Writer's Block or Pandemic Fatigue?

Guys, I think I'm having a little bit of an existential crisis about my writing.

I've really been dragging my feet about it the last couple months. The idea of finishing and publishing a novel seems daunting, not inspiring. Looking for places to submit my short stories seems tedious and not worth the effort.

I've been "supposed" to be working on Brinyor since November, but find I keep delaying rereads and editing in favor of making a map I probably won't use, in depth costume research I probably don't need, in depth linguistic name research that I'm probably the only one who cares about it...

I've been "working" on Brinyor for ten years - Wolf and Sheath, and BrightFire for twelve and eleven years, respectively. (I guess I should quit thinking such uncharitable thoughts about George R R Martin, huh?)

Maybe it's the pandemic fatigue talking - here we are almost two years in, and we just had another exposure scare. (I guess I shouldn't complain - I know a lot of people who have had it; I know some people who have had it twice.) I was supposed to be getting back into things, being productive, now that we're through the holidays and Elianna was going back to school (prior to quarantines and lack-luster ice storms).

I just don't feel the drive. Some people get up in the morning and they HAVE to write, like they have to breathe. Most successful authors will tell you "you have to write every day." I'm definitely not doing that right now. People say, "If you REALLY want to do something, you'll FIND the time, you'll MAKE the time." But you know what I'm making time for? Naps. Admittedly, I have never been ambitious about ANYTHING, so maybe this isn't such a big change. But I am starting to wonder if I'm wasting my... time? Time may not even be the right word, since I'm not even spending that much time on it right now.

But if I don't write, if I'm not a writer, what am I?

(It's an open answer, possibly even a rhetorical question, and in no way meant to be a downer. I've just been rolling this all around in my head recently.)

...though Jason is feeling the same way about some of his leisure activities, so it helps to know I'm not the only one.

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What To Do In '22

It's time for my annual update on goals!

First, what my goals were in 2021, and how I did with them (full post on that here.

Because I was trying to be a little less vague about my goals, some of them were more time-specific (do X by the end of January):

-Get back into my writing schedule - Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday mornings.

-check

-Submit either one story to at least three publications, or at least three stories to one publication each by the end of March.

-check

-Resume my weekly blog schedule.

-check

-But within the first couple weeks of the year, examine my current writing schedule and see if I want to move which day I do my blog. (I currently am "supposed" to be posting a blog every weekend, but that hasn't happened in a while.)

-check

-Resume my monthly project/status updates.

-check

-Finish rereading Bright Fire by the end of January.

-If I recall correctly, I did

-By the time I finish the above, decide what work I want to do next on The Wolf and the Sheath.

-I did work on W and S for a while, but I didn't make a lot of progress

Other things I did last year included:

-revamped my platform. This included updating my website's layout and imagery, and adding a Twitter account.

-made nine submissions (which admittedly isn't a lot, but it's something).

-made decent progress on setting relatable, achievable goals and meeting them. I figured out a formula of sorts of how much to increase followings on various platforms by and did pretty well with that.

So what are my goals for 2022? Honestly, I haven't given it a lot of thought. For the moment, I will continue my status quo:

-Continue my regular writing schedule (Monday afternoon, Tuesday and Thursday mornings and evenings, Sunday evenings, and alternating weekends (the last of which I have not been good about).

-Continue my social media posting schedule: Writerly quotes on Mondays, alternating Writing Prompt Wednesday and Throwback Thursday, and posting a new blog at least every-other weekend.

-Make three submissions by the end of January. Whether or not those publications/contests allow for simultaneous submissions will help determine what my next submission goal is.

-Continue to increase my following on various online platforms by approximately 10% each quarter.

-Update and/or swap out material on my website quarterly.

"But what about writing," you ask, "all these goals seem to be platform-oriented." You would be right. I haven't had my head in the writing end of the things the past couple months - even NaNoWriMo was tough for me this year. I haven't really given a lot of thought as to what writing goal to set or how to measure it. I've been working on Brinyor since November, and I'd like to continue that. I did a little bit of research for it, and a little map and costume sketching over the past week or two, so maybe that will give me some fresh inspiration.

In any case, I will definitely make an update post at the end of the month, so maybe I'll update my writing goals at that time.

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Whataya Know, NaNo?

Wow, December already? November just flew by... which is odd, because SO much happened in November. It seemed like one of us was always sick - sinus infections and COVID boosters for the adults, colds and pinkeye for Elianna. Fun. Add Thanksgiving to that mix and... well, who decided November was a good month for NaNoWriMo, huh?

So, first I'll talk about what I did in November, and then I'll launch into my goals for December and January.

In an attempt to kick myself into gear a bit, I decided to do a modified National Novel Writing Month challenge in November. My goal was not to write a new novel, but rather to try and crank out new material I need to flesh out Brinyor, one of my current novels. My intent was to write every day and, even thought many days I only managed about 20-30 minutes after Elianna had gone to bed in the evening, the first 2.5-3 weeks of the month I did pretty well. But, the week of Thanksgiving, everything kind of fell apart at once. To twist a line from Ian Malcom, "life, uh, gets in the way."

I knew I would be unlikely to write on Thanksgiving itself... but I also wasn't expecting people to get sick, Elianna to take a big step back in night potty training and/or willingness to go to sleep (cold, pinkeye, picking up on our stress? possibly also teething - I mean, that'll do it). She's gotten very defiant about naps as well and, as we speak, is sleeping on the floor on the opposite side of the room from her bed because she likes her play blanket and giant stuffed corgi and, well, Jason and I are tired of fighting with her at 4 AM. Two-year-olds, man.

But, yes, less griping, more progress reports. I managed to write a little over 17,000 words for Brinyor in November, in addition to spending some time working on my platform (including my newly-added Twitter. I even submitted a story to a podcast.

So, on to my December goals, which are... really low-balling it. Honestly, between holiday prep and Elianna being out of school for two weeks, I'm going to cut myself a lot of slack. If I can keep my current writing and social media schedule,* reread what I wrote in November, and start inserting it into the main body of the novel, I'll be happy.

*-Writerly quote of the week, plus business - social media, platform work, submission research - on Monday

-Work on my monthly goal while Elianna is at school on Tuesday

--Writing prompt of the week (alternating weeks) on Wednesday

-Work on my monthly goal while Elianna is at school, and alternating Throwback Thursdays on Thursday.

-Blog each weekend (unless I've done it earlier in the week)

-Alternating weekends to really focus on writing.

In fact, I have so little faith in having time to write this month, that the above goal is actually going to be my January goal, too. More of a six-week goal (because I know I'll be pretty useless the latter half of December) than a monthly goal.

NaNo? Maybe So...

The night is dark... A restless spirit moves through the house... Something calls my name...

"Elizabeeeeeeeeeeth... you know you want to do NaNoWriMoooooooooooo..."

So it's the same debate every year - to NaNo or not to Nano? And I think I will this year. Not the normal National Novel Writing Month - because I need to finish one of the novels I've already got started - but a modified version. A few years ago, I took one of my works in progress and wrote a new scene for it every day for a month, rather than trying to meet a certain word count. That worked pretty well for me - it rejuvenated my interest in the story, and got some new material down. Of course, that was the November before Elianna was born, and the November before Baldur died, so suffice to say I've had a lot going on since then...

But, in any case, I'll be doing that again this year with Brinyor. Fittingly, I started Brinyor for 2011's NaNoWriMo, so it feels right to try and get some fleshing out done to it for its 10th anniversary. (Oh, god, y'all, I've now got three novels I've been working on for ten-plus years...)

However, despite this decision, I'm not going to press myself super hard. I've spent September and October dealing with colds, sinus infections, potty training, and another round of colds and sinus infections. I never did get around to decorating for Halloween, and Thanksgiving and Christmas loom. I'm going to try really hard not to beat myself up if I can't get a scene, snippet, etc. written every day. I mean, the point is to try, yes, but I need to walk the line between making time to try and dreading doing so because I have too many other obligations.

We'll see what happens and, as always, I will have an update for you at the end of the November.

High-Stakes Secrets

Psst... Can you keep a secret?

Recently I've been consuming media about secrets - what a character will do to keep a secret, what happens when a secret gets out...

Jason and I recently watched There's Someone Inside Your House. It's a horror movie about a killer making his way through high school students with secrets. At one point, one of the characters throws what he calls a "secret" party. The attendees are encouraged to share their secrets, the idea being that if your secret is out, the killer no longer has a hold over you. These being high schoolers, the secrets range from crushes to miscarriages. Though as you might expect, not everyone confesses the Real Secret, the Big Secret, the High-Stakes Secret, and people keep dying.

I also recently finished reading Speak, a book about a high schooler keeping a secret that takes such a toll on her that she pretty much stops speaking all-together. Read more about that here.

It made me start thinking about my stories. What secrets do my characters have? What secrets do they consider to be high-stakes? When I was in high school my Big Secret was who I had a crush on, which seems so stupid now. But it's a matter of perspective. Sometimes it's a matter of culture or your place in society, too. A secret that is a big deal for a character in one story, in one world, may be laughable to worry about in another story and world.

I have neglected my characters' secrets. I don't even know what secrets some of my characters have. I need to go through my stories (and especially Brinyor, now that I've decided to workshop it some) and figure out what people's secrets are.

Oh-well-tober

The downside to the timing of Banned Books Week is that since it's always the last week of September (and often a couple days into October), I don't have a good opportunity to post about my October plans and goals in the time frame I normally do. Oh, well.

I've been working on-again off again on updating my platform since March, yet, somehow, it feels like I haven't gotten much done on that. I have fantastic new pictures I need to switch out on all my sites - here, Facebook, and LinkedIn - and somehow have not gotten around to it. I've been dragging my feet on getting a Twitter account up and running.

Additionally, because I've been focusing on the above (have I, though?) I haven't been doing much writing. I have an idea for a cosmic horror short story that's been tickling the back of my brain for a month or two now. I have pieces that are done that I need to be submitting. And, of course there are those three unfinished novels always looking over my shoulder...

In fact, I think what I'd really like to do the next couple months is focus on one of those.

I've been working off and on (very off sometimes) on finishing The Wolf and the Sheath for the last couple years and... while I'm not saying I can't or don't want to work on that one, I also wonder if maybe working on a different one might give me a little freshness and inspiration.

I still don't know what I'm doing with BrightFire. It needs a massive rewrite.

But I do think that I will go back and reread Brinyor. Depending on how it sparks as I reread it, I might do what I did for W and S for NaNoWriMo a couple months ago - go through and make a list of what scenes and transitions I still need, and then spend time each day in November adding a little. No, most likely not the 50,000 words in 30 days/1,700-some-odd words per day - but something.

I'm not saying it will be easy, and it will be the first time trying something like this since Elianna was born. But she's very good at playing on her own, looking at books, even going potty on her own now. In fact, I've been strongly leaning toward converting the downstairs diaper changing station back into a desk. It's in the room that she mostly plays in, so it would be a good place for me to work while she plays, rather than coming up to my office (which is a MESS*) and either trying to keep her from messing with stuff, or keeping an ear out for her while she's across the hall in her room. (Though, honestly, we could probably try her hanging out in her room - she can keep herself occupied with books for quite a while, like someone else I know.)

*Yes, I could clean it. But right now my time limitations are "clean OR write" and I really need to get back to the latter.

Na No No Go

Today's a big day - no, not just the day after Halloween (and don't you DARE start putting up that Christmas tree yet ; ) - today is the first day of NaNoWriMo*.

*If you're not familiar with the abbreviation, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel-Writing Month, which takes place annually in November. Writers challenge themselves to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. It's not as hard as it sounds - it breaks down to about 1700 words a day, which is just a couple pages. The hard part is not writing 50,000 words - the hard part is actually finishing the novel after November ends.

Those of you who have been following this blog for a while will hopefully forgive me as I give a little background on my NaNo history here:

-In 2009, I did NaNo for the first time, and succeeded in writing 50,000 words. This novel, which I've referred to often in this blog by its working title, The Wolf and the Sheath, still sits unfinished 11 years later.

-In 2010, I did NaNo again, leading to BrightFire... which is also unfinished.

-In 2011, because I was very busy, I gave myself the goal of 30,000 words instead, and ended up with the partial novel I'm currently calling Brinyor which is, you guessed it, still unfinished.

A few months ago, I had been hoping to be back into some semblance of a writing routine by now. I have been trying to sit down and work on writing stuff a couple mornings a week. There have been a few times recently that I've worked on something else like laundry or food prep during the time I should be writing. I really need to cut that out. I really need to start treating my writing time as non-negotiable.

So, I'm sure that you might have guessed from all of that that I will not be participating in NaNoWriMo this year. I just have too much going on (which, yes, all of you with multiple children that get shuttled back and forth to various activities, just pat me on the head and call me a sweet summer child) .

We're heading into "the holidays" and I have crafts I want to put together. There are areas of the house that haven't been cleaned since before Elianna was born. And we're going to have to start taking her to physical therapy because she's behind on walking. In addition, I'm dealing with anxiety and insomnia (though, it is 2020 - who isn't?). I'm trying to be more active so I can kick my weight loss into gear... I hope it doesn't sound like I'm making excuses; this just isn't the time to be putting a major task on my plate.

But with all that said, I think that I am going to try and reread all three of my partial novels this month, as well as do some other creative things (art rather than writing, but I feel that any creative juices are going to get others flowing).

And those of you who are going to take up the challenge this year - go for it! Take those emotions, those anxieties, and pour them into your novel. Write about the dystopia you fear, or write about hope and recovery. Just write. And, hopefully, your novel will make more sense than this year has.

To those about to write, I salute you.

#NaNoWriMo2020

You Go, Wri Mo!

November draws to a close and so it is time for me to reveal the results of my personal NaNoWriMo challenge (read more here: https://www.iveyink.com/blog/2018/10/30/lets-go-wri-mo ).

On Wednesday evening, I sat down to write my daily scene, struggling to find a snippet that still needed to be written that would be long enough for me to consider it complete (I was thinking 500-1000 words, but I have some good solid scenes I wrote that were only in the 400's). But on opening the separate document that I had been writing these scenes in, I discovered that at 24 days of writing (I missed 2 days, and one day I wrote a scene for another novel in progress, Brinyor) the document stood at a hulking 31 pages.

Looking at this, and looking back at my much-crossed out "scenes to write" list, I said, "Hmm... Maybe rather than struggling to find more scenes to pound out just for the sake of being able to say I wrote up through the 30th, I should instead stop while I have good material that I need and change gears."

So what's next?

I am in the process of rereading and making minor edits to the new scenes that I have written. For the month of December (which is a month that I'm always pressed for time), I will work on editing and planning for Wolf and Sheath, as well as working on short story submissions.

For W and S, I have some new scenes in addition to the ones from this month that need to be inserted into the main document. I need to look at those in conjunction with these new ones and see what needs to be put where. Does that mean that my 86 page novel will now be 117 pages? Well, no. Some of the new scenes that I have written were to replace really clunky telling-not-showing exposition that I wrote lo these many years ago. But some of it is also completely new material. We'll see what the updated word and page count are in a few weeks.

The Costume Makes the Character

In a previous blog post a couple years ago, I talked about the importance of costume in character and world building.  You can read that here: 

Revisiting "Costume and Character" Post, April 2016

As a theatre major and a costume designer, I personally find that figuring out the character's costume really helps solidify who they are, what they are, where they are, and all those great W's of a character. Granted, there are times that going into too much detail can be distracting. As much as I love reading George R. R. Martin, he does have a tendency to go into so much detail that only a cosplayer who is going to be actually building this costume is still interested at the end of the description.

But it is helpful to know something about how a character is dressed and why. Did she pick out this outfit herself? Did she MAKE it herself, and what does that say about the world she lives in and the position she has in it? Does the character have a certain color, or range of colors that he wears exclusively? And again, is it a case of choosing that color, or is it more that he's in a position that he has to wear this for whatever reason? Regardless of the how or why the clothes were made or chosen, how does the character wear them? Does she take pride in her appearance? And is the pride related to her position? Does he just throw on whatever is lying around? Or has he specifically chosen clothes that make it LOOK like he has picked up whatever is lying around?

This is just as important in a contemporary peice as it is in a fantasy, sci-fi, or historical peice. I think it's something that maybe people think about less for modern peices, but showing the difference between a character who wears a nice dress even when she's working in a book store and a character who has just thrown on whatever rumpled khakis and t-shirt are lying around already tells you something about the two charatcers, even if you don't know anything else about them yet.

As I said above, I majored in theatre, and when I did so I chose a double concentration in performance and design. There was a decent period of time in college where I was always working on some costume project or another. But I was coming at it from the other side than I am now. In college, I was given a fully-formed character and told, "figure out what they're wearing." I had clues in the text to go by. Sometimes the playwright has very specific instructions. There's a Chekhov play, I don't remember which one now, where the dialogue indicates several times that a character is wearing a very tacky combination of a pink dress and a green sash. But this, of course, had it's reasons. Chekhov was pointing out not only that this character was awkward and didn't have a good fashion sense, but also that the other characters were petty enough to talk it up.

Now I come at it from the other side. I have to make sure that if I have pointed out what the character is wearing, that it's important. I'm the sort of person that reading a story I see it in enough detail that I don't necessarily need to know every nucance of a character's outfit. If you tell me they're at a ball, I see them in the finery of the time period you've already set up - unless you have made a point to note that one of the characters is wearing a suit that is at least a decade out of style.

This is actually something I need to work on for Brinyor. I don't know that I have ever described what Rigan (the main character) is wearing in any particular scene. (What makes this a particularly heinous oversight is that her mother dyes fabric for a living.) I do have one scene where I have described what Janus, another major character, is wearing, but really only because he is wearing it for an important ceremony and he's not happy about it. I really need to go back to the peice and figure out scenes where the reader needs to know what people are wearing and why. Maybe that's what I'll do next.

I have been thinking about this again lately, as I work on The Wolf and the Sheath.  I have, fortunately, done a little bit more to describe what Reyala wears in this piece than I had for Rigan in Brinyor, above.  But I still need to do more work on that.

Reyala travels from one society to another in this story.  The clothing of the two societies is different.  I have a very clear image in my head of what she wore in one place, and what she wears in another.  I still need to work on translating those to the page.  Are her clothes easy to move around in?  Can she dress and undress herself?  How does the difference in weather affect what she wears in one place rather than the other?

More than that, though, I need to work on the other characters' clothing.  It occurs to me that I have barely touched on ANY of the other characters' clothes, except one.  Even though Reyala is the main character, that doesn't mean that I can neglect what the rest of her society are wearing.

Write What Ails You

If you've been following this blog for a while, you've probably noticed that on occasion I will talk about how I've been late with a post or gotten less done than planned due to a bad headache.  In my case, "bad headache" generally means "migraine."  Now, thankfully, these aren't the completely incapacitating, "12-hours of crushing, vomit-inducing pain" migraines I used to get when I was a kid, but they are, according to my ENT, that type of headache.

What does this have to do with writing, aside from the fact that sometimes my left eye socket hurts too much to focus on a screen?  It occurred to me this weekend (a substantial portion of which I've spent laying down due to a "bad headache") that I have several stories where characters are affected by similar issues.  

In Bright Fire, the main character's brother suffers from migraines and chronic sinus and ear infections (though they don't call them that).  In Brinyor, the main character's little sister and mother suffer from sinus headaches like this - which means that she knows what to do when a friend of hers is dangerously ill and their healer doesn't know what else to try.  Her grandmother's remedy for this type of sinus issue ends up being an important clue to something else later in the story.  I have another story I haven't started writing yet, but have a solid story-line in my head, where the main character is a young queen who has identified 4 distinct types of headaches that affect her; the story begins as she develops one of her weather headaches as a "storm of the century" moves in.  Later when the same symptoms return, she realizes another monster storm is imminent in time to get people to safety.  

Oddly enough, the last story above is the only one in which the main character suffers from these kind of headaches (though Bright Fire has issues with being inexplicably cold, which is another issue I have).
 

What Writing Brings Out

Even though I haven't actually gotten a lot of writing done this month, I've been thinking about it a lot.

If you follow my personal Facebook page (Elizabeth Ivey Garrett, rather than Elizabeth Ivey) you've seen that I'm doing 30 Days of Gratitude; each day I have a prompt to post about a certain thing, topic, etc. that I'm grateful for.  It's been interesting, introspective, and kind of cathartic at times.  It has also gotten me thinking about how some of my stories have certain tones, character interactions, etc. that are heavily colored by where I was mentally or emotionally when I started writing them.

Even when I sat down to write Bright Fire in NaNoWriMo of 2010, I knew that there was probably going to be some stuff that came out that reflected what was going on in my life.  One of the characters in the book was based heavily on my mom's best friend, who was dying of cancer at the time.  That character does die in the book (though I also cheated - that character has a sister who picks up as a mentor figure when the other dies).  In 2010, in the space of 6 months: my dog died, I had the worst breakup of my life, one of my coworkers died, my mom's best friend died (5 days after the end of NaNoWroMo), and my grandfather died.  2010 was a bad year.

So I guess it shouldn't be any wonder that the book I started writing at the end of a year where it felt like my world was falling apart, that I started writing a novel about a girl who's world is very drastically and literally falling apart.  Things get better - I guess showing that even at my darkest moments I've still had hope.

About 6 months after I started writing Bright Fire, I met Jason.  That November (approximately 6 months after I met him) I started writing Brinyor.  And, interestingly, even though I didn't plan it, Brinyor is about reconciliation, new possibilities, and two groups coming together to build something new and better than either had before.

It's amazing the difference a year can make.

On the Equality of Couples in Fiction

If you've been following this blog for a while, you've probably read my lamentations about the many problems that Bright Fire, one of my novels, has.  Some of these problems are obvious, and some of them are things where I know something isn't quite right but I'm not sure how so or what to do about it.

Recently, upon comparing Bright Fire to my 2 other partial novels (working titles are The Wolf and the Sheath, and Brinyor), I realized that one if the many issues is the imbalance of power between Bright Fire and her love interest.  This isn't to say that it's a bad relationship - it's just not very realistic right now.

Reading back on Wolf and Sheath and Brinyor, I realized that both of the main characters in those stories have a better balance of power with their love interests.  (Side note - none of these stories actually qualify as Romances, despite the presence of a couple and other romantic elements.  But the difference between romantic elements and Romance as a genre is a topic for a different post.)
  
Without giving a lot away (because I do intend to publish both), in Wolf and Sheath, while Reyala technically is of a higher station and has more political power than her love interest, he has his own special station and knowledge within another group, and they live in a place where her position doesn't remove her from "normal" people as much as it might in another time or place.  In Brinyor, Rigan and her love interest both have high positions within their respective communities, are very close in age, and have recently suffered similar losses.  One major problem with the relationship in Bright Fire is a big age gap, and the fact that he starts out as something of a mentor figure to Bright Fire.  I'm not saying it can't be done - it's a quasi-historical fantasy, a setting where a big age gap isn't as much of a problem as in a modern piece, for example - but it's also something that I may not be a good enough writer to make it work yet.  

And honestly, this revelation doesn't bother me as much as it might have a few years ago.  I recently read The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman.  It is a fantastic book that won the Hugo, Newbery, and Carnegie awards,  among others.  In the afterword, Gaiman admits that he had the idea when he was 25, but that when he sat down to write it for the first time, he realized that he was not yet a good enough writer to do the story justice.  Eventually, he did sit down and complete it.  This gives me hope.  This book that I have been so hung up on for the past several years, now I can take a breath and say, "Ok.  This is a good story.  This has the potential to be a great story.  I just need to give myself a little more time to figure it out."

But back to the couples...  After I realized that Bright Fire's relationship is potentially tricky, I sat down and looked at some of the other major ideas I have.  (By "major" I mean that I have the majority of the plot worked out in my head.)  There is always a balance.  The couples may not both be immediately obvious as equals, but there's always something - fame vs. maturity, political power vs. perceived power, political power vs. street smarts, etc. - that keeps the couple in balance.

Maybe this is something that I understand the importance of now that I am in a stable relationship and have been for over 6 years, and why I'm only just now recognizing the imbalance in Bright Fire.  (Though it's also interesting to note that I wrote the bulk of W&S when I was not in a relationship of any sort, and 2 years before I met the man I am now married to.)  I think this is something that is just important in fiction as in real life - the couple have to work together.  They have to have strengths to lend each other.  You can't have one leaning entirely on the other, just as you can't have them both be exactly the same.  The couple in Wolf and Sheath came to me very easily - oddly enough since that is the first novel I started writing.  The couple in Brinyor are also good and strong - once they finally get over themselves long enough to realize there's something between the two of them. : )

So it's a little odd to me that Bright Fire, the novel I started between W&S and Brinyor has, of all my stories, the most imbalanced couple*.  But that might also have a lot to do with where I was mentally the year that I started it.  

*Well, except for the one where someone gets killed, but that's also another subject for another blog...