I’m one year old

Hard to believe, but it was a year ago today I started this little blog.  Who knew I had a year’s worth of stuff to say?

This isn’t going to be a long one, but I have a few people to thank for this blog still being here a year later.

First, Monica Kuebler.  She published Vanishing Hope and she was the first one to urge me to develop some sort of web presence.  She also told me not to worry about posting about “writing stuff” all the time.  So if you want to blame someone for the shit stories and the vasectomy stories, etc…blame Monica.  She started it.

Next, a collective thank you to Ann Douglas, Mary McIntyre and Allyson Latta.  During last year’s Ontario Writers’ Conference, Ann gave a talk on Shameless Self-Promotion and it made me realize I could likely consider this blogging thing.  She also pushed me to Twitter and Facebook.  Mary then, on the same day, introduced me to WordPress and correctly read my wild-eyed look of fear and calmed me down and explained in simple language that even moron like me could learn it.  She used much nicer language than that.  Finally Allyson, in meeting me for the first time, was an enthusiastic supporter and nodded her head in all the right places.  They all encouraged me to write that first blog a year ago.

Next, I want to thank everyone that stopped by to read my musings over the past year.  If someone had told me a year ago that I’d have had almost 38K hits to this blog, I would have laughed.  I likely would have been delighted if, a year later, I had a couple thousand hits.

I’d also like to thank all those that have supported me in my “writerly” ambitions over the last year, including Gavy Swan, Dan Mansfield, Elizabeth Young, Deepam Wadds and Noelle Bickle from the Writers’ Community of Simcoe County, all the folks from the WCDR, including James Dewar, Sue Reynolds, M-E Girard, Dale Long, and a list of others too long to name, as well as Colum McKnight and Jason Darrick from Dreadful Tales, two of my first fans and good friends, and Ian Rogers, my fellow BE peer, as well as Ed Kurtz of Redrum and Abattoir fame who was crazy enough to give me a writing gig.

To Cara Michaels, who came up with a crazy idea to write 500 words a day and it’s taken over my mornings, as well as a page on this blog.

To all the students in my Creative Writing classes, many of which I consider friends now. Especially Pat Flewwelling, my constant supporter.

Finally, I want to thank my long suffering family, the Boy, the Girl and the Wife so frequently mentioned and lampooned on this site.  Hunter, Madison and Karen, thank you for your patience, your encouragement and for not killing me for some of the stuff I’ve written.

And an extra-special thank you to Karen.  I always know when she’s reading one of my so-called “funny” blogs because I’ll hear an occasional whoop of laughter and a whack as she pounds the desk.  Kind of makes it all worth it.

I know I’ve forgotten a lot of people along the way, and forgive me and remind me if I’ve missed you. No slight intended.

 

Write on!

I’m exactly 29 days in on my resolution to follow Cara Michaels’ #WIP500 project.  You can read all about it here, but in nutshell, she’s created an alternative to NaNoWriMo’s one-month novel writing marathon by spreading the goal out to the entire year while also lowering the daily word count significantly.

In NaNoWriMo, you have to average 1667 words per day to hit the target of 50K words in one month.  50K words is a significant chunk of one novel, roughly somewhere between one-half to two-thirds of the total word count of about 75-100K words.

And I totally applaud the reasoning behind NaNoWriMo.  I really do.  I wrote about it here and I still agree with everything I said.

Problem is, it’s only thirty days, and it’s only a month before the craziness that is Christmas.  I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s usually a busy time at work, my thoughts are straying to what to buy loved ones for Christmas, and all the daily crap that comes along.  And if you miss even one or two days, suddenly you’re now looking at 1700-1800 words per day.

I know everyone writes at different rates.  For example, Pat Flewwelling over at Nine Day Wonder thinks nothing of pounding out a 300-350 page manuscript over the three-ish days of the Muskoka Novel Marathon.  She consistently wins the “Most Prolific Author” award.  And the thing that pisses me off is, the stuff is good.

In fact, Pat and I were chatting the other day and, when she includes her blogs in her word count, she’s averaging a reasonably Stephen King-like rate of just shy of 5000 words per day.

5000 words.  Every.  Damn.  Day.

Again, for the initiated, that’s 20 manuscript pages every day.  It means she’s essentially creating enough words for a novel every twenty days, or, at a steady pace, just over 18 novels a year.

Obviously, NaNoWriMo is not a problem for Prolific Pat.  But it is for me.

Which is why I gravitated toward the #WIP500 idea.  All you are asked to do is 500 words each day.  That’s about two pages, double-spaced.  That takes me 20 minutes, on average.

So, I hear you say, if 500 words only takes you 20 minutes, then NaNoWriMo’s 1667 words should take you just over an hour a day, right?

In theory, yes.  In reality, what I’ve learned from this whole exercise is that much over a thousand words and I slow down considerably.  How do I know this?  Because, for the first twenty days of this year, I aimed for the 500 words and, with the exception of one day, hit it easily.

Starting just over a week ago, I started a different project, a novella called Soft Kiss, Hard Death.

Let me take a minor detour here for a second to talk about Soft Kiss.  Early in January, Ed Kurtz, a fellow horror author and a man with a sense of humour as dark as my own, reached out with an intriguing prospect.  He’d written a novella called Catch My Killer! which is positioned as the first in a proposed series of six Sam Truman Mysteries novellas under Kurtz’s own Abattoir Press imprint.  He explained that Sam’s a PI working in an unidentified New York-style setting in 1960.  And he just happens to get twisted up in some supernatural shit.  Then he asked me if I’d be interested in taking Sam on an adventure of my own.

Would I?  Would I?  Hell yes!

I had a plot kicking around that I’d started to write a couple of years back under the name Out that I just didn’t know where to take.  When Ed told me about Sam Truman, I immediately saw the possibilities.  I quickly wrote a synopsis, shot it off to Ed, and Ed gave me the thumb’s up.

The plan as I understand it, is for Abattoir Press to release an ebook version of each of the six stories a couple of months apart through 2012, then collect the stories in two hard copy versions (mysteries 1-3 in one volume, 4-6 in the second) next year.

Now, having said all that, Ed’s only read the really rough first draft prologue and hasn’t seen the rest yet, and for all I know, he’ll read it and wish to hell he’d reached out to someone with some talent instead of a dude with questionable talent, loose morals and a fascination for scatological stories.  But for now, he still thinks I may have some talent, so please, no one tell the man differently, okay?  In the meantime, you can watch for more news here.

Anyway, I promised him a first draft in March and I’d like to get it all written and debugged before then.  So, because of the deadline, I upped my daily target to 1000, just for the duration of this project, which should be complete no later than mid-February.

So, for the last nine days, I’ve been punching out 1000 words a day on average.  And I’m finding it harder to get done.  Obviously it takes me longer than the twenty minutes.  I find myself checking the word count more often and groaning if I’ve only managed 700-800 words.

I never did that with the 500.  I found I could do the sprint, then get up and walk away with a lot more still in the tank.

I also don’t do that when writing blogs.  But blogs are a whole different animal.  I’ll really think through anything I write for fiction.  I’ll check it over and rewrite it multiple times.  But blogs?  I sit down with a basic idea and just start typing.  Blogs shape themselves and anything you read from me in a blog is first draft.  I write it, add the pictures, add the tags and publish, bing bang boom.

I wish writing fiction was half as easy.

So, this is just my way of sending a big thank you to Cara Michaels first of all.  Without her, I guarantee I’d be struggling to get some words down everyday.  Without her, I wouldn’t have made it well past 20K words in less than a month.

By the way, just so you know how important this is to me, I didn’t write 10K words last year, the entire year.  And no, I’m not counting blogs I wrote last year, and I don’t count my blogs in my daily word count this year either.

If you’re interested in participating, you can join up at any time throughout the year.  All Cara asks is that you update on her site at least once a week or she’ll “drop you from the list like yesterday’s news”.  And she’ll start your count from the date you started.

I think the other thing that helped me was making myself accountable, which is why, for the full month of January, I posted daily updates on Facebook, Twitter and on another page of this blog.

I’m guessing most of my FaceTweet friends don’t really give a shit how much I’ve written, so going forward, I will continue to update Cara’s site and my Daily Word Count page every day.  But for FB and Twitter, I’ll likely do more of a end-of-the-month summary.

But the cool thing is, I’ll definitely keep writing.

A strange beginning to the year

Here I am, three days into 2012 (or, if you’re into Twitter we’re on page 3 of 366) and I’m not sure I’m exactly digging the year as yet.

In fact, I believe I’ll come to see New Year’s Day 2012 as an analogy for the entire year.

The morning started off great.  Unlike a lot of people, we took it easy on New Year’s Eve, hanging with friends, having some laughs and watching the ball drop.  I was in bed by 12:11 am.  Got a good night’s sleep and woke up refreshed and excited for the New Year.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t do my traditional playing of U2’s “New Year’s Day” first thing that’s screwing the year.  I don’t know.  We’ll reserve judgement on that one for a while longer.

What I did do is grab some breakfast, walk the dog, then sit down to take the first of 366 steps toward my newest Resolution, that is, the #WIP500 initiative I talked about in my end of year blog.  Basically, the aim is to write 500 words a day.  Every day.  And dammit, it really isn’t that hard.  I think the longest it’s taken me is maybe twenty minutes.  Who can’t take 1/72nd of a day to write?

Well…apparently me through most of 2011, for one.  But I’m fixing that now.  I’ve kept it up every day and faithfully entered my numbers on both Cara Michaels’ site (I’m #49) as well as in a separate page of this blog.

Some things I’ve noticed so far are all positive.

1. Like I said, it takes no time at all to pound out 500 words.  I typically type for a few minutes, then do a word count check and find I’m already at the target.  Which leads to…
2. Because it’s so painless, I actually do that word count and get a thrilling little “wow” moment.  And then I have permission to save it and not worry about it the rest of the day.  But I remember the “wow” at different points through the day.
3. Because it’s only two double-spaced pages, I’m not writing until I have nothing left in the tank.  Hell, there’s lots left in the tank, so I can end it mid-sentence and leave a note as to where I’m going.
4. I’m not walking around guilt-ridden all day because I haven’t written anything.
5. I’m finally getting down a story that’s been percolating in my melon for a few years.  I’m getting to watch it come alive, two pages at a time.

So, the first hour was amazing.  Then I started on dinner, knowing it was going to be a great night with great friends.

In fact, the entire day went well until the Wife came down the stairs.  Unfortunately, most of the distance was traveled by way of flailing arms and thudding ass on stairs.  Of course, the blood-freezing scream she can bust out at times like these never helps.

So I go running to her as she came to rest on the bottom step.  And, as per usual in our house, the event was summed up neatly with dialogue between myself, the Wife and the Boy.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“What do you think?” the Wife responds, and rather sarcastically for someone that’s just dropped ten feet of altitude at a rough and tumble forty-five degree angle.

“I think you just fell down the stairs,” I say.  “Are you okay?  Did you break anything?”

“No,” she says, dredging up her most miserable voice.  She tentatively bends a couple of joints.  No shrieks and everything bends the right way.

At this point, the Boy comes upstairs.  “What happened?” he asks.

“Your mom did her usual,” I say.

“Tried walking down the stairs and fell down them instead?” he says.

“Yeah,” I say.

“She okay?”

“She’s okay.”  Exit the Boy.

“I hate you both,” says the Wife.

She manages to hobble around the rest of the day, looking like an old man, stooped over with one hand on her lower back.  But with the aid of pharmaceuticals, she’s gets through it.

Our friends come over and we eat dinner and play games.  Much laughter ensues, including several memorable lines, such as:

• “Babysitting is illegal.  Oh shit, wait.  Damn, I need new reading glasses.  Bestiality is illegal!”
• “Oh shit!  I’m a duck!”
• “I am an apology from a condom factory.”

Yes, it was a bizarre evening and it’s always a good time.

And then the evening was over.  I was left tired, but mostly happy, except for worrying about what the Wife was going through.  Her muscles were starting to tighten up and you could tell the bruises were coming.

I suggested she get into a tub of hot water to loosen the muscles, but she didn’t want to.  She’s not a “tub” person.  I remember mumbling something about it being good enough for athletes, but not her.

Which leads me to how this year seems to be shaping up.  Overall, I think it’s going to be a productive year, due to the commitment to #WIP500.  There’s going to be a lot of laughs.  There’s going to be some great realizations and learnings.  There’s going to be lots of friends and laughter.

But there will be pain too.  It’s just a part of life.

But the good thing is, I think we’ve learned to take it as it comes.  And if we can talk it through and crack a joke at the end, well then, that’s all we can ask for, isn’t it?

And we can break through
Though torn in two
We can be one.