(This was originally posted after Yuletide 2011, on my LiveJournal. Still, it applies.)
For those of you who don't know me, kick back and relax for a second and I will tell you (for possibly the umpteenth time but this time I'll bookmark it on my links) how Kitty came to be a Speed-Writing Freak.
I've been telling stories since I could, well, string coherent words into cogent sentences. I know I've been writing since Labyrinth came out, because that was when I saved my pennies and bought this beautiful thing that had 'dream journal' printed on the cover, along with a beautiful picture. It was silver and slate blue and lavender and bits of pink, and it had cream colored paper with darker tan lines and little floral accents and I loved it to bits. And I thought it was the most elegant thing ever, so I had to put in an elegant story. So I wrote self-insert badly disguised Labyrinth type fanfiction. Also fanciful stories about my life as though it were a grand adventure.
I was really young, shut up.
The second thing I remember writing, although I know I wrote stuff in between because I have vague memories of stretching out on beds with notebooks and colored pens, I just don't remember what any of them were. But the second thing I remember writing was a huge X-Men fanfic with my best friend of my childhood, D. We wrote this on my stationary that my aunt printed up for me on the store printer, on looseleaf, on any paper we could find. We kept it in binders (hers was leather covered and more awesome than mine) and we called it The Manuscript. And we quoted lines from it at each other all the time, and it was about Wolverine/Jubilee and Rogue/Gambit initially, only my pairings jumped around because I was so much more fickle than her. And we'd stretch out wherever and write for a while, and then read to each other or swap fic. Those are some of the best memories of my childhood, hanging out and writing fic and cracking each other up over it and plotting and everything.
After that there was a lot of fanfic. A LOT. Some of it hand-written, some of it on the computer because I've always had a computer in the house. In High School there was a terrible, terrible but incredibly fun thing called the Mage Wars where I ended up compiling a bunch of people's Mercedes Lackey fanfic into an ongoing RP/collective story, the technology wasn't quite there yet, or we didn't have a good handle on how to use it, one thing or another. And I posted it on the web, this was my first major HTML undertaking. The really frightening thing is, there are probably still people on both LJ and DW who remember the MageWars, I've been running into them over the past year and a bit. Thinking back on it now, it was probably really terrible. Literate, we had all our words and punctuation marks in the right place, but very crude. But it was fun, and it was writing, and we did learn and get better. And I had fun. Also at least one of us got cease and desist letters from Mercedes Lackey's lawyers, aren't we proud.
My senior year of High School we all had to do our senior projects, and pick teachers to be our advisors. I picked one of the English teachers I'd really gotten along with and chose outlining and writing the first 3-5 chapters of a novel for mine. It was nice and sedate, I didn't have to go anywhere, and I could write all the things. And actually, looking back on it, that piece wasn't that bad of a concept. The plotting was terrible and the writing was fairly excruciating in the fine details, but it was literate. Grammar and punctuation were decent, it wasn't nearly as strong as it could be but it wasn't bad. For a 17 year old anyway. You know all the things they say bad about Eragon? Yeah, I did that too.
So then we skip ahead to college. One thing I did write was a novel-sized background for a weekend-long LARP character. I wrote 90,000 words for a character I was going to play for two nights. I think I did it in about a month. Basically what happened was the Storyteller (moderator) for the LARP made the mistake of telling me, okay, sure, you can have extra points for every two pages of background you write. And then I went up to her and went O HAI I WROTE YOU A NOVEL. That rule quickly went away. But around that time I also started looking more seriously into writing for a living. And then I did a stupid, ignorant thing.
One of the advice pages I saw said that writers who really wanted to get better practiced their craft every day. They sat down and they wrote five pages or for two hours or whatever, so I was all, sure, I can write for two hours a day. But how much should I write? Because I can't always block two solid hours off. So I thought about it, I sat down, and I wrote, I think, about 2500 words in half an hour. Which was good! I sat down, the words just sort of flowed out onto the screen, and I thought to myself, okay. So I can write about 2500 words in half an hour, in two hours I should be able to write 10,000 words. So I'll aim for that, per day. And I did. For about seven freaking years. I didn't realize that things will distract you, writers block happens, sometimes you just get frustrated, I didn't realize that some writers are lucky to write a thousand words in a day. I had no concept in my head of what was a lot to write and what was more average. So I tried to write 10,000 words per day for seven. Years.
Somewhere over those seven years it sank in that maybe most people don't do this. By this time, though, I was writing about 7k per day on average, sometimes 10k, sometimes less. And it wasn't just 7k of crap, I really was getting better. I could see it when I looked back on stuff I'd written a couple years previous. Over Yuletide I got a prompt that turned out to be the same damn thing I'd written almost 9 years ago, and I went back and dug the story up on FF.net, and it wasn't terrible? But it wasn't good, either. I've grown as a writer. And I've gotten really fast. Because for seven or so years I had no idea that I couldn't do this.
These days, or at least these days as of this writing, I try for about 2000 words per day. I can do that in an hour, maybe half an hour, and it frees me up for other pursuits like exercise to stay healthy, cooking which I do enjoy, playing music, earning money at my day job. Sometimes I write more; around Yuletide I've been consistently going above 5k per day, but I've also dropped a lot of other things. In my opinion which, I think, is shared by some of my closest friends, I've gotten healthier about writing. I've learned where my limitations are, learned how to listen to my body and my mind and what it churns out, and I don't think I'm the worse for it. But I also do enjoy being a speed demon when it comes to writing. Somehow, whatever the writing process is in my brain has been changed to the point that I can sit down at a keyboard (because it's much easier on a keyboard, I type at about 100wpm) and let words flow onto the page. Because for seven years, I didn't know I couldn't. I knew there were words in there, I just had to get out of the way.
I don't recommend this to anyone, at all. It wasn't the best time in my life, and it was a stupid thing to try to do. But for those of you who see me posting my word counts and go "O.O how do you DO THAT?" that's how. By, basically, not knowing and then stubbornly refusing to believe that I couldn't. To the exclusion of most else. For seven years. Also, devouring everything printed I could find and just plain writing every day. The usual rules still apply.
Showing posts with label on kitty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label on kitty. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
In Which We Do Ten Things At Once
I'm cooking dinner and committing a minor act of bloggery that may or may not go anywhere, while planning out the menu for next week with the boy, while pondering the line edits I have to do, while keeping an eye on Twitter. And this is pretty much an evening in the life of Kitty. In another forty-five minutes or so I'll have dinner ready, and I'll sit down to chew on an episode of Haven and do line edits when my head is too full of that, and then chew some on an episode of Person of Interest since it's my week to do that. And undoubtedly I'll be fussing with something else, maybe chatting, maybe working some clay with one hand while I attempt to type coherently with the other. Maybe making a grocery list, because after menu planning comes grocery lists. See, there ist method in my madness. Maybe I'll be doing that translation I promised someone that, okay, is half done by now.
I do not, as you may have gathered by now, or if you know me from meatspace at all, do things one at a time. I gather to myself a collection of tasks that need to happen and sort them into categories of things that can happen simultaneously. And it does help that some of these things are things like "finish watching this TV show" or "finish that damn knitting project," or "explore some new bands," things that require different parts of my body and my brain. But sometimes it involves sitting on the couch or at the computer and leaning forward and tabbing between five windows at once, making progress on one project and then when I hit a wall there, even a small one, rapidly moving to the next one so I can make progress and use that momentum to go back to the first.
There's been a study referenced on the internet somewhere or another, I'd track it down if I had more than a vague supposition that I saw it around, that bilingual people multitask better. On the face of it, it makes sense. When you live in a bilingual household, you get used to switching your brain back and forth through two different but both fundamental ways of thinking. So it's not much of a stretch to go from that to switching your brain back and forth from editing in one window, writing something new in another, doing a bit of HTML code in a third, and chatting elsewhere. All similar but slightly different tasks. Or, alternatively and less single-category focused, mending a skirt and watching TV and chatting and writing a story in bits and pieces. While the front of my mind is focused on the conversation and not stabbing myself with a needle, the back of my mind might be taking in the TV show and churning out other kinds of fiction. Or, as I'm doing right now, keeping an eye on a pot of soon-to-be-mashed potatoes to make sure it doesn't boil over, while blogging, while making a meal plan and a grocery list, while chatting, while turning over aspects of my childhood in my head in case I need to pull them out and pass them over for their information.
Everybody does this. And even as I'm typing it there's an element of caterpillaring in here. You know what caterpillaring is. It's what happens when someone asks the caterpillar (or the centipede, as it seems to be more commonly known) how on earth does it move all those legs at the same time. Having to think about it, the caterpillar (or centipede) realizes it has no idea, and promptly topples over. So, Kitty, how do you cook and do household tasks and blog and chat and prepare anecdata all at the same time? I'll tell you! .... I don't know. But everybody does it, and the trick to doing it well is knowing what kinds of tasks you can balance and how many of each of them you can juggle before you and all your tasks fall flat on your face.
I'm bad at this. I'm better than I used to be, so we'll say I used to be really bad at this. There was a time not so many years ago when I would write six to eight projects around Nanowrimo pretty much because I could. There was no question of whether or not it was a good idea, or whether or not I could in the sense that I was capable of doing this in any sort of rational or healthy manner, I was physically and mentally capable of writing 350,000 words in a month, so sure, why not?
Oh the reasons I could give you why not. So many reasons do I have.
(When you're blogging no one can tell that you took a five to mash some potatoes.)
(Or decanting some spices.)
Doing multiple things at once isn't a bad thing. It's a sad truth that one's ability to do a task well goes down with every additional task you pile onto what you're doing; this is the reason people who talk on the phone and drive and put on their makeup and drink coffee, cause accidents. But it's also true that doing something, especially doing it well and to completion, gives a little upswing. A little bit of momentum or at least positive energy (aka dopamine) which can then be converted into forward momentum or energy for one of the other things you're doing. Just looking at my list of tasks, half of them involve short, simple things stacked on one after the other, next to one or two longer or more involved things. Probably half the reason I've been successful with my line edits so far is because I've been doing them in conjunction with smaller tasks I can finish so I'm not going dear god will this project never fucking end? Because I will. I know it, you know it, my editrix definitely knows it.
So, now I've almost finished making dinner. I've got my menu for the rest of the week, and the shopping list to go with it to give the boy since he's the one who goes by the store with the discounted meat and at the hour when it's discounted and stuck out on the shelves. That's three tasks done, and I still have a couple hours left in the evening to do all my blogwork, and whatever else goes along with blogwork. Most likely chatting and eating dinner, and possibly some line edits, and maybe some knitting, coding, or playing around with modeling clay. And whatever it is, I'm sure it will be full of little dopamine mines going off in my head and keeping me moving forward in any of the half-dozen tasks I've set for myself tonight. I may not get it all done by the time I trudge upstairs to bed, but I'll at least have a good chunk of things whacked out. And that's more than enough to be going on with.
I do not, as you may have gathered by now, or if you know me from meatspace at all, do things one at a time. I gather to myself a collection of tasks that need to happen and sort them into categories of things that can happen simultaneously. And it does help that some of these things are things like "finish watching this TV show" or "finish that damn knitting project," or "explore some new bands," things that require different parts of my body and my brain. But sometimes it involves sitting on the couch or at the computer and leaning forward and tabbing between five windows at once, making progress on one project and then when I hit a wall there, even a small one, rapidly moving to the next one so I can make progress and use that momentum to go back to the first.
There's been a study referenced on the internet somewhere or another, I'd track it down if I had more than a vague supposition that I saw it around, that bilingual people multitask better. On the face of it, it makes sense. When you live in a bilingual household, you get used to switching your brain back and forth through two different but both fundamental ways of thinking. So it's not much of a stretch to go from that to switching your brain back and forth from editing in one window, writing something new in another, doing a bit of HTML code in a third, and chatting elsewhere. All similar but slightly different tasks. Or, alternatively and less single-category focused, mending a skirt and watching TV and chatting and writing a story in bits and pieces. While the front of my mind is focused on the conversation and not stabbing myself with a needle, the back of my mind might be taking in the TV show and churning out other kinds of fiction. Or, as I'm doing right now, keeping an eye on a pot of soon-to-be-mashed potatoes to make sure it doesn't boil over, while blogging, while making a meal plan and a grocery list, while chatting, while turning over aspects of my childhood in my head in case I need to pull them out and pass them over for their information.
Everybody does this. And even as I'm typing it there's an element of caterpillaring in here. You know what caterpillaring is. It's what happens when someone asks the caterpillar (or the centipede, as it seems to be more commonly known) how on earth does it move all those legs at the same time. Having to think about it, the caterpillar (or centipede) realizes it has no idea, and promptly topples over. So, Kitty, how do you cook and do household tasks and blog and chat and prepare anecdata all at the same time? I'll tell you! .... I don't know. But everybody does it, and the trick to doing it well is knowing what kinds of tasks you can balance and how many of each of them you can juggle before you and all your tasks fall flat on your face.
I'm bad at this. I'm better than I used to be, so we'll say I used to be really bad at this. There was a time not so many years ago when I would write six to eight projects around Nanowrimo pretty much because I could. There was no question of whether or not it was a good idea, or whether or not I could in the sense that I was capable of doing this in any sort of rational or healthy manner, I was physically and mentally capable of writing 350,000 words in a month, so sure, why not?
Oh the reasons I could give you why not. So many reasons do I have.
(When you're blogging no one can tell that you took a five to mash some potatoes.)
(Or decanting some spices.)
Doing multiple things at once isn't a bad thing. It's a sad truth that one's ability to do a task well goes down with every additional task you pile onto what you're doing; this is the reason people who talk on the phone and drive and put on their makeup and drink coffee, cause accidents. But it's also true that doing something, especially doing it well and to completion, gives a little upswing. A little bit of momentum or at least positive energy (aka dopamine) which can then be converted into forward momentum or energy for one of the other things you're doing. Just looking at my list of tasks, half of them involve short, simple things stacked on one after the other, next to one or two longer or more involved things. Probably half the reason I've been successful with my line edits so far is because I've been doing them in conjunction with smaller tasks I can finish so I'm not going dear god will this project never fucking end? Because I will. I know it, you know it, my editrix definitely knows it.
So, now I've almost finished making dinner. I've got my menu for the rest of the week, and the shopping list to go with it to give the boy since he's the one who goes by the store with the discounted meat and at the hour when it's discounted and stuck out on the shelves. That's three tasks done, and I still have a couple hours left in the evening to do all my blogwork, and whatever else goes along with blogwork. Most likely chatting and eating dinner, and possibly some line edits, and maybe some knitting, coding, or playing around with modeling clay. And whatever it is, I'm sure it will be full of little dopamine mines going off in my head and keeping me moving forward in any of the half-dozen tasks I've set for myself tonight. I may not get it all done by the time I trudge upstairs to bed, but I'll at least have a good chunk of things whacked out. And that's more than enough to be going on with.
Saturday, February 23, 2013
In Which We Meditate on Meditating
Today seems like the perfect kind of day to tell you all about how I keep my mind in perfect (hah!) working (ahahah!) order. Stop laughing, I'm serious.
Semi-serious. I've had more experience than was probably wise at attempting to work through a turbo-charged, somewhat manic state -- somewhat manic both in the clinical sense of manic and in the colloquial, and more the latter than the former. And the fact that I have a coping mechanism for working through or coming down from a manic state of project-tackling is at least half-due to general practice at meditative techniques. I was raised by hippies, what can I say? They teach you this when you're young and raised by hippies.
So, my mental landscape is pretty well defined. It started when I was around twelve, thirteen or so, sprung out of recurring dreams and conversations with friends and far too many fantasy novels. It solidified into something resembling consistent form when I became involved in online text-based roleplay, which, since it was freeform, meant I had to consistently describe things like what my headspace was and who lived in it. The basement muse is a subject for another time entirely, but I did manage to get some sort of concrete idea of what it looked like inside the place where I went to plan things.
My headspace is vast and contains multitudes. The center of it is a tower, because little girls who dream of being fantasy heroes love towers, and Very Important People have them (just ask Neil Gaiman). At the ground level there are gardens and fields and hot springs and a big stone wall, but at the top of it is my private little headspace bedroom, and beneath that is the Workshop.
For those of you who haven't read Meredith Ann Pierce's Darkangel Trilogy, it's a young adult series in which a girl is given a spindle which spins, not wool, but thoughts and feelings. And when she's upset it spins an itchy, coarse thread, and when she's content it spins like fine silk. This also comes out, albeit less blatantly magical, when the protagonist of Wise Child (by Monica Furlong) is learning to spin and weave. And in addition to the hippies I grew up spending summers in the Appalachian mountains with my aunts and uncles, and they taught me all kinds of things like how to weave and knit, how to throw clay, how to sew, about feeding chickens and cows and riding horses, how to make baskets, how to spin and make yarn, how to take plain white or off-white things and put color onto them, and the idea that physically creating something tied into one's emotions flew into the blender with all of this and spattered all over my consciousness. The upshot of all this, I was surrounded by crafty people and books about how being crafty could be magical if you thought about it right, so of course my headspace would be full of magical spindles and spinning wheels and pottery wheels and looms and things. Physical crafts as a metaphor for mental crafts, right?
It turns out, this is exactly what I needed. Years and years later, after one manic bout of Yuletide writing I was finding it hard to sleep. All the stories were theoretically in (that's a complaint for another time and place) and I'd wrapped up a last 72-or-so-hour marathon frenzy of writing, but I couldn't sleep, I couldn't settle down, I couldn't think. My headspace was in whatever the stage beyond disarray. So I made use of all this imagery and meditation training, and I put it the hell back in order. If I created stories and worlds and things out of cones of imaginary yarn and blocks of make-believe clay, after a few straight days of mad frenzied creating my Workshop was probably in a state of tremendous chaos and mess, like a meatspace Workshop would be if I'd done the same thing in the physical world. And if had done that, then it needed to be cleaned up, right? I could wipe down the tables and put things back on shelves and sweep the dust from off the floor, too. And by the time I was done with that, I was a lot calmer and ready to sleep again.
Figuring that out was one of those big revelations that makes your life so much easier, you can't imagine how you did it the hard way all these years before. And yeah, I still have days when the deadlines are creeping up on me, or when I have five different things in my head all screaming to get out, or when I've been up too late and early and can't focus anyway. But having one more tool in my kit to put my mind in order doesn't hurt, and does help quite a bit.
Semi-serious. I've had more experience than was probably wise at attempting to work through a turbo-charged, somewhat manic state -- somewhat manic both in the clinical sense of manic and in the colloquial, and more the latter than the former. And the fact that I have a coping mechanism for working through or coming down from a manic state of project-tackling is at least half-due to general practice at meditative techniques. I was raised by hippies, what can I say? They teach you this when you're young and raised by hippies.
So, my mental landscape is pretty well defined. It started when I was around twelve, thirteen or so, sprung out of recurring dreams and conversations with friends and far too many fantasy novels. It solidified into something resembling consistent form when I became involved in online text-based roleplay, which, since it was freeform, meant I had to consistently describe things like what my headspace was and who lived in it. The basement muse is a subject for another time entirely, but I did manage to get some sort of concrete idea of what it looked like inside the place where I went to plan things.
My headspace is vast and contains multitudes. The center of it is a tower, because little girls who dream of being fantasy heroes love towers, and Very Important People have them (just ask Neil Gaiman). At the ground level there are gardens and fields and hot springs and a big stone wall, but at the top of it is my private little headspace bedroom, and beneath that is the Workshop.
For those of you who haven't read Meredith Ann Pierce's Darkangel Trilogy, it's a young adult series in which a girl is given a spindle which spins, not wool, but thoughts and feelings. And when she's upset it spins an itchy, coarse thread, and when she's content it spins like fine silk. This also comes out, albeit less blatantly magical, when the protagonist of Wise Child (by Monica Furlong) is learning to spin and weave. And in addition to the hippies I grew up spending summers in the Appalachian mountains with my aunts and uncles, and they taught me all kinds of things like how to weave and knit, how to throw clay, how to sew, about feeding chickens and cows and riding horses, how to make baskets, how to spin and make yarn, how to take plain white or off-white things and put color onto them, and the idea that physically creating something tied into one's emotions flew into the blender with all of this and spattered all over my consciousness. The upshot of all this, I was surrounded by crafty people and books about how being crafty could be magical if you thought about it right, so of course my headspace would be full of magical spindles and spinning wheels and pottery wheels and looms and things. Physical crafts as a metaphor for mental crafts, right?
It turns out, this is exactly what I needed. Years and years later, after one manic bout of Yuletide writing I was finding it hard to sleep. All the stories were theoretically in (that's a complaint for another time and place) and I'd wrapped up a last 72-or-so-hour marathon frenzy of writing, but I couldn't sleep, I couldn't settle down, I couldn't think. My headspace was in whatever the stage beyond disarray. So I made use of all this imagery and meditation training, and I put it the hell back in order. If I created stories and worlds and things out of cones of imaginary yarn and blocks of make-believe clay, after a few straight days of mad frenzied creating my Workshop was probably in a state of tremendous chaos and mess, like a meatspace Workshop would be if I'd done the same thing in the physical world. And if had done that, then it needed to be cleaned up, right? I could wipe down the tables and put things back on shelves and sweep the dust from off the floor, too. And by the time I was done with that, I was a lot calmer and ready to sleep again.
Figuring that out was one of those big revelations that makes your life so much easier, you can't imagine how you did it the hard way all these years before. And yeah, I still have days when the deadlines are creeping up on me, or when I have five different things in my head all screaming to get out, or when I've been up too late and early and can't focus anyway. But having one more tool in my kit to put my mind in order doesn't hurt, and does help quite a bit.
Thursday, February 21, 2013
In Which A Prologue Is Attempted
So. I have a blog.
Technically, I've had a blog for several months now. I co-write Unspooling Fiction with my best friend from college, and that's been wildly successful beyond our imaginings. But since I'm attempting to be a real live grown-up author (two of those adjectives are questionable) with a web page and published works and everything, a blog for my own writerly purposes seemed like the thing to do. Required by unspoken contract, if you are an author with an online presence, you must have a blog. Besides, I can hold forth at apparently astounding length, so there you go.
It's a bit strange, this self-publishing and attempting to get published by submission thing. Like almost everyone, it seems, I started writing young and early, and continued through college and into adulthood and being a college graduate and an idiot, I decided I would try to make a career doing what I loved. Because that's what you're supposed to do, right? It didn't help that my first submission to a contest, I think when I was still in college, was accepted. Nothing worse than success straight off the bat, I thought for sure that I could do this, that I was in fact as brilliant as I felt while half stoned out of my mind on research paper deadlines and too much cafeteria food. I moved down to live with friends and my then-boyfriend, I looked for temp work to pay the bills between submitting things and getting paid for it. Ah, naivete.
Fast forward to almost eleven years later. The closest I've come to success in publishing via traditional routes is a few short stories in anthologies I can almost guarantee you've never heard of (and not under this name, anyway), and a kudos from a Putnam editor who said he'd love to see my manuscript... if I could find an agent. I tried about forty agencies before I gave up on that one, and packed in the dream a year later. Not the writing part of it, that I kept up because as we all know, once you start, you don't stop. But the submitting I cut out entirely, because I had a day job first with a soul-sucking call-center and then an actually pleasant day job at the family store, which I did enjoy. So I had day job work I enjoyed, I could still write, I loved where I moved to and now live, I might as well just write for myself and be satisfied with my mediocrity. I made noises in the direction of self-publishing, but something always seemed to come up. After I bought a house, though, and it became more certain that I really was settling in my lovely mountains for good, the noises became a bit more coherent. Traditional route publishing be damned, but I needed to prove to myself that I could write, revise, and complete a freaking book because I had been trying and failing and failing better for so many years.
Somewhere in there, within the last several months, my friend and I committed an act of bloggery. How this happened was how most things seem to happen with me and writing, she and I blather at each other about television shows and the nuances of their acting and filming choices, color, script, etc., out of habit. At some point someone said something that made me write out a diatribe on the subject of a character, which was well received. Upon learning that people liked this sort of thing, first we blathered on more in public on Tumblr, then we perpetrated the blog, because Tumblr just wasn't suited to inviting discussion and having a good dialogue. We started it off with one show, one show became two, and at first we publicized it only on Twitter and Tumblr. We had no idea and no real inclination to explore making this a Thing On The Internet. Which is of course when Murphy stepped in and decreed that writers and in-character twitters from both shows would pick it up and disseminate it far and wide. Suddenly we had that most elusive of creatures, A Readership. And people liked what we wrote. To this day we look at each other and wonder how the hell this happened. We'll probably still be wondering that in a year from now.
I have no idea what's going to happen with this blog. Or with my website or my writing career, if career is even the proper term for it. I write! I will continue to write, and I will continue to try and navigate this self-publishing thing because it is a thing I want to do for myself. The rest is up to the whimsy of the universe. Hopefully, it will be kind.
Technically, I've had a blog for several months now. I co-write Unspooling Fiction with my best friend from college, and that's been wildly successful beyond our imaginings. But since I'm attempting to be a real live grown-up author (two of those adjectives are questionable) with a web page and published works and everything, a blog for my own writerly purposes seemed like the thing to do. Required by unspoken contract, if you are an author with an online presence, you must have a blog. Besides, I can hold forth at apparently astounding length, so there you go.
It's a bit strange, this self-publishing and attempting to get published by submission thing. Like almost everyone, it seems, I started writing young and early, and continued through college and into adulthood and being a college graduate and an idiot, I decided I would try to make a career doing what I loved. Because that's what you're supposed to do, right? It didn't help that my first submission to a contest, I think when I was still in college, was accepted. Nothing worse than success straight off the bat, I thought for sure that I could do this, that I was in fact as brilliant as I felt while half stoned out of my mind on research paper deadlines and too much cafeteria food. I moved down to live with friends and my then-boyfriend, I looked for temp work to pay the bills between submitting things and getting paid for it. Ah, naivete.
Fast forward to almost eleven years later. The closest I've come to success in publishing via traditional routes is a few short stories in anthologies I can almost guarantee you've never heard of (and not under this name, anyway), and a kudos from a Putnam editor who said he'd love to see my manuscript... if I could find an agent. I tried about forty agencies before I gave up on that one, and packed in the dream a year later. Not the writing part of it, that I kept up because as we all know, once you start, you don't stop. But the submitting I cut out entirely, because I had a day job first with a soul-sucking call-center and then an actually pleasant day job at the family store, which I did enjoy. So I had day job work I enjoyed, I could still write, I loved where I moved to and now live, I might as well just write for myself and be satisfied with my mediocrity. I made noises in the direction of self-publishing, but something always seemed to come up. After I bought a house, though, and it became more certain that I really was settling in my lovely mountains for good, the noises became a bit more coherent. Traditional route publishing be damned, but I needed to prove to myself that I could write, revise, and complete a freaking book because I had been trying and failing and failing better for so many years.
Somewhere in there, within the last several months, my friend and I committed an act of bloggery. How this happened was how most things seem to happen with me and writing, she and I blather at each other about television shows and the nuances of their acting and filming choices, color, script, etc., out of habit. At some point someone said something that made me write out a diatribe on the subject of a character, which was well received. Upon learning that people liked this sort of thing, first we blathered on more in public on Tumblr, then we perpetrated the blog, because Tumblr just wasn't suited to inviting discussion and having a good dialogue. We started it off with one show, one show became two, and at first we publicized it only on Twitter and Tumblr. We had no idea and no real inclination to explore making this a Thing On The Internet. Which is of course when Murphy stepped in and decreed that writers and in-character twitters from both shows would pick it up and disseminate it far and wide. Suddenly we had that most elusive of creatures, A Readership. And people liked what we wrote. To this day we look at each other and wonder how the hell this happened. We'll probably still be wondering that in a year from now.
I have no idea what's going to happen with this blog. Or with my website or my writing career, if career is even the proper term for it. I write! I will continue to write, and I will continue to try and navigate this self-publishing thing because it is a thing I want to do for myself. The rest is up to the whimsy of the universe. Hopefully, it will be kind.
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