Life is not fair

I’m finally feeling well enough to start writing again. Nearly two weeks after operation, and nearly a month since I was making steady progress. Back to the grindstone now. And I’m probably going to start by cutting the last 10,000 words I wrote and starting the last act again. Time not writing has given me a perspective I didn’t have when I was slaving over the draft, and I can see the problems–which were the reason why I slowed down on the draft even before the op.

It’s funny how the unconscious mind can see problems in a narrative well before the conscious part of the mind realizes what’s going on. I was having problems writing my daily quota of words for some time before the op, and I think now it’s because I’d planned the middle of the novel very carefully, but left the end sketchy. And of course, it being sketchy meant I was writing to fill a quota, not writing to tell a story. Stephen King claims to uncover the story as he writes, but I can’t tell a story unless I know what the story is. I’ve spent the past two weeks since the op thinking about the part where I was stuck, and slowly moving from despair at how shit my draft was, to feeling hopeful about it, to feeling excited about writing again. But I only realized what was wrong with the story over the past couple of days.

Basically, the last 10,000 words on the novel draft have been sketching, but now I know what the picture needs to look like.

Slow but steady. Now up to 74,000 words. Also outlining a possible submission for the Black Library’s open submissions period. (More here.)

Just a series of notes someone made on Sara Zarr’s keynote speech at the Winter Conference of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Well worth reading if you’re a writer. Here.

I have to say, this quote struck home: “The time between when you are no longer a beginner but you are not yet in the business is the hardest … and one of the biggest frustrations is: no one can tell you how long this phase will last.”

I’ve been in this phase for a long time. Quite a few published short stories, very close with one novel, but no published novel yet. And to be ‘in the business’, well that means selling novels. I’ve got something good that’s winding slowly towards completion . . . but really, given all the shit that has rained down on me in the past eighteen months, I find I don’t really give a crap anymore.

Forget writing things which other people may approve of, or which would fit in the more ‘litr’y’ short fiction venues. (Yes, Fantasy Magazine and Strange Horizons, I’m thinking of you.) I don’t read those ezines, so why would I try to write stuff that would fit in them? Fuck it. I haven’t got time to deal with bullshit anymore. I’m just trying to write the best work I can, and include as many of the things that make me go ‘wowthatissocool’ as possible. If the stories don’t sell, who gives a shit? I know they’re good, and I will have enjoyed writing them.

Tobias Buckell has an interesting post up about how much money he’s made from selling on the Kindle store. A useful counter-weight to Konrath’s single-mindedness.

Diana Wynne Jones has died, reports the Guardian. It’s a shame; I really enjoyed her ‘Tough Guide to Fantasyland’. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favour and pick up a copy. It’s well worth the money. The obit notes she died of cancer–it will sound self-centered, but I get a nasty twinge each time I read that in an obit. It brings home . . . well, it brings home certain things. Let’s leave it at that.

Living in the Shadow of Dead Mountains continues to make slow progress. The draft is now up to 35,000 words, and I’m about one third of the way through my outline, so . . . just about right on length. Some of the writing is a little clunky in places, but mostly I’m happy with it. The plot is moving in the right direction–and more importantly, it’s doing so because the characters are doing what they want to, not what I want them to. The time spent developing the characters before drafting is paying off, though, because the plot feels unforced. Which is always good.

Coming soon to Amazon and others:

Check it out, baby. Three honorable mentions for me. Some other people got more . . . but I only published three stories last year, so that makes a 100% hit rate.

Crowd goes wild!

Sometimes I rock so hard I amaze even myself.

Some advice often given to new writers (along with write what you know and money always flows toward the author) is that in order to produce, writers should aim for a certain number of words per day. Nanowrimo certainly promotes this, with writers having a fixed goal of words per day in order to complete the novel draft in one month. There are even spreadsheets that work out your running average of words per day, and tell you how many days remain until you hit 100,000 (or whatever you set the goal as).

I used to write like this. I’d set myself some rigid goals, and then I stuck to them no matter what. If I was writing 2,000 words a day, I would write a minimum of 2,000, without fail. Every day. My normal quota was around 1,000–less if I was working on a short, but still the idea was to churn out new words.

Now, for tinkerers, this might work. If you’re tempted to revise over and over and over, constantly twiddling but never submitting, then having a fixed goal of words to produce is probably a good thing, and stops you being a poncy git instead of a writer. But for people like me, it’s not so great.

If I’ve written something I know isn’t much cop, I find I can’t continue the story properly without going back and changing it. The thought of the crappy dialogue, or the implausible solution a character comes up with, or the endless waffle of he did some shit, and then he did something else just nags me, and I can’t concentrate. Which is a problem when you’re chained to the desk until you churn out 2,000 words. Because when you’ve got a goal, the lazy part of your mind (which is devious and cunning) works to circumvent your efforts. And if you’re like me, you’ll end up writing utter crap just to get to your goal for the day and go home. Or stop, if you’re already home.

And utter crap doesn’t sell. Not even if you polish it. Because, Best Beloved, polished crap is still crap, no matter how it shines.

And besides that, your novel will end up bloating like a dead whale.I’ve got a whole bunch of unsaleable novels over 250,000 words long, and they’re all crap. Too long, too fat, too much bloody bullshit about he went here and there and who the fuck cares.

No production goals for me now. Just time. I set my watch, then sit in front of the computer for an hour or two, and I don’t get up and I don’t check my email (that’s the hard bit) until I’ve done my time. Word counts for an hour vary from 500 to -800 (that was a bad day), but I’m producing better work, and the draft I have is much better than anything else I’ve written at novel length.

So if you’re working on something that seems to be going on forever and is filled with junk, just stop. Go back and start cutting. The draft will shrink, and if you’re a production addict, you’ll scream as your goal gets further away–but the goal is to produce something that sells, isn’t it? 

Writing is not a race; you don’t get a medal for finishing first.