god did the detroit hustle

St. George and the Dragon by Paulo Uccello (1397 – 1475), via Wikimedia Commons

Dear Internet,
My beloveds, I am deeply apologetic about the timing of today’s post. There were rumors around campus yesterday if the snow fell as much as the forecast was predicting, the college may be closing on Friday. Today was to be a short day for me, my two major appointments concerning food, so I decided instead of wrestling with fates on who was to be the victor, I stole the show and took the day off as an early vacation day.
On my first full day of freedom, I woke fairly early considering no alarm had been set and read in bed for awhile before the dog started getting antsy about going outside. TheHusband, whose been home on his holiday since Tuesday, snored gently to the tune of the whirring of the stand fan by his side of the bed.
I had told my office mates, well anyone who would listen, I was not planning on leaving the house for at least a week. One of them thought I was crazy — “I would go nuts,” she declared melodramatically, “If I stayed inside longer than two days!” No, not me. I even bought new yoga pants to celebrate. Not having to deal with asshole Michigan drivers swerving on rivers of snow, not having to beat feet around campus making meetings, not getting my pant leg tugged by staff and patrons on fixing something. The semester had been rough leading up to this point, I am desperate for a recharge and relaxation. And the opportunity to wear yoga pants and sports bras until they shred.
Today marks the 43rd day of a daily post from me, something I’m still a bit of a peacock about. I’m hovering at about 40K words during that period, or roughly about 1K words a day which is pretty close to NaNoWriMo lengths. I have been most excellent in keeping myself steady on this writing business, last week I had finished a few short stories and a few poems in addition to my daily writing here. I’m finding I am scribbling everywhere about everything, thus I decided during my holiday break to finally take a serious stab at writing a novel.
I have attempted, drunkenly stabbed at, stumbled towards writing a fiction novel since my early ’20s. I have outlines, characters fleshed out, half chapters finished of chaos and mess. Some of it is quite good, some of it also quite terrible. But I could never really get over that hump about getting my shit together and finishing the damn thing. Any of them. Ever.
If you’ve perused my writing page, you’ll see a couple of ideas I had been toying with at the time when I had thrown up the page in the summer of 2012. Of course I did not plan to spend most of that summer drugged on pain killers, which lead to spending most of early spring in the same situation, coupled with being on/off my bipolar and ADHD meds. While I am not trying to judge myself too harshly for my overly ambitious state of mind then, well, forgive me. It’s hard.
I came to the conclusion a few weeks ago I am coming at this finishing a novel business from the wrong angle. Once I started sorting out my technique, things as they tend to do, started to flow. The fruits of putting myself into a small challenge, writing and posting everyday, has been the catalyst for many minor and major life changes. I’m prioritizing my time better, I’m finishing work projects not at the last second but more often than not with time to spare. I feel more confident about myself, which is both a weird feeling and vaguely hysterical. I always knew I would be good at this, I just had to prove it to myself. I now have something tangible to look at and go yes, this is true. I can do this.
Where were we? Oh yes, so I was thinking the time is finally ripe to take one of my ideas and inseminate it with coffee, tea, spice cupcakes, and pug sweat. Last year  I opened the door to people to preview my work as I go and I am going to do it again for this project. If you’re interested in joining, here are the details.
It should also go without saying that I’ll be writing about the whole process, etc etc here so be prepared for that onslaught in the upcoming weeks.
Also be prepared for a lot of food posts as well in the next few weeks. TheHusband and I are huge, HUGE fans of Mark Bittman and to deter the habit of always going out for food, we’re going to be cooking / baking all of our food from Bittman’s cookbooks while we’re home for the holidays. Since I’m handling a lot of the baking and breads, I wanted to document the process. Plus who doesn’t like good food and recipes to share?
I have also not forgotten the Making Happy project, but now that the semester is finally over and I can breathe, it should be easy to start up.
Good night and don’t hog the bed!
x0x0,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe:

Conversations with TheHusband on Writing

Dear Internet,
TheHusband is a snob.
So when he asks me what I’ve written lately, and I give him the word count from EPbaB for the day, he turns his nose up at me. “That’s not real writing,” he says. “That’s just your blog!”
This conversation goes back and forth every couple of months, with me defending and him objecting. Finally, it comes out to him, real writing is fiction. Preferably long fiction, a novella or even a novel. Short bits, flash, and other work such as writing a diary online are not “real writing.” But it would count, he says, if I got paid for what I did. (Which is a whole ‘nother entry.)
Writing fiction is hard work. You have to be an exceptional liar, because something you’re creating is false; a lie upon itself. You also have to have the witheral for isolation, tendency for physical solitude, and the ability to create at the drop of a hat. Doing all of this without going insane.
At least that’s my interpretation of it.
For years, when I come up with a story from my past that I was planning on working into a diary piece, he stops me and says it would make good story period. Why not turn that into something else?, he asks. Use it as a jumping off point for a bigger story concept. In the past, for whatever reason, I’ve chosen to ignore him because where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do with my writing seemed to be so opposite of where he tries to gently push me.
Something today clicked. I was thinking of something, which leads to another, as it often does, when I recalled an event from my childhood that upon my nearly 30 year removal from the incident, seems quite extraordinary. I was indeed going to write about the incident in its natural form for EPbaB, but something stopped me – the idea that this bit from my childhood would indeed make a grand launch pad into a fictional world. Why attempt to explain what happened and why when time has eroded the more fragile of the concepts of the period? Instead I could create another world where I can fill in the details as they were meant to happen or as I wanted them to happen or as I thought I had remembered them.
In short, make shit up.
This dawning of clarity of how this world works came to me at 4:45PM as I was in the bedroom taking my afternoon pills. When the dust cleared from this acceptance of truth, I checked the clock for the time so I could recall it back to TheHusband for I wanted this moment to be ingrained.
And just like that, the beginning of something came and within an hour, I had slightly over 1200 words (or the equivalent of 43 tweets) committed to paper in some kind of coherent series of events. When I told TheHusband I had committed 1200 words on fiction today, I got a “That’s nice, dear. Is that about two pages?” I huffed and corrected him on the page count.
It was the first time since the beginning of the year I have written anything resembling a fictional story.
A couple of years ago, I purchased Scrivener and last year, I started organizing my work. I have roughly over 40 story sparks, ideas or lines that could be the basis of something, which also includes a couple of ideas that are formatted for novel length. In addition, I have five pieces which are in progress and more than a dozen completed. With the exception of the odd submission here or there, none of this has been shopped around anywhere.
It’s always been painful as I could come up with ideas, I could take notes on these ideas, but getting those notes into a fully formed idea has mostly failed. One thing is for certain, I keep collecting ideas and my tenacity to see them through exists regardless of past experiences.
Another truism that has occurred over the last couple of weeks, as my come down from the drugs has taken place, I’ve started to seriously wonder why I haven’t been using writing as a way of my own escapism from this chaos in my head. Isn’t that what I’ve done before? Why is it so different now? And why wasn’t I exploring a fictional world to give some peace to the conflicts that keep occurring?
I have no answers.
If one thing is for certain from going through my archives in the last year, I am my own worst enemy.
x0x0,
Lisa
P.S. The one thing I do know, is when I was able to do what I did today, the first thing I wanted to do after telling my husband was to tell you.

This day in Lisa-Universe in:

Beta Readers: Anatomy of a Tart

Dear Internet,
Anatomy of a Tart is now up!
I wrote this last year for a local flash fiction contest and it did not place. Their loss. It’s was edited by my MIL before submission, who does such things for a living, but I’m always curious to see what others think of it. Comments and criticism are always welcome. I want to use this piece as potentially start making the submission rounds.
If you’re new to Beta Readers, you can find more information here.
x0x0,
Lisa

Beta Readers: New story is up

Dear Internet,
Back in September, I put a call out for beta readers. Tonight I emailed the list with a link to the first story along with the password. As I know several other people have made mention they were interested in the joining in the last few weeks, it seemed like a good idea to put the call out again along with how it works.

Here’s how it will work:
I’ll subscribe you to an announcement list. Every time a story gets posted, you’ll get an email that will include a link to the password protected story on my blog as well as the password. You can either comment on the blog piece directly or email me with thoughts/suggestions.
You’re not obligated to comment every time. The announcement list will only come from me.
Please add readers @ exitpursuedbyabear . net (minus the spaces) to your allow list.
Gmail is sending confirmation emails directly to the junk folder.

I’m looking for comments on: Continuity, wordiness, grammar issues, if it makes sense (or doesn’t), and everything in between.
Because the entry is password protected, WordPress is not posting the link to Tumblr/Facebook/Twitter, but strangely it is posting to LiveJournal. In addition to making an announcement on the list, I’ll also make a public post with an announcement a new story is up.
Let me know if you have any questions.
x0x0x,
Lisa

Uppity Women (NaNoWriMo Day #4)

Today’s word count: 507
Total word count: 1368
Dear Internet,
Note to self: A dinner of Lucky Charms, chased with a half bottle of Witches’ Brew, is probably not one of my more ingenious ideas.
I want to thank everyone for reading, sharing, and commenting on yesterday’s post. We’ve been having some really great conversations on Twitter as well, and I’m loving all the thoughtful commentary. The page is also been shared quite a bit across the social networks, which is also a bonus. Thank you to everyone for participating in this very important conversation.
While TheHusband is one of my biggest champions, he’s often one of the least likely ones to read my blog. This mostly has to do with how sporadic my updates have been over the last few years as compared to the last four days where this will be post #6. I also calculated the word count those posts are at about 5,000 words. My NaNoWriMo piece, well, not so much, but I’ll get to that in a second.
This morning while we were getting ready to head out for the day of errands, he seemed pretty excited by my story idea, which of course got me talking about what I wanted to do. We spent the better part of an hour with me verbally walking through some things about the story, what I liked, my ideas, what wasn’t working. We continued this later, over lunch, where we started drawing up an outline so that I could work from that.
His hypothesis was there were two types of writers in the world: Those who outline and need the skeleton before the flesh, and those who write and need just the flesh. (He listened to every episode of CBC Writer’s and Company from the last three years, thus the basis for his explanation.) He says my problem, or style, is that I write from the flesh AND I over edit. A paragraph could take me four hours. There is a beauty in that, for word precision is very important to me but that is obviously not going to work for NaNoWriMo.
To which I agree.
As we had left late in the morning, our errands were done by mid-afternoon, which would give me about six or so hours to write before Sunday night television kicked in. I was pretty excited about having that much time blocked off with all of my day’s chores done.
Except, I didn’t write. I read Facebook, Twitter, mailing list emails, Google reader and as well as wrote postcards. I had opened up Scrivener as soon as I sat at my desk and kept in running in the background, tabbing to it every so often to stare in petulance at it before tabbing back to whatever I was doing.
I even started answering the political robocalls.
But I wrote nothing.
Nearly every interview or piece I’ve ever read about writing, the author in question always, always, always mentions that in order to write, you must read. Read in your genre, your interests, outside your interests. Doesn’t matter, just read. A particular situation that worked in one story, could be tweaked for yours. As I noted in June , I knew I was depressed when I stopped reading or listening to music. I used to read 10 books a month, now I’m lucky if I will do that every six. I found when I started reading Game of Thrones this week, the connection to reading and writing became clear. Ideas were coming, sometimes fast and furious, as I traveled around Westeros. I got what those authors were throwing down.
(I’ve also read enough interviews of authors where they are often asked, “What are you influences/where do you get your ideas?” and they come off with a flippant reply that ideas are everywhere / from their brain / I make everything up or some other they-think-is-clever response. These authors, some very well known, are full of shit. You read, you get ideas, you make your own connections, you write. It’s cyclic. It’s simple. It’s not magic, no matter how much you want it to be.)
But today! Today after talking and walking through ideas, nothing came to pass. I was worried, I told TheHusband, for I started in one direction and now I have to change it fit this new theme. I’m even changing point of view (first to third) and that means I have to re-write everything. He argued with me, of course, for he said that you should continue in the new path and worry about the opening stuff later.
But I need to read what I have written in continuity to make sure it is making sense! He told me I was procastinating and sent me back to my desk.
I huffed in indignation like a three year old, grabbed my laptop, the notebook with story notes, and with Wednesday trailing behind me, came down to our dining room. Why I thought changing location, where TheHusband was arguing the Internet was possibly my real detrator, would help, I had no fucking idea. I thought perhaps liberal liquid lubrication would be helpful, so I uncorked a bottle of cheap wine and sat down.
And I began to write.
The take away from all of this: I need to develop a drinking habit to get things done.
There are a couple of things about this NaNoWriMo that are important to me: Finish a story, possibly in book form, write it in third person, and make it interesting. I know I can do this, I know that I want to do this, I need to stop allowing the oooh shiny from distracting me.
Or start visiting my local adult beverage store more often.
ttfn,
Lisa

Need vs Want

Dear Internet,
When I came home from work today, I found myself bemused in my driveway when I realized I had not thought of or worked on my NaNoWriMo story at all today. Now that I’m getting back to working five days a week instead of three, I’m still working on a schedule to make everything fit. I’ve also taken on a part-time gig for a committee work I’m involved with at MPOW, which I have to also get cracking on as well this weekend.
Balance.
Our plans for the evening was to head to a concert, which we ended up bailing on as TheHusband wasn’t feeling well and I was feeling tired. My body seems more delicate then I remember it ever being, which seems exacerbated by the complications of my recovery from my arthritis surgery in June. If you’re not following me on across the usual haunts, the tl;dr version is this:

June 28th, I had arthritis surgery on my right ankle to remove nearly 20 years of bone chip/spurs from my original accident in 1995. I was planning on being down for the count for a few weeks, but I was bed bound for nearly 2.5 months and out of work for nearly three months. The number of times I left the house, nay went downstairs, during July and August can be counted on one hand, with some left over. My recovery has been so slow1 they have installed a wound vac, which I wear 24/7 and I have to charge up nightly.

While I was eating my dinner tonight of rather bland canned soup, I was flipping through several back issues of The Writer and Writer’s Digest. As I read quips, advice, and interviews, the one thing that kept popping up in my brain was the idea of need vs want in genre writing. I want to write thought provoking but not necessarily heavy stories while I need to write the dark and spooky stuff to work out all of my monsters. I mused that when constructing characters, I try so desperately to keep bits of me out of them, the darker bits, for reasons only known to my subconscious self. My heart tells me I’m not ready to go down that road right now, that writing the fluffier pieces will help get me off the ground. The fluffier pieces may be good, but the darker pieces is what will create my mythos.
I’m keeping those monsters at bay, until the time when I can properly pull them out slowly, one by one, into the daylight to acclimate them to this outer world. Then perhaps they won’t seem so scary.
ttfn,
Lisa

1. The first question I hear is, “Are you diabetic?” so I’ll just cut you off at the chase and tell you that no, I’m not diabetic. Yes, I do get checked on a regular basis. No, I do not have poor circulation. No, I am not a smoker and have not been one for a very long time. No, they do not know why it is taking me so long to heal. Yes, I’m getting checked by the doctors on a bi-monthly basis.

NaNoWriMo: Day #1

Dear Internet,
Today’s word count: 861
Total word count: 861
One of the projects I worked on over the summer was consolidating my writing into a manageable organization to figure out what needed work, what didn’t and so on. I found all of my Scrivener files floating around various locations, consolidated them into one central location, and was pleasantly surprised to see how much notes and writing I had done on previous existing works. I spent a couple of hours reading and making mental notes because truthfully, I had no idea what I was going to write this time around other than I knew I had to write. I was hoping to put together ome kind of outline or plan, but even with some works in progress, this felt like it needed to be more off the cuff then researched based. Plus, I’ve also been bursting with so many ideas that it is hard to decide which one needs the love most of all.
I found a couple of pieces I had started writing from way back when and pulled bits of what I liked from them, using those ideas to craft something new. I cranked out almost 900 words in about 1.25 hours, which is pretty awesome I say. I know tomorrow, Friday, is going to be hard to steal time to write and I plan on making up most of the slack this weekend. I also need to start constructing something resembling a plot so I can get this project moving forward.
Here is what I’ve come up with: Unnamed female (so far), whom we’ll call Jane Doe for now, wakes up to the looming faces of her best friends to find out she’s lost several days. In panic, and concern, they reach out to one of Jane’s family members, a great aunt, who owns a store of some sort in norther Michigan, specifically on the 45th parellel. Her friends pack Jane, her dog Gaston, and most of her belongings into Jane’s car to send her to this mysterious to figure out her life.
Here is what I know:

  • From the 900 words, with very little written description  I know Jane is a blonde, ex-smoker who cheats like mad, and likes old technology. She’s angry, confused, and brave. She doesn’t know what happened, but she knows she’ll find the answer sooner or later. She has a dog named Gaston who is trained to respond to unique keywords. For example, “Chocolate chips” is his cue to go into attack mode. All of her immediate family is missing/presumed dead and she is an only child (this part may change).
  • Her aunt is going to be Nanny Ogg from Discworld mixed with Mrs. Roper from Three’s Company. Her store (yet undetermined) will also act as a meeting place for the local supernatural/paranormal world. Jane doesn’t know it yet, but her family has some special skills. This also will help explain her missing/dead parents.
    • A year or so ago, I was digging around for conspiracies about the 45th parellel and came up with, well, quite a bit. There were once thought to be magical properties and a major ley line, so if there is any good place to have a paranormal world, this would be it.
  • A couple of years ago, I wrote a very detailed sequence of events of how one of my characters lost time, but it doesn’t quite fit in here. I’ll see what I can beat into submission.
  • I recently read about when the British moved from Julian to Gregorian calendar in 1752, that Wednesday September 2 moved into Thursday September 14 to make up for the drift of time over the centuries. I’ve been toying with the idea this “lost time” as it were, plays into my story. Think of something along the lines of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels, except significantly less funny.
  • I’m debating on creating a new village in the area I am placing Jane or usigng an existing one. Jury is still out on this.
  • NaNoWriMo doesn’t have genre to fit this but it will best be described as paranormal/mystery/magical realism with a dash of quirk.
  • No romance unless it somehow moves the plot forward and pairing will not be the end all/be all for the final.
  • This will not be the great American-Canadian novel and I’m okay with that.

This should be enough to get me going for awhile.
More tomorrow.
TTFN,
Lisa

First Maker of Poetry: NaNoWriMo 2012

Dear Internet,
As my convalescence was ending in August,  I worked out a plan to jump start my writing as all the voices in my head were beginning to drive me to distraction. It was them or me. But as time marched on, my mobility has improved, and lifetm keeps getting in the way, some of those promises have gone to the wayside. I found when TheHusband would chain me to my desk and demand I write 1000 words, I could do that fairly easily, even with just a kernel of an idea. So with that in mind, I decided I’m going to use National Novel Writing Month as the public shame (in addition to TheHusband’s) to push myself back on track.
Goals

  • Write five days a week, 2500 words each day
    • Space break days apart.
    • Adjust word count appropriately if missed more then two break days
    • Does not include outlining or research
  • Blog five days a week, 250-500 words each piece
    • Blog pieces can be on any topic
    • Alpha/beta reading does not count towards blog pieces since these are private
  • No editing
  • No website design changes. Period.
  • Excluding household chores and the occasional eating, non-NaNoWriMo related activities (TV, cross-stitching, knitting, etc) are on hold until days word count has been reached

How you can support

 
Fingers crossed,
Lisa

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