Priorities

It's the bane of most yet-to-be-published writers: with everything else going on in my life, how do I make space to write?

I'm hardly an exception. Between requirements at the Day Job and personal obligations like heading to the gym, spending time with the spouse, taking care of household chores and the like, it can be hard to block out time for writing. Worse, when I've finally sat down with some writing time to use, sometimes there's just nothing left to pour onto the page.

This really comes down to priorities. If working on the novel is important enough, making time becomes simpler (if not necessarily easier). But there's a subtler level, too: none of us is infinite. We all have to marshal our time and our energy. Just because I've managed to score some free time doesn't mean that I'll be able to use it effectively. If I've been shorting myself on sleep (and I frequently do) or failing to take care of myself in some other way (eating well, exercising, keeping my personal life as drama-free as possible), I won't have enough left to do anything like a good job, or to get any sort of fulfillment out of the experience.

The temptation is there to gut it out, to stay up until all hours and bleed onto the page--damn the torpedoes! sleep is for the weak!--but I know that I don't accomplish much by clawing a few hours clear if my brain is tapioca and all I can do is stare at the screen or write journal entries about how I'm so tired and nothing's coming to me. People at work have a right to the best you can do for them; why is your novel worth anything less?

Summing up: one mark of having your priorities in order is carving out the time you need. Another mark is spending yourself wisely: if writing is important, do what you can to make yourself--your best self--available for it.

-Rich

On Technology and Creative Friction

I've spent a fair amount of time this week, between plot outlining and character sketching for The Work (which is going outstandingly, thanks very much), refurbishing an old Dell Inspiron B130 laptop of Amy's. It's 2006-vintage with upgraded memory, which means it's a very competent Windows XP box. I'm typing on it now.

It's got a 15" screen and weighs several pounds, which is gargantuan by today's featherlight standards of netbooks, 13-inch Macbook Airs and "ultrabook" PCs. I do have a netbook which is doing yeoman's work as a primary machine (thanks to its capacious hard drive), but its keyboard, while usable, isn't quite big enough for fast or accurate typing with my big mitts.

I did need to replace the Dell's keyboard, though, which brings me to the subject of the post. Whether through heavy use or simple age, the Dell's original keyboard had become stiff and reluctant to recognize keypresses. Luckily Amazon offered a replacement for $10, which arrived yesterday. Yank the battery, pop a panel, unscrew the old keyboard, install the new, and suddenly the laptop types like a dream. Now that I've stripped off all the gnarly mid-decade software and run through Microsoft's patching gauntlet, it's become a quite respectable and comfortable word processing computer. So comfortable, in fact, that I may well make this computer my primary writing machine.

The Dell's 15" screen and full-size keys are like coming home: I used to use an old (2004-vintage) Mac Powerbook G4 for writing, but I let Apple OS-revise it into senescence: I really should have kept it on OS X Tiger, but wiping it and going back would be too much grief, now. Windows XP, by contrast, is still getting patched, still supports most Windows software (most notably Google Chrome, MS Word 2010 and Scrivener for Windows), and runs like greased lightning on cheap old hardware like this.

It's surprising the difference that a good keyboard and working environment can make for smooth writing. The netbook's screen is just a little too small, its keyboard a smidgen too cramped for comfort, which makes a big enough difference that I'd been using the netbook plugged into an external flatscreen and keyboard just to make it palatable. With the Dell, that's not an issue: despite weighing nearly double what the netbook does, I've been happily typing with the full-sized laptop on my lap-desk all morning, while I would have moved off onto the plugged-in desktop and its less-comfy chair by now with the netbook.

I know: first-world problems, right? Still, I try never to let little stuff serve as an excuse not to write, but getting the little stuff right can really help out by making writing just that much more pleasant and distraction-free.

-Rich

Thoughts and a Request: Nanowrimo Postmortem; Plunging into the Worlds of Horror and the Weird

Well, Nanowrimo didn't work out: November kicked my posterior this year, but the ways it did so were for the most part unpreventable and only slightly foreseeable, so I don't feel but so bad  about it. I fell out of love with my concept about midmonth, too, which didn't help.

However, my falling out of love came largely because of a new enthusiasm: horror and weird fiction. In the run-up to Halloween this year, as I mentioned a few posts ago, the guys in the Magic City Writers group suggested that I look into horror writing, since I enjoyed our spooky/creepy exercises so much.

The more I think about it, my very tactile, very description-heavy style might well lend itself to horror/weird. I'm already a China Miéville fan, and some of the Dean Koontz and Stephen King I've read has been quite compelling. So, I've been buying up all the Kindle horror I can find/afford (and putting the rest on my Christmas wish lists), and I've begun a search for my much-neglected (and buried in my recent office renovation) copy of Vandermeer's anthology The New Weird, which along with comprehensive Poe and Lovecraft anthologies, ought to give me a suitably diverse place to start as I try to build up my literacy in these areas.

I've already got a few story ideas percolating to get started: as I produce prose I'll air some of it here, but I fully expect to be raw and stumbling for a while as I discover which ends are the pointy ones.

So, the request, for those who've read this far: in the comments, if you have favorite horror or weird-fic authors or titles, please recommend them! I need to read as widely and as deeply as I can, so I'm inclined to try a little bit of everything while I find my feet. Thanks!

-Rich

Genre Spelunking: That "Darwin Colossus" wound up Quasi-Steampunk

So. My first attempt at publish-worthy prose is steampunk, or at least the type that's Victorian-revivalist, set in a not-too-distant future. The original concept story I wrote a few years back was actually cyberpunk, in style as well as setting, but as I began reworking it, weeks and weeks back, I felt like it needed something to give it flavor and offer some small basis for a social dimension. Thus "Proxy Bloodsport" became "Darwin Colossus."

Fitness, Mental and Physical

Went to the Magic City Writers group meeting last night, and the critique (not of my work this time, we rotate) was a bit more contentious than it's been in the past. Here's hoping it settles down for next time!

Tonight, in addition to (at long last) work on getting Darwin Colossus suitable for Beta Reader perusal, I'll be heading to the gym. I've been an avid follower of Tim Ferris's 4 Hour Body program, and it's worked well for me, both in terms of adding muscle mass, and reducing the relative stoutness of my tum. After the chaos of the past few months, Amy and I have returned to an exercise program, and we're flourishing for it.

Not coincidentally, I find it much easier to write (and to write well) when I'm doing a better job of taking care of my body. Mur Lafferty of I Should Be Writing podcast fame did a pair of episodes on the subject of staying healthy lately, and her advice is good--I highly recommend it.

I think there's something that needs saying on the subject of writerly mental health, too. Not just in the staying-out-of-the-rubber-room sense (important though that is), but in the sense of regulating one's input, one's "diet." One of the maxims of writing is that you have to do a lot of reading as well. Any writer planning on getting published needs to be familiar with the big authors, both historical and up-and-coming, in one's genre. Read a lot, and read widely. For that matter, listen to podcasts like I Should Be Writing and Writing Excuses regularly. Good advice I've heard is that for every hour you spend writing a day, you should try to spend at least an hour reading. You want to know the material you'll be both compared to and competing with, know the trends, know the tricks of the trade, and get a feel for what consumers of your product (because that's what it is, after all, if publishing is the goal) are expecting and demanding.

Another part of writerly head-health is attitude. As an example, it took me a long (long) time to get over my posture of scarcity toward my own work: "This is my Magnum Opus, my only golden perfect snowflake of an idea. If I screw it up, I'll never have another chance." The Writing Excuses guys, as well as just growing older and perhaps a little wiser, helped me through this, and now writing isn't nearly the angst-ridden chore that it used to be. Amy noticed (me sitting down to write used to herald great tension and grief in the house, which didn't give her or me much incentive to encourage it), and my output has improved hugely, both in qualitative and quantitative terms. An attitude of plenty ("I'm learning more and getting better at this all the time, and I've got great ideas spilling out of my head") has made all the difference.

Strive for health: the image of the starving, alcohol-addled writer suffering for his work in a garret may be romantic, but it's a hellacious way to make a living.

-Rich