Ants in the Pants Syndrome

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 http://www.flickr.com/photos/drewleavy/509975348/

Title: Street Tap

Are any of you what I call kinetic writers? I find that I have trouble sitting still for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a stretch, then as soon as I finish a particular passage I have to get up and walk around.  I’ll go down the hall and use the bathroom or look out the window for a minute or just get up and walk around the room for a minute before I sit back down and jump back into the writing. I haven’t figured out yet whether this is slowing me down or helping the neurons to fire. Obviously there is time lost in all this moving about, but it’s like sitting and writing builds up a static charge and I have to get up and release it. I don’t have a choice.  The charge builds faster if I am doing a more intense part of the story, like somehow the prose are loaded with their own electrical potential and it courses back through the keyboard and into my body as the words flow out...conservation of energy or something.  It causes me to have to get up more frequently when the story is really hopping or getting more spirited. The Ants-in-the-Pants syndrome.  It’s a good sign for me though, that I am doing impassioned work. Something is clicking in the story and I am on a roll, so I really don’t mind, and the interruption is brief, just a quick burst of energy blown off, like letting your gun barrel cool off after firing several magazine loads. I don’t know any other way, if I am in a place where I can’t get up frequently the charge builds up and creates a buffer of sorts that slows down the words coming out. I have to stop and do something else for a few minutes until the buffer clears.

Got Conflict?

Photo Credit: Shiny Things, Creative Commons

The thing to keep in mind when we are writing is that the core of a story is conflict.  I know I have caught myself going easy on my protagonist.  Sometimes I just miss opportunities to heap a little extra conflict on because I start thinking  how I might react in a situation and then write my way out of it instead of letting it unfold in a way that will actually increase the drama, and the stakes for the character, making the story a little richer in the process.  Without conflict there is no story.  And even though we have sympathy for our creations, maybe even love, we still have to punish them for the sake of the story.  Conflict is the engine of our story and if we keep finding an easy path out of trouble it just makes for a lot of prose without a whole lot actually going on.  The fiction becomes lifeless.

Reflections on Residency One

Last week I was at Seton Hill University for my first week of Residency for my Master of Fine Arts in Writing Popular Fiction.  Thanks to my classmate Jenni Spoon for letting my use this picture she took last week. Check out her blog!

I spent the weeks prior getting ready by reading a book that was assigned and doing critiques of ten other writer's work. I also prepared and sent in a ten page piece to be critiqued.  I thought I was going to do my thesis on the work I had already done for Revelation Void, and that was what I edited for submission, but I'd been working on a new piece and during the course of the first few days I realized that piece was going to work out a lot better for me.

I have Clear Ether out to be critiqued, but I realize now that it is far from being ready for submission.  It's going to require a major overhaul to be in any kind of shape that I would be satisfied with.  So Clear Ether is going on the shelf for a bit, along with Revelation Void.  I'm cool with it. I have some good ideas to explore for both of these books, but I am switching my focus to my new story.  I have just over 15k words so far, but they need to be polished.  I am going about this novel in a completely new way for me.  I'm actually outlining it first.  I actually know how it ends already.  I'm also trying something new with the type of story. It is firmly grounded in SF, but this one will be a mystery. The working title is Requiem for Memory, but I'm not completely sold on it and it may change at some point.

NINJABREAD COOKIES!!!!!

I just finished a plate of NINJABREAD cookies...or did I? Perhaps they finished me...perhaps they are still there...

Sprechen Sie Writer?

I've been at this writing thing for several years in earnest, but every now and then it becomes painfully obvious to me that I should've paid more attention to my college English class or read more about certain genres or pop culture references.  I’m actively compiling this list to benefit writers of varying levels of emersion in the waters of authordom, to help us look less stupid or simply to help you navigate the world of writing a little more confidently.

I am taking suggestions to add to this list, it's not complete by any stretch.  I am particularly interested in ‘writer-culture’ words. Or, perhaps you disagree with my definition. I’d like to hear about that as well.

I’ve broken it down by categories.

General Terms

Active Voice                           Writing where the subject of the sentence is carrying out action

ARC                                       Advanced Reader Copy, printed before the actual print run on a new book

Auxiliary or Helping verb         A verb that goes with another verb (have or do)

Back Matter                            Back pages of a book that have appendixes, indexes and endnotes

Wendigisms 2: The Penmonkey Strikes Back

I needed a good title for the sequel.  I thought about naming this one Revenge of the Pen Monkey but Chuck already used that title for one of his writing books.  Next was Dead Man’s Prostate, but that’s just a little too gross to publish across the interwebs.  The Quickening doesn’t sound bad, but I’m happy with what I picked. 

These are all giblets of stuff Chuck has published on his website and most are related to the art of writing in some form or fashion.  They’re priceless.  The first page of stuff is here on my 1st Wendigisms page. You can always read more over at Terribleminds.  

And without further ado:

• Feculent turd-heads
• Eff that in the ay, emmer-effer
• I will beat you to death with a sock full of your own teeth
• Mornings tend to be when your brain is at its lemon-scented freshest
• Think of this as a narrative laxative

Holiday events, life in the Moody House

I love Thanksgiving!  It has turned into probably my favorite holiday. My wife and I shop together and prep the stuffing and turkey together.  I love cooking with her. After the bird is in the oven we have about 4 hours to relax, and call family.  It would be great if we were all together but our family is spread all over the country. 

Today we watched a Kung Fu movie together, about one of Bruce Lee's mentors. Grand Master Ip Man, starring Donnie Yen. It was really enjoyable. 

The turkey came out golden brown and perfectly moist and delicious, just like always and all the other fixins were hot, and scrumptious. The timing worked out just right.  We gorged!

Don't Reamde

I just finished reading Neal Stephenson’s new 1042 page tome, Reamde. Can’t say that I enjoyed it. I’ve read a few other works by him, namely Snow Crash and Diamond Age, and I enjoyed them both very much, but this one was a slugfest from the word go.  This was the single longest book I’ve read and actually finished.  It was more out of stubbornness than anything else though. I’ll warn you now there may be some spoilers in this.

There are some good aspects to the book. The writing is done well, grammatically correct and well punctuated. I didn’t notice any editorial problems from that standpoint. The plot is fairly intricate, moves at a moderate pace initially and covers a lot of territory, which Neal obviously spent a lot of time researching, because he doesn’t hold back any detail. I mean ANY. He waxes on for paragraphs about stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with the story and not just a couple of times, but throughout the book.  He could have easily cut 500 pages out of this and it would not have changed the story in any meaningful way.  Surely he had an editor, but maybe he refused to budge on their recommendations.  I have no way of knowing.  As I said, there is plenty of plot here, but no real story in the sense that I understand story. I’ll get back to that.