Unwrapping Old Stories

The first thing I had to do with my 100 pages challenge was decide what to print on those pages. Cue a trip to my old computer files. I skimmed over file names, focused on finding stories that were old enough that I could look at them with fresh eyes.

Suffice it to say, there were a solid handful that I haven't looked at in a few years. One or two, I didn't even recognize the file name. I saw a file and literally had no idea what it was. Then I opened it and viola! It was kind of like Christmas morning.

Current printed page count: 33

Mapmaker

The new issue of The Absent Willow Review came out yesterday and I've been looking over some stories. I just read one, called Mapmaker, that I wanted to pass along to all of you because I think it's quite beautiful and well-written. I hope you take a few minutes (it's short) to read it.

The Pen Gods Doth Smile Upon Me

Ask anybody who knows me a little bit. They can tell you I have an obsession with pens. I'm a bit of a pen snob, too. Get thee behind me, ball point! So, I like to periodically buy a new pen/set of pens to see if I like 'em.

Yesterday I hit the art department at Hobby Lobb and found a set of Staedtler Triplus Fineliner pens. I eyeballed the 20 pack, but couldn't justify paying that much for pens right now, so I opted for the 10 pack. Though, even then, it was a splurge. Then I got to the check out and learned they were 1/2 off.

I think it's a karmic payoff for all of the out-of-the-house pages I've been doing on Cass. Today, since my office mate Amanda needed the office for student conferences, I stopped by the bookstore. I wrote for about a solid hour (+4 pages) and said "howdy" to Jenny.

By the way, the Staedtler pens are very cool. I love the ink quality and the extra fine points (.3m). I'm thinking I'll have to get more.

Relevance and "Papa Legba" by the Talking Heads

There's a principle based on the idea of relevance. Once you're aware of, or thinking about, something, you see it everywhere. You buy a new car and suddenly notice that model everywhere.

I've been studying up on magical lore for the Cass stories, and Voodoo specifically. I like Voodoo for the Cass stories because Voodoo takes things from a variety of lores and blends them together. A little bit of Catholicism, a little bit of ancient African tribal mythology, and mix it all together.

This weekend I read through Kenaz Filan's The Haitian Vodou Handbook: Protocols for Riding with the Lwa. Interesting stuff. My vision for Cass is that she doesn't have specific allegiance to any one school of mysticism, but rather picks and chooses among them. After reading the book, I fleshed out my idea for the first Cass story to introduce the batch I'm working on. Featured in it, the Voodoo Loa, Papa Legba.

Then, a little bit later over the weekend I stumbled onto a bizarre movie, True Stories. Toward the end, one of the characters goes to none other than a Voodoo mambo and then there's a scene with the song "Papa Legba" by the Talking Heads.

Small world, isn't it?

A Whole Month

Seemed like October was a long one. At the least, it was quite eventful. Neil Gaiman and thesis adventures were the highlights. Lots of reading, too. It's been a fun month (except for the recent thesis stuff, which has been stressful.)

The main thing I'm taking away from October is a reminder to myself that I should lighten up. Drafting is drafting, it's about getting the jist down on the page so you have raw materials to go back and polish up later. More than ever, I find myself making margin notes as I go along, things where as I write the next paragraph, or the next page, I think, "Oh yeah, I should add X in." Then I make a note and get on with things. I'm thinking of it as a drawing process - 1st you just get some shapes outlined, then you go back and refine those sketched lines, then you add detail, etc. It's a multi-step process.

Bottom line: It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be a story. Anything that's not quite right can always get fixed later.

How did your October go?

Oh Yeah, It's Halloween

It's not that I forgot what day it is. I even spent the last couple of days working on scrounging a costume for a Halloween party tonight, so it's certainly not that I forgot. It's just that the realization of today has been rather on the periphery of my mind.

This morning, as I was writing some more of a Cass story in my notebook, I had an "Oh yeah," moment where I thought it was kind of relevant to be writing a supernatural story on Halloween. That's when the connection between the two actually clicked in my mind. Last night I was reading a Vodoo book, and it didn't connect then. Earlier this morning I sat down next to a book titled "Voodoo, Devils, and the New Invisible World," and it didn't click then. I guess I'm a little slow on the up-take today. At least, Halloween or not, it's Friday.

In other news: In honor of the day, I'm passing along an article I just read, "Why We Believe" which is interesting because it gives scientific rationale for why our brains are hardwired in a way that makes us likely to believe in the paranormal. Fun stuff, and very cool.

Otherwise, happy Trick-or-Treating tonight, I hope you get nothing but good candy.

Writing the (Cass) Bible

I love making charts and lists when it comes to stories, even though they usually prove useless in the end. Still the physical act of drawing diagrams often proves fulcrum-like in moving my thoughts around and getting them focused.

In TV shows they often create a Bible, a rulebook that holds details about characters, the mythology of the show, etc. Today I pulled out a fresh binder and started making title pages for each of the dividers - things like "monsters/creatures" and "magical lore" got printed out, hole-punched, and plugged in. It made me feel brilliant, important, and productive.

I'm digging the orderly vibe going on here, though I admit the binder is pretty skinny thus far. Gotta write more stories so I have more details :)

I'll Take The One About Demonic Forces, Please

In order to aid my work on the new stories, I've started to hit the library. Today I went to the branch by campus and picked up a few to get me started. I've gotta say that checking out a handful of books with things like "voodoo" and "witchcraft" in the titles made me feel like I was an angsty goth teen. I was slightly embarrassed.

I had to fight the impulse to loudly announce to everyone in earshot, "It's not what you think! I'm a writer. It's research."

I'm hitting the main branch tomorrow to pick up a copy of a nifty book called Lucifer Ascending. I should wear black lipstick to do it, don't you think?

The New Stories

The new stories I'm working on right now run through my head more like the episodes of a TV show than anything else, so I'm rolling with that kind of framework. I've got a greater plot arc in mind (the season arc) and then littler ones for each story/episode. I'm only a few in, but already I can see how it's tricky to balance out the stand-aloneness of the stories and the cohesion of the overall arc.

I'm digging it, though. It's like a game. I get to do research, too, which is also fun. I know a new word now: Molybdomancy.

'Cause It's Fun

I'm liking the direction this month is going in. Last night I was watching some TV on my computer and started working out a new character, who's kind of a spin-off from my thesis, oddly enough, and then a new series of stories about that character, and then I stopped watching TV and started writing the first story about her. All the while, I was thinking how these stories aren't going to help my thesis, nor do they fit in with the bar novel which I have to keep working on for the CWC.

In short, they're not part of any mandatory project I've got going on right now. There's is no practical reason whatsoever for me to be writing this. In short, no pressure for me to do it. I'm just doing it 'cause I've got the ideas and I want to.

This morning I finished off the first story, which is feeling kind of like the "pilot episode," though that may change. Then I started another story about the character. I'm at about 4,500 words about this gal. She's fun to write, her world (urban fantasy) is fun, and I get to pull out some interesting folklore-y stuff about the supernatural and basically keep running with my thesis themes, but play with them more.

I am really liking October. In the midst of thesis pressure, the challenge of seeing a novel through, and coming off a heinous word-count bet, I'm goofing off. It's nice.

The Push/Juggling

So, after I've talked with Juan during our last meeting, and after he's said that it's important I keep bringing him pages, I make the bet with John. Then I tell Juan, "So, I'm going to write the next fifty pages of my thesis in two weeks and thus knock out a full draft of the fiction portion of it."

Then Juan looks at me with what can only be called an expression of skepticism. He said something to the effect of, "Well... that'd be good." The part he didn't say was, "If you can really pull it off." Oh ye of little faith.

We're rounding out the first week of the bet and I'm standing at 14 typed pages, plus two hand-written ones I did today when I was kicked out of the office because Amanda needed it to conference with a student.

The jist: I'm writing like a fiend because I know the only alternative is to come up short on my CWC submission. My honor is at stake here, yet again. Honor which I'm adamant about defending. I know I talk big sometimes, but I try to back it up. Ergo: motivation.

I've come up with an attack plan that's working well so far. In the past I've tended to stick primarily with either drafting longhand or on the computer - that way all the stuff is in one place at a time. However, since I'm back in the swing of the semester, this strategy wasn't going to work. If I had to rely on only writing on my home computer, it just wasn't going to work. Luckily, as I mentioned the other day, I've gotten a few new ideas for stories. This gave me a way to both split up my work and keep it on one notebook/computer at a time. Depending on where I am, I can work on a different story.

For the big push I'm relying on the interweb, Google notebook, especially, to give me one "place" to keep things. At home I've got it all together on a Word document, but then I get to campus and have a few minutes, so I add to Google notebook and then copy/paste when I get home. Then, since I wasn't in the office and thus not in front of a computer, for an hour this morning, I pulled out a notebook and wrote the first part of another story I had in my mind about a little boy who walks to Nevada.

In the midst of all this, I have to keep up with my reading for the thesis, so guess what I'm doing at the dog park?

There's a saying about how if you want to get something accomplished you give it to a busy person. There's truth in that. I am accomplishing oodles.

Elvis Has Left the Building

This month has seemed remarkably long. There's just something about June that seems to last forever. So, I had plenty of time to tackle my musically themed challenge.

I found a good amount of new music, made a number of CD purchases, and spent a lot of time on Pandora. I even made a station for my thesis. Cool, huh?

Though, I have to admit that on a writing front, this month wasn't especially productive. I ended up running into more problems than solving them, and I've reached a point of frustration with myself. Neat, huh?

I'm feeling the need to mix things up a bit, so maybe the new music has affected me, just not in the way I imagined it would. I'm thinking less about how music influences my writing while I do both at the same time, and more about styles. You have so many different genres of music to choose from, and all of them are approaching a finite pool of subject matter, but doing so with different rhythms, instruments, melodies, and singing styles.

It's impressive, really, when you consider how many songs there are about broken heartedness, for instance, and how we manage to keep from being completely overwhelmed by the number because all of those songs have a different style. It's pretty fascinating, really.

To sum up: lots of music, less writing, and an idea of how to pull myself out of a writing funk. Not much page count-wise, but still useful.

Readers Aren't MIND Readers/The Redundancy Wall

Last week Jenny put up this post about struggling as a writer. She puts it well.

During that conversation I whined a bit about feeling tired of hearing myself write. It's something which gets superbly illustrated when one goes from a small to large page count. All of a sudden, I keep thinking "I always write X that way, I'm so redundant." Since everything I'm writing is so immediate and in such quantity, all kinds of patterns pop out. I have certain ways I like to phrase things, certain types of gestures common to my characters, etc.

A couple days earlier, I was working on a piece and had the thought, "I've already written this story. I'm just repeating myself." I don't remember which story I had that thought during, but the thought itself was clear and frustrated.

So, I asked Jenny a little about my thesis (though she's saving the bulk of her input for the CWC meeting tonight) and then I whined. She let me for a moment, then responded to my redundancy whinge with, "You're okay. As a reader, I don't see it."

At the moment I'm juggling three stories. I have a clear idea of how I want two of them to play out, but I'm struggling with actually putting the words on paper. Thinking about the point Jenny made helps, but I still feel like I'm pushing against, rather than through, the wall, (which is made of granite and at least four feet thick).

How do I write them without feeling bored with myself again?

Intentional Coffee Shop Pages

Went to a new coffee shop last night and did my first out-of-the-house pages since I acquired a dog. It felt good. I got about two and a half pages of the story about finding bones.

Since the other day when Deb told me what she saw as my thesis theme, I've been slowly seeing more and more of it myself. After all this time, trying to figure out what connects my stories and being too close to them, I think her comment was just what I needed to be able to take that step back. While I'm still very much looking forward to what the group has to say, I'm starting to feel I have my own direction.

Which is even better for hearing others' comments.

Whenever we're talking about writing, one of those bottom lines we're talking about is what the author is trying to convey versus what the reader sees. As the writer, I can have a crystal clear vision of exactly what the story is in my mind, but unless the reader reaches the same conclusion, my vision is a moot point. Sometimes, unexpected and fun things come out of this when the reader says, "Well, here's what I see," and it's completely different from what the writer had planned, but better than the writer's plan. Then you steal the reader's vision and use your revision to bring it out, all the while claiming that it's what you were going for the whole time.

So, now that I have a clearer idea of where I'm going, I'll be better able to use the feedback from the CWC folks. Now I have a baseline.

The reason I've brought this all up is because it's relevant to my pages last night. Thesis themes have been rolling around in my head and I've been looking more closely at how those themes cross from one story to the next. Last night I sat down with an idea, which would have been alright on its own, and then played with it a bit to make it fit the themes I can see elsewhere in my thesis. In short, I sat there and said, "Well, how can I make it speak to theme X? Well, if I change this detail, then it relates to that other thing, and if I make the setting this place, then that has something in common with the other story..."

Last night, as I sat there with a raspberry green tea and my fountain pen, was the first time I worked on a thesis story with clear ideas of what made it a thesis story.

Cool, huh?

Chopped

I've decided to cut a bit from my thesis. I put it in, tweaked it a bit, thinking that it was a good fit. Then, I changed my mind. Deb's comment about what my thesis is about got the proverbial wheels turning. I can see the theme she pointed out, and now I'm seeing another which is more of a magical realism theme, and which fits all of the stories, with the exception of The Unusual Life of William H. June.

There's also another factor at work, the soon-to-be-arriving movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which is based on a short story that Jenny recommended I read when I was telling her about June. The timing is kinda funny and I'm thinking that maybe since there's another, much more well-known, story along the same lines that's about to be very prominent, it wouldn't hurt to shelf mine for a bit.

So, here's a question: You're in the midst of working on a story or novel when you discover another story/novel that's already published and remarkably similar to yours. What do you do?

I Owe My Dog

This morning, at approximately six o'clock, my dog woke me up. Now, since our typical waking up time in the morning starts around seven thirty these days, I was not impressed. However, I guess I do owe her a little, because her waking me up meant that I rolled out of bed with a dream still fresh in my mind.

Within this dream was the seed for a new thesis story. After I woke up the second time and went through my morning routine, I fleshed the story out, figured out how to start it, and decided that the main character should be named Maggie.

The funny part is that now I can't really remember the dream itself, which has faded until only one image remains. All I hang onto is the picture of Maggie herself, a gray cloud above, and the thought "she is the weather."

I think the dog has earned herself an extra treat or two today.

A Three-Syllable Name

Sometimes names in a story are more significant than at other times. Sometimes you put a lot of effort into finding a name that's just right.

Right now I'm working on a story and I have it in my head that I need a three-syllable name for a male character. I'm also trying to find a name that's not always shortened, i.e. Nicholas almost always becomes Nick, but Jeremy often stays Jeremy.

Thus far I have:
Christopher
Harrison
Elias
Elijah
Theodore
Sebastian
Archibald
Isaiah
Edison
Gregory
Oliver
Nathaniel
Emerson

Can you help me think of others?

Synchronicity

I'm a big believer in synchronicity, though I don't know if "believer" is the best word to use. What happens is that I notice, time and time again, how things tend to align in life. In my last post I talked about some of that alignment in respect to getting me back to my thesis. There's a bit more of it, too.

When I went to the library yesterday, I hit the new books first, then started roaming around the stacks, looking for titles or covers that caught my eye. Interesting to note: it seems mystery novels tend to have the most eye-catching titles. So, my selection process was pretty random. For the most part I wasn't looking for any particular author or any books I'd already heard of, just pulling stuff off because I liked the color of the cover. Of the dozen books I looked at, a few turned out to be short story collections. Any other day, none would be, they'd all be novels. In light of this, I went with it and of the half dozen books I checked out, three were these collections.

From the library I went to campus and a Hungry Eye meeting, then I went to my office to kill time before the Annie Dawid reading. Juan stopped by to pick up some files for the faculty search and while we chatted he asked if I'd like to go along on dinner with him and Annie. So, instead of killing time in the office by watching TV shows on the computer, I ate Pad Thai and chatted with an award winning short story writer whose first book was a short story collection. One of her books is a short story cycle, even.

Can you hear the "click, click, click" of things lining up before me? Sometimes it's not so much about going out and finding stuff as it is about embracing the stuff that casually comes your way.

Not Just For Bards

At the beginning of the semester I wasn't quite sure what to expect from my Scottish Lit. class. I'm not usually all that fond of survey classes, and especially not of "classical" survey types which are entirely devoted to, or at least emphasize, books whose ages are counted in centuries rather than years.

However, this class is turning out to be oodles of fun. For starters, the professor is incredibly flexible about which topics we explore in our essays. So, I've been reading and writing all about ballads and sea shanties, with a plan to work up, chronologically, to talking about Great Big Sea and others who are in my CD collection. I've been finding a lot of interesting stuff about oral traditions and folklore in the process.

For seconders (or however that goes to transition from "starters"), the past two classes we've had guest speakers - though "speakers" isn't exactly accurate. Last week we had Jack and Barbara Yule (Jack's a native Scot and Barbara has spent a couple decades doing scholarly work about Scottish storytelling tradition). Buckets of fun, especially when Barbara told us about the Traveling People and performed a couple of stories for us.

Then, last night we had Kim McKee and Ken Willson a.k.a The Jigheads. They played music, talked about storytelling/folk music tradition, and Ken told us a story. Also excellent.

Now, from here we get back to one of the questions of writing which is infinitely fascinating - the purpose of doing it. When you look at oral traditions, storytelling was very fundamental. The stories were who the people were, they told their histories, their morality, their religious beliefs, and they were one of the ways the group identified themselves as being X rather than Y.

These days, we don't have the same oral tradition. Other media has replaced the spoken word, and ethnic tales have become internationally known. Still, I would suggest that much of the storytelling imperative has remained. I can think of a number of different ways to go with this, and I probably will go in those directions in subsequent posts, but I'm going to narrow it all down today.

Oral tradition. Communal stories. We don't have the bards these days, but we can't entirely get away from our roots. Back in the day you had a tribe and in that tribe there were the songs and the stories that everybody knew and that knitted the group together into a community. These days we tend to have the exact same thing, just expressed a bit differently.

Instead of the tribal stories, we have family stories. You know, the one about when you were little and you did that incredibly funny thing that everybody still talks about. Maybe it started out being your story, it's about you, after all, but now you know it by the telling just as well (or even better) than you know it because it happened to you. Maybe it started out your story, but now your parents, siblings, etc. are the ones who tell it. Everybody knows how it goes, everybody knows how it ends, but it keeps getting told. It's part of your family's mythology now, it's what knits you together as a family and it's what identifies you as X rather than Y.

Ditto that for any group of friends you've known for a while. After a while, you learn the stories of the others. After a while, when someone starts talking about a specific thing, you can anticipate the story that's coming next. Of course, we have our communal "music," too. Most of us in the writers group have watched Joss Whedon's shows and read something by Neil Gaiman. Great Big Sea is a literal example of our common music, and Deb's got a nifty clip up on her blog, the posting of which is perfectly timed to this posting. (Gotta love synchronicity.)

So, to get to the main point here: though the particulars of our storytelling traditions have changed from the times of bards and sagas, the jist remains the same. If there was nothing to this idea of communal music, you'd never swap CDs with your friends, would you?

Bar Pages: Almost Done With the Nearly Titled Story

I took myself and my notebook out to the bar tonight and finished The Tree Story. I finally figured out the technical part of it and got through the end. It doesn't quite work yet, but I figure I can fix a lot as I transcribe it onto the computer. So, even though the story is complete, it's not really finished yet as a rough draft. I was aiming to submit it tomorrow, but it's going to have to wait.

Getting out of the house with my notebook has been nice. It's a good rhythm for me right now and it helps to have that designated time set aside where I just have writing to focus on without thoughts of homework from my classes, planning for Comp., or any of the dozen other distractions I have at home.

Writing at the bar also provides entertainment for bystanders. Tonight I was asked by half a dozen people how I could write in the midst of all the activity. I'm just one of those people who works well with background noise. My earliest writing habits were developed while I was in middle school and working on a story in the midst of a lecture, so I'm used to it.

I also had a request from a couple of regulars/friends of mine to read the story once I get it typed up. Having "civilians" read my work actually makes me more nervous than having other writerly folk read it. All I can figure is that, with other writers, I know approximately what to expect. Their comments may be critical, but I know what direction they're coming from.

Now I've just got to type it all up, fix it, and decide whether or not the title is going to have "Madeline" in it. Piece of cake.