Mini-Excerpt

The tunnels empty into a cave. I run, shards of glittering volcanic rock shivering and shattering around me, lacerating my face and hands. A torch is pressed into my hands, an urgent whispered “go” in my ear, arms enfold me quick and fierce, then release in a swirl of fire-lit blonde hair rushing into shadow. The ground tilts and I stumble, hands pierced by black razor shards as I catch myself. The torch rolls away and I clamor to my feet, grabbing the torch and running I know not where. The torch in my hand feels gritty-slick. I can find no hint of direction, no distant light of escape. Blood stings my eyes and I’m racing blind as deafening cracks warn the ceiling caving in. I trip, the torch flies and all is plunged into rumbling abyss. I pull myself to my feet, search frantically for direction as ceiling shards shatter all around, a cold sliver pierces through my skull and all is brilliant searing frigid light.

On admitting I'm not a ballerina

April's Camp Nanowrimo starts next week, and I'm beginning to geek out about it, already dreaming of chocolate chai lattes and airship pirates and the degradation of the temporal structure.

Meanwhile, I've finished and submitted my Amtrak Writer's Residency application, and have been dutifully managing my "significant social media contacts." I tweet now. I tumbl. I'm also working on a fiction piece for Ploughshares, though the process feels overly forced. I ride the steampunk novel like a wave, but this literary piece is a road-side root canal.

For instance: yesterday, I spent the great majority of my day writing a paragraph or two of uninspired literary goo, erasing it, and starting over. I finally relented and started working on the steampunk novel instead. Three pages later, I reluctantly surfaced because I had to leave work. I see no purpose in needless suffering in the writer's process. Writers are like dancers. Some are ballerinas. Some jump, jive, and wail. Give me Sing, Sing, Sing over Swan Lake any day.

So, maybe no Ploughshares.

If you'll excuse me, I have to find my sleeping bag and Coleman lantern...

Start

It's hard. Starting. Taking first steps, or even a leap of faith, it's hard. Surrendering to a desire that contradicts every rational impulse, acknowledging that persistent whisper you've tried to muffle for years. Your whole life? There are no guarantees, no safety net. No regular paychecks. Just...the desire.

I've ignored it, locked it away somewhere, an oubliette of the mind. Except I could hear it, whispering, singing. Mournful songs of abandonment. And I longed to release it, but reason forbids. Reason always forbids, with terms of penury, and inadequacy, and frustration. Visions of a terminally blank page, a cursor blinking in accusation. And a familiar voice warning me that artists, writers, musicians, unless they are lucky or brilliant, never make a living for themselves.

I'm not particularly lucky; neither am I brilliant. The stone-forged practical side chose to examine literature rather than create it. What better way to remain close to your first love than to teach it? Write about it? Immerse yourself in pools of others' creation? Become an acolyte of words.

But no. Enraptured as I was by the words of others, always I longed for my own expression. I feared that my words would be insufficient, lacking brilliance. And fear has clogged my veins for years. Fear of failure. Always, always, that fear. And reason. It's...not very logical, living by your art. Not safe at all.

Except I don't belong out there, among people with the talent for efficiency. I am not detail-oriented, task-driven, a team-player.

I belong here, infused with words, hijacked by stories.

But I need a deadline. One that I can't change or ignore. Otherwise, I allow fear and insecurity to dominate, frustration to choke me, despair to stay my hand. I surrender.

I've decided. A submission before May, a story written and perfected. A step, a leap of faith. To live by words.

Hyperfocus

I took some time off from writing over the holidays, as the pressure of an enormous story without end got too intense. I also needed some time to work through a rather nasty bout of jealousy, as some of my friends and family have been published and I'm still trapped in this enormous fictional world. Every time I sat down to write, I would feel this barb of jealousy work itself in deeper, and all my desire to write would drown in the pity puddle. I had to work through that before I could even consider getting back into my novel. And then I heard a little (though irritated) voice tell me to Quit Bitching about it and let it go.

(snarl) Fine.

So now, after the holidays and Spring Break-like Pity Kegger, I dropped the jealousy. And I've injected myself back into that fictional world.

But not the novel. Not just yet.

One of the issues I had post Nanowrimo was that, even after the 50,000 word goal had been reached, the story was still disjointed, disembodied, a complete and overwhelming mystery. I still couldn't see it, couldn't feel it, couldn't live in it. I would get in and immediately begin to hyperventilate because I had no idea what this world was really like. I had glimpses, I had some genre-specific environmental tropes that could guide me, but instead of seeing the world and the events and recording them, I was attempting to imagine them in situ, making everything up as I went along. Fun, but also overwhelming when considering an entire plot/theme arch.

Solution: start small. In this case, a short story. I picked one of the lesser characters and figured out his history. I'm working on this right now, actually, letting the character monologue, then going back and imagining my way through the events to draw out details. Still haven't decided if the story will be first or third person, but right now, that doesn't matter. It's all about his story at this point. Not only do I focus on one event and one character, but I limit my focus to one location, which for me is important, as this location demonstrates one variation of the Steampunk world. I only have to think about this one place, this one type of Steampunk, and the events occurring therein. SO much easier than worrying about a huge plot arch. But it fits into the novel and enriches the story as a whole. It also helps me develop the character. And I've already found a way of incorporating one of the themes from the novel.

Besides, a short story is easier to finish and submit for publication than a novel. Not to mention that it gets my name out there as a foundation for the publication of the complete novel.

Let's see how hyperfocus works.

Kill My Darlings?

The first time I read the phrase "kill your darlings" was while reading Stephen King's book On Writing. It seems simple and reasonable. But after NaNo, I've started the task of trimming the overgrown garden, and now I'm struggling with what to keep, and what to prune away.

For instance, the story didn't go the direction I initially planned, but my manifesto didn't allow for second guessing and since I was writing pretty much by the seat of my pants, I simply wrote what made sense at the time. And I got some good ideas out of it, but my one book is quickly growing and dividing. I've lost the whole sense of the story and have started considering plot lines that frankly annoy me in order to make the pieces fit.

The other option is to rewrite it all as I had initially intended, killing most of what I've written. Not a nice thought. At all. Amalgamating the two isn't possible without resorting to annoying plot lines.

I've decided to give it a rest for a while, just to let the story simmer in my mind over the holidays and pick up again in 2014. Maybe a bit of distance will lend perspective. Or I'll have a sudden "Aha" moment and kill half my characters with a bomb, i.e. The Stand.

And it may be that I took on more of a story than I can properly manage right now. Too many threads to weave, too much to take into account. I did the same thing with my graduate thesis. Overplanned, tried to stuff too much into a relatively small space.

I have what I submitted to NaNo this year, in case I have to do an emergency resuscitation. And just in case, I might tie the dead darlings' shoe laces together in case of zombie novel apocalypse.

The After-NaNo Manifesto

Last night, after the glow of happiness dimmed, I realized that I suddenly had a huge NaNo-shaped hole in my heart. I don't have The Big Deadline to work toward, to dream about. I couldn't let it roll around on my tongue like a marble - something hard and tangible. And now...well, now what?

So I looked over my NaNo manifesto. It helped me through many a moment of WTF Am I Going To Do Now, and motivated me. Especially that "I'm going to finish this MF-er" part.

Only...that's the issue now, isn't it? I haven't finished it. I wrote the 50,000 words, but the book is nowhere near done. So I realized at 5am this morning when I finally began to drift off to sleep, that the NaNo-shaped hole has transmogrified into a Novel-shaped hole that can, indeed, be filled.

So, leaving off where I did with the NaNo Manifesto, I have some new rules for my After-NaNo Manifesto.

1. I will finish this story. The story, not just a word count. It's rude as hell to create leave a creature mostly skeletal and minimally fleshed and soulless. Those kinds of creatures have a nasty tendency to haunt and terrorize. Or fester and rot and stink to high hell and kill you that way. So I will finish this story.
   
2. I will attempt to write on this story every day, but will be lenient with my soul if I should miss a few days, especially during holidays.
   
3. I will set word-count goals and celebrate when I make them. Perhaps not 50,000 words per month, though. I'm not writing the Narnia series, here.
   
4. I will maintain the fun. I will work on sections that I want to work on, rather than trying to plow through chronologically.
   

So that's it for now. I'm sure I'll devise more rules as I go, but these are the biggies. 

All the original Manifesto rules still apply. ;)

Goal Attained

All over Well...the numbers game is over. I finished the 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo tonight, copied and pasted like mad to get the words from WriteWay into Word, went through a mad spellcheck, then validated it.

And...laughed like mad. Because I got the word count in a month. Because I'm not finished, just beginning, the whole thing is sketchy, skeletal, nearly soulless. It's a shell. And ALL over the place. But the goal was met. The first goal.

So now what? No deadline, but still so much left to do. I'm afraid, now, that the whole thing is going to get swept aside, that it'll remain...part of a story. Just another stump.

I need another manifesto. The after-NaNo Manifesto.

Let me get right on that tomorrow...