The Big Writing To-Do 2016, Step 1: Tidying up

The best way to start writing again is to start writing again.

It seems obvious because it is. It’s accurate, there’s no real room for argument. Stephen King doesn’t think about writing books, he writes books. James Patterson doesn’t think about writing books, he…well, actually, Patterson may just think about writing books and BOOF, a book appears. I’m not sure how else to explain the sagging shelves in bookstores loaded down with the thousands of novels he has put out.

But for most of those who write, the process is a matter of sitting down (or standing up if you have one of those zany standing desks, or even walking around if you use the even zanier approach of writing via dictation device) and doing it. You do it regularly, you make it a habit, you slowly improve and the process continues until Oprah declares your book the next selection in her book club and you sell a boatload of copies and revel in your brief moment of fame and fortune.

But it all starts with that first step.

Which I am not taking this week (writing on the blog doesn’t count, I’m talking about writing fiction here and as much as I like to stretch the truth in the name of entertaining, this blog is mostly about actual events and things, not ones I have concocted).

Instead, I am beginning with a series of small goals–laying the groundwork, easing into things, making excuses. Well, hopefully not the latter.

The first goal, to be done before the end of the week, is to go through the many scattered folders I have filled with many versions of stories, in various states of completion, and condense them all down into as few folders as possible. At the same time I will relegate older versions of stories, alternate version and anything that doesn’t qualify as done or an active work in progress to a single folder that will be backed up and then lovingly pushed aside.

I’ve wanted to do this sort of organization for awhile and my hope is that the process will help clear out some mental space and allow me to get a better sense of what I have that’s worth keeping while hopefully providing inspiration for what is yet to come. If it doesn’t work, I’ll just go back to reading Marmaduke* and give up on writing permanently.

 

 * see, it’s funny because he’s such a big dog, lol

Random questions February 8 2016 edition

  • Back in the pre-Internet days, how did people come up with pithy quotes to pop into conversations, magazine articles and books? Did they memorize a bunch they liked, waiting for a chance to use them? Were quotes so often repeated that you’d find yourself finishing a quote someone else started quoting? Did people buy books of quotations and study them with the fervor of a student the night before a big exam? I wonder because now with the Internet it is trivially easy to find quotes said by anyone about anything.
  • Why have personal computers evolved so little in 40 years? In 1976 the first Apple computer was being built by Jobs and Wozniak. Five years later the IBM PC debuted. Look inside one and then look inside a PC from 2016 and they are immediately identifiable as being the same thing. There’s a motherboard, there’s ram and drives and cables and all of it is put together in a clunky kind of way that seems designed to draw blood should you have reason to tinker inside one. Actually, this is probably due to computers largely being commodity items. There’s little reason to innovate or improve on the low end, so it’s inertia and the steady improvement of technology combined with reduced costs that lead to things like the 5.25 inch floppy drive giving way to the 3.5 inch floppy drive and so on. Where pricing is more at a premium, like in the ultrabook market, you do see much nicer machines. Sure, they can’t be as easily expanded as a typical PC box but in exchange you get machines that are fast, light and far less likely to make you bleed. Okay, this turned out to be kind of an obvious question.
  • Why do people like to complain? Does it release a specific pleasure-inducing chemical? I could look the answer up but I’m lazy and I kind of like clinging to the mystery.
  • Why do so many dog owners let their dogs off-leash in areas that are clearly not off-leash?
  • How do countries evolve to have driving on the left or right side of the road?
    • Related: Do countries follow the same rules for which side of an escalator to stand/walk on?
  • Why do we still find violence the go-to solution for so many problems when it almost never actually solves anything?
    • Related: Why do so many politicians believe you can bomb an ideology out of existence?
  • Which is more likely to be real: aliens, the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot?
  • Who would win in a fight, aliens, the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot?
  • Why do I have literally hundreds of games but only ever play WoW and a Mahjong game on my iPad?
  • How do I make myself write fiction again? Are truly passionate people rare or am I just easily distracted?
  • Why do crowds of people move so inefficiently?
  • Is Social Media Widget a good band name?
  • How long will it take for humans to evolve past the need for sleep?
  • If I could remember all of my dreams in exact detail, would I want to?
  • If you get into an argument in a conflict resolution training course, do you pass or fail?
  • Seriously, what was Lovecraft thinking when he named his cat Nigger Man and then used the same name in a story?

Things I’m looking forward to in the next six months

  • Daylight Savings Time resumes on March 13. Goodbye, leaving for work and getting home when it’s still dark, how I shall not miss thee.
  • Being able to jog after work because of the aforementioned DST
  • In slightly over four months it will officially be summer and warm and sunny and men will walk around with their shirts off
  • Tomorrow is a statutory holiday and the high is forecast to be an unusually balmy 15ºC
  • I’m reasonably confident I will finally be over this #$@%^ hellcold
  • Completing the second draft of my novel, Road Closed. It could happen!
  • Winning millions of dollars in the 6/49. I know I’ve written about winning the lottery before. I’m fairly sure if you write about it when a bunch of planets are in alignment and while also suffering a hellcold and having just eaten some Triscuit crackers, it totally happens. $10 million would by a lot of decongestant.

Run with the noses

This most recent virus/hellcold has been especially annoying.

It first took hold a few weeks ago and I was suitably ill and knocked out of commission for a few days. Breathing became a chore rather than something that just kind of happens without a lot of thought needed. After a week or so I got better.

Then last weekend I started to feel the hellcold trying to get hold of me again. I firmly told it, “No, go and bother someone else, some jerk or something.” And it seemed to work, as the rest of the week I again returned to a state of normalcy.

Until today. It is now making attempt #3. The primary victim again is my nose, which ran like an Olympic marathoner on the commute home from work. This is not pretty when you have no tissue on your person. Tonight, anticipating another round of Nose Acts Like a Dam, I have taken a decongestant and am drinking some nice hot tea. I have approximately 50 hours of meetings tomorrow so I am hoping that my body will be generous and kick hellcold to the curb again. It has my blessing to do so for the remainder of the year, in fact.

Other than that, I was also tired and it rained. I will not be writing poetry about this day. Actually, I write terrible poetry, so it may be appropriate to do so. But I’m going to bed instead. I’ll dream of terrible poetry, where no one gets hurt by it.

Book review: Blackout

BlackoutBlackout by Tim Curran
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Note: Minor spoilers in the review.

Blackout uses the same broad theme as Stephen King’s novella “The Mist,” replacing the titular fog with an all-encompassing darkness than envelops a small town, all the better to unleash alien horrors on its citizenry. While the story moves swiftly, it never quite clicked for me. It’s a fast and easy read but I felt indifferent to the fates of the various characters.

The writing is for the most part solid, but unremarkable. Passages like the following, where the main character state the obvious, are not uncommon:

And being a science teacher, I knew that if the sun did not rise day after day after day, there would be no photosynthesis. The plants and trees would no longer process carbon dioxide and release breathable oxygen.

One of my pet peeves–characters doing dumb things to advance the plot–is also in play here, though to his credit, Curran at least has the main character own up to his behavior:

I don’t honestly think it was the cable’s doing, but some weird self-hypnotic thing that made me reach out and touch it. There’s no good explanation for any of it. None at all. The self-destructive urge we all feel from time to time just became so strong, and I was so weak, that I just went with it. I touched the cable.

(The cables are bad, as you may have guessed.)

If you feel the need for a bleak, hopeless tale–that’s not a spoiler, as the first line of the story admits as much–you could do worse than Blackout, but I found it curiously joyless.

View all my reviews

How is the new new new diet going? (January 2016 edition)

Let’s take a look at my progress in getting back to my running form in 2016 by checking in on what my weight was like on January 1st and how it ended up on January 31st.

January 1: 169.5 pounds
January 31: 170.1 pounds

I have gained 0.6 pounds.

On the positive side, the weight gain is fairly trivial and could easily be attributed to something like water weight, a rounding error, etc.

On the less-positive side, it’s still up instead of down. Weight loss kind of requires the numbers to get smaller, not larger.

I shall renew my no-snacks pledge for February.

Sick: Groundhog Day edition

You may remember I spent several days kvetching recently about a cold/virus that resulted in me missing a couple of days of work and spending half the weekend feeling the same level of ambition as a rock.

Yesterday that same cold/virus came back.

It seems to be doing more of a slow burn this time, so while I feel generally unwell I am still at least somewhat functional. The other good news (?) is I still have a store of medicine to dip into, as I did not exhaust the supply I had procured a few weeks back.

Still, this is annoying. January has kind of sucked. Good riddance to it, I say. Stupid month.

 

Book review: The Three

The ThreeThe Three by Sarah Lotz
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The symmetry of the three stars I’m giving The Three is unintentional. If Goodreads supported half stars it would be 3.5. I quite enjoyed this tale of potential apocalypse but a few issues keep me from giving it a slightly higher rating. That shouldn’t discourage anyone from reading it if they find the premise interesting and enjoy the epistolary format.

The Three chronicles how three children survive three separate plane crashes, all on the same day, leading to speculation ranging from “it’s just a coincidence” to aliens to how the children are the four horsemen of the apocalypse and are ushering in the end times. It is the last theory that takes hold most firmly, particularly in the U.S. and especially among Christian evangelicals and their right wing political allies.

The book uses the epistolary format, framing it largely as an account written by an American journalist (From Crash to Conspiracy) who includes news reports, interviews, chat logs, flight recording transcripts and more to piece together the aftermath of the crashes, the fate of the child survivors and the rapidly deteriorating political landscape as people get swept up in Rapture fever.

Apart from a few lapses where author Sarah Lotz has Americans using British slang, the various reports, interviews and chats are handled quite well, with characters emerging naturally through their own words. The narrative builds slowly as each chapter adds more pieces to the puzzle, though some may be frustrated by the ambiguous ending. I discovered afterward that Lotz has a book out that is apparently the follow-up to The Three, which may partly explain why things aren’t neatly wrapped-up by the end, though to give Lotz credit, the ambiguity feels more like a deliberate stylistic choice–and one that I feel works.

Having said that, I miss the art of telling a story in a single book. Sometimes I just want a good tale, not thousands of pages of world building spread across multiple volumes. Oh well, The Three still works well as a standalone novel, letting the reader decide on their own terrible-things-will-almost certainly-be happening ending.

While I found the characterizations compelling and convincing, the rapidly-shifting geopolitical environment never struck me as particularly credible. The idea that the U.S. could so quickly change into what amounts to a fundamentalist theocracy simply because of the improbability of three plane crashes on the same day with a single child surviving each doesn’t feel plausible. Perhaps even more ludicrous is the idea that China, Japan and the Koreas would form an alliance.
These events are important to underpinning the overall story and in the end never struck me as even being that necessary.

Still, the accounts of those around the survivors are vivid, funny and often harrowing. This book may forever convince anyone feeling a little down to stay far away from spooky Japanese forests.

Recommended. Unless you’re looking for something to read while passing through an airport.

View all my reviews

Questions about writing

Some parts of the writing process are pretty straightforward–you put down words, taking care to organize them into sentences, paragraphs, scenes and chapters (assuming you’re working on a novel) in order to tell some kind of story. Other parts seem less sharply defined, perhaps a reflection that each writer tackles these other parts differently.

But still, I wonder, and so I ask:

  • How much of the first draft remains in the final version? 50%? 20%? 0.5%?
  • If the percentage above is low, is it because major chunks of the story get chucked/reworked or is it because sentence after sentence is meticulously altered?
  • How many drafts does a story usually go through?
  • How often does the writer know how the story will end before writing the ending?
  • Do most writers write the story in order or do they jump around scenes and assemble them later?
  • How often is stuff tossed in because it sounds neat, resulting in the writer later having to go back to make the neat stuff fit the rest of the story?

And probably a whole lot more. The big ones are the first two.

Any writers that are not spambots are welcome to chime in.

There’s something new under my feet

On Thursday I picked up my custom-made orthotics devices from Kintec to deal with the problem of my left foot. I’ve gone on about that pesky appendage before so the short version is this: the pad where the toes connect to the rest of the foot becomes sore after I’ve been walking or running for a varying period of time. That time depends on factors ranging from the softness of the surface I’m walking/running on, to the type of footwear to, possibly, the alignment of the planets or something because it can be a tad unpredictable at times.

My doctor and others recommended getting an orthotic so I booked an appointment, had my feet molded in foam (the pedorthist said I had the most relaxed feet she’d seen when making the mold) and on Thursday had the orthotics trimmed to fit nicely inside my normal walking shoes.

I was also handed a pamphlet on how to break in the orthotic. It’s intended that you wear them an increasing amount per day for two to three weeks and only use them when running after you’ve fully acclimated to wearing them in regular shoes. If they cause the feet to hurt, you’re supposed to remove them until the pain goes away.

When I tried them on at Kintec I did not feel any immediate bolts of pain, nor lose my balance and start knocking over displays. Pluses, both.

The next day I wore them all day just like I’m not supposed to do. But in my defense, they didn’t hurt at all. It was unexpectedly pleasant. The left foot did start to hurt a bit when I was sitting on a train riding the Expo Line home. It seemed strange that sitting made the foot hurt. The nominal pain went away shortly after getting home.

Here’s to the orthotic making complaints about that stupid foot a thing of the past. I don’t expect miracles but some improvement would be spiffy.

Things I don’t miss from the 1970s

In 1970 I was six years old. Candy bars cost ten cents and I had a monster green tricycle that could easily have been featured in a kids horror movie. Maybe any horror movie. It was a terror to behold and to ride.

But for all the nostalgia I have for those formative years from age six to sixteen, there are a few things I’m happy to have left behind:

  • the 8-track tape. I’ve written about this before so suffice to say that as a music format it was terrible.
  • long hair. What was I thinking? I was not thinking.
  • rotary dial telephones
  • TVs with knobs, TVs without color
  • Pop Rocks candy
  • that KISS TV movie
  • puberty

Sick of talking about being sick? Nope!

Today I returned to work, though it’s safe to say that I am not exactly 100% yet. I felt like I was spreading my illness every time I touched something. And really, I probably was. Apologies to everyone I may have gotten sick through all of my egregious touching. That sounds dirty and in the germ sense it totally is.

Last night I opted to forgo another ftom-behind-the-counter decongestant tablet in favor of the more all-encompassing solution of Nyquil Complete. Unfortunately the decongestant part kind of stopped working around 3 a.m. This meant about three hours of mostly not sleeping, combined with more mouth breathing and yucky dry mouth. I had the foresight to go to bed extra early so it could have been worse.

The day was characterized by intermittent coughing, general tiredness and everything continuing to taste like cardboard.

On a scale of one to ten coughed-up lungs, I rate today six coughed-up lungs. It could have been worse but boy howdy, it could have been better, too.

I promise the next blog post will not be about my sinuses, mouth or any other part of my body or its current condition.