WARNING:  GRAMMAR AND SPELLING ERRORS MAY OCCUR AVOID FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY

I haven’t posted here in some time.  It isn’t because this is dead, but because I have been focusing my writing time on my book.  I imposed a May deadline for publication.  I had to otherwise I could see myself fettering away the time.  Will it be done?  I aim for it to be.  I am working hard on it getting done in that time.  I see no reason why not.  As I said in the LUG podcast, a professional writer does 2-3 books a year.  If I take that long for one book I need to step up my game and no time like the present.

That said….I have so many things to do to make it done.  To make it the best it can be.  I don’t subscribe to the idea that self-pubbed books need to be half assed or that they are by nature.  My reasoning can be found in episodes of the LUG podcast but I will restate them here.  My primary belief is that writers of the past did not have all these gadgets and gizmos to help us .  Like spell check tools.  I write my posts in MSWord or other tool that highlight or correct my errors.   Sometimes they get it right sometimes not –the worst is when I just post drivel without checking, direct to the site.  This is my personal blog – I choose not to care here, BUT in my novel there is more care mostly because of the tools AND because of my Alpha Readers.  Better still because I have to get that right.  Still, in the past there was none of that.  Writers of the past had to get it right the first time, or nearly so.  Perhaps the main reason was resources.  They could not waste the paper nor the ink.  This got better with the typewriter but not so much.  It was not until the computer that, as writers, we could type away without care.  This may be the concern with eBooks; that with a digital book there is not so much care in conserving space and paper (which is a commodity) costing money so the writer will go on and on and on and on….I don’t think so.  I think writers are perfectionists my nature –at least about their books.  The poor ones are not, and Konrath believes that those folks will be culled out.  I think so too.  Just like readers will not buy a bad book there is no reason to think that they will buy a bad ebook. 

In addition to focusing my actual writing time on writing my book, I have also been trying to break into freelancing.  Talk about a tough market.  WOW.  I might be doing it all wrong because for every piece of advice I follow I can find two more telling it is wrong.  Everything from “do free work for a while”, to “don’t accept anything less than $50 a blog post”.  This only tells me that there is no formula other then put your head down and keep trying.  Eventually the person left standing will win.  Maybe…maybe not, because there is one sure fire rule in this profession – the one of writing—is that there is no expert.  Case in point:  I posted on Linkedin in the freelance writing area, about how hard it was and looking for advice.  Now I must have been brain dead because I wrote a nearly incomprehensible post.  Much like I do here , but in my defence this blog is “personal”.  You get the raw me, and usually after I just dumped my emotions into my book, so I am usually a bit tired.  So the responses, naturally, to my Linkedin post were more focused on my mistakes (grammar and spelling) then on content.  I get that.  WOW rookie mistake.  What drove me mad was the fact that all but one of the responses had errors.   One thing I can’t stand is hypocrisy.   Lecture me on grammar all you want, spelling too.  I will take it because I know I get lazy in certain areas, even though my job is to review and edit techincal documentation.  Sometimes I just don’t care.  I can take my lumps but don’t become Nazi on me unless you can walk the walk. 

Here is the dirty little secret that no writer/author wants any reader to know.  Our crap smells too.  Yep.  Sure does.  I am good at grammar and spelling, my wife and I will have competitoins about grammar rules (sick I know).  Yet I am good mostly because of the green and red lines in what ever text editor I am using.  That and I have an army of people to bounce things off of.  Sure I know all the rules and stuff, but frankly it can impede on the writing process, and then mistakes are made in successive drafts.

So, what is stopping the freelance gig?  No idea, and I am thinking I don’t care either.  From what I can gather, from all the reading, and research most Freelancers just write those top 10 posts or variations of them.   To me that is content farming and hits the point.  There is nothing out there that truly helps up and coming writers, other then being an example.  Perhaps that is the point.  Being the example, showing us your struggles.  Letting us in “the know”.  Every great writer had to start somewhere, they just didn't spring up one day.  I have a list of great blogs that do that.  For example:

The Intern

JA Konrath’s blog

Nathan Bradsford

Query Shark

They tell it true.  Writing is hard.   No one told me that the second draft process was as hard, if not harder, then the first.  It surprised me.  I guess I should have seen it coming, but I did not.  The hard work is getting to me.  Don’t get me wrong I love to write.  I want this.  Yet I am getting discouraged.  Mainly because writing is a lonely effort.  It is just me and book.  Whereas my other job is more team oriented, but not any less difficult.  In fact if I put some of you in charge of a multi-million dollar program I don’t think you would say it would be easy.  Yet I have experience, and have built a pattern of successes that have given me the confidence to do the job.

I have come to the realization that I am not a blogger.  It isn’t fun.  Not what so ever.  I do this because it is a good catharsis, but when deciding between book time or this – I have to choose the book, just as I do between Twitter or the book.  It kind of puts you in a bad place as a self-pubbed person doesn’t it?  It makes that advice seem a wee bit at odds with itself.  Like I said I am not a blogger, I am a writer who happens to have a blog.  I don’t see them as the same.   Give me all the success you want about bloggers who have best selling books, and I will point out that it is not a result of having a blog.  It is a result of hard work.  The blog was incidental and perhaps a contributor to the success, but a sole means of it.

I don’t intend to prove any of this because I have it in the contradicting advice that a budding writer gets.  It is all so confusing.  To all them I say thanks for all the fish, but I am going to listen to the writers who tell me straight and are honest about the complexity and the hard work.  Not about stooping to free gigs, or about how horrid my grammar is.

I'm going to coin this technique "Impulse Writing."  It is working very well to help me prevent procrastinating on my story. 

The procrastination monster makes you look at the clock and says "Eh, you don't have quite enough time, wait until later when you have a full hour or two."  Well poo on him.  If I have ten minutes I can write a paragraph.  So what if I don't write a whole scene?  I can write a paragraph, or two, or three.  No matter how little I write, I'm WRITING and making progress.  The thought that I need a specific length of time to write is consequence of the "Perfect is the enemy of the Good."

Maybe having two hours is the perfect time interval for me to produce optimal writing.  Great.  But an hour still works.  Ten minutes still works. 

So, if I have a few minutes of otherwise "empty" time, waiting for my next student, waiting for someone to come over, etc. I now try to write.  Maybe it's just a paragraph, but that's a paragraph that wasn't there yesterday.

Impulse writing.  Writing in small impulses.  Not to be confused with impulsive writing, which is what you do when somebody makes you rage in some online forum.  Impulse writing is better. 

When does an amateur writer become a professional?  Traditionally when they publish and get paid.  I think there's an essential step that takes place before this however.  Become accountable. 

During NaNoWriMo I was accountable to the NaNoWriMo page and my friends that were tracking my progress.  If I didn't meet my word count goals a graph showed it and somebody knew.  So what do I do about the other eleven months of the year?  I can slack off as much as I want.  I don't have a contract that requires fulfillment, I don't have an agent bugging me.  Since I'm not yet published, I don't have readers eagerly awaiting the next book.

If I slack off, I'll never finish.

So, how to keep the procrastination monster from attacking?  Well, I say put up the walls of accountability.  Get people involved in your writing process that will say "Hey, you haven't written much lately, what's up?"  A nagging spouse would probably be perfect.  Concerned friends work too.  Or, you can reach out to the internet public and say "Here I am, here's what I'm doing, berate me if I don't follow through."  Oddly enough, people on the internet LOVE to berate others, so they will welcome the opportunity to flame you for missing your goals.

Guess what?  You are now part of my anti-procrastination wall.  If you don't see an update here on my progress or hear something concrete on the podcast, comment and say so.  Call me out!  Call me a loser wannabe, a slacker, or anything else to make me feel guilty for not writing.

And if you're a writer yourself, find someone to do likewise for you.  Until we build the habit of writing productively over time, we're going to need the push.

I realized today after the Christmas break that we haven't posted here in a bit. Mostly because I was either fighting off some sort of virus or working feverishly to completing my 50,000 word session during NaNoWriMo.  If you are sick of hearing about NaNoWriMo, then you do really don't get it. For me NaNoWriMo shows starting writers that 50K words is not that big of a deal and is in fact a requirement. You need to be able to produce. This is really true of any endeavor you take on. At the end of the day you have to produce - something for someone.

After NaNoWriMo I took a couple weeks to chill out and review what I wrote. For the most part it is not too bad, but then again it needs a large amount of work. It's like raking the leaves. The yard looks good but you still have another portion of the actual work to do. ick. So the first part of the holiday season came upon us and I had to high tail it to my family's place in southern Michigan, the lack of snow getting a bit disconcerting. I was doing well too - in the world of health.  My family (as I have learned) has a heritary issue with upper respitory illnesses. I usually get something in November and it sticks with me until March. So I was counting myself lucky and for having taken heaping doses of Vitman C months previously. It was all about to come to an end.

Within the first 8 hours of being at my mom's house I, and my wife, were sick. Complete congestion. I felt like I had asthma I could hardly breath. It dawned on us that my mom's house was set to 85 degrees!  85!! In my home it is set to 60 - maybe 62. As I have said before I don't have air conditioning and we like it a wee bit chill. Keeps you moving and you don't get lathergic. The real plus is snuggling with wife on the couch in the evenings - guys never underestimate this.

Still the week was pretty much a blur of cough medicine, snot rags, and hacking up lungs, sinus, and other parts of the body. Still we made it out alive - somewhat. So now I have to deal with the lingering effects of the cold. Post-nasal drip is the worst. Somethinge else you should know is taht I don't take medicine all that often and only go to the doctor in the event of truly bad or low lasting problems. I was raised in a home of nurses so I have a fair handle on my health and such. Besides most times with a cold the best remedy is sleep and water. You really have to know yourself and for me sleeping and drinking water are mircale workers. I have broken the flu with a 104 degree temp just by sleeping 12 hours and drinking nearly 2 gallons of water. I am not saying this is true for everyone, but for me it is brilliant.

So here I am now. Getting ready for the New Years which me and my wife and kids will spend locked in our Michigan home making homemade pizza. The snow is finally falling (HOORAY!) and I am overjoyed. I love the white stuff. It really makes winter worth while. Then we head north to Crystal Mountain for a few days of skiing - again I will be hitting the pub while the wife and kids swish thier way in the ice and snow. I may go on a snow shoe hike - maybe.

If you're reading this looking for tips on your own writing here's one:  you need an outline. 

I'm generally tagged a "discovery" writer.  Not sure exactly what that means.  For me, it means I discover things about my plot and characters as I write the story.  What it does NOT mean, as I've painfully found this month, is that I will always discover what I need.  Sometimes, you have to plan ahead.

I reached a point in my story where I couldn't seem to write the next scene.  Didn't matter which scene I tried to write, I stalled.  Try a different character?  Stall.  Twist the plot?  Stall.  I was stuck.  Writer's block in full flower.  Eventually I realized that I didn't know where the story was going.  I knew where it would end up, but I didn't have a route from here to there.  When you don't know where you're going, even if you know your destination, you end up wandering a lot.  There's a story about this guy named Moses and his tribe in the desert for 40 years...

Anyway, I think you see the point.  I needed an outline.  I had a very rough one when I started.  Some parts of it were no longer valid and I'd stopped really using it almost the minute it was created.  So gave up on my NaNoWriMo word goals for the day and decided to figure out where the heck my story was headed.

I brainstormed.  I'm talking some serious The-Weather-Channel-Issues-A-Red-Flashing-Warning storms here.  And I started creating scenes.  Scenes that needed to happen before other scenes.  Scenes that needed to show something.  Scenes that needed to resolve something (lots of those). Scenes that sounded funny.  At the end, I ended up with almost as many scenes marked "To Do" as I already had written.  But now I have a more-or-less chronological outline from where I am (and where I started) to the end of the book.  If those scenes are similar in size to what I've written before, my story will be about 80k words.  That's 228 pages in real-world book form.  When I saw that I realized: "Hey, that's a real novel." 

Now I just have to write those scenes.  But I've already proven I can do that with the first "half" of my story.

Ok, I'll be honest, it was never exactly EASY.  But the beginning of the month I was intensely motivated and had dozens of simple scenes to write.  Long around the end of the week I had discovered something about my story which led to many more scenes that needed to be written (and they were).

Now, heading into Week 3, it feels uphill.  I mean, like let's-climb-Mt.Everest-in-barefeet-and-skivies uphill.  I find myself staring at my screen, trying to think of a scene to write.  I look at my characters and well, just look at them.  It's a good thing I stopped the drooling thing a while back or I'd probably have shorted out my laptop keyboard by now.

Decisions have to be made in my story.  Usually this is the point where I, somehow, make the decision not to write.  Oh, I never actually say "I'm not gonna write right now."  But I "put it on the back burner" for an hour or two (that turns into days) or I "let it gel for a bit," bit, meaning weeks.  NaNoWriMo doesn't let me do that.  That beast is sitting on my shoulder staring at my word count, sharpening its poisoned claws just waiting for me to quit before my 1,667 for the day. 

So here I am, making decisions on my story and characters without the option to let it sit "for a bit."  That's exhausting.  I spend twenty minutes figuring out what a scene is going to be.  Then, as if I didn't melt enough brain cells, I have to actually WRITE it.

I'm beginning to see why, historically, many writers have gone insane.