Phoenix Living

To follow up the previous post…

I thought up a saying that may very well be found elsewhere in slightly different form, but which I thought conveyed a good concept for many writers:

It’ll never be as good on the page as it was in my head. But it might be as pretty in someone else’s head, when it’s done…

Of course I’m not the only one being supportive of the NaNoWriMo participants, so here’s another link about “writer’s block”.

And a bonus link, to whet the appetite for those of you ultimately interested in following through to the business end of the industry (otherwise known as selling/marketing your finished book), an article from a well-recommended agent about writing query letters.

And don’t forget, SLEEP! (I posted this link several months back but the Storytellers Unplugged site did a massive redesign and moved all the links. I found it for you again!)

I butcher a Shakespeare quote in the title to introduce today’s topic for thought. It might not look like sleep directly relates to writing, but one read of this article and you might see it differently.

I was chatting with a dear friend yesterday and we both found an interesting correspondence in sleep patterns, and I find myself wondering if others have noticed similar patterns. My friend and I have both discovered, in the course of our long and varied working lives, that if we follow our own body rhythms of sleep and wakefulness as those urges arise, we actually need less sleep than if we are conforming to someone else’s schedule or daily calendar. Sometimes these differences can be fairly significant: I notice I can do 5-6 hours easily on my own schedule, with maybe a bit of a nap now and then, but need a solid 7 hours or more to function well when I’m on another person’s clock. My friend has an even more dramatic difference, from 6 hours following her own rhythms, to 8-10 per day if she’s on some other schedule (often 6 hours and then a 3 hour nap later), especially if it requires early morning hours (she’s naturally a night person). She mentioned that it’s frustrating to realize that when she’s working for someone else, she loses several hours more than just the eight punched-in hours each day due to the sleep (and commute, and…)

I’m curious if any readers out there have noticed a similar phenomenon in their own patterns. Or are there folk who are reversed, needing less sleep when working for someone else and more sleep when working for themselves? Thoughts, experiences, questions to ponder?

About to embark on the last major trip I’ll have to take for several weeks, yay! I really enjoy traveling, but would prefer a bit more time to recover in-between major jaunts whenever possible. Unfortunately, sometimes it doesn’t work out that way. I am so glad I’ve been in such a physically healthy place lately; not only did I make it through the winter without a major illness for the first time I can remember, but my stamina has held through this last crazy month-and-a-half of running around the country.

My writing projects to-do list has tripled in the past week, as I come up with at least three new things to be working on in addition to the novel-in-progress. I’ve been doing fairly well at continuing to write regardless of whatever else is going on in my life, and I’m testing my (current) limits a bit under the theory that the more writing in various venues I do, the more likely it is I’ll start to earn some income from it. Not to mention continuing to increase my name recognition wherever I can. Also, my breadth of writing ability is being tested, and I’ve never wanted to be limited to just one or two genres anyway.

I’m currently excited, writing-wise, about:

• My novel-in-progress (yes, I get frustrated just as often as excited, here, but today excitement reigns)
• My next novel (I already have most of what I need to jump right into this after the current wip is drafted–plus, it will hopefully be my first series!)
• cleaning up the old to-do list (finally found my notes to finish up a couple of old projects that were put on hold when things imploded several months back, which will be a psychological weight lifted)
• a regular column idea (this one looks to be endless fun)
• an academic-style paper (research for this will hopefully speed the wip along, too)
• sketch comedy work with a friend (the invitation for this came along on the same day that I was talking to Nathan about wanting more experience writing humor, yay!)
• whichever short story comes next (only a couple of idea seeds here, not rushing this since there are plenty of other projects to focus on)
• trolling the trunk (printing out mostly completed story pieces and going over them to see which, if any, can be brought up to my current standards enough to send out)

Whew! I’d say that’s a decent chunk of writing projects. Now to manage the trick of working on several at a time while NOT dropping off work on the novel. At the least I’ll learn more about where my current saturation point is, and I’ll post about my progress here as it develops. I currently have three stories out looking for a publishing home, and I’ve decided that’s my new minimum preferred standard for number of circulating stories.

For those readers able to work on more than one major project at a time (in whatever field), how does that process work for you? I know every person approaches their work differently, but I’m always curious about other folks’ processes.

Just got back from a great camping trip and art festival so the writing post for the week will have to wait until more sleep has occurred. However, it was my best Flipside yet, and I really enjoyed my first year Rangering and will definitely sign up for more shifts next year. I loved the chill no-drama camp atmosphere, awesome campsite, tons of needed exercise, great conversations with beautiful loved ones, even the weather was the most temperate all around I’ve yet experienced in five years of attending the event (Texas summer conditions still apply, of course).

So, to get the writing thoughts flowing while I sleep, what defines a character as “real” to you? (or “alive” or “developed” or “ready to be written”, etc.) How do you distinguish that from other internal conditional perspectives that most people carry around with them on a daily basis? Does any of this change when you have long term fictal residents, such as characters involved in a multiple-novel series? Where do your characters “live” when not actively dancing to your whim and will upon the page?

I may very well have found one of the best “first readers” ever.  Bouncy enthusiasm along with insightful critique, in-between more bounciness.  And at least for this project, she’s exactly the sort of reader I’m trying to entertain with this novel.  I mostly mention it because I know she’ll blush and get all squirmy when reading this (insert evil chuckle here).

Onto the writerly chat for the week:  I was chatting with a friend the other day who asked about character momentum.  This friend felt that their story character was uninterested or unwilling to tell the rest of their story, that they had run out of steam.  We discussed a couple of more personal possibilities for why, but I spent some time after the conversation thinking and chatting in a more general sense with my local expert perspective on this topic and thought I’d share that here for potential wider writing discussion.

For myself, I find that I usually assume that a character who isn’t cooperating while stilll living in my head just isn’t ready to tell their story yet.  Once I figure this out (you’d think I’d get faster at it, but it varies), I let he, she, or it roam around in the back alleys and halls there while I go to work on telling a different character’s tale.  This becomes less convenient if I’ve already started writing the recalcitrant character’s story, and for now my easy answer to that is “that’s what ‘the trunk’ is for”.  Learning how to set aside a stuck or stale story into the trunk is its own lesson, and I also presume that when I start having to deal with contracts for books not yet written, my method of managing mewlishly mute characters will have to change to accommodate a storytelling time restriction.

Occasionally I’ve found that a character won’t cooperate because I’m trying to tell the wrong story.  I often approach my storytelling by crafting a character first, with a much more vague idea of specific plot, and then see what the created character does with a setting.  If one story path fizzles, I metaphorically turn the character loose to go walkabout and see if they bring back a better or more interesting story.  There’s one character that’s lived in a little nook in my mind since I was 8; I still haven’t found the exact story where she goes, though I think I might have at least figured out the genre.

Steve says that the number one reason he knows that a character would no longer want to tell his story is that the author has already told it.  It’s apparently the reason why many writers won’t talk about their in-progress work before a draft is finished.  This is certainly not a problem I share, given the peculiar verbal aspect to my writing process, and I wonder if that might not be one of the differences between storytellers and writers — whether telling the story once through causes one to lose interest or just see a different way to tell it next time.

Steve also suggests that a loss of momentum could happen if you are asking your character to do something that is not in their nature to do.  Asking them to behave “out of character” can cause them to become stubborn or feel unreal.  One trick he uses for when this happens is to have a “fallback scene” ready, some stock scene that your character can go and do while you-the-writer figure things out (and stay in your regular writing routine while you do).  Steve will often have Vlad go and eat a meal to figure out what to do next; when Vlad solves the current problem, Steve will delete the irrelevant parts of the mental noodling and get on with the story.

What are some of your found tricks for jump-starting a stuck piece?  Or do you have other questions about this topic we haven’t yet discussed?  I’m always interested in hearing about the processes of other artists.

Well, so far our attempts to take a picture of my own contributor’s copy of the Unspeakable Horror anthology have resulted in not enough lighting.  You can use the handy Amazon.com link here, though I see that it is listed as temporarily not in stock.  I will try to find out if there is an in-stock link available for folks before the holidays, if I do I’ll post it here.

In the meantime, the maids have just left, the house smells good and looks great, and the hot tub is warm and with a new filter.  It’s a great day for socializing with friends while lounging around the house alternating with bouts of creativity.  Perhaps some of our long-absent friends will decide that today is the day to end their sabbatical away from our awesomeness.  If not, ah well, there’s plenty of awesomeness to keep us busy regardless.

In other news, laundry is much less of an onerous chore when it’s in-house.  There’s the typical 10 loads to do, but amazingly, not having to haul it across town just brightens my mood about the chore right up.

I woke up this morning (in the morning, even!) with a very strange sensation.  So strange, in fact, that it took a good few minutes to identify said sensation.  If you lived near enough to be aware of how closely I’ve been cataloging my body responses and sensory readings for the past several weeks (and months and years, it’s all the same on the Galactic clock), you’d know how odd my unidentifiable strange sensation is.

And then I finally figured it out:  I’m fully rested.  Like, really.  For the first time in, months?  Ye gods, I can’t possibly remember.  Maybe years.  I’m a little stiff, but nothing more than the norm these days given current conditions; a tiny bit congested, the part that doesn’t go away that I hope will be fixed when I can afford to go to a sinus expert doctor; but alert, not grumpy, not feeling like I’m overwhelmed and behind (which I still am), with the energy enough for two people to get through a day that I remember having in my healthier days.

I’m sure this is a phase state that can be easily disrupted and drained under certain conditions, but I hope we’re done with those conditions anyway.  Today I feel like I can get up and work really hard all day, get a ton of things done and feel a reasonable level of tired at the end of it.  I miss those days.  (Okay, that’s a bit maudlin, and not entirely true, as I really haven’t given myself too many healthy breaks or jobs until recent years.  And even the healthier careers are high stress in their own ways–owning a business and working for yourself brings a lot of positive benefits, but also brings stresses that more “normal” employment doesn’t.)

So, cheers to well-restedness!  I don’t know how you got here, but please tarry in your stay.  I think I’ll stretch while doing my morning online ritual, then check the to-do list and see where would be good to start the day’s work.  Just as soon as I finish checking out this email from someone named Dolores…

Well, our flight here certainly could have been MORE eventful, but I’m glad it wasn’t. Specifically the first leg out: we had last-minute deals on plane tickets, which meant we were doing a bit of airline hopping during our transfer, and also meant that for the first leg we were stuck with US Airways. Seriously, I have a strong inclination not to book another US Airways flight again, regardless of the bargain advertised. In addition to the plane’s layout contributing to us feeling like so many sardines in an overfull can (and the flight wasn’t even sold out), the seats were less comfortable than the airport seating. It felt like we were sitting right on those inflatable vests, rather than cushions.

But you know, when I think “plane travel”, the first thing I think to prioritize isn’t a flat, rock-hard, lumpy seat; nor even the inconvenience of legroom just about right for a toddler under age 5. The inability to keep the plane in the air definitely tops the list for me as far as flight no-nos go, and there were severe questions about that during this flight. Thankfully, we were too sleepy to do more than doze most of that leg, otherwise I’d be twice as physically stressed from worrying for two hours whether we’d just fall out of the sky at some point. (Keep in mind I normally love flying.)

We spent about 20 minutes at the gate, waiting for a guy to “fix some computer issues”.  This involved, at one point, shutting off all the lights and air circulation on the plane, one presumes to “reboot”.  The take-off was choppy, and I was jolted awake from my dozing every time we hit a pocket of turbulence that was poorly corrected for. But the landing I wasn’t sure we were going to walk away from; definitely the worst landing I’ve experienced without something actually going very wrong. We circled at least 5 times, during one approach actually doing a sudden pull away and upward climb like we were avoiding a collision with someone. We finally hit the runway like we were going to keep diving into it, and the braking process felt as if it were panicky, too little, and too late, surging and slowing like a rank beginner sat at the controls learning to drive with Mom or Dad. I just grabbed Kit’s arm and watched through the window, my hand on my phone. We made it! (The flight attendant giving the farewell talk as we taxied to the gate sounded very shaky, so I watched her, and when she put away the intercom handset she wiped her eyes as if she had been crying. Coincidence? Or barely-avoided fiery death?)

…to Phoenix. Now of course we didn’t learn our lesson from the Phoenix airport last time, but the message is this: never, never fly into Phoenix if you are on a time-crunch transfer. Double those nevers if you plan to transfer airlines. Triple them if your airline has delayed your flight in an attempt to kill their passengers. The short story is, with both Kit and I on gimpy feet, we landed with 27 minutes to get to our other flight–which was two terminals away and through security again. Amazingly, we reached it two minutes before they closed the plane door behind us.

United was a much better (and less eventful) experience, with seasoned professionals in the cockpit that took us up and set us down again with a feather-light touch. Plus they didn’t charge us $2 for three gulps of juice. And we arrived 17 minutes early, rather than half an hour late. I could keep delineating the differences, but you get the idea.

We grabbed pitas on our way out to wait for the hotel-airport shuttle, and had plenty of time to eat our snack before it arrived. Another revelation: don’t sit at the back of an airport-hotel shuttle if you can avoid it, especially if you are on bad streets with a maniacal driver, and triply so if you are large-breasted. But they did NOT bounce off, and we made it to the hotel by the charmingly quirky San Franciscan navigational technique of driving directly past it first thing, then looping back around making sure to service all other hotels on the route first.

Check-in was surprisingly fast and un-eventful. We are staying tonight and Monday night at a hotel near the airport, with these two nights gifted us complimentarily by Kit’s mom. Thanks, Siun! (We also figured not having a long way to travel between airport and hotel during arrival and departure days was a smart-monkey thing to do.)

We’re meeting with Kit’s sister this evening, and we haven’t seen her since she came to visit Kit a couple of years ago, so we may or may not manage to reach the conference in time to watch the fucking-machine contest. I’ll be disappointed if we miss it, but family takes precedence over things you can watch later on video. And we’re here in plenty of time to take in the rest of the conference.

Now to quit procrastinating and get back to talking about this presentation with Kit…hopefully we’ll see any of you Californian readers at the conference this weekend! Hmm, perhaps a snack…wait. $9 for buttermilk pancakes? SRSLY? You can, even here in SF, buy two entire boxes of pancake mix for $9. Methinks I will not dine upon hotel fare, here. (Kit’s favorite entry from the breakfast menu is “The Healthy Start”: one grapefruit half, one bran muffin, one low-fat yogurt, and one small box of Special K cereal with milk…for $11.50!)

Well it feels that way, but only because the projects I work on are so huge. We finished the second, much longer pass of the business models monstrosity gargantua paper, yay! Now we only have to follow up on all the tangents and make another complete pass through it before my mom comes down with flowchart and red pen in hand. In two weeks or less. Then another for the rest of the paper. Then we’ll be traveling, so better damn well be done. Argh, so much to finish before travel upsets the creative routine again! Wait, chill, panic is another post.

I’ve got about 2.5 more things to catch up on at the shop, which is good improvement there as well. And not falling to pieces more than a few times a week, which is an improvement from 1+ times daily. And, hmm…ah, the maid service thing for the house was totally some of the best money we have chosen to spend to help our family out. Really, any of you families out there that don’t just totally bond lovingly over housework and can save enough pennies for should look into it, at least to help with the deep cleaning and little tidying details that daily life often makes difficult to keep up with. We have them over twice a month, and it’s quite affordable especially when you calculate the time it would take for us to do the same amount of work.

This week I’ve gotten the dining room to a state of completeness lacking only the tabletop and bookshelf organization to be done. My room is down to one bookshelf’s amount of boxes to unpack, (plus laundry to put away) and we hung all the large pictures in the main room (and I’m a third of the way through re-hanging Steve’s book-cover pictures so they look better) so that room is done except for any small finishing touches we think to add.

There’s still so very much to do, but that’s for another post as well. This post is about taking the time to appreciate the minutia of progress.

*tap, tap, twitch*

Okay, enough of that for now, back to work!

PS - I rolled a 1 last night and actually talked about my novel with Kit. That’s a short step away from writing on it, so should be considered good progress as well.

This business models paper is eating my brain. Not in a bad way, it’s just a bit hard to shift gears and work on other things.

I’ve been operating at the nadir of my efficiency and output in many areas for probably about a year now. I think it’s probably burnout, or brown-out; I didn’t get any recovery time after the drawn-out process of business-buying, and not since then, either. I think I’ve also been depressed, possibly clinically, for the past six months, but if I had to guess I doubt that a mental health professional would consider me so. After all, don’t I get out of bed? Stay cognizant of eating, clothing, relatively clean hygiene? Retain some semblance of interacting with people? I’d fail the checklist, which is part of why it’s taken so long for me to figure out myself, but I think that just as the regular depression signs are to a normal mental state, so is my current state compared to how I remember functioning when things internally worked better.

It’s gotten to the point where I’ve considered official anti-depressant medication, which I never expected to have to think about, given my naturally sunny disposition. But if I’m not willing to take hormonal birth control medication due to the crappy side effects (let’s hear it for women’s health!), I’m quite adverse to the idea of the mood chemical-cocktail and all the adjustments most people have to go through, with concurrent side-effect rollercoaster. Plus, as I understand it, one really needs a cooperative and skilled head shrink to facilitate the process, and I just don’t tend to be someone with doctor-luck. In addition, it really irks to rely on chemical solutions when I haven’t explored the non-chemical options (like altering diet, exercise and activity levels, and so on) fully.

So I muddle through, and when you look at it, there really isn’t all that much wrong with my life, and quite a lot very right with it. I just wish I could access how to enjoy (in joy) it all again. This fake-it-til-you-make-it shite doesn’t always work as well as advertised. And I am so not an artist that works well when morose. But I also don’t work well, or at all, in silence, and I’ve been quiet on what’s up with me for a long time now.

I realize that it doesn’t help me in sharing common humanity bonds to confess that my accomplishments of the past year and more have been achieved under sub-optimal (sub-sub-sub-optimal, sometimes) conditions, and yes that does mean that I would have gotten a magnitude-order more done had I been healthy. But not-talking about it doesn’t help, and things are about to get way more intense for my creative career, so the time to fix my head is past due. I refuse to be a “flame big and flame out” rock-star. I much prefer to shine bright and keep glowing.