Silver Wordsmith: An author's journey |
Well the good news is 2021 is a week old and hasn’t (yet) given us a reason to think it would be worse than 2020 (the opening sentence to this entry was written last Monday, two days before it stopped being true). The bad news is just because 2020 is over doesn’t mean it stops existing, which means I’m still doing my writing and reading retrospectives to start off the year, and will hopefully avoid retraumatizing myself in the process.
In today’s post I want to celebrate my writing successes of the past year, because despite the pandemic and the continuing crushing succession of rejection letters that have spilled into the occasional mopey blog post, there’s still plenty for me to feel good about. First off, let’s take a look at the graph of my daily productivity comparing most of the years from 2005 and 2020:
2020 continued the positive trend I established in 2017 and became my fourth consecutive most productive year, completely crushing 2019’s output. It hadn’t started off that way, trailing behind 2019 for the first few months, and suffering from a period of prolonged inactivity at the start of the pandemic. But then it took advantage of last year’s vacation lag in May and once it overtook 2019 had pretty much steamrolled ahead and even the complete one-month break during my paternity didn’t change the outcome. I’ve already talked about how I exited the pandemic doldrums into the most productive writing period of my life, so there’s no need to rehash that here, but it is nice to see a visualization of the outcome at the end of the year. It’s also worth mentioning that in the same entry last year I had expressed hope that I would be able to hit 120,000 words this year, and met that goal and more with a final tally of over 155,000.
The next visualization I use is my bullet journal entry that is a colour map of daily writing productivity by the amount of words written each day. As you can see, the legend shows which colours correspond to how many daily words, and the little black numbers next to those show how many times each colour is represented on the graph. It was another year where red had come out on top, but with forty-three less unproductive days in 2020 than in 2019 I’ve also met the goal that I set last January to write for more than half the days of the year. You can see particularly long stretches of red around March and April, the previously mentioned pandemic slump, but also the paternity leave in October and the slow ramp up back to a normal functioning human being through November and December. I’m not sure I’m quite there yet, as the baby still has those days where he wants to party well into the night, but everything will return to normal in due course. The streaks that are more interesting to me is that concentration of blue from June to August, and the fact that I hadn’t missed a single day of writing in August. This was the productivity boost I’ve talked about, represented so neatly by this bullet journal entry. The primary goal this year is to keep trying to find that groove and if I succeed, 2021 promises to be crazy. That said, let’s have some other lofty but at the same time realistic goals for 2021. Firstly, I’d like to see if I can replicate the jump from 2019 to 2020 and break 200,000 words this year. Maybe stretching the definition of “realistic” here a bit, though it’s not like I would beat myself up if I don’t meet it. Secondly, I want to continue this trend of reducing the amount of red in this chart. Though the most productive year, it wasn’t my most consistent year, as 2018 had two fewer unproductive days at 147. My goal is to make 2021 my most consistent year, by a comfortable margin, so I’m going to shoot for at most 110 days with no words written. I don’t even care how many orange squares I end up with – it’s red I don’t want to see. I’ve also met some of my other goals I had set for myself last year, like restarting my web novel, The Bloodlet Sun, which has been consistently posted for four months now, and I’ve got a buffer to last another three. I’ve made 29 regular blog posts this year, which doesn’t include The Bloodlet Sun installments and is therefore 8 more entries than I did last year. Hoping to improve on that number this year to an eventual average of 1 post per week, though I don’t expect to meet that in 2021. And there’s the usual optimism about how far I make it into my other projects. Didn’t get to turn over two drafts of my novel this year, but I did do one, and planning to do one more this year, possibly bringing it to a completed version. And I promise myself to renew my publication efforts after somewhat of a discouraging year. All in all, there’s reason to feel good, and I’m going to use that throughout this fresh unwritten year.
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Alright, real talk.
Never in my history of my writing have I felt burnout about writing in particular, and wanted to throw up my arms and just say “fuck it, I’m never going to make it”. It’s not like anything particular happened, more like perfect storm of consecutive punches: the pandemic in general, the holidays coming up where lockdowns have basically took a giant dump on usual plans, the sleep deprivation of having a newborn, stress eating, not exercising due to lack of sleep and therefore not counterbalancing the stress eating, reading about writers having a “barely productive” year with six publication when I haven’t published squat in two years, having a spark of hope during #pitmad and finding out it’s essentially a self-publishing scam, failing to find an audience for my web serial after three months, blah blah blah sob story that most writers go through. I’m jus tired. Tired of trying with absolutely no promise of success; of putting in hard work where the only fuel is hope and the only reward so far has been self-doubt. When does one ask themselves if they’re good enough? Almost constantly. When does one decide to answer the question in the negative? Not now. Not yet anyway. That doesn’t make what I’m currently experiencing feel any better though. Watching the yellow blips of pending submissions in my spreadsheet all flicker to red. Seeing absolutely no traffic on my blog or on my Royal Road page for my web novel. I love writing. This summer, when I had hit the best groove of my life it made me feel good, even though my success landscape was pretty much identical to what it is today. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe I’m just not writing enough, which is what’s leaving room to get distracted by the failures instead of enjoying the journey. Eventually, I will get out of this funk, and will regain my ability to see the big picture – that I like creating stories and playing with language and sharing my work with people no matter how few of them there are. Apologies for being a downer, I just needed to vent, and firmly believe that bottling it up certainly won’t fix anything, and I for one like seeing that I’m not the only one who sometimes feels down in the dumps about their writing, so hopefully I can do the same for someone else. Right, that’s my excuse. Anyway I’ll make it up to you all with my next post which will be about Christmas lights.
As I spend a Sisyphean eternity editing my first novel, I’m busily working on my second one. It went over the threshold from “idea I’m toying with” to full on project sometime in 2018, but overall it’s been slow going since.
As a result of my weird pandemic productivity boost that I experienced in the months before our third baby was born, it more than doubled in word count and is now at a respectable 40,000, though I recognize that a sizeable chunk of it is first draft bloat. I’ve been enjoying this particular project immensely, and a little while ago I talked about how I was using Google Street View to explore the city of my childhood. Despite the level of enjoyment and how well it’s been progressing, I have run into some growing pains, which I think is an important subject for writers to be able to talk about freely. Sometimes there’s this tendency to subscribe to one of two extremes – either you’re a writer to the core and enjoy every aspect of it because it is the essence of your being, or you’re a tortured artist’s soul who is but a vessel for your writing, which rips you to shreds as it crawls out of you. Cute, but not the way things work. I think there’s nothing wrong in recognizing the stumbles we all experience. Writer’s block isn’t a sign of weakness or a disease to be cured – it’s a natural part of the process. It also comes in all kinds of variations from writer to writer and within writers themselves. Not every case of writer’s block is a 100% stupor where no amount of internal turmoil will bring even a single word onto a page. Nice for relatable writer comics, but hardly ever happens. What I’m going through right now with Maple Vodka (placeholder title, so bear with me) is something I like to describe as a “working” writer’s block. Kind of like “working notice” – where you’re fired from a job but stay on for the duration of your notice period. So in my case, it feels like writer’s block, but it’s not stopping me from actually continuing to write, or rather, I’m not letting it. The symptoms I’m currently experiencing are the following: The current chapter is overwrought: I feel like the section I’m writing is entirely too long for the pacing of the novel and how much it actually brings to the plot. It started with the protagonist going to work and then moves into him remembering the long journey that led him to this dead-end job. Sure, it’s important to establish that his career stalled, but is this the best way of doing it? I’m not sure. I’ve certainly found the character exploration fascinating, but will it fall flat with readers? There’s not enough here for a novel: this fear is closely related to the first one – because this particular fiction feels like it’s padding word count, I’m wondering if there’s even enough idea here to stretch into a novel length, or is it all just filler? Sure, it looked good as a synopsis, and then as a full-blown outline, but sometimes when I put meat onto the skeleton I quickly run out of material and end up with a half-dead being of abject horror. Is this the fate of this particular work, or are my perceptions suffering from recency bias, and I just need to get through this stretch to greener pastures? It’s poorly written: hardly any of us do their best work when we’re forcing ourselves. So the last dozen or so pages haven’t felt like the kind of writing that I should be doing. Maybe that means the whole work is utter garbage and I shouldn’t subject anyone to the final product. Equally likely is that I’m too close to this particular piece of writing, and need some perspective in order to properly assess its merits. As I’ve summarized them, these might seem like fairly sizable problems. On a bad day, it’s enough to discourage someone from continuing their work, throwing it in the discard pile, and moving onto the next project hoping this will be the perfect fit. As much as I do think sometimes you do just need to cut ties with something you’re working on, a technique practiced even by the most seasoned authors, I think it’s too early to do a post mortem. Like I said, difficulties are a natural part of the process, and it’s an intricate balancing act to learn when those difficulties are truly insurmountable. In this case, I don’t think the threshold was crossed. Why? I’m not sure. There’s no bright line test here so at the end of the day, I have to trust my gut and believe that the solution to all three of the stated misgivings is: keep writing.
Sometimes Iâm a bit envious of those who write for pure enjoyment and self-fulfillment, without any intention of their writing being shared beyond them or perhaps a close group of friends and family. I feel like thereâs a certain purity to their art and a freedom to their craft that I canât experience. Iâve always wanted to write in order to be read; to touch people with the stories that I tell. Iâve yearned to be published for that reason, and will continue to strive to do so even in the face of the darkest aspect of this dream â there is no writing for publication without rejection.
Those of you like me whoâve been knocking at the industryâs door will know the feeling of endless frustration. Of sending out the fruits of your labour only to watch them be discarded at your feet to ferment into doubt and fear. I like to think Iâd grown a pretty thick skin over the years, watching short stories I think are my best work get rejected by dozens of journals. Sure, it gets a little overwhelming thinking about it in its totality, but each individual âno thank youâ doesnât really affect me anymore. As Iâve recently learned, with exceptions. Sometime early on during the pandemic, I learned that a local (and I use this term loosely â theyâre located in our province and on the same coast but theyâre still about 750 kilometres away) press was planning to put out a collection of short stories written during the pandemic. This in turn was inspired by the Decameron â a 14th century collection of novellas, which itself was inspired by the Black Death pandemic that had ravaged Europe. Something about this endeavour really spoke to me â maybe it was because I was struggling with finding the inspiration to write while the heaviness of the early months of the pandemic set in, or because I was sitting on an idea that I thought would be a great fit for the collection. Either way, I set to writing, and even though I tend not to do well writing creatively to a deadline, managed to complete a nearly 5,000 words short story before the June 30th cut-off date. I was pretty happy with the outcome. The story contained some elements of the type of magic realism or light fantasy that I enjoy writing so much and was a story of a contagious spark of hope in an otherwise bleak world. I had a good feeling about my chances. Mind you, there was no objective reason for having those feelings â I knew it was an uphill battle like any other submission, but something about this one made me feel hopeful. Maybe I just needed something to hold onto during the hard pandemic times, who knows. To preserve sanity, as pretty much with any submission I make, I largely put it out of my mind until receiving an email towards the end of July saying they were still reading the entries and would have an answer before the end of August. The closeness of potentially hearing a response had made it harder to ignore. Every other day Iâd remind myself that I was that much closer to the end of August. Again, maybe because weâre in the middle of a pandemic with a serious shortage of anything to look forward to. In any case, it was an unusual amount of anticipation that I hadnât experienced since I was rejected by a literary agent after a three-month wait almost a decade ago. And then, right before heading to bed on a Sunday night, I received the generic email thanking everyone for their patience and that theyâve selected the winning entries for inclusion in the anthology. Normally, I let these things bounce off me. Whenever Iâm most active, sometimes I get three rejections in a single day. If I let them each individually get to me, Iâd be sapped of energy pretty soon. This one though, this one made me put my phone down, take a few steps to our bedroom window, and look out into the blackness beyond our back porch, letting the light night breeze wash over me. It was another defeat in a long line of defeats; another stumble going up a staircase that didnât seem to end. I know there was no concrete reason for me to think this would be the one. But couldnât it have been, just this once? This was another cool project that will sail into the future without me, while I continue to spin my wheels and learn. With a little bit of time to process that emotion â the feeling of deflation I thought I learned to control, I think thereâs nothing wrong with it. I donât have to like hurdles to success, I donât need to be able to laugh off each one. It would be nice, but humans are humans and shouldnât feel bad for feeling bad. Even if you canât immediately dust yourself off, even if you have to nurse those wounds for a while before you continue, itâs okay. Itâs okay to feel discouraged, as long as you donât slip into giving up. I know I havenât.
Last Thursday I started a new exciting chapter in my writing journey. Technically, this chapter started way back in 2019, but for a multitude of reasons, including naïve planning and overcommitting, that chapter had to be put on held after, well … one chapter. I’m talking about my science fantasy web serial, The Bloodlet Sun, which returned last week for regular weekly updates.
My first attempt at running a web serial was ambitiously launched here last year and concluded with me posting Chapter 1 in three parts. At that point, I’d run out of runway – with no buffer and facing the challenge of writing to a deadline, which had never worked well for my creative process. Now, more than a year and a half later, I’m once again returning with the ambitious commitment of delivering regularly weekly updates every Thursday. You can read Part 1 of Chapter 2 here, or jump right to the beginning of Chapter 1, depending on where you’re at. I’ve got a couple of reasons to believe that this time will be different. Since concluding Chapter 1, and especially over the last few months, I’ve built up a strong buffer, which should not only pick up the slack when life gets in the way of my writing, but also provides a safety net that means I don’t have to be overwhelmed by the pressure to keep writing the story because I’ve committed to delivering. So far, I have enough content to last through the end of the year, and I’m pumping out more material consistently every week. I have learned a lot, about my story, my writing process and myself as a writer over the last year and a bit. I have a better idea of how the story should get to where I want it to go. I have a looser approach of writing as I go, yet also knowing how to keep the story coherent. I don’t have the benefit of writing out a whole “book” at the same time, so it took a bit of time forthis “plotter” to get comfortable with the level of “pantsing” (from “flying by the seat of your pants”) that this work requires. I also have a better handle on how to manage my creative process, by using multiple projects and weekly writing goals to keep myself motivated and producing at workable levels. All this has come together to make me a more efficient and productive writer, and the amount I’ve been able to produce over the last few months illustrates this quite starkly. I finally feel like I’m in a position to commit to a regular online serial. I’ve never truly seen myself as a genre writer. The two novels I’m currently working on I have been describing as “literary fiction” no matter how nebulous and ill-equipped to describe works that fall under it this category is. Recently, I tried this label on for size in the online writing community, and quickly found out that my understanding of literary fiction had been mistaken. Not only that, but the associations with this genre aren’t all positive. For these reasons, I’ve realized that “contemporary fiction” is probably a better label. It’s a similarly vague catchall genre, but I think it fits better with my writing. I have some genre elements even in my contemporary fiction works as well, but I don’t think they’re enough to tip them into any other specific label. Despite the majority of my work current taking place within this contemporary fiction non-genre, I did, however, start of as being primarily a science fiction writer back when I was churning out short stories in high school, so that aspect of my writing never left me. And as the lingering byproduct of a youth spent fantasizing about galaxy-spanning adventures like Star Wars and alien intrigue like Babylon 5, even as my writing moved on from the genre, The Bloodlet Sun and the occasional short story remained. For The Bloodlet Sun, up until recently I’ve described it as “science fiction” but the more I reflect on the main elements of the story and my experience with different genres, I think “science fantasy” is more accurate. Never thought I’d dive so deep into all these labels, but whatever you want to call it, a couple of years ago I decided that this web serial would be my unapologetic outlet for my first writing love, and it’s my sincerest hope that it’s here to stay. If you’re already reading, I hope you enjoyed Part 1 of Chapter 2 and its introduction to Kviye, my second POV character, and if you haven’t yet, I hope you’ll tune and join me in this project. When I started writing my web serial The Bloodlet Sun in earnest is when I realized how difficult naming is in a sci-fi universe. It was one of the aspects of worldbuilding that initially held me back from sitting down and actually putting plot to paper and even when I bit the bullet the names still trickled out like molasses. And this doesn’t just apply to character names either. Every species and minor planetoid gets named only after an agonizing process that probably doesn’t need to be so agonizing, but that’s how I am. So I get that it’s difficult, and I get that certain shortcuts need to be made. Especially in something like Star Wars novels where characters hop from rock to rock at such a pace it’s sometimes hard to name that rock before they land on it. Recently I’ve been reading one such novel – Catalyst by James Luceno, which serves as a prequel to the Rogue One film and follows the rise of Orson Krennic and Galen Erso’s involvement in the Death Star project. I hadn’t grown up on Star Wars novels in general, so I don’t read them that often, but when I do, they’ve been a fairly enjoyable experience. As with any Star Wars writer, Luceno has the unenviable task of putting together a cohesive story that does not trample on any other established aspects of the Star Wars universe. To make the task easier, I found that most of the planets that serve merely as plot devices are created off-hand specifically for the novel itself, which means the author has quite a few planets they have to name without really needing to think of a long story or a full worldbuilding session. A good shortcut to do this is to find words that already sound natural in human language and provide slight modifications to them. Some examples from the more mainstream Star Wars universe come to mind – Luke’s home planet of Tatooine was named after its filming location of Tataouine in Tunisia. Mustafar, which is the lava planet that saw the true birth of Darth Vader, was likely inspired by “Mustafa” the anglicization of an epithet of Muhammad. In a less direct example from my favourite sci-fi series, Babylon 5, two species’ names bare a striking resembles to words existing in the English language. “Narn” is one letter away from “barn” and “Vorlon” is two letters away from “Gorgon”. Neither word is so similar to the original that it immediately invokes it, but both use structure already acceptable to the English-attuned ear. It makes sense to piggyback on existing words to create names for alien words without sounding like you’re trying too hard – something I think I still need to learn. But at the same time, one particular example in Catalyst I think went too far. Mind you, my bar when it comes to this kind of stuff is set fairly low. Only a couple of pages before the hard brakes on my immersion, the reader encounters a planet called “Kartoosh” – obviously inspires by the word “cartouche”, which is, honest to goodness, I’m still not sure what it is, but seems to commonly refer to a hieroglyphic depiction of a scroll. Oh, it was also a very mediocre 90s Eurodance group, which is how I first encountered the word. So for me, it wasn’t exactly an unknown entity, but the liberal change in spelling helped me move beyond that. That is, until I encountered the planet of “Samovar”. This. This is a samovar: It’s basically a traditional Russian tea kettle. It’s like if your characters travelled to the planet “Microwave” or the city of “Colander”. Unlike with Kartoosh, there was no attempt to mask the origins: Luceno could have gone with “Samofar”, “Samobar” or “Zamovar” – all probably would have flown under my radar. Nope, it was just straight up “samovar”, take it or leave it. Unfortunately, my brain left it, and every time I read the planet’s name I giggled internally. Like I said at the beginning, I get it. It’s hard coming up with original alien names that don’t sound forced. But now every time I think back on this book I’m going to think of a massive ornamentally decorated kitchen appliance floating in space. So that’s a lesson learned for my own writing as well – there’s no problem with looking at someone else’s homework, but change a few answers to make sure the teacher doesn’t catch you cheating. In the early days of the pandemic, when the uncertainty and newness of the situation was bearing down on me in full force, I talked about here on several occasions how it had been killing my productivity. I wrote almost nothing for the entire month of March and felt only spurious signs that I would ever get out of this funk. Months have passed, and I’m happy to say the writing funk has not only passed, but transformed itself into a frenzy, as evidenced by the last four months of my bullet journal productivity tracker: This productivity tracker is one my favourites, obviously not because it’s pretty or elegant, but because it gives me such a good bird’s eye view snapshot of how much I’ve accomplished. I’ve introduced it in more detail in an earlier entry, but the basic summary of how it works is: the little numbers on the left-hand side represent the day of the month, and each column is devoted to a type of writing activity. The dots in the boxes means that I didn’t do that particular activity that day, a checkmark means I did, and a number represents the specific word count, if applicable. As you can see, April was still a recovery month from the doldrums of March. The later months are much stronger, while the heavy stretch in July represents some of the best writing weeks of my life. Those last couple of weeks, I routinely hit more than a thousand words per day, which I know for some writers is the bare minimum goal, but for me is a relatively rare occurrence. I don’t really have set goals per day though I have an idea of how many words I want to hit based on how busy the day is going to be or the headspace I’m at. I’ve talked before how I’m not really a believer in daily word counts as I think there’s a risk that they become counterproductive for a writer. As you can see from the bujo spread – I usually take weekends off, and even though I have discovered time to write on the weekends, they tend not to be my most productive days. I did however, recently implement weekly writing goals for my specific projects. Since I’m juggling so many at once, I find that tracking a reasonable weekly goal helps me make sure that none of them slip through the cracks, so I find these, on a balance, to be more of a motivator than a demotivator. Not to mention that it also helps me to keep on top of the buffer for The Bloodlet Sun, since I promised myself I won’t be dropping the ball on its updates this time. The previous time I talked about this particular bullet journal tracker – I didn’t include word counts and the whole thing was checkmarks. Switching to word counts had actually helped me immensely with my weekly word count goals. I made a few attempts to track my weekly goals in my Moleskine notebook instead, but they were too disorganized to stick. Instead, looking at the word count in the project columns of my bujo tracker gives me a real quick look into which projects have reached their goals and which ones need more work, allowing me to prioritize and vary throughout the week, something that has helped me immensely with writer’s block. One last thing I want to mention about this particular spread, is that in June you will see I added a new column for “Dad Project”. I lost my dad three years ago to cancer, and we had a complicated relationship, so I’m using this for now to reflect and I’m still experimenting with how it will develop. So as you can see, the tracker is also customizable in terms of projects as these can be added and dropped every time you fill in the columns for each month. This is just one way to track writing productivity, and I hope you might be able to take some inspiration from it. I’ve had a recent infatuation with voice memos to aid my writing process. I’m a firm believer that a writer’s experience is not measured strictly in the number of words they write. Any amount of our day may be spent consuming other content, whether that be media, news, or simply living, which would then be absorbed into our creative process. For this, boredom is a writer’s great friend, but how many of you had a good idea for a sentence, a scene or a bit of dialogue, and the next time you’re on the computer, it’s gone? It’s not bad enough that you’ve missed out on a potentially good idea, but remembering that there had been an idea in the first place is what really hurts. In order to try to avoid this problem, I carry around a little black Moleskine notebook wherever I go. I’ve accumulated a whole mass of these which I’m sure will be valuable collector’s items when I inevitably (delusions of grandeur incoming) become a world-famous celebrity author who donates mementos of his career to charity auctions. I still stand by my little books, but recently I’ve found that voice memos are also an excellent option. The biggest challenge in using memos is having to listen to the sound of your own voice, which probably for some people will be a show-stopper and honestly, I don’t blame you. That guy sounds effing weird. However, once I got over this particular hurdle and accepted that I don’t have a career in radio (or in podcasts, to use a more contemporary equivalent), voice memos have quickly become a staple of my writing process. The Equipment Many years ago I used to own a handheld dictation machine. I came into possession of such an item to try to deal with a bullying problem I experienced when I first arrived in Canada, which is a long story in and of itself but suffice it to say, having it in my pocket only worsened my bullying. In the years that followed, I occasionally dusted it off and tried to use it for my writing, but having to rewind the tape back and forth, and the aforementioned hang-up about hearing my own voice which I didn’t quite get over until I stopped giving a shit sometime in my thirties, it never caught on. Now we’re living in an age far removed from my quaint magnetic tape dictation device. I don’t know about Android phones, but my iPhone comes with a handy Voice Memos app. It doesn’t do much, but it gets the job done. Scrolling through the recording is easy, as is recording over parts you’ve already recorded. I wish it also came with the option of slowed-down replay, and I’m sure there’s other apps out there that can do just that, so I’m open to suggestions. The Process The When Best part of using voice memos is that so many of your daily activities can be co-opted into the service of your writing. A common time for me to do this is while I’m washing the dishes in the evening – not exactly the most stimulating task, so my brain often goes into creative mode. Having a phone nearby to record thoughts makes sure that creative churning doesn’t go to waste. A car is another place where the mind often wonders. Once I get to my destination, I spend a minute or two dictating everything I thought of on my way there before getting out of the car, and boom, writing done during a time that would otherwise have nothing to do with it. Normally, when I go on my morning runs, I listen to audiobooks, but I imagine someone else might find it helpful to run these notes during exercise too. The limits here are convenience of accessing a phone and your imagination, so make the best of it. The How I found that there’s two ways of using voice dictation to assist later writing: actual sentences and broad strokes. Creating actual sentences is pretty self-explanatory – the writing is developed in my head, sometimes going through several iterations or part-sentences before it fully forms, and once I have the actual sentence, I record it with the voice memo, and move on to the next sentence. Broad strokes, by contrast, doesn’t contain any usable writing. It sets the motions of the scene, the gist of what has to be said, but otherwise the actual writing process would need to occur at a later time. Of course, what ends up happening is a bit of a mix. Sometimes a sentence doesn’t quite fall into place while the next one is bursting to come out, so I dictate a placeholder note. And sometimes when I intend to do a broader outline, a sentence just comes to me so I dictate it verbatim to not waste that little spark of creativity. The Transcription Depending on which method you use above, the transcription process is going to look different. With actual sentences, your role is pretty much just type out what you said, maybe editing here and there if you feel that with the benefit of hindsight that the writing could be better. This is perfect for those times when your muse is snoozing – might as well use your writing time productively without worrying what’s coming out onto the page. I’m a fairly decent typist, though I can’t keep up with my spoken speech – I tend to slow down my dictation if I have the opportunity, but sometimes I want to get it out fast and, in any case, I can never slow myself down enough. For a broad strokes outline, the writing process itself will necessarily be a bit more involved – with creative writing being built on top of what was dictated earlier. In this case, speed of dictation matters less. Usually I play a prompt in its entirety and then set down to fleshing out the writing. All-in-all, this method allows me to maximize the time I spend on writing activities and use my day more efficiently, especially since between a full-time day job and kids, those writing moments are precious and few. Having extolled the virtues of voice memos, they will never fully replace my precious little black notebooks. Sometimes, you’re just not in a spot to whip out a phone and start talking into it. I may have less hang-ups about hearing my own voice but no one’s going to be listening to me dictate my creative writing on a busy bus, especially when it’s dialogue and it will look like I’m either trying to cover up that I’m talking to myself, or having a super weird conversation on the phone. Pulling a small notebook out of your pocket is far more discreet, even if I’ve been asked multiple times why I’m writing in my passport. Also, writing in a notebook is far more user-friendly when you’ve got a random assortment of sentences and ideas that just need to be put down, rather than a single block of writing. These would be far easier to navigate in written form than in voice memos, and it also makes it easier to manage several projects at the same time. As I was writing this entry, I was met with a cautionary tale that I feel obligated to share – I sat down to transcribe a four-minute voice memo, and discovered that it had somehow become corrupted, and all its content was erased. That was about an evening’s chores worth of ideas blasted out of existence. I managed to scrape out of my memory the gist of what I wanted to lay down, but not only was this an unnecessary double effort and therefore waste of time, but I know there were a few choice sentences there that were lost forever. So I stand by everything I said above, but technology is technology and is often unreliable in the worst ways. Again, if there’s perhaps a more reliable voice memo app out there, I’m open to your suggestions. I’m happy and excited to announce that my sci-fi web serial, The Bloodlet Sun, is returning for regular weekday updates on Thursday, September 10th. I released a short inaugural chapter on here last year, but a lack of buffer and writing production derailed the project into a prolonged hiatus. I toyed with the idea of re-releasing that first chapter as part of the refresh and in the end decided that I would sooner focus on the way forward instead of looking too far back. So after more than a year-long break, the next segment that will be released will be the first part of Chapter 2, which will be posted in 7 weekly segments. I have a good feeling about this second attempt at a regular run for The Bloodlet Sun. By the time it launches in September, I should be sitting on a 20-week buffer, and my writing production has never been better. Chapters will follow different POV characters and will be divided into segments of 850-1100 words. I wish I could release bigger chunks, but between having a day job and being a dad, I simply can’t ramp up my writing activity any higher right now. So it would be a choice between larger segments, and a bi-weekly update. And since I think waiting two weeks for an update is too much “out of sight, out of mind” I opted for the shorter interval. Comparing the content though to a comic that releases weekly, I think I have enough there to satisfy readers from update to update. Ideally, I would switch to maybe somewhat smaller segments with a twice-a-week schedule, but these are future goals and I’m taking this one step at a time to try not to overwhelm myself. Those of you that have been following, you would have seen that I’d been very busy on this project. I’ve been brainstorming character names, worldbuilding like crazy, and about a month ago the whole work had undergone a name change. It’s still growing on me, which is not much of a surprise since the obsolete name had been with me for so long and what’s helped the process is coming up with a spiffy new title card for The Bloodlet Sun: This was my own rudimentary photoshop skills at work, so don’t laugh. I’m permitting myself to be proud of it regardless and it should be enough to help me to promote the serial on Twitter and elsewhere. And before anyone else says it, I’m very well aware that spellcheck is not entirely happy with the word “Bloodlet”, even though it is, as they say, a perfectly cromulent word, which itself is not flagged by spellcheck, a fact that makes me very happy. As you can imagine, I’m bursting to share more of the story itself and talk about the characters and other elements of the story. That said, I want to wait before the story releases to get into any details. So stay tuned for September 10th and hope to see you all here when it comes out. Despite the fact that I don’t bring it up here all that often, I’m still very much working on my first novel. The reason it doesn’t really come up is that it has been undergoing an editing process for more years than I’m willing to count. It may not be as glamorous as using Google Street View to explore the streets of Moscow, or coming up with character names for a sci-fi setting, but it’s honest work.
I feel writers generally steer clear of discussing editing or even acknowledging its existence. Sure, there are those strange creatures that profess to actually enjoy it, but those people are either lying, or are gluttons for punishment. Editing is grinding work; it’s tedious and sometimes mentally crushing. It’s where all the self-doubt and self-criticism that I would normally block out come to roost and become an essential part of the craft. Was that the right word? Does this sentence make sense? Is the pacing of this chapter off? Is there even a point to this novel or should I send it to the proverbial trash bin and take up knitting instead? (I should take up knitting anyway, but that’s a different story). I share insights into my editing process here and there – from general advice to how I use word clouds to clean up my writing, but beyond that, I have a hard time describing the process. You just dive into your work and comb through it, over and over until all the tangles have disappeared and it’s as perfectly coiffed as Tan France’s hair (if you don’t get this reference I recommend binging “Queer Eye” on Netflix, or if you're that short on time, at the least check out the following few seconds of Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down” music video). For me, I find I have too focus on the blemishes too much and it becomes too easy to lose sight of how my work can ever reach the stage when I’m satisfied with it. When it comes to Wake the Drowned, I currently only have one chapter left before I complete the fifth draft. In terms of next steps, I already have one wonderful friend who provided me with detailed beta reader comments, with more hopefully drifting in. As far as I can tell, though it’s hard to predict with these things, I’ll need another three edits at most, ideally two, so either way, the job is well more than halfway done. That said, at my pace that could still be another two years. I’ve got some mixed feelings about this edit. Some stretches are turning out really well – two or three pages can go by with only a few minor revisions. Other sections are still giving me serious pacing concerns. I think one of the main focuses of the next edit should be aggressive deleting, which may put me in trouble with the word count, but I can solve that problem when I come to it. I’ve been with this project for so long it’s hard to conceive that one day, win or lose, it will be set aside as the best I can do for this story. My sincerest hope is that I will be able to share it with the world, but if not, at least it will live on in the rest of my writing through the lessons I learned along the way. |
Michael SerebriakovMichael is a husband, father of three, lawyer, writer, and looking for that first big leap into publishing. All opinions are author's own. StoriesUrsa Major Categories
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