Awesome sauce.
So I mentioned in my previous post that I was working on another creative endeavor. I ended up getting it ready to debut a few days earlier than I thought. Without any further ado I direct your attention to the following site where you can see my brand new webcomic – Geeklings!
http://geeklings.wordpress.com/
I hope you all will enjoy it.
Whew, it’s been a few weeks since I updated – to be fair there’s a few reasons for that.
1. Holidays! Holidays are a huge time sink for everyone.
2. Work! Deadlines are no fun. Necessary – but no fun
3. Moving! Honestly most of my life outside of work has been taken up with first packing and now unpacking.
4. Other creative avenues! Watch this space for my next creative endeavor. Frankly I’d rather be making progress towards my next goal in the few spare moments I’ve had here and there as opposed to the digital ego-stroking that is blogging.
5. It’s been boring! No exciting holiday stories, no amusing work anecdotes, no moving mishaps, and no pithy thoughts on what else I’m working on. Nobody cares about which boxes I’ve unpacked or what my work deadlines are (well, my coworkers probably care about the latter).
I did not “win” at NaNo this past November. I made 15,000 words that I didn’t have before and now have a cast of characters to manipulate and at my leisure so I’m not too disappointed in myself there.
I have the hubris to believe that people read this and care, so if you’ve been lamenting the lack of updates rest assured now that my sanity level is rising I will be returning to more frequent (if not regularly scheduled) updates.
So I didn’t make 15k. That’s okay. I’m still on schedule to finish and despite my upcoming move I’m optimistic.
For the first time I’m really excited about my story. In NaNo speak I’d say that my characters surprised me and are defying my plan. Really, I’ve just finaly put in enough thought, gruntwork and “ink” into them to finally develop these ciphers into real characters. It is interesting having developed characters bouncing off each other. Most of my stories are character driven, not plot driven so it’s been a chore pushing through while trying to develop the characters.
The fully developed characters can be bounced against each other in interesting ways. Some of these ways will change the story.
This is getting fun now.
Wordcount is creeping slowly forward. Two and two is four, four and four is eight, something and something is 8,187.
Suppose I can hit 15k by the 19th? That’s four days and I’ll be only halfway behind by then.
Let’s find out . . . .
Yesterday evening I did some writing at Panera. I love the free refills, WiFi, and sandwiches (nom nom nom) but it has it’s drawbacks. I’m not sure which was worse, the soft jazz or the painfully philosophical high school student opining on why football was bad. Rendered double awful by the loss of the Steelers to the Bengals earlier that day.
I’m looking at the words I’ve written for NaNo . . . . . my god they suck. They suck hard. They suck like a collapsed neutron star. Typing with reckless abandon is not one of my strong suits. I prefer to take the time to craft my scenes and finesse my dialogue as I write. And as soon as I put in my time here then I’m going straight back to my old way of writing.
Part of me worries it’s my ideas that suck. That I’ve got some kind of literary tone-deafness. I can hear it during the read back and I wince. It sounds cliched, or hackneyed, or stilted. And I can’t stand it. I have to go back and make it flow. I have to make it pretty, polished and neat. But even after polishing it I still worry. I’m not in it for the literature and grand ideas. I just want to tell a story or two (dozen).
Then I remember some wise words of advice I got from my mother. “Willie Nelson thinks he can sing.”
Willie Nelson can’t sing. He makes his guitar, Trigger, sing like a bird and there’s no songwriter his equal, but he really can’t sing. He rasps, searches for the key, and his voice itself is charitably called unique. . . . but I can’t get enough of him. I love listening to Willie Nelson sing his songs. There’s a reason Willie is an American Icon. His voice, his words, and his music transform in some kind of alchemy that makes him uniquely country and uniquely hip.Would he be as successful if he did sound like a songbird? Probably not.
So maybe my writing’s a little rough around the edges – I should be so lucky as to have a shortcoming like Willie Nelson.
//
“Aim for the moon, if you fail to hit it you will still land among the stars.”
I have always hated that phrase. From the very first time I heard it. It just bugs the hell out of the scientist in me. If you aim for the moon and miss it then you will end up in the countless light years of empty space, amidst a cold and darkness and vacuum the human mind can barely conceive of. And should you have the misfortune to actually land on a star then you’ll be instantly immolated. If you aim for the moon and miss it you’re pretty well screwed.
That little rant out of the way . . . there is truth behind the sentiment. A large amount of truth. “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly,” that’s what I always say. If you’re going to try something totally new, even doing a real shit job of it will get you further ahead than if you didn’t try anything at all.
People rarely achieve more than their goals. But they frequently fail to meet their goals. So what do you do about it? Set smaller goals? Be more realistic? Something you know you can achieve? Beat your chest and call yourself a failure? Listen to that Vampire of Despair when s/he uses it as proof that you just aren’t cut out to be what you want to be?
Hell no! Set bigger goals!
If you’re not going to meet a goal it might as well be a big one. If you fail to meet the 50k words for NaNoWriMo are you a failure? No. You’ll have learned something, experienced something, and you’ll have 10k, 20k, or 40k words that you didn’t have before. That’s not a failure. But what if you failed to meet your goal of 100k? You could still have 75k! Now, that’s what I call failing forward.
This is another problem I’ve seen in the NaNo forums. So many people worried about failing, just because the amazing thing they did do fell short of the goal. I worry about the number the people who put their half-finished work away and leave it there because they “failed.” Or they’re afraid to start because they’re afraid of failing.
NaNo does a good job of turning us dilettantes – us someday writers – into “real” writers. Making us apply some butt glue and inertia to that novel we intend to write “someday.” But in the push for “you can do it! Turn off your inner editor! Don’t let yourself down!” I, at least, can feel like a real failure for falling behind word count.
But you know what? Even if I stopped now it would be short of the goal, but it wouldn’t be a failure. I have a new world, a cast of characters, and three pages of text that I didn’t have a week ago. That’s failing forward. Does that mean next year I’ll set my goal for 20k words? Not at all. If I did I’d never reach 50k.
Maybe next year I’ll try for a 100k.
//
Today we’re talking about Vampires. I’m inspired by the song Die, Vampire, Die! from the musical [Title of the Show].
The song talks about the kinds of Vampires that hold us back. The voices inside of us that discourage us and how they will suck our creative efforts dry before they even make it tottering into the world like newborn gazelles. And how we need to kill them fucking dead.
The song mentions two Vampires I know that I’m plagued by:
The Air Freshener Vampire: Even in my blog here I cringe a little before I type out a swear. What if someone from works sees it? What if my mom reads this? Or gods forbid my grandmother! Maybe I shouldn’t write that sex scene, my fat-ass-fat-aunt-fanny might disapprove. So you know what? I’m going to officially go on record as saying “Fuck-fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck. Fuck the fucking fuckers!”
That felt pretty good.
The Vampire of Despair: Sweet merciful son of crap. I think we’ve all been plagued by this one. Awful but seductive, this Vampire takes on your form and your voice. It only appears in mirrors. And it tells you things that you would punch a friend in the mouth for saying. And it makes you believe all the seductively destructive things it says. And like the song says, if someone in the street told me half the things I tell myself (It’s a stupid idea, no one will like it, you’ll fail and it will hurt, best not to try, you just aren’t good enough) I would think they were an asshole.
Why should we let strangers treat us better than we treat ourselves? I propose that for the month of November, we stake the hell out of that Vampire of Despair. If you wouldn’t say it about a stranger, about a friend, don’t say it to yourself. Because we are fucking awesome. (Ha! Two vampires at once there!)
So lets join hands and sing:
Oh baby, you must escape and grab it by the nape of its neck, by the trachea
fuckin’ break it, go on drive a stake in,
Yeah there’s no mistaking, now you’re shake and bakin
. . . .
In fly the vampires, oh my the vampires, then die the vampires,
filling you with life, creativity, all that you heart should be, out go the vampires
Die vampire, die vampire, die vampire, die!
And here’s six minutes of procrastination to help you:
What Vampires are you going to stake this month?
Ahhhh, the writer’s muse. A beautiful ethereal creature – delicate as a soap bubble. Look too hard at your muse and she will disappear. Present favors that she might come and bless your keyboard or brush; fine wines, chocolates, a magic pen, the right lovely music. The arrival of the muse means that the art will flow effortlessly. Certainly you must suffer a little for your artwork, romantically of course. A frigid attic, stale bread bought with pennies scraped together by the few who understand your work, imbibing cheap red wine with your artistic peers while you swap grand ideas, maybe a slight touch of tuberculosis.
Horseshit. Utter horseshit.
Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. I don’t have time to wait around for an airy-fairy muse to strike me with inspiration. I”m not going to wait for her to bless me with the grand ideas and eloquent phrases. Creativity takes work, it takes effort. It takes just knuckling down and doing it. This is one thing that National Novel Writer’s Month gets right. Just sit your butt down in the seat, and set the words down on paper. Because that muse is lazy. She won’t get off her ass until you shame her into it by working yours off.
However I have a bone to pick with NaNo or rather, some of it’s soon-to-be-really-real-novel-writers: it’s twee. It’s prone to hysterics. And it shows off. All forms of ego-stroking to procrastinate the actual act of writing. To show other people that you’re a real writer! Look at me write!
I refuse to have the patience to deal with that. I’m a busy girl. I’ve got muses to pick the wings off of and plot bunnies to boil.
So what I have here is my Twee-Free zone. NoMoNaNo. This is not where the blood and tears of the creative process will be on display. Just sweat. You are welcome (encouraged even!) to leave comments about your thoughts on the creative process.
Anyone using the phrase “Plot Bunny” will be bludgeoned with their own keyboard. And if you can’t be civil, you better be entertaining.
