Anthea
Sick Anthea is starting to get better…
I caught a cold last week, and then felt better, and then felt worse, and then felt a LOT worse and took two days off from work trying to sleep it off.
It didn’t work. 
On the third day (Friday), I finally went to the doctor, more because I’d been out from work for three days than that I thought he’d prescribe anything but rest and fluids.
I walked out with a prescription for antibiotics instead, and a few hours later, I started feeling like a shadow of my usual self, rather than just an Anthea-shaped body without even the energy to write.
Fatigue, dizziness, mucous, and a rather annoying cough are still plaguing me, but I’m back to writing, so I’m definitely on the mend. 
Sorry for the long radio silence here, though! I’m working on a project and hope to have big news soon, but I think I’m going to wait til it’s actually done to make any new announcements or bold declarations. There’s no telling, after all, whether I’m really in my right mind yet, or just on my way there. 
Always learning…
Learning what kind of writer I am is a fascinating process.
Sometimes, I’ll write and write, and though the words are fine there’s no real story underneath to hold them together. This usually happens when I think I know what story I want to write.
A lot of writers talk about themselves as a duality – the everyday self who does the grunt work of typing, and the muse, or the writer-brain, or lizard-brain, or the characters, or the story council.
I’m definitely finding that I have the same sensation. That there’s a part of me that can spin magic into a story, and a part of me that can type and edit and spell correctly and remember what the character’s names are, and that successful fiction writing requires a delicate balancing act between the two.
In some ways, I feel like I sit down and start writing, and by doing so I invite my writer-brain to come out and see. I’m coaxing it out, like putting out bits of food to coax a small animal out of its hole. And like that small animal, if I look too closely or too directly at it, then it’ll flee back into its hole and make me start the hole process over again.
But if I manage to coax it out and not scare it off, my writer-brain will start poking at the words I’m writing. Sometimes an image of what happens next will pop into my mind, or I’ll realize something I’ve already written should change in *this* precise way.
Once in a great while, my writer-brain will get confident enough to take over, and then the writing flies but I don’t recognize everything when I read over it again. (Sleep deprivation will also have this effect, but I don’t recommend it.)
But a lot of the time I forget that I’m trying to coax out a shy and temperamental part of my mind, and I write blithely on with no attention to anything else, and then wonder why the story isn’t coming out the way I wanted it to. :-p
Learn to code in 2012!
Codeacademy presents a full year of interactive online programming lessons for beginners!
Here’s an article on it from Slate: You Need to Learn how to Program.
I figure at one lesson a week, it shouldn’t interfere with my writing time any more than random websurfing, tv-watching and reading do, and I definitely buy the argument that basic programming is becoming as important a skill as being able to type.
(No judgments from me on *how* you type – hunt and peck gets the job done just fine with enough practice, though I do find touch typing to be convenient.)
Writing is communicating with other people, programming is communicating with computers, not just in terms of telling, but of understanding.
Signal boost: EBooks for Breast Cancer Screening and Education
John Scalzi and Subterranean Press are donating all proceeds from the sales of his ebooks published by them for the next week to Planned Parenthood’s breast cancer screening and education activities, a gesture inspired by the way the Susan G Komen Foundation recently withdrew their funding for the same.
You can read all about it, and find links to the ebooks, at his post.
There are several shorter works available for $0.99, as well as a couple of longer options for a few dollars more. I’ve read The God Engines, and it was quite good, even if I wasn’t sure about the ending.
Braiiiins…
This week…
I’m counting this as “week four” of January for the plan I detailed in the last post, and working on a new short story collection: Zombie Variations. 
I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, but I’ve been getting in my own way, I’m afraid. For some reason when my thinking brain spins out lots of “cool ideas” for stories based on logic and reason and articles I’ve read about diseases and nature and so on… my writing brain goes on strike. It seems like the first seed of a story has to come from my writing brain, or else it’s not going to happen.
And since I only had two zombie stories and a few scintillas, I didn’t really feel like there was enough to make a collection out of. If I’m going to put something up for sale, I want the buyer to get more than five minutes of entertainment out of it!
Getting out of my own way…
Getting back into writing after time off is always hard, so I started a few days ago with a new short story – “The Zombie’s Cat.”
Then another one just sort of happened the next day – “Henry.” (Another tear-jerker, I’m afraid, like The Last Day of School. I was crying while I wrote it, at any rate.
I think I know how to expand Lanie’s scintillas into a full story now, and Corpse Pose is going to get an edit and polish too.
And yes, you will get to read them! Once the collection is done and posted to Smashwords, B&N, and Amazon, I’ll post a Smashwords coupon here for a free download – my friends and readers deserve it! The coupon will be good for a month from when I post it, and you can download pretty much any reader format from Smashwords, so keep an eye out.
Mars, Status Update, and Planning…
First off, happy belated 8th anniversary to the Mars Rover Opportunity! I think it’s so very awesome that it’s still going!
Status Update:
OK, so I haven’t written since Sunday, because of going away for a trade show for work Monday through Wednesday, and being too darned tired to write yesterday or this morning… But leaving that aside, I think my first month has gone very well.
The first draft has 20,528 words, and while it isn’t *finished,* I have a good idea of how the last part of the story goes. So I’m going to settle for writing a summary of what happens next in case I come back to it later, and move on to the next one in accordance with my plan.
I definitely think I’ve learned from the experience of my first month, though nothing solid enough to really talk about. I’m looking forward to what the rest of the year will bring!
Planning:
Speaking of which, for February I’m going to try to pattern my writing as follows:
First week: Introduce the characters, the world, and the key problems, as well as complications.
Second week: The characters try to address their problems and make things worse, but there are hints of what the final resolution will be.
Third week: Achieve the final resolution and tie up loose ends.
Week four: Work on short stories, and maybe put one up for sale on Amazon. This’ll give me a chance to let go of the last long story and its pattern before starting the next one. It’ll also let me start building up a body of work for sale, for readers to find me by.
In fact, I think that’s what I’m going to work on this coming week, as January ends and February begins. I think I might take a fresh look at Changing Course.
I’ve been seeing a lot of short stories published as stand-alones for $0.99, and even bought a couple, so it seems like a more reasonable idea to me than it once did. What do you guys think? A decent way to put stuff out there for new readers to find?
Back to blogging… maybe ;-)
Reading about The Dan Plan has made me think about my own plan for this year, and how this blog might fit into it.
As I mentioned before, I’m trying to get a better grasp of longer forms of fiction than my usual 2000-5000 word short stories, and my chosen method is focused practice. I’m writing a long story each month, and trying to be aware of what I’m learning and where my challenges are as I go. It might be that blogging about that process would be interesting reading, or at least interesting writing.
So I’m going to try to be more consistent about posting – not snippets so much as progress reports, and thoughts on writing as I learn more and play with different ideas and approaches.
For today, for instance, I can talk about some thoughts I’ve been having this week: Continue reading
10,000 Hours…
This is so cool – someone’s specifically testing the 10,000 hour idea in his efforts to go from 30-year-old commercial photographer and golfing novice to pro golfer. Dan of “The Dan Plan”started in April of 2010, and is about 2,400 hours into the project, and blogging the experience every step of the way.
His about page also says that “Through his journey Dan hopes to inspire others to start exploring the possibilities life affords them.”
Very cool!
Interesting…
This is an interesting summary and debunking of recent efforts to identify an evolutionary use for depression: Depression Defies Rush to Find Evolutionary Upside
I particularly liked the closing: “Even if depression is “natural” and evolved from an emotional state that might once have given us some advantage, that doesn’t make it any more desirable than other maladies. Nature offers us cancer, infections and heart disease, which we happily avoid and do our best to treat. Depression is no different.”
Alan Tudyk rocks!
And so did everyone else in Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
Highly recommended for fans of silly movies and horror spoofs!
© 2010 Catherine Wechsler, used with permission.
