Q1 and Done

It’s the end of the month as we know it, and I feel fine, save for the soreness in my legs.  Too much time on my feet, too much time laying on a bed that hurting my calves for some reason.  Or maybe it’s me:  maybe my weight is pressing down on my lower extremities and causing problems.

Last year this time I was lamenting over writers, people who usually make things up for a living, being unable to make up the names of towns and people.  I read this post over last night, and was struck by the fact that most of the people who I’d written about don’t seen to write these days.  When I joined a few writing groups on Facebook back in 2011, it seemed as if there were  hundreds of people posting about what they were going to write, what they were writing–and then, how they couldn’t finish what they started.

Today, those same groups seem to be inhabited by a few dozen hard core members, and a few dozen more people who flit in and out when they decided to pick up their book and get back into The Great and Not So Loving Game.

Writing wears you out.  I managed to edit two chapters of Replacements last night, maybe twenty-seven hundred words total, and when I was finished I wanted to write something new, but couldn’t.  I was starting to nod at the computer, and trying to crank out anything that would have made sense wouldn’t have made sense at all.

In his March 30 blog post, Neil Gaiman offered a few simple words for writers:  ”Write.  Finish Things.  Keep Writing.”  Sure, you’re thinking, “That’s easy for you to say, Mr. Last Cybermen!”, but at one time he was just like everyone else, working hard to get into the biz.  He’s now in the biz, and he still works hard, only now he does it full time, whereas most of us need another job to play the bills.

My biggest problem was always finishing things.  I’d jump into a story with both feet, burn through ten, twenty thousand words, and then–nada.  I’d get disappointed, depressed, defeated:  the story before me had to be crap, so why bother?  It’s not like anyone’s going to read it . . .

I’d say that’s a mindset that it not just unique to me; I’m almost certain there are others out there who end up feeling the same way.  I even get that feeling still, only it starts kicking in about forty-five thousand words into a novel, and it screws with me until I’m about ten to fifteen thousand words from the finish line.

And then I find the strength to make my way to “The End”.

I’ve told people I know that one of the reasons I keep a blog, one of the reasons I write every day whether or not I have anything interesting to say, is that it keeps me thinking, it keeps the mind going, it keeps me writing.  Without it I might not ever bother pulling out a manuscript and doing anything with it, and just become another of those left by the Writing Wayside.  That’s not completely true, but I do feel as if my blog keeps me anchored and focused on my goal of becoming a full-time writer.

Back on December 1 I detailed what I’d written up to that point over the course of a year and change.  At that point, with everything from the end of 2011, and all over 2012, I’d calculated I’d written approximately 568,000 words.  What I should say is that I wrote and finished that much, because I don’t consider the story worthwhile if I haven’t finished it.  During 2012 I started a story for someone, got about five thousand words into it, and then put it away, because what I was writing wasn’t me; the story didn’t feel right.  And to have went on would have meant doing something that I wasn’t going to enjoy, or take from the work any pride.

Since I wrote that last post I’ve written another novel, and blogged every day.  Suggestive Amusements ended up running just over seventy-one thousand words, while the blog has averaged about five hundred fifty words a day for 121 day, or right at sixty-six thousand, five hundred fifty words.  Add all that up, and at the end of Q1 (the First Quarter of the year, as we call it in the business world), I’ve another 137,550 finished words added to my total.

Plug in the numbers from before 1 December, 2012, and we have a new total:  705,550 words.  Ding, ding, ding!  We have a winner!

Yes, there is marketing and editing and getting a great book cover, but the above is the real heart of the issue:  writing and finishing.  You wanna walk that walk, you gotta do diligence.

You gotta write; you gotta finish; you gotta write some more.

Which reminds me–

I got some writing to do.

 

Rolling Up the Next Idea

It’s near the end for the Crazy Train.  Today is the last day that people will enough the days and nights of literary abandon, and either hold up their arms in confident victory, or curse the fact that, once again, they didn’t make their goal for one reason or another.

Either way, you did what you wanted for this ride.  The real truth is, what are you going to do next?

I have some interesting feelings concerning NaNo.  It’s always good to have goals when you’re writing, because if you say, “Oh, I’ll finish this when I finish this,” then you may just find yourself hanging out on your computer–or however you write–putting down a word here, and a word there, and thinking, “Oh, yeah:  this is good” . . . and five years later you’ve got twenty thousand words in the bank.  You’re finished.  Maybe not in the time frame you’d imagined, but you’re done.

Take it from the voice of procrastinating reason:  if you write one novella every few years, reaching your goal of becoming a published writer might not only take a bit of time, but you might want to consider how slowly those payments are going to reach you.

I’ve said before that a story will end when it ends, that it’s difficult to say, “Oh, thirty thousand will do this,” when you’re putting it together in your head.  Maybe once you’re putting chapters together (as I do), you’ll get an probable idea of how long a story will run, but getting the exact number isn’t possible until you’ve seen you word counts for chapters, and you can start doing some Nate Silver-style number crunching.

This is what I did with my NaNo Novel:  once I saw the average count for my first ten or so chapters, I was able to see where the total was heading.  I started out saying that the story would probably run sixty thousand words; by the time I was a couple of chapters into Part Two, I revised that to sixty-five thousand.  I ended up at sixty-nine thousand, which means I’m happy, because it’s not an all-too difficult chore to get the count up over seventy thousand, and make the story a bit more presentable to a publishing company, should I decide to send it out instead of self-publish the work.

The issue I have with NaNo is that is sets your novel up as something that you must do with a certain word count by this date, or . . . well, the “or” is rather nebulous, but it leave one with the feeling that you’ve lost something.  People who write all the time know this isn’t the real way of the world, but you still see people come onto a forum and announce in a somewhat dejectedly post that they’ve failed, that they aren’t going to make their word count.

Well, whoopty do.  If you’re looking at this as a contest, and that you had to reach that fifty thousand word count otherwise you couldn’t treat yourself to ice cream today, then yeah:  it’s gonna bum you out.  If you look at it as, “Okay, I’m at forty-five thousand, but I’m going to need another thirty to finish this off, I’ll jack that out in the next couple of weeks–”, then you’re on the right path.

I’ve done NaNo two years in a row because I want that challenge of getting a novel out in thirty days.  I’ve “won” both times, but NaNo isn’t the end.  I edited my last NaNo Novel and sent it out, and I’ll get around to editing this one and doing something to get it to “my fans,” however crazy that sounds.

November isn’t a beginning and ending, all conclusive.  If you’re writing, then you’re jumping on the Crazy Train to pound out a story, get that first draft, and then either kick back for a few days before you pull back into the station–or jump off somewhere so you can hoof it to a nice diner for lunch with some friends, and miss all the hair pulling and frantic moaning that comes from trying to sprint your ass to that fifty thousand word finish line.

It’s not about the finish; it’s about moving forward all the time.  It’s about thinking of your next project, be it a story to edit, or a getting a submission ready, or writing something new.  It’s always about what’s next–

Not what’s going on.

That will take care of itself.

All Dressed Up and Nothing to Write

NaNo 2012 is over.  Not in the sense that, “It’s over when I say it’s over!”, but in the sense that about ten PM last night, I typed “The End” at the bottom of the last chapter of my novel, and that was that.  Everything that’s been said is said, and it’s time to move on.

The novel is finished, there’s no more writing to do . . . and I’m feeling a little lost at the moment.

When I started the chapter last night, I was feeling a touch weepy.  It wasn’t that I had written some heartfelt prose about my characters that left me an emotional shell–no, nothing like that at all.  It was more the realization that I’d come to the end of the story, and I had maybe a couple of thousand words to write, and there was nothing more after that.

After finishing the chapter, and the novel, I felt pretty good.  It’s always a good feeling when you finish writing seventy thousand words into the computer, and there’s a bit of a rush that hits you like a soft breeze on a warm spring days.  It’s a good feeling, and you close your eyes and take in the wonder that is life–

But come the next day–which, if you’re reading this, is now–you start thinking about what’s coming next.  You have editing ahead of you.  You start having thoughts about if you’re going to send your story to a publisher for consideration, or if you’re going to try and self publishing–with each having their own particular issues one needs to hurdle.

But the biggest one comes–well, it comes about now . . .

What’s next, Sunshine?

I have an idea for a story brewing; hell, I have a few ideas brewing.  There are a couple of things that are pulling me towards writing–but there are also a few things that I want to finish up before moving on to something new.  I mean, it’s great to have a slush pile, but as we know in Northwest Indiana come winter, you gotta clear that slush, or you’re gonna track it into the house.  And right now I have maybe three projects I should get out and get published, but to do that I have to set aside time from writing new material . . .

It’s one or the other, kids.  You gotta do the work, you know?

Doesn’t mean I can’t do other things like prep work while I’m editing a story, or getting it ready for publication.  But I have realized that I need to keep at this game, because as much as I feel like I may be spinning my wheels, I also feel that I’m gaining ground.  This isn’t something I’m doing for a hobby, it’s something that I’m working towards as a career.  Doing it as a hobby is fine, but why not do it for a living?  There are worse jobs, right?  Yep, there are, because I’ve worked them.

It’s never a question of what you’re doing, it’s what’s next?  What do you want to do?  What are you going to work on?  Keep it going, baby, ’cause someone just might be waiting for that story you got bouncing about in the back of your brain–

Only they don’t know it.

Yet.