Why yes, I am alive.
I know, it’s been 7 months since I last posted in this blog, and I really have little excuse except for one. Getting home so late, after working a grueling day, with what I do being mentally draining, I don’t have any energy left to write coherently. Besides, I don’t really have anything interesting to say, unless my readers want to hear the dull details of life in a print shop.
That, however, is changing, come Monday. New job, different hours, more time and energy to think. And, of course, there’s only 30 days left until NaNoWriMo, which usually inspires angsty, stressed-out writing from me around the second week. Hopefully, I will have more inspiring posts until then.
At least for this NaNo challenge, I have a story idea that seems to be a little more energetic than in past years. My first October pre-writing exercise resulted in an aha! moment for a plot. It’s a bit different than what I’m used to, in that it’s a fantasy setting, but there are enough paranormal events that it makes the horror side of my soul giggle in maniacal glee. So, we’ll see what happens.
If you’re ready to stick with me, thanks. I hope to not disappoint.
Insecurity
I suffer from it. All aspects of my life suffer from it, but since this is a writing blog, I’ll explain how it pertains to my writing.
Every time I send out something I’ve written for another person (or persons) to read, I immediately want to take it back. Is it good enough? Is it written well enough for the reader to understand it? How can I make it better? Is it memorable?
Of course, the questions give way to statements… This is not my best work. They’re just saying it’s good to make me feel better, but it sucks. My descriptions are generic and uninspired. Cliché. Boring. My characters don’t talk to my readers. The plot is stupid. This sucks. I suck. I hate this story.
And so on.
Over time, this has led to me being unable to edit my work into anything resembling publishable form. I’ve written outlines to several dozen novels. My computer is full of half-finished drafts. I have a complete first draft to a novel that I absolutely detest- even though I loved it at the time and so did my beta reader.
Ok, I know I’m not a bad writer. I’ve seen bad writing. I’ve seen bad writing that’s been published. What I worry about is that I’m just too average of a writer to get anywhere with it. There are so many authors out there that I worry that if I don’t create something that’s NEW and FRESH and ORIGINAL that my manuscript will end up in every slush pile in America, and my hard work will never be seen.
I’ve toyed around with the thought of self-publishing; still, there’s no guarantee my work will sell. Or, I can just forget the whole publishing aspect of it and keep my words to myself. Lots of options there, but it still doesn’t alleviate my insecurity about my writing.
The best solution for this, I’ve decided, is to join a writers group. I did find one and went on Wednesday, and so far I feel rather comfortable with this group. I didn’t get a chance to share anything I’ve written, mostly because I wasn’t able to print out my story before showing up, but from the feedback everyone was giving, I am looking forward to when I can get my own. I did post a story on the group site and while I have only gotten one response, it was good feedback that I will use to rewrite. This is a new group, so time will tell if it will be beneficial to me in the long run. I hope so. I liked the people that were there, and I’m looking forward to the next meeting.
Now, I shall go edit something. I have a lot to do this year and sitting around watching youtube videos isn’t going to get me anywhere, as entertaining as it is. hehe
Easy Street, Arizona
I do a lot at my job, which is in some ways a blessing. At least I get the occasional chuckle out of what I see, even when I’m being yelled at for something beyond my control.
Part of what I do involves the preparation of mailing lists. We’d had a large mailing for the AZ DOT last month, so my task yesterday was to remove several hundred addresses that had been returned by the post office and tagged as vacant. Now, normally, I don’t read the lists, but because I had to locate each address in the list, I had no other option. Even so, I wasn’t paying much attention to the street names… at least until one particular street name caught my eye.
East Sittin Pretty Path.
Of course, I had to show everyone in the shop and when I was done, I went back to my task. And found more. Ones that were equally bizarre and some that were just downright stupid.
It made me wonder just what these people were thinking. Did these community planners sit around a table, pulling random names out of a hat when it came time to name the streets? Apparently so. Just take a look at some of the gems they came up with for this community…
Some were pretty standard, scenery-inspired names: Summit View Drive, Pinnacle Pass Loop, Sable Way, Sunrise Vista, Sunset Court, Granite Peaks, Summit View, Autumn Sage Street, Pleasant View Drive, Overlook Drive, Plateau Ridge Road (isn’t that a contridiction?).
There were those named after animals, too: Sleepy Owl Way, Coyote Springs Road, Ringtail Drive, Lost Horse Circle, Wildcat Way, Impala Drive, Gazelle Road (last I checked, impalas and gazelles weren’t in Arizona).
Spanish words (surprisingly not as many here as in California): Saluda Avenue, Siesta Sunset Lane, Tierra Buena Lane, Gato de Luna (hahaha Moon Cat?), Mesteno Road (which, by the way, remains untranslated).
Then there are the hokey desert/western theme streets that are probably in every city and town in the Southwest: Painted Wagon Path, Dusty Trail Way, Gentle Winds Road, Prickly Pear Path, Brilliant Sky Way, Bramble Berry Lane, Big Star Trail, Trigger Road, Palomino Lane, Circle Wagons Way, Buckshot Road, Goldmine Way, etc, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
Last, of course, are the ones that made me snort, and not in a ha-ha-funny sort of way. These are what make me wonder about the people who name our streets…
From the plain dumb- Short Walk Way, Paradise Found Trail, Pretty Penny Path, Trottin Down Road, Esteem Way (did they run out of words?)
To just outright stupid: Easy Street, Far Away Place, Dawn to Milky Way, Out of the Way Place, Winners Circle, Penny Lane, Memory Lane.
Really? Seriously, developers? Far Away Place? Memory Lane? Really? Come on… really?
If I put any of those street names in a novel, an agent would chortle and demand I change them to real street names. Of course, I could just send them a map of Prescott Valley and let them see for themselves that someone really does live on Easy Street, Arizona.
I wasn’t going to do Twitter. Just like Facebook and Myspace (and WordPress and Blogspot…) and all those other social networking sites, I just wasn’t interested. I have a hard enough time visiting a site every day, much less writing to it. See, I do write every day. I’ve written some form of fiction nearly every single day for the past three years. It’s just what I do now, and I enjoy it. But writing personal stuff is just a lot harder, because I don’t think I’m at all interesting.
So, despite my misgivings, I joined Twitter and started following a few friends and an author or two (Hi J.A. Konrath! I stalk you at Twitter too!), not really expecting much but a link back from said friends.
This morning, I was informed that an author… a published author… an author I’ve read, even… has started following my Twitter. I hadn’t linked to her, nor did I seek her out. I almost fell off the chair. Why? What did I do that made her eyes turn in my direction?
I don’t know. I still don’t. But it really encouraged me to keep going, I’ll tell you that. So, after I did my little fan-girl *squee* and text messaged Deb, I Twittered a little and wrote this blog.
And now I’m over it.
(But not really. *squee!*)
http://twitter.com/stucuxi
Story of the day
As I was bombarding my coworkers with dumb jokes today, I remembered this little story I’d written a couple of years ago. It’s written from a joke, so you may have heard it before.
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dngf3z7_8cnn8dbgv
I have a blog?
I always forget about this blog. Partly because I know no one reads it, but mostly because I get so caught up in other things that I push it aside.
Thankfully, the “other things” are various writing projects. I do have way too many going at once, but I can’t stop. There are just too many ideas that I think of all at once and I have to get them down on paper before another one hits. I really wish I was more organized… or I had more hours in the day to write. And far less distractions.
Sleep is a blessed event
You’d think that after spending the last month fighting for every little scrap of sleep so that my conscious mind can come up with wicked plot twists and the words that will shock the world, I would revel in the fact I can get all the sleep I need. Yet, here I am, at almost 1am, writing furiously in collaboration with another, in order to bring an evil, wicked event to fruition before our readers awake. They are going to kill us for what we’re writing.
Anyway, I digress. Sleep. I should be doing that.
Behind
I’m officially behind on my word count.
Tonight was a dreadful night to try to write. So so tired, plus all the distractions (self-imposed and otherwise) of non-stop phone calls and friend chatting, brings me to a day and a half behind.
I really need sleep, though, since I’m having to go to the polls before work. If I wait until after, I won’t make it. But maybe if I get enough sleep, I’ll be awake enough to get into a nice writing groove tomorrow night.
Good night, all.
Word count: 2852 (goal: 5001)
New inspiration
I have written nothing beyond the initial word count, but that’s okay. I have been so tired and dealing with some RL issues and both are taking my attention from what I need to be doing. Combine that with some ambiguities over the storyline itself, and poof! No writing gets done.
However, I would like to say, THANK YOU DEB and THANK YOU GOOGLE EARTH for some inspiration. Her suggestion of where the initial murder might take place (doesn’t that make you want to read it? huh? huh?) led me to re-download Google Earth, which is the greatest invention since sliced bread. Seriously. I now can see the entire landscape of the murder scene through the eyes of the victim. A 3D view of what she sees, what the murderer sees, what the witness sees… how frickin’ awesome IS THAT?
This will help immensely when I’m trying to write the starting chapters of this story. And that sort of sucks because I’m leaving for the day in an hour. But… yay! I’m excited again!
Afterward:
For you faithful people who are reading this, as a token of my gratitude of your unspoken support, here’s the 3D view of the murder scene-
Bleak and depressing, no?
Day 1
The midnight kickoff went well in some ways. I got my word count for the day and then some within an hour and a half of writing (I was the first one out of the whole group to meet the word count), however it’s pretty crappy writing. Much of it was simply because I am very sleepy and I’m not quite as creative when I’m this tired. There is a lot of repetition and some of it doesn’t make sense. I know, the whole point is to just get it down, but I did much better writing than this last year.
On a funny note… we had several people approach us at the restaurant asking what we were doing. One person asked if we were playing WOW, and another asked if we were playing Battleship. It made us wonder if this is a common phenomenon. I mean, seriously, are WOW people so hard up that they’d wander into an IHOP at midnight just to play in a group?
Back to writing… What worries me the most, is that I realized about a half hour into it that I may not have enough plot to flesh this out to a full 50,000 words. I don’t hate the story, it just doesn’t have anything to offer. I suppose that after sleeping on it, I may come up with something useable, so I’m not giving it up yet.
Speaking of sleep, I’m going to go get some of that.
Day 1 Word Count: 1763 (Goal: 1667)
