1.

Thinking of getting this blog done up right. Talking to Parajunkee Designs. If you have any other suggestions, please do let me know.

Incidentally, I am now at Posterous.

There will be different content over there for the foreseeable future.

2.

I'm writing about 2 pages -- about 500 words a day. Since the start of May, which means a nice 7k or so.

The next few days will be slow. I'm writing a rousing declaration of war. Note to self: Bush II must have made some speeches about the War on Terror, and I must study them to see what he did right/wrong at some point. Probably should consider Churchill and a few others too.

3.

I'm playing EchoBazaar. Possibly the greatest waste of time on Earth, but I need to sorta disappear from a few places online and therefore I need a new obsession.

Process

1.

My process involves a lot more thinking and waiting for things to piece themselves together in my little head than I would like.

So I spend a lot of time moaning about how if my writing process was more like how I work out the rest of my life, the world would be a better place for me.

2.

Elizabeth Bear:

I've been meaning to blog for a while on writing-related topics, but you know, the funny thing is, as I get better at this writing gig, it gets harder to find things to talk about. One is that historically I've always blogged about what I was learning, and these days, while I am still learning about writing (and I imagine I always will be) the writing curve is a lot flatter, and a lot more of the skills have moved into the realm of unconscious competence. I can still tap into that knowledge when teaching, editing, or critting, but I'm no longer having to work it out for my own self on a daily basis.
And the stuff I am having to work out is much more arcane and of more limited application.

I’ve tried several times to rephrase this analogy in a more compact way with less back-story, but I’m afraid we’re stuck with this rather clunky one.

My undergraduate education has been in economics, with a focus on econometrics; for those of you who are not so well-acquainted with the dismal science, you may substitute statistics for econometrics.

There are lots of formulas. There are lots of proofs you have to go through to understand why those formulas work (kind of). There are lots and lots of criteria as to when and where you can use those formulas. Lots of little bits you must weigh in the pros/cons columns and then decide what your final method will be.

So finally, you can have a long, erudite and technically complex argument as to why you have done it one way rather than another in your study, but really, it boils down intuition as much as anything else.

It’s the same thing with writing, I bet.

There’s only so much you can learn by reading what other people have written on the subject – or taught etc.

There’s so much more to learn by doing. And so much of learning by doing you cannot learn by having it taught to you.

3.

Recently, I taught a friend to cross-stitch. I bought everything, the chart, fabric, thread, needle and frame.

I sat her down, and gave her the basics. I barely managed to restrain myself to the basics. I itched to discuss railroading, linen vs Aida, cotton vs silk, stretch frame vs scroll frame vs Q-snaps vs hoop vs in-hand.

At its very basic, cross-stitch is simply the physical act of making little crosses with needle and thread on a ground (fabric).

Similarly, writing is stringing words together. A monkey could do it. But it doesn’t mean a monkey could do it well.

4.

There are lessons to be learnt each day in doing, and each day in doing, one internalises both those lessons and the lessons one has learnt from classes, critiques etc.

That internalising is what makes for effortless excellence.

Immersion

1.

I’m a write-every-day kind of writer.

It took me three years to earn that kind of discipline, and I’ll be damned if I let it disintegrate now.

2.

But I think it’s not really about writing-every-day.

It’s about Thinking About The Work every day, because it’s what keeps you ‘plugged into your work’. Sort of, if your novel’s a ‘flow,’ then it’s just easier to tap into it if you do it every day.

Pretty sure some people can do it without writing every day, but I’m also pretty sure it’s easier just to write every day – barring time constraints, of course.

3.

I started one of my old blogs to keep my hand in, so to speak. Just to make sure that I wrote something every day.

It kind of worked. I wrote every day, though I didn’t post usually post what I wrote the same day – it got to a point where I was writing my posts up to a week or more in advance because I just blogged, blogged, blogged.

On the other hand, it was the perfect procrastination-from-fiction tool*, because I could tell myself ‘I’m still writing.’

But I wasn’t.

4.

If there’s anything similar to blogging, it might be writing vignettes and other types of short-form fiction. They are like doing the hundred meter dash every day, just on different athletic tracks – somebody will probably want to smack me for this analogy, but I don’t write short-form at all so forgive me.

Novels are marathons. Plod plod plod.

5.

Actually, strike that.

Novels are more like obstacle courses. Sometimes you run into a wall, a mud pit, something you have to climb over, or crawl under…

You need to deal with them, and you need to deal with each of them intelligently. You don’t want to expend more effort than necessary, but sometimes, you gotta bring out the bulldozers.

But here’s the thing. Books are organic objects, whether you’re a plotter or not.

If you dig up something to dump it and you dig it up by the roots? It’ll jostle the foundations of the rest of your constructions.

I think only if you’re truly immersed in your book can you see the rough edges, sand them off, and put the pieces back together to form a new pattern.

6.

So breathe your work. Dream of it. Wallow in it. Hold it deep within your heart.

Immerse yourself.

1.

It snowed today.

Reconsidering my plans to study in Canada now.

I have no idea what I was thinking (maybe that it IS February?) but I decided I’d be warm enough in just a sweater. Which I was. Nearly.

But…snowgasm! In a Sweater! At least it didn’t settle.

2.

I haven’t written pretty much since my exams ended. What’s up with that? So I’ve started on TLOL again.

I would have done so earlier, but it really irritates me that WriteWay does not allow you to open 2 WIPs at a time and I haven’t yet had the time to go print it out.

3.

1-2-3 isn’t going very well. I didn’t do it

I’m just finding it to be such a chore. Damn it.

Habituating

1.

How perfect would it have been if I had managed to make this the first post with this tag.

Alas.

2.

There are a lot of studies that have concluded that willpower is a finite resource.

I won’t link to them here, but I do believe it is true.

It makes sense. Everything else is finite. Why wouldn’t willpower be too?

I do, however, also think that willpower is like stamina. If you use it enough, if you work it enough, you’ll have more of it. Similarly, if you use it for running mostly, your stamina goes longer if used for running.

That is, you can also use efficiency more efficiently.

For instance, once you get used to writing every day, it’s easier to write every day. You need less willpower to write every day, so you can have more willpower left over to do other stuff.

3.

Efficiency can also be achieved in another: setting attainable (but not too attainable) goals that are well-defined, i.e. not nebulous.

You don’t want to waste willpower fiddling over how you are going to achieve your goal.

If you say you want to write x amount of words a day, that’s easy. BICHOK.

If you say you want to read more craft books, make that…I don’t know, one every month. I think one every two weeks would be pushing it, but what do I know? I read economics blogs for fun.

4.

This year, there are two things I would like to add to my daily life. 1-2-3 is one of them, and the other is stitching pretty much every single day.

Primarily, the reason is that I need to relax more. I just don’t like waking up about a quarter of the way to a panic attack. Or sitting in a lecture and trying to Zen my heartbeat into a more normal rate.

Now combine the two, and exchange lecture for exam? That’s called a catastrophe waiting to happen.

5.

So new and better habits.

So I can be a better, improved version of me.

Self-Improvement

1.

I have a fetish for it.

I like to be able to say ‘I’ve done this in ____.’

It’s less that I want to be a better person, but I want to be better prepared to take over the world to seize every opportunity that comes my way, and just to do things better.

2.

In 2007, it was learning to be more extroverted.

That one was hard.

But it was a good year for that. I think it made my first year away from home a lot easier than it would have been otherwise.

3.

2008 and 2009 was meditation.

The reason why it was the same in 2009 was because 2008 was a bust.

So was 2009, come to that.

4.

Which is how we ended up in 2010.

I’m looking for my replacement for meditation, if that makes sense. A way for me to clear The Space in My Head. Hence 1-2-3 and The Year of Starts, to enable more Stabbing Fabric with a Needle.

I decided that this year, I am going to attempt a multi-pronged approach. 1-2-3 is active, whereas stitching every day is passive.

We’ll see how this one goes. 1-2-3 is a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. *bangs head*

5.

I periodically do this with my gadgets too.

I have given up on Outlook. Chrome has to go. Word doesn’t quite fit my writing needs so now I have WriteWayPro. Twitter is better with a Twitter client rather than on web. So forth.

I may settle for Google-izing my laptop in the short-term*, but I doubt I’ll actually do that. I don’t like Chrome. I really don’t like Chrome.

6.

I think that everything can be improved. It’s just a question of whether the improvement is worth the time you spend getting there.

I am, after all, an economist. Marginal marginal marginal!

*Defined as for the next year to eighteen months, as I’ll almost definitely switch out my current laptop for another, or at least get a secondary.

1.

Odd.

I swear I’m undergoing difficulties…but WriteWay tells me that I’ve written over a thousand words in the past two days.

And I would say that WriteWay has lost its mind (a theme so prevalent in my life right now that it ought to have its own tag) but for the fact that I thought about it, realised that I have written one completely new scene, and added to two others.

2.

This novel has been different in every way.

The writing of it has been surprisingly easy. Not that I don’t wrack my brains over the plot and so forth, but I have never felt like I’ve to cut myself to bleed the words out onto the page.

Nor have I wanted to throw out this entire draft to start all over, despite the fact that I am nearly at the 10k mark.

3.

Still thinking about January-in-February.

Joely said she’d be my accountability partner for it.*

I dread the thought of getting up early to scribble three pages before class, though I know what’s good for you is often hard to do.

It’s the logistics of it that bother me. I don’t know how I want to do it.

I do know that I want to get up in the mornings to do it.

But do I do it by hand on paper and toss it? Open up a new word doc every day, write it in an email and send it to sooper-dooper-sekrit account? How?

* If you’re interested, just ping me. I am Cardinal Emily of Gmail, with a full-stop between Cardinal and Emily. Apparently there’s another, more evil Emily Cardinal out there.

1.

Yes. I know. I’m supposed to be dead to the world and unwriting*.

2.

But sometimes the urge takes over and exam tomorrow be-damned.

My cast is slowly expanding, and my multiple storylines are weaving themselves in and out to make a coherent whole.

Never mind nailing Euler equations. This is a whole new level of high.

3.

I have decided I will be doing a January-in-February** challenge, to kick-start my 3 pages in the morning habit to empty my not-so-little mind of its detritus first thing.

I haven’t decided yet how I’ll do it. Pen and paper just doesn’t really appeal to me. At the moment, I’m considering typing 3 pages, whilst listening to Britney Spears’s Three on repeat, and not saving any of it.

Except…what if there are gems in there? There might be, like, diamonds in the rough.

*unwriting is my version of unwinding.

**Something I’ll probably not be able to do next year because I would like to celebrate what might be my first and last Chinese New Year at home in years in proper style.