Author: Shoshana

Flash Fiction Contest: Revenge

by Shoshana, posted in Writings

Recently I’ve been attempting a lot more fiction challenges and short story spats to work on getting the old creative juices running. I ran across Chuck Wendig’s blog thanks to a link from Jess Hartley’s Facebook (internet at its best) and there is a competition for a 100 word short story on revenge. So here is my attempt at doing 100 Words on Revenge:

Shackles by Shoshana Kessock

The shackles were weak; the door was flimsy. The men didn’t understand their mistake.

They came to my village in the night. Their clothes were black, their weapons powerful. They covered their eyes to hide their intention. First, they shot my father. They took me in a van, a bag over my head. They made jokes. They told me I would fetch good money. I was ‘big game’ for trophy hunters. They locked my wrists in silver.

Men have to piss. They dither outside the van.

Silver burns but makes weak shackles. And men can’t run fast enough.

Goodbye, Father.

The Importance of Being Criticized, and Earnest Too

by Shoshana, posted in Random Aside

An important topic of discussion I’ve had with a lot of people in the last six months is that of criticism. How to take it, where to get it, and whose to listen to are all factors when considering the issue of critique and creative input on projects you’re working on. Everyone who has written knows that you have to be prepared to have your stuff reviewed by others and have to get used to taking criticism. The old adage “you can’t please everyone all the time” comes to mind when I think about putting forward work. Yet I keep chasing a problem or two about critiques in my head, such as:

  • When do you put your work up for critique (when it is finished? when you’re in the middle? while you’re working?)
  • Whose opinion counts more, the critique or the authors? Is your work in need of work or are you facing down injection of personal opinion?
  • How do you deal with negative criticism?

The first problem is one I’m running into constantly, and an issue that recently cost me partnerships on a bigger project. I am a writer who does not work well with criticism being laid on the work while I’m writing it. The reviewing process and critique drives me completely out of my work and into the ‘is this going to work/why not/what’s wrong with it’ worry stage too early. In short, it impedes my creative process. This has caused a great deal of issue when working with partners recently, and caused me to become very consternated when being asked to critique in middle of a project we were working on. The resulting friction was a major contributing factor to our partnership being dissolved – I was very uncomfortable with sharing work for review and critique while it was unfinished and was unable to articulate why. I came out of the situation realizing that in this case, sharing for critique for me was still too raw of an issue to do in mid-project, but I also had to acknowledge it doesn’t work that way for everyone. Some people thrive on getting input during the process and find the cooperation involved refreshing. Others find it nerve-wracking (like me).

The process made me consider what it was about review that bothered me, and brought up another issue – namely, the issue of creative control and review as opinion. When putting your work up for review, you are essentially asking creative input from an outside source. You are acknowledging that you respect that source enough to hear them out as a reader who is taking in what you’ve created, and giving you feedback based upon their experience of reading your work. Yet a good number of times, you are going to come up against opinions on your work that ask you to consider changing fundamental elements of your story. At that point, you come to a juncture where you must consider whose ideas you want to incorporate, and whether or not you want to trust your vision for the project alone or go with the outside view of an objective eye.

This is another issue that rubs raw sometimes with authors and certainly with me. Mostly the issue becomes a problem for me because of the idea of personal taste. Sometimes, a critique will point out important plot holes, issues of continuity, and even glaring errors of fact that are important to correct. Grammar and style issues are also important to correct, and can be tagged by a good critique. Yet there also comes times when a reviewer simply objects to some of your material and suggests a change, even arguing that it will improve your work. At that point, it is a question of that person’s opinion versus your own. And it comes back down to ‘you can’t please everyone’. I have found that its difficult sometimes to separate a reviewers personal displeasure and opinion from their critique and for that reason choose very carefully who reviews and critiques my work. Yet I will admit, I’m overly protective of my projects and realize I need to relax a LOT about it. Sometimes a fresh eye with fresh ideas and suggestions can lead you down amazing paths with your work if you have the balls to accept what they are offering over your own concepts. Sometimes, your stuff really just will stink and a new idea can give inspiration. Just beware of people who think that “You know what’s a better idea?” is a good critique technique and just want to input their own framework onto your already existing work. That’s not critique: that’s project hijacking.

And that comes down to the last issue of dealing with negative criticism. It’s always hard to hear that something doesn’t jive, that your characters are flat or your action sequences don’t work. It’s hard to hear that you’re not coming right out of the gate smelling like a Newberry Award or a New York Times Best Seller. The trouble is how to take that kind of input. I’ve found that a good critique is not only based on content but on how the critique is developed. Let’s face it: we all have our inner angry Simon Cowel, ready to rip and shred thru other people’s work with scathing glee. We do it in part because we believe our witty and harsh criticism will ‘be brutally honest’ about ‘how we feel’. The problem is, criticism isn’t about how we feel. It’s about how we see the other work might be improved. And bringing feelings into it makes the situation messy. Keeping that in mind, we also ought to consider the time, effort and difficulty of producing anything creative. For the other person, it’s a labor like bringing offspring into the world. If you’re the kind of person who can walk up to someone else’s newborn infant and say ‘Goddamn, that is an ugly baby! You should go back to the drawing board and try again because it’s face is just… whew, not quite right!’ then you’re not someone I want reviewing my work. Tact is as important as content.

That said, there is something to be said for being too sensitive. And here, I offer up my confession that I speak from experience on this one. Look, the act of creation is an act of passion and giving for some, and it can make an artist feel terrifyingly vulnerable. Putting forward something you have created and saying ‘I hope you like it’ is like stepping out naked and blindfolded onto a firing range… you’re asking in a lot of ways to be hit. Our insecurities hang out all over and when our work is attacked by someone’s negative input or review, we can get defensive. Hell, taking out the we here… I know I get defensive like hell. And yet it’s all part of the process of becoming a better writer.

So how to deal with it well? I’ll be honest – I’ll tell you when I figure it out. But I know that there are some tricks that have helped me. One is finding voices that you trust to not only be fair in their critique but to be fair in their delivery. You don’t want people who are going to kiss your ass, but you want people who will speak truth in a manner respectful to your work and the energy you put into it. (Brutally honest is good, brutal for the sake of brutal is just rude and ineffectual). The second trick is to separate yourself from the work as much as possible, or separate your connection to the work from the critique. If necessary, repeat: “Its not me out there, it’s the words/the art/the song.” And third is a phrase I’ve come to love and try to keep in mind when I’m being pecked at by critique and I’m feeling defensive. “There are no good ideas in a vacuum.” Genius may be the illusive beast we all chase, but the stories of madmen, dreamers and poets locking themselves away and coming out of their caves ages later with fully realized masterpieces is not the way the process works for everyone. More voices enrich a project, so long as you keep your eye on the vision you began with.

These are the lessons I’ve learned so far with critique. I’m working to follow my own rules about dealing with them, though it’s not easy. So I wrote this not only to share, but as a reminder to myself.

So going out there, whoever reads this: beware the naysayers, the so-called experts, the ego-destroyers and the worrywarts. Try to hear the words of those that warn you about marketability and content, about your ideas being too far out, or ‘hey, wouldn’t it be great if…’ But never lose sight of what you set out to do, and if their words don’t jive with your vision, weigh it all as equal and take what works best for you. After all, you’re in the driver’s seat. Trust your instincts and create. The rest will sort itself.

The Novel Progresses

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Update

So once again, it has been ages since I updated. I always feel the need to give a mea culpa for that, or an explanation. This time, I will simply attribute to an upheaval in my life that continues to upheave. I suppose that one can say that there’s always going to be things distracting us from work, and if we want to do something we will. I have, instead of posting here, been actually working on the book I dedicated myself to finishing.

The book I’m speaking about is the project I began for NaNoWriMo this past year in November of 2010. I achieved the word goal of 50K that qualifies you as a NaNo winner before the end of November, as I had done for a few years. However the novel itself, whose title is still in flux, was not finished. With 50K in the bag the book was only half done. So I decided to say NO to starting a project and leaving it half-finished. And so I decided to pick it back up.

It has taken me until now, with the massive nonsense in my life, but I’m at 92,779 words. It has taken me over six months to add another 42K and change to the book, but it is on its way to nearly completed. It will need massive editing and a staunch head-shake from me on a number of issues, including my pacing, but it’ll be done. I refuse to leave another project half done and waiting in my laptop’s depths for me to ‘come back to it someday’.

So the update stands like this: NaNo Continuation 2010 = 92,779 words, three sections (plus interlude) and many, many chapters.

I’m going to finish this one before the Office of Letters and Light (NaNo’s parent company) launches their summer program this year. They’re calling it Camp NaNoWriMo and it’s a second shot at the 50K party for the summer. I’m excited to give it a shot, and I even have a novel concept. But I will not start it before this one gets done. So? It means crunch time. Working on a deadline will give me the focus to get this finished. And I want to check off ‘Completed a Novel’ from my list of things to do category. After that, all I’ll have to do is get this published for another achievement unlocked.

Where I’ve Been (Or: Burnout and Where It Goes From There)

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Update

So I’m back. Or at least, I found my way to this blog again. I have been away for quite some time and below will be a rather candid explanation of why:

It happens to everyone. You write until your brain starts to leak out of your ears to get to the end of a project. You work it until you think you never want to see it again. And when it’s over, finally over, you look at what you’ve created and realize… it ain’t over yet. There’s editing. There’s final touches. You’re never quite happy.

I beat NaNo this last year by a goodish amount of time. I made it through and have a manuscript that is not finished. I have a story I really like and a large chunk of it done. I was proud of my work at the end of November. And then? Then I got really kind of burnt out.

One reason was my health. At the end of November I ended up on disability leave from work due to a back injury which, actually, turned out to be a chronic health issue I was unaware of until then. I was left to rest up, not going to work, and get healthier with medications and painkillers, the works. So you’d think that would mean I would get work done. You’d think.

What actually happened was a level of burnout I never imagined. Due to my health issues, it became almost impossible to concentrate on writing. I meandered through getting more done on my NaNo from last year. I pressed other projects, fiddling here and there. But I have now been on disability leave for months (as this is the midst of April and it started December 1st). I have gotten very little work done and it frustrates me. But I realized, in the end, what was keeping me away from writing was a few things: my own health making me unable to focus, my lack of focus damaging my self-confidence in my work and too many voices in my ear about my writing.

The first problem is self-explanatory. Medications make my head fuzzy or make me sick to my stomach, so it’s hard to get my head together. Fibromyalgia (which is what I was diagnosed with) comes with not only back and neck pain that is severe sometimes, but also a kind of fog in my brain sometimes that makes me feel weird. At first I just thought it was me, but other people who I’ve met with fibro recently say it’s not uncommon. Dealing with all that has been a major hurdle in getting my mind in the game. And that lead into the second issue of my confidence going way down on my writing, which of course does not make me want to write. See the spiral developing? Terrible place to be.

The last issue came about when I was trying to fix the previous two. I was trying to force myself to get back into writing, so I started going to writing groups. I started working on collaborative projects. I talked more to other writers. And in the end, I got a very mixed bag of responses. One writing group was all about just getting together and writing quietly in a group, for mutual support (on Meetup.com as ‘Shut up and Write’ in NYC). They’re great, and I found that writing among other people who were as passionate as I was really helped me get my creative juices going again. Then I joined a writing critique group and hit a wall. When asked to produce on a weekly basis for them to critique, I felt too nervous. And when I got up the courage to give over a piece to be critiqued, it got wacked about for grammar/editing. I felt very demoralized afterwards, and kept pushing off going back. My problem, not theirs, but it highlighted a problem in me that I’m going to share.

My problem right now isn’t writing. It’s self-confidence in my writing. It’s showing it to others and taking critique. And its kept me from trying to publish yet, or pushing myself to work harder. The constant question of ‘is this good enough’ has kept me from going forward with my writing in the last six months. And it’s a dangerous creative killer. It almost made me put down writing permanently.

This is an ongoing problem that I am happy to say I am combating, thanks to the support of a great friend and writing mentor. He has pushed me to continue to work, to nurture the creative energy, and be kind to myself in realizing that while things might need work? That doesn’t mean you suck. Talent, he’s told me, is common enough, but the discipline to work that talent is what makes you a successful writer. With his fosterage, I’m developing better habits and, honestly, flourishing more just from the support.

So I’m still writing. It’s slow. I’m working on a couple of projects all at once, reading some great books on writing (which I will comment on later). I’m even screwing up my courage to go back to that writing group, which I’ll probably bitch about incessantly. And, I came back to this blog. Because more than anything, I couldn’t write anything here about my writing since… there was nothing going on.

But I’m still here. And it’s all still going on. And there is a lot more to come. I’m back in the saddle again.

Word Count Reached- Work Not Done

by Shoshana, posted in Uncategorized

As of 10pm tonight, November 24th, I hit word count for my 2010 NaNo. The project I’m calling ‘Prisoner Sixty-Three’ is by no means done but the minimum word count is done and I am damn pleased.

I am also aching. I realize the joke about writers not taking care of themselves doesn’t just extend to not eating right, not sleeping, drinking to excess or drug use. Hell those are dangerous but does anyone preach about the dangers of forgetting to get up and leave the computer every once in a while? The back aches, the muscle tension, the neck cramps, the eye strain, the carpel tunnel!

I sound like a whiny old woman but I am singing the praises of weary joints today! Lots of typing and forgetting to stand up and stretch make me hurt. But man who wants to interrupt the muse while we’re doing our thing…?

There is still more work to be done on this story- I stopped mid-chapter tonight to save my eyes the damn strain but otherwise this story has more coming!

Way to Kick Word Count A$$ (Or, I pat myself on the back)!

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Testimonial

So this year, NaNoWriMo has not been a labor of love. It has been a 14-hour delivery in which the doctor did not want to give any pain meds and you’re birthing the old fashioned way, screaming and choking and wishing ‘oh god oh god why did I ever want to do this in the first place’…

Yeah, “who the hell thought this was a good idea” went through my head a few times this year. Let’s just say, life has been very difficult lately for me so things have been driving me absolutely batty and therefore away from my writing. So, since that has been making life harder for writing, I fell way behind in NaNo until I thought I’d never catch up. I would lug my laptop all over town and then sit somewhere, staring at it with forlorn eyes for ages.

Until today. There are times you just have to fish or cut bait and today I just said I was going to sit myself down and do it. So I found a few things that made me able to write and man, did I hit my word count with a stick. How many words did I type today? Why, 14,036 in one sitting. Six hours of work, two teas later, I can’t feel my legs, I have a crick in my neck and I have to pee like mad (TMI, I know) but whew.

Total word count: 44,720. Nearly there folks, nearly there!

Plus, the story is finally coming together. This little crazy 14-baby that wouldn’t come out is finally turning into something that might actually be worth calling a novel. Loosely called “Prisoner Sixty-Three” as a codename, it’s my attempt at an alien abduction story and yet, as some of my friends know from my descriptions, it’s a lot more. I’m not going to talk a lot about it until it is DONE but lets just say it’s a whole lotta weird and it’s a different writing style then I’ve ever tried before. But, it’s also showed me a few tips about my writing that I didn’t know before. So here is what got me through the ridiculous word count jump, take this for what it is:

  1. Smut helps: Okay, so you’re stuck in a part of your story that honestly is so boring you want to cut your own feet off just to do SOMETHING interesting. Your characters are sitting around talking and honestly, you have no idea what the hell to do next. You’ve got another chapter where something has to happen, and you want to introduce a spooky element that you need to push the plot along. Okay, need to be spooky? Need to introduce some info? Mix in some smut. I know it’s cheap. I know it’s taudry. But why not, right? Sex happens in real life, and as long as you’re not making it too gross (as in not making it too out of awful left field or too wine and roses OMG I LURVE U high school nonsense) and write it well, there’s no reason a sex scene can’t make your story move a little bit where it’s getting a little saggy… And I just used saggy in the same sentence as sex. Moving on.
  2. Find a Place to Write You Like: This is meta-story here, but I cannot tell you how serious this one was to my state of mind. I had been trying to write all over town for the last week, everywhere from my room (NOT going to happen, with family drama to distractions from the cat to my PS3) to the local Starbucks (the playlist is SO irritating). I kept dodging around trying to find a place that was a writing haven until, low and behold, I came upon the right place. I just sat down and thought “where is the place where I have felt the most creative” and “where have I thought I could write the most when I walked in there”. The place I ran into was a place called Argo Tea in Manhattan and oh BOY did it work. Two teas later, I was settled in to write, relax, and work and oh boy, did I.
  3. Accept That You Will Not Always Write: Again, this is a meta-story thing, but I was kicking the garbage out of myself for the last few days that my writing this NaNo has been coming in fits and starts. I have been going from big word counts to four/six days of NO writing. And that’s awful. Then I’ll have a day like today when explosions happen, and you know what? That happens. Life happens. You’re going to have things that come along and eat your time, your energy, your attention. Have fights with family, get distracted by good books, go out with friends and talk about the nature of life and the universe – that shit happens. But don’t forget to come back to writing – it does NOT make you a bad writer that you can’t write some days. Just try to show up for the work. If you don’t make it that day, don’t give up.  You’ll still have explosion days, and you’ll still have show up days. I managed to get at least a few words in here and there a day, just to make myself feel connected, and that kept things alive.
  4. Don’t Just Kill Your Darlings, Love Your Detestables: I have often had serious problems appreciating certain kinds of characters in stories. Like weak female. Oh BOY do they make my fingers itch for the slappin’ (listen to me rant about Bella from Twilight for a while or Harley Quinn- whoo boy). Anyway, the problem is, if you try to write a story, the idea is you have to write some of these to round out your stories and if you don’t like them, sometimes you’ll jam up your writing mojo because you’ve got a hate on for your own characters. I did this in my NaNo. There’s a character I wrote in that I wanted to include, a kind of weak woman character and the minute I got to the chapter for her? Bam. Stuck. So… what did I do? I had to learn to love my detestable character. I had to get in there and learn to get into her head and write her in a way that would make her interesting to me while still keeping in the spirit of what I had in mind for her. I had to understand her, get to know her, and in the end? I ended up empathizing with her, getting her where I needed her and it turns out? Making her one of the main villains of my piece! Who knew she had it in her! Still the way she was going to be but now, much more useful and dynamic because she’s not cookie cutter and all because I didn’t let the archtype get in my way anymore.
  5. Just Let it Ride: So after all the stress and craziness, I wandered around some bookstores. I thought about writing, and I came down to the most important thing that was holding me back: I was stressing. I was stressing that I wasn’t good enough, I was having aggita, and had to stop. So what did I do? I just put it aside. I decided that if this book doesn’t matter, if I burn it at the end, if I delete it, if it never sees the light of day, I needed to give it its due. I sat down and let it see the light of day because I promised myself that it deserved its due. It chose me as the vessel by which it was coming out and by God, I was going to let it Ride. So here I am, letting it ride, and to hell with what happens next. Next is editing! Next is second draft! This is the ‘Get the hell out of me you enormous monstrocity!’ part. This is just the Let it Ride. And I will not stress it so much.

So that’s it. Tips that got me through these last two weeks of OMG. Class dismembered. I’m going to soak my fingers, I typed too much today!

NaNo Update: The 4AM Candle Burning Session

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Update

So apparently, my muse jumped out and mugged me last night. I sat down at 11PM and said I was going to write for an hour or so after watching walking dead. I have the day off the next day, why not, right?

It’s after 4AM. I’m still wide awake. And my word count from yesterday has jumped.

Day One= 4,060

Day Two= 11,847

Yeah, it’s like that. mugged in a dark alley by the muse. Whatever, the story is shaping up wonderfully. The main character has just made an appearance, or at least… well, I’d say the main subject. One of the main characters has been going strong since the first page, and his section of the story is now done. I go on to the next one very shortly. The story has a few characters which you flick through to chase the subject of the story and… well, it’s complicated but I’m enjoying teh hell out of it. And like I said, one character down. Now I’m onto the next one.

Only my sleep schedule is shot to hell. I’m going to bed.

And so it begins – or NaNo is BACK

by Shoshana, posted in Uncategorized

So I can’t say that I’ve been jumping up and down on this blog lately, but I’ve had a hell of a time with writing this past year. So many reasons why, nothing I want to write about right now, but let’s just say… it’s been a hell of a thing. So I’ve had nothing to update! Which has sucked because I missed blogging too 🙂

But now, there is a time-honored tradition which must be obeyed and that tradition has come around again. The great month of November is here and that giant maw of writing has opened again for me to put my foot in… yes, folks. It’s time for NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month. 50,000 words in one month and I’m at it again. So today began the madness and after one day I am on 4060 words. Not bad for a bad start.

That’s right, what a crap start I had. I don’t even know if I like the place my novel started, but at least its begun. I had a project I wanted to take on, a character-driven experimental piece that had brewing in the back of my head, and I’m trying to kick it out. More about it as it develops but as I was out sick today from work, I thought I would get a whole lot of writing done. Turns out instead that the less structure I have on a day, the less I actually get done with my fool self. So what did I actually do but a lot of nothing until 10PM. And then at 10PM? 4060 words.

The project has a tentative name so far. “Prisoner Sixy-Three is Missing” is the name. It’s kind of tentative naming. But it’s underway. Yaaaaay NaNo! To all those joining me in the madness – let’s get cracking.

Taking creative criticism (or: ouch)

by Shoshana, posted in Uncategorized

Opening yourself up to criticism sucks. It’s the bread and butter of the creative industry however and you’ve got to get used to it if you’re going to do anything creative. Eventually, someone is going to tell you that your stuff is just not that good. Someone, probably more than one someone, is going to come out and say that your stuff stinks or that it’s just not that great or it needs lots of work, ect. The question is, how do you take it? The criticism gets harder the more you care about that person’s opinion.

I have a friend of mine whose opinion I respect quite a lot. He’s a published author who has sort of taken me on as a little bit of a padawan (for you star war’s geeks) or an apprentice, and has been giving me encouragement and advice about my writing. So I bit the big one and sent him one of my stories, which I considered one of my best, called The Castle on Jasper Hill and I waited to see what he had to say.

It… wasn’t entirely encouraging.

He said it was “cute” the mistakes I was making, which were rookie and reminded him a lot of mistakes he made when he was my age. He said that I had a lot of fat trimming to do and started pointing out ways for me to do it. I think it was the cute part that had me bristling like mad. Here I thought that it was one of the best works I’d done and… I wasn’t encouraged a little by the process.

Then I sat back and started thinking about it and realized it was time to toughen up my skin. I had been spending so much time trying to kick my anemic writing discipline into shape that I’d kept myself away from real criticism. I’d gone to classes where people didn’t really pitch much by way of harsh criticism in my direction. And if they did, I really didn’t care much about their opinion. Here was someone whose opinion I did care about, and I nearly ran in the other direction? It was time to thicken up a little bit.

This friend of mine and I are going to sit down over coffee to talk it over and so I can get a better idea of what he liked, what didn’t work, ect. Meanwhile, he gave me an idea of some things to work on, like how to trim the fat on my work. But I think a major thing I got out of this situation was that creative criticism is going to SUCK and it’s going to kick me in the gut every time. So if I want to get to the point where I’ll see my name on a book, published, then I’m going to have to learn and step up my game. And the only way to do that is to take what criticism is given and not balk.

Doesn’t mean it won’t smart like hell, of course. But that’s just part of the game.