A Pattern To Emerge – Writing Challenge

So, the pattern I speak of is going to assert itself if I have my druthers. And that pattern is this:

I want you to come to my blog every Wednesday. Because every Wednesday in 2015, I plan to have a short story written. This shall be the day each week that I’ll check in with a new story, god willing. I promise they’ll be short – not my usual bloated messes. Because that’s a part of the challenge to myself. I have 2,000 words maximum. The challenge is not just a creative one, but a technical one. I have to learn to be concise, to know that I have the determination to kill my darlings as it were. I’m finding submission guidelines to be pretty uniform: less than 2,000 words or GTFO.

This Wednesday’s story is written. I’ve let it marinate a bit, but I’ll run it through a quick edit and pop it into place then. I’m also working on the next story – just a rough. I’m letting myself get ahead because it gives time for polish and editing – something I know I need. I have a bad habit of putting up work that sorely needs it.

I can’t wait to have fifty two stories to share.

January 12, 2015 0

Short Story Writing Challenge

Nano is real popular insofar as challenges go.

Despite my current feelings toward it, it’s really good for people starting out, and it did a lot for me in getting my writing process down.

However, I’m finding my writing needs changing a bit. It’s hard to write long format now and I feel like that creative core inside me is atrophying a bit. I need to do something measurably possible in the time I have available to me.

So I think I shall devise a challenge of my own.

It will involve zero knights, and zero herrings. Well, maybe red herrings. But 2,500 words is a little short to be throwing out red herrings.

I don’t want to name it, so it’ll just be a personal challenge and I can post the results right here – and you can yell at me when it’s not getting done.

I’m thinking that the challenge should involve the script that Ben hooked me up with, already pre-loaded with the 20 master plots, and, genres, settings, and elements that I already like. Each short story should be somewhere between 1,500 and 2,500 words (challenging for me – my average ‘short story’ is something like 5K-6K words).

With that in mind, my first story the script popped out was:

I’m writing a Dystopian Forbidden Love story, featuring Ghosts and Urban Exploration in The Middle of Nowhere.

Well… I’ll see you next Tuesday (Oh god. The pop culture meaning is killing me).

December 16, 2014 0

NaNoWriMo – Be Creative All the Damn Time

You Know What? I don’t think I’m gonna wait for NaNoWriMo this year. The past couple years have been fun, but I gotta say… I participated in it one out of those three years and finished a manuscript. I can cross that off the bucket list. Participation is fun and all, but this year I’ve decided I don’t just have to be creative in November.

I got my idea early this year and just couldn’t keep it in. Not even after compiling a database of all of my favorite stuff to create a killer mash-up generator – shout out to Ben for writing the script to make it happen. Not even with the promise of literary abandon and excitement. Not even with the sweet, sweet promise of a seal of achievement.

I think a big part of it is that a group of good friends in the past three years got together to take the challenge, but also to up the stakes. We’d toss stuff into hats for each other to write about and see what came out. But, as groups of adults are wont to do, some procreated, some got busy with their lives, tragedies struck. It’s just not gonna come together. Without that collaborative event, I think this year I’ll start working early. I think I’ve started to learn what a lot of NaNo critics say:

Why should we put all of this effort into just November?

I’ll be creative when I goddamn feel like it.

I felt creative three days ago and posted a bit from the most recent project, tentatively titled ‘Occupancy’ (you might even still see some of it here). And then, I heard a ridiculous little voice say ‘just wait, it’s two weeks until November!‘

I strangled that little voice before it could say anything else as colossally stupid.

NaNoWriMo - hannity — I wonder if the little voice looked anything like this idiot…

Because why defer that which makes me feel right in the world (though writing a story about a seemingly abandoned apartment complex-slash-prison being a thing that makes me feel good is kind of frightening)? Why put it off when all of the cylinders are firing exactly as I want them to? Procrastination for the sake of Nano feels suddenly dumb. I can use that idea generator anytime I want. I don’t need target word counts, I don’t need a feel-good certificate from total strangers.

I need to sit my ass in my chair and work on my stories. I need to pump out words because they’re the right words, not because of an artificial time constraint. I loved NaNo the years I participated, and some great stuff came out of it. But, this year, I think I’m in it because I want to be a writer. I want to have something I’m doing all of the eleven other months of the year too.

So I’m gonna write at my own pace this year. I’m gonna do my thing how I’d like to.

Cause the guy stuck in this weird apartment complex I’ve created isn’t going to go insane on his lonesome.

Better get writing.

October 24, 2014 0

Attention Span of a Weasel On Speed

My largest creative problem I fear is my utter inability to focus on one damn thing. My attention span is narrow. I can blame it on whatever I like. Perhaps my upbringing in front of the boob tube has something to do with it. Maybe it’s my neurochemistry. Maybe it’s the fact that I live in a goddamned amazing world filled with neat, shiny stuff. Maybe the internet has too many rabbit holes (damn you, Wikipedia).

But at the end of the day, the result is the same: staying focused is really hard for me sometimes.

I often generate multiple creative imperatives simultaneously from the base of my lizard brain, and I have multiple ways to express them. I am trained not just in the ways of writing creatively (though as I’ve aged, I feel this has become my focal point for my creative energies), but I also have college-level training with visual arts, and musical experience as well. I feel tugs of each frequently – with my musical training being one aspect sorely missing given I live in a tightly packed apartment complex and haven’t played a brass instrument in years. Sometimes these pulls come in too fast to even shift gears. I’ve frequently felt the tug to do a webcomic but always feel pulled in too many directions to do it. With all the distractions, I’m not even sure I could keep that a tight schedule. It’s a miracle I remember to go to work some days.

I’m hoping that this blog can help me reign in some of the aspects of creativity into focused into certain directions, partly using the blog’s audience, so that I might draw down focused fire on any one project at a given time.

In the name of focus, I have several projects in mind that I’m listing here for posterity. Maybe if I throw darts at them long enough, I can find one to attack, then complete.

So, here they are:

– Novel draft completed in 2010 (Modern Fantasy, Requires proofreading, continuity edit, and polish)

– Novel draft raft Completed in 2011 (Dystopian Sci-fi, Requires proofreading, continuity edit, and polish)

– Incomplete draft started in 2012 (Speculative Fiction and Espionage, First draft completion needed)

– Five Short story first drafts written in 2011 (Multiple Genres, Requires proofreading, continuity edit, and polish)

– Unrealized project (Occult Thriller, Requires more full development of setting, characters, and underlying mythos)

– Unrealized project (Young Adult Fantasy, full development of setting, characters, and underlying mythology required)

That’s the to do list before any of the other ideas I have in my head can bang their way out.

Time to go to work.

September 3, 2014 0