Weekday Schedule

6:10 AM. When I wake up.

7:05 AM. When I leave for work and listen to my audiobook.

7:50-8:00 AM. When I get to work.

11:30 AM. When I take my lunch break and read my book.

3:30 PM. When I really wish it were five o’clock.

4:00 PM. When I really wish it were five o’clock.

5:25-5:35 PM. When I get home and must be fed dinner immediately.

7:00 PM. When I write for an hour, or at least sit at my computer thinking about writing.

Which author’s rules were these?

1. You don’t have to write.
2. You can’t do anything else.

9:15-9:30 PM. When I fall asleep reading and my husband makes me go to bed.

I like routine. Routine is not boring. Routine makes me happy.

Story of a story

Last year I wrote a 4,000-word science fantasy story. It originated in an idea I’d had centering around one particular moment in which the reader realizes that the main characters are not human but aliens. (The aliens find a crashed spaceship with dead humans in it, but the story turned out not really to be about that.)

I only submitted it twice because I felt that something wasn’t quite finished about it. It got rejected, of course.

This month I decided to revisit the story with the goal of making it shorter by about half. Short stories are easier to sell if you don’t have an impressive publication history; plus there are more venues for short fiction than long. So I read the story over, blushed a little bit at the boring introduction and apparently random conclusion, and set to cutting.

Cutting stories is one of my favorite parts of writing. It might sound painful to reduce the first 500 words of a narrative into three paragraphs 150-words long altogether, but the sense of realignment and purification that such drastic changes gives me is well worth it. In short, I enjoy muddling through what I wrote to figure out what I meant.

In an afternoon, I added a new scene yet still cut around 1,000 words from the story–that’s reducing it by a quarter. The next day I cut another 300 words and sent it to my insightful beta reader, who pointed out some places I could further condense. So I trimmed another 400 words, reducing the sprawling 4,000-word monstrosity into a much improved and more easily marketable 2,200-word story. That’s 45% shorter, by the way.

I also changed the title and all the characters’ names. It turned out to be about the alien characters all along. Story makeover complete.

Now to submit it!

Lesson “plans”

1. On Lesson Plans. As a student, I always hated learning from PowerPoint presentations. As a teacher, I have learned to love teaching from PowerPoint presentations. I’ve just finished writing the world’s most boring presentation on MLA format. Yes, it does boil down to telling my students to figure it out for themselves on the Purdue OWL.

2. Not That It Will Do Any Good. Considering that I have been asked by students what a narrative was after teaching them about that concept for no fewer than three weeks, I don’t have high hopes that trusting my students to teach themselves where to place the commas will have positive results. I direct you to one of my new favorite sites, S**t My Students Write. (Despite temptation, I have never and will never submit here.)

3. Super Bowl Party. My husband and I are going to our Sunday school’s Super Bowl party tonight. I learned from Cake Wrecks that the “Gaints” are playing, but I had to ask to find out that their competitors were the Patriots. At least I know that the sport in question is football.

4. Party = Food. There will be a ton (2,000 lbs.) of food at the party tonight, where I will be resolutely exercising my self-control in order not to eat any sweets. The good news is that my resolution does not extend to ribs or chips and dip. The bad news is that my resolution does not extend to ribs or chips and dip.

5. Look! A Fifth Point. I usually stop at four for some reason. Not today.

Thinking aloud

Perhaps you are aware that I love lists, especially to-do lists, though I rarely refer to them after they’re written. It’s the act of writing them that helps me arrange things in my mind. Yes, I’ll do this first, and then that, which will take about this long, after which I’ll have just enough time for this other thing. Oh, and I can’t forget that I have to, etc.

So here’s my list for today.

• Write 1,000 words of a new scene for Chapter Seven of my novel Edgewood, accompanied by my third cup of tea for the day.
• Write a short article about space garbage for the SAT tutoring center where I work.
• Prepare some SAT material for teaching tomorrow morning.
• Edit an article about missions for a press where I freelance.
• Lunch, accompanied by an episode of Firefly, perhaps “Out of Gas.”
• Grade students’ in-class writing online and give feedback about their in-progress essay drafts.
• Write PowerPoint presentations/lecture notes for next week, since I will be busy Sunday afternoon when I usually do so.
• Read about half of Children of Dune by Frank Herbert.
• Have a lovely dinner at the Cheesecake Factory with a good friend from graduate school.

Will I get it all done? Probably not. I’ll work on all of it, but I might not finish all the projects completely, particularly those related to grading and lecture prep. The dinner, however, is a sure thing–my reward for working hard!

Seven quirks

Seven Quirks about This Writer, Rarely Discussed

With apologies to Ann Beattie and The Book Bench.

1. The best writing happens while wearing pajamas, sitting up in bed, smothered in blankets, with a cup of tea at hand. Two hours under these circumstances can produce in excess of two thousand words, which will probably get tossed away later, as this writer is a gleeful and unabashed draft writer.
2. In the event that writing in bed is impossible, writing at the desk in pajamas and a bathrobe can sometimes produce the same psychological effects of comfort, security, and ease. Tea is still required.
3. Most writing of any length is performed on the computer, with Microsoft Word as the processor of choice. Pages are numbered in the top right corner, and Times New Roman (size twelve, double spaced) demonstrates the influence that this writer’s academic career has had on her formatting preferences.
4. In the absence of a computer, creative work is recorded in the writer’s Moleskine, of which she is filling her eighth. Her pen of choice is a black Sharpie pen, since it has a fine point and does not smear or soak through the page. She writes about two hundred words to the page, in ugly handwriting that is a blend of print and cursive. The words may be unattractive, but she likes the look of pages that are full.
5. The writer rarely eats while writing, preserving food as a reward when writing goals are completed. Favorite snacks are Dove dark chocolates, of which she consumes only two per day. Panera Bread is also an acceptable prize for significant achievements. Sometimes she will even allow herself a cookie.
6. The writer cannot abide wide-ruled paper, or reporter-style notebooks that open from the top.
7. Early drafts of stories are readily discarded. The writer feels that it is no business of posterity’s that she chose to rename the protagonist four times and that she excised the entire first paragraph and replaced the word “verily” with “in truth.” She enjoys frustrating graduate students of the future who lack dissertation subjects. They will simply have to read the published versions and be satisfied.

Tidying up the to-do list

I have a lot of things to get done before November 1.  So instead of doing them, I’m writing about them.  (How typical.)

1. October Submissions.  Since April, I’ve been sending out a minimum of five short story submissions to magazines each month.  This month, I’ve only sent one so far.  I have the stories ready, but not the cover letters, which can be quite laborious, as each one has to be tailored to the individual publication.  The work is worth it, but not necessarily enjoyable.

2. Grading.  I have about twenty-five papers left to grade.  In a very good hour, I can grade ten to twelve.  But I can only do an hour at a time before I start getting zombie-brain, so I have to spread out the work.

3. Online Job Training.  I have to do a dull-as-dirt mandatory online training program and quiz about diversity or something like that.  It takes about an hour.

4. Class Preparation.  Before tomorrow, I have to plan the week’s lessons.  This can take anywhere from one to three hours, including textbook reading and writing handout materials or PowerPoints and so forth.  My dean might also be coming to visit one of my classes, so I have to make sure the lessons are extra good.

5. Work.  And there’s work, from 1:00-5:30 today, and from 8:00-2:20 tomorrow.  So with online submissions taking, say, two hours, grading at three, job training at one, and class prep at three, I have nine hours of extra work to squeeze in around my regular work schedule of the next two days.  No, I haven’t been putting things off (except the job training).  This is normally how busy I am, plus writing.

Goodbye, reading for pleasure.  See you in December.

Sad face.

See how obliging I am?

Your wishes are my command.  I now commence blogging about How I Prepared for NaNoWriMo 2011.

It started with a place name, which isn’t normal.  Normally I think of a character and imagine a world around him or her; this time my subconscious invented a forest named Edgewood, with a mock announcer voice-over asking, “What is it on the edge of?”  So I set myself to find out.

Now, I’m a big fan of narratology, which is concerned with the effects of narrative structure.  When I realized Edgewood was on the edge of fairy-tale style magic, with reality on one side and supernatural happenings on the other, my mind immediately leaped to Vladimir Propp.  He wrote about narrative in Russian folktales, and I kind of love his book, which makes a formula out of narrative events, complete with outline.

So I had two pieces: Edgewood and folklore.  This was in late September, and I knew I had a lot of thinking to do before I would be ready to write on November first.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I think best on the page.  So I took my Moleskine journal, labeled thirty-one pages with the dates in October, and set myself a task: I would write one page about my novel every day.  And I have.  And it’s worked.

Here are things I’ve written about:

• Character descriptions
• Place descriptions
• Lists
• Problems with the plot
• Outlines
• Maps and diagrams
• Complaints
• Scenes and scraps of dialogue
• Backstories
• Fake dust jacket synopses
• Things that have to happen and the order they have to happen in
• Notes on tone
• A list of books I hope people will compare my book to
• Whatever comes into my brain that is ever-so-slightly novel-related

And in the course of just under thirty-one days, I’ve found that I have a novel in my head.  Not complete, of course, but with enough detail that I know what will be going on in each chapter.  The benefit to consistently writing the page is that my subconscious would often be working on plotting or problems throughout the day, so that when I sat down to write, usually in the evening, I had often more to say than I realized before I started writing.

It’s a strategy I’ll certainly be using again.

Meanwhile, I plan to stick to my regular NaNoWriMo technique: write two days’ worth  of words on Day 1 and one day’s worth faithfully after that.  That way if I ‘fall behind,’ I will write double the word count the next day to ‘catch up’ to being one day ahead.

Slow and steady is my motto, where “slow” here can be defined as a (brain)death-defying pace of 1,667 words a day every day for thirty days.

NaNoWriMo, I love you.  Can’t wait for November 1!