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I’m still in a muddle over Dragonfly but it feels like the kind of muddle I get into right before all the pieces fall into place. So while I’m frustrated, I’m feeling like things might be about to turn a corner. I’m taking all the discussion I had with my writing friends and I’m analyzing it
I’m starting to feel itchy for software again.
Oh, my…
I did manage to write close to 500 words yesterday. Go me.
(Of course, now Bette Midler is blaring away on the imaginary radio.)
Dragonfly is out of control. I’ve set things up so that the result of my story is that world changes…only I have no clue how. So I did what any self-respecting writer does: I went whining to my writer friends and said, “Help!”
And they are helping. They help by asking “What do you mean by X?” They help by saying, “Now, remind me of who this character is…” They help by letting me go, “Yeah, but…” and not once making me believe they’re rolling their eyes and thinking, “You know, if you’re gonna reject the help, don’t ask for it…”
I told them when I first asked for help that I felt like I’d reached for an hors d’oeuvres and grabbed a mastodon instead. Now I feel like I have a freezer full of mastodon steaks and roasts. It’s still more meat than I can probably handle, but at least it’s becoming manageable.
I’d like to count all the time I spent on mastodon carving as writing time, but it feels like a cheat. So I’ll count the words I wrote at the end of the day (assuming there’s more than 100).
And it’s still too icy-dangerous outside to walk. Stupid winter.
One of my favorite terms in the world is “earworm”. If you’ve never heard it before, it’s a name for those annoying songs that get stuck in your head and often can’t be dislodged except by replacing them with other songs.
I’ve been lucky in that infestations of earworms are few and far between. It’s not that I never hear music in my head — I do almost all the time. It’s just that the songs I hear aren’t annoying and I can generally change them at will. It’s like having a radio in my head.
Right now the radio is playing the Shins’ “Red Rabbits.” I suspect it’s playing in my imagination because I’ve been listening to it a lot lately, trying to decide if I love it enough to include it on my “10 All-time Favorites” list. You might say that if I have to think about it, it doesn’t belong on the list, but I’ve over-thought this to the point that I’m ready to jettison all the songs on the list. So far, “Red Rabbits” is on the list, but if I remember something I adore even more, off it goes.
In no particular order, here’s the whole list as it stands today:
- “Beautiful Day” (U2)
- “Scarlet” (U2)
- “Tomorrow” (U2)
- “Drowning Man” (U2)
- “Save It For Later” (English Beat)
- “When the Stars Go Blue” (written by Ryan Adams; any version works for me)
- “Red Rabbits” (The Shins)
- “Love is the End” (Keane)
- “Disappear” (INXS)
- “2000 Miles” (The Pretenders)
A song goes on this list if it makes me ache and if I can listen to it dozens of times in a row without getting tired of it. There are about 200 songs I really love, but they don’t have that particular combination of moving me and staying fresh to my ears.
And now the imaginary radio is playing “Disappear.” Life is good.
I managed to write 200 words today, in two stretches. The first stretch was 40 words, and for a while there, I was pummelling myself, telling myself that it wouldn’t count if I only wrote another 60 words.
Of course it would have: The object of setting a very low minimum is to help me overcome any dread of the page I might be experiencing. Telling myself I’m a loser because I could only write 40 words before work is just counter-productive. If you’re the kind of person who generally goes once you get going, so the hard part is starting, a low minimum is key. I think that’s at least one interpretation of “90% of success is just showing up!”
That’s part of why I decided my aerobic activity is giong to be a short daily walk. All I have to do is get my coat on and get outside — once I’ve done that much, the rest is easier. Easier, on some psychological level, than turning around and going inside.
That being said, I didn’t walk today. Boston was slapped with a hideous mix of snow and sleet, making for treacherous footing and less than optimal walking conditions, even for people less klutzy than I am. I decided that it wasn’t worth it and skipping a day was okay. Better that than spraining or breaking something that would make it impossible for me to work out at all for a few weeks.
I think part of the reason I’ve been so brain-dead here is that I’ve been devoting my limited creativity to my book. Since this is a Good Thing — no, A Very Good Thing — I’ve decided to continue down that path. With that in mind, what I’m going to be posting about — unless I want to natter about something else — is how successful I am at my daily goals. Those goals are:
- Write 100 words, or spend 10 minutes, pen to paper, working on the plot, etc., five days of the Sunday-Saturday week. One or the other: no combining them, no 50 words and five minutes making notes.
- Take a walk at lunchtime every weekday, unless the weather is so awful walking isn’t safe (which might actually be tomorrow, as it happens).
So far, I’ve done both things today, so today is set.
I won’t be talking about what I’m reading until at least early March — I’m reading things I can’t talk about, so I won’t say anything at all.
And that’s the plan.
About ten days ago, I mentioned that I’d mapped Kerlis using my oh-so-special-and-wonderful marker paper and my colored markers. Yesterday, I watched a good part of Martin Scorcese’s Age of Innocence and something about Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as Newland Archer made me realize he needs to be my anchoring image of Kerlis. I’d been using Casey Affleck, but Kerlis has changed and young Mr. Affleck no longer works. (He does work, however, for a character in a different story — he works brilliantly, especially now that I’ve seen Affleck in bits of Gone Baby Gone and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.)
Today, using Free Mind and PowerPoint, I turned the mind map and my new ideas into a mapped collage:
The point of this is just to anchor some ideas I have of Kerlis, in case he starts to drift off course. Which is entirely possible.
I borrowed The Lucky Guide To Mastering Any Style: How To Wear Iconic Looks And Make Them Your Own by Kim France and Andrea Linett from the library. (Don’t ask why; I don’t remember.) Anyway, one of the iconic looks is American Classic (think polo shirts, pearls, gold hoops, Katherine Hepburn and Grace Kelly); another is Bohemian
(think peasant blouses, flowy skirts and Stevie Nicks). As I’m looking at the book, I’m thinking I should be drawn to the American Classic but in reality, the clothes that suck me in are the Bohemian pieces.
I do that a lot — try to be something and someone I’m not. It surprises my sister G. because, she says, I’m so strongly me.
I’ve done it with my writing, tried to follow rules that aren’t right for what I do. I write Bohemian, but keep thinking I should write American Classic.
I’m coming out of that. I’m paying attention to my inner reader, the one who bounces up and down in excitement, saying “Do it, do it, I wanna see it!” when I contemplate doing something that defies the rules I’ve internalized far too much the last few years. That’s the gift of time: that you finally learn who you are and then you learn to be true to that self.
My brain did it again.
That little fizzy noise you just heard was the sound of it shorting out.
The sad part is that it didn’t short out because of some really cool intellectual demand. I think it shorted out because I got up at 5:10 this morning to go work out with my trainer (who gets up even earlier, because she travels further, and she’s getting dressed for work while I’m not).
I’m so beat I’m creeping off to bed. BSG will wait until I can watch it with the sister.
There are days when I wonder what possessed me to commit to blogging every day. Today is one of them.
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Judith James’s Broken Wing has been getting a lot of good press — glowing reviews from All About Romance and The Romance Reader (from my favorite reviewers, too), and a good amount of positive discussion on RRA-L, the Romance Readers Anonymous e-mail list. So today, I walked the half mile to the Barnes & Noble at the Prudential Mall in Boston to pick up a copy.
I chose Barnes & Noble because it’s half a mile away, rather than simply crossing the street to Borders. I’m struggling with getting enough exercise, and this was a way to do two things at once.
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Kiyoshi Ogawa struck the Bunker Hill just past the halfway mark of the book, suggesting the use of three-act structure even when telling a non-fiction story. Very cool.
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And those are just a few of my thoughts on this cold — but not frigid — Thursday evening.
It seems to me that one of the most difficult things to write is prose that is dense with factual information while also being readable and clear.
It’s not just my own struggles that make me believe this. If that’s all it was, I would think writing factual prose was one of those things I’m not particularly good at. No, it’s the combination of my struggles and all the non-fiction books I’ve picked up that were confusing or readable or both.
This awareness is prompted by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy’s Danger’s Hour: The Story of the USS Bunker Hill and the Kamikaze Pilot Who Crippled Her. Kennedy imparts a great deal of information about the Bunker Hill — about her layout, her vulnerabilities, and the departments that served her, just to name just a few areas of interest — with prose that’s clean, straightforward and carries its freight of detail with a minimum of fuss. It manages to hold my interest in matters that might, in other hands, be too dull to bear.
While telling the story of the Bunker Hill, Kennedy also tells the story of Kiyoshi Ogawa, the young Japanese university student who died attacking the Bunker Hill in what was a suicide bombing. Kennedy’s aim, as expressed in his introduction, is to help today’s audience understand the forces that can bring someone to the point where the will to live can be overcome in a such a way as to make a suicide attack possible. My sense is that the book is organized to show these two forces — the Bunker Hill and Kiyoshi Ogawa — converging, and what happens when they meet.
I’m not even one quarter of the way through the book, and my interest may give out before the book does (which is less a reflection on the book than it is on my flitty attention span). But so far, it’s an absorbing read, one that triggers my “What happens next?” reflex.
Really, what’s better than that?
