Definition: blessing, benediction.
On his knees, hands bound behind his back, feet grazed and bare, Joshua accepted the malevolent benison with uncharacteristic demurity. His eyes were closed, his expression slack, a listless slump to his shoulders that I had never seen before. Falconer stood over him, tall and proud, victorious, his forearm extended as though holding a gun. His hand was empty of a weapon, still my heart beat fast, and I struggled against my bonds as Joshua should have struggled against his. As I watched, Falconer formed a symbol with his thumb and touched it to Joshua's forehead. My pulse spiked, hands fisted and a bitter taste flooded my mouth. I choked on my response, aware that unless Joshua fought back soon, it would all be over.
This is my first attempt to use the word of the day in a sentence or paragraph of writing. Let's hope I didn't get it completely wrong. I trust someone, one day, will tell me if I have.
Tuesday, 24 November 2009
GB: Going back to school
The next three years are slated for debt repayment, technically, it's more than three years but the contemplation of the continuation of my financial misery beyond that time is outside the realms of sane comprehension. While I'm languishing in the poverty pit -- house bound, socially isolated and unable to recreationally travel further than I can spit -- I might as well acquire some useful knowledge.
Three years is coincidentally the same length of time it takes to get a degree. I don't have one. I have two half baked ones, but not a whole one. I don't regret that fact, I do, however, long to expand my literary education, increase my vocabulary and bolster my writing portfolio and skill. I don't need a degree to do any of that. In fact, having a literary degree could hinder me, so I've heard, been told and unfortunately witnessed.
I have the internet. I have a home library that would make many bookworms green with envy, and when that runs out I have access to local and state libraries where the print pages stretch as far as the eye can see. I have the desire to learn. Motivation could be an issue but that's where my blog comes in.
The syllabus isn't worked out yet, but I envisage setting assignment type tasks such as short story writing, critiquing of original fiction written by others, a daily sentence using the latest word of the day (thanks Dictionary.com), continued work on my novel, book reviews and lots of reading of fiction and non-fiction, including classics, poetry, short stories and novels. Oh, and to jazz things up, some set tasks such as listening to podcasts, doing writing assignments based on weird and wacky prompts and regular submission of new writing to the online critique site. If I become really courageous, some competition submissions. Hmm, maybe that will be a second year requirement.
Regular critiquing though, is a requirement. I will critique the work of others, and submit my own for feedback. The submission of one new story per month (minimum) will be a solid enough goal to keep me motivated, but not be too much of a diversion from my novel. Word count will range from 1,500 to 5,000, depending on how carried away I get. As for critiquing other people's work, one new critique (minimum) per week is reasonable.
Work on my novel will continue, and will take precedent. I'm loathe to set word counts or requirements because I tend to break them the moment I set them. Thirty minutes per day is my minimum exposure to my novel, with a preference for an hour. The morning commute gets me the thirty minutes. By evening, after a day of brain-drain, I'm more suited to blogging and simple creativity. Codee does my head in! This must change, and will change. I'm just not prepared to rush it quite yet.
Roughly, that's the plan. I do wish it were winter though. The whole idea feels wintery, more suited to woollen sweaters, scarves, thick booties and hot chocolate drinks -- or maybe that's just me trying to procrastinate a whole six months away.
Three years is coincidentally the same length of time it takes to get a degree. I don't have one. I have two half baked ones, but not a whole one. I don't regret that fact, I do, however, long to expand my literary education, increase my vocabulary and bolster my writing portfolio and skill. I don't need a degree to do any of that. In fact, having a literary degree could hinder me, so I've heard, been told and unfortunately witnessed.
I have the internet. I have a home library that would make many bookworms green with envy, and when that runs out I have access to local and state libraries where the print pages stretch as far as the eye can see. I have the desire to learn. Motivation could be an issue but that's where my blog comes in.
The syllabus isn't worked out yet, but I envisage setting assignment type tasks such as short story writing, critiquing of original fiction written by others, a daily sentence using the latest word of the day (thanks Dictionary.com), continued work on my novel, book reviews and lots of reading of fiction and non-fiction, including classics, poetry, short stories and novels. Oh, and to jazz things up, some set tasks such as listening to podcasts, doing writing assignments based on weird and wacky prompts and regular submission of new writing to the online critique site. If I become really courageous, some competition submissions. Hmm, maybe that will be a second year requirement.
Regular critiquing though, is a requirement. I will critique the work of others, and submit my own for feedback. The submission of one new story per month (minimum) will be a solid enough goal to keep me motivated, but not be too much of a diversion from my novel. Word count will range from 1,500 to 5,000, depending on how carried away I get. As for critiquing other people's work, one new critique (minimum) per week is reasonable.
Work on my novel will continue, and will take precedent. I'm loathe to set word counts or requirements because I tend to break them the moment I set them. Thirty minutes per day is my minimum exposure to my novel, with a preference for an hour. The morning commute gets me the thirty minutes. By evening, after a day of brain-drain, I'm more suited to blogging and simple creativity. Codee does my head in! This must change, and will change. I'm just not prepared to rush it quite yet.
Roughly, that's the plan. I do wish it were winter though. The whole idea feels wintery, more suited to woollen sweaters, scarves, thick booties and hot chocolate drinks -- or maybe that's just me trying to procrastinate a whole six months away.
Monday, 23 November 2009
GB: A burnt out case
Writing is a struggle. It is a chore. I fear my life, complicated by financial burdens and emotional regret, are the dampeners to my creativity. I admire (and envy) writers who can free flow their work, who can sit down and transcribe hundreds of words to the page without thought, who can write what they feel, what they think, what they see in an internal picture show in their minds. Worse, I envy those people who can do this after a full day at work, and who have children, partners, pets and -- on top of that -- just as many commitments and stressors as I do. My life is relatively uncomplicated. There is no excuse for me not to be writing every night, for several hours at a time if I so wish... and I do, but I can't. Or at least it seems that I can't.
Have I lost the gift? Am I tired? Am I lazy?
On my bookcase is a book entitled 'A burnt out case' by Graham Greene. I've not yet read it, but the title draws my eye. I feel burnt out. I'm not. If I think energy, I feel better, even a little. It's all in my mind.
I am a writer. It is within me, a part of me just as I am fair skinned, brown haired, hazel eyed. This writing gift is something I was born with. I can't add up without using my fingers, but I can craft imaginary words to paper in a way that moves people. I believe that. I trust it. I know it.
Right now though, I seem unable to craft anything other than disjointed, passionless sentences with recycled metaphors and thin similes. The cure, I know, is to write... anything. If I can't write fiction, then I will blog. When I'm feeling more creatively limber, but not sufficiently strong enough to write fiction, I can blog the novels I read, or I can critique other people's work so that I stay connected -- my finger on the pulse, as it were.
Envy of others will serve no purpose other than to erode my confidence and further isolate my characters.
I wrote Iris in the space of a couple of hours. That is the last piece of writing that wrote itself. Codee is work, fulfilling, worthwhile, demanding and joyful work, but work. He doesn't flow to the page, he doesn't reveal himself in picture and metaphor. He's recalcitrant, brooding, stubborn and childlike. Writing Codee is like writing a third year university philosophy essay when you've only studied mid level high school. He and I aren't on the same level. He's smart. He's crafty. He's spent eight years of his life researching, reading, spending every waking hour strategising and studying... and he knows I haven't.
Only I can connect with him in a way that will bring him to the page, and I am doing that, slowly. Right now there's more research and planning than there is writing. I'm trying to catch up. I'm impatient to return to the flow. I want him to tell me what to do, but he can't until I know it for myself.
I miss writing in the flow, the zone. I miss being surprised by what appears on the page. I miss the startling revelations that come about only when the fingers move faster than the mind, when the conscious brain switches off and the subconscious communicates directly with the keyboard. I miss startling out of a writing sessions with hours passed and a wealth of fictional experience laid out before me that I never knew existed in my mind or elsewhere.
Despite all this, tonight I wrote some blog reviews, replied to a critique response and I wrote this. It may not be Codee, but it's writing. It's progress. I feel better for having done it.
I am a writer. I write. Everything is practice. Everything is worthwhile. I trust in that.
Have I lost the gift? Am I tired? Am I lazy?
On my bookcase is a book entitled 'A burnt out case' by Graham Greene. I've not yet read it, but the title draws my eye. I feel burnt out. I'm not. If I think energy, I feel better, even a little. It's all in my mind.
I am a writer. It is within me, a part of me just as I am fair skinned, brown haired, hazel eyed. This writing gift is something I was born with. I can't add up without using my fingers, but I can craft imaginary words to paper in a way that moves people. I believe that. I trust it. I know it.
Right now though, I seem unable to craft anything other than disjointed, passionless sentences with recycled metaphors and thin similes. The cure, I know, is to write... anything. If I can't write fiction, then I will blog. When I'm feeling more creatively limber, but not sufficiently strong enough to write fiction, I can blog the novels I read, or I can critique other people's work so that I stay connected -- my finger on the pulse, as it were.
Envy of others will serve no purpose other than to erode my confidence and further isolate my characters.
I wrote Iris in the space of a couple of hours. That is the last piece of writing that wrote itself. Codee is work, fulfilling, worthwhile, demanding and joyful work, but work. He doesn't flow to the page, he doesn't reveal himself in picture and metaphor. He's recalcitrant, brooding, stubborn and childlike. Writing Codee is like writing a third year university philosophy essay when you've only studied mid level high school. He and I aren't on the same level. He's smart. He's crafty. He's spent eight years of his life researching, reading, spending every waking hour strategising and studying... and he knows I haven't.
Only I can connect with him in a way that will bring him to the page, and I am doing that, slowly. Right now there's more research and planning than there is writing. I'm trying to catch up. I'm impatient to return to the flow. I want him to tell me what to do, but he can't until I know it for myself.
I miss writing in the flow, the zone. I miss being surprised by what appears on the page. I miss the startling revelations that come about only when the fingers move faster than the mind, when the conscious brain switches off and the subconscious communicates directly with the keyboard. I miss startling out of a writing sessions with hours passed and a wealth of fictional experience laid out before me that I never knew existed in my mind or elsewhere.
Despite all this, tonight I wrote some blog reviews, replied to a critique response and I wrote this. It may not be Codee, but it's writing. It's progress. I feel better for having done it.
I am a writer. I write. Everything is practice. Everything is worthwhile. I trust in that.
Friday, 20 November 2009
GB: Anxiety vs writer's block
I worry. I worry about money, about work, about my housing situation, about my family, my friends, my life (whether I'm living it right), my health, my decisions, my lack of decisions. I worry that life is passing me by, that I've not achieved enough, that I've failed in some integral way to be the person I was born to be. Whatver that might mean.
Worrying makes me sick, physically sick. I battle tiredness, aches that have no cause, a tightness and uneasiness that sleep doesn't soothe. A special diet combats the worst of my Irritible Bowel Syndrome symptoms, of which generally science has no explanation or cure, but the need to avoid common foods poses its own problems, and leads to further worry.
To combat my feelings of inadequacy, I make lists, I set goals, I announce to myself that I will achieve a certain milestone by a certain date or time. I fail to meet the objective. I lose interest. My thoughts disperse. My motivation wavers, flits away like a butterfly seeking pollen on a windy day.
Often I sit in one place, physically idle, my brain whirring like a fan set too fast. Without doing anything, I overheat.
Once I used to write in the 'zone'. Given a keyboard and a few minutes, the muse would snap like a taut spring and off I'd go. I would write for minutes or hours, ignorant of the passing of time. I lived in my mind, exposing thoughts to the screen without intent, with no more effort than to transcribe. I've not written in the zone for years. I thought it was writers block. I thought I'd run out of stories. I thought it was because I was taking things so seriously, but now I suspect it's anxiety.
I yearn for a stressless holiday, a quiet beach somewhere with a book, a friend, all meals catered for, all decisions made for me. The hardest thing I'd need to do is decide whether to lay on the banana lounge or the hammock, whether to swim or sleep, whether to lay on my back to stare at the clouds or on my stomach to watch sand particles dance and bounce.
I blame my financial situation. If i were debt free, or at least in a better financial situation than I'm in, my anxiety would be less. Would it? Really? Wouldn't I just find something else to worry about, like impending climate change catastrophe, or the widening gap between rich and poor, the terrible loss of life through war and violence, the suffering of all the innocence in the world, the inadequacy of my contribution, the passivity with which I step forward into each day?
Maybe I need medication. Maybe I need to reframe. Maybe I need to write each day, even when I don't want to, even when my stomach is knotted so tight that to even place one single word on the page would seem to be the trigger that results in my entire undoing. Maybe, just maybe, I think too much and write too little.
How does a person turn off their mind? How do they stop it from overheating?
They write.
Worrying makes me sick, physically sick. I battle tiredness, aches that have no cause, a tightness and uneasiness that sleep doesn't soothe. A special diet combats the worst of my Irritible Bowel Syndrome symptoms, of which generally science has no explanation or cure, but the need to avoid common foods poses its own problems, and leads to further worry.
To combat my feelings of inadequacy, I make lists, I set goals, I announce to myself that I will achieve a certain milestone by a certain date or time. I fail to meet the objective. I lose interest. My thoughts disperse. My motivation wavers, flits away like a butterfly seeking pollen on a windy day.
Often I sit in one place, physically idle, my brain whirring like a fan set too fast. Without doing anything, I overheat.
Once I used to write in the 'zone'. Given a keyboard and a few minutes, the muse would snap like a taut spring and off I'd go. I would write for minutes or hours, ignorant of the passing of time. I lived in my mind, exposing thoughts to the screen without intent, with no more effort than to transcribe. I've not written in the zone for years. I thought it was writers block. I thought I'd run out of stories. I thought it was because I was taking things so seriously, but now I suspect it's anxiety.
I yearn for a stressless holiday, a quiet beach somewhere with a book, a friend, all meals catered for, all decisions made for me. The hardest thing I'd need to do is decide whether to lay on the banana lounge or the hammock, whether to swim or sleep, whether to lay on my back to stare at the clouds or on my stomach to watch sand particles dance and bounce.
I blame my financial situation. If i were debt free, or at least in a better financial situation than I'm in, my anxiety would be less. Would it? Really? Wouldn't I just find something else to worry about, like impending climate change catastrophe, or the widening gap between rich and poor, the terrible loss of life through war and violence, the suffering of all the innocence in the world, the inadequacy of my contribution, the passivity with which I step forward into each day?
Maybe I need medication. Maybe I need to reframe. Maybe I need to write each day, even when I don't want to, even when my stomach is knotted so tight that to even place one single word on the page would seem to be the trigger that results in my entire undoing. Maybe, just maybe, I think too much and write too little.
How does a person turn off their mind? How do they stop it from overheating?
They write.
Friday, 14 August 2009
NP: 90,000 words!
I've just made it to 90,000 words on my novel. Writing is now a joy. For many thousands of words it wasn't. That's not to say that I'm sitting down every day to write, far from it. But I do write every week, sometimes only once or sometimes more than that. Maybe in the future I will write every day but that's not a goal I'm forcing.
Over the past 90,000 words and three years, I've found that I, and Codee, respond well to approaching writing as a form of play. We sit down together and we see what happens -- no pressure, no wild expectations, nothing but getting to spend time with my protag and his mixed up perceptions of how things are. Most times it's a positive experience where he takes over and employs me as his scribe, rattling out his thoughts, expectations, hair-brained schemes and actions to get what he wants. Other times it's just a frustrating patch of dead air where he sits there with a blank face and empty brain. He's a smart guy, but occasionally he's just... not. Or maybe it's me that's not smart, but let's not go there. ;-)
If I've learned anything over these past 90,000 words, it's not to take myself or Codee too seriously. He's flawed. I'm flawed. The novel is flawed. I aspire to literary greatness, not as a means by which to clamour for fame or money (there's enough people already out there doing that), but as a means by which to relate the story that I've committed myself to telling. I'm not self-deluded or arrogant enough to think that I'm doing the story true justice at this point in time. I've got too much yet to learn to be able to say that.
I set my standards high. I enjoy reading a variety of different stories, but there's a difference between a masterful writer and a good one. I think I'm good. I can hold my own in a writing group without blushing beet red with shame, but I'm not masterful. Nowhere close. One day I will be, but I hope I never know it because the minute that I do I will lose my creative edge.
On a different note, I can't imagine falling in love with another character like I've fallen in love with Codee. Having said that, I'm sure I will. That's for the future and my next novel about a guy who lives on the coast. I don't know his name, or his face, or much more about him other than he's not a fisherman but might be a diver. Codee won't let me find out and more and that's the way it should be. One novel at a time.
At this point I must also publicly convey my thanks to Em, my writing buddy, best friend, mentor, coach and Leland's scribe. She, like I, has been working on a novel for the past three years.
Writing a novel is hard work. It's a commitment that many start and few finish. There are statistics out there that suggest that many people who start out writing a novel never make it past the first 10,000 words.
Em and I have made it past that, by a long way! If it takes another six years to finish our novels, those will be six years well spent. I hope it doesn't take that long, but I won't be disappointed if it does. Good things take time. Worthwhile endeavours take time. Our boys are worth it, no matter how much we sometimes think they aren't.
As for how long my novel will get. I don't know. I will write until it's finished and then I'll go back to the beginning and start over in the first of what I envisage will be two full editing phases. That will take time, but while I'm editing I can let diver-boy out of his cranium cage. Who knows what he'll get up to.
Over the past 90,000 words and three years, I've found that I, and Codee, respond well to approaching writing as a form of play. We sit down together and we see what happens -- no pressure, no wild expectations, nothing but getting to spend time with my protag and his mixed up perceptions of how things are. Most times it's a positive experience where he takes over and employs me as his scribe, rattling out his thoughts, expectations, hair-brained schemes and actions to get what he wants. Other times it's just a frustrating patch of dead air where he sits there with a blank face and empty brain. He's a smart guy, but occasionally he's just... not. Or maybe it's me that's not smart, but let's not go there. ;-)
If I've learned anything over these past 90,000 words, it's not to take myself or Codee too seriously. He's flawed. I'm flawed. The novel is flawed. I aspire to literary greatness, not as a means by which to clamour for fame or money (there's enough people already out there doing that), but as a means by which to relate the story that I've committed myself to telling. I'm not self-deluded or arrogant enough to think that I'm doing the story true justice at this point in time. I've got too much yet to learn to be able to say that.
I set my standards high. I enjoy reading a variety of different stories, but there's a difference between a masterful writer and a good one. I think I'm good. I can hold my own in a writing group without blushing beet red with shame, but I'm not masterful. Nowhere close. One day I will be, but I hope I never know it because the minute that I do I will lose my creative edge.
On a different note, I can't imagine falling in love with another character like I've fallen in love with Codee. Having said that, I'm sure I will. That's for the future and my next novel about a guy who lives on the coast. I don't know his name, or his face, or much more about him other than he's not a fisherman but might be a diver. Codee won't let me find out and more and that's the way it should be. One novel at a time.
At this point I must also publicly convey my thanks to Em, my writing buddy, best friend, mentor, coach and Leland's scribe. She, like I, has been working on a novel for the past three years.
Writing a novel is hard work. It's a commitment that many start and few finish. There are statistics out there that suggest that many people who start out writing a novel never make it past the first 10,000 words.
Em and I have made it past that, by a long way! If it takes another six years to finish our novels, those will be six years well spent. I hope it doesn't take that long, but I won't be disappointed if it does. Good things take time. Worthwhile endeavours take time. Our boys are worth it, no matter how much we sometimes think they aren't.
As for how long my novel will get. I don't know. I will write until it's finished and then I'll go back to the beginning and start over in the first of what I envisage will be two full editing phases. That will take time, but while I'm editing I can let diver-boy out of his cranium cage. Who knows what he'll get up to.
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