Prose and Kaa

Full disclosure: I’ve written this post after-the-fact. In December, 2018, but later than it looks like it was posted. But I decided to take a cue from podcaster Chris Lester and sort of do a ‘writing update’ thing. And why let a little thing like ‘it was a month ago’ stand in my way?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

Disaster struck! Apple, in its wisdom, updated Safari, and they broke the extension that kills Facebook after a certain time. <shakes fist at sky> Why? Why?

There were two days when I had to write a bunch of documentation at work, and it sapped my desire to write fun words, and so I counted that as my writing for the day. Not emails, mind you: actual documentation for QA so they could test my code and know what to expect. So I count it. It’s not creative (although QA might take an opposing view on that . . .), but it was words on ‘paper,’ and I counted it. So there.

I did not do NaNoWriMo this year. I added the capability to my spreadsheet, because it was there and needed to be done (for certain values of ‘needed’). So in 2019 or 2020 (or going forward), if I decide to do NaNoWriMo, I have a mechanism in place to calculate, for each day of November, how many words per day I must achieve to meet the 50,000 word goal, and a switch to flip to turn NaNoWriMo Mode on or off. If it’s off, it just goes with the number of words required for the current level. And, even though I drove a grand total of sixteen hours over Thanksgiving weekend and visited friends and family in four different towns in Alabama, I by-God still managed to write some words every day. Yes, I did just pat myself on the back, because I freakin’ deserve it. :)

As a note: I have completed NaNoWriMo a number of times, and don’t need to prove to myself that I can write 50,000 words in 30 days. I wrote 122,400+ words one November. I think I deserve a pass if I choose not to participate. :)

For November, 2018, my stats are

• Words: 27,142
  • Daily average words: 905
• Time: 1443 minutes (24 hours, 3 minutes)
  • Daily average time: 48:06 min
• Average words/hour: 1,128
• Chain: 61 days
• Level: 3, on the 10th
• Quota: 350 words/day beginning on the 10th

Mirrored from WriteWright.

Full disclosure: I’ve written this post very after-the-fact. In December, 2018. But I decided to take a cue from podcaster Chris Lester and sort of do a ‘writing update’ thing. And why let a little thing like ‘it was three months ago’ stand in my way?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

I missed a day, and broke my chain. :( I had 43 days of straight writing — the most I’ve ever managed — and I visited my mother for her birthday at the end of the month and got sick, and then got home so late from that weekend that I was just exhausted and could literally not stay up long enough to write even 300 words unless it had been “All work and no play make Gary a dull boy” 30 times. Which was tempting, but no. :) I hated to break the chain, but it was unavoidable. So, I start over in October with a fresh new chain at 1, and it’ll take me a lot longer to get to level 3. Bummer, but I’m not going to beat myself up over it.

I also hit a milestone! On the first, I realized that I’d free-written enough material to start organizing it into a bona-fide outline! So on the 1st through the 7th, I broke down my brain-dump into chunks and created a scene-by-scene rough outline of the entire novel, from start to finish. Very rough. :) On the 8th, I actually started writing the novel itself. Chapter 1, scene 1. And immediately had to start adding scenes to the outline! :)

For September, 2018, my stats are

• Words: 37,243
  • Daily average words: 1284
• Time: 2048 minutes (34 hours, 8 minutes)
  • Daily average time: 70:37 min
• Average words/hour: 1,091
• Chain: 43 days
• Level: 2 on the 16th
• Quota: 300 words/day as of the 16th

Mirrored from WriteWright.

So, yeah.

I’m not what you’d call great at scheduling and planning. I’m pretty god-awful at it, in fact. I go through my time and make nice little charts (I’m great at charts) showing my work time, commute time, sleep time, etc., and color-code for when I can write . . .

And then, generally speaking, I waste that time on Facebook, YouTube, or listening to podcasts. And to be frank, I don’t consider those complete wastes of time, per-sé. They are entertainment, and entertainment is important to me. But I tend to let them take up time that I should be spending doing . . . more productive things. Like writing.

In mid-August, I’d finally had enough of it. I’d had The Idea™ earlier that week. The one that made all the pieces in my novel fall together, and tie loose ends in a bow, and make my characters make sense and fit in the world . . . it was mind-blowin’, I tells ya. I’d come home from work every day planning that tonight, by gum, I’d get that down on ‘paper’!

And then it would be midnight or 1 AM and I would have nothing to show for the evening. As usual. But hey, I’d get it tomorrow

One of my problems is perseverance. I have firefly enthusiasm for a project for a few nights . . . and then a favorite creator on YouTube releases a new video, or there’s a new Steven Universe episode . . . And then, of course, I’ve broken the chain. So the next night, it’s easier to say, “Well, I’ll just start again fresh next week.”

Only next week comes . . . and I don’t start.

Another problem is lack of accountability. I may write anywhere from 250 to 5000 words in a session, but I don’t keep track. Nor do I keep track of how much time I spend writing. It would be nice to have that information. But no one was making me do that, and, sure, it’s information that’s nice to have, but is it really required? Nnnoooo . . .

The only two things that have ever worked for me, in fact, are NaNoWriMo and Weekend Warrior.

Why do those work? Analysis time! (Charts may be my favorite, but lists are easily #2!)

NaNoWriMo

• has a strict start and end time (November 1 – 30)
• has a strict word-count (50,000+)
• has a daily component (1666 words per day)
• is self-reported until the final day
• is uploaded for verification on the final day
• is during the second worst month possible because of the holiday at the end (in the US)
• requires extensive planning beforehand if there’s any hope of getting anything that resembles a coherent story at the end

Weekend Warrior

• has a strict start and end time (Friday 9 pm to midnight Sunday)
• has a participation requirement of reading and flash-critiquing anywhere from a dozen to two-dozen 750-word stories each week for five weeks
• stories are rated on a (totally subjective) 1-10 scale and there’s a ‘winner’ per team each week and for each team for the entire contest
• has a strict word-count (750 words or less per weekend)
• is anonymously uploaded for word-count verification and distribution to other participants
• has prompts that are given on Friday night
• stories “must” spring forth from one or more prompts, even if they’ve been edited out of the final version
• stories should be a story — beginning, middle, end, character, conflict, resolution — in 750 words
• stories are expected to be (very broadly) science fiction, fantasy, or horror

And boy, can I do it when I get into that mindset. I’ve gotten anywhere from 53,000 to over 122,000 words written in November for NaNoWriMo. I’ve completed a story for almost every week of Weekend Warrior for four or five years running. I can do it. I just don’t

In short, I need structure. Deadline. Planning. Mindset. Goal. Accountability. Statistics.

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There’s a Google Doc spreadsheet that Tony Pisculli created a few years ago, called the Magic Spreadsheet. He came up with many formulae to gamify writing. You write words each day, and you get extra points for longer chains and consistency. You level up based on those points, and each level requires that you write a higher base number of words per day in order to count it as part of the chain.

I thought this was what I wanted: the game aspect. Competing against other people and myself.

But I hated having to go to the site and find my lines and put the info in. And it was, frankly, disheartening to go there on a day when I’d written 250 words and struggled to get them out, only to see others with 6000, 7000, 8000 words for that same day.

So I did what any Excel-groupie would do: I downloaded a copy of the sheet for my private use. I studied it in detail so I could figure out what he did. And I tweaked it and made it my own in a few ways that he either didn’t think of or didn’t want to do. I added a time component to it. I added calculations for average words per hour and such. I even had a couple of friends ask me for their very own copy of the spreadsheet, which I happily provided.

That would work for about a week, maybe two . . . and then I noticed that I was writing at 1 AM or 2 AM, right before bed, as a “Oh, right, I need to write something before bed or I’ll break my chain!” thing.

Not ideal.

So I took a suggestion from . . . I think it must have been either Mur Lafferty or some other writer who podcasts: if my problem is podcasts, Facebook, and YouTube, the obvious answer is: those have to go.

But I have zero self-control. I think this post proves that beyond any shadow of a doubt. :)

I needed a third party to impose that self-control. Short of deleting my account off Facebook, unsubscribing from every channel I subscribe to on YouTube, and forsaking all my podcasts, I didn’t see a way through.

And again, words of wisdom from someone on some podcast, probably again with Mur Lafferty because she’s awesome: there are apps that cut off your Internet. Or limit your use of it in very specific ways.

I located browser extensions for all my computers (Windows 10 work, Windows 10 home, Macbook Pro) for each browser (I know me: if there’s a browser that has the extension and one that doesn’t, I’ll use the one that doesn’t) that turns off my access to certain sites during a range of time. And for my phone (iPhone 7 Plus), it conveniently just updated to iOS 12 with Screen Time, which permits me to shut off apps during a time span. Now, at 10 pm, if I’m still watching YouTube, using Facebook, or listening to podcasts, it abruptly kicks me off and says, “Shouldn’t you be working?” (I had to tell it my workday starts at 10 pm and runs until 7 AM in order to get this to work.)

I’m happy to report that this has actually worked. Quite well, in fact. I’m typing this slightly before 10 PM, in fact. In the next week or two, I might edge that time from 10 PM down to 9 PM, or even 8 PM. I’ve unsubscribed from some YouTube channels that I deemed to actually be a waste of my time and not very entertaining.

Since August 18th, when I randomly decided to start this, I’ve written nearly 50,000 (48,633, not counting this post) words. Most of these have been for the novel I’ve been trying to find my way through for a long time. I plowed through almost two weeks of world-building, just typing away as fast as I could think. Ignoring spelling and grammar errors. What I wrote is an atrocious mess of stream of consciousness, but it forced me to confront the issues that I kept avoiding before. My characters’ flaws. Their backgrounds. Their motivations. How magic actually works in my universe. What the antagonist is up to and why. Side characters. Societal implications of the sudden appearance of magic.

And then, after all that, I wrote an 11,000(ish)-word outline for the novel. From cover to cover, mostly in order. Took me seven days.

And I don’t hate it. I can’t emphasize this enough. I have written things out before, but I hated them, because I couldn’t figure out some stuff, and I’d give up in frustration. But without the shiny-shiny lure of Facebook and YouTube and podcasts . . . I basically had to write or go to bed, and who wants to do that at 10 PM? (The last time I went to bed at 10 PM regularly I was in grade school and being forced to do so by my parents.) Have I mentioned I’m a creature of the night?

As soon as the outline was done, I took a two-night break to write a flash piece, then jumped right into the book and started fleshing out the outline. I use Scrivener, so this was fairly easy.

I’m deep in Chapter 2 of my novel, and paused again to write a short story that popped into my head one night after I went up to bed, because it was knocking on the inside of my skull wanting out.

Tonight, this blog post is my words. You’ll see the edited version, but the unedited version will probably be something around 2,400 words, and that definitely puts me over my Level 2 limit of 300 required words for the day on the Magic Spreadsheet.

For the first time in a long, long while, I feel like I’m enjoying writing. It doesn’t hurt that I got The Idea™ just before deciding to embark on this little adventure. It also doesn’t hurt that a friend of mine gave me an awesome idea at dinner the other night which I will unabashedly incorporate into my world and make it my own. (Thanks, Steve!)

I’m also using an app on my phone to track my writing time. It’s for freelancers / contractors, so I defined a job called “Writing” and set the pay to minimum wage for the US. The final step of this was to actually set up a bank account and transfer money from my main checking account into it for any time I spend writing. Thirty minutes? Sure. Three hours? Better. My eventual goal for this is to use this money and only this money to attend writing-related events, such as WorldCon or Paradise Lost or anything else that comes up. If I haven’t written enough to “afford” it, then I have no business doing it.

Yes, this is going to severely curtail fun things like WorldCon. But after a year in which I traveled to Texas, Massachusetts, and freakin’ Finland for writing-related events and had to fork out a lot for car issues . . . not going to WorldCon in San José this year, or Dublin next year, or New Zealand the year after that should leave me with a surplus for whatever comes up in 2021. And I’m (mostly) okay with that. (Mostly.) It’s time, as they say, to shit or get off the pot. And this includes submitting stuff. But I’ll get to that in another post. I have some more goal-setting to do.

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I’m fully aware that this post makes me sound like something of a Loony Toon, having to trick myself into doing a thing I supposedly like instead of other things I apparently like more, but maybe there are other people out there for whom this is also a problem. And maybe those people will see this and feel motivated by it. Weirder things have happened. The single most-visited page on my blog is the one where I reviewed a tiny little site called 750Words, which was another in a long line of attempts to find that magic something that worked to make me write daily.

This blog post was written on my fortieth uninterrupted day of writing at least 250 (Level 1) or 300 (Level 2) words — new words — every single night. I do not think I have ever written consistently for forty days straight. I’ve even begun to start writing early and not waiting until I’m kicked off sites or have my phone’s apps go dark.

They say that if you do anything for 21 days it becomes a habit. For me, that’s not true. It’s more like 60 days. :) So give me another month at this and maybe I’ll only use Facebook and YouTube after I get my words down for the day. Weirder things have happened!

1. Weekend Warrior is an annual contest that takes place over five consecutive weekends beginning in January of each new year. I explain it a little in the text after this footnote. It’s on CodexWriters.com, but you have to be a member of Codex to get to it, and to get into Codex, there are requirements.
2. It is called WasteNoTime.
3. Right now, it’s set to Facebook and YouTube. I may include others if I start to notice myself hanging out on something else too much.
4. Edited it — the most time-consuming part, thanks to formatting and links and dealing with WordPress’s new damned editor — and am finishing up at right around 12:15 AM.
5. It’s called HoursTracker.
6. Writers tend to think in terms of cents-per-word. A professional level market will pay $0.06/word and up for stories of Novelette length and below, often with a reduced rate or wordcount limit for novellas. Semi-pro and fanzines are below that. Novels will get — on average — around $2500 to $5000 for a beginner, and going up — or down, alas — from there. Expect to sell around 250 copies if you’re lucky; more if you’re a fantastic marketer. You don’t go into traditional publishing to get rich. You can do better selling independently if you write very fast, publish ebooks only, put out multiple novels per year, and have avid fans who like your writing and will buy whatever you put out and demand more. People are making hundreds of thousands per year doing this. More power to them. I’m not there, yet. :) Not sure I ever will be.

Mirrored from WriteWright.

This entry is part 13 in an ongoing series of semi-irregular posts detailing my frustration with Workers Compensation and the wonderful world of rotator cuff surgery. In case you haven't been keeping up: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13, THE FINAL CHAPTER (probably) (YOU ARE HERE)

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the fall that caused so many problems during the intervening year. Last July 31st, on my way from the parking lot to the building where I work, I slipped on damp pavement littered with small acorns(?) and tore my rotator cuff badly.

It has been three and a half months since the surgery to fix the problem. I have almost my full range of motion back. I can reach straight up, straight out, across my body, and only get a few twinges now and then. I still can't reach behind my back without pain, but perhaps that will come with time. The surgeon told my housemate that, among other things, I would not be throwing anything overhand anymore. And you know what? I can live with that. :)

As far as strength is concerned, I have very little, but it IS getting better. When I first started doing the exercises a couple of months ago, I could barely move the elastic band. This morning, I realized I had to move farther from the door to put more resistance in the band. There are only two of the five exercises he gave me that hurt at all, and that is getting better, as I said.

There are still times when I do something that will cause a sharp pain that reminds me that I hurt myself and that not everything in there is "right" anymore. This usually happens when I'm doing something so habitual that I tend not to think about it, like moving the laundry from the washer into the dryer, or hanging my dry laundry. It's just one of Nature's lovely little ways of reminding me that I need to think about what I'm doing. :)

The scars are still on my shoulder, and I guess they're permanent. I had originally thought they'd fade over time, but they're still quite noticeable. Meh. Looks like I lost an argument with a particularly shoulder-hating staple gun. Again, I can live with that.

I have changed my parking habits at work. I no longer park in the front lot with all the oak trees that tend to shed tiny little acorns. Onto a sloping surface. I now park in the "lower forty" lot where the ground is nice and level and the only trees are pine. The walk is much less treacherous in all weather, so it's a good thing.

I can't prove it had anything to do with me, but I mentioned before that just about the time I was having the worst of my battles with Some Woman at Some Company, my employer resurfaced the entire parking lot, making the surface less slick, and they also keep it almost devoid of any tree-detritus. So even if I were still parking in the front lot, there would be far less to trip over or slip on. Still, I'm going to continue parking in the "lower forty."

I'm tempted to call Some Woman today and let her know that I have one final doctor appointment in September, and then I'm officially done with the whole mess. I will continue to exercise my arm, being careful not to overdo it, of course (Mom). And I'll continue to be extra careful while walking, because it's been shown that I can't be trusted to do that.

In my last entry, I mentioned payment. I have yet to see a single bill for any of it, so I'm fine with that. I was also paid for the time I spent on short-term leave. I think I might have lost a few days because of some policy involving short-term leave, but that's small potatoes, and I'm not going to raise a stink. Thank you for respecting that and not admonishing me in the comments.

As a final note, I was sorely tempted to prank you all and lead with "Today is the one-year anniversary of the fall that caused me such grief, and you'll never guess what I did this morning on the way in to the office! At least now, my arms match again! Just kidding!" But I decided to be nice and not yank anyone's chain. (Just to be plain: I did not injure myself at all. Yet. The day is young. :)

I’m charting my daily progress on NaNoWriMo. Since you may or may not care, I’ll kindly hide it. Thanks for taking the time. :) ( Read more by clicking here! )

Originally published at WriteWright. You can comment here or there.

These are some thoughts I had on NaNoWriMo. They were originally written as part of a lengthy reply to a friend of a friend who was curious about the whole process of NaNoWriMo and who had some concerns about writing a character based on a real person.

It’s quite normal to agonize. Over your characters, your setting, your plot, your vocabulary, your grammar, whether semicolons are pure evil or useful, whether or not subtext exists, your skill as a writer, whether you should defrost the freezer before writing, how to clean the grout in your shower . . . procrastination takes on a whole level of evil when you have a deadline, or at least mine does. (Look up ‘waxing the cat.’ No, it’s not dirty.)

Writing something semi-biographical is rougher still, because of discomfort in potentially harming the person’s reputation or angering their descendants. Our society is litigious to a fault, after all. But it’s merely based on a real person. You may not want to take too many liberties, but you may not have ever met the person you’re basing the character on, especially if they lived and died before you were born. Just keep their best interests in mind (assuming you like them) and remember that no one is or ever has been a paragon of virtue. Everyone has a darkness. Everyone has flaws. If you don’t portray that, the character will come across as unbelievable. Flat. A caricature.

A lot of my very fictional characters have inside them a tiny core of someone — or a mixture of several someones — that I know. But I don’t worry about them figuring it out, because if I’ve done my job well enough, they’ll never know, even if they read it. But basing it on a real person, that might be harder to conceal, if you even want to conceal it. Let’s say it’s Frida Kahlo you’re writing about. Of course, people will know it’s her, and they’ll also know that you had to concoct stuff. But as long as you’re more or less faithful to the events and things people do know, and that’s consistent with the stuff you make up, then . . . sure, it might tick off some people, but others will read it and think, “You know, she could have thought that.”

My take on it is this: Write the story, and do the absolute best you can. NaNoWriMo is about getting the story out of your head and onto paper / electrons. It’s not about making it perfect. It will never be perfect. Rewrites are for getting it as close as you can. If what you have after November is over still strikes you as having something you like in it, you can go through it after letting it sit for a month or two without looking at it (that is key), and decide what works and what doesn’t. And if nothing works? You still learned what doesn’t work, and you probably have a better idea what will.

I have this Epic Fantasy story that has been knocking on the inside of my skull since I was around eleven. In different forms over the years, of course, but basically the same story. I must have written chapter one a hundred times. In pencil or pen. In a spiral-bound notebook. Because it had to be perfect or I wasn’t doing the story in my head any justice. So I’d write chapter one . . . and it would suck. And I’d hate it, and I’d rip the pages out and burn them. And then some time later, I’d write it again . . . and it would be slightly less sucky (at least to me), but not good enough. It wasn’t perfect. It. Had. To. Be. Perfect.

This went on for more than thirty years. Then in 2008, I finally decided, “Idiot, you’ve got to get this out of your head. Just write it.” So I took all my character notes and all my plot notes and all my other stuff and I started writing on November 1, 2008.

And by the end of that November, I had 53,515 new words that I never had before. And I got a lot of that out of my head. But I used virtually none of the copious notes I had been taking for all that time. I came up with some great new ideas. I invented new characters, thought of scenes I never realized were there, before, discovered things about my characters I never had. Because I learned something crucial:

To write the story, you have to bind and gag the editor that lives inside your head. And lock him in a small, dark room.

That editor will tell you that what you’re writing sucks. He’ll want you to go back and “fix” stuff. He’ll pester you to stop using the word ‘actually’ so much. So you have to beat him over the head with something hard, tie him up, stuff a gag in his mouth, and dump him in the basement and lock the door. Until you’re done.

You’ll find yourself around day eight or so thinking, “Gah! This blows. I’m just going to rewrite that last chapter because–” No! That’s your editor. Why didn’t you make those knots tighter? He got out! You have to club him again and make sure to tie him up tighter next time!

You don’t fix that chapter. You make notes in the margin and go on as though you had fixed it and don’t worry about it. So what if for six chapters your main character is a monk in a monastery in Tibet, but starting in chapter seven, he’s a famous Las Vegas entertainer? You assume the story has taken place along your new path up to chapter seven, and you go on.

You probably won’t encounter anything that drastic. I think my “drastic” change was that in Chapter nine, I realized one of the secondary characters needed a skill I hadn’t given her earlier, so I just assumed she’d always had it, made notes to go back and fix it, and wrote forward.

Of those 53,515 words I wrote in 2008, probably less than half of them are useful words. But what is useful is what I learned about those characters. When I go back and revisit that story and add more plot, the characters, setting, etc. will be all the better for having had to work through stuff to make it make a bit of sense for the novel. On the other hand . . . that story is no longer knocking on my head. I’ve moved on to other ideas. Better ideas. But I learned a lot in writing that epic fantasy, and I will still come back to it at some point, and by golly it’ll be better. Because I’m a better writer, now, than I was in 2008.

For 2009 I wrote a mystery novel (55,000+ words) and had no idea who the killer was until about halfway through. Same thing. I had to silence my editor, who kept saying, “Gary, what the hell are you doing? Who is the killer? Don’t you even know?” *PWANG* with a shovel right in the face. Basement. Knots.

For 2010 I wrote a science fiction novel involving time travel. Got to 78,000 words on that one, then 93,000 by February. Finished it. It needs editing big-time, but this time, my inner editor went on vacation to Aruba while I was writing. He learned. It only takes one or two shovels to the face to make an editor learn his lesson. But there’s some good stuff in that novel. Stuff I really like. And some stuff I really hate.

And yeah, no one ever has to see it but you. The only time you have to show anything is when you paste the full text into the site on the last day so it can verify your word-count. It’s not saved by their site. The count is tallied and all anyone need know is that you either did or did not make it to 50,000.

Even if you don’t get to 50,000 words, you’re 9000 words or 15,000 words or 27,000 words closer to having a book than you were when you started. Or 250 words. Any honest attempt is better than nothing.

If you’re worried about lawsuits resulting from basing a character on a real, historical figure . . . I’ll tell you what someone told me when I had some similar worries: When the publisher agrees to publish the novel, that’s when you worry about lawyers. Before then, tell the story and don’t worry about stuff like that. That’s not your job. You’re the writer. That worry is your editor talking. Remember what we do with internal editors? *grins evilly and hands you a shovel*

7 Tips on NaNoWriMo: Backup often. Backup often. Backup often. Backup often. Backup often. Backup often. Oh, and backups? Do them often.

Do you feel pepped? Has my pep talk helped? I love NaNoWriMo. Love. It. It pushes me to do things I’ve never done before, and with each November, I feel more pumped up than the last one.

Originally published at WriteWright. You can comment here or there.

I’m forcing myself to go to bed as soon as I post this, even though I’m not the least bit sleepy, and probably too excited to sleep. Tomorrow is the Big Day™. I’ll get on a plane in the morning and fly to Boston, then bus to Woods Hole, then ferry over to Martha’s Vineyard for Viable Paradise. Can. Not. Wait.

I just hope I’ll sleep. The plane leaves at WayTooFreakingEarly:30, which means I have to get up at some unbelievable hour that I’ve heard tell of, but can’t recall seeing with my own eyes, just so I can get to the airport two hours before the flight because of TSA. I’ve checked my itinerary and the ferry schedule about 300 times since this morning, convinced it’ll change before my eyes and say something else this time. I was . . . not exactly present, mentally, at work.

At least the drive down to the airport will be easy at that hour. The only people up will be vampires and milkmen, one of which is mythical. And I think it’s milkmen.

Anyhoo, enough procrastination. Bed!

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Wondering what the “Prologue:” is about? Stay tuned! All will become clear, soon. </cryptic>

Originally published at WriteWright. You can comment here or there.

I was trapped on a plane today for several hours, and as I am wont to do when that happens, I either read or listen to podcasts. Today was a podcast kind of day.

As it happens, one of the podcasts I listened to was The Creative Penn hosted by Joanna Penn. It’s a new podcast for me, and I’m still trying to decide if I like it enough to keep listening. For now, it’s interesting and a keeper.

The episode I heard was “Writing Religion and Spirituality With Jill Carroll.” Jill Carroll, as it turns out, is a doctor of world religions. She and Joanna had an hour-long talk about how your own faith (or lack thereof) informs your writing, and how writing characters who follow specific faiths (or none) can help make them more rounded characters.

Which brings me to my epiphany.

When I listen to writing podcasts—and I listen to several—I almost always end up thinking about how whatever the host(s) (& guest(s)) are saying can apply to whatever I’m currently writing. In this case, I’ve been restructuring my urban fantasy universe in my head. I haven’t put much of it down on “paper,” yet, but it’s churning around up in my cerebellum, making waves.

I describe it to people as “It’s paranormal FBI agents and Atlanta police solving crimes in modern Atlanta, only magic works.”

One of the main three characters is a devout Catholic. I know almost nothing about the Catholic religion, so I’ve been glossing over that when I write him. Just mostly using it as “background information” that the writer (me) knows, but the reader (hopefully, you, one day) is not necessarily even aware of, except that that bit of information informs how the character reacts to things that happen in the book.

And that’s when it hit me: in my world, magic is . . . well, it’s special in that not just everyone can do it, but the ones who can do it can pretty much do miracles.

In a world where many people can perform genuine, demonstrable, repeatable, scientifically verifiable “miracles,” . . . well, what place does religion based on miracle-working have in that world?

I just love it—no, really, I do—when a passing thought causes me to go “Oh, crap,” and rethink pretty much everything.

Of course, there’s still the concept of divinity and having a direct line to a god or gods (as it were). But if my characters can do things that are only in the purview of gods in our real world, what, then, is a religion in a world of magic?

I’m gonna have to think on that one.

Originally published at WriteWright. You can comment here or there.

I mentioned the other day that I submitted three of my very short flash pieces that have appeared here on my blog over the last year or so to a podcast called Toasted Cake.

I got a response back from Tina Connolly (podcastrix).

So as far as first rejections go, I’m not displeased. It’s a very good one, actually, encouraging me to submit again in the future.

Plus . . . now that that’s over with, I’m not dreading that first rejection anymore. :)

I still want to get into Viable Paradise, though, Universe, if you’re listening.

Originally published at WriteWright. You can comment here or there.

Hi, everyone. I wanted to let people know that this-coming Thursday night, March 22^nd, 2012, at 6 PM SLT (Second Life Time), I will be reading my story “D Is for Dragon” live.

Second Life Time is the same as US Pacific Time, so that’s 6 PM on the west coast, 9 PM on the east coast, and 10 PM if you live in those extreme eastern provinces in Canada. You can probably do the math to find your local correct time.

The reading will occur in the Workshop building, on the second floor beside the traditional meeting circle. Our area is in the Pen Station region. The reading is a voice event, so attendees are encouraged to come with their “ears on” and their microphones off. Since the event is also being recorded, we request that you refrain from using audio “gestures” or other devices that create ambient noise.

If you get on, my name on Second Life is “Sathor Chatnoir.” Contact me or “Timothy Berkmans” (our host for all things podcasterrific) for a landmark to the event site, or click on that link above (on “Workshop building”). Show up early (15 to 20 minutes, I’d say) so you can adjust your settings for voice.

The recording (or perhaps a cleaner one) will appear on our podcast in the next couple of months.

Those of you who are not already on Second Life can get on (For free!) by going to the web site (See that handy link earlier in this sentence?), downloading the software (For free!), and creating a character (For free!). Those of you who don’t want to be on Second Life can wait for the podcast. (For free!)

Those of you who <sniff> don’t want to <sniff> hear my story (that I worked so hard on), I <sniff> understand. Really. It’s <sniff; wavering voice> OK. <sniff> Really.

For free! Did I mention that? (For free!)

Originally published at WriteWright. You can comment here or there.