Tuesday, July 29, 2014

The Best Laid Plans

"No plan survives contact with the enemy." Alexander of Macedonia said that, right before he was killed by Ebola-laced elephants.

I propose a variant truth: "No plan survives contact with an infant."

I have determined, after incurring a brand new car bill, various medical expenses, repeated housing repair expenses, and numerous oversized grocery bills (not to mention how ridiculously expensive crabs are this year), that I would like to start making actual money with my writing. Which means writing for publication, in addition to endlessly tweaking the epic fantasy novel squatting in my brain meat.

In preparation, I've been reading Six Figure Freelancing, by Kelly James-Enger. It's a first edition copy, which means it's a bit dated (written in the days where the Internet was only a research tool and Word hadn't devoured every feature of word processing), but it still has some valuable insights on the level of persistence and organization a writer needs to freelance successfully.

I took the book to heart and declared that I would get organized. I set myself a goal for my first week, namely that I would take half an hour a night to sit and write without doing anything else. To hell with the dishes, laundry, and dog! I would set aside all my chores at 10 p.m. for a half an hour and just write.

I told my wife about my declaration, because that's how they work, and she did everything she could to help me cut down on my chores for the night, God bless her. All I had to do was put Ben to bed at his usual time, between 9 and 9:30, and I'd be set to get started.

So naturally Ben developed a mild cough and wet himself three times in a row, then refused to stay asleep when I put him in his crib, then passed out, then woke up again, then sucked down his third bottle of the night and drowsily threw himself upside-down in my lap in some non-Euclidean baby sleeping position that led to me half-lowering, half-plonking him into his crib, whereupon he tossed a bit before he gave up and passed out at the stroke of 10:30.

Now it's 10:45, and I'm finishing up this post to tell you, Dear Reader, that it is never wise to leave an infant out of your calculations, especially when he is sleeping on your chest.

Fifteen minutes to go. Onward! Upward! And stay asleep little buddy!

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

On Trying New Writing Things Forever

This blog post is procrastination. I am supposed to be writing a novel; specifically I am supposed to be writing the second draft of a novel. To do that I am supposed to be reviewing and revising the first draft to see what bits I can keep, going over my character, location and plot notes to flesh things out, and sketching out background, timeline and geography notes to try and make everything fit together. To do that I am supposed to be collecting notes and snippets strewn across three different formats of writing project into one cohesive whole I can look at without going stark raving mad.

This blog post accomplishes none of those things. But I need to confess. I'm a sinner!


I started the current novel... dear God, is it a year and a half ago? For NaNoWriMo, getting an idea down that had floated in and out of my head for awhile. I succeeded in that and finished a first draft. So far all well and good.

But editing, man, like, whoa. It's staring into the maw of insanity and knowing you created utter chaos, and furthermore that you won't get your dessert until you clean this shit up. And dessert is sopaipillas. That's a dessert worth eating.

I had a first draft, but I didn't have a fucking novel. So I had to fill things in. Character. Notes. Backstory. Cut the shit plot, add new plot. I lost two months trying to sort out geography because I had a plot that demanded my main character walk from one side of this forest-covered island to the other, and I didn't know if he would make it or how long it would take him. Two months.

Fucking mountains, how do they work?
And then, inevitably, I fucked up. You know, more.

I listen to Writing Excuses, which is normally a great source of inspiration and comfort to the writer. Not this time, though. This time the topic was story bibles. Howard Tayler and Brandon Sanderson swear by maintaining a wiki as a story bible. These are writers who write a super-long-running webcomic and a ridiculous amount of epic fantasies, respectively.

I'm writing an epic fantasy. First in a trilogy. And I'm currently up shit creek in my revision precisely because I do not know the details that are necessary to make this book hold together. Clearly I need my own story bible!

Now, all evidence to the contrary, I'm not a complete idiot. I'd done the first draft in Scrivener and I was creating a fairly competent note pool in that project. But I was running into a couple of problems with that, the first being that keeping a story bible in the same project as the actual story would fuck my reuse for the next two planned books. The second being that I'd been importing images into the faux bible like mad and it had bloated the project files to unmanageable levels.

A wiki sounded like the special sauce I needed. I would update it as needed and have a handy reference ready anytime I had to look for some valuable information. What could go wrong?


For starters, I work cross platform. I need wiki software that just works no matter what I'm writing on. That means an online solution 9 times out of 10, but because wikis are supposed to be collaborative, most of the ones freely available are public and can't be set to private. That's not suitable for a story bible for maybe a thousand different reasons.

Wikispaces was an ideal solution because it was free and it didn't require you to make your first wiki public. So I settled on that and took the time to import my story bible into the wiki. Cue: massive amounts of reformatting, because wikis don't generally do WYSIWYG cutting and pasting from a Rich Text document. But I did it, I got the story bible uploaded and I got to work and I actually made some progress...

...annnd I lost access to the wiki.


Eventually I got access back but I was all like "Screw that! Local storage for life!" And cross-platform wikis that work locally are not easy to come by, let me tell you. But there is one, and it is called TiddlyWiki and it is a pretty neat little bit of HTML and Javascript running a one file wiki, which I urge you to check out for the sheer geek factor.

I didn't like the interface, but my options were severely limited at this point so I gave it a go. And I imported all my stuff into TiddlyWiki and out of Wikispaces, and I got everything nice and neat, and...

I froze.

Why? Because I'd just burned I don't know how many weeks fiddling with this bullshit and I didn't know what to do now. Any momentum I had in the main text was long gone and I hadn't written any significant new background material. And the TiddlyWiki interface was really getting to me. Cool factor aside, my brain locked up any time I opened the damn wiki to add something to it.

Also, fun fact? Wikis demand a lot of cross-linking. Great way to waste valuable writing time.

Eventually I just started jotting down all my notes long hand, vowing to type them up into Da Bible later. Then I even dropped that pretense, and popped the notes into - you guessed it - Scrivener whenever I felt it necessary. After awhile I looked at the TiddlyWiki again, checked for an update, and found out the devs had done a complete overhaul that would blow my wiki away if I tried to use it.


Finding out that I'd locked myself into an obsolete piece of software that hurt my brain and took way too much time to use was the final straw. The final hay bale, really. I started a new Scrivener project, dumped the notes I thought were important into it, and moved on. Or so I thought.

I am now at a point where I want to review my new notes and my old notes, my original draft and the new text. And I can't wrap my ahead around the different places that stuff is stored now. Online wiki, local wiki, two or more Scrivener projects and probably a few Word documents haunting my workspace.

I know I need to take time and get everything lined up so I can look at. And what does that mean? More time not writing.

It's a little hard not to be demoralized. But! The book continues to demand release and I'm not giving up on it anytime soon, even if I have to wade through a mountain of discarded Moleskines and Post-It notes.

So what have I learned? First, don't chase fads, at least not for a major project. A wiki might work for Tayler and Sanderson, and it was worth trying, but not on an already-troubled novel. Just, no.

Second, don't chase fads, period. There's always some new tool or software that will make your writing go so much easier ohmyGOSH! It won't. Which is to say it might, but you can't make that determination in less than a year and you have other things to work on. Try stuff out, but don't waste a lot of your time on anything less than brilliant.

Third, for the love of God practice prewriting and organizing and the other things that NaNoWriMo overlooks. Especially the organizing piece. Get yourself a comfortable project layout and workflow, one that won't bother you when you're banging your head against a desk working on the actual book. The less extraneous things stressing you out the better.

And now I have to go pass out so I can tackle these damn notes in the morning. Again.