Category: side projects (Page 2 of 4)

Early Morning Writer

April 21, 2023 / JennyDetroit / 2 Comments

I’ve been trying to start this habit for AGES. Everyone who works and has kids seems to swear by waking up in the wee hours of the morning and getting their writing done before anyone else is up. They make the sacrifice to go to bed earlier, or simply give up some of their sleep, so they can devote time to their writing.

It sounds like a good solution, right? If life is busy and there’s no time for pursuing one’s creative work during the day or evening, then get up before dawn and do the work then. Simple. Effective. Before you know it, you’ve written a novel in your little early morning productivity hour.

Except, I have always struggled with this strategy. I can train myself to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier (or, as often happens, sacrifice my sleep), but what I cannot do is form coherent, interesting, or evocative sentences in the pre-dawn hours. I just can’t. My brain doesn’t have any thoughts or ideas that early in the morning. 6:00 a.m. is for shaking the fuzz out of my head, not for making up stories.

And if I wasn’t going to be an early morning writer, then I’d have to be a night time writer, slinking down to the computer after putting the kids to bed and trying to plunk out a few plot points before exhaustion claimed me. But that’s just it: by the time night rolls around I’m EXHAUSTED and cannot form many coherent thoughts either.

I know this sounds like a lot of whining, but there’s a somewhat happy ending here. You see, today, I tried again with the morning writing thing. I woke up at 6:00 a.m. and headed down to the writing computer, and I told myself I wasn’t going to do anything else but write fiction. No writer’s notebook. No reading. No nothing. Just plunk those keys to make some sentences and write the next line in the story. I was going to force myself to write, and by some kind of miracle, I did! I wrote about 800 words in a little less than an hour.

Now, this was just one day, and one day doesn’t make a pattern or a habit. But I figure if I keep doing this every day, if I keep forcing myself to write (even if the writing is crap-ay), then over time, my mind and body will be trained to associate early morning wake ups with heading down to the computer to write.

This kind of pattern/habit building happened to me recently with my back injuring in late December. I was in so much pain (mostly down my leg due to my nerve being pinched) that the only relief I could get was to walk slowly around the house. I had to do — I mean I HAD to do it or I would be in excruciating pain — and because I did it every day without fail when I woke up in the morning, I started doing it automatically. Alarm goes off, do some stretches, roll out of bed, start walking. I used that walking time to listen the the Liturgy of the Hour, so that became part of my daily ritual as well.

And after fourteen weeks of waking up and walking around the house every dang morning, I find that I simply cannot start the day without doing it. My brain doesn’t even make the conscious decision anymore. I get out of bed and start walking. That’s just what I do.

I’m hoping to develop the same pattern/habit with my writing in the morning. Just like my walking, I don’t have to do it perfectly. Most of my morning walks are me hobbling along at a snail’s pace just to get my back and legs feeling normal again. It’s not pretty. But it doesn’t have to be pretty. The walking is what’s important, and the repetition that builds the habit.

So tomorrow, after I wake up and walk, I’ll head downstairs to the computer and start typing. I’ll write anything — a new short story, the continuation of an old one, the prologue to a novel, a random sentence in the middle of my work-in-progress — and I won’t think too hard or too much about it. I’ll just force myself to write, just like I had to force myself to walk despite the agonizing pain.

Knowing that I have to be a little hard on myself to keep the pattern going, it will be worth it if I can change this aspect of my writing process and work habits.

Today’s only the first day. Maybe after I’ve been at it for a week or two, I’ll revisit how this experiment is shaping up. I hope I can make it stick this time.

Blogging Every Day? (Again?)

April 16, 2023 / JennyDetroit / 2 Comments

I don’t know if this is a worthwhile challenge for myself, but maybe I should try blogging every day again.

(To use the word “again” feels like a bit of a stretch. In late 2020/early 2021, I almost managed to blog every day… for a few weeks. But when March rolled around, I was back to sporadic posts and self-loathing. So, to say I’m doing this “again” feels misleading. Anyway. The point is, I’m gonna try blogging every day.)

The trouble with a challenge like this is that my life is filled with the ups and downs of raising young children, and there’s a reason Hollywood directors don’t like working with kids or animals. I can have the best intention of blogging every day, and then suddenly I’m taking care of three sick kids with a stomach bug, or someone’s broken their arm, or they’ve all declared war against each other over who gets to play with the big foam blocks.

I hate setting a challenge for myself and then not completing it. Story of my life, unfortunately.

But I’ve being doing a private challenge for the past several weeks, and that challenge is still going strong despite the hectic life I sometimes lead. Back in the beginning of March, I made a commitment to write at least one sentence of fiction every day (with Sundays being an optional day), and since March 6, I haven’t missed a single week. There are days when I can only write one sentence, but I still write it and count it as a day in my habit tracker

Maybe something similar can be applied to blogging. I might not write long, epic posts every day, but I’ll post something. I’ll write a quick missive about what I read or watched or listened to, or something I noticed the kids playing, or an update on how my writing is going. I don’t know. Kind of a “show your work” project.

I still want to write longer, more in-depth blog posts, but perhaps I can work on those slowly while also posting my shorter, day-to-day ones. A bit like how I write my newsletter.

I might fail this challenge, but I’m still gonna take it on. I’m nothing if not persistent, I guess.

Kickstarter is LIVE!

October 5, 2022 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

The campaign for Avalon Summer and Gates to Illvelion has begun on Kickstarter

I can’t believe I’ve already reached my funding goal and unlocked all the stretch goals! I’m in shock, frankly. Everything else at this point is gravy.

Both of these novels aren’t coming out officially until summer 2023, so to get advanced copies, consider backing the Kickstarter.

I’m offering both ebook and paperback versions of both (with some special perks if you pledge at higher levels), as well as stretch goals that include two short stories and a digital copy of The Thirteen Treasures of Britain, so please join the campaign if you can!

The Bamboo Curtain

August 18, 2022 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

Today I finished another chapter in Avalon Summer. It’s called “The Clay Mines.”

Not sure about it yet. The novella itself is based a lot on my memories from childhood, and sometimes I’m just writing things as I remember them, not really thinking about plot or structure or conflict or tension or anything, just seeing everything in my mind’s eye and transcribing it on the page. The ending of “The Clay Mines” was like that. I was just remembering things and putting them in there, hoping that somehow my subconscious was making connections.

When I go back and reread my words tomorrow, maybe I’ll see things that don’t fit and I’ll cut, or maybe I’ll see a place to add more, but sometimes it’s hard to judge. Everything is hard to judge when it’s your own work. There’s the version in your head and the version on the page — and they don’t match up — but it’s hard to know if what you put on the page is trash, or if it’s just that artists can’t judge their own work.

I think it’s probably better — as the artist — not to judge at all. Just put it all out there and let the readers decide. This is where enjoying the process — the crafting of the story — is more important than the finished product. Whether the “Clay Mines” chapter works or not is/should be an after-thought. I had fun writing it today. I had fun remembering and trying to picture everything clearly, and to my delight, I remembered a detail about my grandparents’ basement that I hadn’t thought of in years.

That memory alone was worth all the time I spent writing the chapter. Suddenly, with the memory of that detail, an entire vault of other memories opened up and came back to me. That experience is part of the reason I’m writing this book in the first place. I want to remember those forgotten details of the past and put them into some kind of coherent narrative, to lift them out of memory and bring them to the present. Today, I did that.

Drawing a Picture of Structure

August 14, 2022 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

I was experimenting the other day with drawing pictures of the structures of my two works-in-progress (Gates to Illvelion and Avalon Summer).

Avalon Summer was pretty easy. The drawing was like a bullseye target with my main character, Sarah, moving through each ring of the target until getting to the center. The novella is very much an interior journey for the characters. Each ring of the target is an experience or set of experiences that leads to insight, facing fears, internal change, etc. I could visualize what I was doing very clearly.

For Gates to Illvelion, however, my first attempt at drawing the structure was a mess. I had these venn diagram/concentric circles going around and then in the middle of it all I drew a “traditional” plot structure (the old linear up and down lines leading to a climax). Somehow I was trying to express the story’s circular nature as well as its linear progression. As a drawing, it was a mess.

Does that mean Gates to Illvelion is a mess too? I don’t think so.

I tried to draw the structure again.

This time, I drew two jagged lines, one on the left side of the page, one on the right. These lines weren’t slowly going up, though, they were going down to a point in the center. This point was the low-point for each of them, the characters of Gwenhivar and the Queen. They were on parallel but also crisscrossing journeys, and I realized that what I had drawn was a mirror image.

THAT is the structure of Gates to Illvelion. A mirror image. The young girl and the older woman are on mirror-like journeys, one going down into the depths and the other trying to find her way back to the surface. A much better image than my first attempt.

Why even do all this drawing anyway? What does this have to do with storytelling, with writing, etc.?

I guess I just wanted to have some fun. To see what my stories would look like visually instead of verbally. I suppose I also was hoping such drawings would help clarify things for me. What kind of stories I was telling, how my imagination should experience them. I don’t work from an outline (not anymore, anyway), so visualization is important. I need to see the movie unfolding, flickering into view from the darkness. But I also need to have some idea of the form my story is taking. This isn’t the same as an outline, but it is a way to “see” what I’m making. Outlines are too plot-focused for me. If I outline, then I get bored of the story when I actually sit down to write it.

But if I discover the story as I’m writing, the experience is thrilling and a lot of fun. No boredom.

However, at some point in the process, I need to have a feeling for the form the story is taking. I need to feel the shape of the story without necessarily knowing what will “happen next.” I don’t think it would be useful to draw a picture of the structure too early in the process; that would be too much like making an outline.

But once the story is a living, breathing organism, then a picture can help. It can show me what kind of organism I’m dealing with. I still don’t know what will happen next in the plot, but I know what kind of story I’m telling, and that lets the movie images flicker more clearly through my mind so I can transcribe them onto the page.