Category Archives: General Writing-Related Posts

In hopes of forging new habits

Posted on by under General Bloggity Stuff, General Writing-Related Posts

Or “Help, I’m Experiencing a Horrible, Painful Book Hangover.”

I was planning this blog entry for earlier, and by earlier I don’t mean earlier today so much as some point yesterday.  Then I worked for ten hours, which transformed me into a three-toed sloth with a strong, overwhelming need to loaf about the couch.  I had also wanted to come up with a really witty title about having a sizable, ever-growing backlog of books (that didn’t pan out anyway, because the best I could come up with was “book-log”, and that sounds like toilet humor).

The three new habits I hope to form this year, which aren’t to be mistaken for New Year’s resolutions because, as mentioned in my last entry, I don’t usually handle those well are as follows:

  1. Read, even if only a little, every day
  2. Write, even if only a little, every day
  3. Write a journal entry every day before bed

The first one is actually what waylaid me from making an entry earlier.  Instead of writing about how I have a backlog of books to read, and how I already have some titles I want to add to my library (I’m looking at you, “Vampires in the Lemon Grove“), I ended up reading the two-hundred-some pages of “Dreams and Shadows” I had left (and hadn’t gotten around to for the past couple months, which is a shame because it’s a fantastic book).  Since a bit before my last year of college, I noticed I’d been making less and less time for reading.  Not for lack of wanting to read, and not for using the time for video games or other means of entertainment.  At some point, reading began happening less.  Yes, I realize there was probably an actual, underlying reason for that.  Since I genuinely enjoy reading, and I like to claim I’m a writer (though there is limited proof of this), I feel like I need to get back to reading, and reading often.  The intense feeling of sadness I have from finishing “Dreams and Shadows”, which I referred to above as a book hangover (if you don’t think that’s a great term, you need to reevaluate everything about your life because it is a great term) is something I’ve missed.  Falling deep into another world for hours on end is something I’ve missed even more.  And, of course, those new books I received for Christmas aren’t going to read themselves.

The second habit I intend on getting into will be a bit more difficult for me, but it’s one I need (emphasis on need over want) to get into.  I’m a writer, damn it.  I should start behaving more like one.  My schedule with my nine-to-five job, which is almost never actually 9a.m. to 5p.m. usually leaves me more ready for extended periods of sleep.  That being said, my notebook for “Joshua’s Nightmares” has been sitting out in places where it can make me feel guilty, and I acknowledge how awkward it would be if all of these lovely notebooks I have were to continue to remain blank.

Thirdly, and feeling a bit like a simple variation of the previous habit I hope to build over the course of this year, I want to start keeping a journal daily.  My all-around wonderful sister got me a TARDIS notebook this past Christmas, and I’ve been thinking about what to occupy its pages with.  A couple days ago, for whatever reason, the idea of starting a journal popped into my head.  The idea of journaling then proceeded to buy prime real estate in my head, where it built a tiny, but cozy, cottage, unpack all of its things, and refuse any notions of eviction.  I’m the sort of person who tends to worry a fair bit (read as “I’m a ball of anxiety on a regular basis”), so I thought it couldn’t hurt to have another outlet for what’s on my mind (without polluting Misadventures in Fiction with it).  It’s also a great way to make sure I do at least a little writing every day, though that one pertains more specifically to writing of a creative nature.

Anyone else working to form new or stronger habits, creative or otherwise, and feel like sharing them?  Post ’em in the comments.

And now, in line with all this positive-thinking, new-habit-forming business, I believe it’s time to write a journal entry.

New Year’s Resurrections

Posted on by under General Bloggity Stuff, General Writing-Related Posts

Happy New Year, everyone.  If you’re still feeling the after-effects of your New Year’s celebration, you should contact a doctor.  And Guinness World Records, because that’s one truly impressive hangover in terms of endurance.

I’m subscribing to the no-New-Year’s-resolution-here school of thought this year, because my New Year’s resolutions never really stuck in that they didn’t exist a lot of years.  Honestly, I can’t remember half of them.  Okay.  More than half of them.  I don’t remember most of my resolutions.  Moving along.  The short version is I’m going to take 2014 and give it a chance to not be 2013, because that guy was a real asshat.  I’m going to make sure, one way or another, I have a kickass year in 2014.  2014 knows I’m willing to resort to outrageous, cartoonish physical violence to keep it in line (that calender will never know what hit it).

More writing must happen!  My notebook featuring the Joshua’s Nightmares notes keeps reminding me I’ve been a lazy little shit.  Motivation would elude me here.  Sleepiness would creep up on me there.  Did I mention laziness?  The point is I’m going to work harder on being a self-motivated, strong writer who actually writes.  My wealth of notebooks need the appropriate level of love, and I’ve got enough tea to accompany about a thousand years worth of writing.  I wish that were an exaggeration.  I’ve got tea knocking the tea off of my cabinets because its being displaced by other tea.  And whiskey.

Naturally, I work bright and early tomorrow, but I promise more regular updates, some short stories here and there, and better efforts at getting things published because I need to actually make those efforts if I ever hope to accomplish anything as a writer.

Once again, I wish you all a happy, healthy, and, yes, belated New Year.  I only feel a little guilty for it being this late because it’s already crossed the social threshold from “what a thoughtful sentiment” to “well-wishes from someone who clearly spent the start of the year hiding out in some Doomsday-proof bunker”.

A bit of writing laryngitis

Posted on by under General Bloggity Stuff, General Writing-Related Posts

Or “How I seem to occasionally misplace my voice”.

I have some very bad writing habits.  That’s to say I’m still figuring out what constitutes good writing habits, since there are so many different opinions on the subject.  Not writing regularly, mind you, is certainly not a good writing habit by any  means.  It’s something I’ve not done nearly as regularly as I would like since I graduated from college.  Because of that, I’ve noticed something when I do get around to writing.  It’s one of those creeping realizations that sneaked up and slapped me good and hard upside my (admittedly, at times, somewhat dense head).

I’m losing my voice.

One of the things stressed by a number of my writing professors (or, at the very least, by a number of professors I took seriously and respected a great deal) was the importance of writing often so as to establish and preserve one’s writing voice.  Mine’s changed a great deal from early high school writings, where the strongest tool I had at my disposal was the ability to completely bullshit a persuasive essay with the standard distanced voice high school papers seemed to call for.

The last post, for instance, didn’t quite feel right.  There was something about it that registered, for me at least, as the croaky gasps I’m stuck trying to use to convey my thoughts when I’m losing my voice.  I had gotten accustomed to having a certain ease with writing with my relatively relaxed, somewhat snarky, tone, adding in parenthetical asides here and there as they felt necessary.  The writing, itself, isn’t any more or less difficult; I just seem more prone to distractions and letting the big, bad world of real life push my writing to the backburner.  And then off of the stove completely.  On a similar note, having a small cat walk across the keyboard, only stepping on the WiFi toggle button, is very distracting indeed.

I was honestly going somewhere with this, but then the magical process of me opening Microsoft Word and getting to work happened.

Don’t drink the water (and other recent events)

Posted on by under General Bloggity Stuff, General Writing-Related Posts

I’m doing that thing again where I try too hard to compel myself to write, only to become frustrated with the efforts I make.  I end up shutting down as a result.  This revelation brought to you by the on-again, off-again functionality of my left Shift key, which has seen more than its fair share of use in college writing.  Good old Satellite 5 (why yes, my computer is named in reference to something from Doctor Who).  More on the writing stuff in a couple of paragraphs.  A pair o’ paragraphs?  A herd of the written word?  I’m not sorry, but I’ll stop.  For now.

This has been a strange month, with more parts frustrating than good.  The sighs of relief were, by and large, outnumbered by the groans of frustration, and I have taken so many trips to my Happy Place (to those of you in the know: no, it does not involve a place where I go to set fire to my enemies, thank you very much) I’ve taken up dual citizenship.  My car was deemed totaled, and then through the good graces and unending kindness of my parents it was replaced (I got their car, they got a new car, and everyone but the environment won out I suppose).  There were two instances in which I was double-charged in a way that left my bank account missing at least $200.  Not many people I know are all right with that kind of money just floating about in Limbo, and I am not such a person.  Those problems were, in time, reversed.  Most importantly, or at least I’d like to think, I’ve taken the pile of good things and bad things this month has provided me with and understood that the bad things didn’t make the good ones any less good, and the good didn’t make the bad any less significant.  More Doctor Who references.

My household also welcomed a second kitten, now named Meowiarty.  He’s an extremely affectionate little kitty who moves with the speed of lightning and all the grace of someone who is about ten beers past their limit (read as: lots of magical moments featuring little M headbutting walls).  I mention his speed, specifically, because his ability to suddenly be places he hadn’t been moments before resulted in nearly getting shut in the fridge today.  He is also co-authoring this post, sporadically running across the keyboard.  That’s totally where the typos are coming from.  Not me at all.  Probably.
Speaking of authoring and co-authoring and writing and so on (I’m being lazy with transitions; just go with it, people), my good friend, all-around entertaining guy, horror movie enthusiast, and author of “Beauties in the Deep”, Zachary T. Owen, has asked me to contribute something to what I think is still a super-secret project.  I mean, in hindsight I could’ve always asked him how secret this is, but this is mostly a chance to point out how it’s close to Halloween.  There’s no better treat to give, to others or yourself, than a copy of “Beauties in the Deep”.

Unless you give it to someone who is easily frightened, in which case it’s the perfect trick to play.  Win-win situation, I think. The plan, as of now, is to at least have one short spooky story, minus the alliteration, posted as a Halloween treat.  Or, in the event I don’t deliver, I can always say it was a trick.  Joking.  Only joking.  I can think of a handful of people who wouldn’t let me live such antics down.

Funny enough: I almost forgot to include any explanation for the title, which was part of why this post is happening to begin with.  Drawing upon my half-hearted reporting skills I learned from one semester of hating my life-choices at Point Park University, I will take a moment to relay recent Hollidaysburg news.  Some asshole left what is being called a “vague threat” (note: the quotation marks are crucial, as they appear in most mentions of this “threat”), and so I’ve been advised against using tap water all weekend long.  Something about bomb threats in Hollidaysburg, too, but I feel like any explosions would have to be cleared as historically appropriate so as to not affect Hollidaysburg’s overall historical aesthetic.

It’s about time I wrapped up this collection of comments, or perhaps these meandering musings, since I’ve got to go back to what amounts to herding cats before a vet appointment.

Slowly escaping a writing funk

Posted on by under General Writing-Related Posts, SRS BSNS BLAHGING

I am, at least in my own mind, very good at coming up with excuses for things.  There are times in college when I couldn’t go to the bar because I had some big writing project due and I’d not started on it, which often involved a raid in World of Warcraft that required my attention.  I’ve excused myself from social obligations with some groups of friends to make my way to other ones in similar ways.

Lately I’ve been making excuses for not writing.  Work has me so tired, and I just can’t get my brain out of this fog.  My days off are so full of errands and household chores, and I do want to relax a little.  To properly appreciate those last couple sentences, imagine how hard I was kicking myself while I wrote them.  They’re lousy excuses, and they make me feel lousy.  Hell, even as I type this I’m trying to not say how being all tired and foggy after work is totally a legitimate excuse, and I shouldn’t feel as bad about it, which is and isn’t true in equal parts.

I bring these things up because, and I am a bit embarrassed to admit this, I have publishing envy as of late.  Two of my good friends are published authors, and I know more people than that who have been published in the past.  On its own, that feeling of envy is bad enough (only made worse by how annoyed I become with myself for feeling such jealousy).  And then there’s my magnificent, well-known tendency to be my own worst critic.  Yes.  Just like every other person who creates.  I’m aware.  I look at my writing, then at the works of other writers (published or not).  I get that feeling of never being quite as good with the written word, or a sense of how the stench of my overwhelming mediocrity could easily be used to fumigate a medium-sized house on a good day, and an opulent mansion on some of my worse ones.

The plan is to stop.  Stop with the envy, and the days of fretting my writing being bad.  Definitely the excuses (I mean, in regards to writing; no promises elsewhere).  At the very least, I’m going to work on remedying these things.  On a related note: I have what I think is a pretty cool idea for a scary story.  It’s almost October, which means I need to get ready for my usual month-long celebration of all things Halloween (read as I will be eating so much candy corn and caramel apple lollipops that all dentists within a five mile radius of my house will feel a sense of overwhelming dread).  What better way to get in the Halloween spirit than scary stories?

And other story and writing ideas have cropped up, too.  In short: onwards to MS Word!

Mighty little Moleskines

Posted on by under General Writing-Related Posts

image

Two of my increasing number of Moleskine notebooks.  The red one on the left, complete with Moleskine pen, contains all of my notes for Joshua’s Nightmares so far.

The purple one on the right?  That information will have to wait until Monday.  I’d like to say I picked a purple Moleskine because it seemed like a mysterious color, but it was actually just a whim decision.

Anyway, Monday’s big reveal.  Big news.  Good news.  Hopefully, and I mean very hopefully, it will result in good progress as well.

Beauties in the Deep – a novelette by Zachary T. Owen

Posted on by under General Bloggity Stuff, General Writing-Related Posts

My friend, former coworker, and all-around awesome guy Zach Owen just announced his first published novelette, “Beauties in the Deep”, is available for pre-order through the publishers web site.  The release date remains to be determined, it will be available on a number of sites (including Amazon), and though the site mentions it specifically as a book for the Kindle it also features instructions on how to purchase this story for a number of other devices.

I could go into my usual lecture about why it’s important to support people’s artistic endeavors, but I honestly feel the summary is a far more compelling argument in favor of buying at least one copy of this novelette for yourself, if not one for everyone you know.

Ivory was only supposed to go fishing with her father. She was never supposed to run off and get into trouble. But that’s what she’s done. And now the cries of a drowning boy beckon her into icy waters, into a madness which lurks deep inside the lake, waiting to paint her world black.  © Zachary T. Owen

As someone who has had the good fortune of reading some of Zach’s other work, I can say on good conscience I’ve no doubt this will be brilliant stuff.  You can place your pre-order here, though keep in mind you’ll have to use PayPal or Google Pay, and I’ll be announcing when it becomes available on Amazon and other sites for those of you who want to wait until then.

Changes, schemes, and so on

Posted on by under General Bloggity Stuff, General Writing-Related Posts

This is one of those big, crazy, confusing, and amazing times of tremendous change in my life, where I’m transitioning from one job–the very first job I’ve ever had–to a new job, and I’ve only got two days left there.  It’s bittersweet and all, but I’m more focused on how it’s a huge change in my life.  One of those “oh-shit-am-I-really-sure-I-know-what-I’m-doing?” changes.  So naturally, it’s pretty daunting and my creative thinking processes seem to have handled it in the most appropriate fashion possible by completely shutting down.  Those lazy, good-for-nothings.  (On a related note, however, I do have a short horror story idea that needs writing once I figure out just what the hell I’m going to do with it.)

As a teaser of sorts, I’d like to say this much (and only this much), and I’ll leave the rest for next Monday: I start my new job next week, and I feel like something new should accompany that.  Something new in terms of writing.  Ooh, mysterious.

Still doing an absolute ton of world-building for “Joshua’s Nightmares”, and I think I’ve reached the point where if I were to lose my red Moleskine notebook I would also actually lose my mind.

Lastly, given the way last week went, I hope anyone who reads this, their families, friends, and so on, are all safe, happy, and healthy.  There’s enough bad shit in the world as it is, so do remember to take care.

Manufacturing landscapes

Posted on by under General Writing-Related Posts, Joshua's Nightmare Updates

Let me start by saying this much: this is my second to last week at my first-ever job, and it has been quite busy.  I finished my second of three 3p.m. to 10p.m. shifts in a row, which is a lot more tiring than I’d expected, and so writing’s been minimal at best.  Really minimal at best.  There’s an idea, drifting about in my brain, for a short horror story.

That much out of the way?  Good.  Thank god.  I hate whiny, personal-blog-stuff me.

I built a very large chunk of the world in “Joshua’s Nightmares” tonight at work (in my trusty red Moleskine notebook, actually).  It’s evolving into this big, amazing, surreal thing that I’m slowly falling in love with, which is dangerous for a writer because there’s always the risk it’s actually not nearly as good as I think it is.  However, I do have the good fortune of getting universally positive feedback so far.

Building worlds, when my brain permits such activities, is one of my favorite bits of writing (the top favorite being writing villains, which may very well get an entire series of posts dedicated to it and by may very well I mean it actually just will).  Sometimes the environment takes a backseat, like with Death at Teatime.  The location was irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, so there were just little glimpses of it with the bigger focus on the characters.

There’s just a tremendous joy in building something massive out of what could’ve started as a tiny detail, one little point in a vast landscape, and just going from there.

The Sleep State of “Joshua’s Nightmares” is turning into this massive, and hopefully highly-varied, mix of different locations that I hope will encompass the vast, bizarre realm of dreaming quite well.  A taste, just to tease readers of my blog with: there’s an entire landscape that exists in the sky of this world, linked to dreams about flying and such.

At any rate, I hope to get some writing done should I survive the remainder of the week.  And by the remainder of the week I mean the insane sale that’s going on tomorrow and Friday.

On getting better

Posted on by under General Bloggity Stuff, General Writing-Related Posts, SRS BSNS BLAHGING

A while ago, a good friend of mine (who I’ll refer to for the sake of this post, as I refer to him in general, as Doc Martin) posted the video I’ve attached (shared? stuck to my blog so you’ve got to at least notice it if you read this post?) below to Facebook, and it really resonated with something inside me.  Probably because I was still at a point where paying back student loans seemed like figuring out some long-dead, alien language never meant to be grasped by humans, looking for jobs was still a terrifying prospect, and I was fairly certain I would never figure my life out.

Much of the above remains true, and the song still resonates with me.

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