Category: writing Page 2 of 3

The Deadline Experiment: A Progress Report

On September 7, 2012

I’m in the midst of what I am now calling the Deadline Experiment – wherein I gave myself a deadline to get this draft of Never finished.

I set myself a goal of 10k words a week, which gave me six weeks from the beginning of the experiment to reach the anticipated end of this draft. Right now, I am a few weeks out from my deadline, and I thought I would take a few minutes to blog about how it’s been going.

First of all, I’m not certain if I’m going to make the deadline, because I don’t really know how long this draft is going to be. I have just hit 90k on the manuscript, and I’d ideally like it to be no longer than 110k. We’ll see what happens. The problem here is that I’m rewriting the entire last third of the book, and it is difficult to know how long it’s actually going to be.

However! I have been meeting my goal of 10k words per week. And I know that there are several experiments making their way around the net where people write 10k a day successfully. This is a starting point for me, coming back from several years of little and slow writing, and I hope to be able to train myself to write more in the future.

The things that have been helping me write 10k a week:

Outlining

Yes, it was a dirty word for me for a long time. I always loved the feeling of just exploring a story, digging down below the page to see what I find there. And maybe, one day I’ll be able to return to that, when I’ve levelled up as a writer more and have internalised a lot of the outlining and story structure stuff. For now, though, the outline is key. I know where I’m going every day when I sit down.

Turning off the internet

I’ve been kind of failing at this a little. I downloaded Freedom, which worked a treat, but I’ve also realised that I love talking to one of my writer friends while we’re both working. And I love using Spotify. I will probably spend some time investigating ways to turn off just the damn browser while I’m working. Or, yanno, just turn off the damn browser.

Not neglecting my health

Most of you should know by now that I live with a couple of chronic illnesses, which means that I don’t get the luxury of abusing my health too much. But I think this is just as important for anyone who doesn’t suffer from any illnesses. I eat well, I make sure I get my sleep, I get fresh air every day and I exercise six days a week. These things cannot and will not change. There’s no point pushing myself to a point where I collapse for a month or two after finishing a draft.

I still have fun

I’m still reading (though at a slightly slower pace), I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 some evenings, I’ve been watching TV. This is good, because I know if I ever have to face a really tight deadline, these things can be temporarily pushed aside for more time.

Some things do get neglected

But not my kid 🙂 And I have to add here that the only reason I get writing done at all is because I have help looking after him for a handful of hours each days. That, and he still naps for 1-2 hours during the day.

I consider myself as working two jobs: as a writer and as the person who runs the household while my husband works full time. This means (to me) that the house needs to be at least passably clean, we have enough food and necessities in the house, errands are run, the kidlet is looked after and we have dinner on the table every night. These things are not neglected.

You will notice the passably clean part up there. I don’t keep up with the garden the way I should (though nor is it totally overgrown with weeds), and there does tend to be some clutter around, especially in my working spaces. I’m dealing with this by making a list of the things I want/need to do after I finish this draft, and I’ll deal with them in a big spring clean afterwards.

You will also notice a lack of blogging in general. At this point, there’s not much to say apart from “Oh, hey, I made word count today.”, and so I don’t bother overmuch. I’m sure I’ll get back into the swing of it all once the draft is done.

Refilling the well

This is key for me. I need to find the things that refill my creative well and keep on doing them while I’m writing. One of the major things, for me, is reading well-crafted fiction, as well as reading non-fiction that inspires me. I also take some time every day to read some humour websites, just to give my brain a break.

Planning time off

I actually know what I’m going to be working on after this – tacking the outline of The White Raven, which I intend on taking apart piece by piece and seeing if I can make it into something better. I did have a couple of short story anthologies I wanted to submit to, but I think I’m going to miss those deadlines. However, I do have a story half-written for one of them, so I might also work on that for a while.

I do plan on taking at least a week or two away from writing after finishing this draft, just to give my brain a rest. At that time, I hope to enlist a few beta readers to have a look at the whole manuscript before I look at it again (which won’t be for a month or two, maybe longer), and I will be tackling things like that spring cleaning.

So, overall, this is going well. I really want to get myself used to writing to deadlines, because in the real world, you kind of can’t avoid them. And I’d like to experiment with writing faster next time, especially when writing a first draft, and in being more productive in general. It’ll happen.

Setting myself a deadline

By Stephanie Gunn

On August 13, 2012

In never, writing

I asked for, and have received, some very good advice on how to write faster and more productively.

Turning off the internet really does help, and I have a feeling that I’m going to be very glad that I have Mac Freedom on some days. I know from past experience that making myself publicly accountable also helps.

At a guess, at approximately 60k words, I’m about halfway through the manuscript of Never. So, assuming I have 60k to go, I’m going to assign myself a deadline to have this draft finished by September 22nd, which is in six weeks time, or thereabouts. That’s 10k of forward motion a week, which is totally doable.

I’m going to keep myself accountable here, which means that I’m going to aim to post weekly wordcounts.

I am going to have other work to keep on top of – Aurealis reading (which has actually been a bit thin on the ground so far, which doesn’t mean that I’m on top of it, mind) and slush reading, and I owe some beta reading and some reviews. But it’s all manageable, I think.

Let’s do this thing.

Productivity (and a winner!)

By Stephanie Gunn

On August 10, 2012

In writing

First: I picked a random winner for my sneaky giveaway tucked at the end of my post about the Night Circus – the winner of the paperback copy is bookgirlwa over at Livejournal! Lob me an email with your address (stephanie.r.gunn AT gmail.com) and I’ll get it out into the mail!

And I just had a writing session using Mac Freedom for 75 minutes. And, to be fair, I did chat on gchat a bit on my phone during said session (which I think I’ll continue to do, because the only two people I talk to during the day are used to me being silent on chat for ages while I work), and I did wander away from the computer a couple of times just to get a break.

But in that 75 minutes I managed almost 2,400 words. And they’re words I’m fairly happy with, and can move on. So, a success I think.

I’m going to squeeze in another writing session today, I think, assuming the brain will comply. Is it possible to actually train your brain to concentrate for longer? Must research, I think.

Dear internet, I have a problem

By Stephanie Gunn

On August 10, 2012

In writing

~~I hate the book that I’m writing.~~

No, scratch that. I don’t hate this book per se. I hate the fact that I am still writing the damn thing. I am hating the fact that my process is so slow, and that it takes me forever to churn out a draft.

There are some limitations that I cannot change: I have a small child, for one, and he always takes precedent over everything else. But said small child is getting older and more independent (and would it be awful to admit that part of me is hanging out for when he goes to kindergarten just so I get those writing hours?), and I do have help with my mother coming and watching him for one or two hours, plus he does reliably nap for at least an hour every day.

You’d think that would be plenty of time. But I’m still not getting enough done. And it’s driving me crazy.

There are many issues here at work. The first being the internet. I am a distractable person at the best of times, and the internet is just too much of a damn siren call to me. Today, I think, I shall be downloading Mac Freedom and using the damn thing for my writing time.

At the moment, I manage one writing session in a day, usually from 11am until somewhere around 1-2pm. At that time, I usually switch to reading, reviewing or slushing. All things I don’t want to cut back on, since they, in turn, feed the writing. The kid usually wakes up somewhere around there, and I spend time with him, and get some exercise in (which usually involves me dropping him off with my mother again so I can walk/run/do weights/whatever). Exercise is a necessary thing for me, since it is the primary method I have of managing fibromyalgia pain.

What I would like to do, given the constraints I have, is to carve out some more writing/editing time in the day, maybe in the evening. I also need to be way, way more productive in the writing time I do have.

In order to do this, I am going to make myself accountable here. Right now, I average about 1500 words a day while I’m editing – which for me, involves retyping the whole manuscript. It’s just how I work, and word count works as well as anything else as a measurement of this.

Let’s see how much I can push this.

If anyone has any advice on how they manage to be more productive, feel free to share?

Bloodstones TOC announced, featuring me!

By Stephanie Gunn

On July 3, 2012

In publications, squee, writing

It is with much squee that I can announce that my story, The Skin of the World, will be appearing in the upcoming Ticonderoga Publications anthology Bloodstones, edited by Amanda Pillar.

For those following along with the patchwork quilt of my writing worlds, The Skin of the World is a prequel to the novel I’ve been working on (which is currently in a very messy draft that needs to be stripped to the bone), The White Raven, and also takes place in the same universe as Narthex, which was published in In Bad Dreams 2: Where Death Stalks. Yes, I like having interconnected stories!

Here’s a little peek into how awesome this is for me – not only do I get to work with Amanda again, who is an amazing editor (she was co-editor for Grants Pass), but there’s also this: a few months ago, I sat down and started making a list of goals I’d like to achieve with my career, including some of the publishers that I’d like to sell stories (or longer works) to. And Ticonderoga was on that list 🙂

The awesome table of contents:

Joanne Anderton, “Sanaa’s Army”
Alan Baxter, “Cephalopoda Obsessia”
Jenny Blackford, “A Moveable Feast”
Vivian Caethe, “Skin”
MD Curelas, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”
Thoraiya Dyer, “Surviving Film”
Dirk Flinthart, “The Bull in Winter”
Stephanie Gunn, “The Skin of the World”
Richard Harland, “A Mother’s Love”
Pete Kempshall, “Dead Inside”
Penny Love, “A Small Bad Thing”
Karen Maric, “Embracing the Invisible”
Christine Morgan, “Ferreau’s Curse”
Nicole Murphy, “Euryale”
Jessica Otis, “And the Dead Shall be Raised Incorruptible”
Dan Rabarts, “The Bone Plate”
Erin Underwood, “The Foam Born”

Bloodstones will be released in October 2012.

And so my writing week is done

By Stephanie Gunn

On June 15, 2012

In never, writing

It always feels kind of strange to sit here at 1:30pm on a Friday and declare that my writing week is done. Technically, it is and it isn’t. I’ve finished the part of the week where I sit with Scrivener open and work on Never, but I have a lot of other work left.

As an aside – I still kind of love that reading is pretty much work to me. It means that I do end up reading some things that I wouldn’t always (I like to keep up with what’s popular, for one thing, just to try to figure out why, even when the book or series isn’t something that I’ll actually enjoy completely. Hence the recent reading of the 50 Shades of Grey books, which you’ll have seen if you follow me on Goodreads. There will be a post on them coming up soon, once I organise my thoughts).

And that was a long aside. Heh.

I’m working slower on these Never rewrites than I’d like, to be honest. I’ve crested 10k on this draft, but I feel like I should be about double that. I do rewrite in a time-consuming manner though, by retyping the whole draft (am I the only weirdo who does that?) and I am making a good deal of changes to the beginning of this book. I’ve been pushing my daily wordcount from 1k to 1.5k consistently, which is awesome. I’m aiming to get that up to 2-3k if I can.

I also caved and joined the Online Writing Workshop, which I’ve been toying with for far too long. I have one awesome beta reader reading along with me as I write Never, but I kind of wanted some new eyes on it. Plus working on my own reviewing skills is also a good thing. I’ve posted the first chapter of Never and gotten one really lovely review. Just need to review a bunch of stuff so I can post more now 🙂

Lessons from the slush pile

By Stephanie Gunn

On June 14, 2012

In Uncategorized, writing

I’ve been reading slush for Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine for a while now. As an aside – I highly recommend slush reading for anyone who’s learning their craft. It gives back to your community, and you get to learn a lot about writing in general.

We’re pretty lucky in general with the quality of submissions that ASIM gets. I rarely see anything that is truly dreadful – mostly people are good about checking their spelling, getting formatting right etc. It’s pretty heartening, actually.

However, in my experience, while I’ve rarely seen anything absolutely awful, it’s also pretty rare to see something that is truly amazing.

And as an aside, you may be reading this and thinking that you want to take this post with a grain of salt. Go ahead. I’m still learning the craft of short fiction writing myself, and though I have a handful of short stories published – some of which I am pretty darn proud of – and I’m willing to admit that I have a lot to learn. See my first paragraph about learning from slush reading.

I’m thinking that I want to make this a bit of an ongoing thing. I’m not referring to any specific story, by the way, in case anyone is worried about that. These are just going to be things that I’ve noticed again and again.

How to make it through the slush pile, in three parts:

If your first line is poorly crafted or downright boring, I will not be compelled to read on. I will read on, because that’s the way I slush, but unless I am interested by at least the end of the first paragraph, the story is not going to be a win for me.
Rewriting Biblical stories, especially Adam and Eve (even if they are in space) has been Done. I don’t know if anyone can make this work any more, even the best short story writers (and please, if you know someone who has, let me know!). I have no problem with allegory, but when your story literally ends with “and they were Adam and Eve all along!”, you’re going to want to rethink it.
Ditto for most of the myths and stories that everyone knows – if you think you can do it well, go ahead. Just be aware that many of them have been done to death. And again, allegory can be fine, just make it original.

To be continued and added to…

In which I get annoyed at writing advice

By Stephanie Gunn

On June 7, 2012

In writing

I was reading through my rss feeds last night, as I am wont to do, and came across a piece of writing advice that I’ve seen many times:

“Don’t have time to write? Get up an hour earlier – or better, two hours earlier – and write!”

I do know that this works for some people, but it’s just struck me this morning how damn ableist this kind of advice is.

For example, you have someone like me. I deal with chronic illness on a daily basis, and to manage the worst of the illness, I need to move, I need to eat vaguely decently, I need to rest.

If I forced myself to get up an hour or two earlier to write, I would be a wreck. I hate that I need more sleep than most people. Ideally, I need about nine or ten hours a night. Most nights I get about eight. I can coast on one night of six or seven, but it hurts. Anything less than that, and I am not functional.

I know it’s a pretty obvious thing to complain about, but I am complaining anyway. I always feel like people who dole out this kind of advice are implying that if you can’t sacrifice sleep to write, then you’re just not determined enough to be a writer, dammit. It’s a great idea if you can manage it without sacrificing your health (and that goes for people without chronic illness as well), but it’s not the only way.

Writing is a priority for me, but so is my family and my health. There has to be a balance.

Look what arrived today!

By Stephanie Gunn

On May 31, 2012

In squee, writing

My contributor copy of Fablecroft’s Epilogue. Shiny!

Buy a copy of your very own!

Today has been, so far, a productive day. Played with the kidlet for ages this morning, mostly building train tracks for him (holy crap is he obsessed with trains). We watched a bit of Peter Pan, which always makes me sad/happy. He is now napping, and the house is quiet except for the sound of windchimes outside.

It is a fairly bad pain day, despite me dragging out the heavy duty drugs. Air pressure changes are fun when you have fibromyalgia. Plus we haven’t gotten any actual rain here yet, which just makes it all not worth it. It has gotten overcast in the last half hour, though, so hopefully we’ll get some. It’s been a distressingly dry month, and tomorrow Perth goes into full sprinkler ban for winter, with little more rain on the horizon. Thankfully, our garden is mostly natives, which will survive, but I may need to get out and hand water the roses a little.

More organisation today. Finally diving into reworking the outline of Never. I’m making some major plot changes, and also pacing changes – most notably, I’m splitting most of my early chapters into much shorter ones. My brain is melting now, thanks to the weather, so I think it’s time to step away from the novel and rest/read for a bit while the kid sleeps.

Getting organised

By Stephanie Gunn

On May 30, 2012

In life, writing

This week is turning into a week of not much actual writing, and lots of organisation.

Today involved the acquisition of some new stationary and filing organisation, and I began the task of truly getting my working area sorted. The husband is amazing at keeping things organised, while I tend to just lob piles of paper into drawers. Everything looks neat, but you can’t actually find anything.

The reality is this: if I want to pursue this as a career, I need to treat it like a business. That means being organised, having vital papers where I need them. I will note that I took particular joy in labelling a file “Contracts” today. And realised that, even though I’ve only written three short stories in the last few years, I’ve sold all of them. I have my fingers crossed for the fourth one, which is currently trying to find its place in the world. I’ll never be a prolific short story writer, but I feel like I’ve levelled up there, at least.

I have my character bios rewritten, printed and filed away for Never, and worked on my place descriptions today. Tomorrow, I’ll start getting my outline all sorted out. I have hopes for this novel, and I really want to get the next draft finished relatively quickly.