Bethanie's Brain

So a while back, kick-ass authoress Holly Lisle , in her fantastic newsletter, mentioned something about multi-tasking as a writer. Not in those words exactly, but what she was getting at (paraphrasing here...) was: 'don't work on more than one project at once'. Or at least, if you're serious-writing on one project, don't be serious-writing on another at the same time. World building on another project and/or final polish-editing on another project (i.e., max: 3 projects at once) is probably managable (if-and-only-if you MUST). And I thought: 'is she serious'?? Because I am a many-many projects at once sorta gal. At least I thought I was. But then I got to thinking and it sorta started making sense. When you're serious-writing on a project, you're immersed in that project's world. You live it. You breathe it. If you're a bit of a method-writer like me, you become your characters and take on their personalities from time to time in your r...

So I'm trying to prepare for this Script Frenzy thing and, apparently, certain aspects of screenplay writing are going to be no different from novel writing for me. That is, I'm up against the same old brick wall: I've got great characters, I've got a fabulous, far-out setting, I've got absolutely No Plot. OK, I'm exaggerating. Slightly. There's an inkling of Plot. There's a beginning of one in that my characters want something (each other) and can't possibly have it without risking their lives and the lives of everyone they care about. There's even a real, nasty bad guy this time. And here I am: Stuck and No Idea what to do with them now. Aaargh. So. Frustrating. .

Learned something new the other day while editing a client's manuscript. I love that. I ran across this sentence: The Mann-Whitney test was performed to identify genes whose expression was altered during allergen exposure. I stopped short at "whose", thinking "WHAT?! 'whose' should refer to a person, right? A 'gene' is not a person. I need to fix this." Unable to come up with a rewording that I liked, I went looking for an alternative to 'whose'. Strunk and White had nothing to say on the matter. Likewise, the 9th Edition of the AMA Style Guide. Stymied, I turned to Google. (When Strunk & White fail you, what else is there, right?) And I found Grammar Girl ! Grammar Girl had this excellent explanation of why 'whose' is, in fact, perfectly fine. Shakesphere used it this way. So did Milton. I won't bore you with repeating what Grammar Girl has already explained well, but the gist of it is: English doesn't have a relative...

OK, so it's been a while since I last posted. But we are drowning here. Drowing in more ways than one. Drowning in life due to soccer, school events, and life events (we have a family wedding this weekend, so everyone's in town and wants to visit). Drowing in resposibilities at the Evil Day Job, which is getting perpetually stranger every single day... Oh, yes. And it's raining. It's been raining all week. We're supposed to have "possibly severe thunderstorms" today (so the wedding won't be outside this afternoon; poor sister-in-law-to-be :( And actually, we get a break from drowning in soccer today, since the fields are closed, which is good since because of the wedding we'd have been running around like crazy all day. This way we're only running around like crazy half the day....) I don't even want to talk about school - my school - and the test I have tomorrow and how I haven't even read the chapter yet, let alone done any studyi...

Or: Maybe Not. So I decided last night that I was done. After reading so many good books lately while occasionally glancing at my growing pile of pathetic, feeble - and entirely unfinished - attempts at writing, I just gave up. "Fuck writing," I said. "I'm all done. I'll just read from now on. And edit. And maybe review some stuff." As I left the house at 6 AM this morning, I was resigned to just driving. No more plotting on the commute. No more conversations with my characters during the inevitable stop 'n' go near Trinity Lane. No more feeding Dorothy the Muse with my new favorite song while going 80 in the slow lane. Just no more. Dorothy apparently took offense at this decision and smacked me upside the head continuously the whole way to work with all kinds of things I've been stonewalled on for the past several weeks. Figures. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it yet. I may just ignore it and go ahead with the plan to take up s...

... every time I HAVE time to write, I find a 1001 other things to do instead and ... every time I'm up to my eyeballs in everything else, all I want to do is write? Why is that, huh?

...so I can walk off it, 'cuz I could really use a dip in the drink today. It's been a helluva week. It started with a list of 5 papers to edit, submit and/or do something! with (as-soon-as-possible, thank-you-please), which soon grew to 7, then 8, then 10 , which is as many as I normally deal with in a month. Add to that another massive data entry project (which apparently counts as editing, don't ask me why...) and -- drum roll, please! -- a page proof! I knew it! I just knew there would be a page proof this week, since I'm insanely busy. There's always a page proof when I'm insanely busy. Never on a slow week. What fun would that be, anyway? And then, there are the pirates. I got frustrated with them for going full-blown novel on me, when all I wanted was a short story, so I fussed, pouted, and was generally very grumpy until they agreed to tone it down. And then I tried to cram them into a 500-word flash piece. That sorta worked, because I actually FIN...

So I’ve already used up 3500 words of my 5000-word limit on the pirate story. That’s good, in a way, because I’ve written a whole bunch in the last few days and I don’t hate it and I love the characters, but… I love the damn characters and – totally fucking predictably - they’re taking me WAY deeper into their adventures and lives than I have room or any business being in a short story. I mean, I could write 5000 words worth of just backstory ! Seriously, if I manage to tell the story they’re wanting me to tell in less than 20,000 words, I will find a fucking plank and walk off it. Gah! Part of the problem with me writing short stories, I think, is that I don’t read nearly enough of them on a regular basis. I just don’t have a good enough sense of how they’re put together to successfully put one together myself. I’m making an effort to correct that, but … well, there are only so many minutes here and there in a day during which I am not required to be doing something else. *exas...

Or: NaNo - I Hate It When That Happens I just realized I took a bit of a wrong turn in my final climax/battle-to-the-death scene. A wrong turn that is going to cost me 1200 words that I spent the last, like, 3 or 4 days writing. Yeah. 1200 words totally wasted. God damn it, but that SUCKS . I think I'll go do something fun now. Like laundry or swabbing the kitchen. Gah! .

OK, I have swallowed my horror at not finishing the story in December and set a new goal of 85K words to reach the hallowed ground know as “The End” . That will add a little over 5000 new words. Which should be PLENTY , dammit. I’ve got a pretty tight deadline for this – January 12th. That’s when my online Anatomy & Physiology class starts, and since I’ve been out of college for a shocking 14 years (*faints*), I think it’s going to take some adjustment to get used to that kind of brain activity and I doubt I’ll be up for writing much (at least, for a few weeks). Anyway, if I reach The End before the 85K mark, I’ll go back and work on some of the new scenes I’ll have to add when I edit. If I’m still not to The End at 85K, I’m just gonna throw a big, fat hissy fit. .

Still making progress, but slogging along. Christmas, Florida, and family are NOT conducive to writing. Like, at all. I wrote all of 29 words before the kids woke up yesterday, and then it was non-stop Everything Else all day long. Tennis, shopping, Bananagrams ( great game!), and movies (Wall-e, which is effing brilliant) - oh, yes, and eating, let's not forget eating - took up the rest of the day. This morning I managed to get just over 1000 words, so all is not lost, but I wanted to be DONE by now! Arrrgh! At least, the story is where it is supposed to be. Two more scenes and That's. It. Until it's time to edit and probably add another 20K... OK, I think I'll go quietly insane now... .

Thanks to Soleil's blog, I found a nifty little word counter thing-a-ma-bob! The Angel and the Assassin 72,022 / 80,000 (89.0%) This is cool, because it shows what I did before (the gray area) and the progress I'm making on 'phase II', so to speak. Very cool! And I think if you click on it, you can get one too! :-D EDIT: Ooo, weird... does it look all broke up to you? It seems to be fine in my sidebar, but here in the actual post, it's ... been julienned! Ack! .

NaNo 2008 Current Word Count: 70,121 Cumulative Total Words for December: 13,432 Aaaah! I broke 70K last night and it felt good. Bran and Heilla are still a crazy mess and I still don't understand a few critical things that are happening, but I'm just going to go with it. I really, really want to finish the draft by the end of December and I'm running out of time! We leave for Florida next Sunday, and between Christmas and my sisters, I have a feeling not much writing is going to get done there... Plus, there are some other BIG things going on: I got my business licenses from the county and city last week, which means I really need to get the content written for the website so it's ready when the design is done. Saturday in the mail I got notification that the Board of Editors in the Life Sciences thinks I have enough experience to be eligible to take their certification exam - woo-hoo! and I'm thrilled, but now I have to go through the study guide, figure out whe...

NaNo 2008 Current Word Count: 65,433 Cumulative Total Words for December: 8,744 Yep. Still steaming along and even averaging over 900 words a day! Which is bloody amazing considering how much else is going on (most of which I can't even talk about, because it's so top secret...). Unfortunately, it's all about to come to a crashing halt. At least, it's trying to... I can see a brick wall on the horizon. See, Bran and his girl have to escape. They're currently on a forced march through the wilderness to a worse prison than they were in before. But that isn't even the real problem. The real problem is that they have to get away before the bad guy catches up to them, and he's not far behind. Only they have no means of getting away because they're marching through a meadow. There's no cover. No bushes. No boulders. Not so much as a tall weed to hide behind. Plus, it's early spring, so the meadow grass is all flat and half rotted from sitting unde...

Or, at least, there is someone with some sense out there. Someone posted a link to this NY Times article on writing to the AMWA freelance listserve. It's brilliant and painfully, painfully true. Typing Without A Clue And it reinforces my sense that SOMETHING has got to change in the publishing industry, and that if it doesn't change itself, we-the-writers will figure out a way to circumvent it. Maybe POD. Maybe PDF. Maybe something entirely different. I don't know. But there has be a way. There has to be. Because I'm tired of waiting to read Susan's novel about Trevor and the gang . I'm tired of not having hard copies of Joely's stuff . I'm tired of reading about people like Joe the Plumber and OJ Simpson getting published, while people who can actually tell a damn good story don't. OK, so what if the rules are the rules and life isn't fair. I say let's change the damn rules already. So there. .

Amazingly enough... I have not yet fallen behind! OK, OK - so I'm only going for 750 words/day. That's still the Mt. Everest of goals some days, what with grant deadlines, kids, colds, Christmas, and the ever-present Hell known as Housework... :) And things are getting "interesting". I had this one character that had sort of dead ended during NaNo, so I had just let her sit and pout in a corner. Monday morning on the commute in to FPU, she burst out with what actually happens with her while her cousin is being tortured...! Yahoo! Total December Words: 2,399 Total Words for the 2008 NaNo: 59,088 .

I was going to actually sit down and re-figure out how much story I have to write, then post a number, but naturally Boss Lady has a grant to submit tomorrow, so - no time for such pleasures... However, my ball park guess is 9 more scenes and since my scenes tend to run about 2500 words, it comes out to 22,500 for December, which it totally doable. I've set my daily goal at 750 words and snagged that easily yesterday. Tonight, of course, will all about the angiogenesis (formation of new blood vessels) and the genes in this pathway related to breast cancer survival. Oh, the joy. I can hardly contain it. Gah! .

I don't really want to do NaNo this year. Really, I don't. I have too much going on. Someone will get sick. An unplanned grant is sure to appear out of nowhere and be due in the middle of the month. My family is coming here for Turkey Day. Reasons against abound. But it's NaNo's 10th anniversary. Seems like a shame to miss it. And while I was washing dishes a bit ago, I got this totally wicked idea. A deadline would be a really good thing for it, right? Right? Dammit . .

It never fails to amaze me when I'm driving along in the car, minding my own business, Song of the Day cranked up as loud as I can take it, and suddenly BAM! I get fwapped on the head by the huge-est of epiphanies about a story I thought I knew inside out. It happened again this morning. Now just yesterday I had the huge-est of epiphanies that this particular Song of the Day ( Viva La Vida by Cold Play, of all bands...!) is NOT about the character I thought it was, but about someone else entirely and makes so much more sense that way. So I was not expecting another huge epiphany, not so soon after the other one. But there I was, squinting through the pre-dawn dark made even darker by the blessed rain that dear ol' Fay has delivered (it hasn't rained here in a month), Song of the Day cranked up really, really loud - like, loud enough that I could feel the drum bit reverberating in my chest. And as I'm sitting there, squinting and cursing my windshield wipers for not...

Well, it's about time for a post, non? OK, it's past time - kids are sick, work is nutso, etc. And coincidences are coming out of the woodwork. Event 1: Best college girl friend sent me a birthday card last week and we started emailing (after an embarassingly long hiatus). Turns out she's ended up doing much the same thing as I am -- editing for non-native English speakers (although she's in economics whoo-haa, rather than biomedical whoo-haa). Event 2: Not so much an event as the general atmosphere of disorganized bureaucratic clutter at FPU lately has been approaching the itchy side of intolerable. I'm getting fairly burnt out on it. Event 3: One task set out for the Impending Vacation is to write up the content for my freelance website. I did some of that today, since I was stuck at home mopping up vomit (again) and therefore found it difficult to concentrate on actual work stuff and decided: what the hell, I'll just take an effing sick day. Event 4:...