Tag: internal editor

Sorry, no Trope Tuesday (again)

Yeah, sorry, no Trope Tuesday this week.  Third week missed in a row!  Not so good.  Thing is, I’m really focused on finishing Star Wanderers: Reproach (Part VII) right now, with a self-imposed deadline of May 31st. I figure that’s more important, and I really don’t want to break my momentum.

I’ve been vacillating a lot about this project.  Sometimes, I think it’s halfway decent, perhaps even good.  Other times, I wonder how the @#$! I came to be trapped in this story and why I’m wasting the best years of my life writing this crap.  The other Star Wanderers stories are selling decently well, but this one is so shite that it’s bound to kill the series and why am I writing this why why WHY??? 

And then I get the chains back on my inner editor and drag him down to the dungeon, where I keep him on a strict diet of bread crusts and rotten cheese.  No wonder he hates me.

I know those trope posts are a popular feature around here, so I’ll get back on top of them once this project is finished (which WILL be this week!  It WILL!!)  In the meantime, if you’re looking for a trope fix, you should check out Anita Sarkeesian’s latest Feminist Frequency video.  She does an awesome job deconstructing feminist video game tropes, in a much more meticulous and thoughtful manner than I have ever achieved here:

Part of me wants her to take my own stories and analyze them for feminist tropes.  The other part shudders in abject horror at what she might possibly find.

Whoops, looks like the inner editor just got loose again.  Better go hang out on the KBoards until I’ve got him back in the dungeon.

Later!

Some new writing resolutions

So I’ve been following Dean Wesley Smith’s blog pretty closely over the last few days, as he posts about his creative process for a novel he’s ghost writing.  It’s more than a little mind-boggling–he started literally with nothing, not even a working title, and yet he’s averaging between 5k-7k per day.  If he hasn’t already, he’ll probably finish it tonight.

I’m learning a lot from these posts, especially about the importance of switching off your internal critic and trusting your creative instincts.  Over the last couple of days, I’ve tried to do just that with the sword & planet novel I mentioned last week, and I can say that it really works!  By doing all I can to put words on the page and ignoring everything else, I’m averaging about a thousand words per day and the story is unfolding wonderfully.  It’s like a trust fall with my muse, where instead of failing miserably I’ve found she’s there to catch me.

All of this has made me think that I need to reorder my writing routine and make some resolutions in order to keep this momentum going.  If I can overcome some of my bad habits and replace them with good ones, I can be a lot more productive, and writing will be that much more fun.

So here’s what I’m going to do this week:

  • Start every day with writing.  Even if it’s only fifteen or twenty minutes, as soon as I get out of bed I’m going to sit down at the writing computer and pound out a few hundred words.
  • Write in lots of little chunks, rather than one or two large chunks.  In other words, don’t put off writing until the chores are done–put off the chores!
  • Shoot for 1000 words per hour or better.  If the pace starts to flag, switch projects if necessary, even if the other project is fanfic.
  • Go for at least one walk at some point in the day.  Walks do more to re-energize my creative energy than just about anything else.

Basically, I’m going to treat my work-in-progress as something fun, rather than work or a chore.  I’ll use a stopwatch to keep track of how many hours I write each day, but I won’t give myself a quota.

My writing process isn’t the same as Dean’s, and I’m not going to try to imitate his process, but I am going to pick out what I like about it and see what works.  Also, I’m going to focus a lot more on quantity than quality, with the understanding that treating everything as practice will likely improve both.

As for the A to Z blogging challenge, I’ve got two posts left, Y and Z.  I haven’t written them yet, but I’ve got a great idea for both of them.  Since writing takes precedence, though, I may not get to them until later in the day.  It also depends on whether the temp agency calls me up in the morning with a job–they’ve been doing that a lot recently.  Last week I was at a factory making toothbrushes for dogs (true story).  This week, I could be doing anything–or nothing, as the case may be.  I’d like a couple of days of nothing, just for a good chance to write.

I have a confession…

…I’ve started writing a Sword & Planet story.

In case you’re wondering what the heck is Sword & Planet, think Conan the Barbarian in space.  With giant lizards and man-eating plants.  And half-naked princesses getting kidnapped by evil technomancers with giant four-armed bodyguards that wield laser-bladed swords.  Basically, science fiction in the style of the classic 20s pulp adventure novels.

In other words, this:

I’ve read a lot more Heroic Fantasy and Sword & Sorcery than straight Sword & Planet, but I figure there’s a good deal of overlap.  I read A Princess of Mars way back in college and really enjoyed it, and of course I’m a huge fan of Star Wars and other series that were heavily influenced by the genre.  Basically, I want to try my hand at a classic science fiction adventure style, without the scientific rigor of Hard SF or the sprawling world building of Space Opera.  It’s all about the adventure, with liberal helpings of awesome sprinkled with omigoshomigoshomigosh.

The tentative title for this book is The Last Warrior Princess, though it’s about a twenty-something college grad working a wilderness job in southern Utah who accidentally finds a portal to another world while wandering around Arches National Monument.  The princess comes later, though not too much later.  I don’t know much about her yet.

In fact, I don’t know much about the story at all.  I’m discovery writing everything, and I do mean everything.  This is a fly-by-your-pants ready-set-go kind of book, with no restrictions and no limits–just me and the muse, not caring what anyone else thinks.  My internal editor is bound and gagged in the cellar with the spiders, and if he breaks out somehow I’ll hamstring him and toss him back down.  This project might never get another mention beyond this post, but I’m okay with that because it’s going to be a whole lot of fun.

For those of you waiting for the next Star Wanderers story, don’t worry, I’m still writing those too.  This is more of a side project at this point, so I won’t put up a progress bar for it until I get fairly close to the end and know it’s something I want to keep.  Which might never happen.

So basically, it’s just a personal pet project for now.  It’s interesting, though, because when you’ve got nothing to fall back on but your own creative impulses, the words start to flow in remarkable ways.  Take this passage, for example:

I drove up just as the sun was setting. The crescent moon hung like a razor in the yellow-orange sky, with Venus a twinkling point on its edge. Blood-red Mars was not far off, while Jupiter loomed ascendant.

I have no idea where that came from, but in the white-hot creative heat of the moment, it just spewed out onto the page that way.  The only word that I changed was “loomed,” which I had originally written as “hung” (maybe I should change it back? Nah, who cares).  In a little over an hour, I committed about 1,500 words, all just like this.

So yeah, if nothing else, this project will help to shake up my creative process and get the juices flowing for other projects.  I could really use that right now, what with a couple of recent life roles (my grandmother passed away last week, which wasn’t unexpected but it did throw a kink in my already rocky routine).  And who knows?  If it turns out well, you might see me put it out as a novel in a few months.  Or maybe the first part of a new series … nah, better not get carried away.  Better just write it first.

Besides the A to Z challenge (which I may also turn into a book at some point) and Star Wanderers: Reproach, that’s what I’ve been up to recently.  I’ve got a Star Wanderers omnibus in the publishing queue, but there’s nothing firm I can say about that yet, other than it will probably be for Parts I-IV and feature a professional cover (though I plan to keep the space images for the individual installments).  I could say more, but I want to go for a walk.  Later.

Slow going (but still going)

I’ve been back in the States for exactly one week now, and while my stomach is still having trouble adjusting, I’m more or less used to the American way of life.  Not much culture shock this time, though that could change once I get back to Utah.  That place is pretty strange.

So without a foreign culture to navigate (or a job, though hopefully that will soon change), I have a lot more time to focus on my writing.  Trouble is…it’s coming slow.  Like, reeeally slow, at least for me.  I’ve been clocking in at less than 800 words per hour, sometimes as low as 500.  I’m still hitting betwen 1.5k and 2k words per day, but still, it’s way more of a struggle than it needs to be.

I think the main problem right now is that I’m writing with my internal editor looking over my shoulder.  Somehow, I seem to have forgotten how to turn him off (maybe that’s why I didn’t get very much written in Georgia, hmmm…).  To compound matters, it seems like every ten minutes I want to get up and do something else.  That’s not a very good way to be productive at anything, let alone writing.

Fortunately, I think I’m slowly getting the good habits back.  I’m writing a little less than two scenes a day, and the momentum is building.  With this timer constantly staring me in the face, I’m much more conscious about how I structure my day.  I haven’t hit four hours of productive writing time yet, but I am consistently getting to three, so I think it’s just a matter of self discipline before I can up that to four.

All boring writer stuff, I know.  But the long and short of it is that I’m slowly getting back into the swing of things.  If I can turn off that internal editor and start writing faster, I think I can finish The Sword Keeper before the end of the month.  That would free me to work on a lot of other things, most noticably publication of Stars of Blood and Glory.  That’s the next one in the publishing queue, though I’m still waiting on a couple of first readers <cough>.

That’s about it.  I just wanted to vent some frustration, since man, writing is tough when your internal editor is breathing down your neck.  But don’t worry–I’ll shut him up soon, and my writing will be better because of it.

Time to get immersed back in story.