Kate Larking's Blog: Anxiety Ink, page 8

Ink Links Roundup – Wattpad, Writing as Resistance

Publishing Perspectives writes up a great overview of Wattpad platform here. If you’ve been thinking about diving in (like Kate has pondered), check it out.

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A gorgeous piece of writing by Dimas Ilaw called The Shape of the Darkness As It Overtakes Us posted on Uncanny Magazine.

No: this isn’t a story about escape. Because we need writers now; we need you now, here, with us. The man who would be dictator is telling a story. It is one where, as though the Philippines were a body afflicted with gangrene, he would cut off the infected limb to save the rest of us—the pure and good and clean—for progress. It is a compelling story. It would be the only story, through the sheer force of its telling, if not for those who tell other stories, who speak and write and create to cry out: this is murder.

We need writers because we need someone to articulate everything that arises within us in response to the brutality of our lives. Because, after this nameless cry has found a semblance of words to frame it—at least enough to be sentence-skeletons, enfleshed enough to hold together as a mass of muscle and skin and anger—then we can grasp it. Then we can act.

…

In my notebook, written in capital letters three inches high, the words: STORIES ARE HOW WE SURVIVE. Before it, in smaller writing: in times that seek to destroy us.

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NaNoWriMo Week 1 Check-in

Welcome back, Kathleen, for another guest post! (I can not thank her enough for everything these guest posts do – mainly, give me time with my little one and time to figure out how and when regular blogging fits in this new normal. ♥)

Happy National Novel Writing Month! Write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days? Challenge accepted!

Have I accepted this challenge before?

…Maaaaaybe.

Okay, yes. I’ve accepted this challenge five times since 2006. I only ever crossed the 10,000 word mark that first time, when I won—and took the challenge with two of my school friends.

We lived in each other’s pockets, pretty much, and every night we’d meet in M.J. King’s apartment and hammer out our daily word counts.

Living with people who were also striving for those daily 1,667 word counts was the reason I completed NaNoWriMo in 2006. Have I touched the novel since? No. Was the novel itself complete? No. But the sense of accomplishment I got from finishing was amazing.

I’m what Barbara Sher calls a “Scanner”, someone with jack-of-all-trades interests, and no desire to master—or commit to mastering—most of them. We’re akin to honeybees: it feels pointless for us to stick with one flower forever, because our goal is to visit all the flowers. Scanners like me often feel like flakes nowadays, like we’re defective because we don’t have One Burning Passion to commit to, to the exclusion of all others. While writing is my umbrella passion—one all my other interests feed into, because everything a writer lives and learns can be used as inspiration—it’s liberating to find out you’re actually perfectly normal for acting like a honeybee and not a specialist…but that’s a post for another time.

The point of bringing up being a scanner is this: I started NaNoWriMo in 2006 with the fear that I could never write a novel, the fear I couldn’t commit and stick with such a huge writing endeavor long enough to actually finish such a project. After all, I never had before, and I’d begun plenty of novels, all of which seemed to shame me with their incompleteness as they languished in my writing folder.

But magically, miraculously, in 2006, I met National Novel Writing Month’s challenge. By 11:59pm of November 30th, I’d written 50,000 words of brand new novel, and had written out solid plans for the scenes I’d skipped or not gotten to yet.

Finishing NaNoWriMo that year assured me that, if I committed, worked hard and stuck to it, had an external deadline, and surrounded myself with the necessary support, I could actually finish a novel-length project. In other words, if the circumstances were right, even I could commit to and follow through on a long-term, novel-length project. I prefer to write in sprints, but if I wanted to, I could write in marathons too.

In the years since NaNo 2006, the circumstances for novel completion haven’t been write right. No in-person support, no impetus to write every night, life circumstances not conducive to that level of commitment, projects decided on a whim. I’ve used NaNo write-ins to help further writing goals that weren’t novels to decent effect over the years, but for the most part, every other year I’ve signed up for NaNoWriMo, I’ve been certain 50k just wasn’t going to happen. Self-fulfilling prophecy? Perhaps. 100% accurate? Yes. Tellingly, I was never upset by losing those years, because I wasn’t fully committed to winning—that would’ve felt like setting myself up to fail.

Enter 2017. I have two novels to finish, and I’m committed to getting this first one out of my hair, preferably before 2018. I have a friend in town who’s big into NaNo, and who invited me to her kickoff write-in (which I rocked!). I also live with a friend who wants to finish her novel…though we’ve been trying to write at home together since summer, with little follow-through or success, as we are both highly distractible procrastinators.

Still, in October, I told my housemate, with confidence, “Let’s do NaNo together and finish our novels!”

If she agreed to throw down with me, I knew this year I would win.

To understand my certainty, I compared my 2017 circumstances to those of 2006. Committed to the project? Check. Ability to work hard and stick to it? Check—I managed once, and could manage again if I prioritized and stayed on track with the target word counts for each day. Bonus: because of joining Dreamwith, I was on my laptop daily, just as I had been in 2006—and was thus automatically positioning myself to write when I got home. External deadline? Check. Surrounded by necessary support? Well, I have fellow NaNoers in town, one of whom lives in my back pocket, so: Check.

And that…? That’s everything I need. I am perfectly situated to complete National Novel Writing Month in 2017—and, given where I am in the pre-existing project, completing the novel draft.

I’ve finished novellas, but never a novel, so I’m pretty excited. That excitement’s definitely helped so far…Because I’ve been doing NaNoWriMo 2017 for a week now, and it’s going well. I’ve written four out of seven days, and finished Day 7 ahead of schedule despite not writing that night.

As a writer, my ideal is to write in four-hour stretches, but not necessarily every day. As someone with a day job who needs lots of sleep, four-hour stretches are only possible on weekends. So what I’ve been doing is trying to keep abreast of the target word count for each day, if one is writing 1,667 words per day, and either catch up or jump ahead on weekends.

And it’s working. As is mapping out scenes in my head on my commute and as I’m going to sleep, so I have words to write when I can finally sit at my laptop to get them down.

I’ve modified the challenge in that I’m counting story notes too, not just words added to the novel. Words on the novel are words on the novel, and I plan to write many tonight to unstick myself from the lamentable over-outlining I did on Day 6, which has my brain convinced I’ve already written the scene in question. So! Day 8’s writing will begin with the notes I’ve planned to help me get unstuck; Day 9 will hopefully find me finishing that scene; and the weekend will get me long writing stretches and, if all goes to plan, at least six thousand words ahead of schedule for the coming week’s daily targets.

But I’ll let you know what actually goes down when I do a Week 2 check-in.

In the meantime, why not consider the circumstances you’d need to win NaNoWriMo—and try to put some in place now?

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Timeliness and Timelessness, Are They Part of the Same Whole?

Fair warning, I’ve been home alone thinking and today’s post has grown somewhat philosophical. I’m going to start with some definitions so as not to confuse anyone or myself:

Timeliness refers to the fact or quality of being done or occurring at a favourable or useful time.

Timelessness suggests something not affected by the passage of time, something independent of time.*

When it comes down to it, I think every writer wants their work to have an element of timelessness so it survives the ages. However, stories also need to incorporate elements of timeliness so that their popularity surges and they’re read widely. Ultimately, I think this is what allows a story to transcend into timelessness. So are these ideas separate, independent, or are they part of the same whole?

I don’t have a solid answer, but I have an example from a book I just (mercifully) finished. The movie came out a few years ago in 2011, the book long before that in 2003, but I’m hoping you’ve at least heard of We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver.

In a nutshell, this is a story about a woman grappling to figure out how her life came to the point of utter destruction on the day her son kills a group of his classmates. Much of the story is devoted to discussing mass school shootings—I’m 99% certain that all of the examples provided by Shriver in the book are factual. But I’m going from memory, and I was only 12 in 2003.

I had a difficult time getting into this story, and not just because I didn’t like a single character. I felt alienated because mass school shootings are rather passé in my reality. As a student who grew up in the shadow of these horrific events, I was one of the kids the narrator described with a sense of incredulousness. I was trained on how to act during a school lockdown in the event a shooter entered the building, we were told how to spot odd behaviour in fellow students, and we were conditioned to report any weapons brought to school (though I’m not sure why you’d need to be taught to do that).

By the time I graduated, mass school shootings perpetrated by students were not a major concern anymore; we’d come far enough dealing with alienation and bullying that kids weren’t turning to that any longer. Again, I’m going from memory here, please correct me if I’m wrong.

When WNtTaK was published, school shootings were every parent’s worst nightmare. They were so politicized at the time that this was likely a very timely book even in the wake of 9/11. Now, not so much. Now, we have grown men going into public places and shooting them up every other day. While their (perceived) motives are eerily similar to those posited in this book, it’s almost too much having to read fictional accounts while watching the real thing play out on the evening news.

Perhaps this book simply missed the mark for me as a reader, but I had a tough time getting through it. There’s a quote on the cover saying it’s hard to put down; I had a hard time forcing myself to pick it up in order to get it done.

My opinion of the story aside, I think this is a book shifting into timelessness because it’s still rather popular. It’s been made into a well-received movie with a well-known cast. It seems to have had a number of print runs. It’s always available at any bookstore I go to and every used book sale I attend.

While I’d argue it’s too political to stand the test of time, I have a feeling I’m wrong. As long as there are acts of terror (I’m using that as an umbrella term here for any kind of horrific event whether it’s backed by ideology or not) there is an intense human desire to understand them. Books, and movies, help us understand the human condition.

Do you have any thoughts on this?

 

*Thank you Google for the definitions.

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Compound Work

I’ve been back at work a week now and I’m starting to find a groove for my compound working.

Get to day job. Work 4.5 hours.

Lunch at day job? Work 1 hour on side job.

Back to day job work. Work another 2.5 hours.

Go home, spend time with family, get dinner.

Evening, spend approximately 2 more hours on side job.

Shower and go to bed.

That has been my hectic schedule for the last week. Being on parental leave was not all I had hoped. I had hoped for a lot of time to work on writing and reading and other creative projects. Instead, my time filled up with a lot of chores, deeds, and tasks. With working two jobs now, I had to get in a few friend visits before I got back to work and had little time left to socialize.

In the meantime, there are lofty plans in place to read in my stolen hours of time, cultivate ideas, and be ready for the new year.

So in the next few months, most of my updates will relate to my reading progress and my experiences at Sirens.

First Winter Reading Update

I have started into two books.

One is Tortall: a Spy’s Guide by Tamora Pierce. It’s a scattered read that looks more like a bindup of letters so far but I am enjoying piecing together stories of my childhood favourites.

The second is an advance reading copy of All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages, Edited by Saundra Mitchell. The very first author in the anthology is an upcoming Sirens Guest of Honour and it was a lovely tale. I’m hoping the rest let me relax into reworked fairy tales in a queer space.

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Ink Links Roundup – Piracy, String Theory, and Webcomics

In the indie publishing world, there is a lot of talk about piracy. If someone downloads your book illegally for free, some say that it really doesn’t matter; they wouldn’t have purchased your book anyway.

In the traditional publishing world, it’s different. Maggie Stiefvater explains how piracy impacted her series, career, and fandom.

“The Ronan trilogy nearly didn’t exist because of piracy. And already I can see in the tags how Tumblr users are talking about how they intend to pirate book one of the new trilogy for any number of reasons, because I am terrible or because they would ‘rather die than pay for a book’. As an author, I can’t stop that. But pirating book one means that publishing cancels book two. This ain’t 2004 anymore. A pirated copy isn’t ‘good advertising’ or ‘great word of mouth’ or ‘not really a lost sale.’”

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Anyone want to see a list of books that take string theory into another world? Thought so.

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A short interview with Nilah Magruder on webcomics and her new series, M. F. K.

Webcomics benefit from a very low barrier of entry. All you need is a website, a computer, and time. As a creator, you’re not at the mercy of editors and executives, marketing departments, paper costs, or distribution channels. You can put your work online and anyone, anywhere in the world, can access it.

So naturally, there is a wide variety of creators and stories in webcomics, and change there happens much faster than in the bigger comic companies.

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Vocation Stations

Kathleen has a post for us this week on something I’d never heard of: vocation stations. The name is unfamiliar, but but having one makes for an incredibly useful writing tool.

In her book Refuse to Choose, Barbara Sher suggests setting up Vocation Stations: work stations for projects or interests where everything’s set up, ready for you to start the minute you sit down.

Having a Vocation Station, for me, means the hardest part of my writing process—the getting started part—has been stripped of the most troublesome, draining bits.

Getting started, for me, involves fending off easy distractions (things I want to do), fending off necessary distractions (housework I don’t want to do, making food although I’m tired from work), amassing what spoons I have left to do a hard thing I hate to do (block out said distractions, get set up, and do something selfish, i.e. write), all while protecting the mental energy surrounding the idea that’s spurred me to write in the first place—assuming what drove me to write wasn’t just, “I should write today.”

The distractions in my writing spot are all immediate and much more easily begun than writing. I wrote 200 words’ worth of distractions just within arms’ reach of that spot before cutting myself off—and my whole house is like that, and full of things populating my various To Do lists and buzzing around in my brain lest I forget them.

To start writing, which I do primarily by computer, I have to fight my awareness of all those things, many of which I want to do, and win. I have to then pick up my heavy laptop bag, reverse-tetris my laptop out of it, wake the computer up, pull up—or create and (gasp!) name (argh!)—the appropriate documents. Then I have to ignore my internal voice counting down my three remaining waking hours before I have to go to sleep for the day job tomorrow, listing all the things I still need to do before bed, and reminding me having four hours to write would be ideal, but require sleep deprivation, so if I write every day after work the way I want to, I’m going to feel awful all week and crash hard over the weekend.

Writing any project feels daunting with the deck stacked against it like that.

Starting wasn’t always so hard though.

My laptop and I used to be inseparable. I had an active, thriving life online, and lively online writer communities I kept up with on the blogging site LiveJournal (LJ). Not-so-coincidentally, I also wrote stories constantly, whenever the spirit moved me—and the spirit moved often. I was prolific while LJ thrived…and then friends started migrating away from the site and its new management, and I moved to a desert and got severely depressed, and my carpal tunnel symptoms worsened until I couldn’t type without hours of pain.

By the time life was under control and I could use my computer again, LJ was practically dead, my online friends had scattered, and I was years estranged from the Internet. To top it off, I wasn’t writing nearly as much as I used to, and couldn’t figure out how to re-create that productivity. I unburied old writing habits with moderate success, and joined online platforms hoping to find similar communities to what I’d lost—but when nothing recreated that old magic, I continued as I’d become: computing from my ever-present phone, laptop languishing in its satchel.

In October, however, some friends and I decided to move to Dreamwidth (DW) from LJ and try to rebuild the community we lost. It isn’t everyone, but it’s enough of us, that we think it’s worth a shot.

The second day on DW, I got onto my laptop to check my friends list. I felt more like playing a phone game and being mindless now that the workday was over, but I’d committed to our community, so I had to comment and be active, and the laptop was better for that than the phone.

I ended up writing for hours that night: 5.1k of the novel-in-progress, on top of checking DW and commenting and being engaged and encouraging, and cleaning out my Archive of Our Own (AO3) inbox.

I felt so accomplished! Sure, my body was tight from typing all day—at work and at home—but my mind felt active and happy, and so I began this post.

All of which brings me back to Vocation Stations.

Because I put myself in a situation where getting on my laptop when I got home felt necessary not just for myself, but for people I cared about, I unwittingly sat myself at my writing Vocation Station and was perfectly positioned when that novel scene wanted to come out.

Because that 5.1k? Was just going to be a few notes before checking DW and then playing a mindless match-3 mobile game before bed. Hours later, I felt more accomplished than I would have if I’d stuck with that plan—and I’m still proud of my decisions weeks later. My commitment to rebuilding my writing community on DW made me make choices when I got home that worked to get me writing better than any decision to Write When I Get Home ever has and probably ever will.

While I’m not yet as consistent as I’d like to be about choosing DW when I get home, I’ve found the outcome of choosing it consistent: I do more writing.

I write best in community, but what I realized that night was community doesn’t just motivate me to write—fostering it makes me position myself to write whenever the spirit moves me, even if the whim is whisper-soft and the commitment to that whisper is only supposed to be a sentence.

Thankfully, with Vocation Stations, a whisper of a whim is all it takes to begin.

P.S. If you are curious about me and what I write, my short story “The Faerie Tree” is out now in Lightspeed Magazine! You can read it for free here: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-faerie-tree/. If you’re still curious, “You Will Always Have Family: A Triptych” is free to read at Nightmare Magazine here: http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/will-always-family-triptych/. Both magazines are excellent and full of wonderful work. It’s worth purchasing issues if you can. Anyways, happy writing! ^_^

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Waving the White Flag: NaNoWriMo 2017

Since January I have been jonesing to tackle NaNoWriMo. Every time I post a goals check in and write TBD I stare at it with a sense of dread and anticipation. After the disaster that defined November 2016, I was determined to tackle and defeat November 2017.

Well, it’s November 3rd and I am waving the white flag. I am not waving it enthusiastically. Rather, I am waving it after swallowing the bitter pill called reality.

That 50,000 word goal seems highly unattainable from where I’m currently standing. But I could always do a different challenge, right? Well, like Melissa stated on Monday, I don’t want to tackle a pseudo-NaNo because I won’t take it seriously. I agree, that statement smacks of quitter talk, but my plate is so full right now there is no sense in lying to myself that I’ll make it a priority.

I intended to plan my November out last weekend in order to put my best foot forward in terms of hitting my goal; when I opened my calendar my eyes literally bugged out. Even if I did not require sleep—and believe me, as I type this I am barely staying upright I am so exhausted—there is literally no time to squeeze in the time-blocks I would need to hit even a small daily goal. I have next week off from work and already I have maybe two days where I don’t have time-consuming tasks scheduled. I can’t write 25k words each of those days. If I could, that would be amazing.

Needless to say, I’m a little bummed. This was going to be my November of Redemption! But all things considered, especially my mental health, this is the best course of action. At this point in the year I’m trying to be forward thinking. I had so many projects I wanted to tackle over the past 10 months without a clear plan that each and every one basically fizzled out. In the bit of spare time I have this month, I need to start planning 2018.

To all of those participating in NaNo I wish you the best of luck! And I’m only a little envious.

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Back to Work

Today marks the end of my sabbatical and I’m back to work. Also known as parental leave.

I am coming back to over 1000 emails (and it’s still updating), multiple job changes in my store, and a lot of books that need to be restocked.

While I didn’t get much done on my parental leave (or at least I feel like I didn’t get much done on my parental leave), I am pleased with how my brain is. When I left work, I was still scattered, catching up from round-the-clock keep-baby-alive vigilance. I hadn’t found my writing groove again or even my story state of mind.

On Sunday, I returned from Sirens full of inspiration, if extremely tired. I am feeling more centered. I have more direction in my life than I have had in a while. Coming back to work is challenging. I have to dedicate 35 hours of my week to a bookstore, instead of my family, my stories, and my home.

So a short post today. Hopefully I’ll have more balance going forward, but I think getting crunched by work will take a lot of my time.

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Ink Links Roundup – Insight, Writing Fears, Revision

This short and sweet interview with David Sedaris provides important nuggets for writers!

Kate loves Kiini Ibura Salaam’s post on writing fears and why we should delve deep and tell more. It was part of Kiini’s workshop on Writing What Scares You presented at Sirens 2017.

This comprehensive post on how to explore revision from Pleiades Magazine can help you if you are stuck on where to start with revisions.

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NaNoWriMo Strikes Again

I haven’t properly participated in NaNoWriMo in over a decade. (Holy crap, National Novel Writing Month has been around longer than a decade! I feel old now.) Those half-assed modified years don’t count, if only because I never took them seriously. This year? I figured it wasn’t worth even thinking about.

Then one friend made the assumption that I was participating. My, “Lol! No – did you forget I just had a baby?” response morphed itself into a fairly convincing argument for participating.

Because I’m caring for the little one, I won’t be working for all of November. I’ve been struggling to write something – anything – for so long. I desperately need practice to stretch those storytelling muscles. Particularly as my career/life plan from this point forward is to focus on creative things, which will hopefully include finding ways to make money through those creative things.

Although I will be returning to work, it will be part-time enough to still permit me that creative focus in terms of time, energy, and brain space.

So I need to stretch those writing muscles that have more or less atrophied over the last nine months. Writing – storytelling – is a craft and a skill that requires regular practice and repetition like any other.

Also, 90% of my waking hours I spend with her in my arms. This makes doing anything else a challenge. (As I type this one-handed, she is sleep-sqirming on my chest.) But while everyone tells me that contact is wonderful (it is) and you can’t spoil a newborn (my attachment issues rejoice), she is already nearly four weeks old. As much as I adore the constant snuggles, Future Me will not thank me if I don’t start weaning us both off that comfort dependency.

All this boils down to: yes, I am making a good-faith effort to participate in and win NaNoWriMo in my modified way.

I won’t necessarily be working on a novel. Instead, I’ll be counting everything I write (including blog posts!) and doing one writing prompt each day. I’ll post these prompts over on my brand-new Dreamwidth account. (Dreamwidth theoretically will give me the accountability of community without filling my other blog with unedited drivel of dubious quality.)

Who knows? Maybe I’ll get a new novel out of a prompt.

On that note, please share your favorite prompt sources! I’ll need all the help i can get to track down 30 prompts I care about enough to write. Because yes, I am that picky.

I also plan to get some novel revision done and write/prep at least two short stories for submission. After all, I set a goal for the year of at least two submissions and have so far done exactly none.

November will be an exploratory month. A month of throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Will I hit 50,000 words? Highly doubtful. Will I manage a prompt a day? Two short stories? I have no idea how realistic any of these goals are for my new reality. I’m not holding my breath, but I’m going to work my ass off to do what I can. Without losing sight of the wonder that is my daughter.

So. Are you doing NaNoWriMo this year?

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