Lost Marbles

So I recently suffered a personal setback and, in an effort to distract myself, I poured myself into the new novel. I had already begun chipping back at it, but found (with the amount of distraction I needed) that I was able to increase my output dramatically. I now have a rough first draft and am planning to jump right into the rewrite.

The thing that struck me (as it has with every completed project) was the question: "Why didn't I do this sooner?"

The answers are numerous, but the main point of it is distraction. Distracted by life, television, work, money, fb, hanging-out/"liming", family, etc. etc... All the distractions are there for entertainment and necessity. The necessities must be dealt with. There's just no way around that. But the entertainment... well that's where you can sit down and write. Write for the joy of it and remember what it is that really fuels the desire, which is the love of the craft.

I hope I'm finally learning to let the writing become the distraction (at least until it can become "the work").

I wouldn't go so far as to say that I lost my way, but I would sit and churn out a page here and there like it was my duty, a promise I had made to some old former-self to never give up on this dream, to put in the time until the windfall. Because, you see, you reach a point where you feel, "I need to do this," and forget how much you really WANT to do it.

For the first time in a long time I think I feel that old desire again. Not just the desire driven by the knowledge that I AM a writer. That nowhere else do I feel as at home, as relevant, or as satisfied. That this is what I have to do. But the desire also driven by the fun of it, of losing myself in a world of my own creation, of chasing my shadow through widows and refusing to let the real world catch me, age and reason be damned - at least for a little while, at least for a moment...

Life will surely come beckoning. Right now though, I'm writing for me again. Because I want to.

And I like it.

Un-Fun 1.2 – Making it Fun

The outline is done. Now comes the hard part… the other hard part. Making it -- forcing it -- into prose. Exciting prose. Not flowery, not literary. It’s just gotta get the story across while revealing character, but it definitely needs a voice. And I’d like the voice to be representative of the tone, and of me.

Last night, after I finished my outline, I decided to skim over an unfinished novel from a few years ago. It made me cringe in some spots; the immaturity of some ideas and the writing, and made me smile in other spots. There were plot points, characters, and setups in that prologue and first two chapters that I completely forgot about.

It was never my plan to re-read some of my own prose before sitting down to hammer out these treatments and synopsis, but I’m glad I did. Writing a treatment isn’t the same as writing a novel, but they share some obvious things in common and reading that stuff last night actually has me looking forward to what I used to think of as a daunting and painful task.

Here it is....

My first post. A year, almost to the day, from when Dan posted the first entry. And now, Im coming in from the cold to settle down into the role of a serious writer. Is that possible? Im not really sure. But this is a first big step.

Already my thoughts go haywire. Where do I begin? I've already started typing and erased the previous line about five times. This is not a good sign. So, I'm going to put some pertinent stuff here and call it done.

I'm writing. A novel. A slow, meandering process. Its a novel that I've been writing for fifteen years. It started strong, so many years ago, with a great opening paragraph. In my mind it became the paragraph that could never be topped. Then it became a few pages here, a few pages there. I turned to other stories, short ones. And completed a good handful. One of them was even published. It was a story called 'Permission'. It was published in Tesseracts 10, a Canadian anthology, which came out in 2006.

But. And this is the big, But. I never, ever could bring myself to restart that novel. It was my albatross. Lack of confidence, lack of motivation, lack of discipline. So many lacks, conspired against me. But, I've started again. Ive started at a page a day. A goal that has been mutually arranged with Hugh. As he is also fighting demons to complete his novel.

Questions and reasons and further musings will all be address in later posts. But for now, it's going well. Slowly, but well.