Tag: Writing

Flash Fiction Challenge: “Juggling Is Hard, And Also Murder”

by Shoshana, posted in Flash Fiction, Writings

It’s that time again. Flash Fiction challenge is up on Chuck Wendig’s Terrible Minds. This week it’s Antagonist/Protagonist as a theme, and the idea is to write half the story from the perspective of the antagonist and the other half from the protagonist. So here’s my contribution to that, which I like to call “Juggling Is Hard, And Also Murder.”

 

Juggling Is Hard, And Also Murder by Shoshana Kessock

There’s a technique to juggling, they say, and Robert Fagan knew he didn’t have it. He stared hard into his reflection in the mirror and tried a basic hand-off without looking. The ball in the mirror went from his right hand to his left with careful fluidity. His doppleganger made it seem a lot easier than it felt. Robert frowned, then tried the pass again. His fingers fumbled on the ball and found purchase; no drop. Still, it wasn’t clean, wasn’t smooth. He tried it again and his thumb fumbled, wouldn’t close over the sphere, wouldn’t complete the movement. A phantom pain juked through his knuckles and he fought the urge to wince. He’d been practicing for too long.

“I’ve got four days to learn to juggle,” he said over his shoulder. “Four days. God had more time to invent the world.”

Behind him, the only response was the uncomfortable shuffle of feet. Robert grinned into the mirror, sheepish. “Sure, I guess that’s a bitter analysis. God had a lot more to put together than a simple three-ball toss. Still, God at least had the tools when He started out. He had the design knowledge, one would expect, for life and the totally-phenomenal cosmic power workbench from which to launch Universe 1.0. All I’ve got are three balls and a fourth on the side that’s never going to get used.”

The word never hung in the air thicker than Robert liked and he turned from the mirror. Behind him, Carina stared at him with her impossibly wide eyes. She shuffled her feet but otherwise sat silent, still.

“Do you think that’s stupid?” Robert asked. He held up the ball in one hand. “I can’t help but imagine that I’m overstating the importance of this, but you do understand, don’t you? They’ll hire someone else if I don’t get this. Then where will I be? Jacky Hardooley is just waiting for me to fail because he wants to get off the midway. He wants into the tent and if it means manipulating the Boss Man into unrealistic expectations-“

Robert stopped, then ran a hand through his hair. “What am I saying? What am I doing here?” He threw the ball up in the air and caught it with a satisfying thwack. “Last year I was at Fordham, now I’m here. Last year I was debating where I’d go for my PhD for Chrissake and now-“

He tossed the ball up in the air with more force. It came down, a loud smack on flesh. Carina winced.

“I’m sorry,” he said and found, strangely, he meant it. He set the ball down on the worn dresser that rounded out his battered, road-worn furniture. As he did, Carina tensed and Robert saw her eyes track to the ball and then back to him. “I’m talking too much about this, aren’t I? I’m just under so much pressure. I shouldn’t talk so much about myself.”

He knelt beside Carina’s chair and his knee kicked up a cloud of dust. Robert hesitated, then put a hand on her slender, perfect foot. The charge of skin on skin contact made him shudder and he heard her whimper. It sent a jolt through his blood and he looked up at her with barely masked adoration.

“You’re just so easy to talk to,” he confessed, then set about checking the rope around her ankles.

 

Talking, Carina thought. The key was just to keep him talking. That’s what they said in all the shows, but how did one do that without being able to talk back? How did you make small talk, build empathy, with a dirty pair of Jockey’s shoved in your mouth?

The eyes. Windows to the soul, weren’t they? Carina’s heart rate rode high in her ears, her blood pounding, and her mind fragmented into a million cliches: windows to the soul, home is the place your heart is, grass is always greener, and all that jazz. She felt crazy, the taste of cotton and sweat in her mouth driving home the inevitability that said she was seeing, for the first time, the real face of this rodeo clown Devil’s Rejects escapee.

He talked. He talked for hours. When he wasn’t speaking, he tossed that ball. She watched the ball because as long as it was in his hand, he didn’t have a weapon. Only his words. Only his hands.

Carina wasn’t sure how long she had been in that chair. She knew it was long enough for her to have to piss so badly that she’d nearly cried. He’d brought her a bedpan and humiliated her by smiling kindly into her face while she used it. Had he been a nurse? She saw the scars on his knuckles and thought better of it. Boxer? MMA fighter? The thought made her cringe. He had barely used his hands on her when he’d carried her from the midway at the close of the day. Could he do more? Was he trained? Was he capable?

He kept talking and Carina watched the ball in his hands, reading his words and not his body language. He was calm and she wanted it to stay that way. Gain an inch, she might get a mile in return.

She shuffled her feet; there were the cliche’s again.

Her eyes widened as he turned to her with those too-wide eyes. He earnestly asked her a question and knelt beside her chair. It took everything she had not to scream when he touched her foot and she felt the eager tremor in his moist grip. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and steadied herself.

If she was going to embrace cliche, she’d stick with something about darkest being before the dawn. She prayed, hope against hope, that he wouldn’t figure out the ropes were loose.

‘Whatever It Is, It Can’t Be That Bad’: The Wisdom of Reading and Centauri Ambassadors

by Shoshana, posted in On Reading, On Writing

I woke up this morning with the unbelievable drive to read a book, read a book, read a m-****ing book.

(Sorry, I had to quote that song. Consider that the first use of real profanity on this blog. I’ll keep it to a minimum, promise.)

It’s not as though I don’t get the urge to pick up a book any given day. I think one of the driving forces behind my interest in writing is my almost insatiable appetite for books. In fact, the happiest way for me to spend an afternoon is browsing a book store, lost in the various sections in an attempt to discover some tome I’ve never seen before. But today of all days, I woke up with the urge to read, not write.

I’m staring down the barrel of a deadline that is, for all intents and purposes, tomorrow and all I want is to pick up a book and lose myself in a good story. Is it the drive to procrastinate that’s keeping me away from my work? Is it some self-sabotage instinct? Not this time. This time, I believe, it is the voice of the inner muse reminding me of one glorious notion: others have walked the path before you and more will come behind. See what they’ve done in the past and are doing now and be reminded that it can’t be that bad.

The line – it can’t be that bad – has always come with a particular voice in my head since I was in high school. One of my favorite shows, Babylon 5, had the most brilliant character in it in the form of Centauri Ambassador Londo Molari. His accent was some kind of Eastern Europe space hodgepodge and when he spoke, he let vowels drip like wine. In one episode, he consoles a morose Security Chief Garibaldi by telling him a story about how in his intensely stressful life, he was once sitting in a strip-joint and couldn’t concentrate on the dancers due to his inner angst. Suddenly he looks up and there is a beautiful dancer there, looking at him. She leans down, kisses his bald dome-y head, and says, “Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad!” That little moment of stripper-provided wisdom stuck with me for years, especially spoken from such an awesomely tragic character as Londo in such a hilarious scene. Because sometimes you need a reminder from the weirdest or most off-beat places that it really can’t be that bad.

I had prepared an article for the blog about the isolation that can come from being a writer, especially when one is like me and tends to find the best writing times in the dead of the night. I wanted to talk about the difficulty of telling friends ‘it’s cool, go out, I’m going to stay home and work’ when you want to be there yupping it up over some beers, but your manuscript is calling. I was going to jam on messed up circadian rhythms and the secret joy of finding your muse hiding at the bottom of your second cup of coffee at two AM when nobody is around to witness your discovery and triumph. Then I got an eyeful of Chuck Wendig’s latest blog post about caring less as a writer and I sat back to think, really think, about what can be taken from the lessons I’ve learned lately about being a writer.

First and foremost, I’ve learned to shut up and stop complaining about being a writer so much.

Let me be clear about that statement. Being a writer is no easy roll of the bones. It is an often thankless, uphill battle against your inner demons, resource (time/money/patience) management, and the ever-capricious well of ideas. It can cause you no end of strife either internally or with your family/friends. Hell, it can cause strife with total strangers when they read your work and suddenly you’re in the middle of a flame war online about the true meaning of words like ‘misogyny’ or ‘feminism’ or, y’know, where you put an apostrophe in a sentence (because people just like to fight over ANYTHING but ESPECIALLY grammar). And talking to your friend/significant other/whatever about what is going on in your head is healthy to a certain extent – it’s called sharing and helps make us well-adjusted little keyboard-tappers.

But behind all the fighting and the fretting and the problems writers have, there’s an inherent magic that I think we keep forgetting about. The act of creation that writers embark upon is, at the risk of sounding way too hippy-like, a beautiful one at heart because creation is beautiful. And when we sit down to make the choice to be creators, we take upon ourselves the task of bringing something new into this world.

I’ll highlight that important bit there that we often forget about: we take upon ourselves. 

A brilliant editor I know, John Adamus, once told me that the first step in being a writer is making choices. I also amended that in my head to the first act of being writer is making the choice. When you sit down to the laptop, when you pick up a pen, you are choosing to take up the chance to make something new. There’s no writer chain gang, shackling us to our desks, demanding it’s ten thousand words before your opportunity for parole. And then, shortly thereafter, you make the choice whether or not to fret yourself to death over the very same choice. It’s all within our power to control and those inner stressors we put upon ourselves are within our power to control if we would just, to quote Chuck Wendig, care less.

Those outer stressors, like money and time managements and friends who wish we’d come around more and parents who ‘just don’t understand’, may be more outside of our control than our inner workings, but it’s still our choice where we put our time and our resources. We make the hard choices to find time to be a writer if we want to. We take the power of creation upon ourselves. And then, when we need to outgas some of our self-imposed internal worry, we crank about it aloud and make it part of our creative process. Sit down, write, fret, grouse, get back to work. I took a hard look at that cycle and thought to myself: which parts of these actually serve the creation process and which don’t? I can tell you, it’s those two in the middle that don’t vaguely resemble work.

I spoke last night with my best friend Andrea who recently completed training to become a doula. For those who don’t know what that is and think that’s a very funny word, a doula is someone who helps with childbirth and yes, it is a hilariously funny word. (It always reminded me of Aanold in Kindergarden Cop trying to pronounce ‘tumor’ – tuuumah!). She just went through her second birth yesterday and we caught up as she recovered from the strain of the whole thing. I marveled at her ability to go into a room and help a woman bring another life into this world and told her so – the very notion of the whole childbirth process freaks me out so badly I can barely listen to her describe it. Yet she made the choice to take up a calling to help bring new little people into this world, and as she talked about the long hours and the worry and the shouting involved (there’s a lot of shouting in coaching a birth apparently, just like on TV), I marveled at the excitement she had for all of it and the pride with which she spoke about the entire affair.

Suddenly, all of my complaints about my long hours behind a keyboard went away. I was just helping to bring some sentences and ideas into this world and all I had to worry about was getting them in the correct order to convey ideas and (hopefully) some proper grammar. I wasn’t standing in a delivery room, worrying over a new life coming into this world. If she could find the joy in the midst of stress, the accomplishment in the middle of BabyDefcon One, then what was I missing? Why did I let my stress overwhelm my creative joy? Why was it inherently part of my process?

I won’t go into why I stress about writing here. It’s a long, drawn out conversation that, in it’s own mental Olympics way, can cycle into that woe outgassing cycle in it’s own way and that’s not where I’m going with this. Instead, I’ll say that in the light of perspective, the little things that drive us to neuroses about our writing can be put into silence if we make our choices and keep an eye on where we fit in what I call the chain. That’s where the books come in.

For a writer, reading isn’t just the act of doing research on the greats in the field, or a chance to lose yourself in the work of your favorites. It is a chance to realize that once you picked up the pen, you are among a peerage that stems back to the first time someone chiseled something into a rock for fun and said, “Hey, Caveman Joe, you gotta read this!” You’re among those who made the choice to spin words out of dead air into strings of new reality that spark the human mind the moment they touch a reader’s eyes. And you’re burdened with the idea, just like they were, that if you don’t bring your particular vision to the world, who will. That book in your hand should remind a reader that there are others out there who could look at your stress and your inner demons and say, “Hey buddy, I feel you” and mean it. You as a writer are not alone and in the end, whatever it is that’s holding you back internally and setting off the monkey on your back, it can’t be THAT bad. There are real-world concerns to stress over that need to be focused on, sure, but the woe we generate over our creative selves sometimes needs the perspective only a good book can give.

Or, y’know, a kiss on the head by a beautiful, wise stripper. But if those are in short supply, take your revelations where you can get ’em. I’m sure trying to.

Welcome back to the rodeo, I’m your host, let’s play our game

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Update

It’s been a long time since I posted on this blog. I say that a lot. I’m not going to be saying it much anymore.

Welcome to the relaunch of Wisdom in Silence, my writing blog. You can tell it’s no longer called that. Now, it’s just straight up called Shoshana Kessock. That’s me. From now on, this is going to be my blog about being a freelance writer, game designer and geek girl. I’m going to talk here about what it’s like chasing the dream of publishing in the role-playing industry. I’m going to talk about my experience being accepted into the NYU Grad program in Game Design. I’m going to talk about facing down chronic illness while still trying to publish and deal with school. I’m going to talk about the geek world at large. This is going to be my journey and I’m putting it out here for those who want to read it.

But why, you ask? Why would anyone want to read about this kind of struggle? Well, I’ll tell you, I don’t know for certain that people will. I know that I’ve gotten a lot of questions lately about what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. And I find myself answering a lot of the same questions over and over. What projects are you working on? How’s it going? What’s the update on such-and-such? What do you think about this? So here’s a place where it’s all going to go. Here’s the start:

I’m Shoshana Kessock. I’m twenty-nine. I’m starting graduate school at NYU for game design in a matter of weeks. I’m the creator of Phoenix Outlaw Productions, an independent gaming company out to publish and produce quality game products for the world at large. I run the company with my business partner, Josh Harrison. You’ll hear more about all that in future posts. I’m also writing my first gaming book through Phoenix Outlaw Productions. Some folks may have heard of it from me: it’s called Wanderlust and I’m excited to talk more about it’s development.

I also work freelance as a writer and copy editor for Eschaton Media, which publishes the Dystopia Rising tabletop role-playing book and other products. When I’m not doing that, I’m a full-time staffer on the Dystopia Rising Live-Action Role-Play game out in Sparta, New Jersey. I’m also a freelance blogger who writes for Tor.com where I cover comics, LARP, film and various geekery. When I’m not doing all that, I’m writing a novel as well that I’m three quarters of the way finished with and I’m dedicated to getting published. In between, I spend time with my friends, write short stories, live in Brooklyn, read tarot cards and a mountain of books whenever I can. I am also currently trying to learn to play the harmonica. Because harmonicas are cool.

What I’ve been up to lately includes getting ready for graduate school, making some new friends at Dexcon 2012 (updates for that to come) and got myself picked up to go staff at GenCon 2012 in just a few weeks. I will be attending as part of the staff for First Exposure, the independent gaming play test track run by the staff of Double Exposure. I’m excited for the prospect of play testing what I’ve got for my Wanderlust game at that convention just before school starts, and I’m also excited about a couple of projects that I can’t talk about just yet that are on the horizon.

That’s my life. That’s what you’ll be hearing more about. In between I’ll be posting some Flash Fiction challenges from the glorious Chuck Wendig’s blog (because his challenges make my inner writer do a dance of creative excitement) and I’ll be talking about writing challenges and techniques in general too. This blog will be two parts running tally of my life and two parts exploration of what it is to be a female geek and writer.

Sounds good? I do hope so. From here on out, it’s all shooting for the horizon folks. Stick around, won’t you?

Brand New November, Brand New NaNo

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Update, Writings

November has once again come upon us and it is time for nano to commence. I’ve always been a huge fan of nano and the opportunity that it gives tentative writers to get their fears out in one giant explosion of writing. The question has been presented to me however… Am I past nano and what it can offer me?

In years past Netto has been a great opportunity for me to get past my writers block and focus on one project for one month. There have been many times when I was scared to go forward with a project because it seems too large or too unwillingly. Yet in recent years despite long jags of writers block I haven’t been having the same problem with getting my ideas out. In fact it seems whenever I do sit down to get a project out I’ve been able to produce large bodies of work very quickly.

For example, I decided this month that I was going to forgo NaNo. It was a conscious choice on my part since I was swamped with other projects such as blogging and going to work and beginning the gaming book that I’m writing — which I will speak more about later. However, day before last I sat down to put what I believed was going to be the beginnings of an upcoming project onto paper. I had no intention of starting a new project altogether! My brain apparently had other intentions.

I ended up putting down nearly 20,000 words into a new project that I am calling, for now, “The Lakeside.” I did all that in approximately 36 hours.

At a recent convention that I attended I spoke to a writing editor who asked me why I was still doing nano if I was not having problems producing. I said I enjoyed it and that was the reason that I kept up with the project year after year. I enjoyed the creative spirit and communal support that nano offered. However what she said stuck in my mind. Is nano really only for those folk having trouble producing work?

The fact is, before my 20,000 word jag I was having trouble producing. I was stuck in anxiety-laiden writers block over all the work I wanted to do. I was having difficulty finding the right words to bring my ideas to paper. Nano this month did give me the impetus to go forward and start on a new project once again. Only at this point maybe the 50,000 word word count is not quite a challenge anymore.

I am planning on finishing this project For NaNo this month, whether that means finishing it at the very last minute like I did last year or finishing it in two days as seems to be what might happen. The Lesson I’m going to take away from this is that I don’t need to be hampered by large word goals, nor by anxiety about producing work. I think I’m proving right now that I can be prolific. The trick now is to be more precise with my work. NaNo does teach you to produce a lot of words at once but it does not teach you how to be specific with those words. Right now I need to focus on quality over quantity.

So will I do NaNo next year? I don’t know. But for right now “The Lakeside” has 20,000 words down and it’s only the middle of the month. I started two days ago. Let’s see where this goes.

Speak Out With Your Geek Out: Fantasy Writing, Like Bowties, Is Cool

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Testimonial

Sorry for the little Doctor Who quote there, but it’s a good way to get things rolling. On my other blog, ReImagined Reality, I posted up my very first Speak Out With Your Geek Out post. The idea behind Speak Out With Your Geek Out is to support geekery in all its forms everywhere across the Internet. I began my other post like any Ten-Step Program would, so I’ll keep up the tradition…

Hi, my name is Shoshana and I write geek.

I don’t mean that I write like a geek, or that I write stories about people biting the heads off of live animals. No, I write geek in all forms in that I write science fiction, fantasy, horror and blog posts about everything geeky. I have written geek since I was knee high on a dog tiny. I started writing fantasy stories when I was in grade school. I re-wrote scenes from movies and comics and books that I didn’t like to include things I wanted to see (I didn’t even know that the term for that was fanfic by the way until MUCH later). I did all this because in my heart of hearts, I knew one thing – I had ideas. And they wanted to get out.

And my ideas were not happy relationship stories about women and men in everyday lives. They weren’t stories about children coming of age in a modern, normal world. Nope, my stories had witches and demons, robots and dragons, mutants and super heroes. To me, my stories had a drama that the every day world did not come anywhere close to exhibiting (and that’s the good drama, folks, not the sad silly drama). And when I was younger, I thought I was utterly alone in liking what I liked.

See, I grew up religious. And where I came from, people didn’t read Tolkien often. When I was reading the Chronicles of Narnia, other people looked at me funny. It wasn’t something they really trended on much and I felt like kind of a freak for having my head in realities that didn’t exist. In high school, though, I got lucky enough to meet another girl in my all-girls school who liked similar things. I felt less like a freak. She’s still my friend, over fifteen years later, and more like family. And all because we both spoke the same language, the language of looking at geek and digging it.

So I’ve written. And it’s not easy sometimes. People joke that all of my work is on some wacked out other planet. I’ve never written something that doesn’t have a supernatural bent to it, and that’s okay. I think that writing has to come from what you love and I love the unreal. I think that writing things that don’t exist in this world lets our minds expand and consider things that might never have been considered. The fantasy brings home concepts, criticisms or ideas that we might otherwise want to sweep under the rug, that we might never want to address. In the race to open our minds to accept bizarre vampire stories or alien love triangles, we writers manage to slip in themes about acceptance, prejudice, violence and ethical quandries for the audience to ponder.

And then, sometimes, we just want to write about demon dogs and hell beasts. Y’know, because that’s what tickles our noses.

The day’s come where I now write commentary on other people’s geek too. And that’s just as satisfying, where I get to talk about what I like and don’t like about the geek world around me. Sure, it’s not as satisfying as creating. Its not a short story done or a game development session come to fruition. It isn’t a novel nearly completed (oh God let me get it done soon!) but it is geek and it is good writing too. It is the spore-spreading of good geek content across the internet waves and that brings us as nerdlings together. So in the end, it is also words well spent.

I write geek. And I enjoy it. And I don’t think I could ever stop. After all, if you’re at something for so long, you start to look back and wonder what your life would be like without that thing, that one thing that lit you up for so long. And you honestly can’t imagine your life without it. That’s me and my writing, vampires and woogity demons and all.

May I never stop.

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.

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!

Back in the saddle, baby! (Or, how a writer got her groove back)

by Shoshana, posted in Uncategorized

Oh yes, when the muse comes back she’s dancing a jig!

Well, let’s not say that the muse came roaring back with such a ferocity this time. More like I invited her in, plied her with alcohol and fine chocolates and wooed her ass into staying. I did my damnedest to get the damn creative muse back into my backyard and guess what? It’s back!

…..okay, I’m way too exuberant about this. Let’s take it from the top.

From my last post, you saw that I was having some problems with writing. The fact is, it was more like I was having problems with life and the writing was just a symptom of a MUCH larger problem. My health has not been so spectacular this year – in fact, it’s been the worst it’s ever been. After that, I was trying to carry WAY too much work on my shoulders lately, between full time schedule at work, my coarse load at college while I try to graduate, and running role-play games. All in all, after I completed the major gaming project that was running a game at I-CON 2010, my brain was FRIED. After that, I got sick AGAIN, had some time off to spend time with friends, and then found out I had to go find another place to live pretty quickly.

All in all, I was moody, upset, depressed, and stressed to the point of nutball-soup. How the hell was I supposed to write anything except the words ‘helphelphelphelp’ over and over again? That’s not a very good place to be writing from and I knew it. So I was waiting for things to calm down again. More like I was waiting for me to get a handle on things again.

The truth is, life hasn’t calmed down. Life is still crazy. I’m six weeks to graduation and six weeks to the kick-off of the major Live Action Role-Play game that me and my friends are running. There are friend troubles, not enough time for work, I’m still getting sick, and my moods have been ALL over the place. Money troubles, work troubles, school troubles – you name it. And you know what I realized?

Pardon my language but F*** this, it’s time to get back to work.

See the fact is, things are never going to be calm. I can certainly work on calming down them down soon, getting my life in order, getting a handle on things – and that is my damn priority from now on because one cannot live like this much longer – but that isn’t going to mean that stress is going to miraculously disappear. So it’s time to get serious: either I’m a writer through thick and thin or I’m just a whiny hack who can’t make things happen when they need to happen. That’s what separates someone who is a writer from someone who just thinks they are – making it happen no matter what.

I got back on the horse on the 23rd despite having a WICKED migraine and bad stomach day. The sickness continued into the 24th and into today, the 25th but in those days? I wrote 56 pages of a new manuscript and my word count stands today at 12,965 words. It has no name yet, but it’s something and I’m really liking it. It’s simple, it’s fun, and it’s inspired by my favorite authors: Gaiman, King, Pullman, Lewis. It’s what I’ve been thinking about writing since I was eleven years old, a concept that has floated in my mind since then and it’s honest. My main character is down to earth and fun, and it is what I feel like writing right now.

I’m also going to be picking up a short story that I’ve almost finished and knocking it out, called The Bunny Grinned and submit that for a contest by the end of this week. I’m also working up some of my poetry for submission for extra credit in class. And this is on top of catching up on about six weeks of homework I’m behind in another class and going to work and working for the LARP I’m going to help run. And why? Because that’s what a writer does. A writer makes it happen no matter what. If I’m going to make this work, then I’ve got to deliver and it’s got to come from a place of no fear anymore.

So here we go. Back in the saddle. The muse can take the spare room cuz she’s going to be dropping by for a while, if I have anything to say about it.

Growl, growl, not enough sleep…

by Shoshana, posted in Uncategorized

When the muse wakes you in the middle of the night to make you get up and write, it can be the most goddamn disruptive thing in the world. But it did make me productive! I was tired so I went to bed early and then my body woke me at 2AM. So from 2AM to 4:30AM I wrote. And what I came up with was nearly 2500 words in my project, the big fantasy story known as Exeter.

So the wordcount for my projects stands as follows:

  • Exeter: 41,045 words (seven chapters plus prologue)
  • Big Pete: 49,419 words (thirty-three chapters – not all completed)
  • New Gods: 57,264 words (twenty three chapters)
  • Trilogy Book Two: 83,918 words (twelve chapters)

This is just the stuff I’ve picked up and poked at with a stick recently. But the drive to keep working, to keep my word counts up and just keep writing, have driven these projects through the roof. I won’t say that everyone of them is good – in fact, I finished a chapter in Exeter last night that I wanted to murder with a stick. The next chapter though started off immediately great! It’s just a question of not getting frustrated.

And from good news perspective: I got full time at my job so now I have to find time to write even when I’ll be working all the damn time. It’s going to be fun.