Zachary Ricks's Blog, page 20

Retrenchment challenge counts…

11:26, Friday night. Word count – 2217. I really didn't think I was going to make that second thousand words happen. Spent the afternoon after work yarn shopping (don't ask) and going to dinner with friends, and that turned into a long conversation at their place. I had not planned on not getting home until about 10:30, feeling exceptionally sleepy. Maybe even exhausted.

But with a little space and time, I pulled the second thousand out of… my head? I guess?

If you made it, or if you didn't, that's fine. Did you start? Did you make the time to get 1000 words? 500? 250? Whatever it is, enjoy that. And if you didn't get any… then you need to ask yourself again. Are You In?

Retrenchment Challenge Update

Shooting for "Leopold".

So… yesterday I threw down the gauntlet and told people I was going to write at least ONE THOUSAND WORDS in TWO DAYS.

And it took me about an hour once I got started. (Embarrassing, really, that something I thought would be so daunting would take so little time… once I got started.)

Which is the whole point of the exercise. TO GET STARTED. I picked an image in my head and started writing – a man driving a big motorcycle down the highway. 200 words in, I realized that I was writing something that I'd had as an idea for last year's NaNoWriMo, and suddenly I realized that I had an idea of who this character was, what was going on in the world, why he was riding down the road, what would happen in the town where he stopped… the whole nine yards. Which is why I'm doubling down on the initial challenge to myself, and by midnight Friday local time I will have written AT LEAST 2000 words.

It doesn't matter that elements of what I wrote last night are cliché. It doesn't matter that the idea is borrowed from different pieces of popular entertainment. Martial arts movies. Big Trouble in Little China. Aliens. Maybe a little Ghost Rider. First, it doesn't matter because… I mean… who mixes Big Trouble in Little China with Aliens? Second, it doesn't matter because the elements that I pull out of this won't be the elements that anyone else will. And lastly, it doesn't matter because no one gets it right on the first draft. You, me, anyone is going to need edits before that work is ready to go out.

So. 1000 words. Done. Heck, I even threw in rye bread (bonus points). Now the next step is to do it again. And then do it again. And do it again. Until you're done. And when you're done, polish it as much as you can. Send it out.

And start again. That's where I blew it last time. Don't make that mistake. Start Again.

Retrenchment Challenge: Are You In?

Ante Up - #AreYouIn?

Content here at MPF has been sparse lately, which is Not A Good Thing.

For the last few months, I've been working on a project at the Day Job that was taking a lot of my creative energy – involved a LOT of technical writing, legal consideration, and… you know what? Doesn't matter. I was busy. Really freaky busy. Yes, yes. I know my Goodreads profile says something about my available time for the last few months.

So now it's time to reclaim some of that time from the sweet, sweet Kindle-powered content consumption, and start plowing that back toward content CREATION.

Had a friend reach out to me today, who wanted to know if I'd been writing. (Well, no, but I really really meant to! Have I told you how busy I am? Did you know I'm editing a science-fiction/fantasy magazine?) And at the end of the conversation, a challenge was extended. Write 1000 words in two days. Yeah, 500 words a day is really not that much compared with say, my regular output during a NaNoWriMo. The upside to this is, 500 words will take me anywhere between 20-30 minutes a day. And if I can't set aside 30 minutes a day to club all distractions in the head and just go find someplace quiet to make the clackety-clack sounds over the keyboard, then I'm not really fooling anyone.

So I'm extending the challenge. Anyone who wants to participate can. If you're a writer, I want you to create 1000 words of fresh content between right now and 11:59:59 Friday the 13th of May (yeah, Friday the 13th. So what?). If you see this, extend the challenge to others over the social network of your choice. Come Saturday, I'll tally the words counted, and we'll update the site accordingly. If you're not a writer, but you have something else that's been bugging you, drop me a line in the comments. Reach out. Stretch. Write. Do some good. And play with it.

 

THE RULES: 
1000 words of fresh, new content. No re-writes or edits. NEW.
Any genre, any field. Doesn't have to be fiction, but that's what I'm shooting for (a second Sinner story).
Bonus Points for using the words "rye bread" in the fiction
report your results – win or lose.
UPDATE: And it has to be something you would not have written otherwise. No assignments, school or work related. Because the whole point is creating despite how busy we are. Or think we are. Or something. And also because I Am A Nitpicky So-And-So.

No one's keeping track of your success but you. Maybe that's part of the problem. Time to ante up.

Are You In?

The Battle Of Wildspitze

Last year, Scott Roche and I co-wrote a… well, it's a little longer than a short story. SFWA would consider it a novelette at around 10,000 words. It's already up at Smashwords, and it's also available here now for $1.49. If you buy it here, it's in a lovely zip file that contains .mobi (for you Kindle users), and ePub (for everyone else). If you're looking for the story in another format, such as PDF, you can get that at this Smashwords page.

Smashwords is nice because it allows you to get a bit of a preview of the story before you buy. So I figured, why not do the same thing here? So, in this page (by which I mean CLICK HERE FOR THE SAMPLE), you'll find the opening of the story Scott and I wrote – The Battle of Wildspitze.

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Buy it now – $1.49 gets you a 10,000 word story for your Kindle (.mobi) or Nook/iDevice/Other Reader (.ePub).

Making Time and Space

(Cross Posted at FlagShip). I'm working on an outline for a new fiction project, which is exciting. I've never really been an outliner, and getting some things put together so that I have an idea of where things will go is proving to be an interesting exercise.

However, lately I've found it particularly hard to get into "writer mode". Maybe you've had that issue at various times. Day job, family trouble, the heartbreak of simple chronic halitosis… all kinds of things might be getting in your way.

For example…

The day starts about 6:30, trying to wake up and get moving after having been up 'til about 1:00 am the prior evening. At that point, it's all about getting the daughter up and moving and down to school, and getting myself ready and out the door to work.

Last night, I was at work until about 6:30, because of an after-work meeting. Some interesting things dropped during that meeting that have a particular impact on me and my family, so there's a great big swath of mental space being consumed right now by that process. (If my brain was a computer, I'd be looking to get more ram right now. And maybe an upgraded processor. And a new graphics card. And I'd be using the Task Manager to kill processes like "worry.dll". But I digress…)

Immediately after work, I took my wife to run a necessary errand. She's just gotten her real estate license (yay! know anyone looking for a house in Austin TX? drop me a line.) and she needed a laptop. Craigslist led us to a nice secondhand unit with a Core 2 Duo, xp, 2 GB RAM, and a not huge but adequate hard drive. We got home at about 7:45. (Took a little longer than we'd hoped.)

Change from work clothes as fast as I can, scarf down some dinner. (chicken breast, baked in Rudy's bbq sause. Yes, that's how they spell it.)

At 8:00, Galley Table kicked off, and we were talking until… 9:30? Something like that? Good discussion, really enjoyed it. So, 9:30? I think? At which point, I took my wife's laptop and started installing updates, anti-virus, and MS Office. That always takes longer than you really want it to, so by the time it was all said and done, it was about 1:00 am, and I had to get up for work in the morning.

That's not going to happen every night, but it seems that these kinds of things have been occurring with more and more frequency. And it's not necessarily the errands and the laptop maintenance. It's the mental creep that I've been getting from the day job and my volunteer work and…

I know, I know. I'm whining. The fact that I'm complaining about it in the first place does bother me. But I know I'm not the only out there who struggles with this, and I'm sure there are people out there who deal with more and bigger issues, but still manage to create that space and time to write. I've started experimenting a little with meditation, but I'm only in the bare beginnings of that.

So, I'm wondering – what do you do to get around that? How do you clear your decks – both in time and in thought – so you can sit down and write? Or do you not have this particular problem?

Gates, Bars, and Fear

Of late, my thoughts (when I'm not actually bashing my head into a wall getting back onto the writing horse) have been turning to what it is exactly that I intend on doing here. And I know, I know – big plans, etc., keep your eye on the feed, yadda yadda…

But I've been thinking about one of the themes I see in my writing – paying a price. Anything worthwhile has a price associated with it. In Cost of Miracles, it was the sanity of one of the characters. In High Moon, it's the service the Sinner does for the Preacher. In real life… what is the price we're willing to pay for success? Is it worth it?

What do I mean by that? Well, I was thinking about writing and publishing, and how the bars to entry have come down so significantly. You'll note that I have a small publishing venture of my own. The gatekeepers have been kicked out, told to take a hike, and in have come people with stories to tell. The gates are really demolished. Anyone with access to the internet can go to blogger or WordPress, set up a free site, and start writing their stories. I did that myself last year – Mad Poet Files started in exactly that same way. A free site, set up on blogger, where I was going to (and did) write stories and put them up on the internet for people to see, to hear, and to buy – maybe. And my expectations were that people would enjoy the stories, and maybe pay a couple of bucks to read them in their e-reader. Oh, how high were my expectations! I didn't realize that while the GATE was down, the BAR was still up there, and it was a pretty high bar to hit.

The Bar… Oh let there be no moaning of the bar… yes. The bar. The bar of quality. Anyone can come in and write. It takes time, patience, practice, skill, craft, attention, soul, art, heart, and I'm sure all kinds of other things that people can add to that list to clear the Bar. Looking back at my work last year, I don't know that I cleared that Bar. What I do know is at some point, I got so caught up in my failed expectations that rather than correct my expectations, I quit.

Yes, I was a quitter. A nancy-boy. A wimp. A Very Special Snowflake. That's what I was.

And I didn't realize that I needed to pay the price in time, sweat, and practice, to clear that bar. To keep going toward the promised land. To overcome my own fear.

Fear? What does fear have to do with it? Everything. And it's based on some truths, and some lies.

Fear is that little voice that says you're not good enough and that therefore you should quit. You may not be good enough – yet. That may be true. But should you quit? No. Adjust course, reconsider your expectations, have hope, dig in, adapt, improvise, overcome, yes. But quit? No. Never. As Churchill said, "Never give in. Never give in! Never, Never, Never, Never! In nothing, great or small, large or petty, never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense." Three months of writing, and throwing in the towel because I don't know what the market ramifications are? Screw that. Not knowing what the market ramifications are? Not planning for it, not trying to use it for my own advantage? Screw that action too. Reach, Practice, Play. Right? Fun, Right? When a defensive lineman squares off against a center just before the snap, they're playing a game, right? Fun, Right? Look in their eyes as they stare each other down. Fun. Right.

Fear is that little voice that says you're not ready, not able, not worthy. You may not be ready today. You may not be able today. You may not have paid your price yet. I may not have paid my price yet.

Yet.

So yeah, stay tuned, blah blah blah… more stuff coming, yadda yadda yadda… Get it together, Osaka.

Turn and face the strange…

Started the next steps here at MPF this evening. Basically, I've ditched Blogger in order to pay for my own hosting and run WordPress. In the long run, this will be a good move in a lot of ways.

One way in particular – I think I can get away from libsyn.

Don't get me wrong, I haven't had any problems with Libsyn, and they're a fine company. However, with this site, I get unlimited hosting and bandwidth, and the monthly cost will work out to less than what I was paying before. Also, WordPress. And other things which are coming.

So, eventually the blogger blog (available right now at madpoetfiles.blogspot.com) will be imported here, and then we'll move on to the next phase.

What I'm Doing Today.

After shutting down GSG, the obvious question is what's next. What will I be doing with my copious spare time?

Hopefully I've learned one lesson from last year – and that's to hold your cards a little closer. So, I'm not going to be very explicit in what I'm doing for the foreseeable future. There are the obvious things, of course. Flying Island Press continues to take some time – FlagShip has a Super Secret Subscriber's Only issue coming out next week. If you ever want to see it, you'll have to be subscribed by the end of January, because at that point, we take the files down and it will no longer be available anywhere.

That's Flying Island, though. And I've been teasing people to pay closer attention to Mad Poet Files. What's up with that?

Chris Brogan has this thing where every year he boils down into three words – three concepts that he uses like a compass to guide his actions. Seemed like a good idea, so I thought it would be an interesting idea to do the same myself. I've teased a little about people paying attention here to Mad Poet Files. This is where I'm going to start trying to explore my own three words for 2011.

Reach. Practice. Play.

Reach. Out. Up. Inside. For the Stars. Your Goals.

Practice. What you preach. The way to Carnegie Hall. What a professional does.

Play. Hard. Well. On. For Keeps. For Fun. For All the Marbles. Here's the crazy part. I really believe this will be the hardest one for me. But it's also the one that makes the others work.

And that's it. Read your own meaning into that, folks. Your guess is as good as mine at this point.

What I Did Yesterday.

Yesterday, I recorded the last official episode of Geek Survival Guide. Some people were a little disappointed by that, and I wanted to explore a little why I did it.

At the beginning of 2010, I came out of the gate with a ton of enthusiasm. I was going to run Mad Poet Files AND Geek Survival Guide, get a lot of content out there, really kick butt. And I recorded this gung ho episode that in hindsight was pretty hilarious where I said I was going to release a new episode of one or the other every week. Which was an utter failure on my part. I think I recorded something like two additional episodes of GSG in 2010 before we actually hit November and I did the NaNoWriMo thing again.

While I was doing NaNoWriMo, I realized that I enjoy podcasting, and talking about writing, but it just wasn't coming across as FUNNY to me, and GSG has always… well, has MOST always been about the funny side of geekdom, geekery, sci-fi and fantasy ideas and all that fun stuff. If anything, it felt a little like a betrayal of the podcast to do NaNo 2010 in such a non-funny manner. Weren't a lot of survival tips. Was a lot of writing advice, from people that I trusted on the subject, but it really wasn't GSG. And one of the first criteria for me on GSG was always to make myself laugh.

And it's not the first time I've thought about ending the podcast. I seriously considered ending it at the end of 2009, but let myself be talked into keeping it going. And we see how well THAT turned out.

It also needed a real ending – a "This Is The Last One" kind of a sign-off. In a way, it's a return to classic GSG – the survival tips, the stentorian voice of the announcer, etc. It's always been a combination of my love of science fiction, fantasy, the the old Goofy "How To…" cartoons. I loved those cartoons that showed such a crazy disparity between what the announcer was describing so seriously and what Goofy was actually doing. It's hard to pull off in audio, but I hope I got at it. Lights Out Radio never had that, and I still feel guilty for not finishing those stories off.

Listening to it now I am still giggling, hearing the references to Sunset Boulevard, Casablanca, the long quote from Blade Runner, the crazy things people just accept in Close Encounters – always a rich source of GSG material. How many times have we gone back to the sculpting Devil's Tower in mashed potatoes well? When you think about it, he did have to be nuts to get on the ship.

I probably should have made a reference to everyone getting off the spaceship actually being Tyrell Replicants, brought the whole thing back around full circle.

It was a fitting send-off, I thought.

Reading Renaissance

(Cross-posted at FlagShip) This Christmas, there was an e-reader bonanza at the Ricks household. Out of the six families that gathered round the tree this year, four came away with Kindles. My Mom, both of my brothers, and a sister now have a handy dandy e-reader, which it became my job to fill with sweet, sweet content. Courtesy of Baen, and Flying Island Press, I think they've got plenty to read for a while.

If you've been listening to the Galley Table podcast for the last couple weeks, you've heard me talk about Baen a bit. Bottom line is, if you pick up certain hardcover editions, you get a CD that contains a LOT of Baen books. And because those files are all distributed with specific language that allows… um, encourages… uh, DEMANDS sharing, sharing is what you do with them. And while you don't necessarily have to buy the hardback (images of those CDs are available online at the Fifth Imperium), I'd encourage you to do so if for no reason other than to show some appreciation for a forward thinking publisher and some love for the authors that provided some really ripping yarns. And while you're out and about the internet, maybe you might consider swinging by webscription.net and picking up a Baen e-book that isn't available on their free CDs.

Full disclosure. Baen is not paying me for this.

While I enjoy the audio format, and am very happy to see that Nathan Lowell's Owner's Share has its first five chapters available at podiobooks.com, I'm also wildly enjoying all the reading I've been doing lately thanks to some free apps for my phone and the ready availability of content.

So, what's your take? Did you get a shiny new e-reader this holiday season? Have you had one? What do you think about it?