Tag Archives: blogger

April 28, 2013 · 7:42 pm

Time Divided

Over the last month or so, I’ve been writing more and more at a steadily increasing rate. Ya’ll haven’t seen it, since ya’ll aren’t reading my new blog (and for good reason) and you haven’t seen the fragments of the short stories I’ve been working on (once again, with good reason), but the writing is happening more.

Which means, unfortunately, that I’ve had less time to spend over here. I used to write more than the quote I set for myself. You can see a few times last year when I wrote more than ten entries per month. This year, however, you would be hard-pressed to find a week where I’d written more than my required two entries.

I can’t say that I’m entirely bummed out that writing is getting in the way of writing. I’m just letting ya’ll know that I am writing, even if I’m not writing.

-D-

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January 1, 2013 · 2:59 pm

I Do Resolve

As has become a tradition, I will spend today not looking at how I goofed up last year’s resolutions, but looking at how I can improve for the following year. As I grow ever older, I’m learning more and more about myself; not just in how I need to improve, but in the best way to improve. For example:

1. This year I want to write two to three blog entries a week. Last year I resolved to write ten blog entries a month and I succeeded, though there were a few months that the last week of the month was loaded down with last minute entries. While I don’t necessarily want to increase the number of entries I write this year, I want do want to increase their regularity. Previous attempts to write on specific days failed miserably. I would get so hung up on trying to write on Monday/Wednesday/Friday that I if missed those specific days, I wouldn’t feel the need to make up the day on Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday/Sunday. With this new resolution, you get the same amount of content, spread out regularly through the month and, hopefully, less last minute, badly written entries.

2. I hesitate to mention writing projects. I’ve found through my own experience that announcing a writing project or a planned writing project removes all of my interest in actually carrying out the project. So secret resolutions go here.

3. I want to run, continuously, around the reservoir. In the last few weeks, I’ve fallen away from my running, but hell, this is the time to get back on old horses. It’s always better to pick a specific goal rather than a general one (I will be able to run two miles in five minutes versus I will run more), so as my first running goal I want to be able to run completely around the local reservoir without stopping. I hope, truly hope, it won’t take all year to do, but once I accomplish this goal, I can adjust accordingly and choose a new target.

4. I want to expand my cooking knowledge. I want to plan a series of recipes to make throughout the year, some difficult, some less so, but right now my recipe repertoire is a little lacking. Cooking, to me, is like magic, but, you know, real. The ability to make a good meal, a meal that people want to eat, is an ability worth having. My end goal this year is to make….bouillabaisse. Don’t ask why I chose this. Maybe because it’s French and French cooking has a certain something about it. Maybe it’s because Alton Brown talked me into it with an episode on making bouillabaisse. Maybe because it seems difficult, but doable. Whatever the reason, it’s one more goal for the year. To make bouillabaisse.

And that’s it for goals I have for the whole year. I have other things I want to do and accomplish, but they’re small projects or events or none of your business (for now). I hope there’ll be some exciting things in store for ya’ll.

In the meantime, enjoying a metric ton of beer reviews.

-D–

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November 12, 2012 · 8:26 pm

A Confession

It was, perhaps, a bit of extreme optimism that made me think that I could update the blog three times a week while I was also trying to write a fifty-thousand word novel in a single month.

Now, to be clear, I am not going to completely give up on updating my blog. But, I think we will both just have to accept that there will be days like this where you’re going to be reading entries like this; short, to the point and not really what you were expecting to read.

But, surprise is the spice of life and I think you’ll manage to do without a proper blog entry for a few more days.

-D-

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November 2, 2012 · 7:17 pm

Good Habits Are Hard to Make

I’ve gotten used to writing every day. It’s what I do. I come home from work. Get dinner and/or a beer, sit down in front of the computer and try and  make words appear on the screen.

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve felt that way. For the last two years, writing has been a special occasion; something I do for holidays or events or because I really have nothing better to do.

But now writing has turned into part of my day, as opposed to something that I could do today.

But it still feels very fragile, like if I stopped, even for a day, I would fall out of the habit and go back to the way things used to be. And that scares me so much. I don’t want to go back to that. Writing is so embedded in who I am and I how I think of myself, that I can’t believe how far I let it slip away from me before. I can’t believe how I almost let it fall away completely.

You can’t just call yourself a writer, but never produce anything. I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want to be the person who tries to skate by on the stories that he wrote five years ago.

But that’s what I’ve been doing. I love the stories in my book, but I wrote them a lifetime ago. You should, by all means, read them and enjoy them. But I was a different person then, in the long ago. I want to write stories that reflect who I am now.

So I’m going to keep moving forward, laying down words, one after the other.

It takes 66 days to build a good habit. I have 34 more days to go.

And I’m going to make it.

-D-

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October 24, 2012 · 7:33 pm

31 Days of Spoooktacular: The Gauntlet

Way back in the beginning, you may recall that I said that 31 Days of Spoooktacular was part of how I planned to force writing to become a habit for me. Writing has always been something I do sporadically, intermittently and with no true pattern. Even over the course of this year, where I’ve given myself the goal of writing ten entries a month, which I have done so far, I don’t evenly space those entries throughout the month. Usually they’re all shoved in at the end of the month and then I go on another, three week long sabbatical.

But with 31 Days of Spoooktacular, you get one entry a day, every day, for 31 days. And that’s great for me and great for you and everyone is happy, except for people who aren’t so interested in me writing about horror day in and day out. But, if you remember, I said that in order to successfully form a habit, you have to do it for around 70 days. I need to continue to write every day for another 30 days (and some change) before it becomes rigidly locked in as something I just do as an impulse.

It just so happens that there’s an event for the entire month of November that dovetails so nicely with my needs. That’s right, I’m doing NANOWRIMO. Again. But this time, I’m picking up that gauntlet and I am slapping NANOWRIMO in the face with it. I am going to write a 50,000 word novel and then some. The way I see it, I’ve been in training for NANOWRIMO this whole month, a light workout to get me into shape for what’s to come.

And by the end of it, I’ll be the better for it, I think. I’ll have mastered a skill that has eluded me almost my whole life; the ability to stick with something through to the very end. I’ll work on a project, sometimes very close to the ending point and then just sputter out, within spitting distance of the finish line.

But not this year. I can feel it. I have the idea that I want to write about. I have the tools to write it. And here, on October 24th, I think I’ve managed to prove that I have the ability to sit down in front of the computer everyday and put words to screen and keep going long after the point in which I should have stopped.

I have never written a novel, though I have tried. For me, just finishing one, even it’s terrible, will be a triumph of sorts. I’m looking forward to the challenge.

31 Days of Spoooktacular, for all of it’s goofiness and beer tasting and horror conventions, is just the beginning.

-D-

PS Check out my profile here and cheer me on all next month. Or not. It’s fine.

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October 15, 2012 · 8:48 pm

31 Days of Spoooktacular: Reflection

I’m still reeling a bit from the convention yesterday. I’m not a person that really likes big crowds of people and I don’t like big crowds of exuberant people. So yesterday was a bit overwhelming.

But, as I mentioned briefly in my last blog entry yesterday, there is something invigorating about being surrounded by a bunch of people who are doing what you want to be doing, who are enjoying what you enjoy. I write, on occasion, horror, but I surround myself with the things I like and the things I’m familiar with and it doesn’t really do a lot to get me going creatively.

I need to and should, go outside of my comfort zone, trying new fictions, new places, new art forms. The convention, in a lot of ways, was not geared toward someone like me. I don’t wave my freak flag high. I keep it locked in a chest in the basement behind a padlocked door. There were people with fangs and people with spines showing and and people on stilts and people with mohawks (!!!!!).

And all the things! There were posters and toys and little sculptures and pins and paintings and indie films and actors and make-up artists and authors and pythons.

It was overwhelming and wearying and tiring and by the end, I needed a sit down.

But I’m ready to start contributing again, I think. Ready to start putting those stories back out there and wincing as they’re sent back to me, but sending them out again anyway.

It’s about adding to that wonderful cacophony of scary that I saw on Sunday. It’s about going back there one day, not as a gawker or a viewer or a spectator, but as a maker.

-D-

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September 29, 2012 · 11:08 pm

Entry X

So! For the second time this year, I’ve forced myself to write ten entries in a single day. I’d feel bad about making this last entry a cop-out, wrap-up entry, but I don’t.

So there.

In the future, I’d like to avoid this little bit of tom foolery. Shouldn’t be too hard. All I have to do is actually update my blog in a reasonable fashion so that I have the proper number of entries up per month.

Ha!

Anyway, it’s been fun, but I’d really like to go watch Hellraiser now. If, for some reason, you missed any of the entries I wrote today just click on the following links.

Entry IX

Entry VIII

Entry VII

Entry VI

Entry V

Entry IV

Entry III

Entry II

Entry I

 

Thank you and good night,

-D-

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· 3:01 pm

The Same Old Song and Dance

Once again, I find that I’m at the very end of the month and I’ve realized that I’m a couple of blog entries short of hitting the ten entry mark. Specifically, I’m eight entries short. This is not good. I don’t want to go into October with that level of failure hanging over me, right when I’m about to try and write a blog entry a day.

So, like in days of yore, I will overcompensate for the lack of entries over the past month. I will do ten entries and I will do them all over the course of this single day!

Yes, at this moment, I wish that I had started this earlier in the morning like I had planned. And yes, I wish I hadn’t been so lazy with the writing this month. But, on the other hand, I apparently enjoy tormenting myself.

So let’s get this party started!

I’m going to hate this blog by the end of the day.

-D-

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September 17, 2012 · 8:04 pm

Hallowed Days

In ye days of old, I did something terrific and scary and awesome to celebrate Halloween all month: I would write a short story every single day and post it on my old blog. I called it Thirty-One Days of Horror and the last time I did it, I raised the roof and brought down the house at the same time. Nowadays, I’m too old to do that and too worried about my stories wandering off of my site and onto other sites.

But I want to try something like that again. I want to do something epic. I want to do something crazy. I want people to sing songs about my Halloween Celebration. I want this to be a painful, horrible slog and I want to come out the other side changed.

I hereby promise, on an oath shaped by the very forces of Halloween itself, an oath bound up in black cats, bats, witches and pumpkins with scary faces carved in them, to write a blog entry EVERY DAY IN OCTOBER.

Thirty-one blog entries, one after the other, until Halloween’s bloodred moon rises and I, at last, can rest for the entire month of November.

I’ll come up with the some cool, kitschy name for it later.

But it’s coming.

And I promise to not drop the ball this time ON AN OATH OF HALLOWEEN ITSELF.

-D-

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June 24, 2012 · 9:09 am

Paring It Down

For most people, editing is about excising. You trim out all of those unnecessary words and details and phrases and commas. You said too much. You described too much. You gave him too much to say. Stephen King even comes up with a basic formula for editing your story that goes as follows:

First Draft – Ten Percent= Second Draft

It’s one of the more difficult challenges for most writers because you have to determine what’s actually crap and what’s actually good, what actually helps the story and what hurts it. Even if that paragraph is utterly brilliant in terms of language and artistry and characterization, it’s unnecessary. And that’s the key word: unnecessary. Pare it down, clip it out, get rid of it, especially it doesn’t help the story go forward.

I don’t have that problem so much. Yes, I do clip out my fair share of badly used and superfluous words, but, for the most part, that’s not my problem. My problem is my first draft is always anemic and pared down already to the point that the story is skeletal. I’m an impatient reader and viewer and I’ll rail against authors who spend their sweet time getting where I want to be going. And when I write, I do the same thing. Why show this? The reader understands! Why show that? The reader can figure it out.

My murder mystery looks like the following: The body is found. The detective looks at the body. Ah-ha! He says. He captures the killer. Fin

I ignore little things, insignificant things like: personalizing the victim, describing the investigation, adding in a second murder to really kick it up a notch. I know the tropes and the cliches and the tools and the frameworks; I just choose not to utilize any of them because I want to go from A to B in the fewest number of steps.

So my editing process ends up being the exact opposite of Mr. King’s advice. I fatten. I add. I write more pages and boost the word count way up and flesh it out and grow it out. It’s the process of adding flesh to a skeleton. For me and for writers like me, it’s more:

First Draft + Twenty Percent = Second Draft

What about you? How does editing work for you? What do you have to do after completing that first draft?

-D-

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