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It's still work

2/23/2015

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Apparently the universe has decreed that I am spending an extra day in Toronto, because when I tried to board the train yesterday I found that my ticket mysteriously read MONDAY, February 23. And the earliest they could arrange to get me home at that point was 3:00 today anyway.

So I am perforce taking my remaining vacation day for the year and spending it chilling with my frighteningly brilliant sister, eating a whole lot of pakoras, and, of course, writing like a madwoman.

My dismay and heartbreak, internets. IMAGINE THEM.

My sister draws for a living. She is also in school full-time for graphic design. And on top of this she has her own epic projects percolating on the back burner. We were talking yesterday about how you manage to wedge your own stuff in around the cracks; she was bitterly discouraged at how difficult and anxiety-making her own stuff had become when for clients she could confidently hash out concepts and refine them without any trouble.

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It's so easy to get sucked into #4 with your own stuff, because you care so much about it - if it's not coming easily, you must be a total fraud, a hack, a sell-out who will spend forever chained to a desk churning out mediocre nonsense for other people.

Here's the thing: your own work? It's still work.

It's just that the client is you.

Ever have one of those days where you really want to draw and you go to start and then WHAM OH LOOK EVERYTHING YOUR PENCIL TOUCHES IS CURSED

— Zélie Bérubé (@zibliedraws) February 22, 2015

After sleep and talking with @metuiteme and Indian food and a multivitamin I am feeling a lot better.

— Zélie Bérubé (@zibliedraws) February 23, 2015

Among the things from said conversation that struck me is that for some reason I feel way too emotionally invested in work I do for myself

— Zélie Bérubé (@zibliedraws) February 23, 2015

Staring over my own shoulder being like "THAT'S NOT RIGHT" while I've barely even started working? I'm ACTUALLY my worst client.

— Zélie Bérubé (@zibliedraws) February 23, 2015
Kameron Hurley has an excellent post about the virtues of her day job writing corporate copy. The environment in which I write for pay is much less cutthroat - probably downright cushy by comparison, actually - but there are still deadlines and clients with expectations and stakeholders to negotiate with. And there are always going to be those people whose input you just have to roll your eyes and run with, because, to quote the post mentioned above, "you're a professional."

You get used to finding a foothold in an abstract idea, drafting text around it, noodling around with it until it works, having it come back for a shift in emphasis, and then again to be cut down by half because it turns out there won't be space for the French version otherwise. It makes taking three or four tries to sort out a scene in a novel and then finally axing it or moving it and having to readapt it all over again look reassuringly normal.

This from Kameron Hurley is also spot on:

Writing is a job, for me. When you get to work at 8am at your day job and your day job is writing, well...you come to work and you write. Having a day job in marketing and advertising actually trained me really well on how to hit deadlines and write to spec. No one ever comes to work where their job is stocking vending machines and says, "Well, I really need to warm up my stocking-vending-machine brain." They just get to work.


(Almost more reassuring, coming from her, was this: 

Working on a Thing, feeling overwhelmed by Impostor Syndrome. Fake it til you make it, my friends.

— Kameron Hurley (@KameronHurley) February 23, 2015

We're in good company!)
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Seeking some insight into my madness: Critique blog hop

2/15/2015

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I discovered this brilliant initiative hosted by Amy Trueblood and Michelle Hauk while surfing through the Twittersphere. The notion is that you post your novel pitch and first 250 words on your blog, add it to their list of links, and then critique the five entries before you and the five entries after you.

So here is mine! If anybody cruising through here is interested in exchanging full manuscripts, please email me (click on the little envelope button in the top corner). 

*** Taking this down for now, but am totally up for swapping queries, pitches, whatever - drop me a line! ***

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Work places

2/14/2015

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I am writing this rattling along on my little bluetooth keyboard with my tablet perched on my lap: a three-year-old Samsung Note 10.1, purchased about a year ago from a friend. This setup is not as adequate a replacement for a laptop as I'd hoped, but still, holy portability, Batman.

Both tablet and keyboard are festooned with stickers from my younger daughter's dance class, since I haven't gotten my act together enough to get her a sticker book for the purpose. Said dance class generates a 45-minute window during which I can sit in the lobby of the studio and hack at whatever document I'm working on; this window expands to about 1.5h if I remember to bring the kids' tablet to keep her entertained until her sister arrives with my husband...which I am just realizing I did not do today, dammit - between that and leaving my tea in the car I'm really on a roll. Ugh.

The lobby is a wasteland of industrial gray carpet and winter boots and fluorescent lights, about the size of our dining room, intermittently packed with fellow kid-wranglers. I seize the downtime, since it's available - it's a precious commodity these days and you learn to take it where you can - but there are definitely nicer places to write. Such as...

* Pour Boy. I think the building might have been converted from an old house. Two smallish, drafty floors, loud music, Strongbow, and an assortment of delicious and inexpensive food. Quirks of the floor plan create a couple of little nooks that one can curl up in quite comfortably with scarf, sweater, work, and drink - I'm particularly fond of the one upstairs, which has a big orange light hanging over it, a power outlet behind the bench, and enough room at the table for about six people. I have had a few highly successful evenings there with delightful company, either typing away in companionable silence or chewing over tricky plot points, and the whole place has acquired a pleasant air of inspiration for me as a result. Being there has become a productivity charm, my equivalent of Mr. Earbrass's writing sweater ("always worn hind-side-to.")

* The Elgin Street Diner. Well, I only managed this the once, but it was awesome. This was when my husband was spending three days a week in Montreal and schlepping to the bus station at 5 a.m. every Monday. Easter Monday was a holiday for me, since I work in Ontario, but it wasn't for him. Since the kids were at my mom's overnight, we got up together at 4:30 and I drove him to the bus. And then I took myself to ESD to enjoy their marvelous "hangover breakfast" (eggs, bacon, poutine - yum) over obscenely early morning writing. The place was almost entirely deserted at that hour and as a result felt pretty grim and twitchy and horror-movie-ish, which was perfect for the scene that fairly flew onto the page over the next couple hours. I have been meaning to do this again ever since.

* The deck. (In my mind these words are always accompanied by a fanfare from a heavenly choir.) Last summer's all-consuming DIY home renovation project resulted in the best room in the house, an oasis of order, peace, and quiet overlooking the garden. I am dead proud of it and cannot wait to use it again. It's piled with a good three feet of snow at the moment, but man, come mid-April, I will be out there every morning it's not pouring rain with tablet and tea, chilling on Ikea's ingenious modular outdoor couch.

* The project room. Somewhat more chaotic and definitely less Pinterest-worthy than the deck, mostly because the project du jour always ends up strewn all over it; just now, this translates to heaps of fabric I haven't yet finangled storage for. As long as I can wedge myself into the corner of the couch with enough space on a shelf to rest a drink, though, I can cope. It's especially fabulous in the morning, when the sun comes pouring in. I plan to hang some inspiring wall art - my "NOVEL REVISION ATE HER BRAIN" poster and some pages from The Unstrung Harp - to egg myself on.

* Office lunchtimes. It took me a long time to figure out how to carve out the mental space do this, and I don't often manage it, but it's surprising how much I can get done in an hour if I closet myself in one of the meeting rooms with a wall of windows overlooking the courtyard. There's the swank coffee shop down the street available for this purpose, too, but it is (a) pricey and (b) usually packed. This has the added bonus of speeding up the workday, too, because I look forward to it in the morning and then, having accomplished it, spend the afternoon feeling all virtuous.
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Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered...

2/7/2015

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Fellow Canuck Kate McIntyre, whose debut novel comes out this summer, is launching her writing blog with a great series of posts on disentangling oneself from a prolonged dry spell. I read the following and was all ZOMG MY PEOPLE.

"I kind of stopped writing for a while. I did this because writing got hard. We get to a certain age, or a certain level of education, or a certain something, and it doesn’t come quite as easily as it used to. And there are so many reasons. We have things to do. We think every word we put down sucks. We get caught up in the little things. We compare our work endlessly to that of our favourite authors. We come across something in our outline that doesn’t work anymore and it seems daunting and impossible to fix it, so we quit. I wrote almost twenty novels between 1992 and 2000, and then for eleven years, nothing. A lot of false starts, a lot of fanfiction, a lot of outlines, and not a single manuscript. The stories I wanted to tell didn’t go away. They just piled up. Some got repurposed into fanfiction ideas. Some turned into roleplays with my friends. But it’s not the same as writing down and really creating something, and when I tried to do that, it was like I was lost in an impossible labyrinth. The walls were all the reasons writing had stopped being the easiest thing in the world and started being one of the most frustrating, and it was like I couldn’t get out."

I have also recently fought my way free of this particular labyrinth, and the worst thing about it is that you're sure you must be the only one trapped there. Because a REAL writer would have a map, or a vorpal sword, or a helpful talking animal so as to breeze through this whole ordeal, but you're left trudging around in circles and taking inventory of your pockets and wondering how a lipstick or a ball of string is going to help you get out of this mess. You must not be a real writer, clearly.
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Laurie Halse Anderson, in that post I mentioned in the last entry, attributes writer's block to one of two sources: fear or exhaustion. Exhaustion is easy to fix. Fear less so. That's the one that landed me in the labyrinth both times. Better to sit quietly and look stupid than to pick up a pen and remove all doubt. And with two kids and a full-time job (the most recent bout) or school, a wedding coming up, and a full-time job (the previous bout) or pretty much any roster of, you know, adult obligations and preoccupations, you've got plenty of excuses to not make it a priority.

So yes, I'm definitely looking forward to reading about Kate's experience, and thought I would post my own strategies for solving the labyrinth:

* Make up your mind to do it. Do or do not, there is no try. My parents used to tell me (about any number of things) that "you don't have to like it, you just have to do it." As a kid I found that profoundly unhelpful, but as a grownup it's oddly liberating. You don't have to do it well, or graciously, or quickly, or without drinking and whining and eating a lot of chocolate; you just have to do it. 

Draw a line in the sand - something nice and immutable and impossible to argue with, like a date, preferably an imminent one - and tell yourself that beyond this line there will be no more not writing. I have a marvelous quote on my office wall, where I will see it every day: "Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."

* Don't bash your head against anxiety for too long at a stretch. I once read a strategy for overcoming phobias that boiled down to "stand closer, stay longer" - this is sort of the same principle. I wrote my MA thesis in two-page chunks because that was about as much as I could take without feeling physically ill. But two pages a day still piles up eventually. And slowly the productivity made me feel a little better, and I could sit with it a little longer and get a little more done. Again, set the bar for volume and enthusiasm low. You don't have to like it; you just have to do it. Small increments are, helpfully, also easy to stuff into the cracks in the rest of your life (like the 2h between the kids' bedtime and mine).

* Bribe yourself with treats. Pour yourself a glass of wine, buy yourself a fluffy coffee concoction, sit yourself in your very favourite and most comfortable spot with a pastry. Even better, save your treats for writing time; then you have something to look forward to, even when writing is about as appealing as a poke in the eye. Don't save the treats as a reward that you can only have after being productive; that just makes it more depressing if you screw up.

* Find allies in productivity. They don't even have to be writing. If you know somebody who's in school, who's coming up on a work deadline, who's knitting something, who has to do their taxes - get together and sit quietly together while you all get shit done, whether at somebody's house, at a pub, or over Skype. It's like having a gym buddy; they keep you accountable. (Although you have to be a little careful with this one, because god knows it's easy to get derailed into just hanging out and drinking wine. Not that this has happened to me. Ahem.)

The labyrinth has no power over you. Give it hell.
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Halfway through a remarkably unhorrible armpit of the year

2/2/2015

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Three things I have learned from a month of reading books and roaming the intert00bz over wine:

1) It is OK to set time aside to recharge every now and again.

I spent a couple of thoroughly miserable years doing nothing but working a dead-end admin job and watching TV (“I once thought I had mono for, like, an entire year,” to quote Wayne’s World, “but it turns out I was just really bored.”) I didn’t even realize how zombie-like I was feeling until – out of sheer desperation – I went back to school and started picking up as many side projects as I could handle in an attempt to find a different track for my life and get on it as fast as possible. The effect was so revitalizing that I’ve made sure ever since to keep my plate chock full of extracurriculars.

So when I arrived at January thoroughly burned out and kind of broke after the holidays, unable to justify the expense involved in crafty classes and sick to death of all my current projects, I was pretty much resigned to spending the armpit of the year in the slough of despond. But instead, I found that a few weeks’ worth of evenings spent on the couch with books, blogs, and wine was…astonishingly restful. Restorative, even. It helped that one of the first blogs I looked up was Laurie Halse Anderson’s; I took this post about writer’s block as justification for purposefully putting my feet up. Sometimes you need permission, you know?


2) Twitter is awesome.

If you pile a bunch of people onto your feed whose interests align with yours and whose ideas you respect, the result is a treasure trove of fascinating and enlightening reading. @Torbooks posts links to short stories, for instance, something I would only rarely catch up with otherwise. I have discovered blogs about kidlit, blogs about writing, blogs about SFF, blogs of fellow Ottawa writers, blogs about marketing. Book recommendations! Agent websites! It gets to the point where I’m going to have to ration it carefully to keep myself from falling down the rabbit hole. Will have to round up links in another blog post so as to be able to go back to them.


3) Many writers – if not most – keep their day jobs.

I knew, vaguely, that writing is not lucrative unless you write something that sells outlandishly, freakishly well. Still, I was surprised to learn that writing is still an income supplement – because it would be a modest and/or unreliable living – for people with ten books in print or a stack of accolades and awards.

Is it weird that I find this reassuring? Better than finding it discouraging, I guess. I’ve been picking at a post on this topic after reading some interesting back and forth in various forums, so maybe more on this later. The short version: it confirms for me that it is perfectly OK not to stake my living on this particular ambition. It also clarifies what exactly success in this venture means to me, namely writing something – preferably more than one something – that is respectable enough to (a) print and (b) find an audience of some kind somewhere. The lack of fame and fortune involved somehow makes this look a lot more achievable.

 

All in all, the result of giving myself January “off” is that I’m heading into February feeling shockingly restored. I’ve launched into the next round of editing and elaboration for Ghost Story #1 with enthusiasm and confidence at high ebb. And having set myself the modest goal of 30 pages in 30 days (nice round numbers combined with low expectations make for encouragingly achievable goals) I find myself about a third of the way there on day 3.

I will remind myself to be patient and moderate my excitement later. For now, excelsior!

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    The Unspeakable Horror of the Literary Life: A Blog

     The night before returning home to Mortshire, Mr. Earbrass allows himself to be taken to a literary dinner in a private dining room of Le Trottoir Imbécile... The talk deals with disappointing sales, inadequate publicity, worse than inadequate royalties, idiotic or criminal reviews, others’ declining talent, and the unspeakable horror of the literary life.  
    - EDWARD GOREY
    Tweets by @metuiteme

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