Random Acts of Literary Vandalism

1) Whip It

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a blog post-reviewy thing about Whip It for about two weeks now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just not going to happen. Not because I think it’s a bad film – it’s utterly charming in its ability to recognise that something can be simultaneously camp as hell and the most important thing in the whole damn world – but because it fits into the same space as contemporary art where I find my critical vocabulary isn’t really up to the task of expressing what I’m thinking about after seeing the film.

 My short, haphazard take on the film goes something like this: it’s endearing. Specifically, the kind of awkward-coming-of-age endearing you find in Taylor Swift film-clip, only Whip Itcome without the puritanical undercurrent that usually causes me to froth at the mouth when encountering Swift’s oeuvre (and thus, Whip It comes closer to having actual substance). The film actually reminds me, very strongly, of Bring It On (another film that didn’t seem like something I’d like that somehow turned out to be highly entertaining) and I kinda wish it existed in a world where Bring It On didn’t because there’s far to many parallels there. The sound-track is phenomenal in its eclecticism, but gets bonus points for including both the Ramones and Yens Leckman.  The most irritating thing about the film is Drew Barrymore’s characters, but only because it’s exactly the same character she played in the Charlie’s Angel’s films with a tendency to act stoned on top. Plus it has Ari Graynor in a minor role (Graynor seems to have become the new incarnation of the cinematic past-time once dubbed “Breckin-Meyer-Spotting”)

It’s also a goddamn spectacular film to watch from a writing point of view because there’s not a damn subplot in the whole thing that doesn’t get a resolution in the end. Admittedly this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but there’s something powerful about knowing that if a film introduces conflict it will provide resolution to it, even if said conflict is just a five-second scene between the protagonist and a minor character in the opening minutes of the story. While Whip It telegraphs a lot of punches on the macro-level (I doubt anyone can’t pick the father’s final scene in the film a full hour before it happens), it gets a pass on this because the resolution of the really minor conflicts are also dragged back into the main plot and made meaningful.  It’s a neat trick, and one I’m gleefully lifting given that I’m in the midst of writing the second draft of Black Candy and dealing with a dozen or so minor characters who walk onstage and do very little after their first appearance.

Seriously, though, you can probably ignore all that and go with this instead: my friend Chris and I are the kind of snarky, mid-to-late-thirties blokes who are continiously dissapointed by films and prone to venting our dissapointment in Waldorf-and-Statler type critiques. As a general rule, it’s a bad idea to go and see film you think you’ll like when either of us are around.

Both of us hit the end of Whip It and said “Yeah, I need to own a copy of this.”

 2) Minimally Acceptable Levels of Productivity

 So I set myself the goal or writing 14,000 words words last week. I didn’t succeed. In fact, I struck a point significantly below success:

On the plus side, it means I’ve hit the minimum accepted levels of productivity for seven straight days now (aka if Peter doesn’t write a thousand words a day he ceases to feel like a human being and makes life miserable for everyone) and actually started to live like a real human being again. There are even parts of my house that are clean, and food that isn’t ordered from the Domino’s website.

That largely means the weekly goal achieved what it needed to achieve, right in time for the rewrites of Cold Cases to land in my inbox.

My process, an overview: start a new story; write eight hundred words; start another new story; write three hundred words; think “fuck, I really do need to finish a novel”; make revision notes for Black Candy; realise Black Candy is horribly flawed and wonder if starting a new novel will be easier; write a hundred words; hate them; write another hundred words; hate them too; pick up a finished novel and read the opening paragraph; think “the new novel I’m writing is complete pants. I’ll start a new one.”; write 100 words; delete one hundred words; work on black Candy; start a blog post about Whip It;  delete it; start a blog post about how much I hate writing; delete it; work on the second short-story I started; work on the first short-story I started; work on Black Candy; start a new novel; research boredom on Wikipedia; find the following quite comforting and accurate – Boredom has been defined by C. D. Fisher in terms of its central psychological processes: “an unpleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest in and difficulty concentrating on the current activity; start a new novel; work on Black Candy; start a new story; discover traction with the new story idea; work on it; blog about process; go back to working on the new story; realise, yes, this one, this is the one I’m ready to write.

Recorded here because it’s always like this, time and again, and I always forget and panic when it happens. Life really would be easier if I had a different process. One that involved working routinely and constantly, rather than gnawing at a dozen bits of bone until I find the one that happens to have a little leftover meat.

Now I’m going to listen to Iggy Pop for a half hour, meet my parents for long, and ponder what happens next for Dead Girl Molly and the Soldier-Boy Walther P.

So last week I started working on a story about a man with a birdcage full or sparrows instead in of a heart and the question of what happens when you swap out the sparrows for something else. It ends badly (because it’s one of my stories and they almost always end badly), and there is heartbreak (’cause, again, I’m writing it…), and last night I finally hit the end of the draft and said “oh, well, that’s done.”

It’s not a terribly good story yet, and may never be, but there is rewriting to correct that problem should I decide it has the seed of a good story in there.

The important thing is that it’s done, because that’s how The Fear is combatted – you crush it beneath the weight of endlessly finished drafts until it gives up and goes away.

And because I was the model of writerly virtue yesterday, I’m going to go collect mail this morning.

Current Project: Getting Back to Basics
Number of Stories Submitted in February: 0 of 8
Rejections Accrued in 2010: 0
Consecutive Productive Writing Days: 1
Days without coke and other soft-drinks: 3
Days without chocolate: 6
Today the Spokesbear is: getting his emo on.

Okay, point the first: Twelfth Planet Press has offered up free e-copies of their 2009 projectsin the name of getting folks to read them prior to the Hugo nominations at this years Worldcon in Melbourne. That means there are free copies of Horn up for grabs. Make of this what you will. (I should also mention that the inimitable Robert Hoge has started a campaign to get Australian’s nominated to the Hugo ballot, and he’s compiling a small list of recommendations for people who might be interested; the real action is over in the facebook group where everyone’s pitching in names).

And so, point the second: February is the month where I combat The Fear again.

It’s a stupid thing, The Fear, all the more stupid because it commonly manifests itself when things seem to be going right. People start accepting stories and asking for submissions and nominating me for awards and suddenly this little voice in the back of my head starts saying “you don’t deserve this” and “you’re going to fuck it up” and the next thing I know I’m sitting on top of a dozen half-finished stories and binging on coke and junk-food because it’s so much easier to not finish things than to start sending them out and face the fact that maybe, just maybe, this time people will realise I suck. Nothing unusual about any of that, really. I’ve never talked to anyone who wants to write who hasn’t experienced The Fear at some point or another. It’s just part of the process, and if it wasn’t for the fact that The Fear creeps up on me in stealth-mode and messes with my head it wouldn’t actually be a big deal at all.

My way past the fear is pretty simple: I start submitting stuff. Lots of it. Writing and submitting stories is actually habit-forming, and The Fear stops being a factor after you get into the routine. It doesn’t go away, but I get to stop capitalizing it. And, as with most things, I can distract myself by focusing on numbers. Make eight submission in February. Accrue 100 rejections this year*. Make sure I write 1500 words a day. Forgo the coke and chocolate which is salving my psychological wounds as I wallow in self-indulgent panic about never getting published again.

So for February I get back to basics and focus on numbers again.

Current Project: Getting Back to Basics
Number of Stories Submitted in February: 0 of 8
Rejections Accrued in 2010: 0
Consecutive Productive Writing Days: 0
Days without coke and other soft-drinks: 0
Days without chocolate: 0
Today the Spokesbear is: Sighing and giving me meaningful looks as he gets all passive-aggressive about the fact that I *should be working* right now if I mean to make any of this happen.

*A goal picked up from my friend Chris Green, based off the theory that you can’t control the acceptances but you can send a bunch of stuff out.

1000 words of redraftage on Black Candy last night. It appears that the “hours per day” writing metric I’ve been used to get the Cold Cases draft in is going to be replaced by the more familiar ”wordcount needed before I can sleep” metric. I suspect my process may be seasonal – Brisbane is too damn hot in summer to do regular work-hours in my flat and I find myself drifting towards writing at night when the temperature and humidity is down. Either way, I’m back work after taking the first ten days of January off for the purposes of taking a break from writing, celebrating my mother’s birthday, and writing my somewhat over-detailed yearly plan (sixteen pages and counting) of what needs to done on the writing front.

My T0-Do List for January and February:

1) Redraft Black Candy
2) Write 3 short-stories I owe people after saying “yes” when they asked if I’d be interested in submitting
3) Write 2 short-stories to replenish the somewhat bare submission pile
4) Brainstorm the project I’m planning to draft in February or March (time permitting) – aiming for about 4 pages of notes a day.

Place your best on how long it’ll take me to go off the rails.

Things I’m going to do this week:

1) Write a short story
2) Re-establish my writing routines after letting them fall by the wayside during the march towards the deadline
3) Write some blog posts that don’t involve the word “novella”
4) Work out a series of goals for December that are flexible enough to suddenly transition into “fixing Cold Cases” when needed

Things I am not going to do this week:

1) Write five thousand words a day in a desperate binge to complete NaNoWriMo with a 50k manuscript.

I thought about this one for a long time over the weekend, because in the back of my head there’s the awareness that five thousand words a day isn’t beyond the realms of possibility. Up until Sunday evening I really thought it was going to happen – what was another week of being a work-obsesses shut-in after three weeks of working on Cold Cases – but in the end common sense won out.

The salve to the wailing, angry writer-child within that stomps his foot over failing a wordcount goal is this: My regular routine will still get the 50k draft written by mid-December, but it’ll also allow me to stock up a few short stories along the way and leave me a complete burn-out at the end of the process.

Before I begin, let me direct you to this: Marshal Payne’s Super-Sekrit Clubhouse has a new interview with my Write Club peep Angela Slatter, which should give you a pretty good insight into why I usually use words like “awesome” and “inimitable” when discussing both her and her writing.

Angela remains one of those folks who fuses talent, hardworking dilligance and bucket-loads of smarts in her approach to writing (although she’ll refute the latter with Simpson’s referenes, giving half a chance). She speaks wisdom and her writing is good – so go read about her now, while she’s still an ‘emerging writer’, and then  you can join me in the nodding and looking smug when people start talking about how this awesome new ‘emerged’ writer in the years to come.

And if you don’t, well, I’ll mock you -with a very mocking mock - because that’s the kind of guy I am.

Okay, back to the entry. Or, to put it another way, a Cold Cases update

It appears that if you past your writing progress in the forms of Lord of the Rings references they become a lot more palatable in this newfangled world of social interactivity, so allow me to adapt from one of yesterday’s twitters/facebook updates and say this: I walk, I walk some more, there is a swampy bit, and I keep reminding myself that if I keep walking I should be hitting Mordor in the near future and tossing the deadly weight of the unending draft of doom into the volcano (and I’ll stop the metaphor there, of course, because the next step would be talking about tonight’s Write Club and I suspect any attempt to position Angela Slatter as the metaphorical Samwise Gamgee in the process would result in some form of bodily injury. Although it also reminds I should do a post about the psychology of write-club once I’m done with the novella).

In less fancy terms, the update goes something like this: rewriting continues, two more chapters got added, and I’m within striking distance of hitting the end. I don’t like the book at this point, but that’s kind of natural in the writing process. After all, I’ve just spent five days looking at it and focusing on the things that are wrong wrong wrong and nothing seems to be working. And the weight of it keeps dragging at my attention, reducing the world down to words and more words and more words, with the occasional break for food and sleep.

Every now and then I take a break and re-read a fragment of an old nanowrimo peptalk:

“The last novel I wrote (it was ANANSI BOYS, in case you were wondering) when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book and write something else instead, or perhaps I could abandon the book and take up a new life as a landscape gardener, bank-robber, short-order cook or marine biologist. And instead of sympathising or agreeing with me, or blasting me forward with a wave of enthusiasm—or even arguing with me—she simply said, suspiciously cheerfully, “Oh, you’re at that part of the book, are you?”

I was shocked. “You mean I’ve done this before?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Not really.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “You do this every time you write a novel. But so do all my other clients.”

I didn’t even get to feel unique in my despair.

So I put down the phone and drove down to the coffee house in which I was writing the book, filled my pen and carried on writing.

One word after another.”

I suspect it’s all about tension at this point – a fight between fixing the longer structural problems “this story makes no sense” rather than the short-terms problems like “this scene has too little tension” or “why do I keep setting things inside cars” or “wait, wasn’t it daylight when I started this scene?” In short, there is much to do, and the evil writer brain wants to tackle them all in an omnivorous burst. The spokesbear tells me to go scene by scene and trust in the process.

As usual, the spokesbear is smarter than I am.

On Friday night, during the Write Club recently documented over on Angela Slatter’s website, I finished the first draft of Cold Cases. Afterwards, I looked at the messy first draft state that’s so familiar after years of first draft, and immediately started fretting. There were sixteen days until the deadline.

My usual rewriting process, particularly for something this long, winds out over the course of a year or more. I do a little rewriting, let it sit for a while, then do a little more. I tinker with scenes, do little bits here and there. I show it to a critique group, get some feedback, then show the revision to a different writer-buddy or two in order to see if it works yet.  I sort through what other people think works, what I think works, and I fine-tune. I can’t replicate that process in sixteen days, especially with a work that’s sitting at 24,000 words.

So I spent most of Saturday freaking out, reading through the manuscript and making notes, hoping I could do something to salvage the story in time. I even let myself have a brief moment of “it can’t be done, I should ask for more time.” That may even have worked, although given how tight the timeline was when I discussed the schedule with the publisher I’m pretty sure it would only have earned another two or three days at most. Since Alisa reads this blog, I shall point out that  everything is fine – it was only a momentary laspe into writerly weakness.

After that moment, I kicked my own arse and went back to work. I spent most of Sunday redrafting the story with a focused and detailed plan rather than my traditional tinkering . It’s different an alien process for me, yes, but it works and it’ll get the story done in the timeframe. At this point, meeting the deadline is more important than preserving a familiar writing process that isn’t really viable in the long term.

Because one of the things that occured me to me on Saturday night is this: deadlines are a fact of life. All going well, I’d like there to be more of them in my future. Getting out of my comfort zone and figuring out how to rewrite faster makes much more sense than blowing the deadline, especially given the fact that I’ve been telling myself I wanted to be a professional author since I was sixteen. Being a towering icon of literary genius would be nice, sure, but I’m generally more interested in getting writing to work like a career and be someone who is easy to work with than anything else (besides, given the state of my PhD, towering icon of literary genius status is certainly *not* in my future).

So Things may still go wrong, but I’m okay with turning in a book the publisher doesn’t want to publish as long as it’s still the best damn book I could make it when the submission goes in. There’s thirteen days to go before the due date and a third of the MS is rewritten already. There’s two thirds of a manuscript that needs large-scale redrafting and 24,000 words of line-editing in my future. That’s doable in thirteen days. Hell, it’s doable in less than that if I’m willing to work.

So in the words of my good friend, Jason Fischer, it’s time to unleash the Fists of Steel!

There’s usually a point in a project where I stumble over it’s identity. Not a theme or a plot or a character conflict, but a moment where I can suddenly look at the piece and realise why I’m writing. Sometimes it’s easy - Horn got defined as as the book about unicorns for people who hate books about unicorns right from the very beginning, before I even came up with the characters. Most of the time it isn’t, and it takes a good deal of noodling around before I have moment of realisation and everything falls into place. The noodling is actually kind of painful and aimless, because even if I’ve got a plot in mind and the story is travelling okay, it always feels a bit listless without getting to know the reason for the book.

Cold Cases spent a really long time without that sense of identity. That thing that makes it a specific book I want to write, rather than just a thing I’m writing. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – I’ve completed short stories without ever having that moment, and people seemed to like them regardless – but it slows things down a lot.

Then, at some point during the Friday write-club, I wrote a scene and went “oh, that’s what this book is about.” And in the days that followed I went from having 10% of a finished draft to about 60%. Because it’s so much easier to write a book once you know it’s identity, if only because it tells you how to make narrative choices that work.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the weekend, because originally I thought it was going to be easy to write a follow-up to horn. Claw was going to be the talking cat book for people who hate talking cats, only identity is rarely that easy and it quickly became apparent that I wasn’t really excited about rehashing the identity of Horn with a different trope. I wanted to work in the world again, and use the characters, and I still wanted to have a talking cat in there somewhere, but it needed to have its own thing. The thing that made me want to write it, even if it didn’t get published, because it had it’s own reason*.

I’m still not sure I can articulate it properly, since the closest summary I’ve got is the book where I torture Miriam Aster with the possibility of happiness and that’s really just a summary of every conflict, everywhere, but it’s somewhere in that ballpark.

And at this point the draft is 60% done and I’m happy enough with what’s happening that I can finally stop freaking out about the fact that it’s got a deadline

*This is not always about the story as a whole. On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War Machines of the Merfolk exists in my head as “the story where I make fun of the little mermaid statue.” For some reason I tend to hinge an books identity on one or two scenes, then everything else tends to grow around it and justify the scenes existence.

“So this is what the volume knob is for”

Within it’s original context this line floors me with its emotional impact, time after time. Divorced from it, it’s just a collection of words. Except for the fact that the Mountain Goats have claimed that sequence forever now, and it’ll always be one of those stray phrases that’s loaded with meaning.

These are the kinds of things I think about on a Friday afternoon.