Author Archives: Autumn

Writerly Support

In my regular circle of friends there is a disproportionately large number of NaNoWriMo participants, and most of us got together last night for mutual support. (That proportion is complemented by the frustrated artists, who were not with us. We’re a very creative bunch when we’re given the opportunity.) It’s a good group, and we discussed a lot of really neat stuff while enjoying some good food. One of the things we talked about was the Cheesy Fantasy Epic, which Dez claims writes itself because it’s formula, formula, cliche, formula. Sounds like his material is marketable already! (Don’t mind me, I’ve just worked in the book business for eleven years, and cannot believe the crap that gets published. This of all things assures me that someone I know, if not myself, will be a published author some day, because our worst is still better.)

We discovered things in common, such as people trying to sneak in novel-writing at work while on the phone, people forgetting to eat, working late at night, writing huge blocks less often, and so forth. One of my friends, when we pressed him for his word count, was remarkably stubborn, and he finally admitted that he’d begun a novel and it had hit a brick wall, so after arguing fruitlessly with it for a couple of days he’d abandoned it and begun a new one a day or so ago. We were stunned, but cheered when he told us that he’d written a few chapters already (although he still didn’t share his word count!). It takes guts to abandon something you’ve put time into, even if it’s dead in the water.

Everyone’s optimistic, everyone’s having fun, and the only damper on the evening was when the waitress told us that they had run out of cider.

This morning I teach, my informal Shakespeare reading group reads another play aloud this afternoon (which keeps growing no matter how hard I try to keep a limit to it; if everyone shows up we might have a seating problem!); tomorrow, I will write. I called it quits last night an hour before I had to leave for the meeting; I could have stayed and hacked out more, but I was tired. This left my word count just a thousand shy of half-way to 50K, which was a bit frustrating, but it’s good to know that when I sit down on Sunday that milestone will be passed.

More Teeth-Rotting Kitten Cuteness

Oh, dear gods.

She drinks tea, too.

I have a brand-new wide-mouthed mug with herbs all over it. It fits kitten heads quite nicely, apparently. Kitten heads attached to bodies which evidently like the taste of lukewarm Twinings Lady Grey.

Enough, you cat. Shoo with you. You are distracting me (a) from my freelance work that pays for your kibble, and (b) from my novel.

Go play with your Auntie Maggie, or chase Roman’s tail, or something.

Teeth-Rotting Kitten Cuteness

I’m having a bit of difficulty typing this morning, because there’s a kitten sitting in front of my monitor.

Yes, she has discovered the computer. At first, she just wanted to sit on my lap and purr adoringly. Being with her human was enough. Then, she wanted to see what all the clicks were about. Keyboard; okay. Then, ah then, she happened to look up as I moved my mouse across the screen, and it was love at first sight. Now she climbs from my lap over the keyboard (adding Xs and Ks and the odd Q, deleting other stuff, pulling up a couple of screens I’ve never seen before in my browser) and sits right in front of the monitor, watch my pointer as I navigate, or my whirling propellor “working” icon.

Okay, she’s moved to the stack of NaNo reference book I have piled next to the monitor. Gads, she’s cute. This is teeth-rotting cuteness. You’re lucky I don’t have a digital camera, or it would be, “here’s my kitten being cute”, and “here’s my kitten being painfully adorable”. (Please don’t knock the books over, darling, or you will plummet from cute to gaspingly laughable, and I’m drinking tea, here. That dictionary balanced on the very top may look solid, but it has two mass-market paperbacks underneath it.) She’s managed to lie down so that she can look down and crane her head around the edge of the monitor and watch the words appear on the screen.

Gah. Who needs honey in their tea when they have a kitten?

I’m still working on the seasonal gift list my parents asked me for a couple of weeks ago. I’m terrible at brainstorming a list of stuff I want. Evidently I shall have to take an afternoon and wander through a large bookstore and make notes of what strikes my fancy, and then do the same at a music store. Ikea gift cetificates are always good too, I suppose; inevitably I end up needing at least one more bookshelf per year.

I’m having dinner with Ceri, Marc, and Annika tonight (anyone dares to make a Marc’s Angels joke and they’re toast)… maybe I’ll go downtown a little early and do some browsing. All in the name of finishing these gift lists, of course.

Words and Music

I avoided my novel yesterday and sat down to do some serious book research, which consisted of going through two novels with an orange highlighter, a pencil, and a pad of sticky notes. Now I can press onwards, confident, using these texts to inspire my protagonist as she makes connections between these novels and the world around her.

That’s why my word count hasn’t budged. That, and practicing, and orchestra.

I’ve had better nights, but I’ve had worse nights, too. Two of our best cellists were missing, so Walter and I were struggling to fill in sound-wise and technique-wise, with our last two cellists alternately playing the bass part (which really threw me off a lot) and attempting the cello line. For some reason I didn’t move up to sit with Walter in the first chair (actually I know exactly what the reason was, it was avoidance of being close to the conductor for the Handel and the Mendelssohn disasters I foresaw looming), so both he and I sat alone, one behind the other, which meant we both felt unsupported because we couldn’t hear anyone else’s line to lend us psychological support. Next week I’ve promised to sit up front with him.

There were good parts (namely the bits I really, really practiced) and bad parts (the bits I practiced but became severely thrown off by the presence of the rest of the orchestra as we passed around the fugue theme of the Handel at breakneck speed). I’m really going to have to buckle down and do some serious work on these pieces in the next week or so. I don’t feel tremendously defeated, however, because there are some bits I can play that no one else can. So you see, I’m not a complete failure, which is a blessed relief, trust me. I still can’t get into the music, though; I’m finding it very difficult to create any sort of positive emotional attachment to it. I’m rather neutral about it all, which bothers me. Music is a very emotional art for me, and if a piece doesn’t make me feel something, I’m going to have difficulty playing it. Technical difficulty is a seperate negative stumbling block for these pieces.

This afternoon I’m going to do a couple of hours of freelance work, then I’ll novelise for a while. Can’t have my fingers losing flexibility, or my creative juices drying up, now, can I? (I believe I used the phrase ‘drooling language all over the page’ in encouragement to a fellow NaNoWriMo, and you know, it’s quite the apt metaphor…)

NaNo Reflections

It’s snowing again. Wet, messy snow that’s sticking to cars and sidewalks. The roads are wet, and I can hear the sticky hiss of tires on Sherbrooke street.

Ladled up from Ceridwen’s Cauldron:

She told me that after the first day she had gone to friends’ blogs to find out how the first day had gone. She was disappointed with the result. Sure, some of us had posted word counts, but that’s no indication of how the day actually went.

It was an awkward time of day to call people, I didn’t want to e-mail anyone and put them on the spot, so I surfed web logs instead, and no one had really said anything. I mentioned this to Ceri in passing, and now that she has blogged about how she felt on her first couple of days of NaNoWriMo, I figure that I should, as well. She credits me with the stimulus to talk about the first day or so, after all, so unless I wish to be subject to tomato-throwing fans, it’s only fair that I do so, too.

It was good. It was comfortable, and I felt like I was accomplishing something. I didn’t clock-watch; I wrote what I needed to and just let new things unfold, as if I was reading someone else’s story. It can be tidied up later. Better words can be carefully chosen some other time. I haven’t really reread it all from beginning to now, but I’m fairly certain it flows.

Not that it matters. This is about hitting a quota, of discipling yourself to sit down daily to do something, and, of course, to say at the end, “I have a big gloriously messy novel” and then say, “neener, neener” to anyone who asks to read it.

I mentioned to a few friends that I wouldn’t be comparing word counts; this project is for me, it’s not a competition. When I went to post my word count the first time on the official site, though, I wandered around a bit and looked, because I was curious. I didn’t want to beat myself up, I certainly didn’t want to gloat… I was just interested in seeing how others’ works were unfolding. Yesterday I discovered that three people claimed to have hit 50,000 words already, and that one actually claimed to have reached something like 999,999. In three days. Right. I went back this morning to check it out again, and found that the individual in question has been removed. Good to know the organisers thought it as unlikely as I did.

This leaves two people who have achieved their goal already, one of whom joined on November 3 itself. Which would mean s/he likely registered after she wrote the novel, because I checked late morning on the 3rd, and s/he’s in Virginia, so the pretext of a vastly different time zone can’t even be used. What gets me is that the word-count programs don’t go on-line until November 15th, so these counts and claims can’t be verified until then, which gives anyone claiming to be finished the morning they joined a two-week buffer to actually hit his or her count.

No, I don’t care. It doesn’t affect me. What bothers me is the idea that some people don’t care about the rules. I have no way of verifying if this person has a novel or not; s/he just might, and that would be great. If s/he doesn’t, then s/he’s just cheated him/herself.

Back to me, though.

I love writing, and I love being able to write. The two days I’ve sat down and written for three or four hours straight have been terrific. As Ceri says, I felt like a “real writer”. I feel like that already, though. I don’t need (another) novel, finished or in progress, to prove that to me.

However… this is the first novel I’ve written where I actually feel like I might be able to do something with it afterwards. I have a context imposed upon me from the outside, so I won’t be too sprawling. I feel more focused in my efforts. The Great Canadian Novel feels similar; I’m focused, not reaching out wildly on tangents, but I’m letting it unfold as it wills, too. I think the difference lies within the knowledge that there’s an ultimate word count goal, so I’m just letting the NaNo novel run on. I don’t really edit myself in the GCN, either, but there’s still a difference, and I can’t quite put my finger on it. The GCN is more complex, but I’m assuming that comes from the less-frantic approach. The GCN has time to breathe. I do write primarily for myself, but in the back of my mind I’ve been thinking about attempting publication sometime in the future; I just need a likely manuscript to sacrifice. The NaNo script will likely be that sacrifice, since the GCN is too precious. I’ll cut my teeth on the NaNo novel, and then we’ll see how things have gone before I go leaping into the publishing fray with the GCN. Publication is not validation, not by a long shot. If you have a finished novel, though, why not try? The worst they can say is “No”. (Which is plenty crushing for any author, thanks very much.)

I won’t be writing as much as I’d like to be today, because my fellow professor e-mailed me to remind me that I had volunteered to teach two-thirds of the class tonight. I had agreed do it last week, and then in the next seven days my free time sank spectacularly in Kingston television performances, rituals, teaching, NaNo writing, and crisis-handling. This leaves me today to finish reading two books and to prepare a seminar on them. In addition, with all this snow, I have a sneaky suspicion that my husband will be home by early afternoon. Now, if only I could work those books and seminar into the NaNoWriMo novel somehow…

On White Lies To Preserve Sanity

I hate it when I’m caught between two choices and both make me feel awful.

It’s orchestra night, and I’m still having so much trouble with the Handel and those fricking legato sixteenth note passages in the Mendelssohn. I’d have slunk in and played air cello for those particular bits, except that last week our second cellist made note of the fact that he wanted a cello sectional rehearsal sometime tonight. That means the five of us sit in a room alone and battle out passages.

Sure, sounds like a terrific idea if you’re having trouble. Except that I’ve been having trouble for weeks, and I’m no better. And I’m so upset about it that playing it badly all by myself over and over, with two or three people telling me how to do it and getting impatient because I can’t, is the very last thing I need tonight.

So I called the secretary and told him I was working late on a project and couldn’t get away. He was completely understanding, and I feel dreadful. A different kind of dreadful than I’d feel if I went to orchestra, though. There I’d be fighting back tears, and the urge to throw my bow across the room.

I’m so upset about this music that I absolutely cannot get, no matter what I try, that I’m tempted to back out of the December concert. Yes, it’s that bad. I don’t enjoy this music in the least; I get no thrill out of it; I can’t settle into it musically, let alone technically. If I can’t offer even a passable product, why am I wasting everyone’s time for this concert? Oh, I’d go back afterwards when new music is introduced; I don’t want to drop orchestra completely. And by not going to rehearsal I’m not scuttling away from challenge. There’s big difference. If I was scuttling away from challenge, I’d have quit last September after three rehearsals. The phrase “It will be all right on the night; how? It’s a mystery”, while it appears to apply to most theatre, doesn’t apply in the same way to orchestral performance, I have discovered after three concerts. I haven’t decided yet, anyway; it’s a possibility I’m turning over and over in my mind. For now I’ll just grit my teeth and practice those gods-damned passages till I hate them even more – I’ll be able to play them, but I’ll hate them.

When my husband walked in I asked him not to talk to me for a while, and he hovered for a bit before asking what was wrong. I blew up at him – with reason, I think, since I had already indicated politely that I was not in the mood to talk and when I was, I would. We’ve always been straightforward about this sort of thing, and have respected such requests, so why he broke the rule this time completely escapes me: it just made it worse. Terrific; now we’re both scowly and anti-social. Evidently we’re in for a wonderful night.

Ups and Downs

Seeing the end of October creep up on me, and knowing that the last time I sat down to work on the Great Canadian Novel was about two and a half weeks ago, I threw some Tori Amos in the CD changer yesterday and sat down on the living room floor with my laptop. I wrote three pages and felt really good about myself. I’d stopped being as curious as I had been about my GCN world, and deliberately immersing myself in it again was good – it felt comfortable. I also felt a bit worried, what with NaNoWriMo looming. Having two novels on the go is a bit like having a new child and having to soothe the elder sibling: no, I still love you, I haven’t forgotten you, this new baby just needs so much attention…

Then I amazed myself by getting up and making a wonderful dinner that included baked chicken, and brussels sprouts done in cheese, onions, and lemon butter. (“What are these?” asks my husband. “Baby cabbages,” I answer, unconcerned, as I begin to eat. “Oh,” he says, munches on one, and begins to rave about it. “I didn’t expect you to like brussels sprouts so much,” I remark calmly, reaching for my water glass. He faltered for only an instant, brave man.) After dinner, he asked what he’d done to deserve a big dinner, and I told him that as of Friday, I wouldn’t be able to do things like this, so I thought I’d get one in before I sacrificed my life to NaNoWriMo.

Yesterday was pretty good. Then this morning…

Argh.

I spent two hours setting up Eudora as my mail program, importing my Outlook Express stuff, and generally fumbling around until I can at least use the ruddy thing. I have experience with Eudora; we used it at work once or twice a week to mail out newsletters and such, so it’s not like I’ve never seen it before. Still, I get as frustrated as the next busy human when I can’t grasp things immediately. I also went through a bunch of old e-mail to delete it from OE before I exported stuff to Eudora, simply to save room, and it always takes longer than I expect – click, scan, click to delete; rinse, repeat. Boring. Like housework. Tidy, polish, sweep, dust.

Gods, it’s all so exciting, I think I’ll have to take a break and go lie down.