I have finally gotten the time to finish this beast.

Critiques and compliments welcome.

Time to animate some cameras and stick it on my reel. Maybe then I'll have time to write again.

As some of you might have noticed, the economy is a tad weak right now. For those of us busking for change -- excuse me, I mean "working as a contractor" -- times are challenging. This slowdown in paying work has given me more time non-paying work. And then once I've finished the housework and the shopping, I might squeeze in some time to work on my reel.

I am beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel on this one. And I am happy to say that it is a train.

(click for bigness)





(Bah! My pix are not showing for some reason for some people. Here's a link to my gallery.)
http://pics.livejournal.com/thormation/gallery/00007f5a

The textures and lighting are temporary, currently just enough to give me contrast, hence the plastic toy train appearance.

How many hours have I spent on this? Too many. Other than that, I haven't kept count. I do estimate that I spent at least 24 solid hours just scouring the internet for reference pictures. I would have gone and taken my own reference pictures of one, but the nearest one was a good 18-hour drive away--a pricey jaunt in these lean times.

After this, I might relax with a less challenging project, like, I don't know . . . anything else I could possibly think of, maybe?

Every time I look at the manuscript, I see something new to cut. Do I have to destroy this manuscript in order to save it?

On the lighter side, I've been getting a lot of work done on my 3D reel. In this economy, contracting doesn't pay the bills. A real job-type job looks to be a necessary thing.

-------------------------

Last P1 Word count:  120,784 words.
P1 Word count as of now:  117,982 words.
P1 Word count for today: -2,802 words!

It was all going so well too...

All the holes in the first half of the story? Filled. The manuscript now goes from the beginning through the transition and a dozen pages into the second half seamlessly. So bully for that, at least.

But now that I'm looking at the fragments that I have previously written in the second half, I'm finding their usefulness as guideposts dubious. Some of them were obviously written by a much younger me -- a me who was a bit too idealistic and/or naive. Some of them were written without following the chain of causality all the way through. And some of them were rendered moot by the patching I did on the first half. This leaves me with about 40% of my pre-written text intact, and I can already tell that at least 80% of that will be all-but-rewritten when I get to it.  At least the 400 words that I end the story with are still intact, so I still have a place I'm trying to get to, even if the path has become less distinct.

But the last couple of weeks have been replete with false starts and scenes that spiral into directionless chatter. You know those scenes in books where the characters talk a lot about unimportant mundane matters and nothing really happens and you start to skip ahead to try and find where the action picks up again? Yeah, I've been writing those. It's incredibly easy to have your characters just talk to each other and not do anything dangerous -- not unlike real life -- but fiction needs to be more interesting than real life. And characters need to be more focused and decisive than you or I are, or at least that's the only part that needs to be written about.

I've been re-reading Bujold, mostly because she is so re-readable, and when I can school myself to analyze and not merely partake, her ruthlessness really leaps out at you. The moment a conversation starts to slow down at all, she immediately summarizes the content and moves on to the next interesting exchange. No more interesting exchanges in that conversation? Then the scene ends with the next paragraph. Bam! Onto the next interesting thing. (It's good that she allows no slow down, because some of the things her characters do would not withstand lengthy scrutiny, but I digress.)

I'm not sure what I'm going to do about this time in the doldrums. I can either keep throwing things until something sticks, or I can attempt to outline and organize and hope that I don't kill any feeling of life through overstructuring. But I'm out of interesting things to say about it, so I'm going to end this entry right now. Bam!

----------------------------------------------

Last P1 Word count:  109,009 words.
P1 Word count as of now:  120,784 words.
P1 Word count for today: 11,775 words.

Eight day benchmark goal: 1,600 words/day = 12,800 words
Eight day actual output: >400 words/day = 3,138 words

What went wrong? Well, aside from not racking up as big of a number as I had hoped, not much.

I was plunging into the second act of my book at the hoped for speed, when I had to look up an event from the first half. Not a problem; it happens all the time. But on this occasion, it led me back to a hole--a place in the manuscript where I hadn't actually worked out the specific of getting from one scene to the next, and had simply written "[[Transition]]" and expected to finesse the connection later. Paging through the document, I found another dozen of these gems with [[Rewrite with newer character]] or [[Adjust to fit timeline]] or simply [[WORK]], all to be fixed later.

I decided that now was later.

So even though I've been packing in the 5-6 hour days at the keyboard, neglecting the housework, and typing until I feel my brain start to seize up, the number at the end of the balance sheet still shows low gross output. Fortunately, the only boss I have to impress at this juncture is Spouse, who recognizes both a two-thousand-word block of new text and the thousand-word block of text that vanished to make room for it.

Now I've got 2 final holes to plug in Act One: one of those [[Transition]] blocks that is turning into a few pages already, and a paragraph-length [[summary]] of a scene that will probably run another couple thousand words before I'm done.

This thing is getting huge. If Act Two is only half the size of Act One, the first draft will run somewhere around 170,000 words by the time I reach the end. Sounds sorta bloaty to me, but that's a problem for the Second Draft.

-------------------------------

Last P1 Word count: 105,871 words.
P1 Word count as of now:  109,009 words.
P1 Word count for today: 3,138 words.

There's nothing like having you attention split between two things to guarantee that neither gets done. This has been my life for the last 12 months.

On one hand, there's my real work, or in my case, my reel work: Trying to create professional-level work samples from thin air so that I can regain some sort of ongoing employment in the 3D biz. On the other hand, there's my writing. Something I have pursued with varying degrees of success and activity since I was 18, back in the late '80's. Both have been vying for my time and energy, and the struggle has been a drain to both.

So I went to Spouse last week and proposed an experiment. I would put all my 3D work completely aside, and devote all my free time and creative energies toward Finishing the Book. After all, I had always whined that I never had the time to "really work at it", so this would be the test of that. Either I would show clear and obvious productivity and progress, in which case we could extend the test run, or I would admit that writing was just my version of a stamp collection, and I would be a responsible grown-up and let it sit in limbo while I pursued income.

I am pleased to announce that writing has won the first battle. My goal was "at least 1,000 new words/day" and I achieved it. (The count below seems to contradict me, but it does not show the ~2,000 words of prose that was pruned in the process.)

So I have now been authorized by my household's bill-payer to move onto Phase II: 50,000 new words by Hallowe'en, or completion of novel first draft, whichever comes first. This is a pace of ~1,600 words per day -- a not-at-all unreasonable pace for a professional author. Being pragmatic and knowing my historic love for procrastination, Spouse has set a seven-day checkpoint of 11,000 words. This is fine. I actually work better to deadline.

I am excited. This just might work.

Now if you will all excuse me, I have a couple thousand words I need to pump out.

------------------------------

Last P1 Word count: 102,170 words.
P1 Word count as of now:  105,871 words.
P1 Word count for today: 3,701 words.

Writing happens in fits and starts. I sat down and made up a timeline of what I had written, which was very useful. Knowing when things happened in relation to each other made it much easier to connect scenes, even if all it took was "Three days later...". 

My mother just sent me a copy of Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2nd Ed., by Crawford Kilian. It has to be the most curious and inchoate books on writing I've ever seen, or at least that's my first impression. It's like a shotgun blast of advice.

One thing mentioned was how the literary market has been inexorably turning into Top 40 Radio in the last couple decades. Once there was a thriving mid-list, where talented writers could make a fair living by appealing to a smaller, but consistent, section of the reading populace. Now we are moving steadily toward a marketplace of only Big Name Authors churning out book after book, and One-Hit Wonders whose first novel doesn't immediately take off like wildfire and so they promptly fade away.

When I finally finish this thing, I'm going to do some serious investigation of the self-publishing route. It seems to be getting more respectable and profitable, and with Amazon.com and the "Long Tail" it might just be the new slush pile for the publishers. Why dig something out of the hell pile on your desk when you can find a product with proven saleability and repackage it for wider distribution?

---

I have now been unemployed for a full year, and other than the household money shortfall problem, I kind of like it. Of course once the Unemployment payments go away, things start declining fast, so I am committed to using my time more efficiently to finish up my reel, and find some sort of 3D work.

Ideally, I need three showcase pieces. I've finished my bassoon.
( Bassoon, High Angle )
and my gum tree seedpod
( Spiky ball-ball )
But my Big Boy locomotive is still a work in process.
( Choo-choo to-do )
So for the next 6 weeks I get to knuckle down and make a few hundred little parts, tweaks, and fudgings as I attempt to make my creation look more like this. Spousal Unit will be both pleased and sad. More income is good, but having a live-in homemaker is good too!

--------------------------

Last P1 Word count: 100,008 words.
P1 Word count as of now:  102,170 words.
P1 Word count for today: 2,162 words.

Back to six digits.

Enough said.



-------------------------

Last P1 Word count: 97,672 words.
P1 Word count as of now:  100,008 words.
P1 Word count for today: 2,336 words.

It's been a while.

In late June I discovered the difference between food poisoning and OMFG FOOD POISONING. Without getting too graphic, the former is 24 hours of feeling crappy. The latter starts with the worst pain I have ever endured and a trip to the emergency room, followed by IVs, CAT scans, and some truly fine pain meds, and a strict prohibition against consuming anything more challenging than apple juice and jello for the next day or two. In the end, about two and a half weeks were shot to hell, as I was unable to do more than sleep and stare at one screen or the other due to either unwellness or the drugs I took to fight the unwellness off.

My doctor put it best when she said, "This is why I don't eat hamburger any more."

Random thought of the whole process. "This is really a good time to be unemployed. I'd hate to have to burn vacation time for this."

I'm better now, thanks, and have been plugging away at the prose. Writing descriptions, bridging transitions, fleshing out scenes. Nothing exciting, but a couple thousand words more in place. So, I get cocky, and decide to find out my true word count. WordPerfect has a Comment feature that I have until now not deigned to use. No longer. Placeholder text? Into Comments. Word count log? That too. Text that I've struckout but not discarded, just in case? Join the rest.

End result: Large negative numbers.

I shouldn't really care. The point is not the quantity of words. Quality of story is the real goal. Still, six digits was a nice milestone.

And will be again, I suppose.

------------------------------------------

Last P1 Word count: 102,944 words.
P1 Word count as of now:  97,672 words.
P1 Word count for today: -5,272 words.

So, deciding that I could fill in the dinner party gaps later when I had a little perspective, I gritted my teeth and settled down to write the first battle scene.

And finished about  90 minutes and 900 words later.

No, seriously. Done. And that included poring through my notes to find out who was where and who lived and who didn't, and then updating my wiki with the changes. I've been putting off writing this scene for (literally) years, and then it was over before I had a chance to even wince.

I'm not usually one to question good fortune, but this still felt awfully quick. I showed the passage to The Wife, who declared that it worked for her. She said (paraphrased) that she likes her battle scenes like her sex scenes: A quick overview, show the sections that are significant to the viewpoint character, enough details to infer but not enough to exploit, and then onto the characters dealing with the aftermath.

Well, I suppose that's good enough for me too. Now onto the many small holes in the second half of the book....

----------------------------------------------------------

Last P1 Word count: 102,038 words.
P1 Word count as of now:  102,944 words.
P1 Word count for today: 906 words.

In his book on writing--titled strangely enough On Writing--Stephen King likens his way of writing stories to unearthing fossils. You find the edge of a story protruding out of the bedrock, and the act of writing the story is merely excavation. Sometimes it takes big excavation tools, powered by steam and fire. Sometimes you need tiny featherlight brushes and gentle caresses. But in the end, the entire story is unearthed, and it is what it is. It may have looked like a velociraptor when you started, but it wound up as a pterodactyl by the time you finished, and that's okay.

This analogy for the most part holds true, but King is not telling the whole truth about storycrafting or paleontology. Neither are so clean and neat.

When you dig up a dinosaur, chances are slim that it died in its sleep, stretched out in orderly repose. Once all the bone-shaped things are dug up, the scientist must identify the function and position of each fragment. Inevitably, some parts of the fossil will be missing. If they cannot be found by further digging, then the scientist make an educated guess and construct an approximate new piece to fit in the gap. Some pieces will belong to other fossils, and will need to be tagged and put on the shelf for later. And there will often be stray bits that look like they might be fossil pieces, but are really just junk that can be tossed away. Hopefully the analogy to writing is clear enough here to forestall reiteration.

So in the unearthing of my story, I have done an inventory of my missing pieces, and it goes a bit like this:

I have the first half of my dinosaur intact and roughly wired together for display. Except for one vertebra. Well, I think it's missing a vertebra. There's a bit of a gap, but it's a bit of a challenge to find the right sized piece of fossil to fit in it. (This is my "dinner party" scene.)

Next I'm missing the pelvis. Well, it's not missing, per se. It's just completely embedded in this granite block over here, and it's going to be a bitch to dig out. (This is my "first battle" scene. I hate writing battle scenes, but it is a big and important scene that, like a pelvis, connects the front half with the back half.)

Lastly I'm missing a few bones out of the tail and about half the bones from each leg. I could use some of the leg bones as models for bones in the opposite leg, but there are a few bones missing from both legs, which makes it hard to get this beastie upright. And one of the tail bones missing is a big ol' spike without  which I can't finish this critter off right. (The leg bones are a couple of crucial scenes either establishing a conflict or resolving it. The tail bones are transitions between scenes in the storyline. And the spike is my "climax" scene.) I know generally where these bones are buried, I've just have been fretting about the pelvis so much that I've put off digging.

The word count increase below indicative of having unearthed the vertebra. Now I just have to finish deciding which parts are rock and which parts are fossil. I may put that part aside for now and give the pelvis a few swift strokes of the sledgehammer.

Last P1 Word count: 100,234 words.
P1 Word count as of now:  102,038 words.
P1 Word count for today: 1,804 words.

"Let's see," I said to myself, "I could avoid those three nasty [[bracket summary]] sections until the very end, or I could be brave and just start slogging my way into them."

Well, I was brave, but not exceedingly so. Given a choice of [[battle scene 1]], [[battle scene 2]], and [[dinner with intrigue]], I chose the dinner scene. If this scene continues to go well, maybe I'll feel ambitious enough tackle one of the battle scenes. (A confession: I don't really dig battle scenes, either as reader or writer, but since P1 is about a soldier, I'm going to eventually have to grit my teeth and do it.)

The dinner scene was slow to get into, but after a couple hundred words, it took a twist I wasn't expecting, so it may be more interesting than I thought. I should speed up for the rest of this scene, but tonight I was just happy to have finally broken the 100,000 word mark.

Last P1 Word count: 99,476 words.
P1 Word count as of now: 100,234 words.
P1 Word count for today: 758 words.

It's been an...educational 9 months of being mostly unemployed. The details are dull and dreary. let me just say that between the infrequent contract work and the efforts made toward getting the next job, there has not been as much time (and certainly not as much will) to sit down and bang out the prose as one might hope.

A good chunk of that inactivity, however, is attitude, and frankly I have grown miserable of being miserable, so enough of that.

I must admit to being inspired by leighdb's recent foray into fiction writing. She announced that she had a great idea, and BANG started pounding away at the keyboard, not even letting the oppressive knowledge that she lives in NYC stop her. Every few days she put in a new entry saying that she's written another X,000 words, and then heads back to the keyboard to plug away some more.

Inspiring? Actually, more like goading.

Looking back at my word-count records for P1, I can see that the first 4,163 words were tallied on August 29, 1993. Taking off my shoes, I discover to my chagrin that I have been working on this book for the last 14.5 years. That's a rate of about 18 words per day. To be fair, I completed two full 120,000 word novels during that time (which have been back-burnered due to thick veins of D&D-like plotting running through them at crucial junctures) and I have written at least another 100,000 words of snippets for the sequels of those books and the book upon which I currently work. However being fair is not nearly as motivational as smacking myself with an 18-word-per-day flagellum, so the number stands.

And now this young upstart leighdb sashays in spewing out thousands of words a week, as if it were easy and enjoyable? This shall not stand!

So here's my challenge to you, leighdb. You have ~10,000 words written, a burning bright spark of a story idea burning in your head, tons of research yet to do, and no prior novel-writing experience. I've got ~400,000 words of prose under my fingers (100,000 of which are in my current novel); 18 years of writing experience; mountains of world-building and character development already logged and filed; a story with a beginning, middle, and end that needs about 20,000 words of patches, transitions, and a couple key scenes; and lots of spare time to do the work in. I'll race you to see who can complete their first draft first.

(I realize that all the indicators above point to an easy victory for you, but I'm willing to try anyway. Go easy on the old man, eh?)

--------------

In any event, here's my latest numbers:

Last P1 Word count: 99,149 words.
P1 Word count as of now: 99,476 words.
P1 Word count for today: 327 words. (Yes, that's less than a word a day over the last year. Shit.)

The writing has been a bit sparse of late, so no updates.

However, this bit of "business as usual" from the Texas State Legislature just blew my mind.

Have a youtube link.

June 21: Laid off
July 9: Landed contract job. 250 hours of work, due at the end of August.
July 11: Contractor's client has a tizzy over something. The 250 hours of work is now due end of July.

I've been working 10-16 hours a day for 13 days straight now, and the light at the end of the tunnel is either a train or a big, glowing paycheck.

I haven't read the Harry Potter book.
I haven't seen the newest Pixar flick.
I shouldn't really be doing this, but my spleen needed venting, bad.

I hope that Voldemort kills them all before turning the wand on himself.

Shit, shit, shit!

Three months to cover. Yikes.

When last I posted, I had just discovered the joys of a private wiki for my world building. For about two weeks I imported old documents, wrote new documents, and found out where all the holes were in my world. I was both dismayed and pleased by the number. Dismayed as there were so many, but pleased as worldbuilding can be fun--it's all free-flowing creativity. The only "chore" is making sure that the new stuff is consistent with the old stuff...or at least is sufficiently better that it's worth going back and retrofitting the old stuff.

My world building joy was cut short by crunch time at work. For two months we had deadlines--hard and fast deadlines that the various clients would seem to pick out of the air, on projects where the clients would sit on the stuff for weeks "approving" it before sending it back to us with critical changes and just days to implement them. It did not help that toward the end of this period of high activity, my supervisor was fired, to the shock and dismay of the whole 3D team. The last three weeks of trying to hit deadlines while the new boss tries to find his feet were nerve-wracking.

Then about three weeks ago, madness turned into doldrums. All the projects were approved and out the door. The new version of our in-house software had just been shipped to Japan, and little extra needed to be done for the American release in September. What little work there was assigned was largely make-work...make-work that we were actually begging for so that we didn't just have to spend our days surfing the net. Plus there was extra tension--the Big Name Distributor that we had been courting (3rd in a series of 3) was finally working out details with its Parent Company on our partnership contract. This, our CEO explained in breathless tones, was finally our big break. This deal would open up our product as in interface for all of Big Name's numerous clients, and we would have a flood of work and income. Expansion of staff and building were predicted. Ponies for everyone.

With little energy actually spent at work during this time, I had energy to spare for my writing once again. The second half of "P1", the novel I am currently trying to usher into coalescence, had some major holes, and much of my delay in finishing the book came from this.  After a few aborted attempts at outlining, I came upon index cards as a solution. Over the course of ten days, I very carefully read through all my scenes and all my story notes--about 50,000 words total. On colored-coded index cards, I separated out all the mostly-exposition scenes from the mostly-story scenes, jotting down a summary of each and noting the current order of presentation. This has so far resulted in the writing of two additional scenes, the removal of about as much material, a half-dozen transitions created, and the realization that one of my conceits on how to move to the climactic scene was just plain stupid and needed reconceived.

Eight days ago, I was ready and eager to move on to the next step in this process.

Eight days ago, on the first day of summer, I, and two-thirds of my co-workers, were laid off.

You see, part of what my supervisor was fired for was pointing out that Parent Company of Big Name Distributor was a very big company, and would probably act like it. And of course, he was right. Parent Company decided that whatever we and Big Name Distributor might have negotiated was immaterial. Parent Company was willing to sign a contract with us with nearly the same terms, but would retain all contact with the various clients and we would merely provide content for one of Parent's existing products. Our company was so over-extended and so desperate, that the CEO could really only agree. And to produce one company's content required far fewer employees.

I will not end this story with doom and gloom, gentle readers. First, this ends my killer commute. No longer am I spending 2 1/2 hours on the road in stop-and-go traffic every day. Also, not coincidentally, I am sleeping better and longer, and feeling much more healthy and energetic. I really did need a vacation. And while I was still cleaning out my desk, I got an IM from a former co-worker who had heard our plight. He passed on to me a 5-week contracting gig that I was copiously overqualified for. So life apparently goes on.

Now I just need to have a chance to sit back between gigs, collect a little unemployment, and do some serious writing...

My writing has been interrupted in a most useful way for once.

Part of my stumbling about and stopping short during my writing sessions is that my world is becoming so huge and unwieldy. I've got tons of worldbuilding files in scads of directories, and reams of maps to boot. If I dare stop to clarify a detail like "Where is this character from?" or "How far is it to the next town?" or "What can a newly accredited Master Necromancer actually do?" I find myself waylaid for hours, during which I may find my answer, or more likely I may have to write a small essay on a subject that happens to contain the answer--which will get in an ambiguously named file . . . somewhere.

What I really needed was a single place to find all my information, filed cladistically, and frantically cross-referenced to within an inch of its life. In other words, I needed a wiki.

Now wikis are usually server-based behemoths attached to SomeSQL database, and maintained by the family of geeks you find nesting in the walls of your cellar. I needed a personal wiki, but for the longest time, all the personal wiki software I found was either too constrained, too twee, or both. Now at last, I have found one.

Its name is ConnectedText, and its greatest downfalls seems to be that (1) it requires me to code if I want to format text beyond simple paragraphs and basic word-wrap, and (2) that it actually costs money . . . $29.95 for a single-seat license. Since these hurdles are not the edifices that I once would have drama-queened them into, I have dived in scaled the learning curve, and am proceeding to enter as fast as I can open ten-year old files and figure out what I thought I was getting at.

And of course in the midst of fleshing out the structure of this Encyclopedia Errata Erratica, I am finding both small holes that need to be filled and vast gaping swaths that need to be mapped and surveyed. Fun discovery: I have probably written 400,000 words in and around the same area and the same year of my world, yet I haven't named the continent nor defined the calendar. This is not unlike writing several Michener-length novels on Wyoming while having no idea what country I was in nor which decade--just that some people did know how to ride horses if they had to.

It's a severe detour to racking up my word count, but I think that it'll pay dividends in pretty short order.

Has it really been so long? Hmm. I suppose between the end-of-year chaos and the new year's resolutions, I should not be too surprised at the long dry spell.

End of year is the normal silliness involving Xmas shopping and work related crises. New year's resolutions this year involved me and the spouse completely revamping our diet and eating habits. Surprisingly, we have stuck to it with a high degree of faithfulness. I'm down sixteen pounds since January 1, but that comes at a cost.

The first three weeks were hell. Always tired. Always bitchy. And always incessantly hungry. After that things became easier to deal with, which was good since all of the things that didn't get done during the diet's induction were now looming and imminent. Writing was just not anywhere near the top of the priority list.

Finally though, I have managed to squeak a few more words in. Apparently at a cost of sleeping this evening. Que sera, sera.


Last P1 Word count: 98,167 words.
P1 Word count as of now: 99,149 words.
P1 Word count for today: 982 words.

Turned a few 50-word bracket notes into 300-word arcs of bridging prose. Prospects for next weekend look good with the 4-day weekend coming up. We'll see....


Last P1 Word count: 97,343 words.
P1 Word count as of now: 98,167 words.
P1 Word count for today: 824 words.

Well, that was a long fallow period. Just as work gets light, I get sick. Just as I get better, work gets crazy heavy for about 5 months. So to get back in the game--and because enough time has elapsed to look at the manuscript with a fresh eye--I and the spousal unit went through the whole manuscript twice, looking for typos, stray plot points, missing plot points, character inconsistencies, and any grand structural defects. Happily, we found with the exception of two big battle scenes that I elided over (I hate writing battle scenes) the book needs only a few transitional links inserted, some details nailed down, and a little more fleshing out in the ending, and the first draft will be done! Whoo!

Then comes the polishing...

One thing that I will need to add a lot of is description. I know, many authors (I'm looking at you, Robert Jordan) could stand to take about half of their  description out as it is nothing more than padding to turn a novella into a novel. I, however, am too sparse with the exposition. I enjoy writing dialog far too much, and anything that gets in the way of the character interaction gets given short shrift. This could be a problem, as I have almost 100,000 words of dialog-heavy prose as it is. Adding move verbiage could easily bump the book up to 120k, which is a bit thick for any but the most demonstrably brilliant first novels.

Oh, well. I'll burn that bridge when I get to it. For now, I have to fix the typos, close the gaps, and complete the first draft.
 
P1 Word count still holding at: 97,343 words.

Another long, unexplainable gap in writing. Sorry, that's actually a lie. It's easy to explain--I wasn't writing, so there was a gap.

It might have been deadlines at work, or problems with my sleeping, or patterns in the sunspots--I don't remember anymore. In any event, I'm back at it. Let's see if I can stay back at it...

Last P1 Word count: 97,063 words.
P1 Word count as of now: 97,343 words.
P1 Word count for today: 280 words.

I figured it was better than one of those "quizzes" that ask you a number of questions with as many answers as there are results (and always in order). This, at least, has the capability to be pretty--pretty like a fox, dawg!

Get your own random interference pattern--I mean "spectral analysis" -- from Area 23®, a small-town consortium of flexible molded cheese products.

So, I know that all of you--you supernumerary masses, you--are all dying to know how my week off the Internet and away from my computer went. And the results are...mixed.

( Cuts like a knife, but it feels alright )

All in all--though my abstention was clearly not one--the whole experience was fairly successful. It helped separate the online things that were actually of vital interest and import from those pursued out of inertia. Most importantly, it gave me a sense of proportion to the whole experience, where before I had little more than a sense that it all was just an incredible waste of time. Yes, it mostly is, but some time is made to be wasted, and I think we should all honor that in our own ways. Plus, it gave me a resolution that I could fail at, which seemed to protect the others from neglect and degradation. A habit made out of ablative armor, as it were.

Next week, I hope that the changes to diet, sleep, and exercise will become routine enough that my energy levels stabilize, and I will be posting progress with writing or other creative endeavors here instead. At the very least, without the high level of internetting absorbing my energies and attention, I should be bored enough to do *something* of interest.

...nor is it bad or a waste of time or anything of the sort. It is merely a tool. However, it is a tool that I seem to be attached to for at least 6 hours a day, every day. So it doesn't seem frivilous to question if I'm spending an unhealthy portion of my life on it.

Last week a co-worker told me that he doesn't have the internet at home, and my immediate reaction was "How do you live?" Right now, that seems like a useful question to answer, so I'm going to attempt to spend a week of my life off-line. Let me clarify: I'm not going to not use the Internet--that would be silly. I do occasionally need to use the Internet at work, for work. Also if I need driving directions, or movie times, or a good recipie for clam chowder, I'm going to use the Internet--as a tool. What I'm not going to do is use the Internet as a form of time-wasting diversion.

No games. No forums. No webcomics. No checking in here to see if anyone responded to this manifesto. None of that. No non-useful and/or non-productive Internetting. Also, I will check my email no more than once a day unless I am truly expecting communication. I don't do IRC or the like, so that's no worry.

In fact, just to be safe, I'm not going to use my computer for diversion either. If it's not productive, constructive, or instructive, it's likely a time sink too. Best just to step away from the keyboard and see if I remember how to amuse myself without it. I foresee a lot of chores getting done out of pure boredom. So be it.

I'm unwiring myself now. Wish me luck....

Big ol' gap between updates here, and despite this interim blurb, it's not over yet.

There comes a time called "4th Quarter" that life gets too chunked up with junk to get much accomplished. Part of it is the big run of holiday stuff starting with my birthday (yay--time to set the deathclock forward another notch) and running through New Year's (yay--I'm not out scoring kisses because my social life is nonexistent). Part of it is resigning myself to the fact that all of the things I was sure that I was going to accomplish *this* year are just not going to happen before the year is over...just like last year.

Of course, I have to give myself some credit. Between the apnea, the ulcer, and my feet swelling up to the size of bread loaves for no known medical reason, I'm shocked and delighted that I got as much done this year as I did.

So now I'm medicated and my feet have mysteriously deflated, so progress should no longer be hampered by the malfunctioning of my corpus. So by this time next year I should be able to achieve my two--just two--goals:

1) To weigh less that 250 lbs. again--or to fit into clothes whose sizes are less that 3 characters long. Either works.
2) To finish the first draft of P1 so I can finally get to the editing which, unlike practically any other author I know, I consider the *easy* part.

Starting January 1--*after* this fucking 4th Quarter madness is over!

Hate! Hate! Hate!

Well, during my vacation I spent a lot less time writing and a lot more time relaxing, and I have no idea why I thought that it would be otherwise. I mean, it *was* my first full week off that I can remember since moving to Portland. Still, a fair batch of words did get produced and holes were plugged.

The next few holes are actually more like gaping rifts. And they are important ones too, seeing as they happen very close to the end of the book. Fortunately, the climax of the book has already been written, thank you, so I'm not stuck with the always daunting task of figuring out how to *end* the book. (Writing Tip O' the Day: Always figure out the ending *first*, then go back and figure out the beginning, and then start filling in the necessary intermediate scenes. Everything will be a lot more coherent the first time around if you have some clue of where you're trying to go with all this.) Anyhow, in the big rifts that follow, I have a fight scene, a death scene, and possibly a sex scene, and that's only the stuff I'm reasonably sure has to go in. Maybe the sex scene (more of an "afterglow" scene, really) needs to get a little earlier in the book so that the emotional tenor of the ending is less jumbled.

Yuck. I hate writing fight scenes. The trick is to shoehorn some character stuff into the conflict as well, otherwise it's just gore-porn. I wonder, is it possible to write a novel in the fantasy genre without including a combat scene of sort in it?

Whatever. Time to do the numbers.

Last P1 Word count: 95,913 words.
P1 Word count as of now: 97,063 words.
P1 Word count for today: 1,050 words.

Only 160 words this Sunday, but I am unalarmed. For one thing, I filled in a lot of small, but crucial, gaps. Also, the section that I was going through today had large sections of unbroken prose that I had to read through so that when I found a problem, my head was full of context--and this took considerable time.

But the biggest reason that I have no fear is that I took a vacation from work for this entire week. It's the first real just-for-me vacation that I've taken in about five years, and I'm so looking forward to copious amounts of both writing and relaxing. So my word count for the week should continue to increase as the week progresses. I'm looking forward to it.

Oh, and the mysterious, doctor-baffling swelling in my feet that has been plaguing me for the last couple of months is almost fully subsided, so yay me!

Last P1 Word count: 95,753 words.
P1 Word count as of now: 95,913 words.
P1 Word count for today: 160 words.

It amazes me that I can write steadily and prolifically for around 5 hours, and yet still only post a net gain of 180 words.

Hmp. And unless I can pick up the pace from 5 hours a week, I'm unlikely to get the 10,000 words or so I expect I need to write, written by my birthday. Can I discipline myself for the next six weeks? That would be a birthday present in itself.

Last P1 Word count: 95,573 words.
P1 Word count as of now: 95,753 words.
P1 Word count for today: 180 words.

...And a whole month slips by. Feh. I've been tired, so feh again. I'm just happy for this 3-day weekend. I think I'm feeling a lot more caught up with the hurly-burly of my life in general, and maybe that will start reflecting here as well.

A goal I have is to finish this first draft as a birthday present to myself. That gives me about seven Sundays of full-day writing, or perhaps a more gentle spread across the week. It's possible--but will I feel as optomistic later as I do right now? We'll see...

Last P1 Word count: 95,203 words.
P1 Word count as of now: 95,573 words.
P1 Word count for today: 370 words.

When someone tells you that writing is sometimes like pulling teeth, they are wrong.

Writing is always like pulling teeth.

On a bad day, it is like reaching into your mouth with a pair of needle-nose pliers and trying to wrest out that painful impacted wisdom tooth while the septic, imflamed tissues surrounding it throb and spew various humours.

On a good day, it's like reaching up and popping out that baby tooth--the one that you thought would never come out. But there it is in your hand, and you smile knowing that you can trade it for a quarter at the underpillow marketplace.

And on a very good day, it's like reaching into someone else's mouth and extracting enough teeth to pay for your eldest kids' second year at an Ivy League university.

Though we live for the very good days, we have enough bad days to treasure the merely good days.

Today was a good day, and I appreciate that.

Last P1 Word count: 94,629 words.
P1 Word count as of now: 95,203 words.
P1 Word count for today: 574 words.

Bleah.

Been a while since I've reported in. The apnea is now treated and is no longer an issue, so that's good. The stomach ulcer that I fought off is trying to recur, so that's bad. And my feet have been swollen for the last month, so that's worrisome. Being gainfully employed--and therefore reasonably insured--I did go to the doctor for all these complaints. And though he swears the Prevacid he gave me for the ulcer didn't cause my swollen feet--excuse, I mean my edema--he is at a loss for what might be causing it. All the usual things it could have been we've tested away. Fortunately, I can wear sandals to work (and then take them off while there!) so it is currently only odd, not inconvenient. I'm cutting back on my sodium intake though, just because it's a good idea anyhow.

Writing during this month of nervous health-watching decreased to a trickle. The large gain in words logged below was half today's effort and half the effort of the all the other, incommunicado weekends. Oh, well. Worrying will just make things worse. All I can do is what I can do. That, and spout clichés, apparently.


Last P1 Word count: 93,280 words.
P1 Word count as of now: 94,629 words.
P1 Word count for today: 1,349 words.

The last two weeks were not writing-free as may have been inferred by the lack of posting. Actually, I dashed off a couple of thousand words over the last two weekends, but not for P1--it was for J3.

Yes, I was writing scenes for the third book of a different series--a series where the first book (my next priority after I finish P1) was completed in the mid-nineties, but is currently undergoing a complete top-to-bottom renovation due to the fact that it sucked. J1 was based on a love triangle under which I shoved a very shaky plotline in which the protagonist did not so much participate except to be dragged about in a fearful and bewildered manner. Arthur Dent was decisive and directed compared to my supposed protagonist J. So you would think that if I was taking a break from P1 to write about J, I'd work on the rewrite of J1 instead of jotting down scenes for a book that can't really ever be published without J1 *and* J2 being written and sold first.

That's wrong on two counts. First, writing is a lot like inventing. Edison was famous for saying that invention was 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. For writing fiction, I'd bump inspiration to a generous 5%. Fortunately it is pretty well blended. So one minute of "Aha!" leads to 19 minutes of getting the idea down into words, which leads to another "Aha!" which leads to more typing, and so on. But occasionally, the "Aha!" is a big one, which leads to a couple of hours of frantically typing trying to get all of it down in words before--like a dream--it starts to fade and get confused. Nothing worse than an idea you can't get down before it evaporates. So when I get a chunk of "Aha!" barfed up by my subconscious, I don't worry *which* book it belongs to--I just get it into text so that it can't get away.

Second, since I have not solidified J1 yet, writing J3 is very useful. Writing about the character in a different environment with different characters to react to gives me a larger picture of the character with a richer palette of character traits to draw from. Also, it allows me to include details that are not really important in J1, but by the time I get to J3, all the necessary build-up and foreshadowing is already in place, and it makes the world that the character lives in feel that much more continuous and real. For example, imagine if George Lucas had actually written the scripts for Episodes I-III *before* he made Episodes IV-VI. All those discontinuities that we see now would likely have been fixed and accounted for.

But in any event, this week I managed to push forward on the proper book, and all is well.

Last P1 Word count: 93,280 words.
P1 Word count as of now: 93,913 words.
P1 Word count for today: 633 words.

Last week another working Saturday ate up my writing time. This week the long march continues. At least the big project that has been eating my weekends is now over and done with. Now my weekends should be free for a while, and--dare I dream it?--if I get no big onerous projects for a while, I might have enough juice left at the end of the day to knock out a few words mid-week from time to time.

Last P1 Word count: 92,751 words.
P1 Word count as of now: 93,280 words.
P1 Word count for today: 529 words.

Dudes, the nose hose works *so* well. I feel like I am alive in the first time in--well, I'm not sure how long. Long enough that I've forgetten when I last felt this good.

Since I had to pull an extra 12-hour shift at work on Saturday, I didn't have as much writing time today as I had hoped, but I still managed to pack a lot into about an hour or so. Next weekend we'll see what a few hours will bring.

Energy: It rocks!

Last P1 Word count: 92,301 words.
P1 Word count as of now: 92,751 words.
P1 Word count for today: 450 words.

Desire to write: 100%
Energy to write: 0%
Frustration level: High

Unlike every other step of this journey into treatment, instead of me having to make the effort to have someone diagnose why I'm too tired to make the effort, now I have to sit on my thumbs and wait for the medical equipment people to contact me. Why there is this sudden power play by the nose hose makers, I do not know, but it really pisses me off to no end.

Anyhow, I'm supposed to get my CPAP machine sometime this week. CPAP. What an ungainly acronym. And also an ungainly feeling when it is hooked up to you. This thing covers my mouth and nose (I'm a mouth-breather, yay) and blows air into me so that my airway doesn't close as I sleep. Now I'm getting all the air I need. The trick is exhaling. Instinctually, you want to exhale hard enough to counteract the pressure. Do that enough and you start to hyperventilate. The trick is that you *can* exhale normally, even though it doesn't feel like you should be able to. It takes about a week for most people to keep the panic from rising and the beast within from clawing at the invader clinging to your face. Some people never get used to it and have to have a nasty operation to remove their tonsils, adenoids, uvula, *and* a good chunk of the soft palate. Long, painful recovery time there. I think I'll just have to get used to the "air splint" instead. Provided they ever give me my machine, that is.

Seriously folks, if you know anyone who snores, falls asleep in the middle of the day, and is always tired, tell them about sleep apnea. It's bad for the heart, and it makes you feel like an old piece of crap. 1 out of 11 males and 1 out of 25 females between 30-60 have it and have no idea that it is not only a malady, but a *treatable* malady. Their spouses will thank you too, because people with apnea usually keep them up all night too.

Let me tell you people: If I had my energy back, I wouldn't be wasting my time typing up these boring public service announcements, that's for sure.

The good news is that with co-pay it only cost $10 for the doctor to ask me a few questions, prod me in the right spots, and tell me, "Yup, it sounds like sleep apnea to me!" The bad news is that I don't get fitted for a nose hose until after I have a sleepover at the hospital...which is not until May 3rd.

Nonetheless, he gave me tips on how to make the small amount of tortured sleep I'm getting better. Giving up caffiene after lunch was the hardest, but it seems to be paying off already. Writing certainly went well today, despite the fact that I somehow lost a whole scene. Normally, I do not delete excised stuff, I just strike it out in case I want to claim it later. Maybe I stuck it in a another file so it wouldn't screw up my wordcount? That sounds anal enough to be correct. I'll have to look.

In any event, I'm getting back on the writing horse again, and looking forward to having the energy to do more.

Last P1 Word count: 91,896 words.
P1 Word count as of now: 92,301 words.
P1 Word count for today: 405 words.

It's progress. I'll take it.

Hopefully after I get this apnea under control (1st appointment with the sleep clinic is this Friday) I'll be posting more often with higher numbers. Until then, I'm just happy to be productive at all. The nightsweats are the worst. There's nothing like lurching awake in the middle of the night to find yourself lying in a puddle of I-really-hope-that's-just-sweat. Your choices then are to try to sleep on a towel--which is usually rough and uncooperatively mobile--or to just say fuckit and get as comfortable as possible in the wet spot before it loses your precious body heat. It's not a choice that I want to continue having to make if I can help it.

Whose bright idea was it to make people out of meat anyway?

Last P1 Word count: 91,645 words.
P1 Word count as of now: 91,896 words.
P1 Word count for today: 251 words.

Not much to see here, folks. Just getting back into the swing after another cold. Itty-bitty progress.

Last P1 Word count: 91,265 words.
P1 Word count as of now: 91,645 words.
P1 Word count for today: 380 words.

Eighty-two words. That's all. Why so few? Why even report such a piddly number? Why not just disappear for another week and use the measley 82 words as seed for next weeks number? What's wrong with you boy? I bet you wrote more than 82 words in this paragraph alone!

Yeah, but with those 82 words, I wiped out 17 bracket notes and joined up something like 2 dozen scenes together. The tapestry is finally being pieced together.

That's not to say that there are not still outstanding some mighty big holes. Here's one bracket not I declined to tackle tonight:

[[Ooooooh! The big fight scene! Gore a-plenty! Things get out of hand. Heavy losses on both sides. P & company have to beat a strategic withdrawal. Which is to say they run like hell.]]

That's a scene that will take more than the two hours I was able to allot to writing this weekend. That's at least 500 words right there, and not 500 easy ones either. And I'm not really a big fan of battle scenes, so that one will be like passing a stone when I'm done.

And in any event, progress is progress, and should not be scorned.

Last P1 Word count: 91,183 words.
P1 Word count as of now: 91,265 words.
P1 Word count for today: 82 words.

So, I'm at home with the flu, or something like it, and my fever finally breaks, and I can think coherently again. No energy to move around, but plenty of energy to type! Why not write? Why not indeed!

So I open up P1, skip past the bit I had been hacking at (Writing Rule #459: When slowing down in one scene, switch to another scene and keep the momentum going) and start working on a short bit where I just need to fill in some chronological information.

WHAM! I'm at a dead halt.

Here's the situation:
I'm writing fantasy. Not high fantasy so much as working-class fantasy. If my fantasy genre was a magazine, it would probably be People Magazine, or on a good day, Harper's. I'm really more interested in the social dynamics of the characters in this magical world than I am with epic stories of nation versus nation or Good versus Evil or peasants versus tyrants or what have you. My stories are about people who would be everyday people except for the little extras they have, and how these extras do and do not affect their plans, dreams, and social standing. Ideally, I think I would write books that were 900 pages of dialog and mundane activies, just so I could concentrate on the interactions of the characters, but even I wouldn't want to *read* that. So I need plot too.

Fortunately, I finally figured that out. It's simple, really, though no one really explains it simply. Plot is everything that the protagonist does to try and get their life back where it was before things started going to hell, plus everything in the world trying to go to hell. However, this is beside the point of my posting tonight. Somebody do remind me to talk about "One Step Back" at some later time though.

Anyhow, with plot, you often have setting, and with setting, you usually need a map, just to keep the details consistent. So I have a map...no wait, that's the old map. The new map is...just a sketch on a napkin? Fine, it'll do. So if they are riding from here to here, that's 120 miles, which will take them...um...um...

Here's where it starts to get sticky. They were riding mules, and I have no idea how fast a mule goes. They were riding mules because There Are No Horses In My Fantasy World. (Sorry, horse-lovers, but I don't know horses, and I don't want to know horses. And if I "hand-wave" horses into my story, someone will call me on it, because I will get the details wrong because the whole idea of horses bores me to tears.) So I do a little internet research and I find out (1) *nothing* about how fast a mule train travels, and (2) mules are half-horse, you dummy. Feeling real smart, I resign myself to having to invent a beast of burden, knowing that whatever it is better be good, because I'll be stuck with it forever.

Fine, now I have a steed that can traverse distance x at whatever speed I choose. I choose a speed, reread relevant passages, compare them to my story calendar, and come to the inescapable conclusion that I need to redraw my map again, so that I have a solid, accurate reference upon which I can hang the story.

And that's all the time I had tonight.

Better luck this Sunday. It's past bedtime.