My Vocation Becomes My Writing Focus

I know I don’t talk about this often, but I am an associate professor of human services at Northwest Missouri State University when I’m not writing. My speciality is family resource management, or how families allocate time, money, and other resources to meet goals and deal with events. I deal with not only the specific actions they take, but the process to get to those actions.

Right now, I am writing about a decision that the collective Barn Swallows’ Dance has to make. Barn Swallows’ Dance has some special characteristics that make any decision-making harder — first, the fact that two trees beloved of Gaia distribute talents to the residents. The second is that some of the residents are not human, but are preternatural, energy-based beings and their offspring.

The question is “how do we deal with people in need who come to our collective?” This discussion happens during a time of turmoil and economic disaster. There are concerns of safety vs. hospitality, charity vs. the needs of the collective to support themselves. A discussion of who is “worthy” and “unworthy”, and who is an outsider. In other words, a discussion of how the collective will allocate scarce resources, which is exactly what resource management is about. Any American who was alive in the 80s will recognize arguments on each side of the welfare question in the US., arguments which persist to this day.

There are no wrong arguments among the people of the collective, because decisions there are made by consensus. Consensus decision-making requires that the decision not be made until everyone agrees, or at least nobody stands in the way of the decision. I have an idea of where the decision will go, but it’s fascinating watching the characters argue their positions.

I wrote an easy 2k words today (it helps that I was at Starbucks), and I look forward to the final decision at Barn Swallows’ Dance. In the meantime, I appreciate how my day job contributes to my writing.

A Good Day and a Shameless Plug

I finally got 1200 words on the work-in-progress written today at home. It doesn’t hurt that l got a venti flat white Door Dashed in the morning. I also listened to good writing music. The most important thing is that I had an idea of what needed to happen in the story.

I should point out that I am self-published and relatively unknown. The big thing for me is the writing; although I really want people to read my writing, I have not mastered marketing the books.

If you want to read some, there’s the fluffy Christmas romances and the more serious fantasy stories. And all of them can be found Right Here.

The Problem with Writing at Home

I am writing at home today. As I’ve said before, it’s a bit of a struggle, and I’m troubleshooting what might make it less of a struggle.

First, upstairs vs downstairs. My office (upstairs) is too small, I’ve decided. I’m facing the wall. Three screens is distracting when I write, although I do well with all the screens for my regular work. If there was a way to rearrange the office, I would, but the size of the room means that the computer table will always be facing a wall. Facing a wall, I can definitively say, does not inspire my writing.

Writing in my living room nook works better. I have a window to look out of and a living room to look into. I have a stereo to put concentration music on (currently the Deep Focus playlist on iTunes). This provides a layer of distraction that allows me the flow of words. Most importantly, I have space.

I think it’s a shame I can’t write in my office. What’s an office for if you can’t work in it? For that matter, what good is a room if you can’t put an office in it?

Road Warrior Go!

I write better at Starbucks. It’s official. I’m at Bux and I’ve written 500 words without a lot of effort. Yesterday’s writing looks better. Apparently, it takes a hot lavender latte for me to get writing done.

Or maybe it’s the split mind thing. Part of my mind is paying attention to the activities around me. Two of my acquaintances are talking at a table to my left; a group of women my age or a little older are chatting behind me. To my right, the baristas are puttering around behind the counter. There’s some innocuous background music playing. While all this is happening, I am picking words and writing this. It’s so much easier when there’s noise in the background than it is in my silent home.

Or maybe it’s because I’m writing on my road warrior gear. This consists of an iPod Pro, a Logi keyboard and mouse setup, and a cable to plug in for power. (All in lavender). The keyboard feels springier than my laptop keyboard, and the colors are more stimulating. And my setup can go just about anywhere (with the exception being someplace without a table).

I have to fix my home space to make it easier to write. I said this yesterday, but today it’s obvious that I write better out in public. Or at least at Starbucks.

Losing Steam

I’m losing steam with this book I’m writing, doubtless because I feel like I haven’t enough stuff to write in the remaining chapters. I tried an old motivation trick and went forward to more interesting chapters, having written one chapter where shit hits the fan and the last two chapters. That means I have about 5 chapters where not enough is going to happen unless I figure out how to write them without introducing filler. To advance the story past the “boom”.

This happens when one is pantsing a book. I feel like free-writing without an outline (i.e. pantsing) promotes a chapter-to-chapter view rather than a big picture view. “What am I going to do with this chapter?” is more how I write when pantsing. Although I get continuity by extending themes and plotlines (and I feel there’s a surplus of those), I still feel like the plot is going willy-nilly. Until it’s not going.

The book will probably turn out better than I think. I’ve written books this way before and they haven’t turned out bad once edited. But I prefer my outlines, so I can approach the next chapter and say, “This is what’s supposed to happen in this chapter.”

Wish me luck; I’m about to go back to writing.

Making my Space More Motivating

I have trouble motivating to write in my house, preferring Starbucks and its optimal level of distraction. But, as the temperature outside is getting up to 94 today, I’m stuck at home. I’m now working on how to make motivating space at home.

My writing nook is the loveseat in the living room, because our office is a claustrophobic experience with too many bookshelves and not enough room to think. The library table is right in front of and facing a wall. Even though I’ve put posters on that wall based on book covers my niece has designed, I’m staring at a wall. Maybe they’re too high on the wall, I don’t know. To the right is one of these posters; my niece is rather talented. If it weren’t for that? I still doubtless wouldn’t write well in the space, because it’s too isolated as well. I enjoy having people in my space, even if I ignore them.

The living room has its advantages. I have a table for my laptop that scoots up to the couch. I have control of my music on iTunes on my laptop and send it through Apple TV to decent speakers. I play modern classical and all the iTunes playlists that tout ‘focus’ and ‘concentration’. When my husband is around, I have that person distraction, and that helps. But sometimes there’s too much distraction, like when Chloe crawls all over me or tries to clean my nose.

I still feel distractions, though. I stare out the window less (my ‘thinking mode’), and slink off to Facebook and Reddit more, which cuts down on thinking time. If that’s the problem, I can focus my solution on staying on the current page. What would help me with that?

Or I could choose to do something else. There are promotion-related items I could always do. I could take a break from the novel to write a short story. Or I could just take a break. It’s Sunday, and I have the rest of my life to write.

Comic Relief

I have written some pretty dark stuff lately. Riots with body counts, bombings, scenes that traumatize my protagonists. The United States is falling into disorder, and in two years there will be no United States.

I may write dark, but I don’t write unrelieved grim. There is always humanity. There is always hope. And there is always humor. My characters shine in small moments where humor peeks out, and sometimes I go from subtle smirks to full-out silliness.

Take, for example, Nephilim cats. One of my Archetype characters created a passel of immortal Archetype cats that teleport and procreate. Their offspring, like human-Archetype crosses, fly. They also get into trouble flying around outsiders. The beauty is that most humans can’t believe their eyes, and they ignore the obviously flying cats. But when the outsider recognizes this cat is actually flying, and the ten-year-old girls are scolding him for letting the secret out … a tense moment of an outsider knowing secrets gets silly.

I worry sometimes about my sense of humor. On the other hand, I worry that my writing can get too dark. I wonder if I have the balance right. I would love feedback on this, so if you’re one of my readers, please let me know! Link to my books here.

Writing about Writing about Writing

Sometimes I write about writing. I don’t do this nearly as often as I should, because I don’t have meta-thoughts about writing that often.

I could write about exposition, for example. What wisdom do I have about exposition? Only the big one: Show, don’t tell. And the not so big one: Conversations can be a form of exposition if you’re not writing things like “Did you hear about Betty? She ran off with the milkman last week.”

I could write about writing characters. Where do my characters come from? They come from an amalgam of people and stories I have known. Then I “interrogate” the character to see if they feel consistent in who they are. I have conversations with the characters, I put them in situations. I talk to my husband about characters — for example, “Would they talk back to the police?” Gideon would; he tends to be human and somewhat anti-authoritarian. Most of my Archetypes and Nephilim would never talk back lest they be discovered. They’re not quite immortal, after all, and they would alarm the authorities. Luke would talk around the cops, though. He’s a lawyer, after all.

I could write about publishing. There are many steps to publishing yourself; some of them go surprisingly smoothly, like most of the process on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP for those in the know). Others become a great source of frustration, like putting my book cover up on KDP.

I could write about hitting it big as a writer. No, I can’t, because I have not hit it big. Nor is it likely that I will, but that’s okay. I have a story to write, and it nags me at night. My characters (Sage Bertinelli and Forrest Gray at the moment) demand to be written.

I need to write more about writing, because there are so many topics … thank you, Hannah, for obliquely suggesting this!

Writing with Chloe the Cat

Today, Chloe is helping me write the blog. Chloe is my second-youngest cat at age 4, and she is peculiar:

We adopted her as a kitten from the Humane Society — she was the one who spent her visit climbing all over me, so we knew what to expect.

The kitty we nicknamed “Itty-bitty-bitty-bitty-BABY-BABY girl” has grown into a chubby adult. She sits with me when I’m in my writing spot (a loveseat in the living room) or sits nearby, looking out the window. Often she asks for attention so it takes longer to get things done.

I’m trying to figure out what to write today (if anything). She is not helping any, choosing instead to sit on the back of the couch and read over my shoulder. Just now she ran toward the stairs for no real reason at all.

I guess I’ll just write on my own, then.

Pantsing

Pantsing refers to a style of writing whereas one makes the story up as they go along. It’s part of the trinity of methods, the other two of which are planning and plantsing. Planning the story is just what it sounds like — from using an outline of each chapter to setting up scenes and documented world-building. Plantsing is somewhere between the chaos of making it up spontaneously and organizing everything.

Normally I am a plantser — I have “note cards” (a feature on Scrivener, the program I recommend for writing novels) for each chapter denoting what should happen in the chapter, and I see where those directions and the characters take me. But this time around, I have diverged from the note cards enough that I am most definitely pantsing.

For example, I was writing about how my characters in their collective (think commune, sort of) were going to cope with the potential for communications and shipping breakdown in the oncoming breakdown of American society, and I thought about replacement parts and fuel for the farm. While I was in the middle of writing that, I thought, “Oh my god, what are they going to do about the staple goods they don’t grow themselves?” The collective eats a certain amount of bread, for example, but they don’t raise the wheat themselves because only the wrong type of wheat grows in the Midwest. In addition, they’re vegetarian and bought rather than grew their legumes. They use their farm land for more suitable items for the collective, like fresh fruits and vegetables, as they could always buy the staples through the local food co-op. So they suddenly figured out they could have a food crisis. In striving to be self-sufficient, they blinded themselves to the fact that they were not self-sufficient, any more than other humans. They discovered this at the same point where I thought about it, of course.

I may edit this later, putting the food crisis before the capital goods crisis chronologically. But I may not, because if it occurred to me in that order, maybe it would have occurred to them in that order. Maybe the capital goods crisis they envisioned was the one the collective saw most clearly^* and therefore first. Part of the process of pantsing is the harder job of editing down the line.

Photo by u0410u043du043du0430 u0420u044bu0436u043au043eu0432u0430 on Pexels.com

It’s been a wild ride writing this novel so far. I feel like I’m climbing a rock wall without a belayer. If I felt a lot better about my rock climbing skills, I would not feel like I needed belaying.^** Ah, well. See you at the edit.

^* This is known in cognitive psychology as the availability heuristic, whereas we believe the most readily imagined scenario is the most likely or important one. This heuristic is why young people buy life insurance and not disability insurance despite being 7 times more likely to die than to become disabled.

^**I just about used the word ‘balayage’ here, which is a hair-dyeing technique. Oops.