The Elephant's Child

A Bit of Home.

I look around the inside of the camper we bought back in April and I realize I've inadvertently made it just about as close to what a house in Liberia would be like as it is possible to have here in the States.

The fabric I picked out for curtains is very lappa-like. Even the windows are similar.

Writing resumes tonight, after nearly two weeks of getting almost nothing done. I'm a little concerned for this fall, when the days get darker and Mad Musician is gone overnight more often. It will be harder to make good progress. Nothing to be done about that, though, but to keep going.

Still so very thankful for this camper and the "away"-ness of it.

Sixteen Months.

It only took sixteen months from this: I'm Not Really Sure Why She Got In the Car until tonight, when I stopped writing for the evening at a word count of 50,143 words. 

Sixteen months.  Yikes. 

But I like what I've written. It doesn't make me cringe, and I'm not embarassed by it. And those 16 months includes a lot of heavy editing.  And I don't mean editing like correcting spelling, fixing punctuation, or catching doubled words. I mean editing as in rewriting.  Everybody needs to rewrite. Everyone. Even Stephen King. 

Book is not yet done. There is still story to work out and discover. I have a feel for the ending, but I've not written that far, so I can't say for sure what's going to happen. 

Sixteen months. I can't believe it it's been that long.

Sixteen months. I can't believe I actually have written fifty thousand words.   

Grammar and Editing.

The book I'm currently reading, Pandora's Star by Peter Hamiliton, uses commas where I have been taught to use semicolons. 

It's driving me absolutely batty.  Two independent clauses require a semicolon, not a comma. It makes the otherwise very well written and engaging book feel amateurish. I cannot find anything online, including on several university-level writing helps websites, that indicates it is ever ok to join two independent clauses with a comma. 

It's so consistently wrong throughout the whole book that I can almost assume that the editor did it intentionally, thinking that it's a modern change in usage or practice. I cannot fathom that a big name publisher's division such as Del Rey would have editors on staff that would allow rampant incorrect usuage. 

Here's a sentence as-is from the book:

"Even though it incorporated genetic algorithms the RI was essentially stable, it would never delvep alternative interests and goals in the middle of its operations as some large array software had done in the past, with often disastrous consequences." (pg 188, paperback edition.) 

Here's how I think the above should be punctuated:

"Even though it incorporated genetic algorithms,(comma!) the RI was essentially stable; (semicolon!) it would never delvep alternative interests and goals in the middle of its operations as some large array software had done in the past, often with (flip word order!) disastrous consequences."

A mark against this being an intentional thing is something that occurs on the very next page, where we see correct usage followed directly by incorrect usage:

"Hasty decisions were just as dangerous as hesitation; one of the main requirements of his job was to keep calm in all circumstances. (Two independend clauses and correct joining.) It was a trait he'd learned early in his first life, it just got misapplied back then."  (Oh, the humanity!)

Let me fix that for ya:

   "Hasty decisions were just as dangerous as hesitation; one of the main requirements of his job was to keep calm in all circumstances. (Leaving that alone; it's correct.) It was a trait he'd learned early in his first life. (Period, because it sets off the following thought better.) It had just been got misapplied back then."

 

I'm not a Grammar Nazi. In fact, one of my biggest pet peeves is people who constantly correct other's grammar in what I consider to be causual and colloquial situations: bantering speech, causual, non-business email, chat and instant messaging, and social media.  I do hold the published word to a much higher standard and I hold written product that is intended for the general public (i.e., not only family and friends) to a higher standard: classifed advertisements, newspaper articles, sales flyers, resumes, business email.  I think one of the great failures of our current education system seems to be the inability of many to distinguish between what is casual or colloquial usage and what is formal usage. That's unfortunate. 

Tips For Writers And Why I Won't Read Them Right Now.

I think I will ignore online helps for new writers, tips for dialog, hints for not making stupid mistakes, and 99% of the other editing and novel-writing ideas on the gazillion blogs out there.

They are noisy. And the advice is conflicting. They make my head hurt. They do not make me want to work on writing, they make me want to crawl into a fetal position under a table and suck my fingers while moaning incoherently.

I think that, to continue improving my writing skill (and to continue improving my editing skills) I will instead keep reading books by authors whose writing I love and admire. I will keep reading books that hang like find golden mist in the air after you read their last pages and close their covers, because that is the kind of book I want to write. 

After all, that's how I became a writer in the first place. I didn't work through some magical curriculum or study under perfect, magical-powers-endowed writing teachers (although I did have some very good ones along the way).  People keep telling me that I write well. I have a tendency to believe that it's just friends and family being nice, but a few random strangers on blogs and forums have told me the same thing. 

If I write as well as people have told me I do, it's because I read. And that's how I'm going to learn to write a book: by reading books. And by just doing it and figuring it out as I go.

 

The Unintentional Break.

I never suspected when I hit a wall back in mid-June that an intentional break to recharge the creative juices would turn into an UNintentional month-long stretch of little to no writing. 

Grumble, grumble, grumble. 

I finally got back out in the camper tonight. Today was the first "normal" day for our family since, oh, about June 28th or so. Didn't get much done other than some review-reading of my draft. I gave up after about a half an hour and instead took Pearl out for nice long drive. Which was good for me and needed doing anyway. It's been so blasted hot that going for a pleasure drive in an un-air-conditioned black car with a black interior seems the better part of insanity rather than valor. It's now cooled off a little: the thermometer on the dash said 27 degrees Celsius. 

In the end, the lack of progress over the last few weeks only means I won't be at 50,000 words by September like I thought I might be, but that's really no problem.  

Mad Musician's been reading my whole draft, all 168 pages of it so far, and I have been happy and relieved to hear him call it "really good. " It's so nice to actually discuss it with someone, and by discussing it, learn more about what I need to write and work on yet. 

 

 

 

Working on the One Sentence Pitch.

"The unexpected coming-of-age account of an already-grown-up woman, wrapped in the story of a lost Third Culture Kid who finds redemption in the face of the twin kidney grilles of the BMWs belonging to an ex-racing, divorced engineer ten years her senior."

Sabbaticals and Creativity.

I listened to an interview with Jonah Lehrer on EconTalk yesterday, while doing housework. Lehrer's book is called Imagine: How Creativity Works. 

It was a wide-ranging interview, talking both about artistic creativity and the kind of creativity that we call "out of the box" thinking, that kind of thinking which solves difficult problems in all sorts of industries and fields.  

The tidbit I found most interesting though, was the bit about how important it is for the brain to "do nothing" for a time in order to be creative. Or, to at least spend time doing something completely unrelated to whatever it is that you're currently working on.

I'm finding this to be true in my writing.  So far, it seems that I can write intensively for a few weeks only - about three or four - before I hit a creative wall.  Oh, and it is a wall. A dead end. Bang, no airbags. 

I'm finding that rather than rail against the dying of the creative light, it's working to just give up for the moment, set things aside and work on something else. This time when it's happened, it's coincided somewhat with three weeks of extensive travel by Mad Musician, and I'm finding that it's pretty impossible to get writing done when he's not home anyway. So, I've decided to use the break to send my manuscript out to a few beta-readers, some people that don't seem to mind that the thing isn't really Officially Finished yet.

I'm also using the break to read some novels that are similar to mine in tone and construction. Which are hard to find, honestly. There aren't many novels out there, apparently, that are coming-of-age-even-though she's grownup stories, wrapped up in the guise of girl-meets-boy story about two lost former Third-Culture Kids who find redemption in the faces of the twin kidney grilles of three different BMWs.  I suppose I'm taking that advice of "write what you love and write the book you want to read" to heart? Hopefully not to an unpublishable fault...  

Remember This.

"...And the difference is that now I have 23,000 words that I love. Instead of 50,000 words that I can’t stand to read over."

All of a sudden, I don't feel so weird about having no desire to participate in National Novel Writing Month. 

I have felt uneasy about it for several reasons, some of which are in the article linked. 

Another reason is the same reason that musicians sometimes play a piece very slowly while learning it: so they do not embed poor playing or mistakes by making the mistakes over and over again.  Poor writing begets more poor writing. Writing carefully improves your writing, just as careful practicing improves a musician's playing.  Writing poorly in a race embeds poor writing in your brain.  

Or at least it does for me. Your mileage may vary, of course.

I also love this: Write the book you've always wanted to read, but can't find on the shelf.

That's what I'm doing. It's probably unpublishable due to the weird mix of topics, but that's what I'm doing.

Statistics After The Camper.

A little over two months ago, I put aside my book manuscript because it had become clear that continuing to attempt to write without some big changes in circumstances and logistics was not a wise idea.  Counterproductive. I was miserable, because I wanted to write, but the interruptions were frequent enough that getting much done was near impossible. Quiet was scarce. 

Writing fiction is, for me, not something that happens naturally or organically. It's hard, hard work getting words down on a page. It's utterly unlike other work I've done in front of a screen: it can't be started and stopped quickly; it's impossible to work on in ten or even thirty minute chunks. I'm discovering that I am the opposite of a few other fiction writers I know; they relish the putting of the first draft on to paper and dread editing.** For me, editing is a joy and a delight, because in editing, I'm creating and expanding off of something already started. I'm a deriviatevly creative person.  The Blank Page is a horror to me. (This is why I don't scrapbook, by the way...)

At the time, at the beginning of April, I could not see a way out of the corner I was in. Continuing to (try to) write was causing huge frustration and aggravation and yet putting the book aside was a huge disappointment. In the end, I had to choose my family's sanity and my own over my desire to not-give-up on the book.

But a month ago, a way out presented itself.  We found a small camper listed on Craigslist. Not only was it very cheap, we found it during a month when we were between mortgage payments (we recently refinanced our home) and so were able to pay cash for it. 

 

We parked the camper so the views out of the windows are of the Long Border.

So, since April 29th, I have been going outside most evenings to sit at the dinette table in the camper for an hour or so with a Moleskin notebook, my Waterman foutain pen (bought on a shopping trip with MM not long after we were married), and a draft of everything I've written so far in the form of a Kindle ebook.  No computer.  I'm working long hand.  It's messy, my hand gets sore, I can't say my penmanship is improving; it's getting worse, actually!  I may be wearing out the nib of my fountain pen, and I have to refill my pen every other day. But that's all ok, because I'm am enjoying writing again.   I make notes off the Kindle draft, and write little chunks as I can, then later, back in the house, transfer them to the main manuscript on the computer(and thus give everything a round of editing in the process).

I began working again on April 28th, with a manuscript that had 24,806 words.  Since then, I have written 5,319 words over twelve days of work, averaging 443 words per day worked. That's at least twice my previous average, and at zero emotional cost to my or my family.

As of last night, May 14th, the manuscript is at 30,125 words. 

And last night, I passed another milestone.  I found a link, a small one, between several of these only barely connected sections I've been writing. All along I've had only a vague sense of plot; this is the first real link I have between bits of the story. And that is really, really huge. It's so huge that I feel like I should throw a party, set off firecrackers (ok, maybe not), bake a (gluten-free) cake... or write a blog post, even though I'm a little hesitant to tell anyone about the progress I'm making for fear of calling down Murphy's Law upon my head. 

 

 

 

**Take "editing" here to mean not spelling, grammar and punctuation correction, but massive re-writing, reorganizing, fixing sentence construction, smoothing flow, finding continuity issues, etc. 

Thanks.

A big thank you to those of you (you know who you are) who either sent me a Moleskine notebook or gave me a gift card so I could buy one.  They're just the right size for writing long hand; they've been a lifesaver this week as I very tentatively and carefully dip my metaphorical toes back into the waters of my manuscript. 

Having to refill my Waterman fountain pen every other day is a very nice problem to have.