I'm moving. Well, my blog is.

As you may have noticed, there has been no activity here for a few weeks. This isn't because a) the Rose City  shriveled up and fell off the bush; b)I shriveled up and fell off the bush; or c) I gave up writing and/or blogging.

What I have been doing requires a bit of a list. For a long time, I was searching for a new day job, convinced as I was that making enough money to actually pay all the monthly bills in the same month would be an awesome way to make writing easier. Hard to concentrate when you're worried about whether you can keep the lights on or if you can stretch the food you have for three more days.

Fortunately, I actually found the right day job, working fewer hours for more money! Sometimes, life works out.

I've also been very busy with writing on my WIP (though I've fallen behind in the last week and a half) and with researching all sorts of topics related to writing - craft, business, publishing. And I've also been designing a new blog.

I originally started this blog as a chronicle of my progress on my novel, but it wasn't really cut out to be a public endeavor that could legitimately be part of an online platform. So I built one that is meant to be that: I call it Writing While Insane. I hope you'll follow me over there, because it's really going to be a much more interesting place for all those people out there who aren't me. And that encompasses most of you.

Thanks so much for befriending me on this rather self-focused blog. Please go claim your reward by visiting my new one!

Breaking the final (round) frontier!

Contrary to appearances, I have not fallen off the face of the earth. I haven't been blogging here mostly because I was concentrating on real life stuff while also maintaining my 500 words a day quota (which I'm happy to say, I've been meeting).

Also, I'm preparing to start a "real" author's blog soon, one that is a lot more focused on establishing a platform than this rather inward-focused tool has been.

At any rate, the word count stands as follows:

Yay! I'm almost 37% finished with my first draft.

In other news, I learned late last night that I'm a finalist in the NYC Midnight Screenwriter's Challenge 2011! We started with about 425 screenwriters divided into 25 heats. The top five from each heat were chosen and divided into another five heats, and the top five of of those were selected as finalists.

I was really happy with the second script I wrote because, unlike the first one, the genre prompt was fantasy rather than--ugh--romance. Now I wait until 9:00 pm Pacific tomorrow for the final prompt, which will give us a genre, a required subject, and a required character type. I will then have until 9:00 pm to turn in a five-page screenplay. Yes, that's a 24-hour turnaround! Sounds terrifying, doesn't it?

All 25 of us will be writing to the same prompt this time. Please join me in praying that the randomly-chosen genre is NOT romance.

And just in case you're interested, feel free to check out the screenplay that got me into the final round.

Matter over mind

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been dealing with more or less constant migraine or migraine-related symptoms that have seriously impeded my ability to concentrate. We get so accustomed to thinking of our brains as multitasking miracle organs that it comes as a bit of a shock when some of that multitasking performance is reduced by illness or ailments. Yeah, so my heart is still pumping well and my various autonomic functions are proceeding properly--so what? I can't seem to form complex sentences on the first try! I'm trying to comment on someone's blog and I'm completely missing my own point! This, frankly, SUCKS.

Even in dealing with my own blog, my mind is in disarray. I want to put up a post every day--and normally, I can--but this week, it was not to be. This is not even the topic on which I wanted to write today, but the actual topic is both too complicated for my fractured mind to do justice to and too important not to get right, so instead, you're getting this. Please accept my fervent apology.

The good news (thank God, there's some good news) is that I have managed, in spite of it all, to keep up my daily word count. I've been hitting about 550 words a day and allowing myself to be satisfied with that. The plot is marching along and the writing feels good. By that, I mean that I feel that I am producing fruitful material, not that the material I'm producing is necessarily great or that it will even survive past the second draft. It's just that what I'm putting down now is at the very least seeding the plot down the road and possibly seeding the second draft.

I have no idea if that last point is at all clear, but in case it is, I'll leave it in. I hope that over the weekend, I'll get back some of my missing cognitive abilities and can write a post that better illuminates what I'm trying to say.


And before I forget to mention it, I have unceremoniously crossed the 30% completion mark on the first draft and continued right to 31%:

Feel free to celebrate as you see fit. :D But please, no fireworks. I've had enough of those, inside and out.

Of ice picks, brain cell failure, and 500 words

Yesterday, my eye exploded.

I jest, of course, but only in a literal sense. My eye didn't actually burst--it only felt as though it was about to. For a couple of hours.

And the eye pain was just the central gem in a complete jewelry setting of head pains in the form of "ice pick headaches," for which the official term is "primary stabbing headache." Both names are sufficiently and accurately descriptive; these are sudden, sharp headaches that seem to be focused on a specific point in the head that feel exactly the way I imagine it would feel to have an ice pick thrust into the skull.

Apparently, ice pick headaches are predominantly experienced by people who also suffer from migraine *raises hand* and cluster headaches, but they are not actually migraines or cluster headaches, so treatments for those ailments don't work for these. There is, in fact, no known treatment yet for ice pick headaches.

The eye pain was repetitive, but variety was provided by the fact that the other ice picks were scattered around at various cranial locations. It was a lot like having a fireworks show taking place inside my head.

Write, don't edit

I am happy to report that I am back on the writing wagon, after a brief stumble late last week. So, hooray for the resumption of forward progress! That progress is a bit slower than it has been up to now, but I've averaged at least my 500 word quota per day over the weekend.

Said weekend was fraught with serious problems on the personal front (which are still ongoing and shall be for the foreseeable future), and in the course of dealing with those problems, I managed to lose track of exact word counts, but I do know what the overall word count of the WIP was as of last night, and it has put the first draft over 28% complete:

It's always interesting to see how confronting problems in my non-writing life affects my writing progress. Sometimes, I will use the writing to "self-medicate" by diving into it even more obsessively, finding a measure of comfort, I suppose, in my complete control over the fictional world I'm building and certainly a healthy dose of escapism.

However, no neurotic worthy of the label would sit still indefinitely for creating something positive out of a negative experience; it's contrary to the by-laws of our guild. Accordingly, as the excrement has impacted the air circulation device, I've found myself periodically drifting toward really unproductive thoughts about my novel. Contrary to the approach I've been espousing in this blog and trying valiantly to live up to, I've found myself spending time editing the old rather than churning out the new. Part of that is due to my brain being filled with a lot of extraneous worry and more chaos than normal--it's damned hard to map out where I want a scene to go (or even start) when three or four real-life crises are pounding on the window and screeching like manic owls.

But another factor in my reversion to revision over slogging forward through new territory is that my personal difficulties have simply made me more vulnerable to the host of fears that tend to plague most writers, especially we of the unpublished variety.  I know this, and I've tried hard over the past few days to keep my editorial busyworking to a minimum, but I was still grateful for the timing of today's entry on Kristen Lamb's Blog, Editing-Meet the Novel-Killer.

In which I admit to being a Very Bad Girl

Bless me, readers, for I have sinned.

Yes, it's true. Yesterday, I fell off the writing wagon. I did not write on my novel at all. Not a single word. I feel slightly soiled, as though I'd directed a sneeze into my shirtsleeve that really should have been sent into a strong, name-brand tissue.

So, I failed to meet my word count. I feel incomplete. Plus, I need a clean shirt.

It's not like I didn't think about the novel yesterday. I spent quite a few hours mulling over the re-plotting I now have to do, since the completion of Scenezilla deposited the story in a place somewhat to one side of where I had originally intended to go from here. What's more, this replotting required me to think in somewhat deeper detail about the circumstances surrounding the story's climax, which I had been putting off until later.

The battle against Scenezilla

Sorry to be so uncommunicative this week, but you see, I've been fighting a monster. I call it Scenezilla.

You see, I started working on a scene in my novel--a pivotal scene in which the protagonist is forced to make a decision he doesn't want to make--waaay back on June 30. Now, I realize that June 30 was a mere week ago and that it might not seem like a long time to be working on such an important scene.

But you see, I've been writing at a deliberately breakneck pace up till now. The idea is to reach the end of the story so that I will have a Completed First Draft (cue celestial choir). The near-term goal of this undertaking is, in fact, the Completed First Draft. It's the name of the game, the water under my raft, the wind beneath my wings (cue Bette Midler, then club her in the throat with a two-by-four before she finishes the first bar).

This is what a psychotic break looks like

I approach this blog in an unusually chaotic frame of mind. And that's really saying something, because on a good day, the inside of my head is roughly like a combination of the hallway closet and the kitchen junk drawer, with the leftovers from the last 7 yard sales and a pair of snow boots I don't even recognize and three unmated gloves tossed in for lack of anywhere else to put them.

And the odd thing is, as I glance back over the entries I've made to this blog since I started it way back 31 days ago, there is very little evidence of this internal chaos here--or, indeed, of any of my actual personality. Instead, I've been frightfully earnest about the challenges I've faced as I boringly chronicle the writing my novel. This is more or less by design, actually, because I have been using this space as a) a public declaration of  my intent to write a novel, and b) leverage to shame myself into continuing the novel even when I get discouraged.

In other words, I wasn't writing so much for outside consumption as I was holding a knife to my own throat. "That's right, just keep typing. You make your word count today or, I swear, I'll do it!"

(It's possible that I could do with some medication, yes.)

I wasn't even concerned about how boring this blog is until other bloggers such as Laura Stanfill and JoEberhardt and Emerald Barnes started coming by and leaving comments and even linking to my blog on

Gotta get out more... and go to bed earlier!

Somehow, I have apparently skipped 23% with the 1126 words I added yesterday! I now have a grand total of more than 24,000 words. Pretty crazy!

Of course, my progress is not without a price. I decided to go out and do a couple of things again last night and stayed out until well after 10:30 pm, and still wanted to do another 400 or so words before going to bed. Needless to say, this was not a prudent decision. Today I have a persistent mild migraine to deal with.

But I don't regret going out one bit. I went to Powell's to attend Scott Sparling's reading from his newly published book Wire to Wire, and am so glad I did. Scott lives here in the Portland area and this is his first novel, although he has been working on it for twenty years. It was fascinating, and very entertaining, to hear his tale of this literary journey. I am eager to read his book now!

After that, I visited a friend on the way home and wound up staying for a couple of hours. Don't regret that, either; the lack of prudence was in staying up late to continue writing. Should have cut myself some slack and made up for it on the long weekend.

Writing, blogging, volunteering, and hair coloring

Yesterday was a very atypical day, in that I did more revising of the plot map, did a little writing, worked on a couple of different blog posts, spent an hour and a half phonebanking with Organizing for America, colored my hair (first time I've ever done it myself! Eek!), and finally got back to writing. Still, I did manage another 1102 words! I am closing in on 23% completed on my first draft.

I'm a little worried that I may be taking too long to get to my protagonist's decision point, but I'm just going to keep moving forward. I can sort all the plotting out later, and if I need to cut some stuff or move it around, the second draft is the proper venue for that.

Oh, and here's the result of my debut as a hair self-colorist:

Just keep swimming, just keep swimming

Still making steady progress, having added another 1072 words yesterday. Sometimes I find myself wondering how many of the words I'm banging out every day will survive into the second draft, but I suspect that such speculation is a threat to progress. After all, it's hard to justify writing words that may just end up on the novelist's equivalent of the cutting room floor. So let's not think about it, shall we? I am very close to 22% finished with the first draft, and that's something to celebrate!

Today, I would really like to get to what I feel is the end of the "first act" of the story, the point where the protagonist makes the decision that catalyzes the rest of the plot. I think I may be coming to it later than I should be, from a technical standpoint, and that may be something I have to correct in the next draft. But I have been pretty careful to make sure that every scene has actually moved the plot forward, so I do feel good about the plotting so far. And everyone who has read the draft has indicated that they are finding it gripping, so it doesn't seem to be a saggy story.

I don't know--maybe it's just fine. Who cares? I need a completed draft before I start dissecting the darn thing. Onward!

Back to the grindstone... thank God

Yesterday was a slow-starter. Most of the time I spent on the novel was applied to plotting in greater detail the next three big scenes. This was necessary because the plotting I've done so far has kind of been like planning a road and marking where I think it's going to go with little dots of spray paint. Then, as I actually write, I find the places where the ground is to hard to dig or there are obstacles that I don't want to try to write around, or I just find a better or more interesting direction.

In other words, writing can trump plotting, particularly when it comes to details. So where I ended up on the last big scene did not deposit the story precisely at the place that I had expected when I was plotting. Therefore, re-plotting was necessary.

Once I was ready to start writing, though, I found my reserves of enthusiasm were greatly depleted. This was due to several factors. Fortunately, a good friend called late last night to slap me upside the head with some common sense. At the time he called, I only had 450 words written and was struggling to reach the 500 word minimum quota. After he called, the writing caught fire and I finally stopped at 1200 words. This means I have officially surpassed the 20% completion mark!

"That's it?"

As I predicted, I spent most of the weekend working on my new entry to the screenplay competition, so I didn't write as much on the novel. I did, however, add a new 1083 words, which puts me over the 19% mark for completion of the first draft.

I tore my hair out for the first part of the weekend. Literally no concepts were coming to me for the screenplay prompt (genre: fantasy, subject: a natural disaster, character: an airport security guard). I eventually realized that the reason was that I was attacking it from a scenario and plot angle instead of letting the plot grow from a character. So I finally picked a concept and just started writing a character walking into the situation, focusing on who she was.

Thankfully, the writing flowed after that. I finished the first draft Saturday, polished it a little bit Sunday, and turned it in with hours to spare. Now I wait for a confirmation that the competition received my entry without any issues, and after that, I wait until July 18 to hear if I made the cut to the final round. I feel pretty good about my chances; I really like what I turned in.

Just write, damn it!

I slowed down a little yesterday, not deliberately but because the words seemed to come more slowly. I think I feel prey to a bad habit for writing a first draft: thinking too hard and too long about everything... word choices, characterization, etc. And while I felt good about what I'd written, I finished without that sense of elation that I've been experiencing at the end of the day up to now. I believe the reason for that is that I gave up so much momentum by stopping too often to think.

Still, I wrote another 1,038 words, bringing me to 18% of the first draft completed.

I've been doing a lot of reading of blogs by writers lately, looking for advice on how to build a "writer's platform," which is the latest terminology for writers doing their own marketing and promotion work. In doing this research, I came across a truly hilarious, and highly profane, website and blog--terribleminds.com by writer Chuck Wendig. If you are not easily offended by obscenities (I'm not), you should really check out his page on building a writer's platform, and pretty much anything else he posts to his blog. I laughed so hard reading this stuff that I was nearly in tears, and yet he consistently makes valid, practical points from which any writer will benefit.

But where I really found some advice that was very timely for me, in particular,

More progress and some good news

Okay, folks, I'm officially closing in on the first plot point, and at just about the right time (according to plotting experts), because after writing an additional 2,081 words yesterday, I now have my first draft 17% complete!

As part of my never-ending campaign to derail my own progress, I've been worrying a lot the last few days because the writing is coming so easily. Not that it doesn't take me a lot of hours to come up with each day's words--it does--but I'm not actually struggling, and it seems like I should be. After all, didn't Gene Fowler say, "Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead?"

Well, so far, I'm digging deep for what I'm writing and I like what I'm doing--a lot--but I'm nowhere near bleeding. And yes, I know this sounds stupid, so please feel free to make a doll with a lock of my hair and stick pins into it to your heart's content. That might at least provide me with something legitimate to complain about.

In other news, I just found out that I have advanced to the second of three

The good times keep on rolling

Had another really good day yesterday, wherein I actually wrote about 2,000 words, but did enough adjusting in the process that I actually had a net gain of 1,889 by the time all was said and done. So I am now a solid 15% done with the first draft!

But the exciting thing is that what I did yesterday felt so good. While the genre of this novel is contemporary fantasy, it is also comedic, and the scene I was working on yesterday was especially heavy on the comedy. Writing it was an absolute blast! When I finished, I texted a friend to say "I hope this scene is as funny as I think it is." She later read it and declared that it was, indeed, funny, so I have more or less independent confirmation.

I can only hope that this trend of feeling good about the writing will continue, although it's a double-edged sword; whenever I feel so wholeheartedly enthusiastic, I begin to wonder if I'm losing perspective, which leads to suspicion that the writing isn't as good as I think it is, which then triggers a certainty that it's not, and so on and so forth. You'd think there'd be a good medication for this, wouldn't you?

My cup of inspiration runneth over

After doing a bit of rewriting and tightening of the 11% of my first draft that I had completed by Friday, I found myself in a strange position: I was overly inspired. I know that sounds a little ridiculous, but I honestly felt so good about what I'd written and so full of creative energy that I was momentarily not sure where to go with it all.

At least one character that I'd intended to use and discard turned out to be too interesting and full of possibilities to toss out after a single use. On top of that, I suddenly had a number of ideas for the the climactic scenes of the story that were much more interesting and full of delicious conflict than I had previously imagined.

So, I took the weekend off from writing while I pondered all this. And I'm still not sure exactly what my outline will look like going forward, but yesterday, I did manage to get most of the way through my next scene and produced a tidy sum of 2,258 words, bringing my draft up to 13% completion!

Never mind!

Yesterday was a very atypical day for me, novel-wise. I didn't actually write more from where I left off the day before. Instead, I went back and read everything I had written in order to clean it up, weaved in the stuff I had just sort of air-dropped into the plot along the way, and tackled known problems that I had left myself notes about. I wound up writing probably an additional 800 words or more, but because I also cut a bunch of stuff as I went, I only ended up with a net gain of 179. But hey, I still have 11% done!

I know I had kind of committed myself to just writing straight through to the end of the first draft, but I think I'm not temperamentally capable of that. I used to go back and rewrite everything I'd done before each day before continuing on the story, which resulted in a really great first couple of pages which then progressively deteriorated. I'm not doing that this time. But I do think I need to do a quality-control rewrite every 10,000 words or so, just to ensure that the tone and the logic and plotting remain consistent throughout.

What really shocked me as I reread my first few scenes was this: they weren't in need of that much rewriting. I did completely strike one paragraph and I rewrote the first three paragraphs of the novel, but after that, it was just a lot of smaller tweaks. I had really expected to have to do more rebuild, when in fact what was needed was mostly finishing work.

And today my friend and writing partner (on yet another novel project) read the whole thing and declared that it is, in fact, not even close to crap. So, yay! I can stop driving myself batshit crazy and get back to work. Several other people have offered to read my draft, so I have to add some more to it in order to make it worth their time. :D

And by the way, I feel I should apologize to anyone who actually follows this blog for the fact that it reads like it should be titled "Leanne: Portrait of a Middle-Aged Neurotic." But hey, they do say to write what you know.

This is a stupid concept that nobody wants to read

As I predicted in yesterday's post, the pace of my writing did indeed slow down yesterday as a result of my having to stop and rework the next portion of my outline. This was necessary because, after actually writing the stuff dictated by my outline so far, the next scenes I had prescribed initially either weren't quite appropriate or just not as good as the ideas I had now.

Still, I managed to do 700 words yesterday, so that's nice!

Interestingly, my subconscious saboteur decided to make another derailment attempt. Last night, I started wondering if maybe my protagonist was the only character I would ever be able to write successfully. (This was brought about by the fact that this is far and away my most successful novel attempt.) I promptly rattled off several other characters I've written successfully (in a separate novel I'm co-authoring), so I beat that attempt at sabotage rather easily.

This morning, however, I was taking a shower and suddenly had the thought pop into my head that my novel plot was stupid. Just silly and stupid and utterly uninteresting to anyone but me. This bit of negativity has been harder to refute, simply because, besides me, nobody has read what I've written yet. I really don't know for sure that my plotline isn't dumb, I have no way of knowing if anyone who doesn't see my face in the mirror every day will find this story compelling. For all I know, people will cringe as they read it and won't progress beyond the first ten pages.

Don't touch that fire extinguisher

My hot streak has continued.Yesterday, I wrote another 1,955 words! This brings my running total above the 10,000-word mark by a healthy margin:

Things will probably slow down a little today, because I need to rework the next part of the outline. The way I've written the last couple of scenes dictates that the outline I have for the next two or three needs to be tweaked quite a bit. So I suppose that most of today's work time will be spent reshaping the next scene or two, with enough left over to write my minimum of 500 words. Unless my fire is still burning after all the outline work and I can zip through an extra 500 or so.

That's actually a real possibility, since I've reached the point where I'm actually "living" in this novel world of mine now. That's when my creativity hits overdrive and I just don't want to stop writing until it feels like the right time to quit. Although I love being inside the head of my protagonist so much, I never really feel like stopping. I just have to sometimes, to eat and sleep and stuff.

Anyway, I'm off to rework the outline. Wish me luck!