Original fiction project – week of 11/22/2009

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 3 Comments

Still organizing and sorting my story ideas, but I’m almost finished and December is upon us. So that means writing already, damn it, and the plan (I think) is this: morning pages. That seemed to work well for me when I was generating ideas, partly because the first-thing-in-the-morning thing kind of bypassed the critical left brain, and partly because it was only ten minutes. You can do ten minutes, can’t you? Less pressure. The other thing I’d like to try is to stick to a chronological narrative. In my earlier writing attempts on this story, I worked off prompts of various sorts, and that produced a lot of random bits. That was on purpose to generate ideas. But now I am thinking that if I want to keep my interest in the writing going, I need to tell myself a story. As in, “this happens, and then that happens, and then, what happens next?”

So that’s the plan.

Original fiction project – week of 11/08/2009

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 2 Comments

November is turning out to be a “take-stock” sort of month for me. Which makes sense. I finished a five-year-long writing project on the last day of October, and am only days away now from my birthday. Today marks the two-year anniversary of starting my present job. Pinned between those those events as I am, I feel take-stocky–cleaning the disaster zone that is my house after pouring most of my energy into writing and home improvement; organizing and filing away the piles of paper work that have just accumulated because I throw everything papery that is not an unpaid bill or obvious junk mail in a big pile; making a *budget* (eep).

And continuing the process of pulling together and collating all the ideas on my new story I’ve come up with in the last year.

I think the next step will be to pick a few of the ideas I like best, and just start writing. No outline, minimal quality control, no word count or deadline goals. And as soon as I run out of ideas, return to my giganamous idea font. And of course report in here that I am indeed doing that.

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.