Some things I’ve learned about writing

(Note: This post was originally published to my personal Tumblr. I’ve made some tweaks before posting it here.)

In the past four-ish years, I’ve managed to finish and publish a couple of manuscripts (one ~44,000 words and the other ~96,000 words), which for someone who’d never finished anything longer than ~5,000 words is a really huge deal. Here are some things I realized/started practicing that helped me get to this point:

  • “Writer’s Block” isn’t a thing. That’s not to say that I didn’t sit down to write and have nothing come out, but the thing that got me past those times was realizing that there isn’t some outside force called “writer’s block.” When I couldn’t put words down, it wasn’t because there was a thing separate from me that kept me from doing it. It was because I didn’t know what happened next. When I realized that, it became a lot easier to deal with because “all” (scare quotes because even knowing this didn’t make it easy) I had to do was figure out where I was going and I could get back on track. Which leads in to…
  • Talk it out, even with yourself if that’s all you have. This is the main thing I used to get past my slumps. Sometimes I’d talk with friends (seriously, I love all of my friends who are willing to put up with me talking about fictional things pretty much non-stop). Sometimes I’d just “talk” it out with myself in a separate document or inline using square brackets (which was a technique that Piers Anthony once told me about when I was way too young to understand the value of the advice). It wasn’t always quick, but talking things out always got me past the parts giving me trouble.
  • If it’s boring you, you’re doing it wrong. Another huge momentum-killer for me was feeling like I had to “show” everything, even the boring bits. But if I’m bored writing it, my audience will certainly be bored reading it. Which means I need to find some other way of coming at the scene/chapter/whatever to spice things up, or just “tell” about the boring bits for the sake of advancing the story. Sometimes that’s resulted in things being really weird, and sometimes I ended up dropping the scene/plot thread entirely later, but that’s what revisions are for!
  • Embrace crummy drafts. I kind of hate all the teachers who praised me for having such clean “rough” drafts because they gave me a complex about how drafts ought to look. It took a really, really long time to let myself start having drafts that look like crap. I’m about 14k words into the sequel to AMIND and it’s littered with so many instances of “and then this happened” or things in square brackets where I haven’t decided exactly what goes there yet. Instead of stopping to figure things out exactly, I just sketch things out and let it go. It can be fixed when I do revisions.
  • Notes, notes, notes! So literally everything I write these days I have either a Google Docs or Evernote file full of random bits and pieces of musings about plot/outlines. AMIND’s Evernote file is about 5k words long, most of it copied from Hangouts chats I had with folks during the initial development of the plot and world-building. I would often go back to this document to remind myself of where I was going and what I hoped to accomplish. The version of the manuscript that I have now doesn’t bear a whole lot of resemblance to the notes anymore, but those notes were imperative to me getting the damn fool thing done.
  • Outlines, outlines, outlines! I used to be really bad about being a “pantser,” which is to say just writing without any idea where I was going in any but the most broad sense. This was Not Good because of the first bullet point up there. If I didn’t know what happened, I didn’t write, and nothing got done. I’ve started doing the vaguest outlines for scenes and that has helped keep me on track and writing consistently. I doubt I’ll be producing more than 300-900 words a day any time soon, but the fact is that with my skeletal outlines I can produce those words every day. And trying to sketch out about 2/3 of the story before I start (the arbitrary number I gave myself before I let myself start on the sequel to AMIND) gives me enough wiggle room to surprise myself while also keeping me on-track.
  • Schedule writing time. This was kind of hard and is also a very new thing but it seems to be working well. I wrote most of Bodies Are Disgusting in spare minutes wherever I could, and probably about 50% of it was written on my smartphone. With AMIND, I tried to set more goals for myself and stick to them, and that seemed to help. Now I’m trying to write at least a little bit every week-day after I get home from the day job. I am getting really militant about achieving a certain word count goal during the week, and I also try to give myself the weekends off.
  • BONUS: Writeometer! Google rec’d this app to me and HOLY COW, I LOVE IT SO MUCH. I don’t even use the whole “guava” and “treats” thing. Just having a way to record words and see a chart and set goals… oh my goodness, it has helped motivate me so much this past month. It automatically calculates what you need to do in order to meet your deadlines and you can set alarms and it’s FREE. If you have an Android device, I can’t recommend this app enough.
  • BONUS BONUS: Scrivener! This list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning how awesome a tool Scrivener is for putting drafts together. I still do most of my writing in Google Docs, but once a large chunk of a draft is done, I’ll bring it into Scrivener so I can tweak scene placement and chapter arrangement. There are other cool things it can do, too, but it can  be a little intimidating. Even so, I still really really really recommend it.

So, yeah, sorry, that got a little long, but I just wanted to share these things with y’all in case it helps anyone who’s struggling with their own writing. I’m certain that none of this is new information, but this is the specific cocktail it took to get me to the point where I could stop saying “I write” and start saying “I’m a writer.”

Big News!

So, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, I haven’t really been posting much here recently. This isn’t to say that I don’t haunt the Internet, just that I’m usually on more casual sites like Facebook and Tumblr. Since last I posted, a lot has changed for me: I have been at my current day-job for almost two years; I bought a house; we moved into said house; friends have come and gone. Perhaps the biggest thing is the state of AMIND.

When I completed the Camp NaNoWriMo in 2014, the rough draft weighed in at about 55,000 words. This was still 25% more than Bodies, but still kind of anemic for a full-length novel. I let the draft rest for probably longer than I should have (about a year), and when I came back to it, I ended up making some major changes. The current draft is almost twice as long (about 95,500 words), with some of the story significantly changed and the entire POV of the novel shifted to be first-person.

Late one night in early April of this year, I decided that I was going to submit my manuscript to a publisher that one of my friends had recommended to me. My friend (whom I have talked to pretty extensively about the plot and development of AMIND) had worked with this publisher before, and they felt that they might be a good fit for me. So, in a fit of insomnia, I stayed up far later than I should have crafting my submission letter.

As of May 18th, 2016, AMIND is under contract to be published by Less Than Three Press! There are still a lot of things that need to get done before I have a firm date, but words cannot express how excited I am about this development.

Additionally, I have also begun work on the rough draft of the sequel to AMIND, whose working title is (oh-so-creatively) Alonso Munich Is Still Dead.

In the coming weeks, I’m hoping to revitalize this space with more information about AMIND as it makes its way through the publishing process, as well as some thoughts on the process that got me from Camp NaNoWriMo to here.

The next weeks/months are shaping up to be really exciting, and I’m so excited to share it with you all!

Post-Camp Nanowrimo Post

Well, after taking a day to kind of recover (both from Camp Nano and my first week at my new day-job), I just wanted to let you all know that I am stoked as heck and ready to celebrate!

First, as those of you who have been keeping up with my stats may have noticed: I successfully completed my Camp Nano challenge! I had a lot of fun and it taught me a lot about ways to improve my personal writing process, as well as what proper expectations for myself can be given different circumstances. It was a great learning experience all around, and that brings me to…

Second, the first rough draft for AMIND is finished! There’s still a lot of work to be done on it, but the skeleton of the story and a lot of the flesh are all there, and it is definitely going to be a full-length novel once I’m done with revisions/rewrites. Considering that it took me over two years to finish the first draft of Bodies, having finished the first draft of AMIND (a more ambitious project, in my mind) in a little over a year is absolutely astonishing to me. And, speaking of Bodies, that brings me to…

Third, I’m running a celebratory sale! Until August 15th, you can use coupon code DF87K when you purchase Bodies Are Disgusting on Smashwords to get the book for $.99!

Thank all of you for your encouragement and support! Regular Music Monday, Fiction Friday, and art posts will be resuming a little later this month. :D

Camp NaNoWriMo

Sorry for being so quiet lately. Unfortunately, I’m probably not going to get much more talkative this month because I am participating in Camp NaNoWriMo! I’m using the event as a way to kick my butt into gear when it comes to finishing AMIND, and it’s been working pretty well so far. I’m finally over two-thirds of the way through and coming into the final stretch. I’m estimating that it’ll come in at around 60,000 words once all is said and done (so it will definitely be a full-length novel rather than a novella like Bodies), maybe a little more.

If you want to keep track of my progress, check out my stats page. I’m really excited to hopefully get this story finished because I can’t wait to share it with the world at large.

More AMIND

Since CorgiHat is out the door and things are settling down after MomoCon, I’ve had the chance to plug away at Alonso Munich Is Now Dead, and I’m eager to share a little more of the story with you all. This part takes place immediately following the first post (so I highly recommend catching up before jumping below the cut).

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An Announcement and Some Silliness

So, CorgiHat went live while I was at MomoCon, which is why the announcement for this is a little belated. You’re still completely welcome to sign up for the CorgiHat Beta group, as we’re going to be improving the app and launching other apps over the next several months. For now, though, we’re taking a bit of a break to get caught up on personal stuff and plan the next iteration of the product.

I also completely forgot to mention that Bodies Are Disgusting is now available on Google Play! It took a little while for me to iron everything out, and to celebrate, the book is free until 6/6/14 on Google Play only!

In silly news, I realized that yesterday was the third anniversary of Alonso Munich’s death! Happy death day to him. :D I’m very excited about his story and hope that I can share some more of it with you all soon.

A little taste of what’s to come!

I know that I have not been providing a lot of updates recently, particularly in the art and writing department. Part of that is because I’ve been spending a lot of energy on work, and part of it is because it’s getting close to release time for CorgiHat. However, I’ve definitely been writing, and thought I’d share the first couple thousand words of my current project, tentatively titled Alonso Munich Is Now Dead. This project is less horror and more supernatural mystery. The sample can be found below the cut.

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