On Being 27, and My Monthly Goals

Yesterday was my birthday. And now I'm 27. There is a funny thing about this age – and by funny, I mean morbid. Have you ever heard of the 27 club? By pure coincidence (I'm sure), several famous musicians have died at the age of 27. Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin… Just to name a few.

Okay, I don't actually think I'm going to die this year, but I am morbidly convinced that something awful is going to happen to me or someone I love. Is that stupid? Maybe, but it's there. I've been obsessed with the idea of the 27 club for a long time; I'm even writing a book about it - A Hunter's Fire.

At any rate, I think 27 is going to be much better than 26. On a superficial level, I like odd numbers better than even numbers. Also, the number seven has always been kind to me. Both 17 and 7 were wonderful ages for me. Not to mention, I still have three years to go until the dreaded 30. So that's not too bad.

Enough of that. Let's talk about writing.

January was a total wash in terms of writing. I was supposed to be finishing Grave of the Goddess, but I barely got anything done on it. February was much better: I started writing Holyoak Five, and that has been going swimmingly. (If you haven't read this story blog yet, please consider checking it out. Link is below, or in my sidebar.)

I want March to be my month of Awesome. Because I'm still unemployed, I'm able to be extraordinarily productive in terms of my writing. I want to take advantage of that for as long as I possibly can. So in that vein, let's take a look at my goals for this month.

MARCH GOALS
 1 - Participate in Write Motivation
2 - Blog post about writing once a week
3 - Booking Through Thursday post once a week
4 - Post an episode of Holyoak Five every Friday
5 - Finish reading at least 4 books (in an effort to catch up to my Goodreads challenge)
6 - See note.

Note! I posted on Write Motivation that I wanted to catch up on my backlog of critiques for Grave of the Goddess's first chapter, BUT I think it's far more important to just finish the rough draft before I start in on the rewrite. I was hanging with my boys yesterday, and they agreed with me about this. So I'm adding a goal of ~500 words a day of work on GotG for March.

All right. Wow, if you stuck around through all that, thanks. My final note is this: I followed everyone from the Write Motivation roll call sheet on Twitter and by blog, and I'm hoping to participate a good deal in a community of motivated writers. Here's to making friends and enjoying the community spirit.

Hopefully next time I'll have something more interesting to say. This post made me feel wicked self-conscious. o.0

Superbooks part II

So the other member of TTT (Monsieur Tra La La) jumped on the superbook bandwagon. Hallelujah! Check out his awesome sciencey, magicky, heroey project here: Mighty

Superbooks

My best writing friend and I have long-discussed writing exercises that are especially good for character development.

A few years back, I began a word document titled "Subconscious Theater" specifically for this purpose. It's the place all of my characters go when I'm not writing about them. It's a place where they can interact with each other - across genres and plot lines - and tell me things about them I might not find out otherwise. I add bits and pieces to this document all the time, but most especially when I have writer's block. It doesn't seem to matter how much I can't write in the midst of a novel or short story, I can always get someone to say something to me in the theater.

Anyway, last night, best writing friend was telling me about this man named Henry Darger who worked for years and years as a janitor - and was all the while writing and illustrating a fairly epic fantasy novel (15,145-page, single-spaced manuscript called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion). This excited best writing friend into something he's calling superbooks.

It's a writing exercise in which hundreds of characters are treated in four to five page installments in an interconnected world but without necessarily interacting. The purpose is to develop characters, concepts and scenes for later use in conventional writing.

This made me insanely excited because it sounds like a better organized version of my Subconscious Theater, or the soap opera project I've been trying to put together. So I suggested: oh, hey, blog format. And he agreed.

So, here we go. Two superbooks for you to lose yourselves in. Two very different superbooks, I might add.

Best writing friend's can be found here: Godhead of the Immortal Moth-King. He is a fantastic writer (the Terror member of TTT) so I can attest that his blog will definitely be awesome.

Mine will be the polar opposite of his in many ways. A somewhat trashy, but hopefully immersive and possibly surprising, soap opera style story. It can be found here: Stormwatch 

We, soldiers of a different sort -

“We, Soldiers of a different sort,
We, wasters of ink and page,
We, warriors of words,
Masters of melancholy,
Harlots of the pen,
We bleed these volumes,
and expect only absolution.”
- Jarvis Black

Writing has been going... and going. I made an executive decision to get virtual TTT sessions going. TTT, for those not in the know, is a writing group that a few of us began back when I was a junior. The acronym stands for Triumvirate of Tea and Toast as we were originally a threesome who would get together in my kitchen, drink tea, and make extravagant toasts to our own greatness. Really it was a chance for us to get together and commiserate, read, and edit each other's work. Often it devolved into the sharing of internet memes and occasionally insane giggling fits induced by too many pixie stix. (I bought a ginormous package of them for NaNo that year, and they carried through for much of the year.)

The year after its inception, TTT gained some distinction. We assigned T-words to describe our different writing styles (Terror, Tragedy, and Tra La La - guess which one is mine?). We created ourselves a banner that hung proudly in my room and living room for two years, and which caused some grief when I left Worcester and had to leave it with the other two original members.

(Preserved forever in photographic form. Our Ts are all supposed to correspond to their meaning.)

This past year, we incorporated another person (unfortunately he's still T-less, but we did say he could be the floating tea pot above my head on the poster). And last semester all four of us blazed our way through National Novel Writing Month together because we are awesome like that. So it was a little sad this year with our newest member and me both moving away from Worcester. Terror and Tra La La will fortunately be living together for their final undergraduate year. But due to this minor diaspora, we decreed that having virtual TTT sessions was a must.

I've decided to commit myself to getting through the final edits for Wings of Destiny, my 2008 NaNo of paranormal romance genre proportions. Via virtual TTT this means getting an edit from my fellow writers for a chapter each week. This also means that I have to personally edit a chapter a week. Good kick in my butt, I'd say. I'm excited about this because I think it's going to be a lot like what William Tapply's Writing the Novel and Advanced Fiction Writing classes were (minus his awesome read-aloud of our work).

So I've got that going.

Face the Flames is still forging ahead. Slowly but surely. Chapter 8 is gonna be done in the next few weeks. And then there's only one more chapter in part one! Part Two is gonna be a hellacious ride, so I'm itching to get to it. Plus Terror and Tra La La make special guest appearances beginning in chapter 9. Whee.

And then there's the short story I signed up to write for Fantasy Big Bang.


Author Sign Ups | Artist Sign Ups
Come and join us at the
I'm writing a prequel to Creatures of the Wind, a novel of mine that is almost as old as Face the Flames. Yow. More about that as I write it.

That's where things stand in my writing world. Now if I could just get a job...

(No real reason for this other than my thinking that every writer should have a cat. This is Callie, my grandparents' calico. She's a sweetheart and absolutely loves to walk across my keyboard whenever I'm typing. ... of course, I have a quote for this.)

"A catless writer is almost inconcievable. It's a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys."
- Barbara Holland