Monthly Archives: November 2013

Guess what? It’s me.

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Well, I held out for as long as I could, but I just gotta blog. Screw this “must save all my writing energy for the NaNoWriMo book” bullshit. Frankly, that doesn’t take up that much of my creative energies.

Maybe it should. I dunno. But it doesn’t.

So first, the book. It’s going quite well. I am up to around 32K words, which is a gnat’s pube under 2K ahead of schedule. What can I say, some days I go over.

I am having one problem,and that’s the one I anticipated : it might not be a book-length idea. I find myself casting about for things to expand upon because right now, I could probably finish the thing in 40K words, and that is nobody’s idea of a book.

But it is also way too long to be a short story. It would be that dreaded white elephant of publishing, the novella, and good luck getting one of those published.

Then again, it might not matter in the world of eBooks, which is where I am headed with this thing. Mainstream publishing success would be great, especially in the ‘becoming famous’ department, but I am increasingly wary of subjecting my works to unnecessary gatekeepers.

I could do the practical thing, I suppose, and try the traditional dead tree publishing world first, and if I get no takers, then put it on Amazon or whatever. That would be a very time-consuming process, seeing as the turnaround time on books can often be measured in years (madness, I know), but it would probably be the smartest strategy in the long term.

Kinda like Isaac Asimov’s strategy of sending short stories to the people in order of pay rate, from the highest to the lowest. What a simple and sensible strategy for making the most money with your pen!

Still, the idea of waiting years before even having a chance to reach readers depresses me. So who knows. Maybe I will eBook my previous two novels and save the current one for the full treatment.

Because I think this current one is my best yet. It’s hard to describe why, it just feels right. Like I have evolved to a new stage as a writer and everything is just so more solid and exciting now.

And I am actually looking forward to Dec 1 (or whenever, maybe earlier) when I start editing the damned thing. I know that I can make it even better and that what I am writing is just the rough skeleton of what the book can be, if I just invest the effort in it.

And at this point, I don’t feel like going back to a blog post and a video a day. I want to do something more substantial. It’s only just over half way through the month, and it already seems like everything I have done in the year between this NaNoWriMo and the last was pointless.

I could have been writing books and stories the whole time! Duh.

But I didn’t decide to blog tonight (just) to brag. I also want to vent.

See, I feel I am on the downswing of my mood cycle, and that means this would be a good time to write one of my emotional emesis entries where I get a lot of the bad stuff out.

So here it is : while the writing is going well, I have felt the depression building in my mind. All those little fragments of suppress anxiety, anger, and irritation are starting to weigh very heavily on me, and I am learning to get rid of that poison sooner rather than later.

Mostly what is pissing me off lately is being ill. I have a cold that is now ten days old (and gee, I didn’t get it anything) and long term illness always weighs down the soul. You can keep it together for a while when you are sick, but when it drags on and on like this, you start to feel like it will never end.

And it’s not a very severe cold. Mostly what it is doing is draining my energy, plus give me a heavy feeling in my chest and a scratchy feeling in my throat.

I have had far worse. Its the persistence that is wearing me down and making me want to scream and leap. I am just so god damned tired of feeling kinda crappy and scuzzy all the time. I feel disgusting, basically, and it is really getting me down.

So despite my cold, I am probably going to go to Safeway tomorrow afternoon. If it’s raining, no, or super windy, or very very cold, but if it’s an average fall day for this region, I will bundle up and go over and get myself some comfort food.

The process of realizing I can actually afford to indulge myself now continues apace. I was planning to have $150 in my pocket when I get my next cheque this Wednesday, but that didn’t work out. Now it looks like it will be a lot more like $120.

Fine, whatever. It’s not healthy for me to take these little goals for myself too seriously, especially now that I am richer. It’s just a way to set myself up for tension and worry and self-loathing.

The important thing is to have enough to put on the card so I can buy gifts for all the important people in my life. Yes, actual gifts! Not just cards! Yay!

And that includes something nice for me, although I might have to wait until the new year before I have the money together to get myself the Chromebook of my dreams.

I have been thinking about it, and even if all the Chromebook does is give me the option of writing while sitting on the couch in the living room instead of at this computer here, it will be worth it.

Anything that gets me away from my bed is a good thing at this point.

Of course, in the New Year, I will also get a bus pass, so ideally, I would have the laptop with me as I go off in search of contacts in the local arts scene and so on.

Baby step, though. Baby steps.

That’s it from me for now, folks. Seeya soon, prolly.

The deal with November

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It’s that time of year again, when men grow beards for charity and writers write a novel in a month more or less just for the hell of it.

What can I say, we’re a wacky bunch.

It’s all part of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo as it’s known on the street. It’s when nutbars like me attempt to write a 50K word novel in 30 days.

That’s 1667 words a day, give or take a word here and there, and in the past, I have done that while also keeping up with my blogging and whatnot.

Admittedly, up until the 60 60, I had very little in the way of whatnot.

But this year, I plan on devoting as much of my creative energies to my writing as possible, and that means that for the month of November, there will be no new videos and no regular blog entries.

I might blog, I might not. Sorry I can’t be more specific. But this year I am adding editing to the mix. I will bang out my requisite wordcount per day, take a break for a little while, then come back and edit the damned thing to within an inch of its life.

Adjectives will be struck down harshly. Sentences will be brutally rephrased. Darlings will be murdered.

But dammit, at the end, those will be 1667 (or more) damned good words.

I am hoping to thus avoid the daunting task of having to edit a 50,000 word novel all at once. Doing the same thing every day really works for me, and so I hope this leads to a higher quality product in the end.

Who knows, maybe even something worth sending to a publisher.

I am sorry this means abandoning you all for a month, but I will make the final product available to anyone who asks nicely enough at the end, and come Dec 1, it will be back to music and videos and blogging and all kinds of merry mayhem here at Chex MJB.

I am wandering off into the wildness in search of better prose. Wish me luck!

A thoughtful mood

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In a thoughtful mood tonight. Not depressed and frustrated, like yesterday, thank goodness. Doing the emotional emesis trick worked it usual cleansing magic and I feel a lot better today than I did last night.

But I am still feeling pensive and introspective. It is a mood best suited for quiet reflection and exploring one’s inner realm, making a firmer connection between mind and self, and letting long-delayed processes bloom into the empty space freed by your quietude.

And that would be great, if it wasn’t Halloween night. Don’t get me wrong. I love Halloween, despite being an agoraphobic diabetic. I love any holiday that encourages people to express themselves by dressing up and letting their hair down and letting their freak flag fly.

Sure, it’s a little sad that more people can’t be who they want to be every day of the year, as Jello Biafra makes clear in this song.

But I am a more forgiving and understanding person than JB. I get that not everyone can just be a big flaming freakwad with no hesitation and no regrets. So I understand.

And I love fireworks. Fireworks rock my world. They are an amazing thing. Sometimes I wonder at how relatively casually we treat them. It makes big shiny things in the sky! The whole freaking sky! That’s some serious mojo working there. Total tribal magic of the highest order.

So I love Halloween and I love fireworks, but I don’t like them combined.

What some of you might not know is that, somehow, here on the West Coast, they have the crazy idea that fireworks are for Halloween, too.

And that wouldn’t be a problem either, except that because Washington State is so near and they will sell fireworks to absolutely anybody, the fireworks festivities are not limited to nice, well organized displays at public events where everyone can either choose to participate or stay the heck home.

Oh no. That would be remarkably like civilization. Instead, any library mumbler with a Zippo can have their own show, and as a result of that, I get to have very loud explosions going off at random times seemingly right outside my window all night.

This overstimulated my poor introvert’s nerves to the point of something approaching shell shock.

Now I would never dream of peeing on anyone’s parade by telling them they can’t have fun. Nobody wants to be That Guy, the party pooper, the cranky complainer.

But I draw the line when it involves loud noises, whether they be brief and intense, or long term and moderate, like when someone is playing their music too loud.

Their right to make loud noises end when I am trying to sleep or relax. We all have the freedom to do as we please but only if it doesn’t interfere with the rights of others.

Modern life plays a funny game of convincing us how we are all independent individuals with so much freedom, and yet we have never lived around so many others before and thus been limited by their needs.

There is also this : I would really rather people had fun in a way that does not involve any old rube using fiery explosives anywhere and anyhow he goddamn well wants. We’re just lucky this is a damp climate, because if not, every Halloween would burn the whole damned place down.

We are one dry autumn away from oblivion.

So I am just plain not keen on this whole “Halloween = fireworks” bullshit. Whatever happened to needing a license to do this shit?

But still, um… calm. Thoughtful. Introspective. Zen. The fireworks seem to be over for now, so I can… relax.

That’s probably why I ended up doing a video like this one tonight.

I had the idea for that vid in my idea file for a while before finally feeling like making it tonight. Art works out that way sometimes. There is the brilliant idea, and there is the time to execute it, but those are not necessarily coincidental at all.

That’s why writing these things down is so important. You can have the idea, put it in the file, forget about it, then some day in the future, you will be looking through your ideas file and something will just click, and you will say “That’s the one. That’s the one I am doing tonight. ”

We creative types are all worshipers of the same deity : our muse. And one of the most important things to learn about creativity is that you will get nowhere by trying to force your muse to conform to your ideas of how you think creativity SHOULD work.

That bird does not sing when caged. You have to be willing to submit to its will and do things the way it wants to do them, and then you get the really good results.

This becomes particularly troublesome when your “religion” has to deal with the outside world, and its incessant demands that you do things its way.

We creatives are but acolytes to the religion of our muse. We learn the rituals and the rites over time, but we no more understand why they work than a mystic shaman understands whether it’s the herbs or the chanting or the dance that drives the illness from a tribesman’s body.

So when we say “It just doesn’t work that way!”, we don’t know why that is any more than you do.

Don’t ask us, we just work here.

Now myself, I am constantly overflowing with creativity, and so far, that has always been enough. I have never run out of ideas. Quite the opposite, in fact. I have so many ideas that it can be quite overwhelming.

And so I am quite confident that, even though I will be starting a 50,000 word novel tomorrow with only a vague outline in my head of what will go into it, I am not worried.

Whether it’s a novel or a book of short stories, I am quite confident that I can do it.

I mean come on, it’s only 1667 words a day!