Posts tagged with "resolution" - Faerye Net

Classics January

2010-12-31T17:14:56+00:00

So, I’m thinking of starting a new tradition. As some of you may know, if I froze my to-read list tomorrow and didn’t deviate from it until I was done, it would probably still take me 5 years to finish. This means that any individual book’s claims tend to get short shrift, and there’s a sort of triage at play: oh, I need to read that as research for a project; oh, I need to read that so I can return it to its rightful owner; oh, I need to read that because I know the author. This means that if I have a whole lifetime to read a book and no greater prompting than my own curiosity or its own merits, a book may keep sliding down the list indefinitely, especially if it’s long.

Well, I want to arrest the slide somewhat. I’ve been meaning to read War and Peace forever, and I have a perfectly lovely copy of it to read, and by jiminy, I’m starting it tomorrow. Do I promise to finish it by the end of January? No. I am not insane. But I think starting off the new year with an old classic will be a good experience, and hopefully, one worth repeating next January.

Who’s with me? Have you been meaning to dive into Moby-Dick? Our Mutual Friend? Persuasion? I, Robot? (I didn’t say whose definition of classic you had to use!)

Wordcount wisdom

2009-11-22T01:21:57+00:00

I always feel a bit self-conscious posting about my writing process. Not only do I believe fiction is a bit like law and sausage, but I’m also keenly aware the internet teems with unpublished novelists. I may be a special snowflake, but it’s positively blizzing in the intertubes. However, I’ve been encouraged to post about process, so here it goes again.

Some time ago, I made a daily wordcount goal. I stuck with it for three months before I missed a day. The day I missed was the day before my move, and then the day of my move, and the second day on the road, and, well, once you break a habit, it’s hard to glue it back together. My daily wordcount has been more of an unpredictable hare than a methodical tortoise of late. Over the summer, I started it up once more, and declared that, should I miss a day, I’d have to make it up plus penalty words the next day. That worked fine for a while, occasional deficits being repaid in massive fits of productivity. I filled a lot more pages in my journals. But eventually a hundred words lost here and there added up, especially with the steep interest applied by “penalty words.” The system was joyless and disheartening, and made me feel like a debtor to myself, rather than a creator. So I forgave my debt and scratched the system.

This tale I told, in brief, to some fellow writers at World Fantasy. (Specifically, over lunch at the delicious and reasonably priced Tandoori Oven in downtown San Jose.) “So I need to find a way to keep myself on the wordcount system without sucking the joy out of everything,” I said.

“What you need is positive reinforcement,” said Vylar Kaftan. This was one of the many times people have told me things that should have been perfectly obvious, but they break across my thick skull like glorious sunbeams, and I am filled with gratitude. I know I respond better to positive reinforcement than to negative reinforcement. I’m the kid that would stop putting her oboe together to practice when her mom yelled up the stairs “Why haven’t you played your oboe today?” but practiced ’til her lips lost sensation when her teacher said she was improving markedly. This is how I work. I should know this.

The brilliant Vylar suggested rewarding myself with $20 fun money for a week of accomplished daily wordcounts, but my new problem was that I can’t really make the reward monetary. And apart from money and things that require money, I couldn’t think of a reward. Making cookies for myself would be a reward (for me and for Ryan) but it would also mean I had to, you know, make a whole batch of cookies. Not so rewardly: another task to do.

And then my second wordcount angel flapped in. Ruth, Ryan’s mom, is a psych nurse. I told her I was thinking of just making myself Reward Coupons for successful weeks, and figuring out what they stood for later. “Honestly, that should work well,” she said. “You’d be surprised by the motivating power of gold star stickers.” I realized she’s right. Marking success is its own reward. After all, I want to write. I want to see the pages fill up and the stories finish. Why wouldn’t I feel richer when I see what I’ve accomplished?

I haven’t gone out to buy my packet of star stickers yet, but I have started counting again, as of the day Ruth and I talked, the 15th. And today marks the first completed week, each day over my wordcount goal, even when I spent hours revising (which has a tendency to generate something like -30 words per hour). I have more than a hypothetical gold star to show for it: I have a story more than halfway done. Many thanks to the wise women that turned my snoozing hare back into a tortoise.

500 words a day (or so)

2008-08-20T11:33:07+00:00

Of late, I’ve been listening to the Adventures in Sci Fi Publishing podcast (are podcast names italicized?). This only happens, say, while grocery shopping or folding clothes, so I’m plugging through them fairly slowly. However, it’s interesting and often inspiring.

This summer, they’re doing some contest which, in manner of crossover comics plotlines, is supposed to get AiSFP listeners to listen to sister program I Should Be Writing and vice versa. It has writer guests deliver ‘Keys to Publishing’ which we’re supposed to collect from both shows. Anyway, the first one, in Podcast 56, was delivered by Tobias Buckell and was, naturally, persistence. Always number one, that one, I thought, as I picked out green taco sauce for enchiladas, but when Buckell expanded, it turned out he was not talking about sending stories out doggedly (hey wait, how many stories do I have out? Maybe I need that pep talk too), but about writing doggedly. “I think a professional has to write a lot, and be persistent about it. It takes about 300 words a day or a page a day to create a novel in a year, and a novel in a year is quite often, you know, a rate that a lot of people have to hit in order to make a living at it.”

Obviously, this is good advice, as is the unpacking he does about practicing for productivity and practicing our craft in general, so I decided I would start writing 500 words a days towards a project I’m working on. If I only hit 300, that would be okay (I’ve discovered that setting goals works better if I don’t berate myself for falling short), and this is in addition to any other projects I’m working on. The first obstacle was, of course, that I do my initial drafts longhand. My Clairefontaine notebooks don’t have a word count function. So I chose a couple of pages and counted the words, estimated how many pages would make 500 words, and did that the first day, then typed it in (revising as I go, which is part of the point) and found it was 562 words. So far, so good – my goal is four pages longhand, not counting cross-outs.

I’ve been doing it ever since, though yesterday I tried to cram it in before bed and ended up with three pages (hopefully that falls within my 300 word range). With the exception of yesterday’s hiccup, what I’ve found is that it’s easy. I sit down with all the despair and feeling of dorkiness that besets a new project, unsure what scene to write on the heels of the one I finished the day before. But I get an idea, or maybe two before one sticks, and I write. Most days I have written well over four pages, written to the end of a scene or until looking at the clock in alarm. This is the mystical “butt in seat” that our faculty member David Long recommends in place of muse. This is doing the work. This is self-conscious and awkward, but it’s moving me forward to revision, to having made something, to the future.

Sometimes when established writers throw numbers around, it’s in the form of a rate, and it tends to cause panic in me and my fellows. But it doesn’t have to, if it’s not a rate, but a small, manageable goal. 500 words. 4 pages longhand. I can do this, every day.

Taggers may learn highly instructive things

2008-08-07T11:45:01+00:00

I love tags. They’re intuitive, individual, flexible and informative. They appeal to the part of my mind that color-codes obsessively and also to the slapdash right-now portion (or portions). So one of the chief advantages to upgrading to a newer blog engine was the tags, the glorious tags.

I haven’t finished tagging the archives yet, but after Ryan wrote the Top Tags plugin, I was surprised to see certain trends emerging. For one, I hadn’t thought I blogged about ‘real life’ all that much. For another, I was disturbed to see ‘grouse’, my chosen tag for negativity and ranting, in the top 5. Am I really that negative? I wondered, and considered how many fewer items could be tagged with ‘huzzah’, grouse’s opposite number.

So I’ve been trying to be more positive. Oh yes, if something is a grouse (like yesterday’s Zyrtec-D rant) I dutifully and truthfully tag it that way. But I’m trying not to write as many, to think of more blog items that celebrate or interest rather than excoriate. Tagging is self-revelatory. C’mon, be honest, you’ve looked at your tag cloud on some site or other. It’s interesting to see in aggregate the choices and distinctions we make in individual places, and to compare them to the aggregate choices of other users and the site as a whole. And the thing about any sort of self-revelation is that sometimes it shows you things you didn’t really want to see. It gives you a chance to change.

So I’ve already managed to push grouse down to number five on the Top Five Tags list…let’s see if I can’t push it off altogether!

Must...learn...German!

2005-10-14T10:42:16+00:00

I’ve figured for a while that German would be approximately six barrels of monkeys to learn and speak. It first came upon me whilst singing a Bach hymn that sounded like a drinking song, back in high school. And today, the resolution to learn this language came upon me with renewed force. For I am researching logistics for the World Cup in Germany. I am not sure what kind of flight or flying machine flugzeug might be (pronounced something like floog-tsoig, I would guess), but by all the Muses, a language that can produce a word like that is one that I should know.

Other gems:

flughafen. I’ve heard this before, but it never gets old. (means ‘airport’.)
Judging from the English site, unsere zimmer means ‘our rooms’, but I seriously assumed it meant ‘the height of luxury’ at first (the photos assisted me in forming that impression.) How much more fun is ‘zimmer’ than borin’ old ‘room’? I ask you.
Freizeit sounds a bit more excitable than ‘leisure’, but I’m sure I could get used to it.
lichtdurchflutete. I infer this means ‘furnished’. I am speechless.

Pie, or, why I want to stay home from 'school'

2004-08-05T16:07:19+00:00

I like to make things. I really do. There is nothing like the exhilaration, pride, and power, of looking at something I’ve made. Clothing, short stories, drawings, dinners, analytical essays, pillows, footstools, cookies, whatever… I love to make things. To make something that is greater than the sum of its parts is a kind of primal magic, a way of working your will upon the world.

My only problem is, I don’t have time to do it all. Lately, I’ve made a baby dress, and I’ve been working on embroidering initials onto some pre-made hats for a pair of twins that is coming. Meanwhile, I haven’t made cookies in months, and I think I’ve made two pies, maximum, since we moved in November. I haven’t drawn very much for a while, and my correspondence is far below its stellar ideal. I haven’t practiced my oboe in ages, or played our piano, and I haven’t added much to my ongoing attempts at novels and short stories. I seem to be juggling, always (which is something I’m not particularly good at), and I’m always noticing something shinier on the floor than what I’m throwing about at the moment.

Is it a problem? I really don’t know. I enjoy myself, and things get made. But I’m trying, every once in a while, to step back from the new thing, and do something I haven’t done in a while. Therefore, this weekend, I am making pie. And, well, someday, I hope, I won’t have this pesky ‘wage-earning’ thing to do — and then I’ll be free to make and do with reckless abandon, and maybe, just maybe, finish a few more things.