The muse strikes (out)

What a weird turn of events this month has been, writing-wise.

I was not excited about my story idea for National Novel Writing Month but I at least had an idea and was able to start on Day 1 with words a-plenty. Even as I hit roadblocks in the first few days I always found a way to push through.

Then doom came to NaNoWriMo.

On November 7th I decided to take a day off and plan/plot/mull/whatever. This was a mistake. By design taking a day off slows momentum. You skip 24 hours and the next day you need to write 3334 words instead of 1667. The latter is not even intimidating to me but the former is. And if you don’t write those 3334 words on the following day you begin to slip further behind and risk not just killing the momentum, but salting the earth it’s buried under. Or something like that.

November 8th was the U.S. election that saw Trump elected. This was, in psychological terms, the equivalent of hearing, “The world has gone mad, nothing matters anymore. Give up. Stop.” And I did not write that day.

The next day felt like a bad hangover. I made another decision that was not necessarily unwise but also didn’t help. I switched back to another project, Weirdsmith. I’d re-read what I’d done during last year’s NaNoWriMo, liked it more than I’d remembered, and committed to picking it up. But I only wrote handfuls of words. I wasn’t able to get into the story’s zone so the next few days I stumbled about and fell even further behind.

Then I thought of revisiting Road Closed, my still-unfinished 2014 effort (I did hit 50,000 words with it, though). This is something I’d been wanting to do for awhile. I started tidying up the story into a workable format again and this is where I sit, with two weeks remaining.

I am not feeling overly confident. Or confident.

Tomorrow is November 17th. I feel like it will be a turning point or maybe I just want it to be one.

The other odd thing is that while my NaNo effort has sputtered, even my regular blogging has fizzled. It’s like all the energy I had pent up got sucked out by a few sour events and I’ve been unable to get past them. Or I like making excuses.

Which is why I’m making this blog entry tonight. Excuse-making time is over! Over-ish.

Almost over.

Book review: Bite-Sized Stories

Bite-Sized Stories: A Multi-Genre Flash Fiction Anthology (Flash Flood Book 1)Bite-Sized Stories: A Multi-Genre Flash Fiction Anthology by George Donnelly
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was turned onto this collection by one of the contributors, a fellow forum poster and author of a published novel (so one more than me!) This is a free collection and can be found at all major ebook sites. The idea behind it is simple–offer a bunch of very short (3-4 page) stories from a raft of authors to allow the reader to quickly sample their styles. The hope is the reader will enjoy at least some of what they read and seek out more work from the same authors.

It’s a good idea and, I think, a successful one. The stories cover a range of genres so there’s bound to be something to interest any reader (though romance and literary only have a single entry each) and each story is short enough that there is minimal investment. Even if a story outright stinks (and none in this collection do) it’s only a few minutes of reading before you move on.

At the same time it’s difficult to pull out highlights because a lot of the stories trade on twist endings, are more sketches than stories, or skip nuance because there’s only four freaking pages to say everything. And the horror section in particular is a bit disappointing in being so zombie-heavy. At least it’s not wall-to-wall vampires.

But there is a lot of entertaining stuff here and I will indeed be seeking out work by some of the authors.

The collection is free, it’s a quick read and it’s a handy introduction to a lot of indie authors worthy of your time. Recommended.

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Run 472: Rainy with a chance of unleashed dogs

Run 472
Average pace: 5:28/km
Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW)
Distance: 5:04 km
Time: 27:34
Weather: Light rain
Temp: 10ºC
Wind: light to moderate
BPM: 173
Stride: n/a
Weight: 158.4 pounds
Total distance to date: 3750 km
Devices/apps: Apple Watch and iPhone 6

Apparently the appropriate headgear for rain is a baseball cap based on what I saw on today’s run. A few people had hoods but most were relying on droopy, soggy ball caps to keep their heads…um…wet.

I headed out in the early afternoon, waiting for the rain to stop and finally realized that wasn’t going to happen. Ironically when I headed out, it did stop (until I got to the lake).

Given the erratic behavior of the watch in the rain, I chose to lock it this time after starting the run and it worked. Hooray.

Save for a few seconds and a strangely higher BPM (I’m wondering how accurate it is or how out of shape I am), the run was nearly identical to last Sunday, with an overall pace of 5:28/km and the same pattern as last week–faster first km, a retreat in the second, then faster from there up until the end. I avoided running along the athletic fields because the trail was muddy and filled with puddles a-plenty, meaning the area around the field would have been a complete swamp.

I saw a few other runners but most of the others out were the ball cap-wearing people, soaking up the rain. One guy headed out with his dog just before I started and a) had his dog off-leash b) had one of those ball sticks used to throw balls for dogs to chase (which he did) and c) was often seen jogging to catch up to his dog, which was always running ahead of him.

Idiot (the guy, not the dog).

The trail was sparsely populated overall, though, which was nice, and my dexterous ducking of puddles kept me from getting completely mud-splattered. But not entirely (this is post-run, when I was sitting on the SkyTrain, not sitting on the toilet):

muddy shoes

Amazingly there was almost no color bleeding from the shoes. I guess it’s all leeched out by now, so that’s good. Or at least better than before.

This week I may start running during lunch or on a treadmill after work. Somewhere I’ll be running, anyway. In theory.

NaNoWriMo 2016: Days 7 & 8: Little concentration, fewer words

On Day 7 of NaNoWriMo 2016 I found myself feeling particularly unmotivated but I dutifully sat down at lunch hour and typed out 100 words. I tried continuing but could come up with nothing. Rather than force it I decided I had earned a rest day and would devote myself to thinking about where the story would go next. I had written a little and would still work on the novel, if not directly.

Day 8 coincided with the election south of the border and my lunch was cut short because I needed to be somewhere immediately after. As such I only managed a paltry 124 words at lunch (it sounds more impressive when I frame it as a 24% improvement on Day 7) and when I got home in the evening to find Donald Trump was going to be the next president of the United States (I cannot adequately summarize my feelings about this in a few words but imagine my head tilted to the side and strange, incoherent babble issuing from my mouth and you’re close enough) I found I could not write at all, feeling a near-existential level of anxiety and an inability to focus.

I avoided social media, I avoided the news, I holed up and mentally hid away.

Today I am uncertain of how to proceed. There are a few concrete facts. My total word count as of yesterday is 10,536. To be on par after eight days would require 13,336 words, meaning I have a deficit of 2,800 words. With a strong effort that could be condensed into one extra day’s worth of writing, something that could be knocked out on a weekend, for example. This also assumes that I stay on track today and all other remaining days by continuing a pace of at least 1,667 words per day.

While I surprised myself by getting past an early hurdle with the story–a story I’ve never been enthused about–I am less certain I can do so now after a couple of down days. I debate over whether to plod on (“all writing is good!”) vs. admitting defeat and stopping (“now I can devote my time to something more constructive and/or enjoyable”).

The benefit of continuing is it helps reinforce the habit of writing and that is by far the most challenging aspect of writing for me, more than my annoying habit of switching between present and past tense, more than my tendency to lapse into passive voice, more than my stellar ability to start a story but never finish it. Sitting down and writing every day is essential to instilling the discipline needed to write and it is that discipline that strengthens the writing, that lets me find my voice as an author. It’s why I vowed to post every day on this blog last year (I’ve kept up fairly well on that, though I’ve lapsed, ironically enough, this very month).

If I do stop this story my backup plan is to start work on another but keep the existing word count toward my official NaNo total. I’ve written the words, after all, so they should still count. Technically it’s cheating but in the spirt of writing vs. not writing, I think it’s okay.

The next challenge would be what to write. My choices, as I see them:

  • start writing a new story
  • continue work on a previous NaNo effort. Even the ones that are technically done still need work or revision and several are still in a DNF state. The choices here are:
    • Road Closed (needs revision and an ending)
    • The Ferry (needs revision)
    • The Mean Mind (revision/ending)
    • Weirdsmith (barely started)
    • Start of the World (a little further along than Weirdsmith, but not by much)
  • continue working on my short story collection, 10 Pairs of Shorts.
  • free write 39,464 words of prose

A lot of options, some more enticing than others. I am not going to free write 39,464 words over the next 21 days (though I’d love to see what the last few thousand looked like).

I’m going to mull and commit to something this evening and get back to writing, blotting out (or perhaps infusing my writing with) the completely bonkers results of the US election.

Book review: Lovecraft’s Monsters

Lovecraft's MonstersLovecraft’s Monsters by Ellen Datlow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you want a collection of stories where more than a few people have “that Innsmouth look,” then Lovecraft’s Monsters will leave you happy as a shoggoth.

Most of the stories are as weird or horrifying as you’d expect, as the various authors draw on Lovecraft’s pantheon on Old Ones, Great Ones, Elder Gods and more, but a few are lighter in tone, most notably Neil Gaiman’s opener, a tale of a werewolf in Innsmouth, with a healthy (?) mix of arcane rituals, fish people and time-to-change-into-a-hairy-eating-machine thrown in.

One of my favorites is “The Same Deep Waters as You” which tells of an animal behavior specialist conscripted by the U.S. government to go to an island off the coast of Washington state in order to communicate with people (?) who have been held there since 1928, people with “that Innsmouth look.” It takes one of the established and best-known parts of Lovecraft’s lore–the fishy doings in and around Innsmouth–and tackles it as a scientific problem (that also worries the military). I felt the end, which takes a turn more into straight-up Lovecraft weirdness, was a bit of a letdown but the story as a whole remains strong.

Laird Barron’s “Bulldozer” features the usual rumpled pile of machismo protagonist with the heart of a poet. When he’s not ladling on metaphors, he’s swinging his fists or firing his pistol. Barron also continues to be a big believer in eschewing the whole “you can’t tell the story from first person POV if the character ends up dead/rendered unable to communicate to the reader because of various non-Euclidean horrors.” The story actually picks up steam as it progresses, so the excesses end up not feeling as excessive.

There’s a bunch of other stories here and most of them are worth a read. There’s even a few poems if you’ve ever wanted to see someone try to rhyme something with “Cthulhu.” (I’m kidding, no one does that, though I wish they had.) Overall there’s 21 stories and poems, enough to sate the appetite of any Lovecraft fan looking for stories drawn from the mythos he created, but pruned of the purple prose and occasional racism.

On a scale of five star-tipped tentacles, Lovecraft’s monsters rates four out of five tentacles.

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NaNoWriMo 2016: Days 5 & 6 (20% there)

Here are the stats for Days 5 and 6:

Day 5: 1,727
Day 6: 1,746

The total after six days: 10,312
Minimum needed to stay on target: 10,002

I have a 310 word buffer–not exactly a huge buffer, but the important thing is I’m now over 20% of the way to my target, the novel is starting to take some kind of shape (though I still don’t think it’s very good) and I’m content to keep plowing along.

I feel I am past the point where I could switch to another story and still meet the 50,000 word target by month’s end, so I’m committed to this story, for better or for worse (right now it’s more for mediocrity).

Run 471: Tacky, with bonus happy dog in poop

Run 471
Average pace: 5:26/km
Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW)
Distance: 5:04 km
Time: 27:28
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 11ºC
Wind: light
BPM: 170
Stride: n/a
Weight: 158.4 pounds
Total distance to date: 3745 km
Devices/apps: Apple Watch and iPhone 6

I ran in the morning today and discovered there was some hiking club out in force (several of them carried little hiking club flags with them), so the first half of the run was especially crowded, though fortunately everyone was spread out. I had to dipsy-doodle around remnants of puddles from yesterday’s monsoon more than people. My clever plan to start the run closer to the park entrance to avoid getting to the soupy part of the trail near the fields was thwarted when it turned out the entire stretch along the field was a soupy, lake-sized mess of unavoidable puddles. Hopefully one day they will actually shore up that entire section so it doesn’t go underwater every time it rains.

I started out well then immediately fell back quite a bit on the second km. Surprisingly, I rebounded on the third km and kept improving my pace, finishing at the same pace I started, 5:18/km, with an overall average of 5:26/km (itself a surprisingly nine-second improvement over last Sunday’s run). The only thing I can think of here–because I was not crackling with boundless energy when I arrived at the lake–is that the crowds inspired me to get the run over with as soon as possible. So I did.

The legs were a little stiff after, something that will probably persist until I get back into a regular routine again (once a week is regular but not really often enough for the muscles to readjust).

Other than the high heart rate (my walking BPM was higher today than some of my previous runs, yikes) I am pleased by the effort. I experienced no issues, other than feeling a tad tired toward the end.

The poop was on the Brunette River trail where it seemed a lot of people were choosing to let their dogs walk unleashed, allowing them to fully enjoy the first full day of standard time. One woman was consistently walking ahead of her snow-white canine, completely unaware of what it was doing. And what it was doing was finding a nice big pile of poop in the middle of the trail that hadn’t been cleaned up and rolling around in it in a kind of doggy ecstasy.

I like to think it was karma at work.

NaNoWriMo 2016: Days 2, 3 and 4 (still trucking)

Here are the stats for Days 2-4 of NaNoWriMo 2016:

Day 2: 1867
Day 3: 1112
Day 4: 1722

As you can see I slacked a bit on Day 3 but the buffers of the other days have kept me slightly ahead of pace. Four days in requires you to be at 6667 words and I’m sitting at 6839. Way to be a tiny bit above average!

I am not very excited by my story so far and in a way I am surprised that I have been able to keep on track and keep writing. I think the difference is this year I am taking a wider view of the effort, seeing beyond the effort of specifically writing a novel in 30 days and instead seeing the restoration of the daily (fiction) writing habit as a worthy goal unto itself, even if the novel ends up being poop.

I’m also now ahead of last year’s effort, so I’ve already achieved a victory of sorts. Hooray for me!

NaNoWriMo 2016 Day 1: 2,138 words (a good start)

Although I wasn’t entirely sure what I would write–as in, which story idea I would go with–I ended Day 1 of National Novel Writing Month on a successful note, exceeding the minimum of 1667 words by topping out at 2138. This is already close to half the word total of last year’s failed attempt.

The second day is one of the toughest in my experience. It’s fairly easy to blurf out almost anything to get started, but the second day is where you need to start finding a direction for the story if you haven’t already. It was at this point last year that I stalled out and never recovered.

But I am cautiously optimistic this time. Sort of.

NaNoWriMo 2016 Pre-Update #6

It is the eve of National Novel Writing Month and I technically have a story ready to go, though I’m actually not really sure what I’ll be writing tomorrow. I’ll be writing something, though. A story of some sort, all fictional-like.

What I do know is I won’t be writing on a shiny new MacBook because Apple has decided to make all of their laptops insanely great expensive. I’m still a little tempted by the “low end” MacBook Pro or even the old model that they’re still selling for $1549. Sure it’s a little slower and a little heavier but for $350 less I might be able to live with that. We’ll see.

In the meantime, tomorrow begins the great writing adventure once again. I can’t say I have a good feeling about it this year but I may surprise myself. I have made a promise to keep writing even if my NaNoWriMo project fizzles and if I break that promise I will make myself feel bad. That’ll show me.

Run 470: A leafy return to running

Run 470
Average pace: 5:35/km
Location: Burnaby Lake (CW)
Distance: 5:08 km
Time: 28:25
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 12ºC
Wind: light
BPM: 168
Stride: n/a
Weight: 157.2 pounds
Total distance to date: 3740 km
Devices/apps: Apple Watch and iPhone 6

Twenty six days later and I am finally running again. Early in the month I was felled by an especially nasty cold. That wiped out any chance of running for two weeks, then I lost another week because I was still not feeling great and after work runs were no longer possible because of that whole getting-dark thing. I’ll eventually come up with a plan for dealing with that but for now, today arrived and I was finally feeling up to a run.

I kept it to 5K because of the long downtime (and I feel that was the right call) but conditions were otherwise pleasant–a cool but not cold 12ºC, with little wind and clear skies.

The run went about as expected, which is to say I was much slower than usual given the long layoff. I started out not bad at 5:16/km for the first km but then dropped way off. On the plus side, the drop stabilized and stayed consistent and I actually picked up the pace toward the end, even as I began to feel a bit tired. The only negative I felt while running was a pressure headache, a remnant of the still-somewhat-lingering head cold.

The trail around the fields was a bit soggy and was the reason I ended up with some mud splats on my shoes and up my calves. This is to say that I was dry for about 99% of the run. It was literally in the last few meters that I faced unavoidable puddles and mud. Not that I mind, but if I can choose between mud and no mud, I usually go with no mud.

There were plenty of leaves on the trails but pleasantly, the conditions were not slippery.

My legs are starting to feel a little sore tonight but they shouldn’t get too bad.

Now I just need to figure out where to run during the rest of the week.