Kate Larking's Blog: Anxiety Ink, page 24

A New Way of Keeping Tabs: Things in My Face

On my list of 2017 goals is a vague item: Be accountable to the 6 Month Plan. I didn’t intend on posting about it so soon since I wanted to wait and see if my Plan would work, but I’m too excited about it not to share. As I type this, I’m a week into it and so far things are stellar. As this post goes live after the first month, it’s worked pretty well for me.

So, what is my 6 Month Plan?

The “Plan” is an ugly chart I created. Months ago, when I was thinking about all the habits I needed to change in 2017, I bought a piece of poster board at the dollar store. In December, I laid it out on my floor with a ruler, a black sharpie, my calculator, and a piece of scrap paper. Applying the little knowledge I’ve obtained about bullet journals (thanks to Kate’s interest I did some research), I decided to make a calendar devoted only to January through June.

I felt that a 6 month timeline would be less intimidating than a year. Not to mention it would allow for more fluidity should anything change about my situation. Plus, I’d be able to fit more and determine whether I’d keep going with it from July onward.

My chart is a bit messed up because I forgot there’s a reason your standard calendar lists five weeks instead of four. Honestly, I don’t care. And I’ll fix it in June if I continue with it.

As of January 1st, I still didn’t know how exactly I wanted to use the 6 Month Plan. All I did know was:

1) It needed to tie into my goal of writing at least 3 days a week,

2) It also needed to tie into my goal of submitting each short story at least three times over the year, and,

3) It needed to put my tracking in my face.

If you check my history, those two goals have made it onto my list over and over the past three years and have led to little success. One of the reasons that lack of success kept recurring was because I never realized until the end of the week that I was behind.

I work Monday to Friday and do all of my chores after work in order to devote my weekends to writing. I do my most intense workouts on Saturdays, which fries my brain, so I do a lot of writing administrative stuff afterwards. By Sunday, when I’ve cracked all my writing ledgers and notebooks and documents and have a clue what’s going on, it’s too late to catch up.

The Plan is bright blue and taped to the wall to the right of my desk. It’s the first thing I see when I walk in my room. It is impossible to miss.

On January 2nd, I finally figured out what I was going to do with it. In her goal post, Melissa discusses her means of keeping track of her writing. She keeps a tally of all the days she doesn’t write, and has a number that she does not want to exceed over the year. I wasn’t sure if that would work for me because of the habits I detailed above. But I was inspired.

Every day that I don’t write, a big red X gets drawn on the Plan. Every day that I do write, a big red check mark gets drawn, and on its tail I write my day’s word count.

It doesn’t get much simpler, or in my face, than that.

What’s more, this system lets me see exactly how much time is going by. I’ve mentioned before that I have a tendency to let time flow by willy nilly because some part of me thinks there’s an endless amount of it. There’s not, and I need to be made aware of that.

I also have submissions on the Plan, so I know exactly how close I am to deadlines. This will also prevent me from forgetting about that goal and will keep me actively working towards it.

I really hope this works for me and that I have a positive check-in in 6 months!

What have you done this year to increase/ensure you’re producing words?

 

*Before I went on vacation I submitted one story to a magazine (the orange tab you can see in the image above). It was rejected, but I managed to submit it because it was on my radar. That’s progress for me.

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February Freewriting Challenge

Mid-January, I posed a question to my fellow Inkettes: would you want to do a freewriting challenge with me?

Why did I ask?

To be honest, I have been feeling stuck lately. I want to write–a lot. I want to write a whole bunch this year and move forward with publishing plans and queries and just get myself out there. I’ve sat on my ideas and doubted my skills long enough.

I have issues writing in my current notebook. I tried to blame everything else–I didn’t like the paper, my pens were being finnicky, it was never around when I needed it…

But the reality was, I didn’t want to ink anything I wasn’t certain of, that I wasn’t proud of, that I didn’t want to be cemented in the journal like a vault of my embarrassing past.

One of the tactics for writing faster, writing with less judgement, is writing sprints. I’ve seen it in 5000 Words per Hour by Chris Fox (affiliate link), and 2K to 10K by Rachel Aaron (affiliate link). I’ve seen it in productivity articles. I’ve seen it just about everywhere (because I’m a productivity article and information junkie. Sigh.)

[image error][image error]And I used to do it all the time. I would have word wars with friends, in-person and online, holding each other accountable at the end for how much we had gotten done.

I wanted to get back to that level of focus, pushing forward with words and focusing on them. But I didn’t want to wait for when other people were around or online. I don’t have that much luxury in my time anymore.

Elisa and Melissa asked me for more details about what a freewriting challenge was…and I promptly replied that I had no idea. After a little back and forth, here is what I propose.

What is Freewriting

Freewriting is a creativity exercise where you start writing and don’t look back. You keep your pen flowing and don’t stop for a set interval of time. It doesn’t have to be pertaining to any specific project. You are start with a prompt or an image or a song. If you get stuck, return to the prompt and keep going, even if it is disjointed.

Uhh, I don’t want to show people what I write during these…

Don’t want to share? Totally fine. Neither do I, really. Last time I did freewriting I did some weird hand-bell magic scene and I relied heavily on my preferred filler words.

The idea is that you let the words get ahead of your censoring brain. You might write your way out of a corner in your current creative work. Or spark an idea for another book–after all, Camp NaNoWriMo is coming up in April.

You might write stuff that you want to simply burn once you realize what you scribbled down.

What you will need for this challenge:

Something to write with. This can be pen and paper (yeah, pen, so you can’t go back and be tempted to erase it :P). Or, this can fingers to the keyboard if sitting in front of the computer is where you feel stuck.
A timer. Something reliable. If you have issues where you keep looking up to watch it tick down, turn it away from you so you can’t see the countdown and just write.

That’s it. Two things.

The Freewriting Challenge

For the month of February, I challenge you to do a certain number of 10-minute freewriting sprints per week.

For example, I want to do a minimum of 7 per week. I might have to do two on one day if things get hectic, but the week offers me that flexibility. Especially since I know I have one 15 hour work day and two 10 hour workdays in the month of February.

If you’re tighter on time, you can try Melissa’s goal of 2 sprints per week. We just want to try it and are hoping you will give it a try too!

Joining in?

Let me know below if you want to join in on our challenge. Tell us how many sessions you want to aim for in a week and link to your blog if you are going to keep track there.

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Ink Links Roundup

Fairytales and fantasy when the need is greatest. I love Terri Windling’s blog, and with everything going wrong in the US right now, I needed this post.

I am sharing this article about establishing an online author presence with caveats. It has some great information if you’re making writing a career on par with the standard concept of a day job, but it doesn’t discuss moderation or recognizing limitations. I don’t know offhand of any writer present on all major social media channels. It requires time and energy, which sometimes you have to take from time and energy you would otherwise use on writing.

This book review came in handy for Kate’s research:

My science fiction writing research has led me to preorder this book: Reality Is Not What It Seems.

And if you would like to add it to your reading pile and wouldn’t mind a small kickback from the purchase going to support our efforts here on Anxiety Ink, here is an Amazon affiliate link.  [image error]

How Family Tragedy Inspired the Bronte’s Greatest Books. Elisa feels about the Brontë’s the way many people feel about Jane Austen. Though she readily admits she needs to read more of all of them. And not just because the BBC is giving people glimpses into what created Anne, Charlotte, and Emily.

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Celebrate Success

Celebrate your success. The little things will keep you going when the going gets tougher. And we all know that it will get tougher.

I feel like I’ve talked about creative hours non-stop, but it looks like I just mentioned them here once this month.

Let me put it this way: I spent eight months revising half a novel, then this month I revised the other half. One month. So that’s exciting.

I’m celebrating by bragging.

But I haven’t finished the draft yet. Time to type (and curse my need to do everything longhand). Then I’ll send the damn thing out to beta readers to get their reactions and feedback.

Maybe when I make the next revision pass, creative hours will help me finish it in two months! Unlikely, but I can dream . . .

In the meantime, I’m going to need a new project. I have a week or two to decide – however long it takes to type everything. But with my less-than-stellar decision making ability, I will need every second. (Even then, it will likely come down to a coin toss. Or dice roll, if I give myself too many options.)

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Reader Preferences: When a Literary Problem Becomes a Genre Fiction’s Convention

It’s no surprise that I read widely. I’m willing to pick up anything and everything made up of words that you can find out there. Whether I’ll end up liking it is a different story, but I’m not that hard to please. Though I am hard to wow.

Right now, I’m in the middle of a writing text called The Making of a Story, by Alice LaPlante. I talked about it a bit here when I mentioned it before. While I think it’s widely applicable, it does focus on the literary side of writing.

I have a literary background though I’ve been reading “genre” fiction for as long as I’ve been reading. And for the record, I think those labels are idiotic, but they serve their purposes when you’re comparing them. There are merits to both branches of fiction, I really don’t believe one as a whole is better than the other, though I do think people could meld them better and they could learn from one another. But that is a post for a different day.

In Chapter Six: Who’s Telling This Story, Anyway? LaPlante discusses point of view and narration. On pages 280 and 281, under the header Common Point of View Problems, she says this:

In general, once you establish your point of view, you’re going to want to stick with it. The point isn’t to follow some esoteric rule, but to avoid jolting your readers out of the story. When such jolts occur, some would argue that there is a point of view error that needs to be fixed. But while this might be the case some, or even most, of the time, you can read stories—good stories—in which the point of view shifts, say from one kind of limited third person to another kind of limited third person. In such cases, we assume that the author felt it important enough to risk jolting the reader to get some additional information into the text. Does it work? Does the author get away with it? Only the reader can say. (LaPlante, Alice. The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to Creative Writing. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York. 2007.)

In response, I jotted this in the margin: Depends if the writer is good at conveying two narrators with different voices –done routinely in romance successfully.

In literary fiction, readers are used to seeing a lot of experimental things in a piece they’re reading. Though literary readers are harsh judges. In genre fiction, like romance, readers aren’t as critical, they’re happy to see a new twist on an old convention, and they’re more lenient towards their writers.

Like my response indicates, this POV “problem” amused me to no end. Shifting POV between your heroine and hero is a longstanding convention in romantic fiction. With or without breaks in between the shifts. Even pulling back the camera lens for a wide shot of the action is perfectly normal in romance.

Personally, I think this is something that speaks more to skill regardless of the writer’s genre. This isn’t so much of a problem with POV as it is an illustrative example of a writer’s abilities with voice.

But like I said, I’m not a picky reader. I’ve seen shifts between narrators done well and not so well. The bad ones haven’t jolted me out of stories, even when I’ve had to go back to figure out who I’m seeing the world through. More often than not the parts that have a tendency to ruin my reading flow are spelling or grammatical errors or characters doing complete 180s with absolutely no explanation.

However, I will admit that I’m forgiving as long as everything stays in third person. There’s something about a writer mixing first and third person in one story that I find off-putting. And stories with multiple first person narrators who all have the same voice, even with different chapters devoted to each which also identify them, irk me. No two characters voices should sound the same in the same piece no matter what.

My reading preferences definitely influence my writing preferences. And I love playing around with voice, though I’m tentative to experiment with point of view.

What are your thoughts on shifts in point of view? Are you a forgiving reader or do you have preferences you don’t like to stray from?

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Writer’s Block Diagnosis: Comparisonitis

Let’s talk a bit about comparisonitis because I am feeling majorly crippled in the writing department right now.

The last few times I’ve sat down at my computer to write, I get stuck. In my idealistic mind, January is a month of pure, unabashed ambition for me. I’m rarring to go. I want to write all the words. I want to build a publishing plan. I want to start planting the seeds of a marketing effort to get momentum moving.

But then I take what I am looking at, and I’m comparing my writing to the published writing of others. When I look at my publishing plan, I am trying to compare myself to the writing and publishing speed of others. When I want to start marketing, I look at the established platform of others.

My brain has been struggling to get ahead of these negative thoughts. The blinding optimism from the beginning of the month is now buried under a very busy month at work, a hefty car repair bill, extremely cold weather that keeps me cooped up inside, and the fussy baby.

I sit down at the computer and I am just paralyzed with these comparing thoughts.

Overcoming comparisonitis is…not so simple.

This isn’t a new feeling for me. Published work by most authors, I mentally place it on this “unattainable shelf”. I shouldn’t, but I do. So I’ve been reading as a break from churning out words.

Published writing, unpublished writing, any kind of writing. The published writing I read…it isn’t perfectly in tune with me as a reader and writer. The unpublished work I’ve been reading, even less so.

But seeing other people get their words out there, even if the works aren’t fantastic, really boosts me to keep producing.

So this week, more words are forthcoming. My stories will be mine, not anyone elses’. They won’t be perfect when perceived by others, just as others’ work isn’t perfect for me.

So I’m just trying to take small steps ahead, even if it is just 20 words here, 600 words there. I am building my base for this year, and that will help me toward my goals.

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Ink Links Roundup

Sharing your story-baby can be a frightening ordeal, but here are some reasons why you should take the plunge and do it. Most of these reasons are so true, though I don’t quite agree with the last reason on the list that posits writers should share our work because it’s our job. But you don’t have to make writing your profession to be a writer!

And here’s a list of five YA books in which art saves lives. I was so happy to see it include Daniel José Older’s Shadowshaper! It’s an amazing book, so now I think I may have to track down some of the others listed there . . .

Kate found some lovely and haunting Grimm fairy tale images to spark your imagination.

People, the final frontier: how sci-fi is taking on the human condition.

Reading articles like this really gives me a boost in my writing. I will be focusing on people in my science fiction writing, not the hard science.

Elisa just discovered the By the Book segment in the New York Times, which features writers on literature and the literary life. She’s more than a little pleased that an author she adores, Zadie Smith, marks her reading inauguration for this one.

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Writing Limbo: Responsibilities and Tough Decisions

I have been in writing limbo for the last year, maybe longer. It has been a time of low output and high flakiness. I have flaked out on so many things.

Including my writing group.

As writers, we tend to be solitary creatures, but things like writing groups bring us together. A good group will help you grow as a writer, and my group has been amazing. Me as a member? I’ve been something less than amazing lately.

I wait until the last minute to read the stories posted for the meeting, then don’t have (or don’t take) the time to organize my thoughts into anything coherent. See, a writing group demands time. Which can feel like just another obligation when I’m already stressed and my schedule leaves me no breathing room.

But here’s the thing: everyone in my group deals with that same stress. I owe it to them to stop making excuses to myself and carve out the time. I know it’s there. Somewhere.

I’ve thought about leaving. If I’m not submitting (which I don’t do much when I’m working on a novel, because no one should have to puzzle out my handwriting), I should be critiquing the way I want the group to critique my stories.

But I think I’m getting better. I’m not ready to leave the group. For purely selfish reasons, I’ll probably never be ready for that. But if I’m dragging so badly that everyone else has to work harder to compensate for me, I will have to leave.

This is the sharper side of accountability. Here’s hoping I get my act together!

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What I Confirmed About Character Enduring “The Rock”

You hear all the time that character is everything. Characters carry your story. People fall for characters, read for characters, and buy for characters. Story is nothing without the people that bring it to life.

I know this, I believe this, but like other advice you hear often, it tends to fall into the white noise. Recently, I watched a movie that brought this bit home for me.

On New Year’s Eve, I had made plans to go to an outdoor party with friends to ring in 2017. It was the first time I’d ever made plans, but I figured Canada’s bicentennial was a good time to break my tradition. However, Mother Nature was not down with my plans.

It was cold, which I could have gotten over. But it also snowed. And snowed. Then snowed some more. Around 5 p.m. I went to my local grocery store, which is about five blocks from my house. The speed limit in my town is 30 km/h. The trip was not a pleasant one. That sealed it for me: my New Year’s plans were not happening. I was not driving 50 km in treacherous conditions on a highway that is largely pitch-black.

So instead of partying it up with friends I stayed in and watched a movie with my parents. The choices were meagre, but we settled on a 90s action movie because it’s a genre we all enjoy. Plus my mom and I really like Nicholas Cage.

There’s no nice way to say it, The Rock is a terrible movie. Its cast includes some great actors, Nick Cage, like I already said, Sean Connery, Ed Harris, a ton of people who are big actors now who were still nobodies in 1996. Even the director and the behind the scenes people are currently major Hollywood players.

And yet not one of them could save this movie. The dialogue, even for an action movie, was pathetic. The f-word just doesn’t have as much subtext as the writers were looking for. The acting was not very good in many parts. The shooting scenes reeked of Tarantino-over-indulgence. The plot didn’t make a lot of sense, which made all of the character motivations hard to believe.

The only thing that made it watchable, fot us, was Nicholas Cage’s character. He played his out-of-his element, federal-biochemist-turned-field-agent so superbly, we had to see how it turned out for him. Every commercial break I turned to my mom and said, “This is awful.” And all she kept saying was, “But I really like his character!”

So we watched it to the end. It’s stupid, stupid end.

I’m not saying anyone should write a horrible book and hope their character can carry it for them. No one should strive for that. But it’s a reality that not all of us are going to write the next Harry Potter or Hunger Games or what have you.

Write the best story you can. Always. But invest doubly so in creating the best characters possible. If you’re going to go the extra mile on any part of your book, do it with character development. This is isn’t the only movie I’ve sat through more than once because I was invested in a character. I’ve done it with loads of books too.

Character is everything. Remember that and your readers will thank you in the end.

 

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You Have Time to Write – New Mom Writer Series

You have the time to write! This is the third post in my New Mom Writing series.

Part of this post is for those who are not parents–that is who this post will help the most. For the parents out there, this post is commiseration and encouragement.

The Realization

When my daughter Ryan was born, my brain went on a three week hiatus. Everything was about how to keep this tiny human alive. Babies don’t have circadian rhythms. They have sleep-feed cycles on repeat. Sometimes they are clustered together like feed-blink-feed-blink-feed-blink before finally hitting sleep.

In the first few days, when you get 5 minutes to yourself between attending to your child, you celebrate! What luxury are you going to indulge?!

Choose from the list below:

Close eyes for 5 minutes
Stuff your face full of food to make the hunger shakes stop
Go to the washroom
Google life-saving but highly ambiguous Internet-available information on everything you are doing wrong or think you are failing at in taking care of your child and how to fix it, OR
Sterilize bottles that you will need for the feeding after the next one.

Yup, that’s your list. Pick one. Usually the answer was to eat something one-handed like a muffin or yogurt tube while washing and sterilizing bottles. After all, you’ll need the bottles. And you can Google while trying to wake the baby to take the full feed. And hunger is for the weak, sleep is for the dead.

Some breaks are fifteen minutes long; luxury.

These five-fifteen minute breaks? Imagine that, 24 hours a day. All day, all night.

Once we hit over the 3 week mark, finding those pockets of time became easier. And that’s when I really understand that I had before.

So here is my advise for you.

Drop what doesn’t matter

Whatever doesn’t add to the life you want to be living? Drop it. Just let go and move on.

Look at your life right now and think about what you regret not doing. Now dig and find what adds the least and get rid of it to make time for what you really want.

You have the ability to make the choice and set your priorities. Some people have told me that they lack the discipline or self-control. I call bullshit–make the choices. It means you might not be able to keep up with pop culture references or all the newest movies, but if you want to write, then write.

You have the time to write. You can pick it out and find it. And if you don’t do it now, you will regret not using it when you find yourself missing that time in your life.

For the new moms

So what do you do when you don’t have the easy things to get rid of? I get it. A lot of the time goes into taking care of the kid (or kids. I have no idea how parents with multiple children at different stages and needs do it). That time isn’t so easy to make available again.

Start seizing the available moments

Your lunch hour at work? Instead of fiddling on Facebook, get writing.

Commuting? Bypass the repetitive radio and opt for a podcast or audiobook.

Kid at a supervised activity? Pull out your notebook and get to work.

That moment of silence in the morning before the kids wake up? Use that time!

You can do this. You can change your life into one where you can get to where you want in your writing career. You just have to make it work and get to work.

You can do it. I know I am going to. Let’s kick some ass together.

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