Sheila Rambles

I sometimes wonder if I separate things out a bit much in terms of blogging, but for those of you who only follow me here, I have another blog called Wonderbink.com where I talk about free writing and the various ways I make use of it. This marks the start of something potentially amazing. I'm not sure where it might lead. But I do know that there's no going back from it.

Yes, I won NaNoWriMo. As of yesterday, actually. Final count: 50,114 words. These are characters I've been noveling about, off and on, since 2005 and I think I've written about as much about them as I'm ever going to need to. I've enjoyed playing with them in my little self-indulgent way and I'll probably go back and reread the results now and again for fun. I doubt I'll be inflicting the results on anybody else, though. Having gotten all of that out of me has had a surprising effect--I'm now contemplating no less than three different ideas for other novels. And I think I may well go ahead and get started now instead of waiting for November. So you may be seeing a little more activity here as I sort out the possibilities.

Just crossed the 17,000 word threshold (17,015 to be precise) and I've still got an afternoon ahead of me. (I suspect a lot of novels will be written this month by my fellow Victims Of The Economy.) For those of you reading who haven't cracked 10,000 yet and are feeling worried, despair not--first off, what I'm writing is so pointless and aimless I'm not even trying to get much of a plot out of it and secondly, if I can crank out 17,000 words in five days, well, so can you and you still have twenty-five days left to work with. Permit me to offer a bit of advice for those who may be reading who are new to NaNo, which occurred to me as I was driving back from from running a few errands (and doing some obligatory writing-in-a-coffeehouse while I was out in the world with my laptop.) I live along the length of a very busy road (technically a highway) that crosses Interstate 285. As I was making my way home, I found that the traffic to get onto 285 was stacked up so badly...

I started just after midnight. Skipped the headliner at the EARL just so I could get home, fire up the laptop and get started. I even wrote some preliminary lines in my catbook as I waited at stop lights all the way home. Got a few hundred words in, went to bed, took advantage of the extra hour of sleep and then got up and wrote some more in between my usual Sunday business. I'm at 2500 words already and I could call it a day easily, but this thing has already become an addiction--just a few more lines, a few more words, one more scene and then I'll quit. Really. The compulsive quality is probably helped by the sheet of graph paper I'm using to visually track my word count, so I nudge myself to just a few more words to fill in just one more square and the next thing you know I've hashed out a paragraph. It's . . . pretty crap, but I'm still enjoying writing it, and at least one or two good lines manage to slip through as I progress. And I think I'm going...

Yep, I'm doing it again. National Novel Writing Month starts in three days and the ideas are already percolating in my head. This year, like last year, will be utterly self-indulgent fluff and I can't wait. I'd thought about tackling a more complex idea, but it doesn't quite feel ready yet, so I'll give it another year or perhaps even work on it outside of the bounds of NaNo, since it requires quite a bit of research. So I'll be posting periodic NaNo updates here over the course of November. Might even resume the Excuse Note practice to keep myself honest. The novel I started this blog over is still in limbo, as I'm still waiting on feedback from my inner circle. So I'll be keeping myself amused in the meantime with this.

If I were ever doing any of this properly, my job at this point would be to start on My Next Novel while waiting to hear back from the select circle of readers tasked with reviewing my first draft. Then again, I've been (as the Internet likes to say) Doing It Wrong from about the very start. Why start following the rules now? I just got whacked over the head with a notion that will start with changing one or two lines of dialogue, reviewing all events that follow those lines of dialogue with an eye to that change and rewriting the ultimate outcome in a way that is subtly different but much more satisfying. The line that will mark this shift will probably go something like this: "That's okay, thanks."

So I sent out copies to the short list of folks who I felt I could trust with my novel. The only response to the manuscript itself has been "um, why did you do your paragraph breaks that way?" coupled with a promise to read in more detail when time was available. I held my breath for a month and a half and avoided even looking at the thing, lest I find myself changing words and then having to send the thing all over again. Then, a few nights ago in a fit of insomnia, I finally reached some kind of breaking point and ended up rewriting two scenes in one particular chapter. I packed up the revised chapter and sent it out. This time, I got a few responses of the "life's been crazy busy" variety. Can't really complain about that, given that I knew that was likely to be the case going in. Any response I get at all is a gift, and I accept that. I think I will probably continue to refine the language and restrain myself from any rewrites that will significantly...

Is there such a thing as "submitter's remorse" when one sends out a manuscript? Heck, I haven't even sent it out for publication, just for an initial read by some friends of mine and now I'm thinking "Ack! What was I thinking? This is a self-indulgent mess!" Then again, I'm grappling with a slight case of depression, so that may just be the serotonin deprivation talking. I suppose I'll find out whenever I hear back from the folks I sent it to.

So I did one last read-through, transformed it into a PDF and sent it to a short list of people I trust. I feel like I just jumped off a cliff and have no idea what I'm going to land on.

Okay, remember that scene I'd retrieved from a previous draft and added back into the manuscript? I took it back out again. The perfect final ending I came up with didn't fully jibe with the scene before it and I realized that it needed to be excised for the thing to flow properly. I spent some time coming up with a better way to conclude the penultimate chapter and after a few tries I think I have something that works. I'm still in the process of reading the entire thing aloud to catch any missed fuck ups and to purge any awkward language. Once that's done, then it's time for conversion and handing it to my initial readers.

I think it's at a point where I can show it to people. Not quite ready to be published, but ready to be run past some People Who Are Not Me to get a feel for how it looks from other angles. I'm kind of elated and frightened at the same time. I think one more read-through and then I'll be dealing with formatting and converting the result into a PDF and figuring out who to send it to.

So I was at a networking meeting thingy this morning and somewhere in the middle of it I got clobbered over the head with a scene that I feel brings the novel to a proper conclusion. I rushed home to hash it out the moment I had a chance. I think it's a good sign that when I read the last lines I thought "Yeah. Yeah, that's it." There are a couple more scenes that I want to revamp, followed by one more going-over of the novel in total and then the next step will be rendering it into a PDF and finding people I can trust enough to show it to. I still don't think it's fully ready for publication but it is at a point where I can solicit feedback without whimpering in shame at the obvious flaws.

As I wrote in my excuse note, yesterday I didn't get any work done on the novel because I was sitting in a parking lot watching people trade stories for drinks. Yes, really. Once a year, the Starlight Drive-In (one of the last surviving drive-in theaters in the country) hosts an event called Rock n Roll Monster Bash, which features rock bands during the day and a double feature of monster movies when it gets dark. The Venn diagram of people who like rock music and people who like B-movies has a pretty significant overlap, so it draws quite the crowd. So what does this have to do with people telling stories for drinks? Officially, nothing, but my older brother has established a tradition whereby he brings his portable bar and offers people drinks in exchange for interesting stories about their lives. When people scratch their heads and say they don't have any interesting stories, my brother prompts them with the following suggestions--arrested, almost arrested, could have b...

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today as she spent most of the day in a parking lot, watching people trade stories for drinks.

So I added back an additional scene that I'd lopped off and grafted it to the ending. I'm still not 100% sure about it. But it seems to work better than where I'd originally left off and it was nice to retrieve some of those clever lines that I'd tossed away. (Thank goodness for saved drafts.) And now I'm already pondering ways to rewrite the returned lines into something a little more plausible than what I'd put down in the flurry of NaNo. I think I'll go do that now.

Just at the point when I think, oh, man, I'm so stuck, I'm never going to finish this thing, I wound up devoting all three of my morning pages to writing about it. It's a sort of ramble about something that happens 'offstage' and now I'll have to rewrite the scene it leads up to now that I know more about what happened beforehand. I sometimes wonder if there's going to be a word left standing of my original draft by the time I'm done with it.

I'm now looking at two different versions of Chapter One for the novel. I wrote the new beginning as something of an experiment--a way to get a clearer picture of what came before. Now I'm thinking it might do better as the start of things as a more detailed way of setting the scene. But I've gotten so used to the notion of the book beginning where I first began it that I'm reluctant to throw it away completely. So right now I have two different Chapter Ones saved in Scrivener and I'll be figuring out which one works best as I go. I must say that the new opening seems to have refreshed my interest in working on it.

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel yesterday as she had her time devoured by TVTropes.org. She did complete work on her novel today. If you didn't shudder in recognition, you probably aren't familiar with TVTropes.org. It is an extensive wiki that started as "Television Tropes and Idioms" and eventually sprawled into just about every storytelling medium. It is also an enormous timesink because there is so much of it to read and each link tempts one to click, if only to find out what the heck a "Big Lipped Alligator Moment" is. (In case you wondered, it's a scene that comes completely out of nowhere, has no bearing on the plot and is never spoken of again.) Tropes are things like plot devices, characters or settings that are seen over and over in various iterations. Anybody who thinks they have the most amazingly original idea in the world can quickly be disabused of that notion with a trip to TVTropes.org, where they can find entries fo...

I spent my Memorial Day at home because I decided to start working on this nifty idea I had for a sort of instruction book on different free writing techniques I use. I think I may have gone and drafted the thing. It's more of a pamphlet than a book, but it's out of my head and in a Scrivener binder, so I can figure out what to do with it from there. May add to it a bit, but the main methods I use are in there so far (including the odd names I have for them like "Sub-C Session", "Catbook" and "Clicktappity.") If nothing gets done on the novel between now and the end of the day, this may serve as my Excuse Note.

On the plus side, obviously, I've been working steadily enough to avoid having to post Excuse Notes here. On the minus side, some of the work has been on the level of rewriting one sentence and scampering off into the night. That's probably not too helpful. I mean, it may well get it done, but I'd like to have this thing finished by the end of the year, not the end of next decade. Since I'm not working under any external deadline and I do have other matters to attend to (such as finding a job before my unemployment insurance runs out) it's all too easy to file it under Things To Be Done Real Soon Now. I pondered this in my morning pages (yes, I do morning pages, yes, I know this makes me a cliche, no, I don't actually give a damn as long as it works for me) and it occurred to me that part of my reluctance comes from a lack of focus on the reasons why I'm writing, so the reasons why not wind up driving my actions. Since the only Reason Why that I've ...

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel yesterday as she had . . . just a really weird day, okay? She did work on her novel today. Thank you.

I have managed to avoid Excuse Notes for a few days running (and there's one day in particular that I want to write an entry about) but I have to get this out first. I am delighted to discover that the domain poetry.com has a new owner. Poetry.com was previously owned by the International Library of Poetry, a literary scam outfit that had been kicking around for decades. Originally, they solicited poems for their "poetry contest" in newspaper ads (I remember seeing them when I was a kid) and with the advent of the Internet, it became easier than ever for them to solicit submissions. The trick of it was this--every single poem was a 'finalist' in the contest and they would offer to sell you an overpriced hardbound book of 'finalists' that included your poem. So, excited poets (or their proud parents) would pay a chunk of change for an 'anthology' of, well, twenty-line attempts at poetry and look, there's yours on page 187, crammed on a page wi...

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today as she visited the library and ended up checking out four books, which she takes as a clear sign that her brain is in inhale mode rather than exhale mode at the moment.

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today as she spent most of the afternoon unconscious and most of the evening attending a dear friend's birthday party.

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today as she dealing with a distracting level of stomach pain and needs to be as well-rested as possible in order to play with her niece this evening, as promised.

I've decided to try something with this here blawg to motivate me to keep working on the manuscript. For every day that I don't do at least something on it, I will require myself to post an Excuse Note explaining why. For example, today I might post something like: Please excuse Sheila from working on her manuscript today as she spent the morning in a networking meeting, the afternoon in a nap and will be spending this evening visiting her family and then visiting a friend. . . . except that today I don't need to do that, because I just made some cuts to the manuscript in anticipation of inserting a revised scene that deletes an extraneous character. So there.

I can spend an afternoon reading my manuscript from beginning to end, making a few cuts and rewrites as I go, taking notes of which scenes need some serious reworking and then end up feeling vaguely weird and guilty, like I should have been doing something productive .

One of the common myths that stands between people and completed manuscripts is the myth of 'time.' I'm sure you've heard it. "If I just had the time , I'd be able to Write My Novel." But our time is a limited resource, consumed by forty-hour-a-week jobs with hour commutes each way and all the other obligations of the business of living. If only, one sighs, one could have time to oneself, time to write without all those pesky distractions, then one could finally write that novel that one has been promising oneself that one would, one day. One is, of course, bullshitting oneself. The beautiful thing that NaNoWriMo did for me--and, I'm sure for many others--is thoroughly debunk that myth. The raw material for the novel I'm trying to hammer into a publishable form was drafted in the space of two separate months of do-or-die typing (supplemented with some scribbling to allow me to keep the plot on track) while still holding down a job and everyt...

It's about eighty thousand words, give or take, at this point. Since the full arc of the story is still in an odd state of flux, I don't feel fully comfortable explaining what it's 'about' to people.  But I am now at a point where I'm willing to at least tell people how the story begins, since I've read the opening scene aloud at a few events and it looks to be one of the firmly anchored points of the thing.  And it seems to serve well to give an impression of the kind of story I'm hoping to tell. The narrator, June, is sitting in the Majestic, a 24-hour diner that's an Atlanta institution, having just wandered up the street from seeing her favorite local band at the 10 High.  She realizes that her wallet is not in her pocket.  She decides to sit tight for a bit, digs up enough pocket change to pay for a cup of coffee and when the guy behind the counter asks her if she wants anything, she explains that she can't find her wallet. "It's in...