Feb 28 to April 28. Shall I blog every other month, do you think?

Everything’s different. My dashboard’s all funky. I have no idea what’s happened.

My sewing stuff is just nuts. I’m stressed and busy and still loving it. I’ve had to close up shop and go to custom orders only. Oohlala, the exclusivity of my dolly couture. It’s all good.

But it hasn’t been good for my writing. When the dressmaking first started to take over, I took a firm step back away from the computer. In a few places where I was expected, I checked in to say good-bye and be back later to friends and I spent about a month trying to adjust to my new workload. And I find that now, after 2 months, not only has my fiction suffered, but I’ve forgotten how to blog. Wow.

If you’ve read me before, you might remember that I feel like blogging is an important element for me as far as maintaining my own voice and just being able to let words come as easily as ideas. It helps to keep things running more in sync, I suppose, though of course they rarely truly do that. And when I found that I was sitting in front of my screen, even at my personal blog where I have been for years and where I have felt very comfortable for a very long time, I didn’t know where to start or what to say, and I found myself way too concerned about whether the subjects I had to talk about were going to be of interest to those who would read.

So often Howard Roark whispers to me that I shouldn’t care about that. And so often I forget how useful it is to say that this is mine and if you don’t like it, you’re welcomed to go elsewhere.

I’m sure I’m quite off track as far as what I was going to talk about, but losing that comfort zone I had in blogging, I had no way to get myself back into the writing. And then I decided to write Letters to Casey.

Lame as it seems to say it, I made myself an imaginary friend. Someone I’d met who was just terribly interested in hearing about my current story. Someone who wanted to hear every little thing I had to say about my work. And seeing as how she has that handicap of being imaginary, it’s somewhat easier to accept that she does not express the proper amount of interest and doesn’t bestow the wanted amount of unearned praise. Real people you just have to be annoyed an how clueless and insensitive and wrapped up in their own stuff they are.

I enjoyed writing to Casey yesterday. So much so that after I wrote her once, I wrote her again. And again. Until I had written her 6 letters totaling close to 3800 words in one day. In doing so, I worked out details that I had been avoiding or just couldn’t pin down. And last night it seemed so much easier to settle myself for the descent into madness that is sitting down to write a scene. I opened up the file in which I had written a few hundred words of a scene and left off before the middle. And after some cautious steps forward, skittering back nervously, repeat as necessary, I finally put down some words on the screen.

And before I knew it I was through. I wrote 837 words. This morning I decided they were pretty good words, and I should try again tonight.

Thanks, Casey. Talk to you soon.

It’ s been awhile.

I’m trying.  Maybe not very hard, maybe not in the most consistent way, but I am.  And the why of it is simply that my head is full of brain dolls, and more show up all the time.

A brain doll is sort of like a character.  But a character is someone whom I work, whom I form and mold and tweak.  A character fits into a story and the story fits around the character.  They are the ones who make it to the keyboard and are not generally allowed to run amock.  A brain doll works me.  Brain dolls are creatures that live in my head.  They’re made up of bits of backstory and internal conflict with a dash of physical characteristics, and they often show up in pairs.  They tend to come with very few accessories like, say, plot points, and most of them are lazy and don’t build on their own.  They just wait around for me to do it.

Some of my brain dolls, the ones that have been with me a long time, make their own spaces in the corners of my world.  They build sets and create stories, and they live lives within the borders of their regions.  Their stories tend to be soap-opera quality messes that I could never untangle enough to put to paper, even if I wanted to.  Some of them are former characters, retired with their abandoned plots to enact and embellish on their favorite scenes for, it would seem, all eternity. 

Matt and Alex still live in the WOTM region, waiting for that last 20K or so of grey area to get colored in.  They’re still characters, and thus far, they continue to wait silently for my return, should you wonder what became of them.

 But it’s the huge brain world playset of Supertown that’s out of control.  That’s the world where Mac and Colby live, though they, too, linger as characters trapped in the brain doll world.  Rand and Marissa want their story told, but not enough to give me enough hints on plot points to keep the action going.  Marissa brought in this ex-boyfriend named Joel, and next thing you know, Tina showed up with a criminal past and said she wanted to, after much angst and denial, be hooked up with Joel please.  Well ok, Tina, but what else ya got?  Give me more to work with or get in line.  One young woman showed up a month or so ago, and she felt promising.  She brought a hero, a father, a sister.  And then she turned around and informed me that no, she had 2 sisters, and they had beaus, but please excuse their complete fuzziness.  Great.  Thanks.  Take your trilogy and wait over there.  Patiently, Carolyn waits, reminding me that she’s important and she has a love interest, and please don’t forget to introduce him at some point.  But while she’s told me what she can about him, he has yet to show up and introduce himself properly.  Which might be why we refer to him as Stasis Guy.    Today, as I stare at the last line I wrote for Rand and Marissa, wondering about their motivations, I realize that someone needs to die.  Not right now, just, you know, sometime.  And the man she leaves behind waves to me from a dark corner.  I didn’t even know he was there, but he’ll be ready to play the Grieving Widower type who finds true love a second time later on down the road.  He introduces me to his Best Friend, who pulls him away from the body of his lover.  Best Friend says hey, how’s it goin’?  Just wanted to let you know that that experience will make me realize what a jerk I’ve been to my COMPLETELY FUZZY love interest here, and I’ll be having one of those Don’t Know What You’ve Got Till It’s Gone moments (yeah, coincidentally Cinderella is playing right now, neat).  Oh, how will that come about?  Well I don’t know, that’s your job, isn’t it?

Hey, I love hangin’ out in Supertown.  I love you guys.  Really.  But I’m constantly distracted by all these new arrivals.  You guys are never going to reach your character potential if I don’t get some work done.  Help me.  Help me help you.  Give me some stories to go along with these setups, or your world is never going to be anything but a some assembly required brain doll playset. 

Rand, you’ve got that anti-gravity thing going for you.  Get up there and pull down the Welcome to Supertown sign with the everchanging digital population indicator.  Bryan, get off your not coming up with my YA subplot butt and help him out, because I suspect you’ve got a bit of telekinesis going, don’t you?  The new sign is right over there.  It reads:

No Admittance Without Plot.

I know, Wow! a post from me.  Ugh.  It’s just been exotic varieties of awful this fall.  And I’m going to spare you the details of my neuroses and angst over the past few months. 

 You’re welcome.

Anyway, today Kettle gently says: I think that’s why blogging was so good for you.  But then you sort of dropped that too.

I talk to Kettle about all kinds of things, and still, though I’m not writing, we talk of many writerly things.  So it occurs to me that just because I’m not writing doesn’t mean I can’t talk about them at you.

Last night I emailed her the following:

…I think what’s holding me back right now is that I don’t have a single character on the board with whom a feel a real connection.  There are a bunch of them who are fleshed out, whose backstories I’ve come up with and whose motivations I feel I understand, but it’s sort of like reading their dossier rather than having any intimate understanding of them.  Matt, Alex, Jack, Siobhan…  I felt them.  These guys, every time I try to slip into them, it’s like wearing rented underwear or something.  Not. Right.

How to explain what we talked about this morning…  I think the general idea was that they hadn’t incubated long enough.  They were people I made up, rather than people who sort of showed up.  They have a lot of characteristics that I gave them because it was what the story needed, not because character or writer actually owned them.  I theorize that it’s because, while I like to plan, I’m not usually planning and then jumping into actual, you know, writing.  Not like I have been this year.  And although Matt and Alex were largely created in this way, for some reason it worked for me.

Much as I like to create a hero or heroine and then create the mate from that character’s rib, think through that character initially in terms of a compliment, perhaps my characters are created from something of mine.  And lately, I’m just not seeing the resemblance.  I’m not able to relate to them; understanding and empathizing can be quite different things.

So I’m not sure what I’m saying here, but I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind if I just came by to talk about my random thoughts now and again.

Kettle’s recent post, Do Overs, made me think of something I’ve been musing about for some time.  She started the post with the following quote which I’ll just snag in it’s entirely.

From Madeleine L’Engle {Herself} : Reflections on a Writing Life, p. 19

With free will, we are able to try something new. Maybe it doesn’t work, or we make mistakes and learn from them. We try something else. That doesn’t work, either. So we try yet something elsea gain. When I study the working processes of the great artists I am awed at the hundreds and hundreds of sketches made before the painter begins to be ready to put anything on the canvas. It gives me fresh courage to know of the massive revision Dostoyevsky made of all his books–the hundreds of pages that got written and thrown out before one was kept. A performer must rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, making mistakes, discarding, trying again and again.

There’s a thing, when it comes to art, that “real” art just happens, that really talented people just whip stuff up out of their heads.  I first started to become aware of this with regard to sewing.  It seems like everyone who doesn’t sew has an great-aunt or knew some woman or some such who could just lay out a piece of fabric, take a pair of shears to it, run it through a sewing machine, and come out with something that fit perfectly.  The “she could just look at someone and make a dress that fit” story.  And when you’re at your drafting table, transferring changes from your second muslin mock-up to your paper pattern with your back hurting and ruler getting blurry, this can really make you feel like crap.  (Not what the speaker, who probably doesn’t know jack about what good fit looks like anyway, intended at all.)

There’s the artist who slaps paint on canvas and comes out with a masterpiece.  Isn’t that the one we always see on the screen?  The chef who just knows.  The composer who hears music in his head and takes dictation.  And of course, the writer who just writes.

For me, there’s no question that we value the off-the-cuff artists above those who are more technically inclined.  While a few in this category are the absolute geniuses for whom superlative perfection just flows out in pretty much everything they do, a lot of them are just ok.  A lot of them just do good work.  Certainly not better work than another artist who plans, sketches, layers, revises, and produces a work of depth and complexity that’s on a whole different level. 

And yet still it seems to me that we sit in awe of the pantser (she who flies by the seat of her pants).  I suppose it’s just part of the awe we feel regarding the mystery of the creative process.  And we forget, or perhaps we never understood, that those bursts of pure inspiration are a necessary component for all artists.  Because some wish to or are capable of riding those waves farther, because they’re able to jump from one to the next and find their way to shore, to some point on some shore, without stopping to plan a route, we think of them as true and pure artists.

Do you ever feel like the word technical has no place in art?  The term “technical writing”, the writing of manuals, documents, etc., is often considered to the be the opposite of “creative writing”.   When you’re talking to someone who is just so proud to be a pantser, do you ever feel like you need to make excuses for the way you work?  After days and weeks of creative work, of crafting the framework for a story, do you ever read something and feel like your brand of creativity just isn’t recognized?

I’m not saying that either course is better or more justified.  There are masterworks and abysmal stinkers that come from both methods.  But I absolutely feel like we as a culture don’t so much value the “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” adage, even when the ”pure art” isn’t overwhelmingly impressive, and I wonder if I’m the only one who gets ticked off by that.

 Ps. Thanks to those of you who have stuck with me and stopped by to leave me lovely and encouraging thoughts.  I’m mostly on hiatus right now, doing some reading, some sewing, knitting, and generally recharging.  I hope to get back to keeping up with you and to get back to writing very soon.

I haven’t written anything since my last post.  I haven’t even tried.  Every time I think about it, I feel vaguely uneasy.  I’ve made up a bunch of dresses for my Etsy shop which I’ll be listing over the next few days, so I haven’t been wholly unproductive, and I was behind on that too.

I hope my Nano and Sweat buddies are doing well.  I’ll try to get around to see you soon.

No new stats to report.  Someday, maybe I’ll learn how to handle writing and my brain chemistry, but after beating myself up pretty good the other day, I’ve just taken a break. 

I figured out that if I wrote 2K per day from now on I would still make it.  That sort of made me feel better.

Right now, though, my mind’s just blank.  And that’s an improvement.

I did another little bit this afternoon.  Officially I’m at 11580, although I’ve got another 500 or so words written in the scene I’m currently (not) working.

I got an email from a municiple liason today in which she talked about Week Two and how it’s said to be the hardest week of Nano.  She said, amongst other things, that Week Two is the week in which you may come to feel that you are writing the worst novel ever.

And I thought, nah.  For one thing, I’m pretty sure I’ve already written the worst novel ever, so this probably isn’t it, and besides that, I’ve read an awful lot of crap in my life which often serves to make me feel better.

Then, just now, BAM.  It hit me.  I was sitting here, pondering something other than Nano for a while, and next thing I know

Damn!  My story totally sucks. 

So I don’t know, either I need to figure out how to fix it up, or I just need to get over it and move on.

Anyone else have this happen this week?

So my update for yesterday.  Hard hit by the plague, and even though I had to spend most of the day being still so I could keep breathing, I didn’t get much writing done.  It should have been a good time to get ahead, but I just couldn’t think straight. 

 By the end of the day, I was only able to come up with 755 words.  Which is far better than nothing.  It means I only have to write 2572 today to catch up instead of 3334. 

Ok, that was my attempt at positive thinking.  How’d I do?

So the thing that didn’t make sense?  I skipped it.  I know a reasonable answer is there and I just refuse to see it right now.  The thing about the traitor, as well as coming up briefly later in the story, is really a background thread for the series.  So it’s not critical that it be here for me to move on.  Skip!  Then I checked my outline and was supposed to write about my heroine going about town talking to people and finding out stuff about Mac.  Oh, I forgot about that.  The fact that I forgot it makes me wonder if it’s important, or if it’s just fill.  Since I couldn’t think of a way to make it important (like I wanted to write the dinner scene from my snippet yesterday, so I forced new reader info into it, which was easy and worked) I decided to just skip that too, for now.  Maybe I’ll come back and fill it in with things about Mac and thoughts from Colby that I fail to illustrate any other way.  And maybe I just won’t write it at all. 

So what the heck did I do?  Not much, like I said.  Mac came home from work and had some words with Colby.  I established that it’s his regular poker night and it’s his turn to host, and he can’t get out of it because everyone wants to come gawk at the fake girlfriend and he’s pissed off an worried. 

I did have him pull his shirt off as he stalked down the hall to the shower.  It was gratitous because we were in his head and there was no one there to see it but me.  But a girl needs to get her kicks somewhere.

Speaking of which, romance stuff is on the horizon, action too, and, beyond that, immersion into the superhero world.  Trying to remember to be excited about that.

I’m at 10764.  How’re you Sweaters and Nanoers doing (and those of you who don’t need a challenge to get stuff done too)?

 P.s. If you didn’t visit Joely Sue Burkhart’s blog yesterday, she had an interesting post that included her storyboard and a collage of inspirational stuff for her story.   Which, of course, made me want to show you whom Mac and Colby resemble.

So our heroine, Colby, sailed into town to recruit our hero, Mac, into the organization for which she works.  Since Mac’s coworkers had just been talking about his long-time girlfriend, Grace, whom none of them have ever met, they assumed Colby was Grace.  To fill in the gap where Mac should have stepped in and corrected them but didn’t, Colby slipped into the role.  For some reason, Mac has chosen to let that go.  So now Colby is posing as Grace.  She still hasn’t had a chance to get Mac alone and explain why she’s here.  She’s prepared him a lovely dinner, but his friend, Curtis aka Moochy, has shown up and joined them.  We’re in Mac’s head.

[Copyright, common decency, mine mine, don’t steal, don’t copy, links only, yadda yadda]

            The moment seemed to go on between the two of them.  Colby’s dark eyes held his, and Moochy’s voice was just an annoying drone in the background that he barely noticed.  Then suddenly Colby changed.  She frowned, scowled even, and a little crease formed above the bridge of her nose.  Her eyes took on a hard glint, and everything about her suddenly seemed edgy. 

            “I’m sorry, Curtis.  I missed that.  Where did this happen?”

            “Just outside San Antonio.  Rounded them all up and took them away just yesterday.  It was in the paper.  It must have been big talk; I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it.”

            “I guess I was too busy getting ready to come out here to see Mac.  I’m afraid I don’t pay much attention to what’s in the news if I can help it.”

            “Well, I think the paper said there were five of them living there together.  Just think Grace, that close to you.  You might even have met them.  You might have even been serving terrorists in that restaurant you work at.”

            “And what makes you say they were terrorists?”

            Moochy didn’t seem to notice the brittle tone Colby’s voice had taken on, but Moochy was an imbecile. 

            “Well, it’s obvious isn’t it?  Freaks like that, holed up together, hiding out from the authorities.  Who knows what they might have been cooking up.”

            “Maybe they just wanted to, you know, live?  Like everybody else?”

            “Can’t live like everybody else if you’re not like everybody else, can you?”

            Surely seems to be the case.

            “You’re not one of the terrorist sympathizers, are you Grace?”

            “Can we talk about something else, please?” Mac cut in.  He was surprised that Colby looked ready to pound Moochy into the ground.  He would have bet nothing ever got to her.  Moochy was looking back at Colby with a calculation that was making Mac even more nervous.  Any time Moochy started thinking too much, no good came of it for anyone. 

            “Well I don’t know, Mac,” Grace began, “it’s an interesting discussion, and I don’t think we’ve ever had it.  Do you think the differently-abled-”

            “Differently-abled,” Moochy snorted.

            “-have an obligation to turn themselves in to the federal government?

            “Well… I think-”

            “Why wouldn’t they turn themselves in?” Moochy interrupted.  “It’s for everyone’s protection.  NIAC teaches them how to use their abilities so they don’t hurt us ordinary citizens.  Or themselves, for that matter.” 

            “The National Institute for Ability Control.”  Colby gave an unladylike snort.  “They turn those people into slaves.  Sure they teach them how to control their abilities.  So they can use them as unpaid soldiers doing God knows what.”

            “Ho ho!  Now there’s a rumor!”  Moochy took another swig from his bottle.

            “Have you ever heard of any of those people coming back from NIAC?  They pull little kids away from their families and they’re never seen again.  How long do you think it takes to teach them control?  What do you think NIAC is training them for?”

            “Mac, you never told me your girlfriend was one of those bleeding-heart libertarians.  And a conspiracy theorist too, huh?  We’re not at war anymore, sweetheart.”

            “Not as far as you know.”

            “Ok, that’s enough.  Both of you.”  Mac’s head was swimming.  Colby might as well get Freak Sympathizer tattooed on her forehead and turn herself in right now.  And if Mac couldn’t find a way to gloss over this with Moochy, it would be all over town by tomorrow.

            He wanted to put his head down on the table until it all went away.  He hated these conversations, because he never really knew where he stood on the issues.  On the one hand, if everyone who manifested abilities turned themselves in the way they were supposed to, everyone would probably be a lot safer.  Certainly his parents’ lives would have been a lot easier if they had just turned him in rather than trying to hide him and keep the family together all those years.  He thought about all the moves, the loss of his father’s business, how his mother had to go to work to help support them, and how everything had changed.  Maybe if the laws weren’t so strict, maybe if they allowed little kids to stay with their parents, maybe there wouldn’t be so many cases like his, of people growing up hiding what they were from the government and everyone else.  If the government had had control of the group that did the Templeton Wagner Bombing, hundreds of lives could have been saved, thousands if you counted everyone who died in the riots afterward.  If you counted his parents.

            “You both know how much I hate to talk about this crap.  Can’t we just enjoy this nice meal that Grace prepared and leave the politics to the politicians?”

            “Maybe I’ll just leave the politics and the meal,” Colby said as she pushed back her chair.  “I’ve suddenly lost my appetite.”

            She sailed out of the room and disappeared down the hallway to the two bedrooms.  Great.  Apparently he would have to deal with her later.  But right now he had serious damage control to manage with Mooch.  Mac got up and moved to the fridge to get more beer while trying to think of a story to cover “Grace’s” sympathies.  He had a feeling it was going to take a lot of beer to get Moochy to forget Colby’s “unpatriotic” attitude.

So thanks for reading.  If you’ve been here before, you know what to do.  If now, check out the WIP Clip Wednesday page (tabbed above) for the rules and whatnot.

You know, I like to write in scenes.  I write from beginning to end and then I’m wiped.

So it seems to be a bit of an issue that scenes for me are rarely more than 1600 words.

Anyway, 1632 today to total 10009.  That makes me happy.  My heroine told the hero why she was there, which, of course, he didn’t take so well.  But neither she nor I expected him to.  She because she read his file, and I because I’m just all about the conflict and I know it.

So I sat down to write out some notes to get me throught the next scene.  I wrote some general impressions of the head of the bad guy agency and then WHAM!

Um, if the bad guy agency has someone inside the good guy’s secret mountain compound (such that they have the information they’re about to discuss in this scene), why don’t they just get its location from the aforementioned traitor and wipe them out?

Yeah, so my outline has a bit of a flaw, huh?  I think I’m too stunned by my own stupidity to think my way around this right now.  Right now it feels important to me that they actually don’t discover the location, as opposed to being able to get that information but feeling like other goals are more important right now.  So I don’t know what to do and I think a simple solution is right there and I’m too sick and miserable and pissed off right now to see it.

And aside from how lousy that last paragraph was, I’m not really in that bad a mood.  Not really.  I am, however, out of it to the point of senseless babble.