Strange Days

I’ve been acting weird lately. It’s not a surprise to me, but perhaps it’s a surprise to others. My father’s dying and it’s the hardest emotional thing to go through that I have yet to experience.

I feel very much like when I was a teenager. Overwhelmed by my emotions. Tired. Never really hungry but when I start eating I can’t stop. Unsure of what my role is. In the way. Out of control.

I’ve been apologizing to a lot of people recently because I’ve put life on hold while this all happens. I’ve been trying to keep going, but it’s hard to keep my mind focused on a task for too long. And consequently, I feel like my work is suffering because of it. My mind bounces from one place to another.

The only difference between when I was a teenager and what’s happening right now is that I am not a teenager and I know why I feel like this. I didn’t have the words to understand what I was feeling emotionally as a teenager (in a sense: all the things), but now I know what this is, this time. Sort of. I know what this is, but it’s still the hardest thing I’ve ever had to go through because I don’t actually know what this is. I don’t know what the outcome of it will be. Other than that my father will no longer be here.

All signs point to letting this happen, because I can’t fight against the tide. I can’t fight against this any more than I could fight against the overwhelming trauma of being a teenager. I just need to let it happen and pray that it will turn out for the best.

And then I realize…

I’m writing Young Me into a story.

Okay, who am I fooling? I already knew I was writing Young Me into a story. The whole story came out of a desire I once had, plus a particularly nasty experience.

So why is it so hard for me to write Young Me?

Is the character too close? Do I not want to remember how foolish and niave Young Me was so when I’m trying to write her all I see is the bland nice things and none of the dark shadowy things that made Young Me interesting?

That’s the problem here. I’m writing Young Me and she’s as boring, dry and er, crusty as a bowl of day-old oatmeal. She’s utterly unexciting. She has none of the pinache, none of the off-the-cuff ridiculousness that Current Me exhibits (usually).

What am I doing wrong? Should I be writing Young Me? Shouldn’t my character be separate from me? Every where I turn, I keep learning that you need to know your character as well as you know yourself. You’re writing her, after all. So what the fuck, Current Me? Why you no write good no more?

Maybe it’s because I have other things on my mind. Big things. But this is what I’m doing right now to keep Current Me sane. I’m writing. I’m writing about Young Me. Young Me and the stupid ideas that she had that got her hurt and molded her into what eventually becomes Current Me. But…not really, because this is supposed to be fiction. The lesson that Young Me learns won’t take her years to figure out like it took me. By the way, I’m calling her Emily in the story for now. She’s gone through several name changes in fact, including at one point STEALING her sidekick’s name, can you believe that? What a fucking hussy.

What’s her lesson? That there are bad people in the world and they will steal your innocence. But you can come back from that hurt stronger and smarter than you were before. You just have to stop trusting people.

It’s kind of a sad lesson, isn’t it? Yeah, well. I had to learn it as well. And I’m trying to teach it to my character, but how can I teach it to my character if I can’t even define her?

Here we are. We’ve made it to the point where I am doubting myself. I’ve written well over 17,000 words in the first draft, plus MUCH more in my character sheets and outlines, and I’m at a point where I think: holy fuck, I know nothing. I know LESS than nothing about writing and I’m trying to write a story. What the fuck was I thinking? Clearly I am in way over my head.

Earlier today I began thinking about starting it all over again and the thought alone is so insurmountably depressing that I can’t think of it any more. So I’m going to step away from the computer and do other things to occupy my time until the urge to delete the first draft that is only half-finished (wow, is it already half-finished?) subsides.

Throwing Out Pitches

Sometimes I get bogged down by the amount of advice that I consume on the internet. It feels like a weight that presses down on me. I get advice and I can immediately see where I can use it to improve, but then there’s more advice coming at me, and I start to lose my grip. Maybe it’s less like a weight pressing down on me than a conveyer belt bringing along fresh products that need to be put into a box quickly. I lose control of my rhythm because I get confused and I start stuffing information into my mouth to make it disappear because I can’t think of where else it can go. Then my brain shuts down.

Lucille in the Chocolate Factory. She knows what’s up.

Can not compute.

I know I have a lot of stuff to learn about this whole writing business. I don’t want to get bogged down by all of this advice, though. It stalls me. It makes me think that I’m no good at what I do. It makes me forget all of the progress that I’ve made.

Lately I’ve learned to be more patient. A lot of my stalling out happened because I wasn’t patient. And I think part of this comes from the overload of information I would give myself. I would spend a day mindlessly consuming information and I would be left with a whole lot of confusion at the end of hte day because all of that advice came with actionables and I didn’t know what to turn to first. Which actionable should I do? To the point where I wouldn’t know what to write about anymore.

So I’ve been more mindful of that lately. I want to succeed and I’m understanding now that, while advice is good, it’s the getting shit done part that actually makes things happen. To that end, I use my time in different ways now. I’m mindful about it. When I decide I want to do something for a set amount of time, I set my mind to that task and that task alone (with the occasional Facebook or Twitter break, of course. Come on, I’m only human.)

It took me a long time to realize this is how I need to work to get shit done. And thus far it’s proven a good method. For instance, I’ve written over 12,000 words in my novel thanks to this method. I set a goal of 500 words for myself. And just recently I decided that this would be a daily goal. Instead of waking up each morning with a cup of coffee and an hour on Facebook (please don’t judge me) I’d wake up with a cup of coffee and a half hour on Facebook, followed by 500 words. I’d been stalling on the book lately because I haven’t been making it a priority and I want to complete this book. I realized though that I wasn’t giving it enough of a priority on my to-do list. It was there, but it was often at the bottom of the list and it was rarely crossed off. That and updating my mailing address on my credit card; these were two tasks that I just keep putting off and having to write them each time my to-do list gets too full and I need to write a new one. Now it’s going to get crossed off each time I write a to-do list and then I’m going to write it back on because it’s a daily task. It’s not a once-in-a-while task. The mailing address thing, I’ll get to it eventually.

Back to the pitches. Seeking advice used to be a task that I would spend mindless hours on and I would quickly get bogged down by my desire to learn. I can’t do that anymore. If I want to learn from these experts, I need to do it the same way that I do my other tasks: mindfully. If I want to read articles, I will put them on my to-do list and cross them off when they’re done. And while I’m reading them, I’ll take notes of what I want to learn from them. And then I’ll use that information in the most useful way I can. I have to stop mindlessly searching for advice like that. And I know it’s hard. Half of my Twitter feed is advice for writers, but I can ignore it or save it for later when I know I’ve got the time and energy to read it.

At the end of the day it just comes down to time. How much time do I have to devote to learning versus time I have to devote to the actual task at hand? Right now I’ve got a good amount of time I can dedicate to my career. I have a boyfriend and a good social circle of friends. I don’t have a child, though, which is the number one factor that will cut my time in half (or even a third). A lot of my friends are having children right now. It seems a week doesn’t goes by that I don’t hear about someone having a baby. It’s made me think a lot about my own desires to have children and how they’ll impact my desires for my career. Yes, I want kids. Yes, I get pangs when I hear about others having babies. No, I wouldn’t rather trade places. I’m glad I have this time. I need this time and I’ll use it to learn and do. Because who knows how long I’ll have this time for and if i don’t use it wisely, it’ll be time that I’ll never get back.

First Draft, Second Draft, Third Draft, Go!

There’s something satisfying about writing my first draft by hand. Obviously that doesn’t always work. I can’t write a whole novel by hand and it boggles my mind how one must have done it before the typewriter or computer was invented. Obviously it happened otherwise we wouldn’t have Dickens, Austen, or even Homer or Ovid.

But luckily I live in a time when I don’t have to worry about ink stains and sharpening quills to the right width for my preferred writing style. I do suffer from a distraction when my pen ink runs too thin or not fluidly enough, though.

Despite that, sometimes I need to get off this machine and write by hand. It forces me to think in a different way.

Just now I finished the first draft of an article about fashion designer Lucien Matis for PRODUCT. I transcribed our conversation on the computer and printed out the pages as I often do to highlight the good quotes. But then I was struck by a desire to stay off the machine. I wanted to write this story by hand without the usual aids that I turn to when I get stuck. For instance, I’ll often go looking for a detail while I’m mid-sentence or thought so I can finish it completely. But because I wasn’t on the laptop, I couldn’t find that detail just yet and so I had to force myself to rephrase it. And it doesn’t lack anything without the detail, it’s just a detail after all. I can go in and add it in later of course.

Then there’s the quotes as well. For sometime now I’ve been trying not to write and add quotes at the same time because it makes me lose my thought. I’ve begun to see quotes as devices to use as emphasis, not as driving forces for the story, as I used to. It’s been a good exercise and I feel like I’ve gotten better at structuring my thoughts without those pesky quotes flying around me like little butterflies, waiting to land on the paragraph.

The idea of that came to me when I began writing my novel. At the same time I was reviewing a manuscript for a friend and I noticed that his work contained a lot of dialogue. It wasn’t always needed, though. So I began to see dialogue as something I could use for emphasis, not as a driving force. Perhaps I’ll learn later on that it can be used as a driving force. I don’t think there’s only one solution to writing after all. But this was something that came to me most recently.

This whole writing business, now that I’ve embraced my love for it and have stopped fighting against the tide, is a learning process that is constantly giving me new inspiration and creative fodder. I used to see stories in everyday life. I still do! But now I have the confidence to know that I can write something good because I’m learning how to do it. It’s empowering. Galvanizing. Really fucking cool.

I must get back to Lucien. His second draft is waiting.

How I Learned to Organize My Story

It’s funny how one can take a break from writing a story and when you come back to it, it feels a bit rusty, but once you get some momentum going you end up surpassing your all-time word count record.

Why did I stop writing the piece? Because I needed to figure out how the story went. I realized that  writing sometimes requires organization. I used to think that I was the type of writer who can just free-write without a plan, but now I know that anytime I start to get confused by my own story, I need to stop writing and look at the plan. This time I actually created a spreadsheet to map out the weeks of the story.

Here’s what’s happening. I’m writing a story about a song competition, like American Idol. But I’ve never watched a whole season of the show. I usually drop off after the first round of auditions. The show itself doesn’t really appeal to me. I like some of the singers that have been discovered like Kelly Clarkson, Jennifer Hudson, Hedley (of Canadian Idol fame), Adam Lambert and Haley Reinhart most recently. But the competition itself doesn’t really hold my interest. I’m just not committed enough to sit through a whole season of it. Maybe if I had cable it would be more appealing for me, but even when I had cable, I was more interested in watching The Simpsons to get my tube fix.

So why am I writing a story about a song competition? Good question. I think it’s a good setting for this story.

I really wish I knew what Sass Jordan is famous for, other than being Sass Jordan.

But when it came down to actually writing the story, I only have experience with the first part of the competition, both as a spectator and a contestant. Yes, I auditioned for Canadian Idol. I didn’t get past the first round. Coincidentally, my boyfriend also auditioned for Canadian Idol. He got as far as performing in front of the celebrity judges. He met Sass Jordan! (Canucks will get a chuckle out of that.)

I knew I needed to map the process, but I didn’t know how. I joined a writing community to ask their opinion but, of course, as soon as I did that, I was already thinking about the process and decided to try on my own anyway. First I looked up “How does American Idol work” on Google. That led me to about.com, which became my guide. I opened a new spreadsheet and began mapping it out.

That became an unexpectedly fun part. Not only did I know now how many weeks this competition would take (eighteen) I began to fill in the themes for the nights I wanted eventful things to happen on. Now I have the rest of my story more or less mapped out. I may need to tweak things a bit as I go along, but the task is no longer as daunting as I thought it would be. All it took was me stepping back from the word document for a minute and giving the song competition a good think.

The hardest part was getting myself to sit down long enough to think about it. Because it was confusing I didn’t want to think it all the way through. I was not happy that it was confusing me, but I was also afraid of thinking about it so I avoided it for a good two weeks before I finally did it.

I’m glad I did. I don’t think I would continue this story if I didn’t step back and do a bit of organization, and where would I be? Right where I started off: not knowing a thing about my own story, and not writing.

In the end, I not only got back into the story but I wrote well over my 500 word goal for the day–all thanks to a little organization.

Animals Make Me Happy

I’ve been battling a cold lately thanks to this weird weather we’re having. But it hasn’t stopped me from going out with my camera or phone in hand and snapping away. In particular I love taking photos of animals. The thrill of it is in capturing the animal in a moment of stillness. Animals can’t be told to stand or sit still. Well, you can try, but perfect stillness is not easily achieved. So as a photographer, I have to try and capture them in focus while they’re moving–a particular challenge I love to work on. Plus, they’re so god damn cute.

My father with my cat Trotsky

 

A few weeks ago, I went to a maple sugar farm in Lanark County. The museum and restaurant was closed, but the animals were friendly.

The same week we celebrated Easter and during the holiday weekend, my sister and I visited a goat farm near my parents’ place.

My nephew Ethan was particularly enthusiastic.

Leah was a little more hesitant but she got into the spirit once we showed her how to pick up a lamb.

Animals can be therapeutic. Can you tell?

I can’t tell who loved this more: me or the goat. This photo was taken by my sister.

Animals seem to be everywhere. Thankfully I’ve had my camera with me to snap them in their elements.

This big guy was coming at me to say hello.

My sister’s dogs. Charlie (with the legs up) and Sage.

Horses are a particular favourite of mine that I don’t get to see very often so I made it a point to stop and say hello to these twin beauties when I saw them one fine day. We spent a good twenty minutes nuzzling before I tore myself away. I couldn’t resist taking this last snap of them before I left. I vow to return one day soon with a bag full of apples.

We fell in love with each other that day.

 

Into the Woods

I’m visiting my parents in the country right now. They live about four hours northeast of Toronto, on Highway 7, between Maberly and Perth, Ontario. It’s a lovely little homestead nestled into the rocky Canadian shield. The house is literally built upon a rock, which doesn’t make for good gardening soil, but makes up for it in the amount of beauty it possesses.

Being a city girl in the country, I’ve been doing my best to keep my mind occupied, and I’ve taken to perambulating through the woods that surround my parents’ property, camera in hand, in the hopes that I may capture some of the beauty around me. That and it keeps me from going batshit crazy from boredom. I won’t even tell you how far away the nearest Starbucks is. Let’s just say I haven’t found it yet.

The woods are beautiful. Dangerous, but beautiful. As the snow melts it’s beginning to reveal the mossy rocks and soft leaves that cover the ground in the warmer months. It’s still bloody cold out, though. On this particular day, I went out foolishly in only a sweater, hat and scarf and I was not warm enough. It wasn’t so much my torso that was cold, but rather my feet. Some spots were more snowy than others. At one point, I sunk nearly to my knee into a snowbank. Oops! Watch your step!

Speaking of watching your step, these little beauties are not what you think. It’s deer poo.

The woods are lousy with deer poo! My parents have begun feeding them “deer apples”, which they pick up from a grocery store just outside of Kingston. Deer apple are old and buggy fruit that are unfit for human consumption. Rather than wasting them, this store sells them by the kilo to bleeding hearts like my parents who do things like this:

Deer apples placed conveniently atop the snow on a “dinner plate” for their convenience.

Bleeding hearts, I tell you.

The yellow stuff mouldering in the middle was my offer of celery leaves to the deer. Suffice it to say, they’re not into celery.

Here are a few more shots from my foray into the woods:

This shot reminded me of an ancient Tolkein-ish hilltop. It’s actually the stump of a tree.

We don’t know much about the former owners of my parents’ home, other than that they were a bit…messy. Someone long ago dumped this entire truck onto its roof near the forest’s edge.