Tag: Writing

Let the Anxiety GO (Or, How Not to Stress Submissions)

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Update

In the land of struggling writers, nothing is more terrifying than the concept of getting a rejection letter from someplace you submitted your work. At least, that’s how I feel about it – I am petrified by the whole process. You pour your heart and soul into a story, you pound at it until it hurts, and then just when you think it’s safe to feel good about things, you realize that you need to send your stuff out for submissions. You realize you need to listen to someone else evaluate your work. You realize that, in the end, the creative process is up for review by some editor somewhere who can decide whether or not your work gets published.

Hurts, don’t it?

Submitting my work is the most difficult thing I can imagine. I have stayed away from it, preferring instead to ‘hone’ my work. Really what I was doing was hiding, but I didn’t want to call it that. So yesterday, when I was busy being utterly ballsy about finishing my grad school application (more about that in next post) I decided to just get it over with. Get my first rejection letter – who cares! Just do it! And so I sent out my story. To hell with it! I know the work I sent out isn’t half as good as it should be, but there it goes. And if it gets rejected, well… at least the first one’s out of the way. Then, I can just keep going from there.

First one underway. Let’s see what happens.

Short story explosion- Javi’s story

by Shoshana, posted in Uncategorized

In the spirit of my insomniac-induced writing mania, I submit for your approval the following recounting of this evenings insanity. I took a nap due to having a headache for three hours, woke up at 9:45 and realized  I could get some work done for a while. I went to the little writer’s room for a powder and came out, having an idea for a short story. It was sort of inspired by Avatar, which I saw recently (and was amazing) and by this article I read in National Geographic last month about a tribe in Africa which had no concept of time because they lived in a pre-agricultural, hunter/gatherer society.

Out came a story I’ve named Javi’s Story. It is twenty-five pages, which I wrote in three hours at 9,841 words. I cannot BEGIN to tell you how incredible this writing experience was. The words just seemed to flow out of me and though the story is not unique (how many coming of age stories can be?) I think this one has its own ups and downs. I’m not sure I like the ending, to be honest, but I don’t have the heart to revisit it right now. I jut want it to sit… and be what it is right now. Which is a piece of writing born in a bleery-eyed whirlwind.

The biggest part about all this? It is COMPLETED. Revisions be damned, this one I did beginning to end in one sitting. And that’s a big deal for me. Tomorrow, I will celebrate my birthday with some people, have a good couple of days, and get back to writing the other story I was working on. For now, this one is completed and that’s enough for me.

Now to get to bed. I have to be up in less then five hours.

Old Projects Come Back

by Shoshana, posted in Uncategorized

Tonight apparently is the night of exhausted writing drives, because I got one hell of a push to get into the writing saddle this evening. This is after, of course, falling asleep on the train on the way home from work. When I got in the door, I thought for sure I wouldn’t get a thing done. Who knew I’d be writing for nearly two hours? It’s totally amazing what can happen when you get your second wind.

So recently I tried a new project: getting back to old work. One of my biggest problems, which I may have mentioned before, is often finishing projects. I begin big projects, usually coming up with dozens of characters and large sweeping plots, and then have some serious problems finishing up to the end. I peter out somewhere between the 60-120 page mark, leaving my characters unresolved and a good idea floundering in the land of unfinished plots. This, I decided, had to change, so I started to figure out ways to make that happen.

The answer came to me with a trip to Staples and the expenditure of some serious amounts of paper (and cash). I went ahead and printed out and bound one copy of each of the major stories that I had begun and didn’t finish. This would be tangible proof of the work I had done so far and the projects that I so far had left unresolved. What I ended up with was as follows:

  • One copy of my NaNo project from 2006 (approx. 80 pages)
  • One copy of my NaNo project from 2007 (approx. 90 pages)
  • One copy of my NaNo project from 2008 (approx. 90 pages)
  • One copy of my NaNo project from 2009 (approx. 130 pages)
  • One copy of my project designated Big Pete (approx. 70 pages)

Now each of these except for my NaNo from this year is single spaced, normal fonts, which means that double spaced or in manuscript format they would be a helluva lot larger. Hence, this represents a LARGE portion of the work I’ve put time into in the last few years (notwithstanding work on my large fantasy project, my superhero kids story or any of the dozen short stories I’ve finished and the others I haven’t completed either). All in all, these are the major projects I have undertaken – and they have yet to be finished.

So I sat. And I read through them all. And in the end, I remembered why I wanted to write them in the first place.

What I assessed is that honestly? The work from 2006 is BAD. Some of the ideas are good but the rest of it is pretty bad writing and needs to be overhauled completely. It makes up the first part of a trilogy I continued the next year in NaNo 2007, which is a MUCH better story and a good example of some fast, fun action writing. The third part of the trilogy from the next year is also pretty good, though it needs some work too, and I’m planning on getting to it soon. However, I decided that the 2007 NaNo was the best place to enter back into the writing of these three books and I picked up the file again.

So far, I’ve jammed out twenty pages in the last two days. The writing spurt tonight was fueled by considering and thinking about the story all day at work (in between, you know, actually doing something too for my job). I realized that sometimes, a good story doesn’t leave you, you just paint yourself into a scene you don’t know how to get out of and get stuck. In the 2007 story, the characters were just about to go rescue someone in a deep, dark basement full of evil things… and I just lost the thread of it somehow when I was initially doing the writing. In the rereading, I rediscovered the energy of that scene, the hectic race to rescue a fallen friend, and found my way back into the story. So it goes.

The rest of these stories, I hope, will get the same treatment pretty soon. I’m excited to get some energy back into Big Pete as well, even though it is a behemoth. And there has been a few inches of progress on other big project (the fantasy one) due to some help from Scriviner. The project from this year’s NaNo is also plugging away very slowly, though I think I may need to go back and reread because I think I got run over by my plot-bus somewhere and can’t find my way back to where I was going.

All in all, mission to reignite old projects: accomplished. Now maybe the evil Muse will met me sleep.

Priorities

by Shoshana, posted in Uncategorized

This is a bit of a stern post to myself, actually. It turns out that today, I had a bit of an epiphany.

I want to be a writer. So why do I keep letting myself get distracted?

I’m putting together my application for graduate school and realizing that I really love this. I really love writing and doing photography and that there is no reason in the world why I shouldn’t be focusing on this now. Today was sort of the last straw decision: I need to work on writing. A regiment has to be developed and make sure that I’m organized and effective. I’ve been scattered and crazed lately because I’ve been letting myself get distracted by all kinds of nonsense (video games, thinking about other things, money problems) but writing is the most important thing ever to me. So that’s going to be my focus.

New goal: at least half an hour of writing a day. Start small. While I’m working, it’s hard, so half an hour might be it. Maybe an hour. If I can do that, then I’ll be set.

This is the new goal.

PS: Update, I have finished editing my work for graduate school. I’m terrified it’s not going to be good enough, but I’m sending it along.

An interesting question of trust

by Shoshana, posted in Uncategorized

Another thing on my mind, which just occurred to me, is a conversation I had with a fellow writer recently. She had been reading my blog (thanks for your support!) and when we got together for lunch, she asked if I was nervous about writing on my blog about my projects. She asked if I was afraid that someone would come along and steal my stuff if I wrote about it on here.

The answer is: absolutely.

It’s strange that I feel this way, but I feel like I get worried about people reading my things all the time for fear someone will come in and bogart my idea. It’s not like that hasn’t happened to plenty of writers throughout time, but for me, I guess I’m just paranoid. I feel like I work very hard at my writing, and I don’t feel entirely comfortable detailing my work on this blog. So I’m pretty vague about my projects. Even when I give little idea tidbits, I nickname things or I’m pretty oblique about what I’m talking about. The reason is, I don’t feel like anything should be disclosed until its completed and the manuscript is in front of me. So if I ever come across as being vague, I don’t mean to be annoying… I’m just vague for my own personal paranoia.

I’m actually curious, though, since my friend brought it up, if anyone else feels that way besides the two of us. This paranoia keeps me from handing out my work to be read by people a lot; when I pick editors, I’m very specific who I pick. I have friends I pick out very carefully for the job. So I wonder how many other people feel this way? It’s on my mind on this night of much blogging and little sleeping.

Here’s a story I’d like to tell…

by Shoshana, posted in Uncategorized

So here we are again, sleep and I, estranged and unloving bedfellows. We should be snuggling up, enjoying some dreams about sexy television stars (my friends know I’m a sucker for Castiel from Supernatural), but alas, we are parted by silence and unkind stares. That’s a super dramatic way of saying I took a nap this afternoon after doing the last of my holiday shopping (I’m really done, I swear this time!) and now I can’t sleep. So I decided to update here.

My writing has taken a back seat to a big dilemna in my persona life right now. For a very long time, I’d been deciding what to do for a future career. There was always a large part of me that was drawn to law enforcement and another huge, galloping, tremendous part of me that wanted to be a writer. When I entered college, I was sure that no matter what happened, I couldn’t take up writing as a career because there was no future in it. The world is full of people saying that they have a novel that they’ve been writing,  and even those who do get into the business are usually poor, starving things who hope to not be a hack and want to be as big as the big names they’ve always looked up to. Me, I wanted to be able to pay my bills and eat, so I chose to go into film. Yeah, I was real smart. Lookit me. S-M-R-T. End of college and I realize I not only didn’t want to get into film, it wasn’t going to make me happy and I wasn’t motivated by it. So I decided to seek out the things I love in life. That came down to becoming a cop or writing.

Two diametrically opposed notions, right? Most definitely.

I took the police exam, and aced it. Like, flying frickin’ colors. I looked at the possibility that, if I lost weight and got in shape, I could legitimately be a police officer. It’s a good job. It’s something I wanted to be since I was a little girl. It’s a career I can be proud of. There is just one problem.

I’m a writer. I wake up wanting to write. I breath writing. I talk about it constantly. I have ideas for stories coming out of my ears. And when I’m not writing, I’m not happy.

If I became a cop, there would be no time for writing, no energy. I would be breaking my head to become the physical specimen that I would need to be to become a police officer. I wouldn’t be able to write, consistently, in any way that would be good when I’d be tired all the time.

So while I was waiting for the local hiring freeze to wear off for the police department, I decided instead to go to graduate school for writing. I came up with some great ideas of where to go. I went to some open houses. I got some great feedback from teachers, from people I spoke to at these schools. It seemed that I could get my MFA, teach, and go forward as a writer and teacher. The idea thrilled me. It made me so happy I can’t describe. Sure, I’d be giving up one dream to live another. It was less sure, however, monitarily. In fact, it meant wagering a lot on how good I might be, and that… is less something I can do with a clear conscience. But I had decided.

Just as I was filling out applications, the police department called to start processing my application. The hiring freeze is over.

So now the dilemna begins. Do I go forward with the police department or graduate school? Which part of my heart do I follow?

I’m still writing. I’m trying to find money for graduate school applications. I am, in fact, working my tail off to get all this lined up by the deadline. I have less than a month to get most of these out and filled out. But the fact is, nothing is for certain. The police department is less certain because of my weight. Grad school is also uncertain because they don’t take everyone. Nothing is for certain but I keep trying anyway so at least one of my dreams can be fulfilled.

Where writing fits into all that, I don’t know. But that doesn’t mean I’m giving up. I’ve just really begun, and I won’t let that go now.

The magic of NaNo and the Glory that is Victory!

by Shoshana, posted in Uncategorized

So there is nothing better in the world, I think, receiving a little bit of praise for something that is not often noticed or recognized as an accomplishment. That’s why I love NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) – it gives writers a chance to bust their chops to produce something in the month of November, 50,000 words in one month, and then get a little bit of a celebration for their accomplishing their goal. When you get down to it, writing is often a thankless creative outlet that can bring nothing but frustration and sleepless nights. This time, however, it has brought a little bit of fun and frolic along with the bouts of rampant creative-inspired insomnia.

For this year’s NaNo, I decided to try a different novel idea than what I had done previously in the past. The last three years, I wrote a trilogy of novels set during an apocalypse with demons and angels in them. This year, its a modern world with ancient and crazy gods. You can see how my  brain works, of course, to destroy the world blatantly in so many ways. I went for something a little more subtle, though, this time (and yes, I can hear you wondering – how are crazy gods actually less destructive? Oh they are!) and the result is a novel called Emerald Fires. This is the working title, of course, but for once in a long time… I think I have something here. I think I have a solid, creative idea that is actually a new take on something old and well-done to death. So the stats go down to this:

As of November 29:

  • Word Count: 52,972
  • Page Count: 149 (in manuscript format)
  • Chapters: 15

This new story is one I’m hoping to continue for the next little while, so I’m postponing the work I planned on doing for the other two huge projects of mine, Exeter and Big Pete (my monstrocities, as I call them).

Oh, and update! So instead of lugging about my current writing machine (two-year-old 15 inch macbook pro), I have decided to go much more portable which is a Dell Mini – I have gone to the land of the PC for a netbook. The little thing is driving me nuts, though, because the keyboard is smaller than my frickin’ hands, but we’ll see how it works out. I’m looking to upgrade my Macbook Pro anyway, so that will make my old machine a stay-at-home anyway… I just plan on making sure that writing for me is the most painless process possible, and lugging around a 15-inch macbook pro when you’ve got back pain like me? Not painless!

Speaking of painless, for any Mac user? Check out a program called Scrivener for writing. It is fantastic – helps compile everything into manuscript format for you, and on top of that? Helps you keep your research, old drafts, everything. I heartily enjoy it and it made NaNo-ing this year a dream.

Anyway, that’s it for now!

When is it cliche and when is it classic?

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Update

Its been some times since I wrote anything regarding what I’ve been working on so I thought it should be time for an update. The New Year has come and gone and I’ve had tons of things to do, but one project I have not taken my hands off of is the notion of writing a novel. I have had the idea for a massive project, a fantasy novel, for some time and now I’m getting into it finally. The trouble is this…

I’m not sure the concept is any good.

I read a website recently that asked you questions regarding your concept for a novel. It said that due to the volume of cliche material being produced, if you fall into any of the categories listed in the survey, you should abandon your novel at once because you’re relying on cliches. While I think that is harsh, and while I don’t believe everything I read on the internet, the concept has occurred to me that perhaps I am relying on cliches. Yet one of the major things I’ve been looking at with this book is following the hero’s journey as laid out in “The Hero With A Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell. That is to say, I’m looking to write something that plays with epic story, heroic struggles, and a fantasy world. Some of the characters, however, do seem to be running along cliche lines and need to be revitalized but the question still stands: when it is a mythic journey? When did we begin to say ‘this has been done, so you shouldn’t do it again’? The fact is, everything has been done in one way or another a thousand times before. So who in the world says that it’s bad provided its got a fresh direction?

Regardless of how little one should pay attention to a lot of things you read on the internet (bloggers, I’m sorry to say its true, the internet is a place full of fun people and then there are the ones who are just wackyland), this does bring up some issues I need to consider about my character development in this book. Especially for the main character. It makes me want to bang my head against the wall. Yet I especially want to write to the arrogant pricks who wrote this website and ask where they get off telling anyone to ‘abandon their writing’ should it fall into cliches. How about work on making it better? Improve it? Evolve?

Some people don’t know what improvement looks like if it jumped up and bit them in the ass. Some people only want to be naysayers. And what was it a subway poster said recently? Naysayers don’t do much except shake their heads and say nay, what do they accomplish if anything? In the terms of the hero’s journey, they would be considered the archtype of the Threshold Guardian, holding back the hero of the story from the next level of the adventure unless a solution or resolution can be reached. The Threshold Guardian is our proud little naysayer. Well I don’t say nay. I say I work smarter and harder to make my characters better.

Hrm, seems I worked out the answer to my question. In the end, it doesn’t matter if someone says ‘abandon hope, all ye who enter here’. It just motivates me to improve things. In the end, it might not be the best thing I ever write… but it will get done.

The NaNo Madness Has Begun!

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Update

So naNoWrMo began four days ago and already I’m off to a running start. I’m bleary eyed and tired but I’m off to an incredible rate. I’ve already buried 15,000 words out of 50,000 and it’s only day 4. My justification is that I want to strike while the anvil is hot but the truth of the matter is, I always write in bursts like this, be it for short stories or for larger works. I work while things are inside my head and then I can get into long stretches when I’m not in the least bit interested in looking at a blank Word document for anything. You can’t get me to write when I’m not in the mood for anything in this world. So for that reason, I’m on a bit of a jag with this one.

This isn’t new with writers. A lot of writers get on these long writing jags that can last for as long as the muse wants to make you her bitch. I, for one, will not complain. I started to hit a bit of a bump in the jag road this evening when I was trying to write one part of the story but I managed to punch through it. If I go too long without writing this, I’m afraid it’s going to go back into the recesses of my brain wherever it comes from and I’m going to lose it. Twenty four pages down, however many left to go.

The name of the story is “A Walk in the Dark” and I can’t decide if that’s dorky or not. The story centers on a character from one of the previous NaNo’s that I wrote who gets visited by the angel of death and the two go for a walk to talk about some stuff, including the end of the world. I’m too edgy about getting this work done to talk more about it but needless to say its going to deal with a lot of the things I wrote in the other two installments of the NaNo story which has become a three year saga to complete and will deal with some new stuff including more spiritual discourse and things like that. This one is going to be more cerebral, less action, which I think I like. I don’t know why but I have a good feeling about this one, I really do.

More later. Now I have to sleep.

The Writing Project Load

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Update

So a new part of this blog project is going to be writing up a little bit about what I’m writing right now. There isn’t much of a purpose in it, really, except to sort of check in every once in a while on projects that I’m going through and to keep my progress. It helps also to look at the sort of accomplishments I’m going through and getting them tallied for me to see. What I’m in the middle of right now is as follows:

  • A longer novel about a young woman who goes to rescue a friend and gets into trouble with werewolves because of it, which I’ve written myself into a bit of a corner on and I’m waiting for the inspiration fairy to visit.
  • A longer story about a character I wrote up for a roleplaying game when I was younger and couldn’t put down, which has so far stalled out due to lack of inspiration.
  • A short story set in a world that I’m creating for a novel called “The Death of Scarling”, though the title is still sort of fluid. (This one is in editing stages, as the short story is done)
  • A short story I completed for workshop called “No Hero” about an original super-hero concept in a world me and my friends recently used for a roleplaying game. (This one is all but finished, just needs the finishing touches from editing suggested in the workshop). 
  • The beginnings of a story about a girl, her relationship with her father, and his death in Israel.

It’s this last project that I started today and I’ve got already five pages on. Now I like it, it has some oomph, and could be finished right now if I was satisfied with it remaining a short story. There is something to the place where I stopped in it, right now, that could make it a short story about death and grieving, but I think there is more to it than that and I might want to explore it. I’m drawing a lot from my own visits to Israel years ago to sort of address some of the issues in it, and one of the important ones is the disconnect one can get from their religion while their family might be more connected than they are. I think that’s a fundamental and interesting concept to tackle and I’m not sure it would be addressed in the five pages I’ve already got. I think this could go a little further and I think its maybe the most normal thing that I’ve ever written.

One of the jokes people make about me is that I’m incapable of writing something that is completely normal. I have never really written a story that wasn’t about a supernatural thing or a spiritual thing or a horror thing or a ghost thing or whatever. I got dared to write a short story about two women having coffee and set it in a post-apocalyptic urban city. I tried to tell a story about some girls in college in a convenience store job and made one of them a superhero. I’m not good at normal. This story, about the girl in Israel, might actually be the one normal one. I haven’t decided. I think there might be something supernatural in there, or at least have some kind of magical realism to it, but I haven’t decided yet. There is something to leaving it just the way it is, dealing with important issues of family and religion and death and heritage, without dealing with something blatantly supernatural. I can’t decide yet but something about this story seems really different for me, very good. It feels, to sound like a kid for a second, like grown-up writing. The story has no name so far.

So the tally is really:

  • “The Death of Scarling” – In editing with 6 pages total
  • “No Hero” – In final editing with 10 pages total
  • Untitled Werewolf Story – In progress with 27 pages in
  • Untitled Roleplaying Character Story – In progress with 15 pages in
  • Untitled Israel story – In progress with 5 pages in

That’s not all too bad for works in progress. I’ve had a lot more ideas for short stories since I started reading all of these anthologies so I’m focusing a lot on getting that refined too, so there should be more of those than anything else. I’m going to keep churning those out and see if that helps with the longer stories. 

And all this, plus NaNo is coming up. Heh. I’m so doomed.