Spinwork Blog

The more I write, the more I liken the process to falling asleep. There are times when it happens easily, and you drift right away without so much as a second thought. Then there are times where you actually have to lie there and will yourself to relax before it happens. And finally, there are times where you completely overdo it and try to make yourself, which never works.

Lately, my writing feels a lot like a mix between the last two. My good days even require will to get going, and my medium to bad ones usually involve me forcing it. Every so often when I have a bad day with writing, I stop and pull up one of my old projects from my archive and read it over to see if I can garner some knowledge I had in the past. Yesterday, however, doing this afforded me with a few surprises. I’ve made it a rule to avoid my old Hellion material–mainly because after thinking and over thinking things, I pretty much wrote that off that project as hopeless and wanted to avoid digging gouges in my laptop with my nails. So when I found myself pulling up draft two stuff–crap I’d written from August to December of 2005–I found myself terrified to read. Then I started flipping through scenes and chapters and what-not.

The conclusion I came to was that while early Hellion was a conceptual wreck–I seem to remember now all the editing I did was to make sure the concepts worked–the actual writing was easy and flowing. The characters have glimmers of reality and everything really feels a lot lighter than my current work in terms of construction. Of course, I know a lot more than I did in 2005 about paragraph and chapter structure (Hellion chapters clocked in around 17-22 pages–Salamander stuff was around 10-15.) and if anything I view my characters as real people now and not cartoons (it was always fun discussing with Marina how my characters sometimes acted like they came from an anime). But still, when they weren’t acting unrealistic, I can actually feel life in their literary husks. It really hit me reviewing my rewritten introductory stuff–Chapters 2-3 where you met Lionel and Danielle for the first time. Of course, work was needed, but askl;jfsdjl;. It was a far cry more natural than my current stuff.

See, this tears it. I now know I’m over thinking my current stuff. And what’s funny is, I know how I used to write and the mindset that came with it. Although to do that now, I’d have to completely zen myself since I’ve factored in so many other mentally perceived consequences to my work. One of them is what people think–which is horribly wrong of me. That’s a major factor, too. All this Hellion stuff I read happened before I started showing my work online. While I did gain a thing or two about feeling my work was readable, I lost a lot in my development process. Before, it was “yeah, I can’t see this published, its crap, but somehow I can still write without being in mortal anguish.” Like, I had no intention to show Hellion to anyone until it was done, and you know, that was GOOD! These days I write it all, “soon, I’ll show this to someone. To see if I’m doing it write.”

The logic here makes me want to throw back my head and flog myself mercilessly with my own spleen.

Yes, I know I’m completely terrified of pulling another Hellion–starting something I don’t finish. But at the same time, I’ll never finish something if I keep putting all these stops on myself. Half of it are perceived, too–since I came online. I don’t know how, or why, but as soon as I started going to RUGE, people just started having a great deal of respect for my stuff without hardly reading any of it, or knowing me. Now I sort of want to crawl in a hole away from all things internet. I guess this would explain why.

I’ll take this as a call to loosen up ^_^;

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Spring break’s just started for me, leaving me with one of two choices. 1). Go home and go back to my old routine of staying up until 5AM watching movies with basically no internet, then rising to write at 4PM in the afternoon or 2). Stay in Vermont, spend the next ten days writing like a fiend, and get back to where I want to be with Avondalius and my other projects. As things go right now, it’s looking like a split of both. Prior to this week, I went through a rough two weeks just trying to motivate myself to so much as think. Now that’s done with and I’m feeling creative again, I think this week will be spent living off of salad and ramen while I plug away, and I’ll maybe head into town on Thursday or Friday and see my folks and all that.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been going over a lot of project notes for other works of mine, among them Twice Born and Shadower, trying to decide which one I want to pick up when I finally get Avondalius online and rolling. The way I’ve got things planned out is I’ll only be writing Avondalius three days a week, leaving the rest of my time pretty much open for other stuff. I suppose that’s an upside to the three-chapters-weekly thing I have in mind. I’ll be able to theoretically work on another project while producing this one. The good thing about Avondalius is that if I do my homework now, I’ll basically be set for the next six months in terms of what to write. I’ll be titrating the story. This should be good exercise for me =)

I decided back in 2005 that no matter what happened in college with my projects, that I wouldn’t try to publish until I’d graduated and spend most of my time “training” myself to write full time. Shifting tasks is one of my goals. Even if I don’t wind up writing full time as a profession, this ability will allow me to–hopefully–go between whatever job I choose and writing. This summer will be a test of this while I write Avondalius, work, and hopefully keep up to date on this second project I’ve picked up. I can’t say much about what it is now–I’m still in that phase there I’m plodding through, seeing if what I’m writing is enough to hook me for the next several-some thousand words I may be with it. What it looks like is I’ll be working on this for most of break while I let my two-straight-months of Avondalius writing sink in while devouring this new morsel.

Blathering done–I’d like to say thanks to anyone who reads these and has shown interest in my work over the past few months. I really appreciate it ^_^

And no, this post title isn’t supposed to make any sense.

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The way I see it, there is actually something worse than writer’s block, and that’s writer’s anguish. Undefeatable by rocket launcher or caffeine, writer’s anguish permits the writer to have inspiration and write, but only a crock of complete and utter incoherent shit. Correct in grammar, fecal in nature.

To wit, the only way one could conceivably describe writer’s anguish is if whatever creative muse you possess getting horrendously drunk and getting violated anally (and for the purpose of the rest of this sentence, vaginally) by a raunchy titan, thus producing a love child so disgusting and vile that it’s only purpose in life is to defecate repeatedly in epic quantities over all whom the muse inspires. Of course, the inspiree is still capable of putting out. Only they are completely covered in said love-child’s shit.

Now that I’ve filled your minds with images that would probably make any Greek or Roman God thunderbolt me in the nethers…

I’m currently suffering from writer’s anguish. No, it is not pretty, nor does it involve feces, but it might as well. Because for the past two days, I have penned what must be some of the most soulless, unworthy crap I have ever put down as a writer. You think I’m exaggerating? I probably am, to some degree, but I kid you not when I say it was shit. Like, shitty enough that I asked myself why I decided to major in writing and didn’t go to flight school like I’d originally planned. You know, “oh, woe-is-me, life is meaningless, I’m going to go print up my manuscript and destroy my flash drive while slitting my wrists with the pages, God fucking dammit why was I born, can some one rid me of this misery, the Lord poops on me” sort of stuff. Of course, I’d never go to that extreme, but writing does occasionally fill me with such anguish ^^;

What’s the point to this little anal excretion of thought, this heartless defecation of emoness?

Bad writing days happen. They happen, and sometimes you feel like shit. In fact, you might even want to consider crawling into your own rectal cavity. But life goes on. Writing goes on. And you can always edit, despite the utterly rancid diherria you may unleash. Just slog through it as best you can, no matter how high the shit rises. Put on your writer’s boots.

Good luck, and keep shitting writing.

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Most of the people who know me in real life are surprised when I tell them that anime chokes me up. But it does–to an almost ridiculous extent. Like yesterday, for example. I was up early by accident and sat down to finish watching Kanon (the 2006 version), which I’d downloaded the previous week. To make a long story short, I loved it and the ending affected me enough that the rest of the day was deemed useless for anything other than quiet reflection. It was disappointing in a way, because I’d been really looking forward to getting some more work done on Avondalius, but in the end it was probably necessary. 2007 was a really rough year for my personal life, and in a way it was nice to actually have something choke me up that much that wasn’t directly related to my perceived failure, even if it had moments that were cheesy as fuck.

Naturally, no one on SE understands my anime obsession. I think a lot of people over there are used to me as “Ben, fantasy writer” and not “Ben, anime otaku.” I’ve never really been into anime enough to consider myself an otaku, but I watch it enough that some of the structures and themes do seep into my work. A lot of the later chapters of the original Hellion were anime-inspired. That, and both Clannad and Kanon have undoubtedly influenced some of my ideas for how I want to pull off a few concepts in Avondalius and Twice Born.

Speaking of Avondalius, I’d say I’m overdue for an update. I think I’ve settled on a working structure for the project that involves breaking up the action into “parts,” starting with a prologue and then going to part one, two, etcetera. Given that my updates are 2-3 pages and I aim to update three times a week, this seems like the best choice. It gives the project a bit more of a webcomic-like ability to run parts for 4-5 months at a time, followed by periods of break so I can write other things, side stories and the like.

My goal is to finish off the prologue, subject it to some intense editing before I think about getting a site together. Right now, I’ve been pretty much been steering clear of the internet. I’d like to get some work done on this project until I focus on the sites I have. When I do get back, you can bet your ass ESS and SE will get a pretty sizeable update.

I hope. I pray.

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Whenever I write a first draft, I always have that horrible foreboding feeling that “sooner or later, I’m going to have to edit this shit.” Over the years, I’ve come to realize editing is just as much an art as writing is–doing it good enough the first time that the editing process doesn’t involve being ass-raped by a self-held red pen. When I mean editing, I mean self-inflicted edits–those things you do when you want the story to live up to your own standards before you give it to anyone else to read. This hit me last night when I was doing the tangent segment for Avondalius and I realized, “yeah, there is a large chance I’m going to have to totally redo this bit, add a lot more here, and maybe nuke this paragraph to oblivion even though I spent a half hour getting the wording to sound right. Fuck.”

When doing something like this, one has a tendency to want to completely scrap the scene and write something entirely new.  I had this problem when I was writing Hellion–although, then again, the entire structure of that book was totally hopeless to begin with (you try writing 440 pages–179,000 words–in eight months in one of the most stressful periods of your life and see how editing goes for you.)–starting anew rather than editing what I had. There was a point where Marina and I had a running joke that I wrote a new first chapter every week for the project. I even remember Crimson, a barista friend at Atlantic where I did most of my Hellion work coming up behind me to see me contemplating the words ‘Chapter 1′ written on the top of the page. She shook her head at me and was like, “not again” before walking off. I literally can remember doing 7+ versions of the first chapter.

That actually makes me laugh, considering how my last summer went, where I’d sit in a cafe for five hours staring at a blinking cursor, resisting the urge to scream “FUCK” at the top of my lungs over and over until I was either arrested or tranquilized, or go on a killing spree using my over-sized Inspiron laptop as a melee weapon.  God help any of you if you ever get to that point.

I guess this all goes back to what we’ve been learning in Acting: “Acceptance is Perfection.” When you’re in a scene with another actor, the only way to move things forward is to say “yes, and…” thus accepting what the other actor is giving you, no matter how asinine (last week I was coerced into having alien sex with a 40 year old man). When applied to writing, that would suggest you make sure you give any piece of writing a shot, no matter how much grief it gives you. I can relate there, when one piece of dialogue going wrong has prompted me to rewrite an entire ten page chapter (read: two and a half days of writing) to compensate. Big energy waster. And if you’re a professional up against some kind of epic deadline, that’s going to be even less helpful.

I suppose the trick is working around the good stuff in your work, which is probably why a good editor always points out the good stuff as well as the bad. It allows one to work around the stuff that’s absolute shit (which in my case would be a good 70% of my writing). That’ll be interesting when I finally get around to beefing up Avondalius. If it’s as difficult as I think it will be, I will personally record myself cursing violently for your amusement.

… If anyone reads these. Which I’m pretty sure they don’t. Ah, wasted binary. In other news, I probably should think about sleeping one of these days. If I don’t, my brain will surely explode, and that will lead to less than amusing writing.

Spinner Uncategorized Avondalius, Editing, Methods, Rants