geekgirlgoddess

Meh.

The life of freelance is one where you have to be your own boss, co-worker, and marketing department.

You also have to provide your own inspiration.

Bleh.

Community is a thing too. It’s hard to find other creative people to share experience and frustration with.

Especially ones that won’t suck you dry or trash you once you leave the room.

Spleh.

This attitude, this feeling of Meh is your enemy…it’s also your friend.

It means you’re paying attention but probably too much attention to the noise around you and not enough to your output.

If you’re introverted it means you need to take a break from stimulation, turn off everything, take a walk, feed the ducks.

If you’re extroverted it means you need to go do something exciting, see a movie, work out, go to a game.

Then you need to get back to work.

Because it’s not going to change.

Sigh.

Post this under Advice To Myself.

Image is Lattes by Trent Gudmundsen

How do I find the time to write?

It’s easy: you steal time from your kids, your spouse, your pets and yourself. You can also neglect your chores, your work, your health and your friends.

See where I’m going with this?

If you’re a caretaker or breadwinner this is maddening. People tend to believe others are first and we are second. Women are raised to be caretakers and sacrifice ambition for the comfort of others. Men are raised to be breadwinners and set aside creative pursuits in the name of family. (I hate to be sexist about anything but you know it’s true.)

There’s also the very Now problem of a geeky dedication to various media and connectivity sharing. No one anywhere has ever had as much access to books, movies, games, and music as we do now. We can share everything, everywhere, anytime and this can steal all of our Creative Making Stuff time.

You have to cut out some of the intake to have output.

Not all of it, just some of it.

Over the past years I’ve become very good at cutting things out of my life so I can write instead. This is a luxury that comes with age, a grown child, and being married to someone who pays the bills. (Not that I can’t do that myself.) It has also happened because of my delicate health and the fact that I’m running out of options.

Stealing time is an art form when you do it right. Getting there is like going on a diet or adding exercise to your daily routine. It’s a matter of making it a priority. Failing, and trying again till you find what’s right for you. Just this past week I gave up online gaming because I looked back over 2015 and noticed  I could have written an entire novel in the time I spent gaming.

My formula involves learning to put myself first then assigning special time for the people closest to me so they don’t feel shut out or unappreciated.

Chores are done according to a ranking system. One room every Saturday, laundry when I feel like it, (I enjoy laundry) the basic kitchen stuff everyday, morning pet chores, evening pet chores, (I love my cats) and errands/shopping once a week. (My husband does half the chores by the way.) I also walk for 30 minutes minimum every night.

I don’t know what I’d do if I still had a young child at home. Seriously, anyone who can write while having a child/baby gets a medal from me.

As to managing marriage: it’s taken us a long time but we finally figured out that ‘roommate stuff’ gets discussed for no longer than one hour every Saturday and ‘financial stuff’ once a week on Sunday. We discuss nothing serious/important before coffee or after dinner. Your results may vary.

Then I pick a few things to fill my geek card and give that time some parameters.

Creative Output must = or > Media Intake.

It’s not easy at first and took decades to learn but now it’s second nature.

Writing is a lonely affair.

I often think I would be a better writer if I lived an ascetic life.

Partly because the act of writing is a never ending churn of creativity and perfectionism, partly because giving yourself permission to be brilliant is anathema in our society.

If you are a writer you know what I mean about the churn, so let me explain the anathema:

You make something and then you have to decide when to show what you’ve made and what to do about the reactions to what you’ve made.

The first part, deciding when to show, is hard on beginners. We are all children looking for approval wether we want to admit it or not. That first showing of a thing can lead to showing a second and third person… maybe more.

Criticism can halt the advancement of making things. We can all relate to having someone’s reaction be so disappointing that brilliance is stopped dead.

But this does not need to stop you. The second part of showing is figuring out who to listen to as a critic and who to dismiss.

The critics come in several guises: Expert. Consumer. Competitor. Bystander. Patron

Many critics are more than one thing.

Some are terrible things. Some critics are trolls. Some are jealous. Many just want to stop you from achieving brilliance. Many just don’t understand that your point of view does not have to be their point of view. Your beliefs do not have to be theirs.

You will hear people dismiss your talent and work in the name of decency, morals, humility, taste, ignorance, insensitivity, blah blah blah.

This is noise.

People will compare you to others. They will pat you on the head. They will tell you to pay your dues. They will say you need this class or that workshop. You need to follow this method or that formula… or worse… wait to be discovered.

*shudder*

This is nonsense.

Noise and nonsense will keep you from finishing things, from trying new methods, from wandering outside the tropes.

Learning to tune out the noise and nonsense is what makes it a lonely affair but you need this part of the process.

So how do you get this time?

That, my dear creatives, is the secret to creation.

And I’ll talk about it next week because I need to go write.

In the meantime…

Embrace it all, take what you need, show your work. Repeat.

Now go be brilliant.

I read about 300 short stories a year and I’d like to share some thoughts on how to improve your story.

Know where to start your story. Sometimes you’re five pages in and you realize that the fifth page is the start. Don’t be afraid to throw out those first five pages.

End your story in a manner that feels finished. Your story should not sound like the first part of a novel, or a few chapters from your latest work.

Don’t be afraid to rain the pain on your characters. They aren’t real.

Make the reader feel like your character is real and not just a cookie cutter trope.

Watch your pacing. I can tell when you’ve run out of room and are on a deadline.

Don’t make me guess what’s going on unless it’s part of the plot. If I have to guess at the setting, the time period, or the genre I am too confused to figure out if the narrator is unreliable or the characters are.

Just because something is a trope doesn’t mean you can’t make it yours.

Learn to edit yourself, your family, friends, and fellow writers are unreliable. Mainly because they aren’t experienced or they are envious.

And on a side note:

I like to say that there are 100 ways to tell a story and you only have to pick one.

This is the hardest thing to learn as a writer.

You are not alone.

Kerrie

We are not robots. We are humans trying to make a living while doing stuff that makes us feel like we belong. We are also creative beings who need to be alone sometimes.

I started doing writing/editing because it was the only outlet I had for creativity after my asthma drove me away from chemical infused photography. I wanted to switch to painting or drawing but I’m rubbish at both.

Words however…now that’s a paintbrush of another kind.

So why don’t I have more to show for my ten years of work?

Answer: because deciding to write is a revelation, being a writer is a process, finishing things for others to consume…ugh…so intimate.

Fortunately for me I am aware of the painful process of what happens once the art leaves your hands and goes up for display, but that’s a post for next week I think.

The thing I wasn’t aware of was how much time management goes into writing. How it steals from the rest of your life and how hard it would be to insist that the writing come before everything else.

My revelation, once I embraced the scariness of having very little money while building up my output, is that this is a very lonely process and it’s too easy to become a hermit.

Thank goodness for social media.

And curse you social media for giving me the daily opportunity to fall down the rabbit hole of belonging.

Back to the point.

There is no one method for managing your time just like there’s no one method for writing… or managing your health… or making a living…or anything else that requires time and choice.

Just know that your not alone even though it feels like you are.

Oh, and by the way, If you want to know what has been successful for me it’s learning to adapt to creating my own deadlines.

I break the year down into quarters, then break that down into months, and then weeks.

I have three calendars; one for the overall yearly plan, one to mark my progress, and one to list my weekly goals so I can see what’s next instead of losing myself in the rabbit hole.

I also have the immense privilege, one that I have worked toward and stolen, of being able to put myself first.

I think that too is a post for another day.

I’ve been talking to several fellow editors this week about punctuation in narrative genre fiction. Partly because I write in this arena and partly because I’m currently working my way through about 250 short stories for an upcoming workshop.

I noticed that in addition to style and structure, each author had a unique punctuation style. Most writers understand periods and capitalization but when someone wants to emphasize a word or invent new ones the parameters are fuzzy. In my favorite genre sometimes the main character is thinking to herself and/or hearing the voice of a familiar in her head. I had to come up with a way to delineate who was talking and when without constantly going to the same dialogue tags. When I asked other writers what they do I got a myriad of different answers, sometimes I got haughty feedback that seemed like a pat on the head.

Annoying right?

So shouldn’t punctuation be set in stone? Those of us with Master’s degrees have heard for decades that APA, MLA, and CMS are the last word in punctuation. In my experience, people who write literature often tell those who write genre that the best writer’s stick to the Chicago Manual of Style. However, when I go to the CMS website looking for advice on how to use emphasis in punctuation, I find I am being threatened with becoming a “hack.” Oh my. http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Punctuation/faq0013.html

So I’m going to give everyone a giant piece of advice, as long as you are consistent with how you use the punctuation forms that are open to interpretation, like em and en dashes, and stay true to things like periods and exclamation points, you can pretty much do what makes sense for you.

Until your editor gets a hold of it. 😉