blah de blah blah blah

How to do this. How to do that. Sometimes I think I’m swimming against a never ending tide of writing advice. Lately, I’ve been reading many different books and blogs on writing technique, story technique, and all that. It’s getting really frustrating, though, to know how much to rely on them. Why can’t I just write the story I want to read and say to hell with it all?

Now, I know there are things that make your writing better – and boy, did I need to hear some of those tips – like cutting unnecessary words, keeping it simple, and blah de blah blah blah.

When does it end?

What’s the right dose to take?

All I want to do is finish my story once and for all. But all this advice floating around in my head has been hindering me these last couple of weeks. I can’t turn off my inner editor. I can’t just sit and write like I did at the beginning.

Maybe this is good, though, right? Maybe all that extra careful writing I am doing will mean less work once the first draft is finally finished. Right? Right!?

…crickets…

I guess I’ll just have to wait and see. It’s May already. I wanted to be finished by now. The weather is beautiful. My cats are escaping through the patio door and I sit around worrying about them. Or I go outside with them and have my thinking time – where I think about my story.

Some good will come out of this. And something will come out of all the things I read on writing.

In the words of Spartacus: apologies, for breaking words lacking invitation.

In other words, sorry for the ramble. I am obviously very frustrated, but still around.

J

Cheers.

Riddle me this, Google (a ramble about waking nightmares)

I lay awake in the deep of night;

To close my eyes is to block all sight;

But as the sweetness of slumber envelopes me,

My mind shows me things I wish not to see;

Of evil, of strangeness, of fearful things;

A shadow, a form, a slayer of everything.

A shuffle of feet on the other side,

The door knob twists – I open, I close my eyes.

Am I awake? Am I dreaming?

All I know is the fearful feeling.

Heart is pounding, body is in stasis,

Always appears the same faces.

Mother, brother, even father;

A cry of nothing – why do I bother?

They reach for me with taunting arm;

Oh, why do they wish me harm?

I've been good daughter, good sister, too;

But it seems there is nothing I can do.

A knife or a pillow – my end is always near,

With lids shut, I lie back in fear.

The moment arrives – this is my destiny.

Until I jerk awake and realize 'tis not reality.

Still, my heart races, my body shudders;

Though I know it will not last forever.

My heart calms, my limbs can move.

All it was, was a night terror.

 

 

That was a poem I wrote a few years ago (and published at fictionpress). I was having night terrors - the ones that leave you paralyzed with fear, unable to cry out or move. To deal with them, I decided to write a poem. Now, I don't really like poetry and in my opinion, the poem is not very good, but it actually helped me. I didn't have anymore episodes of that same night terror until this year.

 

It's always the same. I'm lying in bed. Someone comes into my room. Sometimes with a knife. Sometimes it's a stranger, more often it is someone from my family. They try to kill me. I try to scream, nothing comes out, I try to move, but I can't. Then I wake up, on my back, my heart pounding like a rampant drum.

 

The last time I had the dream, it was in a hotel room while on a trip with my mother. She called my name, I woke up. She told me I was mewling in my sleep. She said my father had dreams like that. My father has a term for them - a Mohawk term I forget at the moment (will edit in later when I ask him about it again). Interested to learn more, I googled "what does it mean when you have the same dream of being murdered?" and various other questions of the sort.

 

Gotta love the Internet. There's some real gems out there. Putting questions to Google has become one of my favorite pastimes. According to Google (well, the Internet, really):

• I have been abducted by aliens
• I am psychic
• I have ancestor ghosts watching over me
• I may be schizophrenic

 

Ah, that's what happens when you have too much time on your hands. Google is like the new oracle at Delphi. It answers you in riddles when the truth is obvious: you're an idiot for asking that idiotic question in the first place. But, I digress.

 

After that I simply googled "waking nightmares". I came upon an article in the Daily Mail. It turns out I have been experiencing "sleep paralysis". Self-diagnosing myself through the Internet is also one of my favorite pastimes, which I do not recommend at all - it could drive you crazy (and really, just go see a doctor if you are in tremendous pain). But in this case, I think I have it right.

 

The article says sleep paralysis: causes you to partially wake up during a dream, while your body is still ‘asleep’. It can be caused by stress, even by your partner's snores. People who suffer from this often see figures in their bedroom, can even feel touches, and because they are still in REM sleep mode, they can't move (the brain paralyzes you at this time so you can't act out your dreams) or scream. The vividness for me is what separates it from a nightmare. And because it always happens in my bedroom (or in the hotel room), this is sleep paralysis. If it were a nightmare it could be happening anywhere.

 

Anyway, I don't really have a point here. I just find dreams and sleeping to be a very interesting topic. These sleep paralysis nightmares can be a pain in the arse, and scary as hell (I thought I was going to die one time), but they are fascinating. It's amazing what the mind can do.

 

What about you? Do you ever have these night terrors? Recurring nightmares? Do you ever have those jerky falling moments (you fall in your dream and "fall" in your bed)? One regular dream I had a lot when I was a kid involved dinosaurs. Lately, it's been alien invasions and asteroids. You?

 

Have a good evening and may you experience nothing but sweet dreams!

Woohoo!

In the words of Blur, woohoo! The other day (thursday, I think it was) I met and surpassed my goal of 25,000 words. Now, it's a small victory. A bittersweet victory. After all, that goal was supposed to be a february goal, and then I cheated and extended the deadline to March 31st. But I succeeded. And I am allowed to change deadlines, especially when they aren't gonna hurt anyone. It's my party and I'll cry if I want to. Anyway... I just wanted to post an update on that. On the downside, the story is still not finished. I don't know if that's a bad thing... I know how it should end now, but it's taking long to get there. Oh well, I shall worry about my story's length when it is actually done. Have a good weekend, and Happy Easter!

I Need a Break

Good evening!

 

I'm taking a break this week. I am not writing anything at all. I will even try to not think about writing or any of the other things that have been nagging me lately. My mind needs a time out. On the plus side, I am 3310 words from meeting my goal. That said, I should be able to reach that goal by the end of the month. Just wanted to put that out there. Happy writing to everyone else!

 

 

Sunset, March 8, 2013 (also posted on my Instagram)
It was nice to see the sun after about 20 days of clouds/snow.



New Goal

Okay, I'm a cheater; I've decided to extend my February goal into March. February was an epic failure. Well, maybe epic is too harsh. I did reach 57% of my goal. I suppose that is good? It's a pass in university standards, though it would have been a fail in high school. Anyway, I didn't have much time to write. Then again, maybe I didn't feel much like writing. But I don't think that the month was a total waste. I did get some writing done. And mostly, I planned out my ending way better than what I had already planned for it. So, now I am hoping to finish my story once and for all. I don't know if I can do it in March, but I will at least try to hit my word count goal.

 

In the meantime, I've got a lot of thinking to do about real life. I just can't seem to tell my mind to shut up so that I can have a clear mind to write. But anyway, I will have another post on my old diaries coming up real soon. Have a good day!

An "a-ha" moment!

Did you ever have a plot epiphany as you were writing? Something that would change the rest of your story so drastically from what you had planned, but for the better? I did.

While I was writing today, I was wondering how I would fit everything I had planned into the rest of the story without going overboard long on the word count. I had originally intended to introduce a very important character (let’s call him Bob for sanity’s sake) into the story but I kept delaying his appearance. I kept writing, and writing. And I would ask myself, when is Bob going to show up? It’s not going to make sense when he comes around for my heroine to follow him because there won’t be any time for them to get to know each other and their reasons.

So I opened a new text document in Scrivener and typed at the top: What would the rest of my story look like if Bob did not exist?  And then, as I was replying to that question, I had an "a-ha" moment.

Bob was already in my story.

That’s right. Bob was already there, right under my nose all along, only masquerading as something I hadn’t planned way back when (let’s call this character Rafael). Suddenly it all became clear what I needed to do.

Well, maybe not all clear straight away. I still have some things to work out. So it’s back to the outlining for me. There’s nothing I have to go back and drastically change; my subconscious wrote Rafael the way I need him to be to fit in as the important character Bob. Somewhere, deep down inside I had known Rafael was Bob.

Okay, so this is probably not making sense to you since you have no idea what my work in progress is about, but trust me, this was a big epiphany for me. And it will make finishing my story a lot easier, I hope anyway. There’s still the matter of the showdown with the villain. I have to make it satisfying; I have to make it make sense. This tale will be turning in my head until I figure it all out.

I have a feeling I won’t be getting a lot of sleep tonight.

A Goal for February

So, I've decided to give myself a goal for this month. I hope to write 25,000 words of my current work in progress. That would bring me to 100,000 words and probably to the end of the story.

 

I am a bit worried, however, that I won't actually get to the end of the story once my goal is reached. There's so much that needs to happen from now until then and I don't think I can fit it all in at 100,000 words. My story is a fantasy, and right now I'm writing it with an adult audience in mind, but I keep thinking it might be better as a young adult. That being said, I am a little confuddled as to how long it should be. General guidelines I've read over the Internet are all over the place, though from 90,000 to 120,000 max seems to be the generally accepted rule for fantasy.

 

*le sigh*

 

I think I'll just worry about all that once my story is actually finished. Then I can revise, edit, and cut any needless things. It might not ever get published anyway.

 

*face palm*

 

Think positive, missy!

 

Anyway, I've set up a word count meter to the right. As you can see, today I wrote 2,091 words. Pretty good. I haven't calculated how much I'll need to write every day to reach my goal before the stroke of midnight on March 1st, but I figure I can reach this goal. It will motivate me to sit down and write. And if I could do 50,000 in November, when I actually had a job and things to do, then I can definitely do this in February, even if it is only 28 days long and I didn't really write for the first two days. I hope I can do that anyway...

 

I'll update the meter every time I update the blog, which I don't know how often that will be; suffice it to say update times shall vary!

 

Have a good evening and a good week! Ciao!

 

P.S. How about those habs there, eh? 6-2!? Looking good, especially compared to last season (which I would like to forget ever happened).