Tuesday

News For Today

Yesterday some kind of amazing things happened in the course of writing the first chapter. My idea of a working process is continuing to evolve based on that... specifically as regards writing versus the other parts of my work day.

All told, I spent about an eight hour day on that chapter and it felt good. I was writing at a really fast pace... 5,500 words with between 3 and 4 hours of actual writing... but it felt very deliberate. For the first time in a long time I really felt like I was not just producing but crafting.

With my current plan of two Tales of MU chapters a week, I think I'm going to keep the days I work on MU "pure"... doing minimal other work and give my whole working day over to the act of crafting the chapter.

Now, it wasn't just the fact that I devoted a day to it that produced such a phenomenal result. There have been plenty of times when I've devoted a day to Getting Something Done on the writing front and ended up with a few unusable paragraphs, written and deleted and rewritten all over again. The whole hour on/hour off business I do is because traditionally I can write more in an hour than I can in a day. But the results are frantic and rushed... I could say "not my best work", but sometimes it does produce results I'm quite proud of. Besides, it's not like I'm able to simultaneously produce another version of the same work produced under more deliberate and studious conditions that is better. The work I produce under the conditions I am able to work is the best work I could have produced. Even if I could do better, what I end up with is my best.

But, for a variety of reasons, it really is less than idea to rely on being able to create a frantic and frenzied drive forward in order to produce art. It's like stripping down the hull of the boat I'm relying on to get me safely to shore in order to feed the pieces into the boiler.

What I'm talking about is anxiety. I'm going to have more thoughts on this in the future, I think. Anxiety has always been part of my life. It's become part of my creative process. I didn't realize that until this past weekend, when someone else shared their thoughts with me on a similar subject. And while I've been able to harness anxiety... somewhat... in order to keep my creativity flowing, it really makes it hard to deal with things like fulfilling orders, going to the post office, dealing with banks, etc. Again, there will be a post about this later in the week. I'd rather focus on the positive for the moment.

Yesterday I did do the "breaking time up into smaller pieces" thing, but... well, it wasn't like it usually is. No anxiety. No sense of "GET IT DONE, GET IT DONE, GET IT DONE" during the active phases. No sense of "WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHY ARE YOU PIDDLING AROUND?" during the less active phase. No problem switching between them. I let my mind wander as it would wander. I wrote.

Originally I sat down with nothing more specific in mind than Steff and Mackenzie at the festival and the conversation with Marcel. The whole thing with Celia... her scholastic probation (which fits with the circumstances of the character) and her conscription to help run the illusionary mascot, the alteration of the fountain to a perm-illusion memorial, all the little details came about during the reflective periods between the writing, which really were reflective.

I'm going to spend this afternoon seeing how well I can bottle this, basically. I'm going to do another Write For Pleasure Day. Last time I tried that I didn't get much writing done. We'll see how it goes this time.

Personal Assessment

Feel pretty good. Another six and a half hour night of sleep. A little stiffness in one of my knees... I still have a tendency to ignore the warning signs (i.e., stabbing pain) when I'm sitting wrong. My body's always given me random aches and pains. I'm still getting used to the idea that the knee ones are significant.

Little foggy, compared to yesterday. That'll make this a good test of how much of my good writing day yesterday was the things I did differently and how much was just a good day.

Dreams From Last Night

Deathless dreams two nights in a row. It's rare for a book... even a book I love... to influence my dreams so directly.

Plans For Today

I have some The Gift of the Bad Guy orders I need to do, but I need to be a little bit more awake to do those. That's it for what I'm going to do today besides writing.

Achievement Unlocked: Achievement

So, I've already written around 2,500 words today. I have a flash story up and two others (long-ish, for flash) ones ready to go into a queue and after I break to take a bath and muse for a bit I'll probably write some more of those.

And here's the thing that strikes me: I have to work really hard... much harder than I worked at the writing... to convince myself that 2,500 words is a good amount of work to have done. I'm proud of the individual stories I wrote, but it doesn't seem like much.

But it its.

2,500 words is mass market pages.

2,500 words is 500 words above Stephen King's stated daily writing target.

Comparing output in terms of sheer weight of words is not a great way to compare two authors on merit or work ethic or quality of anything. Even if I disagree with Cat Valente on some scores about the future direction of This Business Called Showriting, she was dead on with her point that units of art are not interchangeable. But if one is having a hard time believing one is having a productive day, it's useful on an intellectual level to go, "Hey, I wrote 1.25 Kings today." (Sidenote: That means yesterday was nearly a 3 Kings day for me!)

But perhaps only an intellectual level. This is one of the problems with doing something that comes naturally to you: it never feels like an achievement.

I think that's got to be my next goal, if this anxiety-free writing thing works out: a sense of achievement. I've talked before about the need to have a response from the audience, the virtual "roar of the crowd". Now I'm wondering how much of that comes from a lack of any sense of accomplishment that comes from the act of writing itself? I know I've achieved things... impressive things... through my writing, but the writing itself doesn't feel like an achievement.

Yeah, I think that will have to be my next target.

Results: I has them.

Okay, so I'm done writing for the day. I've written somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 words today. This is in the form of five different flash stories. Some were from ideas I've had bopping around in my head that I've never managed to sit down and write out. Some were brand new prompts. One is just something that popped into my head.

The interesting thing to me is that where I have obviously written more than 3,000 words in a day (I used to consider that my target), I have rarely if ever been able to jump from one idea to another like that in the course of a day.

Two days in a row where something seems to have worked is not yet a conclusive pattern, but it's suggestive, especially as the circumstances of the days are very different. Yesterday I sat down to write a single long story that I'd been planning on writing on that day for most of the last week. Today I sat down with no specific agenda and ended up writing several short stories of varying length. Yesterday I felt sharp and alert. Today I felt foggy and sluggish.

We'll see how the rest of the week goes. Tomorrow is going to largely be a Technical Stuff day. Thursday I'm planning on writing Friday's chapter... my housemate's day off is Friday and since I work better when I'm alone in the house I'm going to try to avoid doing any major writing on it. Plus side for everybody else: if the story's done Thursday, I'll post it before I go to bed (i.e., after midnight on Friday.) Thursday is my traditional archnemesis when it comes to days of the week and accomplishing things. If I can have a repeat of Monday's awesomeness on Thursday, I think I'll be in good shape.

Sidenote

As part of my technical day tomorrow, I'm going to be getting my Dreamwidth account set up. Same username as here. Livejournal's become increasingly unreliable as I've become increasingly reliant on it. I'm not jumping ship, but I want to have a backup.