Writing Mania

So, for the past three days or so, I've woken up knowing exactly what the characters need to do next.

Not like a vague, this is where we're going sort of direction, but a literal the exact words I need to type are scrolling across my brain and I'd better get to a keyboard and get them out before I lose them.

I've always written my best first thing in the morning, sneaking down when no one else is awake, putting on the kettle and just going for an hour (stopping to make tea when the whistle blows, of course), but this goes beyond that. I feel like I have moved into this hyperspace where the story will just come to me, and I write until I'm forced to stop (by either work or the need for sleep) and the instant I can get back to it again, there it is, waking me up an hour earlier than is reasonable and demanding I write.

My mother is the sort to self-diagnose all her children with whatever she's last seen on Dr. Oz, but when she told me I was bipolar, I looked into a bit. (Let me preface all this by saying that if I am, it is BEYOND mild and not unmanageable, and probably well within the range of "normal" swings anyways.) It's easy to find patterns of highs and lows in my life, but the human mind has always been susceptible to seeing what it expects to see. Still, as I'm a little older now and can watch for these things in myself, I wonder if I'm not starting a bit of a mania. I was certainly depressed enough these past few months, but anyways. We'll see what yields.

Regardless, I am SUPER excited to have the writing moving along so nicely!

Writing Goals: Week 2.5

Ok, back before I realized what a stupid idea it was to try and talk about CURRENT PROGRESS before it happened, I wrote this post for week three. You can have it now, and I'll work up a better post for my actual progress report for week 3, which is going much better than anticipated. Week 2 had me really, really down.

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TERRIBLE week this week - too much work. Kids came back to school, bad weather and illness in the staff meant I was working way, way overtime, and lost the groove of what was going on in Asylum. We'll get back to it, but it's going to be a struggle, I think. Wish us luck.

Writing Goals for 2014: Week 2.5

 -Keeping my blog post scheduled up at least a week in advance, so I'm not stressing deadlines: Still working with the re-vamp of the schedule, so I guess Mini-goal: Figure out what posting schedule I want to go with and get its page up.

-Writing at least once a day, as is suggested by so many successful authors: Not happening lately. I'm really not happy about this. But it is the first week of school, and everything is crazy, so maybe once I actually settle into a routine?

-ACTUALLY FINISH A COMPLETE STORY so that I can flex my editing muscles a bit: ASYLUM HAS GROUND TO A HALT! I need to figure out how to get back on track with this!

However, on the editing note, it's apparently time to start editing my NaNo, so I guess if Asylum keeps confounding me, I can work on that. I dread the idea of touching that horrid thing again, but I did make a legally binding promise on a silly website, so I suppose I must. :P

-Research employment opportunities in the writing field (so vague, I know) since I'm tired of my soul sucking service industry job: Might have a lead on this, one of my employees suggested I look into working for the local newspaper - any feedback on that, anyone? HR is also a possibility, apparently - I hate that I feel like I don't know anything about the grown up world and grown up jobs! I'm 27, damnit, when will I finally feel qualified to be an adult?

Aaaand that's my writing week. Anyone else able to chime in with something more positive? I could use some success stories right now.

Opinion Time: To post, or not to post

One of my characters is deeply disturbed.

DEEPLY disturbed.

Like, takes it out on small children, 5 flavors of crazy disturbed.

Also not human.

The question is: do I share the crap that rolls through her head with the world? I wrote a scene with her and her brother earlier, and it's still got me shaken up. I'm disturbed that something like that lives inside me. But it's part of the world, part of their story, and just plain who they are. However, it's not at all relevant to what they're doing. She's a side character, with no place to go and no major plot point to affect. She just happened to want to share with a pretty graphic sex scene.

So, to post or not to post? I'd intended on posting some more mature stuff in here as I go on, to see what does and doesn't hit the filters, but this stuff is pretty bad. Nothing too terribly descriptive (at least as far as the disturbing stuff goes - the sex is as graphic as any other sex I write) but just... I dunno. It's bad enough even I'm not sure I want to claim, and for those of you that know me, that's pretty bad.

So what would you do, if you have a psychotic violent killer in your head, talking to you about the stuff they would do if their brother wasn't there to keep them in check?

Filler or Fuller? Posting every day

Sitting down to queue up this week's posts, I find myself wondering: what is the "ideal" posting schedule?

She said What?! Getting to know your characters

My girlfriend and I were IMing the other day, and she shared this wonderful little gem of an idea. I find the concept extremely helpful for jumping back and forth between characters (like we tend to do) and for building up new characters you're not so sure of - or just for fun!

The idea is to take a sentence/concept, and "translate it" into how your character would express it. The examples she gave me when like this:

On Writing: Keeping track of time

One of the author's I follow posted this today, and I've sort of fallen in love with idea of "pantsing". I am a definite pantser, because my characters demand it out of me. However, some planning is absolutely necessary when you write several stories in the same world in the same day, so to keep things straight, Cait and I tend to use timelines, like this:

What if I run out of things to say?

This thought just struck me last night, as I was driving home from a long day of Christmas shopping. What happens when - not if- I run out of things to say? There is only so much that can be said about writing, and even less that can be said about it by me.

And yet, I've been writing, and talking about writing, for years.

I knew less about writing when I first started talking about it, and it didn't stop me then.

NaNoWriMo: Day 11

Mondays were usually pretty good for me on the writing front. I didn't have work until later in the afternoon, but had to get up reasonably early in the day to take Girlfriend to class, so I was sure I wouldn't waste it, too much.

NaNoWriMo: Day 9

Saturdays are usually my day off in the week that I take for my own personal enjoyment. I sleep in, I go to belly dancing, we go out to eat and then I go to Stitch-n-Bitch Lex. That means I tend not to get home until pretty late, and I'm completely exhausted when I do.

The stage is now set for today's offering. Enjoy!

-R

How to stay on (multi)task

As I've mentioned, my writing partner (Caitlin) and I tend to work on multiple things at once when we write together. It makes sure we each have something to work on when we sit down to write together, for one, and we tend to get distracted and follow plot/character bunnies for two. Currently, we're running ...4? stories in the same world (same neighborhood, actually) and same time frame at once, and so the plot lines are a lovely tangle mess. To keep ourselves straight on what we've already written, we tend to take pretty extensive notes.

These are the notes from Haven, the story I wrote my NaNo to learn more about. The events of my NaNo take place two years before my real time Haven, so you'll see some familiar characters, and some new ones as well. There's also even a proper excerpt at the bottom, so real writing for "Day 8" Hooray!