Category Archives: Writing

Last night I wrote a grumpy blog post, but then I deleted it. (Short version: writing is frustrating.)

I’ve been struggling to revise a story. After I wrote that post, I adjusted my attitude towards the story. Even if it’s unfixable, I can still learn from it. I will try to figure out the problem I have with it, and then see if it’ll help me with the next story.

Also, some time ago it occurred to me that revising is a learned skill and I need to learn it. I’ll be working on that in the next year.

I write every day. Not because I think there’s some magical writing power that’s delivered by writing every day (some people who give this advice seem to believe this) but because I only have so much time each day to write, so missing one messes up my plans quite a bit.

Usually if I end up not writing, I feel guilty, and I keep telling myself to write and won’t let myself do anything else important. It turns into a big waste of time. Sometimes though I do the smart thing and give myself the day off.

Like yesterday, when my job ate my brain. Instead of writing, or trying to convince myself to write, I made dinner, read the paper, and plopped myself on the couch. I finished one book, started a second, and read about an issue and a half of National Geographic (Vikings on Baffin Island and shamans in Mongolia). It was glorious. I felt like I had hours and hours of free time. (Because, well, I had hours and hours of free time.) Sometimes you just need a break.

Today is also a no-writing day, since I have to go to the grocery store (the day before Thanksgiving, oops) and make a cheesecake. For certain definitions of “have to”.

I belong to two local critique groups and sometimes do other critiques for friends or writers I know online. Most of these are done on the computer rather than on a printout. Since standing at my computer is not particularly pleasant for reading long things, I prefer to crit on my iPad.

However, the word processors on iOS mostly don’t have track changes, so I have to spend time back at my computer finding all my inline comments and turning them into “real” comments, and it’s also a pain to mark grammar and wording changes.

Several weeks ago someone pointed me to Doc^2 HD. It supports track changes!

So far it’s worked wonderfully. The track changes functionality is fine; I haven’t had any trouble opening the edited files in Word. I’ve had a few problems when it refused to open a file (it connects to Dropbox) and once it refused to save, although when I closed and reopened the app, it had in fact saved. This could obviously be a problem but I simply save obsessively and haven’t lost anything yet.

My only complaint is that it needs an internet connection to get at the files in Dropbox; you can’t tell it to download them so you can edit them offline later. Since I do most critting at home this isn’t a big deal, but if I wanted to also do my writing in this app it’d be a dealbreaker.

If you need something that will let you track your edits or comments, this does the job quite well.

My plan to finish a novel and then start the next one on Nov. 1 was unsuccessful. With work being busy and me being gone for a week, there just wasn’t time. The novel is still going well, though.

What does that mean for my NaNoWriMo plans? It means I’m cheating. I’ll still aim for a lot of words, but many/most of them will be for the book I was already working on. I’ll still start the next book right after this one, but it will probably take me into January.

Self-imposed deadlines are so easy to ignore.

Raccoon update:

He/she came back and ate more nuts, finished the last of the rat poison (?!), and ripped open the rest of the bags of tortilla chips. We’ve been keeping the basement door closed, so at least it didn’t come upstairs again.

Animal control sent us to an animal removal company. Their guy said the raccoon can probably open the chimney damper by putting its weight in the right spot, so I hung a bag of dumbbells on the chain. We also left a light and a radio on to discourage it, and moved the rest of the vulnerable food upstairs.

He also set up a trap by a tree whose branches overhang the roof. This morning it had a sad looking opossum in it. Probably by now the animal removal guy has released the possum and reset the trap. I’m not sure how I feel about the trap. Making the chimney impossible to get into would work better (but is probably more difficult).

Happy Halloween!

I’m afraid I have no candy for you. Please don’t egg my website. Instead, here are my posts from the All Rights Reserved blog for the past few weeks:

* Writing fast – I’m a little obsessed with this topic.

* House of cards – Writing out of order feels fragile.

* Family – Happy 5 years and a few weeks anniversary, J.

* A Tale of Two Stories – It’s not the idea, it’s the execution.

As always, go check out what the other members of ARR have to say!

Other links of interest:

* Tina Connolly’s Ironskin is out now – I’m a third of the way through and loving it

* Merrie Haskell’s Handbook for Dragon Slayers will be out next summer – I’m looking forward to reading it in book form

* What if you’re not a born writer?

* Literature & Latte is offering discounts on Scrivener for Nanowrimo winners (and everyone else, too)

* NaNoWriMo – The Pitfalls and How to Deftly Avoid Them

Also, I would just like to say that Penguin and Random House chose the wrong name for their merger. I would love a random house penguin.

I mean sure, I could contact an expensive breeder for an Emperor penguin or an Adelaide penguin, but going to a shelter and picking out whatever species just happens to have been rescued recently, and bringing it home to cuddle in my lap and splash in the bathtub and sleep at my feet, dreaming of krill–adopting a shelter pet would give me such a warm fuzzy feeling.

Or a warm feathery feeling, I suppose.

I’m going to World Fantasy next weekend. I’ve been so busy that I’ve been avoiding thinking about it, but I looked at the program schedule today and now I’m starting to get excited. I went to one World Fantasy several years ago and spent most of my time at readings. That’s what I was planning to do, but there are many interesting looking panels.

It’s going to be a different kind of convention for me, since I’m combining it with visiting family. So I’m staying a 20-minute drive from the hotel, and don’t know how much I’ll be around in the evenings. At least nothing starts until 9 so I don’t have to get up early (and I haven’t looked at the schedule in detail, so I might not even want to be there at 9).

And that’ll be my last con for the year. The next one’s in…August. Or May. Or January. Depending.

I’ve been trying to sleep more lately. And yes, this post belongs in the writing category, because when I get enough sleep, I (shockingly) think better and have more energy to write.

But it’s an interesting trade-off, isn’t it. Because sleep is one of the easiest things to cut back on. Which means that adding more sleep means cutting back on something more difficult–in my case, exercise, which is making me crazy. So that’s not going to work for long, even though getting up at 5:30am in the cold and dark to go swimming is…not my favorite part of the day.

What I really need to do is pretend I don’t know what the internet is…

I’m doing National Novel Writing Month this year. (I.e., writing 50,000 words in November.) I’ve done it twice, both more than five years ago, and it was pretty easy both times–but I’ve never done anything with those books. That was part of what made me turn to outlining instead of writing without a plan.

So why do it again? Well, now that I’m outline-fueled I’m curious to see if it’ll still be easy, and if I’ll still end up with a huge mess at the end of the month, or if having more of a plan will help me get a nice coherent first draft more quickly than the last few.

There’s just one minor hitch: I’m behind on the book I need to finish before I start the November book. I wasn’t expecting to completely redo the outline and throw out 6-7 chapters, or do write a couple short stories that I’ve done recently, or that those would take extra time…. In short, Scrivener’s nifty project target feature tells me that I need to write nearly 2000 words a day until the end of October to get that book done before I start the next. (While outlining the November book, and being in a very busy period at work.) That’s what I’ll be aiming for in November, too.

Sounds like fun.

One of the fun things about being a writer with a day job is deciding what to ignore when the day job gets busy. This week, since I need to sleep and I have a story due Saturday, it’s some exercise, the newspaper, and this blog post. See you next week.