and sit there wondering what to write, I have my choice of all the ideas that came along when something else was scheduled. That's when ideas come. Today I'm planning on going out to Golden Gate Park with a friend, not banging out the start of a new rough draft. But as long as I've created the Ideafile, I can come back to it again. This will eventually be written. I'm also working on some older ideas, sometimes they steep for years. My lost science fiction novel "Garden of Earthly Delights" is getting a new cast. I've been working on building new characters for it and reconstructing it. Not exactly outlining but making a lot of notes, getting ready to do it again better this time. The lost version stank, the new one will have the benefit of a lot more life experience than back when I first got the idea. So when you get ideas, don't just ignore them. This is where the ideas come from. They come up when you're doing something else, when you don't have time to stop and work on a novel or story, when you're trying to sleep or muzzily waking up. Get them down and develop a system for finding them easily. Then when the day comes that you do make time for your writing, you'll have some choices when the left brain takes the lead to put these stories into words.

Writers Block II - Better Taste than Skill

I was mired in Writers Block for decades. From the time I was a little kid dedicated to becoming a science fiction writer someday up to the present, I’ve beaten myself up for not writing more, not editing what I write, not sending it out promptly enough or releasing more self published titles. There was no excuse.

My worst discouragement came from me. Every critical comment from someone else sank deep and broke my soul because I knew it was true. I could look at my writing and see that I had overblown descriptions, bad dialogue, rambling tangents, unfinished work. My tastes were higher than my skills.

That’s true for any beginner in any of the arts.

That’s what makes criticism sink in and take hold as so personal. The myth that “Talent” means you don’t have to learn the craft destroys millions of writers before they even start. Beginners do not produce Shakespeare quality immortal prose on their first time out. It’s a miracle if they can produce a recognizable story with a beginning, a middle and an end. All of us have to teach ourselves the craft and develop unique personal methods to achieve the same goal - good readable fiction.

The way to get past that stage where your taste is better than your skill is to date what you do. Measure your progress against your own past results and nothing else. If your new story is better than your last story, you have progress!

Celebrate it.

Give yourself a pat on the back. Shout it out on Facebook. “I love my latest story, it came out so much better than I expected.” It’s okay to do that. Tooting your own horn on minor accomplishments is socially appropriate in a positive social circle.

What will keep you from turning into a selfish arrogant egotist is going around to all your friends’ profiles and congratulating them when they post a cute cat photo, cleaned the garage, finally finished that accounting course they’ve slaved at for months. People need encouragement to complete long term tasks. Your best, most reliable source of encouragement is yourself.

Being able to post progress by quantity breaks that block to a large extent too. You wrote 10,000 words. That’s a big achievement, the first time you do it that’s almost an impossible goal. It doesn’t matter if they’re not publishable. It doesn’t matter if you go back to the idea, trim it down and edit to wind up with 1,500 words of perfect short-short story. You got something to edit.

There are no bad rough drafts.

We have computers to work on now. We type digitally. Erasing and rewriting doesn’t wear through the paper or mean using up reams of it just for practice. You can keep editing the same story through all the years of learning the craft and at the end it’s just as beautiful as if you’d learned it by writing hundreds of different stories each a little better than the last. That’s your choice.

So don’t throw out anything. Date your drafts. Save your early drafts because there’s a stage of learning to edit where your judgment can get skewed and the edited version isn’t as good as the rough draft.

I did that a lot until I finished editing Raven Dance and still did it occasionally later on. It doesn’t matter. Changes are easily reversible if you save drafts.

In order to get past the stage where your tastes are better than your skills, you have to believe in yourself. That’s what I’ve heard all my life about it - believe in yourself.

That hardly ever helps in its pure form.

Believe in your ability to learn. Trust that your idea is a good idea. Trust that if you love this story, readers will love it too once it’s been polished. Trust that you are capable of learning all the editing skills needed to turn that wretched pile of mistakes into a wonderful story as good as you imagined it would be.

Then remember that learning is life long. Getting one good book or story published doesn’t mean that there aren’t new levels of craft ahead of you. While you live, there will always be ways to improve your work.

I write better than I used to and not as well as I will.

That’s the core of my confidence. That’s the attitude that wins for the long term. It’s not about trying to write as well as Stephen King. By the time I do, my writing won’t be at all like Stephen King’s because I’m Robert Sloan instead. He had a different childhood. His first love was a different person. His childhood nightmares aren’t mine and his pleasures and struggles in life are his own.

We’ll have a lot in common because I also grew up on the same cultural common ground. The better I get, the easier it is to tell that I wrote it. The more I conquer my bad prose habits, the cleaner and clearer my ideas will reach readers even if they don’t have much in common with me at all.

We’re all human and we’re writing for people who speak our language. If you’ve got multiple languages, I envy you. I’ve never been able to retain anything but English because I didn’t have enough social contacts in other languages. I might manage to learn one now that I live in multicultural San Francisco but out in white Midwestern suburbs, I forgot languages within months after the classes ended.

So that’s where “Write Every Day” really matters.

When you journal and write your life story to yourself, you really are practicing. Writing in first person makes you a sympathetic character. You are the protagonist. You face your flaws and understand them, you celebrate your triumps, you understand the obstacles you faced.

It also helps to make public commitments to a writing schedule. Take classes - assignments that need to be turned in on time will get done to the best of your ability. They also break down the skills into more manageable multiple topics. Enter challenges like NaNoWriMo or its editing counterpart. Start a blog on a topic you enjoy and update it weekly or even daily.

It’s all still writing. You may not think the blog about your favorite hobby is improving your fiction skills, but it is. You’re practicing. When it comes time to explain the science fiction premise, you’ve already explained the fine differences between brands of pastels or grains of wood for carving. You’ve done it in a readable way and have readers who like your content.

Everything you write contributes to your skills. When they don’t meet your high expectations, trust your ability to stick to it until they do. The only thing that can stop you is dying before you do it - and even then, it’s better to die trying than to give up. Everything you’ve written to date is wonderful because it brims with potential.

Someday you will reach a point where your skills do meet your expectations. A milestone comes when you read a published book that’s lousier than your latest efforts. Another when you start to see a lot of them. Like learning to cook, there comes a point where you can do it exactly to your own tastes and it comes out fine.

Trust yourself. At that point, you’ll be finding joy in the process even if it was a struggle up till then. It doesn’t need to be though, not if you can take pleasure in the journey and reward yourself for progress without expecting perfection.

The best part of it is that as I write and edit more, I spot problems in earlier manuscripts that are easy to fix. Difficulties that used to be insurmountable come into reach, take a bit less effort until they're routine. Once they're as easy as hunting for typos, even the editing process becomes a pleasure.

I had good ideas, memorable characters and great plots in those earlier novels. When I polish them up to my present skill it's as much fun as writing a new one.

One big internal milestone for me was the point I’d pay money for something I wrote. It's indescribably sweet. I can always get more of it. If I get to the end and want more, I can do something about that. Right now. Write the sequel and find out what happens.

That’s a joy worth working towards. Go for it!