I read a book on the ConformiPad the other day. (That’s iPad, for those who have trouble parsing nicknames…no one ever seems to understand that one. Let it be clear that, in the same way Devo acknowledges their own ludicrousness along with the rest of the species, I can’t exclude myself from the conformism that having one of these things implies.)
I did it because I didn’t know what I wanted to read and it was easier to search through the library on that device than on the slower Kindle. Also I was reading in dim light and would have had to use the Kindle light the whole time, which is OK, and the light on the Kindle Touch case is much more battery-efficient than the one for the Kindle Keyboard. But we’re all still waiting for them to release a sidelit model like B&N did months ago, and it’s getting annoying. (They call it frontlit, but it’s sidelit. I don’t know if it’ll be better or worse than the current lighting system, but it’ll be more compact.)
The device was much bulkier and heavier and notifications kept distracting me, and I had to charge it about three times during the course of the book, including once when I wanted to be reading. Also I dropped it once, on carpet, and it reminded me that I fumble-drop Kindles all the time…they tend to survive nowadays, though I broke about four of the more fragile models in the early days, but truly dropping the C-pad will smash it.
So I don’t think I’ll do it very often. But it wasn’t so bad for occasional reading. Now let it never be said that I’m bigoted against Apple, even though I am.
Not head down, as in hanging one’s head, but heads down, as in, nose to the grindstone. Except I only have one head, so the plural is irresponsible and misleading. And this answers the question of whether it’s possible to digress before you even get started.
So here’s the status. I’m pleased to say I’ve been writing an average of 6.5 out of 7 days since I got back into the saddle after the last road trip. Though that wording makes no sense, since the driver’s seat is more like a saddle than the seat at Starbucks I write in. But again I digress.
I wanted to write everything else before writing the climax of the story, so I went along finishing up the final chapters that lead up to it (that’s lead as in present tense, not the extremely annoying common modern misspelling of the past tense “led”). Then I found I had left a couple of other chapters unfinished, and one or two outlined but unwritten. Then I had to decide whether to write the denoument before or after writing the climax (do books have denouments or just movies?) All this took way longer than I had hoped, especially since I was slow to get into it at first.
But now things are moving along at a reasonable clip, though I continue to have the problem of writing too clean of a first draft, and am spending too much time on word selection and that sort of tweak that the second draft’s supposed to deal with. At this point I’ve got maybe a third of the first iteration of the climax written. I say it this way because I’m sure it will go through several iterations, i.e. rewrites by the time the book is completely done. That’s sort of disheartening, because it seems like everything I do now is throwaway, but I suppose you can’t start rewrites until you’ve finished the write.
Still hoping to finish the first draft before leaving on my next road trip, but it’s completely dependent now on whether I choose to leave next week or a month later to try to catch the turning of the leaves in Maine. Either way, I hereby swear on all that’s holy, that I will write at least 50% of days on my next road trip. (Although I’m agnostic at best, so I don’t know how much that’s worth.) Seriously, it ought to be more doable this time because I’ve learned enough about photography now that, and got my gear to the state where, that other activity shouldn’t interfere nearly as much with this one.
I’ve talked about the first wall I hit since I started this project, and how I got past it. Now I’d like to talk about the second one I hit, and the periodic rearing of its ugly head.
Once again, I’m not talking about writer’s block - the blank page syndrome. That hasn’t happened to me, at least not in the way I envision it, where you sit down and have nothing to write about, nothing to say. I wonder if it’s a cliche in film with little basis in reality. Or maybe it’s a literary fiction thing, where the writer is resisting all structure and plot and waiting for the essence of the universe to flow through him, or something, and it’s not flowing.
What happened to me, this time, is that I got to a point where I had cherry-picked all or most of the sections of the book that I felt like writing, and was now in a position where I had to write pieces that needed to be written, but that I didn’t feel like writing right then. These weren’t necessarily boring parts…ideally all boring parts will be cut anyway, so there’s not much sense in writing them in the first place, really.
These were perfectly good parts, dealing with things important to the characters: relationship building, learning key skills, stepping stone conflict encounters, that kind of stuff. Also, the big showdown climax, which you’d think I’d be eager to get to.
And I am. But just then, I didn’t feel like writing these pieces. I didn’t really know why. Part of it, I think, was that I had spent a lot of time on the parts dealing with one POV character, and now I needed to move to a different POV character who I hadn’t written on for a couple of weeks or more. I can’t explain it further than that, other than to assume it was my own ornery laziness that I had to fight through.
The solution to this was the same as always: keep writing. I chipped away at it bit by bit, and in the process I had some of the shortest writing days that I’d had since early on in the project. It took me almost a week to get through a 2-3 chapter sequence. Now, as I approach the end of the first draft, sometimes it takes days to get through a single chapter.
By this point, though, it seems to be paying off. I’ve got some holes that need to be filled in early chapters, and some continuity smoothing, but other than that, I’m finally to the point where the last remaining parts of the first draft are getting knocked out, and all that will be left is the big showdown climax and the denoument afterward.
Of course, once the first draft is done, that’s when the problems will really start coming.
I’ve written before about how I feel about Apple products, despite the fact that I use them. For now let’s just say it’s a mixed bag, but I have reasons for using a Macbook Air 11” for fiction writing. That’s what I’ve been using all along. It’s smallish, somewhat light, and perhaps more importantly, has no hard drive to crash. But it’s poor in terms of ports, among other failings.
Now they’ve put out a model that’s twice as big, twice as heavy, and more than twice as expensive: the MacBook 15” with Retina Display, or similar name. It has an exceptionally high-resolution screen, though oddly it’s not a touch screen when they clearly have the technology to do that well using exactly the same components. It’s got better ports than I’d expect from Apple (including 2X USB 3.0), an SDXC slot legitimately useful for photography, the same awful keyboard, and the same size SSD as I have now (there’s a slightly larger one in the insane high-end model which is even more outrageously priced). Also a pretty good, though not top-notch gaming card, which I could really only use if I installed Windows dual-boot, wasting a lot of premium SSD space in the process. And of course, no blu-ray (or any internal disc)—I read Jobs didn’t like them for some reason, finding them technically untidy or something, so the company’s employees started spouting nonsense about how you can just download everything including the highest-resolution video you could ever want.
So why am I considering getting one?
Lately I’ve felt that the amount of real estate on the screen has been a problem for things like outlining and referring to notes. The high-resolution, larger screen would let me arrange more resources on the screen at once. It would also be much better for any sort of photo work, since I’ve been doing that at a more pro-ish level than ever before. Also if I someday get back to writing music, it’s more powerful and has a better screen for it.
On the other hand, I can solve these problems in other ways and probably should. I also know they will put out a better version in six months and I’ll wish at that time that I’d waited. Also, the system setting regarding the screen’s resolution is bizarre and misleading, and I still don’t understand it. Also I’d need to use a different bag to carry the thing, since it would be about 4” larger diagonally and almost twice as thick.
So far I’ve resisted.
Since the last batch of blog entries, i.e., for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been faithfully following rule #1: Write Every Day. Getting back into the habit was less difficult than I had expected, perhaps because of reinforcing factors like the fact that I usually go to the same place to do it, which happens to be the local Starbucks. Whatever the reason, I started out expecting to get going @ 10 minutes a day, but quickly moved up to basically draining the laptop’s battery each day and then going home andthinking about the project.
This sounds good and all, and it’s better than not writing every day, but there have been different kinds of problems. First, when I got back from the last trip I had many distractions, some of which were related to the following:
Even so I’ve managed to get on a schedule where writing gets a good chunk of time blocked off to itself daily. But there have been distractions during that time, including:
It may be time to find a new place to go every day, or to train myself to do it at home or the office, but I feel like I should just brute-force my way through finishing the first draft before making any changes to the routine. I guess that’s what I’ll do.
Still, it seems to take a long time to get anything written now, though, and it often feels less natural than it did before. Perhaps as a result of this, I often find myself tweaking existing parts of the book instead of writing the new stuff that’s needed to get the first draft finished.
I guess the answer is always the same in this life: never give up, try; try again; git ’er done; just do it; however you want to say it. So, that’s what I’ll do.
