Needing a little push

I’m rethinking my relationship with being a writer.

Is getting published worth it? I’m contemplating not doing #PitMad (a Twitter manuscript pitching contest) on the 3rd of September. It’s hardly anything to set up, but I’m so tired of no nibbles. I’m just tired of trying.

This may be part of a general depressive trend. There’s so much pressing down on me, most of it having to do with going back to work under COVID. There’s nothing I can do except wear that mask, sanitize surfaces, and pray.

This is not the way I want to be. I want to be productive. I want to accomplish something. I want to get published, if only I could figure out how to do that.

What I can do is just keep doing — keep writing, keep trying to publish, meet with my classes whether in person or online, and have as good a semester as I can manage. Because if I don’t do things, they certainly won’t happen.

I just need a push to get me going.

Decentering Whiteness in my Writing

I read an important tip on Twitter last night that’s transforming my writing: If you’re going to describe skin tone on people of color, you need to do the same for white characters.

It’s a simple, but revolutionary thing — I have been making the assumption that I don’t have to describe white people because it’s assumed that white is the default. I didn’t even do this consciously.

One could rationalize making white the default through statistics — Most Americans are white, therefore. But that’s doing a disservice to people of color, who still make a significant number of people in the world.

Worse, specifying skin tone for non-whites — Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans — while ignoring it for whites signals that minorities are “other”, not of the group, something to be stared at.

So I’m making a point to go back into my writing and add descriptors of white skin. It has felt very strange, which is part of why I should be doing it.

I have gone through one of my finished books and today I will do the other two. And then I will feel like I have done the right thing by my readers.

Free-writing Jeanne and Josh again

I think I will free-write today and try to get somewhere with my book. Sitting and staring at the computer won’t work.

I wish I could write in my room — the atmosphere is better. Except for the little demon who tries to chew on my fountain pen as I write. My fountain pens are relatively inexpensive, but they’re not Bic stick pens (Biros for my British friends). I’d rather they not have little tooth marks in my pens.

So I will be writing pen and paper in the living room, exploring specifically Jeanne and Josh’s relationship. For review:

Jeanne is a 45-year-old botanist whose insistence on logic hides a green thumb — an observable ability to make plants grow. If any hint of that reaches the academic community, her research on domesticating a perennial bean will be discredited. But a memory awakens in her, one in which she is called to create garden oases.
Josh is a 25-year-old writing instructor. He is immersed in a spiritual world through his belief in Shinto and his aikido. His visions tell him that Jeanne must become the keeper of a great garden. But he’s afraid to tell the logical Jeanne about his spiritual life because he’s afraid she’s going to reject him.

I’ve been fighting one plot point for ages: The fact that there doesn’t seem to be reciprocity between Jeanne and Josh. I’ve come to the point that, early on, Jeanne doesn’t even think it’s possible for them to be a couple. He’s too young, she thinks, and would not be attracted to her. Meanwhile, Josh is struggling with his fear of rejection. A twenty-five year old whose reality is fluid might well fear this.

I love Jeanne and Josh as characters, and even better as a couple, because they subvert the whole romance thing. He is younger, more expressive, lightly built (don’t blame me; I’m attracted to men like that). Jeanne is ample, very instrumental (in the sense of making things happen).

There’s so much to carry here, I feel like I’m juggling cats. But rather than structure at this point, I think I need to free-write because I’m making no progress composing within the outline.

The joys of rediscovering free writing

I think I may have found a way to get over writers’ block — free writing exercises.

I have been drafting into Scrivener — which is very efficient, but not a lot of fun. I didn’t realize how its utilitarian background and the very edit-forward feel was keeping me from writing first drafts. The process — staring at the screen every few words, looking for the perfect word …

I attended a writing workshop/guided exercise over Zoom, led by Debbi Voisey, and it was a set of guided free-writing exercises, the type where you put pen to paper and then write. We worked through exercises on scenes, senses, and descriptions, and then we free-wrote.

It felt marvelous! It helped me put together a scene I was struggling with for the past two weeks. Moreover, writing felt fun again!

I believe the reason this works is because our internal editors get in the way of our creativity. There’s time to edit, and that’s after getting words on pages. I found that the words I was putting on the pages needed editing, but not while I was writing them.

I think I will use this free-writing. The way I can use it with Scrivener and with the “Save the Cat” framework is to take each chapter’s prompt (the tag on the chapter that says what goes there) and write that in my notebook, then start free-writing in earnest. Then I can enter it in Scrivener and edit.

I hope I’m onto something, because I have been working quite fruitlessly these last several weeks. (Not that I’ve been doing nothing; I reorganized my classes, recorded several lectures, taken a grad level class, revised my query letters for two books, set up my pitches for SFFpit … I just haven’t been writing.)

Ok, deep breath. I think I could get to liking writing again.

A Writing Manifesto

I will write for myself regardless of how and where my resulting work will be shared.
I will not doubt my imagination.
I will not judge the quality of my work by where it’s published, how many copies it’s sold, or how much I’ve earned.
I will hone my craft for the sake of improvement.
I will write from joy rather than from duty.

Music and Memory

Sometimes I feel so old.

Usually it’s when I listen to music from the 1970’s. I was a child then, as I graduated high school in 1981. As a child, I didn’t go out of my way to listen to music; I absorbed it by osmosis from the AM station in our car and clutched my little brick AM radio with its mono earplug at night.

I knew all the songs, however. I knew them as narrative to a time of solitude, of lying in my room crying over the bullies at school, of words not being sufficient, of glimmers of light when someone extended a hand. Of scraps of poetry, words written in pencil on lined paper, fading as pencil often did over the years.

I do not remember well. My memory is like a pile of Polaroids, instant photos, jumbled on a table, and I pull a random one out. I remember the snippet of memory in the photo and it evokes emotion. The story that goes with the words starts with “I remember when” but has very few words attached. The few stories I remember don’t have video with them, only words.

The right song pulls the most obscure photo from the bottom of the pile, the one that’s faded, whose colors have reverted to greyish brown. All of the emotions, however are there, and I find myself weeping at something lost that I can’t really see.

Right now I’m listening to a playlist on the stereo, with luscious rich tones that we didn’t know in the AM radio era, and I travel in the back of a station wagon in 1974, nine years old, trying to make sense of the world.

A touch of depression

Trying to wake up after 12 hours sleep. I feel like I could sleep more.

This is the sign that I’m in a bit of a depression, although whether biological or situational I don’t know.

I’m convinced that I get into this state every end-of-semester, and that I can hold it off until then. My end of semester wasn’t until now because I had an intense summer class I just got over with.

So what does depression look like? At this stage, it feels like sleeping all the time and wanting to sleep more, and avoiding email. Feeling a bit down about things and not wanting to engage. Taking things a bit harder than I normally do.

The trick here is to not go in further. Get the things done I need to get done. Not take 2-hour afternoon naps (although that’s hard). Try not to think too negatively. Do cognitive exercises if I need to. Push myself to write.

If I don’t get this knocked down in a couple weeks, it’s time for me to see my psychiatrist for a medication adjustment. I hope it doesn’t come to that.

Coffee and Struggle

#nomakeup #nofilter #quarantinehair

This is me at the local coffeehouse I’ve been talking about. I haven’t been going very fast with my writing — this novel just doesn’t want to be written.

I think I’ve written 1500 words in the past two days and rearranged another 1500. Usually when I write, it’s 2000-3000 words a day, especially when I have this much free time.

Despite my outline and my general idea of how the story goes, I’m having trouble writing it. I’m having trouble feeling the story. This shouldn’t surprise me; I’ve been very discouraged lately. Too many rejections. Too many “this story isn’t really grabbing me”. I’ve changed the beginnings of the stories to help people get into them more, but I still fear more rejections.

So, despite that smile, I’m struggling right now. I’m looking for a breakthrough. I’m looking for a chance.

A Tiny Bit of Progress

I actually wrote a little on Gaia’s Hands (the rewrite) yesterday. Not much, because I had to cut and hide a few things for a later scene and make some decisions that took a bit of time, but I got some written.

I have a better idea of Josh these days. (I’ve always had a good idea about Jeanne.) He’s actually a pretty interesting person, given a few years and an instructor’s position at the university.

I’ve been having such a struggle with this particular book (possibly because it’s a rewrite, possibly since I’m using the Save the Cat template from scratch instead of retrofitting it, possibly because it’s a romance, and I just don’t see myself writing romance.

But Jeanne and Josh are a couple, a tightly bonded couple, so their origin story needs to be told. And I’m the one to tell it.

I’m going to get out for coffee today!

In the days of COVID-19, this is going to look a bit different than it used to. The cafe, hopefully, will let us sit 6 feet apart, and I will be wearing a mask when I’m not sipping coffee.

I’m hoping for some good inspiration this morning for Gaia’s Hands. I have come to the conclusion that I’ve plotted as much as I can, and so I have to start getting things on paper. Given that this is a huge rewrite, I do have an idea of where things go, but there are still portions that are underdeveloped that I have to write. Lots of portions.

I’m going to keep this short because I have to work on getting information for a presentation this morning. Wish me luck!