Archive for the ‘life’ Category

The Mobile Office

Posted: April 26, 2013 in life, writing
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Waiting room - Hasanuddin airport of Makassar

This is where time goes to die. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The nature of modern life is that it’s always moving. We’re constantly on our way somewhere or coming back from somewhere. Whether this is a good thing or not* remains to be seen, but it does mean one thing: we have to be flexible.

Sherry Ramsey, a friend of mine, keeps posting about writing from her ‘mobile office’, which near as I can tell is the driver’s seat of her van while she waits for one of her children to finish something. She works on edits, she makes notes on new stories, she reads  submissions…that’s a lot of work she gets done.

That’s making good use of your time. It’s damn easy to take those dead times as just that: dead. Time to zone out in front of the waiting room television, or stare blankly into space.** Or, god forbid, read those disease covered magazines that expired in 1991. Isn’t there something else you could be doing?

I’m not an advocate of working every goddamn bleeding second. Everyone needs downtime. But that time in waiting rooms is not downtime, because chances are you’re not using it to do anything you actually want to do. Unless your doctor’s office is much more liberal than mine, and will allow you to bring a bottle of wine. In those in-between places, you’re just…on pause. Waiting. And probably bored.

So take your life off pause and reclaim those moments and hours. Pack a notebook***, find a corner, and make notes. Scribble down characters or ideas. Or pound out five hundred words of a story. Or, say a blog post. I’m writing this in the waiting room of my garage, waiting for the winter tires to be taken off Marcus, my car.**** Canada AM plays in the background, along with ringing phones and whatever Acadian Death Cough the man sitting across from me has. I could be watching the latest piece on….hm, seems to be the dangers of teen sexting. Pass. I’d rather work on this. I’m getting work done, so once I leave here, I’m that much closer to my daily goals. Which means more time at the end of the day for wine and reading. I’ll take that free time over manically grinning morning hosts any day.

Oh, god. Now Skeletor Kelly Ripa is on. Time to break out the headphones and escape into my new short story.

*Or, you know, both.
**I’m a big fan of staring into space, but I rarely get the opportunity in waiting rooms. Something about me attracts elderly people who want to talk. No idea why senior citizens would choose to engage the bleach-blonde, tattooed woman wearing ripped up jeans and a superhero t-shirt in conversation, but it always happens.
***Or your favourite notebook, anyway. I’ve never met a writer who didn’t have at least two on the go. We’re a stationary obsessed clan.
****Only men think all cars are women.

All About Timing: Deadlines and Time Crunches

Posted: March 22, 2013 in inspiration, life, submissions, writing
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Beasts of Hoth

This is what delivers mail in my province. (Photo credit: leg0fenris)

(Late post is late because I was out shoveling 8,752 pounds of snow out of the driveway. My arms are tired.)

Sometimes, the universe has no sense of timing.*

I’ve been working away at my list of submissions. To date, I only had one story lying around that I could send in. All the rest I’ve had to write from scratch. So in my quest to get thirteen new rejections in 2013, I’ve had to increase my output. I started scouring listings for short stories, and I found quite a few, but I do not keep a large backlog of stories. I don’t write a lot of short fiction, and what I do write tends to be in response to some deadline or another. Well, I figured finding some more deadlines would mean more stories finished. Right?

Well, I was partially right. I have been writing more short story ideas, and in general having more ideas for them. Part of that is the old you only find what you’re looking for trick: if I don’t have short stories on the brain, I’m not going to come up with ideas for them. Law of…I don’t know. Law of brains or some shit.

But, wonderful though it is to have all these ideas, there is still not enough time to get them all done. Or even half of them done. Which can be irritating.

There was one anthology that particularly intrigued me, but I was having trouble coming up with exactly the right story for it. I had some notes and a few false starts, but nothing worth submitting. And then I got sick, which put me behind. I chose to devote time to the anthology I actually had a story for and let the other one go.

And then I came up with an idea. A good one, too. It came to me while I was lying on the couch, covered in cats, trying to sneak in a pre-gym nap. A little more thought, and I knew I had something good.

But there was a problem: the due date was too close. With other projects in the works and, you know, having a fucking life, I wouldn’t have time to get it done. At least not done well. And I’m not going to submit a poor piece just to meet my own goal. That’s cheating. Again, I cursed the gods of inspiration** for their piss-poor timing.

But very occasionally, the world listens. Because when I was back checking more listings this week, I saw a change: the deadline had been extended. By two weeks. Just enough time to get it done.

So now I will. Thanks, universe. I owe you one.

*For example, three snow storms in the last week of March. What the unholy fiddle-playing fuck, Weather Gods?
**Commonly known as Research, Coffee, and Being Bat-Shit Crazy.

Spring Cleaning: Your Writing Routine

Posted: March 20, 2013 in internet, life, reading, writing
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Beach Head (G.I. Joe)

The other half of the battle is guns. (G.I. Joe) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you haven’t heard, Google Reader is going tits up sometime in July. Seems that the service is only used by a relatively small, if dedicated and somewhat insane, minority, and Google doesn’t feel it offers anything to the general public.

Guess who’s a member of that minority.

I am addicted to information. New stuff, old stuff, different stuff, the same stuff but turned upside down…you name it. And Google Reader was one of my primary information delivery systems.* It managed about fifty percent of my information streams, seriously cutting down on the time I needed to spend going out and finding shit. Learning to use it was the agriculture to my earlier hunter-gatherer style: it gave me more time to devote to other things, like culture, written language, and the development of city states run by the Spider God.**

But instead of rending my clothes and organizing a march on the Google offices, I decided to take this as an opportunity. My old system was going away? Fine. Time to experiment with some new ones.

The net result of this is that I spent about half the weekend looking through all my automated systems, information delivery and otherwise, and seeing if they could be better. No system is so perfect that it doesn’t benefit from experimentation. Even if you just go back to the old way, at least you know something that doesn’t work. And G.I. Joe taught us all that knowing is half the battle.

A routine can be great. It can provide structure to the otherwise structureless, which can be very helpful when doing something as fundamentally ephemeral as writing. But never make the mistake of thinking that the structure is anything other than a tool for ensuring something gets done. And, like all tools, there are other versions and upgrades, some of which might improve your experience.

And there can be other benefits. For example, I run most efficiently—that is to say, my fastest times—in the afternoon, so usually I run in the afternoon. But yesterday morning I got up and ran before breakfast, just for the hell of it. It was harder, and my time wasn’t as good, but I started the day feeling amazing from the endorphin rush. Plus, I didn’t have to make sure I left time for a workout later. Both times offer different, but still very good, results.

Experiment with your routine. You write in the evening? Try getting up early on a Saturday and writing in the morning, just to see what happens***. Edit a draft all at once? Try breaking it up into short chunks. Only write science fiction? Try a romance. Shake it up. Your routine will always be there if you want to go back to it. But it never hurts to stretch your legs a little.

*Information delivery systems trump even caffeine delivery systems in my day.
**I may need to review my books from my anthropology minor.
***’Just to see what happens’ is pretty much the reason I do everything.

On Wonder

Posted: February 22, 2013 in inspiration, life
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Hogsmeade as seen in the films

Dude, we were there. It was awesome.(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I spent most of the last week in Orlando*, having a vacation with the Husband. As it was both of our first time in the place, we did a bunch of the usual touristy stuff. Theme parks and shopping, mostly. And lying by the pool in our swim suits, smiling every time we remembered the snow on the ground at home.**

Our personal favourite, and the one that was on our list over all the Disney stuff, was Universal Islands of Adventure. For career nerds like us, this was awesome. We drank Butterbeer, screamed at the T-rex, and got our pictures taken with Marvel villains***. It was a great day.

One of the best parts was wandering through the Harry Potter section, where they built a nice chunk of Hogsmeade and Hogwarts itself.  It’s very impressive, though crowded. I’ll admit that I daydreamed about writing something that would inspire such a real-world homage. What writer wouldn’t love that? Well, maybe some of the literary crew, but let’s face it: no one will ever make a Gravity’s Rainbow theme park.

Everywhere I went in that part, I saw kids—and adults, too, though it was less common there—who looked bloody awestruck.**** They were amazed to just be there, to be in a place that they’d imagined so many times. A place that, until quite recently, existed only inside the pages of a book and their own heads. There was a great sense of wonder about those people.

And, on the other hand, there were people who looked fucking bored. Teenagers, mostly, and of that particular age where showing enthusiasm for anything is second only to wearing last year’s hideous trend in the hierarchy of social ridicule. They’d seen stuff like this before. They were jaded, cynical. Honestly, they looked like they’re rather be elsewhere.

These were the two sides of the park: wonder and cynicism. And, given the choice, I’ll take wonder any day. It’s the font of all creativity, because what person would ever undertake to create anything without it? It’s the first step that takes you into the long fall from the cliff.

Don’t get me wrong: the theme parks are very clear that they exist only to part you from your wallet. The fact that every ride exits through a gift shop reinforces this, as do the prices for just about everything. But that didn’t matter to some people. All that mattered was that their imagination had come to life around them, and they were happy. They had chosen wonder. And that’s the same wonder you can get from a good book, or a beautiful view, or an amazing piece of machinery.

Cynicism is always easier than wonder. But wonder makes the world awesome again, no matter how old you are. And who doesn’t want more of that in their life?

*Yes, I was away again. My ninja posting skills fool all.
**Which I just got in from shovelling. On the upside, it was a good way to burn off some of the junk I ate on vacation.
***Yes, just villains, though there were heroes about. Up to you what you want to read into that.
****All right, we were those people, too. The ones giggling and pointing at things and just watching.

I Can’t Control Time Yet: How to Prioritize

Posted: February 15, 2013 in life, writing
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He's a loving god, but don't push it.

He’s a loving god, but don’t push it.

You ever feel like there’s not enough hours in the day?

Not that I’m complaining about the construction of our diurnal cycle—that would be critical of the universe itself, which just seems ungrateful, even considering how it dropped the ball on the construction of things like the common coffee table corner—but I really feel like I could go for a thirty hour day. That would be ideal. The extra six hours would provide me with enough time to get all my stuff done and hang out with people. Also, I might finally get around to organizing my closets, which would be nice.

But, no. The universe once again refuses to conform to my specifications. This will not do.

Because, goddamn it, I have shit that needs to get done. Words to write, deadlines to meet, asses to kick. And then there’s winter, which eats up a significant amount of time with its constant demands for shovelling and salting and sacrifices to the Sun God* to bring back spring.

So, how to fit it all in?

I can’t, unfortunately. Because, despite my best efforts and the report card comments of some of my more frustrated teachers, I am still human. So now it becomes about prioritizing. I divide the day up into chunks of time. One is the amount of time I need to spend on paid work and keeping life running. Another is the amount I spend on less-urgent projects, like sandbox writing, research, or brainstorming. And the last is the amount I need to stay a functioning human being through things like exercise, social interaction, and trying to wipe out humanity using a variety of plagues.**

All three are important. Burn out comes when one categories eats all the others and uses their corpses to power its own insane machinations. So, yes, I could get technically get more done if I cannibalized social time for paid work, or even sandbox writing, since that often leads to paid work, but that’s only time I’m stealing from myself. Time that I need to stave off the inevitable slide toward super-villainy.

This is a pretty good system. I get most things done. I get all the important things done, important being defined a little differently every day. Do I get as much done as I want? No, but I suspect that if I stopped time itself and used that to get through my lists of stuff, I still wouldn’t be satisfied. As it is, this lets me get my writing done, have a life, and be reasonably well-adjusted.

And, hey, that’s about all any of us can ask. At least until time falls under my sway.

*Our household Sun God is actually a small stuffed toy that I got from a fast-food restaurant about ten years ago now. His name is Ra-Ra, the Two-Faced God. We sacrifice candy to him.
**I should point out that this is a game I play on my iPhone called Plague, Inc. Very catchy, though not as catchy as the stuff I make with it. Last night I destroyed humanity with a virus called Teddy Bears.

Monday Challenge: After The Storm

Posted: February 11, 2013 in life, monday challenge, random
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English: West Virginia Country Church early in...

Nothing but silence and the wind. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Winter: it is not fucking around this year. Those of you who were in the path of the storm, I hope that you’re safe and warm somewhere, and that you have power. Barring that, I hope you have some friend or relative whose power you can steal on a more or less indefinite basis.

Still, it’s beautiful out there today. The sky’s clear, the sun’s shining, and the ice is falling from the roofs, making for an interesting obstacle course outside. And shovelling that icy, compacted mess is hard enough work that I can do it in a t-shirt. After the last couple of days of whiteout conditions and snowy masses of death descending from the heavens, I’ll take whatever win I can get.

While I’m out there beating back the demons of winter with the edge of a steel shovel, I’ll be enjoying the beautiful day that sometimes comes after a storm. The moment where the clouds break and the sun shines again, or the stars. I woke up very early this morning to get a look at those, too. Having not seen them for a while, it was nice to say hello again. Likewise the sun, who I’ve missed. Yeah, there’s a shitload of work to get done today, writing and otherwise, but that can wait. For now, it’ll just be me and the sun and the shovel.

So, in honour of winter reminding us exactly who the fuck is Queen around here, write me the moment after the storm. Not necessarily this one, and not necessarily a real storm. Write me the peace at sea after a hurricane, the calm after weeping, the afterglow that comes after angry sex. Write me a moment of peace before the next storm hits.

And then get out there and shovel your driveway.

Cocaine and Hookers*: A Day In The Life of A Writer

Posted: February 6, 2013 in life, writing
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049 AC-DC 28VI10

You mean you don’t start your day with ‘Rock and Roll Damnation’? (Photo credit: Dena Flows)

Sometime before dawn: wake up to the Bitey Cat living up to her name and biting my nose. But not hard. Just enough to let me know that she could easily kill me while I sleep, but chooses not to for reasons of her own.

Dawn: Have first cup of tea. Watch sunrise. Note that the world failed to end last night again.

Immediately after dawn: Write the day’s blog post if one is needed. If not, spend some time replying to comments/emails from blog if any. If none, then dick around on the internet. Listen to The Husband doing yoga. Put some AC/DC on my headphones. Work on my Brian Johnson impression.

Breakfast: Coffee. Food. More coffee.

Morning: Zero-draft writing on short stories, occasionally interrupted by coffee breaks, text messages, and other ideas that don’t have the common decency to wait until I’m not so fucking busy.

Later that morning: Stare blankly at screen, feeling sure I used to know what word came next…

Still later: Drown doubts with coffee.

Before lunch: Run. Spend half of run imagining fictional characters on a treadmill. Laugh at the ones that fall. Nearly fall myself because of distraction.

Lunch: Refuel and disconnect the morning’s brain, setting it free to roam in the backyard.

Afternoon: Switch to Editing Brain. Work on most demanding project, ranked by due date or level of badness. Weigh choices, because there’s never just one. Start making lists of everything that’s wrong with these projects. Pick one with smaller list. Realize the list is still fucking huge. Get over it.

Later that afternoon: Coffee break, because sometimes you’ve got to get out and push your creativity up the road like a burned out car.

Still later that afternoon: Stare blankly at the screen, wondering what the hell I was thinking when I wrote this. Or if I did. It doesn’t sound familiar. Surely I wouldn’t have misspelled ‘it’.

Even later that afternoon: Daily cigarette urge. Remember I quit. Swear.

Dinner Time: Food and regrouping with the Husband.

Evening: Check brain levels. Spend dark hours doing something fun, like drawing, gaming, or recreational stabbing.** Make a plan for tomorrow.

Rinse. Repeat.

*Actual day may not contain cocaine or hookers.

**I prefer this name for fencing.

The Art of Showing Up

Posted: January 30, 2013 in life, writing
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El Maestro boxing ring 3

Your opponent is here. Where are you? (Photo credit: Serge De Gracia)

January is almost over. The first month of a new year. How do you feel about 2013 so far?

This is the time when a lot of resolutions start to fall off. In the busyness, people forget about all those plans they had. All the changes they were going to make. The stuff they were going to do.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The Husband and I were talking about this the other day. Husband is of an analytical bent, so he likes to distill things into their smallest, simplest form. What is the action that, once taken, creates the changes that you’re looking for?

Nine times out of ten, it’s one simple act: showing up.

And that’s the part that’s the hardest. There’s a lot of talk about first steps, but actually getting to the first step is something that gets passed over. Want to get in shape? You need to show up to the gym. Lose weight? Show up to the kitchen and start figuring out how to change your eating habits. Write a novel? It’s up to you to show up to the damn computer and say, “I’m here. I’m ready. And I’m going to do this.”

Nothing will happen unless you show up. Nothing. The world does not owe you anything, and it will not go out its way to drop all the things you want into your lap because you think you really deserve it. And it certainly won’t make anything come to you. You’ve got to get out there and find it. Hell, you can’t even win the fucking lottery without buying a goddamn ticket.

There are a lot of steps that come after that one, but none of them can happen without that. You need to show up. And, yeah, once you’re there, lots of things can happen. Some days you’ll blow through what you need to do, and some days it will hit you so hard you’ll go down like Liston.* All you’ll see is floor before the darkness comes.

And, in the face of that possibility, it’s easy to give up, to get distracted, to get bored, to say things like “I’m not built for this” or “I’m just too naturally lazy.” Those are lies and stories that we tell ourselves. They protect us from rejection and failure.

They also make it really goddamned hard to do anything.

That is the coward’s way out. So next time you find yourself reaching for “I can’t”, or “I’m not interested in this idea any more”, or “this is too hard for someone like me”, I want you to take a deep breath. Hold it in until your lungs hurt. That’s all the breath you could have been using making excuses. Isn’t there something else you could be doing with it? Something more fucking useful?

You want to do something, then get out there and do it. Stop wasting your time and just show up already.

We’re waiting.

*Or, as a metaphor for non-sports people, like Kong falling from the top of the Empire State Building.

(Sidebar: I have now reached 100 WordPress blog subscribers, according to the stats page. Hello to you all, and thanks for listening. *hat tip* Much obliged.)

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Breaking Things

Posted: December 19, 2012 in life
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broken

Try not to be too desolate. (Photo credit: Jessica Whittle Photography)

I know I’m a big proponent of Never Taking A Break, Ever, but there occasionally comes a time when you’ve got to hang it up for a while. With that in mind, I announce the Christmas Break.

Oh, not from writing. I can’t physically take a break from writing. Seriously, the other day, I was so inspired I thought I should stay up late to write, but instead I went to bed, thinking a good night’s sleep would make me write even better in the morning. Instead, I woke up at 4 am and stared at the ceiling for two hours, wired out of my mind by the sheer volume of ideas sleeting through my head. I designed weapons. I made up new characters. I created settings. I was fucking high on imagination.*

Writing: it’s like crack to me. And, like a crack addict, should you try to take it away from me, I will rend you with tooth and claw.

So, I can’t take a break from writing, but I do occasionally take breaks from specific projects. Usually this happens at the end of a draft, so I can get some distance from the piece before I eviscerate it and make something better out of its hide and guts. I think manuscripts need a little time to mature before you start cutting. When I finish Draft Zero of The Patchwork King, I’ll set it aside for a few weeks and take up something else.

But sometimes you just take a break at a convenient time, especially for ongoing projects. I will be taking a brief blog hiatus until the New Year. Part of the reason for this is to really focus on finishing up the last of that zero draft I’ve been churning out. That’s going to start eating all of my non-Christmas related time now that the end is in sight. The other reason is that, hell, man, it’s the holidays. There’s parties and shit going on. And I deserve a break.

So keep writing and creating. We’ll meet back here on January the 2nd. You know, provided the world doesn’t end on the 21st. If it does, I look forward to meeting you in the shattered post-apocalyptic remains of our world.** I’ll be the one modifying my brass knuckles to deliver an electric charge.

See you soon.

*Lamest way to get high ever.
**Though if you have cool stuff, be warned that I’ll probably rob you. Sorry. Everyone for themselves in the apocalypse.

In Which I Discuss Package Tracking Numbers

Posted: December 12, 2012 in internet, life
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Living as I do in a small town, I do a lot of shopping online. I love that shit. No crowds, no lines, and they bring it right to your door. Sometimes they even gift wrap it for you.

But there’s one tiny little problem with online shopping: the tracking numbers.

To illustrate my point, and because I’ve used up all my good words slogging through the middle of my novel draft, I drew these in between hitting refresh on the courier’s website.

Getting packages in the mail before tracking numbers:

Even that fucking box is happy.

Even that fucking box is happy.

And getting packages in the mail after tracking numbers:

Tip: hitting 'refresh' every eleven seconds is not as helpful as you might think.

Tip: hitting ‘refresh’ every eleven seconds is not as helpful as you might think.

Note that it takes the same amount of time either way.  The package arrives at your house no fucking faster. But I can’t shake the feeling that, if I keep checking, I’ll make that damn box move out of the sorting room. As if there’s a little sensor on it that goes off when someone checks on it for the seven thousandth time and the people who work there go, “Well, shit, we’d better get this one on the truck right away because there’s an impatient asshole out looking for it.” More likely, if there were such sensors, those would be the packages destined to be dropped, shaken, deliberately sat on, and then lost, because you are an impatient asshole. And nobody likes that guy. Nobody.

Still can’t stop clicking it, though. If you need me, I’ll be over here, tracking the package after every sentence that I write.

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