Author: Nancy E. Shaffer

NANCY E. SHAFFER has been an experimental psychologist (M.A., Cognitive Psychology, Rice University), a philosopher (Ph.D., History and Philosophy of Science, University of California, Davis), and software developer. She taught history and philosophy of science at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec and the University of Nebraska Omaha. Her philosophical work has appeared in the journal Philosophy of Science and her pop-culture philosophy website, All Things Philosophical on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series. Dis/inhbition is her first novel. She currently resides in Tempe, Arizona.

That reading thing

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 32 Comments

Once upon a time, I was a big book nerd. I won all the book-reading contests at the public library. You could find me on any given afternoon kicking back on my bed reading something. I think that was true at least up through college.

Then stuff happened.

First, I went to grad school and had piles and piles of required reading. By the end of the PhD, I was burnt out on reading. Second, I actually got around to writing fiction, my long-time dream. Between writing coaches and fan fic readers and the sheer joy of writing, I started spending every spare moment I had writing. To the detriment of my social life (and any other part of life). Third, I started a successful fan website and proceeded to obsessively work on that in my free time. Then those TV shows were cancelled and I cancelled my cable TV and went back to writing fiction again obsessively. Finally, I finally broke down and got cable again and started watching TV a lot.

Suffice it to say, I haven’t done a lot of reading for pleasure in the past thirteen years, unless you count the internet, and then, not fiction of any sort on the internet. I miss it. And yet I find it a big time-suck and don’t do it. I mean, if anything’s going to suck up all my time and be a huge detriment to my social life (or any kind of life, really) it’s going to be fiction writing.

I did some reading in Santa Cruz last week. Mostly because I was on vacation from writing and there was no TV around. I enjoyed it. Now vacation is over and I’m back to writing and TeeVee.

I tried motivating more reading by vowing to read X number of books in 2007 and writing mini-reviews of them in my LJ. That worked fine until moving and job hunting interfered.

Now I’m looking for a way to get myself to read again. It’s ridiculous, really. A pleasurable activity should motivate itself; and yet I can’t seem to get myself to do it. I did it in early 2007 by trapping myself on the bus twice a day without a television or anything to write. Now, there’s no bus. I thought of doing it by trapping myself on some exercise-machine thing without a remote control, but I’m considering buying a rowing machine, so that makes it tough to hold a book. You know the kind where your eye absorb words rather than having some Voice reading it to you?

*sigh*

I know what motivates me to do things I want to do but find it difficult to do. Accountability. Need to lose weight? Go to Weight Watchers meetings. Need to write a novel? Pay a writing coach Real Money to force you to report into her every week. That’s what I need in order to read. So pathetic, I know.

Original fiction project – week of 6/07/2009

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 7 Comments

More work on the morning pages this week. Not as many words as previous weeks, due to unscheduled brain-deadness. You know, there’s still a part of me that wonders sometimes what it is I am doing every morning, since I’m not, strictly speaking, “writing fiction.” I’m outlining, tossing around ideas, accepting or rejecting them, developing characters, thinking about how things will work, but not doing much that actually counts as “writing fictional prose.”

I have been a bit consternated lately since the story I’m developing is still thin on details of actual scenes and is sort of all broad strokes and general plot points. And those broad strokes and general plot points just keep getting more complicated and convoluted. And it’s consternating because I am struggling at the same time to figure out how to cut half, if not more, of the words out of my old ’93 novel, Dis/Inhibition, and here I am busily developing another story that’s going to be just as long.

The only difference is, I’m catching this fact before even a single word is written, and so I can plan ahead of time to make this not one, but a series of novels, with a natural division point, unlike my old novel.

Last weekend I was sitting in a dark theater watching the new Star Trek movie for the second time, enjoying one of the most complicated, convoluted SFF stories of all time, which is of course, also not one story but dozens, if not hundreds of stories. Star Trek is a story world.

And it occurred to me that that is what I’m doing right now. I’m not “writing my story,” I’m world-building. And that’s as important a step as writing fictional prose or plotting the novel. A good “story world” is a world we will want to visit over and over until all its stories are told.

All Things Philosophical on Star Trek

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 21 Comments

So I have seen the new Trek movie. With my flist abounding with spoilers and rave reviews, and me needing to de-friend that I’ve belonged to since I joined LJ, it seemed a good idea.

Plus, yesterday I managed to fiddle with my computer keyboard until I found the culprit causing the typing problem I was having, so I fixed that (for now), and could cancel my Genius Bar appointment allowing me to go to an early morning matinee.

So, to make a long story less long, I liked it. I am, of course, not without my issues. movie spoilers

Original fiction project – week of 4/26/2009

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 7 Comments

Another week, another five morning pages, this time totalling 2,077 words. I am really glad I have developed this practice, but only a couple things are keeping it from turning into a rut of me tapping out prose that doesn’t excite me. One morning, I was writing something about the mythology of my spirit creatures when I just thought, “Ugh, I don’t like this.” So I rewrote the same paragraph four times, each time changing the details until I wrote something that actually interested me. That’s a useful technique to remember.

The other thing that occurred to me, since I am writing in character POV now (when I remember to–hey, it’s 5:30 am when I do this stuff), is to bring in the soap opera already. I have realized this since I started re-reading my old novel, Dis/inhibition. It’s got a lot of stuff about grad school and careers and life, but in the main, it’s about relationships. X loves Y but cheats with Z. A is at odds with their boss, B, and does conniving things to get the upper hand in the relationship. That sort of stuff. It doesn’t come as naturally to me now as it did ten or fifteen years ago, but it’s still what draws a person into a story, even if it’s about space aliens or spirit beings.

It’s also time again for me to go through what I’ve written up until now and pick out the parts I like the best and expand on them in what I write next.

And just keep at it, even when I feel like it’s in a rut.