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By Tgreen, November 30, 2009 11:39 pm

When you’re participating in the NaNoWriMo event, there are two major milestones you always have in mind. One, of course, is 50,000 words. You have to get there or you don’t win. The other one is the end of your story. Ideally, the end and the 50,000 words will show up at around the same time, but it doesn’t always work that way. The first year I won, I needed around 82,000 words to wrap things up. The second time I won, I believe I blew past 60K without ever finding the ending. This year, given how much trouble I was having keeping to my writing schedule, I couldn’t afford to let the story go on for too long because there was no way I could keep up the pace once the 30-day deadline was though.

This is why I worked on a 2,000 words per day schedule. I’d get 60,000 words in November with that schedule, and if I couldn’t wrap the story in 60,000 words then maybe I wasn’t focused enough. When I fell 2 days behind and was never able to completely catch up, I was worried that I’d hit 50K but not “The End”, and this worrying caused me to focus in on plot more than I ever have before. And when I hit 50K on Day 27, I knew that at best I had 6,000 more words to work with, and possibly more like 4,000. The pressure was on.

Long story short (as if), I finished the story on Day 29 with a shade over 56,000 words. Hit the end with an entire day left to go, which is something I would’ve thought impossible way back on Day 1. Of course, on Day 1 the entire project felt mostly impossible because, as I’ve mentioned before, I had nothing back on Day 1. Not even a single idea. And yet here I sit on Day 30 with a 56,000 word story sitting on my hard drive waiting for a rewrite. On Days 1 through 29 I battled with my work schedule and my personal life to bang out approximately 2,000 words a day. On Day 30, I rested, except for rewriting 2 scenes right near the end that I had to fix because they bugged me all day.

Just for the hell of it, here’s how things started late the night of Day 1:

I grew up in an apartment building that I hated every minute I lived there.

I can almost guarantee that sentence will not appear in any future drafts of this story in whatever form it ultimately takes. And here’s how things wrapped on Day 29:

“Ah, well, no big deal. Memory’s a flaky thing anyway.”

I actually started to write one last paragraph after that, but that line seemed a good stopping point after all that had come before. I won’t be surprised if it doesn’t appear in any future drafts either, but you never know.

Now that NaNoWriMo is over, Happy Friday will be returning to this space, either this Friday or next, depending on how fast I can recover from the sleep-deprivation of the past month. Also coming back to this space will be updates on whatever creative project I take on next, because I had fun documenting this and you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. I’m not sure what that next creative project will be, but I’m hoping it won’t take too long to figure out.

After I do the initial read of this book, I might be looking for a couple of impartial readers to give it a look. If you’re interested in being one of them, shoot me an email or comment to this post and I’ll consider it. I may end up bypassing that step entirely, so please don’t be offended if you are interested and in the end I say no. I appreciate the interest, believe me. Hell, I appreciate the time any of you spent reading all these posts this month. I hope I didn’t cure too many cases of insomnia while documenting my crazy quest to write a 50,000 word book in 30 days. See you all in Happy Friday soon, and see you all back here next November for my next crack at NaNoWriMo (well, maybe).

T “step away from the keyboard, sir,” green

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By Tgreen, November 28, 2009 12:47 am

And somehow, 50K. After a brutal month where almost every day my job seemed to be conspiring to make sure I failed to write this novel in this month, it seems appropriate that the 50,000th word of the book turned out to be “working”. No lie, and it wasn’t planned. Sometimes these things just happen. Considering, as I believe I’ve mentioned before, I had no idea whether I even had a story in me when I started typing on November 1, it doesn’t surprise me at all that the word that gets me past the finish line described the last 27 days so succinctly.

I’m not done yet. I’ve got 3 more days to wrap this thing up, and I think now that I can do it. I’ll be really unhappy if I’m still working on this story on December 1. Because my plan is to rest for at least part of December and then do the scariest thing I’ve done since writing this book. That would be reading it. And once that’s done, I’ll be able to decide if I pissed away a month and brought on more stress than I’ve seen in awhile for little reward, or if, as I suspect, I’ve got something here.

I’m tired now so I’m gonna wrap this entry up now. I’ll be checking in at least once more before the month is over to let you know if I finished, to maybe offer up one last excerpt, and to reveal when Happy Friday will return to this space, since I know if any of you are coming here at all, it’s for the Top Ten Lists.

Enjoy the weekend. I’ve gotta go rest my writing fingers now.

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By Tgreen, November 27, 2009 12:15 am

I shouldn’t even be complaining because even though I’m 2 days off my writing schedule, I’m over 48,000 words and will hit the big 50K some time on Day 27. And, more importantly, I’m still on track to wrap the entire story by the end of the month. I really don’t want to be writing in December to finish things off like I did the last two times I won this. But even though things look good now, I paid for this. And I don’t mean the 10 bucks I donated to the organization that runs the NaNoWriMo thing. No, I paid to get to this point this week, and I’m gonna need some time to recover.

As much as I love a good holiday, especially one like Thanksgiving that’s based mostly around food and football, short weeks a work are always dangerous. We might only have 3 official work days on a week like this, but we still have a full schedule. So in that 3 days, they managed to get more than 30 hours of work out of me. This, as you can imagine, made it very hard to make up the two days I seem to have been behind for the last 2 weeks, and in fact it made it hard to not slip 3 or even 4 days back. If that had happened, I would’ve known for sure I wasn’t hitting 50K this year. I was just too worn out and sleep deprived to pull off the kind of comeback a 4-day loss would’ve required. I mean, I was so wiped out that I stood in the middle of the sidewalk on Tuesday night trying to figure out what day it was and whether or not the recycling was supposed to go out. On Wednesday night I stumbled home like Rocky in the 14th round, out on my feet and wondering what was keeping me up.

So every night, even after my one 10.5 hour day, I made sure I wrote something. I wasn’t hitting my 2,000 words, but I was still moving forward. As long as you can keep moving forward you’re doing pretty good no matter what it is you’re trying to do. This is something I learned a long time ago and it almost always holds true. This time around, the motivation that kept me moving forward was something that hit me on Monday. Because that afternoon, in the middle of some deadline chaos I wouldn’t wish on anyone, I had my aha moment.

I probably shouldn’t call it that. I believe Oprah and Allstate just went to court over that phrase. But what the aha moment is in my context here is that point where your story clicks into place and you can see everything that needs to happen to get to the end like it’s a big glowing line on the road. And so while I was banging away on whatever mind-numbing task I was being paid to do on Monday, the little piece of my brain still tending to the story suddenly figured it all out. Or figured out enough of it to make me want to say ‘aha!”. So with that in my back pocket, I couldn’t give up. I had to do whatever it took to stay close to schedule. If all had gone as planned, I would’ve hit 50K yesterday. Instead I’ll hit it tomorrow. Given the month I’ve had, I’ll take it.

So given the time left in the month, unless I get totally inspired and go hog wild this weekend, I’ll end the month at about 56,000 words. Is that enough to end the story the way my aha moment told me to? I’m really not sure. But I’m gonna work every trick I’v ever learned to try and make it happen. Because Monday? Could be another 10-hour workday. Woo hoo!

Hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving. The football didn’t do me any favors, but I wrote some cool stuff tonight so I suppose I’ll be thankful for that.

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By Tgreen, November 23, 2009 2:34 am

Somehow, and I know this is no coincidence, as soon as I realized I needed an ending for this book, the creative part of my brain cramped up and said it was done, and it headed off to take a steam and get a massage, which pretty much left me on my own to get through the rest of the month. Friday was pretty brutal, as I had no ideas and no time to write anyway, as my work schedule continued to grow in all kinds of new and interesting directions. I figured that I’d make it all up on the weekend. Who isn’t creative on the weekend?

Turns out, I’m not. Not this weekend, anyway. Too much to do around the house first. Then there was dinner out at the Cracker Barrel, where apparently Chinese Elvis works (don’t ask, because I was unable to get a picture, but if Elvis was Chinese and inclined to run a Cracker Barrel, this was him — though we all know Elvis is not Chinese and really works at the Waffle House, but sometimes it’s fun to speculate on such matters) , then a day of bills and emails and various other important online business, and before I knew it I was 3 1/2 days behind schedule, and still without a single creative idea to work with. Things were not looking good.

Eventually I forced my ass into my seat with the idea that I would write something, anything, and it would be good enough. So, distractions set aside, I opened my document, put fingers to keyboard, and wrote some crap. Big steaming piles of it for about 1,000 words. Bad enough to make me want to stop and spare the universe from such bad writing. It appeared that I had no interest in coming up with a way to wrap this thing up, leaving me the option of writing the word “gazpacho” 10,000 times and then ending the story with “A vampire did it.” Not exactly Hemingway, but still possibly enough to get me a movie deal at MGM.

Then somewhere during the next 2,000 words the creative part of my brain took pity on me and wandered back in, claiming it was just there to look for some old Spider-Man comic it had lost. It took one look at what I’d written, fell on the floor laughing, and when the laughs turned into heaving sobs, it took over and dragged me past the 40,000 word mark while also tossing in yet another mind-fuck for whoever ends up reading this story. Then as soon as it stopped typing it took off looking for the mystery bottle of Jack Daniels’ that may or may not be missing, leaving me to write this blog post myself.

Which probably explains a lot, come to think of it.

And now I find myself with a week left in this contest, a day and a half behind schedule, less than 10,000 words to go, and, at last, half a roadmap to the ending. I’ll take it.

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By Tgreen, November 21, 2009 2:40 am

By Tuesday night I’d managed to make up a full day of last week’s lost weekend, and I was feeling pretty good about my progress as i took the train home. Work was still kicking my ass up and down the length of Manhattan, but the story was working and until this month is over that’s gotta be a higher priority than anything going on in the office. Even as we lose yet another project manager (I can’t even count how many of those have come and gone since I started this job) and the schedule for next week looks like it might make me want to trade places with a Thanksgiving turkey, I have larger concerns. So I’m on the train, feeling good about the writing I’d done the first couple of days of the week while trying not to think about the office, when I had a huge realization. All of a sudden from out of nowhere came the thought that I was going to have to end this story, and soon.

Sure, if all you’ve ever done is read a book, you must think that the fact of a story ending would be a pretty basic element. Integral to the entire writing process, even. And yet once you’ve tried to write a book, you learn that the ending is the part you spend most of your time in denial about. You write your words and you make your progress but you try not to think about where you’re headed because it’s too scary to do that. But here I was, more than 30,000 words under my belt, and I’d passed the point where I had to know where it was all going. I’d laid down some hints throughout the story. Red herrings and false turns and honest-to-goodness foreshadowing. But still, no thought to what they were all supposed to add up to. I was thinking way more about the 50,000 word goal, and not nearly enough about the “The End” goal.

Besides all that hiding from the ending that I just mentioned, there’s probably another reason for this. The two other times that I started and “won” NaNoWriMo, I did so by working on stories that I’d been carrying around in the back of my head for awhile. I had a basic understanding of some characters and where I wanted to steer the plot, but most of all I was pretty sure where I wanted these stories to end up. And the first time through, I managed to get there in 36 day and something like 82,000 words. The second time, I botched the ending and never finished, even though I wrote well more than 50,000 words, but the point is I knew basically where I was headed, even if I didn’t quite get there.

But this year? This year I sat down with nothing late the night of November 1, so I grabbed a couple of books off my bookshelf and began flipping pages randomly, looking at sentences and hoping to swipe one a a starting point. I didn’t find one I liked, so eventually I wrote this:

I grew up in an apartment building that I hated every minute I lived there.

From that, approximately 2,000 words flowed, and when I stopped for the night I had 2 directions I could’ve chosen. One was a straight up basic story idea about some loser with a job he didn’t like. The other was a light science fiction story about memory. The next day, I chose the science fiction route and never looked back. This story that I’d never realized I had in my head was being born right in front of me, and all I had to do was type it. But because I never knew this story existed until it started to exist, I had no goal. No thought about what it meant or where it was going. And it wasn’t until Dy 17 that I figured out I needed to know this stuff.

This epiphany was followed by two brutal work days, one of which was more than 10 hours long. But somewhere in that time I considered where the story might have been pointing, and I made sure to keep that in mind while banging out my 2,000 or so words per day. And while I’m pretty sure I’ll have to stick to my original plan of 60,000 words in a month, I think I have a shot at wrapping this up when I get there. It goes to show that there’s no better epiphany than the kind of epiphany you have when you’re on the subway. Because not only are you having important ideas that will help you later, you’re also forgetting you’re stuck on a subway train, at least for a couple of seconds.

But enough of that. I promised n excerpt, so you get an excerpt. More half-baked (at best) first draft writing that I’ve barely read and haven’t edited. Enjoy. Or tolerate and don’t come looking for me to complain to. Currently the story is named Rememories Are Made of This, but that’s going to change many more times before I’m done…

“Douglas Sweeney?” the voice on the other end asked. It was a deep, familiar voice.

“That’s me.”

“Douglas, it’s Lew Decker.” I already knew this, but said hello just the same. “It appears you’re in the middle of an eventful evening. Are you aware of this?”

“I just turned on the TV right now.”

“Good, good. I don’t like being the bearer of bad news.”

As if getting a call at home from Lewis wasn’t bad enough, the fact that he mentioned “bad news” in the first 30 seconds just made it that much worse. I couldn’t think of anything to say so I kept my mouth shut.

“Not that we blame you for what happened,” Lewis continued. “I’ve already been in touch with the partners and after a close review of this video, we all agree that both you and your colleague handled a difficult situation with professionalism and empathy. This is what we like to see from every Rememory, Inc. employee, though we prefer not to see it broadcast to the world on every cable news outlet. But we can’t unring that bell, can we?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“We appreciate your efforts, Douglas. From going out of your way on short notice to even be at the clinic, to thinking on your feet and handling a potentially awkward situation with great aplomb.”

“Do we know why this happened?”

“Not for sure. Not yet. We’re investigating this closely, and we’ve enlisted the authorities as well. Obviously this was an attempt to discredit us. It appears someone wanted you to agree to help this boy even though all of our guidelines state clearly that you should not. I’m surprised they bothered to release it once you denied him his request. Have you had a chance to listen to the commentary about the video?”

“Just a little bit,” I said.

“It’s not worth watching, trust me. But if you do see any of it, you’ll notice that this time around our critics are grasping at the thinnest of straws. My theory is whoever made this video released it only because they’d already paid for it and were hoping that any publicity for us is bad publicity.”
“That’s usually the safe bet.”

“Sadly, yes,” Lewis said with a sigh. “It usually is. But this time someone overreached, and with any luck, we’ll make this person pay for the mistake.”

“I hope so.”

“We may need you to speak with one of our investigators in the next few days. It depends on what we find out in the short term. For now I’m going to ask you to lay low. Do not engage with any members of the media in any way. We expect you to be inundated with interview requests as soon as the media discovers your identity. Practice saying the words ‘no comment’ because those two words will become your best friends for at least the next week. Refer all interview requests to our media department but don’t worry, you won’t be doing any interviews. Can you handle that?”

“Yes, sir. Not talking to the media? I think I can do that.”

“Thank you, Douglas. I know you’re scheduled to be out in the field tomorrow, but instead you and Abe will be coming into the office. We’re going to assess the situation overnight and decide tomorrow if it does more harm than good to have you making house calls while this is still an issue in the media.”

He thanked me again and then ended the phone call. I channel-surfed until I found someone just starting the story again and this time I watched the entire video without commentary. Whoever was responsible had access to some good equipment, because the video and accompanying audio were very clear. It ended abruptly after I started speaking and Adam, or whatever his real name was, stormed out. I thought I looked bad, like a heartless jerk who didn’t care how badly this boy was hurting over the loss of his mother. Now that I knew it was all fake, I thought I should’ve felt better, but still, my reaction was to the reality of the situation as it happened, not what it turned into. And anyone watching would understand that and probably agree that I was a heartless jerk. Unless I found a woman looking for a heartless jerk, I’d probably remain date-free for the foreseeable future.

Why, yes, when you put it that way, there probably are better ways I could be spending my November. Like lobbying the Nielsen ratings people to allow me into the family. Let’s hear it for first drafts. Woo hoo!

More later. Gotta make a big push on this and try to get out ahead again before the holiday.

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By Tgreen, November 17, 2009 1:07 am

Things are getting weird as the month rolls on. Weird, or just worse? Let’s go with weird for now, with the option to change later if need be.

So traditionally, Friday is a rough day at work because by the time I show up I’ve already worked close to 40 hours for the week and my energy and motivation are quite low. As it turns out, dropping 2 or more hours of writing per day into that schedule doesn’t make things better. It makes them, what did we agree on again? Oh yes, weird. Like how last Friday I started the day getting called up to see my boss. And how, totally unprovoked, he tried to explain how the company’s default setting is not “Screw Tgreen”. And how later that day the company did, in fact, screw Tgreen once again.

Friday basically helped me discover the exact amount of sleep deprivation that takes away my creativity and replaces it with exhaustion. I banged out maybe 1,000 words that night, half of what I schedule myself to write every day, and I passed out. Not to worry, though, because it’s the weekend now and there’s always extra time over the weekend to catch up. Except not when I’m taking a long-overdue trip up to my dad’s and I don’t want to spend the entire day being an antisocial writing prick. So Saturday I bang out zero words, which is considerably less than the 2,000 words I schedule myself to write every day, and go to sleep wondering if I was too tired to even enjoy the beers I was drinking, because I didn’t enjoy them very much.

Which brings us to Sunday. I was back home that evening with plenty of time to write. Except I still hadn’t slept enough the past two nights and there was stuff to watch on TV and maybe the idea of writing 50,000 words in a month is as stupid as it sounds. Quitting sounds like so much fun. Sleep, TV, reading, relaxing, no stumbling around like a zombie — just some of the things open to anyone smart enough to quit this contest. But I decided I wasn’t ready for that and my excuses were lame.

The thing is, that mind-fuck I mentioned last week? It taught me a quick and hard lesson. If you’re gonna try to pull a fast one on your audience, you’d better be ready to follow through on it. I wasn’t, and so after busting ass to get to that point, I had no idea what to do next. It was almost like Day 1 all over again, but worse because for several days I’d been craning away without any problems, and then suddenly I was at a dead stop. That’s why quitting seemed so attractive. Sure, I was tired and stressed out and the idea of some relaxing sounded so nice. But the truth was I was scared that I’d written myself into a corner and wouldn’t be able to get out of it. That’s why quitting seemed so attractive. And yet that night I stumbled to the keyboard, banged out another 1,000 words, and then stopped when I realized I was falling asleep sitting up, and also continually referring to one of my characters as “Ray,” which was weird since there’s no Ray in this story. Not yet, but maybe there should be. But I digress.

So the final score after the second full weekend of NaNoWriMo was that I was officially 4,000 words off schedule. Still at the halfway point for the contest and still technically ahead of a schedule that would get me to exactly 50,000 words in 30 days, but behind the schedule I’d set for myself. This sure felt like the Lost Weekend I was worried about last week. I needed to make a comeback and I wasn’t sure how that could happen.

Cut to Monday. Monday’s are hard to predict in my job. Sometimes there’s such a mad rush to get things out the door after a weekend that the day starts of like the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, and sometimes I could almost slip into a boredom coma due to lack of projects. Today, despite the fact that my official schedule said I’d be busy as hell, turned out to be a boredom coma day. This could be the comeback I was looking for.

Small problem — I’ve never found a way to write much while at this job. Our desks are all out in the open and a piece of fiction doesn’t resemble the work I do at all. Plus, I didn’t even know if I could write any extended amount while sitting at that desk waiting for a project to appear. But I figured I had to at least try. And 4,000+ words later, I have to say I succeeded. By writing more than twice my scheduled word count, I made up half the Lost Weekend. And even better, I managed to write myself out of the corner, pull a second mind-fuck out of the hat, and set myself up for at least a couple of days of writing where I know more or less what I should be doing. Not bad for a Monday.

Things took an ugly turn at the end of the day. The “Screw Tgreen” policy was once again in full effect, and I ended the day on a bad note that may come back to bite me in the ass. I’m sure I’ll find out early Tuesday if that’s the case. For now, I’ll bask in the glory of a word count that’s only 1 day off schedule, not two.

Coming next, another excerpt. Probably no less crappy, but hope springs eternal.

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By Tgreen, November 12, 2009 1:35 am

If I had to do a self-critique of my writing, I’d say that plots are not my strong point. Anything I’ve written of any length tends to meander. It’s like I kind of know where I want to go, but I’m in no hurry and so I’ll take the scenic route. In my case the scenic route usually involves lots of conversations with lots of punchlines that don’t really do anything for the story, and long observations that are supposed to let the readers get to know the characters but are mostly there to show off the shit that I’ve noticed in my lifetime. This can be a problem with my shorter works too, but usually I don’t have enough space in those to show off my lack of plotting skills.

The thing about writing a 50,000-word novel in a month is that you’re not supposed to have too much time to devote to these kinds of diversions. Somehow I found a way, though, the last two times I won this NaNoWriMo thing. The first time, I offered so many small, pointless diversions that I had to leave out huge swaths of what the story was supposed to be about in the first place. And I still needed 84,000 words to do it! The second time, I wrote way more than 50,000 words that month but was unable to actually get to the end of the story. Still haven’t.

And so, plot. What you’re supposed to be doing when writing a novel in a month is, I think, do everything you can to move the plot forward. You’ll push and shove and poke that plot forward if it kills you. Even if moving the plot forward is a lot like trying to help a fat man climb a fence, you’ll prop yourself at the bottom and shove that fat ass up and up and up every day. Plot is king when you’re in a hurry. You forget that at your peril.

This year’s novel is different from my last two in that the basic plot presented itself to me by the time I’d finished my first 2,000 words. And every night as I’ve sat down to type, I’ve kept that plot focused and I’ve shoved that fat ass for all it’s worth. Snappy dialogue? Only if the snappiness contributes in some way to the plot. Observation on the lonely life in this world? Maybe only a little, again only if the character needs that lonely observation to push that plot over the fence today. I have no illusions that I’ve turned myself into a lean, mean plotting machine, but I’m trying.

Which brings me to tonight’s batch of words. A few days ago I realized that the nature of my story, a light science fiction tale that really only asks you, dear reader, to accept one out-of-the ordinary situation while everything else remains grounded in reality, allowed for the possibility of a major mind-fuck somewhere near the midway point. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to execute the mind-fuck, or if I’d be able to pull it off, but it was in the back of my head as a possibility. And as I continued to write and continued to shove that fat ass over the fence, I realized that whether I should have or not, whether I could keep the mind-fuck from totally derailing the book, I wanted to try it. Hell, I needed to try it. The only problem was, I didn’t know how.

You see, my main character refused to accept the mind-fuck gracefully. He was all for it if I could make it happen organically in the plot, but I couldn’t. For the last 2 days my writing slowed to a crawl while I danced around the scene that would lead to the mind-fuck. There was no way I could think of to get my character to do the one thing he needed to do to get me there. This was dragging me down and making it harder to write. My mood wasn’t helped by some of the antics at work, where everyone I work with seems determined to make me hate them all by Friday. Things got so bad that by about 5PM today I figured I’d get home so pissed off and burned out and exhausted that I’d get no writing done, and maybe it would make more sense to just give up on this 50,000 word plan.

And before I could even complete the thought, I figured out the one way to get my character to do what I needed him to do. The plot and its fat ass was shoved over the fence for another day. And tonight, I got home pissed off and burned out and exhausted, but eventually I put my ass in the seat and executed the hell out of that mind-fuck. I’ve got no idea where to go next, but I like my chances of figuring something out tomorrow.

So, remember, plot good. Mopey emo observations about the world, bad. And, if I learned any lesson today, it’s that one should never underestimate the things a redheaded woman, even a fictional one, can get a man to do when she sets her mind to it.

Today’s musical inspiration (while working, not writing since I’m still going music-free once I sit down at the keayboard) comes from Nick Lowe’s All Men Are Liars:

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By Tgreen, November 10, 2009 1:22 am

I’m not sure how it took me 9 days to notice this, but I’m not listening to any music while I write this month, and that’s something that hardly ever happens. Not only do I usually listen to music while I write, but I also usually make up soundtracks for stories as I write them. But not this time. Not so far. I’m sure it could all change tomorrow, but for some reason the thought of listening to music while working on this story never even occurred to me. Very strange.

It might be a good thing, though. On previous writing projects I’d sometimes find that I’d be writing scenes to the pace of what I was listening to. Sometimes I’d even work in lyrics or ideas I got from lyrics as I listened. I never gave any thought to whether or not this was good for my writing — it was just the way I’d done it since college, basically. And yet this time, silence. It’s too early for me to say if the writing’s any better or worse for the absence of music, because I haven’t read any of this thing yet and I have no plans to until I’m done.

One difference brought on by the lack of music is that I’m not using the songs I’m hearing to help me shape the theme or idea of the story. I’d allow myself to be very influenced by whatever I was listening to, and so it’s no surprise that it was a song that made me realize I hadn’t been listening to music this time around. While working today, I heard this lyric from Bruce Springsteen’s Devils & Dust and I saw that my main character was potentially being influenced by it:

I got God on my side
I’m just trying to survive
What if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love
Fear’s a powerful thing

That will probably be kicking around in my head as I work though this week’s section of the plot and what’s driving my main character to do what he’s doing. Right now the story’s at a bit more than 19,000 words, which is probably the most I’ve ever written without headphones on.

After my mini-revelation about music, I got into a conversation with a coworker who needs me to do some work for him on Wednesday. It’s not a huge project, but to do it right it takes more than half a day. And I told him that I already have another project for Wednesday that will require almost a full day to do. So all of a sudden I’m booked for potentially a day and a half worth of work, and I’ve gotta squeeze 2,000 words in there as well. I can’t wait to see how I pull that off. I can guarantee I’ll be blasting something out of the headphones while I’m at the office.

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By Tgreen, November 9, 2009 1:15 am

So, while work is apparently the big hurdle during the week, it’s also likely to screw up the weekends too because by Friday night I’m way too tired to want to write. I’d managed to write more than 2,000 words per day for the first 5 days of this month, which put me out ahead of my schedule by day 6. At which point the long week and the bad work schedule and the very concept of Friday and therefore a decent night’s sleep all conspired to knock me off track. I wrote that night, but basically I only wrote the difference between whatever I had and the 12,000 words I needed to be at by the end of the day. And that meant that if I wanted to stay on track, I had to bang out 2,000 words on a Saturday where I had moving-in-related work to do all day, and a surprise birthday party to go to that night. A birthday party with an open bar and a bottle of Jack Daniels, a combination that’s practically my own version of kryptonite. And then I’d have to do it again on a Sunday where all I wanted to do was relax, turn my brain off, and watch football.

This coincided with a weird writing block that hits me sometimes. I’d started to figure out where the plot of this book is supposed to go, and I even knew how I wanted to get there. And yet, once I knew this stuff I had no interest in actually writing any of it. It’s like I’d figured out the puzzle, so why did I have to fill in the boxes? I don’t know why this happens, but it does. In fact, if it hadn’t happened I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have slacked off so much Friday night. This was a potentially huge trainwreck, and I wasn’t sure I knew how to avoid it.

Turns out the best way to avoid it is to put ass in seat and write anyway, which is what I did. I managed to write enough to hit my word count and still get a couple hundred words ahead again. I still know where the plot’s supposed to go next, but I’m trying not to think about it too much when I’m not at the computer. It helps if the words are fresh when I hit the keyboard. But I have to think about things a little so I keep my enthusiasm going. This is harder than I thought it would be, and I’m starting to remember just how twisted one has to be in order to create things like this. It’s still a lot of fun an exactly the thing I’d want to be doing if I could afford to ditch work and do it, but there are more daily challenges in the process than I remembered.

And so, this weekend turned out to not be the lost weekend I thought it might be as I walked home on Friday night. I’ll be out of town for part of next weekend, though, so already that one’s not looking so good. Add to that the fact that I’m pretty sure I only know the plot of this book until about Wednesday or Thursday, and next weekend could be an even bigger trainwreck than I thought this past one would be. At least it’s not boring.

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By Tgreen, November 6, 2009 1:59 am

So yesterday I wrote about how a crazy work schedule could be the one thing that might sink this whole enterprise before the month is through (even more so than a lack of actual writing talent, an affliction I’ve lived with for many years). Well, today’s schedule was slightly better, though I spent half the day trying and failing to pick a fight over yesterday’s fiasco. I used to be way better at picking fights like this. I’m out of practice. I’m also out of practice at writing over 2,000 words per day, but so far I’m still managing. The story’s at 11,420 words right now. I cannot complain one bit.

I think what I should do is organize some kind of betting pool to decide exactly when the sleep deprivation will start kicking my ass. With a side bet as to whether it screws up my job first or the book. I think it could go either way now. And frankly, the only reason it hasn’t already happened is that my job has basically zombie-fied me over the last 2 years. I could do (and probably have done) my job in my sleep, and eventually I’m sure I’ll do some writing in my sleep. The question then will be, will I even be able to notice a difference in writing quality? Perhaps not.

And now, as promised, a shitty excerpt:

“After the war I wanted no part of marriage. I’d seen some things that to this day make no sense to me. Did some things I’m maybe not so proud of too, you know? The idea of falling in love and even worse, getting married, well, I couldn’t reconcile that with what I’d seen in Europe during the war. This is how I came to not realize that a knockout like Kay was essentially throwing herself at me for several years after I came home. You ever know a woman who wanted you so badly she’d chase you down no matter where you tried to hide?”

“No, sir, not even a little bit,” I said. I was embarrassed to say it, but it should’ve been obvious to anyone who took a look at me that this was the truth.

“Me neither,” Abe said. “My wife usually acts like I’m lucky she ever gave me a second look.”

“They do that sometimes, women,” Hiram said. “Sometimes it’s completely justified. But mostly they’re just playing. Believe me, young man, if she’s playing with you like that, she’s still interested. You’ve got a good thing going there, I’d wager.”

Based on the stories Abe liked to tell, I’d wager that Hiram was totally off base. But since no one had actually met Mrs. Abe, no one could say for sure. All we had to go on was Abe’s word, and there was no telling how reliable that was.

“Did you know your wife during the war?” Abe asked. I was finished snapping our equipment together and now had to prep the aerosols that were the key to the process. If Hiram were already primed to think about the person in this memory, the whole thing would be that much easier.

“Oh no, no. We met years later. It was 1949, at a New Year’s Eve party. I was back from California and visiting an old high school buddy up in the Bronx. Neal, he was a writer. I think he was writing super hero comics or some such at that point, he had an apartment and was always throwing parties.”

“You had a friend who worked on comic books?” I asked. I don’t think I’d ever sounded so enthusiastic about anything at one of these sessions.

“Yes, Neal wrote for the comics for years back then,” Hiram said. “I don’t remember if he was still doing it in ’49. I don’t even remember what he wrote. I wasn’t into that sort of thing. I was happy for him that he had a good job, but that’s as far as my interest went.”

“So you met your wife at Neal’s?” Abe asked. He was shooting daggers at me with his eyes because I’d knocked Hiram off track. Rookie mistake. I knew better than that.

“Yes, yes, near the end of the night. It wasn’t quite midnight yet, but we were all hanging close to the radio to hear the countdown when it came. I was on the fringe of everything, by the kitchen, because I didn’t know a lot of people at the party and I was kind of shy. A bit like our young friend here.” Hiram gestured toward me with a lazy wave. I had to admit I liked Hiram for the sole reason that he kept calling me ‘young man’. I was on the wrong side of 40 and couldn’t recall the last time I’d been referred to in that way. It was a nice and unexpected ego boost. Maybe Abe and I could nick Hiram from Manny and Annette’s schedule. They were usually busier than we were anyway. They might not even notice.

“I can remember it clear as anything,” Hiram continued. “I’d backed into the kitchen to freshen my highball when the tallest, thinnest young blonde girl asked me if I knew how to make a dry martini. Now of course, I knew nothing about martinis. All I knew is they were hard to make. But this beautiful young thing needed a martini to toast the new year and by god I was going to make her one. So I screwed up all my courage, courage I hadn’t used since the battlefield in France, and I engaged the most enthralling woman I’d ever met in a conversation while I set about mixing the most perfect martini known to man.”

“How did it turn out?” Abe asked.

“The drink was horrible. A crime against humanity, in fact. But somewhere in my stuttering, stumbling patter, Kay heard something she liked. We shared the first kiss of the new year, a polite friendly thing, not like the slobbering stuff you see kids do on the streets these days, and when she was leaving she gave me her number and made me promise to call her before I headed back out west.”

“And you did?”

“We wouldn’t be here today if I didn’t,” Hiram said, shrugging in Abe’s direction for my benefit. “Now come on, it’s been two months since I last went to Paris with Kay. Are we ready?”

“Yes, sir, we’re ready,” I said. I approached and swabbed a patch of skin above his left elbow and then stuck a small electrode on the spot. I did the same to his right arm, then I slipped a pale blue gas mask over his nose and mouth. I began reciting the standard list of instructions, but Hiram had done this before and he knew the steps almost as well as I did. When I was sure he was ready, I flipped a few switches on the console I’d constructed, then hit the gas. In seconds, Hiram’s eyes fluttered and closed, and then his head lolled back and the widest smile I’d ever seen spread across his face. He even looked less wrinkled in this position. Abe tucked a small pillow against the left side of his face to prevent his head from falling into an uncomfortable position.

“How long is this supposed to take?” Abe asked.

“Not sure. Manny’s notes didn’t say.”

“Goddamn Manny, he knows better than that.” Abe gave Hiram one last check, then crossed the room and plopped on the left end of the couch. He flipped on the TV and the two of us watched the local news while Hiram and Kay toured Paris in 1952.

Ah, I love the smell of bad first-draft writing in the morning.