Project Reach: A Writer's Blog

Midnight Update

2009-03-02T02:50:00.001-05:00

Well, I haven't gotten any additional writing done tonight, but I did re-read my first four chapters and performed a very thorough edit of each. So that's some progress. Tomorrow is dedicated to new writing.

Rally

2009-03-02T00:42:00.003-05:00

I am rallying. I cannot continue to let Chapters 5 and 6 languish in my head for want of motivation to write them. Or for want of time. I've lived long enough to realize that you have to MAKE time for the things that are truly important to you. Project Reach is a priority, and I will begin the week by ensuring that I treat it as such. I will begin by re-reading the chapters I have completed thus far. Then I'll open up the drafts of Chapters 5 and 6 and read those. Then I'll see if I can stir up some inspiration to write a little in them, or do a few quick edits. I will rally. This week, I've already put off both of the men I'm dating to make a little writing time. They might not be happy about it, but that is my decision.

No Progress

2009-02-27T14:52:00.000-05:00

I'm a slacker. The entire month of February has passed me by and I have only accomplished a very few paragraphs of writing. But I've gotten a lot of things accomplished in my personal life. I'm dating two men and will be giving a presentation at a Linux User's Group this weekend. I was also interviewed for an Ubuntu web magazine. But I'm extremely disappointed in myself for not being a more diligent writer. Poor Claire and David miss me. But I'll be back at it soon. Chapters 5 and 6 aren't going to write themselves, after all.

Time and Frustration

2009-02-12T04:55:00.003-05:00

February has been spectacularly unproductive. I've anticipated taking a bit of a break after wrapping Chapter 6, but I might as well count all of last week as a break since I didn't get anything written and lost all of the revision I'd made due to a computer error and not properly backing up my work. I'm beginning to feel a pattern emerging. Wrap a chapter, feel great about it, start new chapter, hit brick wall, get frustrated. And I'm never really sure how I work through the frustration. It appears to be different every time, so the exact formula remains elusive. I think it all boils down to time spent with ass in office chair writing. But I never seem to have enough of that. I find my most productive sessions happen during the half an hour I steal during my lunch break at work, reinforcing my suspicion that my most productive hours are long over by the time I make it home in the evenings. Or maybe it's the lack of distractions. Hard to say. I've yet to take the laptop to the coffee shop after work an force myself into a writing session before going home, though. I've been meaning to try that to see if a change in venue prompts more creativity.

Losses

2009-02-09T03:09:00.002-05:00

I've lost all of the revisions I've made this week due to a document recovery error. Bahumbug! But luckily, I hadn't done any real writing all week long, so I haven't lost any new output. But still, the revisions were good and I am very discouraged to have lost them. I'm in the process of trying to recreate them from memory, but it's not a promising endeavor.

And then I lost the blog I was writing.

Phooey.

OBE Research

2009-02-03T23:39:00.002-05:00

I haven't gotten any writing done in the last few days out of pure dearth of inspiration, but I have gotten quite a bit of research done. The more I research, the easier my David chapters are to write. I realize with the last one that I hadn't done near enough research and that's why I struggled so much with it. After I finish this tandem, I'm going to be taking a brief hiatus to avoid burnout and also to focus intensely on research. I'm going to try to make my long-overdue trip to B-town. And as I feel like six chapters is enough progress as to qualify as respectable, I feel less like an imposter or a poser and more confident in introducing myself as a writer. Hopefully this will aid me when I start introducing myself to some local cog sci fixtures. I'm trying to make some inroads, maybe score an interview.

The plan for tonight is to research some persons of interest to interview for insight into the science and psi aspects of the story. There's a guy running a cog lab out of UofL's psych department, and I've been meaning to touch base with him. I'm hoping that he'll consent to chatting with me as I could really use some face time with a scientist just to observe. There's no substitute for being able to see the manic gleam in the eye of a researcher when he/she converses on his/her topic of interest.

Speaking of psi, I had been struggling to place its introduction in my outline, but I seem to have stumbled across a resolution in Chapter 6. I think it's a fairly seamless introduction, and a plausible one, which is key. I only worry that I'm giving the reader too much of a lead on Claire's crisis. Might it not be better to just spring it on them? But then if I do that, I risk forcing a suspension of incredulity, which I'm not entirely sure I want to do. It's very delicate and will require more thought, I'm sure.

Last night I sat up reading first-hand accounts of out of body experiences as part of my research. Scared the hell out of me because a lot of practitioners of OBE are also lucid dreamers. I happen to be able to lucid dream regularly, though I rarely ever actually try for it. The only time I intentionally introduce myself into a lucid dream is when I'm outlining a story. I lie down and allow myself to fall into a shallow sleep, only enough to dip my little toe into the dream state. Then I conjure up my characters, set them in an environment of my own imagining and turn them loose to do what they will. I get some of my best conversations this way, since I'm naturally averse to writing dialog.

Otherwise, I can lucid dream almost every morning, if I choose. I have an early alarm set that wakes me to Christian talk radio. I generally sleep through this early alarm, but am capable of waking myself enough to be aware that when my dream cycle picks back up, it is indeed a dream cycle. I don't often bother to do anything constructive in these lucid dreams. I guess I'm too apathetic to take much advantage of the ability. I don't go flying around the neighborhood of anything like that. On occasion I will conjure up whatever biblical story the sermon is based on, but not often. I did have a lot of fun with Gideon's army one morning, however.

But OBE's? They're a whole different animal. I find the whole concept frightening, and reading about them right before going to bed nearly kept me up all night scared that if I drifted off to sleep, my being or astral self or soul or essence or whatever would drift right up out of my body. The only thing that calmed me down was having one arm around my purring cat. She was like a big, soft, fuzzy anchor.

Power Outtages Can't Slow Me Down!

2009-01-31T00:16:00.001-05:00

Owing to a power outage, I didn't get as much work done on my snow day as I might. But I did put down Wuthering Heights long enough to hammer out some more writing in Chapter 5 and organize my notes and sketches of conversations into a manageable and coherent whole. The battery on my laptop lasts for about three and a half hours. And that's not a bad span of time for a writing session, but it's only midnight now and I find myself wishing I had at least another two hours of battery life to expend as I'm positively on a roll and hate to be kept from my writing when the characters are being so very cooperative.

I have almost 2,000 words of 5 written. I imagine it will eventually stretch to a little over 3,500 just as the previous chapters have done, so I'm about halfway there. This is good progress, but the hardest part still lay ahead, the stitching together of disjointed thoughts and making the actions and movements of David flow one into another effortlessly. I have a bit more research to do still, and a lot of passes with the editor's fine-toothed comb to smooth out my awkward phrasing. David is feeling particularly effusive in this chapter, which is turning out to be rather dialog-intensive. I am still honing the dynamic between he and his mother. It's a dynamic thing, Kathryn is always making adjustments for David's idiosyncrasies, so it's hard to give it a distinct label as being “nurturing” or “combative” and that translates into a lack of focus when I write interaction between them. I tend to wander and get lost in discovery rather than move the story along in a pointed manner. I just have to remind myself that I many tens of thousands of more words in which to explore Kathryn and David's mother-son bond.

______________________________________________

Our power is out for the second straight day, but I charged the laptop at work so I'd be able to get some more solid writing time. I was reading some more in Wuthering Heights before firing up the laptop, though, and got thinking about Claire and MarLo as opposed to David and Kathryn, so I started work on Chapter 6 instead of 5 tonight. All the better, as perhaps when I finish them, it won't be too many weeks apart. I had a bit of an inspiration for the opening of 6, and it merged so seamlessly with the short conversation between Claire and MarLo that I'd already written that I just carried on editing what I've already typed out. The end product is over 1,500 words, which is a healthy start, but what I'm most pleased with is that it's a solid 1,500 words that don't break between paragraphs waiting for me to go back and fill in a transition. Chapter 5 is all in bits and pieces that still need to be assembled. They're in the right order now, but transitions are such a trial for me. I can get stuck on a single transition for weeks at a time. So I'm very, very happy to have 6 being more cooperative in terms of cohesion. But then again, I wrote the Claire/MarLo conversation that opens 6 months ago, so it's been percolating for a lot longer than anything I've invented thus far for 5. Poor David. He's at such loose ends in his life, that it's a real challenge for me to fill his days with anything at all except staring at his chalkboard wall and thinking about how disappointed he is in his lack of inspiration. I'm glad to have Claire finally in his life. She'll get him moving in some sort of direction, even if it isn't the right one.

Research and Work on 5

2009-01-27T02:06:00.003-05:00

Chapter 5 is coming along. I'm very excited about getting this next tandem completed, as 6 chapters is a bit of a milestone in my outline. After 6, things will really begin happening. And I'll be very relieved not to have any more setup to mull over. I think stretching the introductions out over several chapters was a good way to avoid a large backstory dump, and it allowed me to ease everyone into my peculiar style, but there are risks adherent to this decision. More on that later.

Tonight, I'm doing some research on working memory, attention buffers, dual task performance processing bottlenecks in the frontal lobe, that sort of thing. All for one of David's little science asides. I like beginning a chapter while he's in mid-thought, breaking in on his hefty ruminations, and then moving on with the action from there while he works through his little internal dilemmas. In this chapter, some pretty important things are happening right in front of him while he's completely taken up with his own thoughts on his mother's gift. I have the bones of the chapter laid out, but need to fill in the color or else I'll just be moving David from place to place like a chess piece so that he can observe things that need to be observed. I'm waiting for him to make the events his own by adding in his unique non-observations. It's happening, but it will take some solid hours of writing time to work out the kinks. For one thing, I have a conversation between Kathryn and David already written, but it's rather long, and I never know how much of it will be completely unnecessary by the time I get to the end of the chapter, where the conversation will take place.

I think I've finally settled on a name for Decker. I wanted something old-fashioned and lame that MarLo could make fun of. I had originally chosen Lawrence as a nod to one of my favorite films, Girl in the Cafe, but I decided Clarence is just as suiting and will honor my deceased grandfather. His full name is now Clarence Gershom Emmanuel Decker. All of his mail comes to C.G.E Decker. Claire doesn't know his given name(s). MarLo does because she weedled it out of him. Gershom is an Old Testament name meaning "exile" or "a stranger there," and Emmanuel also comes from the Old Testament and means "God is with us." Gershom is particularly telling of his character as Decker regarded himself rather displaced in academia until he discovered his passion for baking. Actually, Decker's character is slightly reminiscent of the law student-turned-baker in Stranger than Fiction. He's much more laconic and non-confrontational, though. But he still has a bit of Ana Pascal's hippy sensibility.

I may make one of my characters a diabetic. Perhaps Claire's younger sister. That will add a little drama.

For tonight, though, I'm about done for. I'll try to make sense of my research notes on my lunch break and continue the long process of stitching the chapter together out of the many scraps and loose threads I have laid out so far.

Chapter Titles

2009-01-24T02:59:00.002-05:00

It's possible that my ulcers have finally perforated. I've been more anemic than usual, have been running a low grade fever, and am in a fair amount of discomfort though it doesn't quit rise to such a pitch that would necessitate calling it pain. So that's kept me away from the keyboard tonight, though I did get nearly a half a page written on my lunch break today.

Chapter titles aren't necessary, but I think they're kind of fun. They give the opportunity to play with reader expectations. It also give me more solid footing when I think back on the story timeline. And I find that giving the chapter a 'theme' in the title keeps me from drifting into asides. I had thought to have every chapter title be a different platitude, as if Elizabeth were giving Claire and David little nuggets of advice or conventional wisdom, but that idea may or may not hold as the story progresses.

Chapters One and Two:
"All downhill from here”
“It's an uphill battle.”

Three and Four:
“Going nowhere fast”
“Speed isn't everything”

Five and Six (tentatively):
“Stop and smell the roses”
“Something fishy”

Revisions to 3

2009-01-23T03:31:00.002-05:00

I actually did a bit of writing on Chapter 5 today. A bit. About four lines. On my lunch break. But it's a start.

Tonight, I wrote a lengthy response to some reader feedback on the Reach Readers forum (some of which I may repost here when I'm not quite so in need of sleep.) After re-reading the input that my panel has given me on Chapter 3, I went in and cleaned up a few minor areas. I'll post the revisions on the Reach Readers site soon. I can't remember now what draft I'd posted, but I'm sure it's not as tightly integrated into the following chapter. I should have waited to post it until they were a completed tandem! I will do that with 5 and 6. I've gotten a good jump on both of them, but I have to make the time to write them out. Saturday at the library might not happen as my friend wants to make a shopping excursion. I may have to turn our all-day shopping trip into lunch and hitting up one store, though, as I don't really need to spend any money, and my priority is Project Reach. Saturdays are my only writing time wherein I'm free to spend a solid block of hours with my ass in my office chair typing. Sundays are generally filled with football and grocery shopping and laundry, and this Sunday I'll have to get scrubbed up because I have tickets to Wicked! So probably no writing on Sunday.

Right now I'm going to shut the computer down and drift off to sleep while trying to come up with chapter titles for 5 and 6.

Waiting...

2009-01-21T23:49:00.002-05:00

Today is NOT a day off, but I can't seem to get down to work on Chapter 5. I'm having trouble finding David's voice again. It'll come, but I can't force it. Instead, I wrote a poem and have developed a really hilarious spoof of Elizabeth Alexander's snoozer of an inaugural poem.
This about sums it up:

All the images of death I've even seen
real, filmed, or imagined
carry far less terror
than the panicked white
of an empty page,
so like skin drained of blood.

The only thing to fill the emptiness is fear.

Ideological Holidays

2009-01-20T02:38:00.002-05:00

I'm taking today and tomorrow off as holidays. Today I watched two of my favorite movies and Girl in the Cafe and Something the Lord Made. Tomorrow I'll watch a new president be sworn in on my lunch break, and probably watch coverage of the inaugural balls all night. It's doubtful if I'll get any writing done, but that's okay. I'm taking an ideological holiday!

Chapter 4 finished

2009-01-19T04:43:00.003-05:00

I have posted Chapter 4 to the Reach Readers' forum. Several of my readers have been clamoring for it, which is about the best compliment I could hope to receive. It took longer than I'd expected to get the final few paragraphs to really sing. There was an exceedingly delicate balance of description and action to achieve. I think I've done it. But I can't be sure.

I'll continue with 5 tomorrow. I've got a good outline for it, but nothing at all written whereas I have much of 6 written but no real order for it to fit into. Hopefully their writing will go much quicker than the previous chapters, now that I know what I'm about, so to speak.

5 and 6 Begin!

2009-01-17T01:40:00.003-05:00

I began Chapter 5 today. Mostly, I just sat down at the Taco Bell after work and typed out an extended outline with commentary that will serve as the bones of the chapter. I was finding it difficult to hear David's voice, though after having inhabited Claire's head for so long, so I'm considering going ahead with Chapter 6 while her cadence is fresh in my mind. I already have a few segments of 6 in a working draft, so it's just a matter of filling in the transitions and pushing it out beyond where I left off.

2009-01-17T01:31:00.001-05:00

The following are my comments on a post in the Reach Reader forum dealing with Chapter 1:

On David's voice: I really don't spend hours scrolling through the thesaurus injecting large words into David's narrative, but he does have a tendency to always choose the best and most accurate word to convey his exact meaning. Most people can get by with saying that something is 'tiny' and adding emphasis with facial expressions and gestures. Since David has little aptitude for recognizing nonverbal cues, he relies more heavily on his ability to retain a large vocabulary. So your 'tiny' would be his 'minuscule'. For my part, it's actually more of an effort to keep large or obscure words out of Claire's chapters. I frequently catch myself trying to slide a David-esque sentence into Claire's internal dialog.

On chapter length: the chapters are running about 3,000-3,500 words each. That is very short. I'm not sure if they will continue to remain the same length or not as the story elements begin to gather complexity. That remains to be seen. The reason that the opening chapters have been so short is that I'm trying to get to the crux of the story as early as possible. Nobody likes slogging through 50 pages of backstory and setup. Also, I wanted the first few perspective switches to be snappy. I wanted to end Chapter 1 on a mini cliffhanger and switch directly into Claire's rather workaday morning for the pure joy of the juxtaposition. In this way (I hope) we can get the initial jolt of the concept of having dual narrators out of our systems early on.

On David's current age: I wanted it to be a bit of a mystery to add a few barbs into my hook, so to speak. So you don't get to know David's age until Chapter 2, and even then if you're not paying close attention it may slip right past without notice. But it's in there, and I've added more emphasis to it in my revision, which hasn't been posted yet. In chapter 2, David states that he turned 18 in the previous June, and as the story is taking place in the fall, specifically early October, that would make him 18 and a half. Though the corpus callosum line is a bit jarring, I've left it in to demonstrate David's early fascination with the brain, though he hasn't much familiarity with its study. And yes, I added in the human anatomy class specifically to justify the later use of corpus callosum. Referencing "Office Space" was meant to be a place-holder phrase that I intended to fix in a later edit, but it ended up staying because I couldn't come up with anything when I was making the last editing pass. I'll fix it in later revisions.

Work vs Writing

2009-01-16T01:23:00.003-05:00

I was having such a good run today during my lunch break that I considered not going back to my desk when my hour had run out. I was sitting in a lounge chair in our employee break room, making another editing pass at Chapter 4, trying to get the ending to progress more smoothly, and I was just making such pretty work of it that it was torture to close the lid on the laptop and go back upstairs. My supervisor is on vacation, so I doubt if anyone would have missed me for an extra 15 minutes, but I couldn't do that. I try to be a good employee, and I love my job. I really, really, really don't want to get fired for being a slacker. But if I did get fired, at least I'd have more time to write. It's just such a shame that I didn't have a story to write when I was unemployed for months on end in 2006-2007. But now that I think of it, I was attempting to write a novel then, too. I outlined the entire story, but barely got a chapter into it before giving up. It was just such a depressing tale that I couldn't bear to spend hour after hour inhabiting it.

What to do with feedback

2009-01-15T03:54:00.004-05:00

I've come to learn that having a panel of first readers is not a typical thing for an author to initiate. Debut authors, especially. But having been a poet for so many years involved in both live readings and an online community, I am confident enough in my writing not to fear feedback. Indeed, I find it to be essential. So when I set out to write a novel, I knew I'd have to recruit my friends as first readers if only to have someone urging me to keep completing chapters! I chose to create a 'formal' panel instead of just passing around chapters as e-mail attachments because I like the idea of having a structured environment for criticism. So instead of a back alley street fight in which my poor manuscript gets the shit kicked out of it by my highly intelligent and discriminating friends, I have a civilized boxing ring in which my poor manuscript gets the shit kicked out of it by my highly intelligent and discriminating friends.

So far there isn't much to critique because nothing has really happened in the story yet, but my readers all have interesting input into the characters and my writing style. My dilemma now is figuring out to what extent I am going to allow all of the feedback I'm getting to inform the story. So far the only revisions I've made based on feedback have to do with issues of clarity. Some concerns that my panel expressed over David's voice I haven't addressed yet because I'm giving David more time to develop and grow into himself. If after a few thousand more words, he is still annoying the hell out of everyone who tries to read his narrative, then I'll consider a re-write. My policy as of now is to "let David be David". And we'll see how that plays out.

I shared some of my ideas for upcoming plot points with one of my readers today, and she approves of and is excited about everything I've revealed to her, but she also made a suggestion for a future event. She thinks David should get a cat. Now, I could write that into the story...but it wouldn't serve any purpose except to gratify the friend who made the suggestion. As a writer, I prefer not to dictate events, but to allow the characters to lead their owns lives and merely record what happens to and around them. I'm hoping that none of the other panel members try to steer the plot by making suggestions that "so-and-so should do such-and-such". Bringing something to my attention that I may have overlooked is one thing. (As when a panel member alerted me to the fact that I'd recorded David making an aesthetic judgment of a book cover, which is something David clearly wouldn't do, and it was actually my own assessment of the cover that had deposited itself into the narrative. That was my error, and I'm glad my reader caught it.) But putting in requests is completely different. I'm gratified that a reader would take so much interest in my characters as to feel ownership over them, but I think I have to draw a line at plot contrivance.

Another line I've drawn has to do with offers of writing assistance. I'm bad at dialog. Thusly, many of the characters I've created are taciturn, introspective types that don't do much talking. I had one of my readers offer to write some dialog for me. While, again, I'm gratified that the reader is able to take so much ownership of David and Claire after only four short chapters that he'd feel comfortable putting words into their mouths, I'll have to pass. I try not to feed my characters lines to deliver, and I'm relying on my readers to notify me when I've written something that David or Claire just wouldn't say. I have a tendency to stay up too late writing, and after a certain point, I just get a bit delirious and things start making their way into the chapter that have no business being there.

2009-01-14T02:22:00.000-05:00

(a reminder to myself to blog about stream-of-consciousness narrative)

Decker and MarLo

2009-01-14T01:06:00.002-05:00

I finished Chapter 4 last night. It was my fourth consecutive night of staying up until about 4am to write instead of sleeping, and I've come to the decision that it's just not worth staying awake until I'm delirious with sleep deprivation because it impairs the functioning of my brain to the point that anything I write is utter rubbish. I was feeling pretty good about the chapter until I read what I'd written last night while on my lunch break this afternoon. I was shocked at how poorly constructed the sentences were. So, yes, I finished Chapter 4, but I'm going to be re-writing the last fourth of it tonight. Only I won't stay up past 2:30, no matter what.

I tweaked my outline today by reordering some of the events that dictate the relational dynamics between MarLo, Claire, Decker and an as-yet-unnamed young woman who Claire mentors through a young adult bible study ministry. I've decided to delay the revelation (to Claire) of Decker and MarLo's relationship and push the introduction of Claire's mother and younger sister to an earlier chapter...which means I have to locate the paper upon which I jotted the names I'd chosen for them. I still have no idea when to add Claire's father into the mix. He won't be an actual character, but I'll have to mention him at some point as he figures into Claire's choices in the final chapters. I still want the Halloween party to be near the front end of the book, when David and Claire's relationship is still brand new, but I keep adding plot before it.

I also discovered the mechanics of how MarLo and Decker get together. Now, the whole idea of MarLo and Decker being sexual partners was not a case of me deciding on it and then writing it that way. I simply created two people who have a lot of common interests, but who have completely different but complementary ways of expressing their interests. The characters themselves informed the nature of their relationship. When the idea came upon to me, it was a complete surprise, but also made so much sense that I allowed it to be what it was without raising any objections. Oh, MarLo and Decker get together. Of course they do. He's so passive and she's so assertive. It would have seemed contrived if they hadn't become intimate. The only thing I got to decide is when to reveal their relationship to Claire. I chose to get it all out in the open right away because I needed something to drive the story before David and Claire actually meet. Now all I have to do is to sit back and record Claire's reactions and thoughts. Easy. The easiest, most organic thing I've written thus far because it 'wrote itself', so to speak. And it's actually written itself three times. I have recorded three variations of the 'reveal' scene. None of them exceed 500 words. One is nothing but dialog. One is two short lines of dialog in the midst of a larger and more important plot driver. One is hilarious simply for the sake of being hilarious. I'm going with option 2.

Oh, but I was saying that last night I discovered the catalyst for Decker and MarLo''s first encounter. I had written into Chapter 4 that Decker had bought carry-out bags for The Deck's first catering delivery, and that he'd had stickers with The Deck's logo printed to put on the bags as advertisement. (Of course I would write that into the story, that's what I do for a living! I work in the art department of a company that prints labels.) But that's how Decker and MarLo get together before my narrative even begins. Claire sends Decker to the copy shop where MarLo works to have them printed. Whether Decker expresses his immense anxiety over starting up the catering aspect of his business or MarLo infers it from his body language, we'll never know, but when Decker comes in to pick up the stickers the day before my story begins, MarLo offers to take him out for drinks to settle his nerves. And, of course, in true MarLo fashion, she gets him drunk and takes advantage of him!

Also, I still don't have any dialog for Decker yet. I've been toying with the idea of having him always in a scene, but never actually say anything. He shouldn't have to say anything because any scene that Decker's in is a Claire scene and I made him the strong silent type on purpose to display Claire's ability to read people. Of course, I wouldn't write the words out of him. If he needs to say something, he will. But it would be fun if he never needed to say anything. And now that he and MarLo are in an intimate relationship, she can speak for him in some instances.

More Words I've Added to my Spellchecker

2009-01-13T02:15:00.001-05:00

waterboarded
caffeinated
playlist
earbuds

Quotes from Chapter 4

2009-01-12T22:48:00.004-05:00

Some lines that I consider highlights from Claire's second chapter:

"I shut my eyes tightly in a moment of what I supposed passes for prayer when I'm at my very lowest. My silent petitions don't take the form of language in times liked these. I do not begin with “Dear Lord” and end with “Amen”. There is merely a succession of wants that rise to the forefront of my mind and jostle for rank. It is a rush of mingled pleading that I could no more interpret than the chatter of dolphins."

"A tiny sizzle of hope flares into being under my sternum and runs length of my arms as I seize my knife and begin immediately where I left off."

"I feel pressure mounting behind my eyes and close them tightly. For a few short seconds I am locked in battle with my unruly tear ducts."

"Gratitude floods through me, but finds no appropriate outlet. I can't very well hug a perfect stranger. I stand, searching for words, wasting precious time. I want to tell her that I couldn't be more in her debt if I were an inmate on death row and she'd just made the call to pardon me, but a simple “thank you” is all I can manage."

Sample Query

2009-01-11T00:59:00.005-05:00

I need to order a copy of Karl Iagnemma's novel The Expeditions. I'm a big fan of his collection of short stories On the Nature of Human Romantic Interactions, and I've been meaning to pick up his debut novel, a historical fiction, for months. Same goes for Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer. I've been following his blog, but definitely need the book. I also need some Richard Powers (Galatea 2.2 and The Gold Bug Variations, in particular) and some Jonathan Lethem. It appears as if I will have to leave my study of the classics aside and delve into more contemporary fiction, not to mention the reading I'm still doing to acquaint myself with cognitive and neurological sciences. No time for classics.

Today, I tried an exercise in which I wrote a mock query letter for Project Reach. I was racking my brain trying to think of a novel I can compare it to in terms of style and subject matter only to find that I've never read anything quite like the novel I'm attempting to write. Iagnemma's short stories at least are drawn along the same lines as they are works of fiction that involve science without being science fiction. They are primarily about people and relationships and science serves only as a backdrop and plot catalyst, which is precisely where Project Reach is headed.

I'm also going to have to pick up a copy of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet as it was represented by the agent that I'm very much hoping will take me on when Project Reach is ready for publication. I've been following her blog since I began writing Project Reach, and she often mentions wanting to acquire more literary works. Hotel is the only literary work listed on her web site, but I noticed that her women's lit and romance titles frequently deal with the paranormal, so that's encouraging. And actually, the idea of writing a mock query came directly from this agent's blog. It's been a very useful and illuminating process. It has helped me continue to refine the direction of the narrative and to re-evaluate the balance between David's and Claire's separate dilemmas. I've also used excerpts from the exercise to update the abstract posted in the sidebar of this blog.

The big question raised by all this, of course, is "Does writing a sample query letter when I only have four chapters of the novel completed qualify as putting the cart before the horse?"

Well, if I'm to be perfectly honest, yes. But it helps me stay on target. As I've said many times, so long as the quality of my output continues to improve, I'll approve any means. I realize my process is quite ass backwards, but I'm making my peace with that.

The Classics

2009-01-09T00:34:00.002-05:00

Well, despite having gotten distracted watching a delightful episode of Great Performances on PBS featuring a new stage adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac starring Kevin Kline and Jenifer Garner, I did actually manage to get a few sentences written last night. I'm in another crucial transitional paragraph, so a few sentences at a time is all I ever manage from session to session. Once I clear this latest log jam, I expect another half chapter in a single sitting. But I'll have to get past this first as it will inform the mood of Claire's next actions. Poor Claire, she's been standing at the same crosswalk since before Christmas! I'm at another point in which I can't seem to make much progress no matter what I do. It's an extremely frustrating situation.

After shutting down the computer last night, again intending to get some solid sleep, I cracked open Wuthering Heights to send me off to sleep. I have been reading Henry James' The American as my bedtime book for months now and can never get more than 5 pages in without drifting off. I thought Wuthering Heights would answer the same purpose. I was very wrong. I haven't ever read Wuthering Heights before, but I am a keen follower of Masterpiece Theater Classic and they're airing a new adaptation of it in a few weeks, so what better time to read the book?

I had the firm intention of only wading in for about 20 pages or so and then snapping up some much-needed REM rebound, but I have a critical lack of self restraint when it comes to good books. I only fell into an exhausted slumber after having polished off a good fourth of the story. The first two chapters, especially, are filled with such wonderfully-polished insight that it makes me fairly despair of my own writing. A Bronte I am not. But I supposed that comparing my own writing with one of the greatest classics in the English language is being perhaps a bit unfair to myself, no matter that they share the attribute of having been written in the first person. I should pick up some Nicholas Sparks and compare my writing to that! Maybe that would make me feel better. Though perhaps not. I've never read anything by Nicholas Sparks, and so I'm not qualified to offer an opinion on the quality of his writing, though I did read an interview with him in Entertainment Weekly in which he boasts of writing 2,000 words a day. He's written 14 books in 14 years! I admire his incredible work ethic, but I'm highly skeptical of the depth and literary merit of his work. But then again, who needs literary merit when you've got millions in sales?!

And that brings me to another point about Project Reach (which I've increasingly begun to privately refer to as Comfort Foods Cure), I'm beginning to get a real sense of what kind of book it will be in terms of tone, readability and overall appeal. I know what it is - or rather what it is going to be - and what it isn't. First of all, in terms of tone, several of my first readers have expressed concerns about David's voice being too lofty. This has concerned me as well, but I believe I've finally decided to stop worrying over it and just let David be David. I want Project Reach to challenge readers. It must be accessible, of course, but it must also force thought. I'd like to say, to hell with the readers who are annoyed by David. If having to infer the definition of an obscure adjective from the surrounding context turns some readers off, then so be it. I'd like to say that, but the truth is that I do hope to procure representation for the manuscript at some point in the future, and no one will touch the thing if it's unmarketable. So I try to strike a balance between my tendency to over embellishment and tangential observation and the critical need for solid pacing and clarity. I keep the idea of "the target audience" in the back of my mind at all times while writing. I actually enjoy placing those scant limitations on myself much more than writing solely for myself. When I write for myself, the end result is often quite abstruse. Taking the considerations of others into the process allows me to see the forest for the trees, so to speak. It forces a level of clarity and warmth that I seldom achieve in writing for my own purposes. As for the appeal of Project Reach, I endeavor to keep it as broad as possible given the limitations that the story will place on it. I think of it as purely literary, if I must apply a label, but I can see it being mistaken for science fiction or indeed as fantasy in the later chapters. I must manage it very carefully to see that it doesn't get misrepresented when/if it every goes out on submission.

Sometime soon, I intend to make a deeper study of those first two chapters of Wuthering Heights that so impressed me, and pull from them some cues to add into my own narrative.

Recharging vs Charging Forward

2009-01-07T00:05:00.004-05:00

Intent to turn in early and get caught up on my sleep, I instead got drawn into a writing vigil last night. When I finally did fall asleep at around 4:30am, I had written yet another poem. I had been meditating on the sheer absurdity of the English language for having only one word for 'love' and only one word for 'pain', and my thoughts became this.

It is 12:07am. We are seven days into the new year and I have already written two acceptable works of poetry. This is encouraging considering the fact my total output for 2008 is a mere 10 works (discounting the Fire Sermon canto of "Rewriting the Wasteland" that I put some work in on). I am very pleased to have some creative writing to my credit in the young year, but I wish I had been motivated to put the lid down on Chapter 4 instead. I have a very intense fear of the law of diminishing returns. I doubt I'll lose interest in David and Claire's story, but the process of writing is intensely draining and I can see myself putting the project away for months on end, using the excuse that I need to recharge. I do not need to recharge. I need to charge forward. I need to prove to myself that I can complete a large, important work of fiction. I need to do it for Claire and for David, for MarLo and Decker, and Elizabeth and Dr. Feigner.

Tonight, instead of working on Chapter 3, I am mailing off poetry submission to the Indiana Review. I think my works are more contemplative and less form intensive than they generally accept, but I'm going to send them anyway to give my home journal the right of first refusal, so to speak. The editors of IR "admire works of risk, ambition, and scope". That doesn't necessarily describe my work. I would have to say they're more works of clarity, introspection and elevation. I am sending "Balm", "Advent", "A Wintry Mix", "Love and the Doppler Effect" and "Van Gogh Eyes". I added a few words onto a line of "Balm" to help smooth a rough stanza break and changed the title and some wording in "Advent". "A Wintry Mix" is actually "A Wintry Mix and "I Become a Blizzard" combined and revised. When I place my works one on top of another in one document, it is apparent that I write often on the change of season, nature, science and emotion.

The Library

2009-01-06T01:36:00.004-05:00

Well, I may not have gotten anything written this weekend, but I did get quite a bit accomplished, nonetheless. I have now set up my library (as seen below) and am quite relieved that my books will no longer have to lay in inglorious piles on the floor. They now have comfortable homes where they are easily accessible, out of direct sunlight and safe from damp and dust. There is even room for another shelf or two if I decide to get rid of the rickety blue one and put my DVDs nearer the television.

My "Favorites" shelf looks a bit thin because I keep most of my true favorites within arm's reach of my bed. (And I don't own the Aubrey/Maturin series, which would claim a shelf of honor, I'm sure.) And it occurred to me hat having a bit of room to grow on my favorites shelf would be wise. I positively impressed myself by having a full shelf of nothing but poetry. And, yes, I do indeed have two full shelves of nothing but Orson Scott Card. They are mostly first editions and many of them are signed. I'm thrilled to finally be able to display them properly. Actually, now that I think of it, my "Science Fiction" shelf is all OSC overflow and the complete works of William Gibson. I really don't think I own any other science fiction books. I always just borrowed them from friends or the library.

But now that the holidays and the hard work on the library are all behind me, I intend to throw myself back into the narrative of Claire and David. I would like to get them past the Halloween party by the end of February. But we'll see how it goes.

Making Time

2009-01-02T02:40:00.003-05:00

I feel as if I've squandered my holiday time off from work. I haven't gotten any more of Chapter 4 written, but I have watched the extended versions of all three Lord of the Rings movies, Funny Face with Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, partied with friends who aren't often in town, and played countless rounds of Wordjong and Scramble. I haven't read a thing in ages or done a speck of research in weeks!

Tomorrow night I have plans, and I'll likely spend Saturday and Sunday putting my living room back in order and installing some book shelves. I'm going to try not to get too involved in the much-anticipated and enjoyable task of organizing my book collection because I'll have to make some time to write. I have another pact deadline on Sunday. Additionally, I need to post the Google Notebook for Chapter 3 and finish some Google Earth and Streetview research that I'm hoping will make the writing of Chapter 4 go much smoother. I'm not even going to think about 5 and 6 yet!

I reorganized the electronic filing system for early drafts and working documents and reformatted my USB drives accordingly, so that is good progress. I'm also attending a Linux User's Group meeting in a couple of weeks and am excited about a presentation on how to run a sync command that will overwrite the latest version of a file between my USB and hard drive. I've found Google Docs to be helpful, but not the best option for me as I often find myself working offline.

And I wrote another poem today. Two whole pieces in one month. I'm quite encouraged by that.

The Weight of Glaciers

2008-12-30T03:14:00.004-05:00

Though I had good intentions of finishing Chapter 4 before I had to go back to work at my day job today, it didn't get done. I severely underestimated how time consuming family togetherness can be. There was, of course, a minor family crisis, lots of drama, and lots and lots of cooking, which I don't do often and had forgotten takes hours upon hours to do properly. So Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were non-productive for writing or even thinking about Project Reach. The subsequent days would be wholly set aside for writing, or so I thought. In reality, I had saved the latest draft of Chapter 4 to my trusty thumb drive...and left it in the port at my work computer! I couldn't get any momentum with the chapter since I was missing a rather crucial transition that I'd written during some downtime at work last Tuesday, so I just left it be and focused on some other pressing tasks

On three of my five days off, I slept very late into the day. There was, of course, the aforementioned family togetherness. I attended an Ugly Christmas Sweater party and spent the day after recovering from it. I began refinishing my living room floors so I can install my wall of bookshelves and finally remedy my critical lack of book storage. I did laundry and put away my summer clothes at long last. I painted my toenails and gave myself a manicure. These are all things that were overdue. Things I had put off in deference to Project Reach. And now that they're done, or on their way to being so, I can make another push at Claire's narrative.

I'm more than a little concerned with the pacing at this point. But there's little point in fretting about it now, as I won't even be able to evaluate the pacing properly until I have at least six chapters strung together. At least I have a better feel now for my own writing pace now and can adjust my expectations for progress accordingly. My pace is truly glacial! But I'm at peace with that metaphor. Glaciers may be slow, but they are an irresistible force and possess fierce beauty.

Also, not all of the verdicts are in, but now that we're two chapters in with David, none of my readers can abide his tone. It's distracting. I knew this was a danger when I began to conceive of David's style of internal dialog. But I'm still waiting on the verdicts of a few other of my trusted readers before I make any determinations as to amending David's tone. I knew that first person narrative was a bit of a gamble, and that present tense risked coming off too 'literary' but I honestly believe that the most crucial bits of the story can only be told properly using the technique of altering first person narrative in the present tense. And one of my readers may have been a bit confused by the switch from past-tense to present between David's chapters. Her comments suggest she read David's present tense chapter as a continuation of his character narration and not as his present reality.

Reach Reader commentary on Chapter 3:

I am once again assaulted by words, that seems to be the beating I will always get from David...He seems more arrogant now, but he also just seems to have no filter when he speaks about himself. He's just saying the truth, as he sees it, that he really does know a lot.

So many weighty considerations. I am not above performing a complete re-write if my approach to the story is completely untenable. However, I still have faith enough to rely on my skill to uphold my creative decisions.

Holiday Plan

2008-12-24T23:55:00.003-05:00

Just because it's the holidays, doesn't mean I'm taking a break. In fact, I have big plans for the "downtime" that I will have on this long 5 day weekend. I had the opportunity to make an editing sweep of the half of Chapter 4 that I have written while I was at work on Tuesday, so all of that is fresh in my mind. Today, our electricity was out for most of the day, so I got all of my last minute shopping and giftwrapping out of the way so that I'll be able to focus on writing tonight and tomorrow (when I'm not cooking or hanging out with my family). Friday morning I intend to put in a good four hours before heading out to an Ugly Christmas Sweater party. Saturday ad Sunday, I have no plans but writing. The hope is to get Chapter 4 completed in less than however many months it took to get Chapter 3 in the proverbial can. And if I'm very, very diligent, perhaps I'll be able to get a jump on 5 and 6.

Words I've had to add to my Spellchecker

2008-12-23T01:37:00.001-05:00

neurochemical
proxemics
amigdala

Chapter 3 finished

2008-12-23T00:13:00.003-05:00

Chapter 3 is finished!! Finally. I stayed in (bed) and worked on it all day on Sunday. Being able to put the lid down on it at long last was a really good birthday present! (Even though I finished up at nearly 4am, so it wasn't actually my birthday anymore.) I'm really pleased with the transitions I created to stitch the chapter together, and I'm especially thrilled that the pacing and smooth flow carries over from Chapter 1 so seamlessly because it's really just an extension of David's introduction. In Chapter 3 we get caught up with who David is now, what his academic status is, the state of his personal finances, and what his major dilemma will be for the duration of the novel. Next up is to get Claire from The Deck, through campus, and to the catering drop off. Doesn't sound too eventful, does it? Even so, I expect it to take about 1,500 words and should link up nicely with what I already have written for Chapter 4. I'm always unsure where the chapters will end, so Claire may have a short conversation with MarLo, too, which will be really fun to write. In any event, my chapters are tending to be very short - about 3,000 words each - so the trick is to keep the narrative from feeling disjointed. So far I don't think it's been a problem, but I'll ultimately leave that judgment up to my readers.

Who Hub Interview

2008-12-21T04:32:00.001-05:00

http://www.whohub.com/reachwriter

Gearing Up

2008-12-19T02:10:00.001-05:00

The last two days I've been focused on remedying some computer issues that have been plaguing me. The thesaurus wasn't installed in Open Office on my new Linux laptop. When I'm at an absolute stall in my writing, I live and die by the thesaurus. I'll just go trolling around in Visual Thesaurus until I stumble on a word that gathers more words around it. Eventually, I end up with a sentence. So I'd been trying to figure out how to get my Open Office thesaurus function to work and was messing around with command prompts which ended up royally screwing up my operating system to the point that I couldn't save a document without the Open Office program crashing. Not good. So I had to roll my laptop back to the factory settings by booting it off of the recovery disc. While trying to accomplish this, I inadvertently wiped the hard drive on my desktop. This could easily have been a major disaster, but I'm very diligent about backing up my files. As it stands, I have all of my most important works backed up on a thumb drive and an external hard drive. I have over 500 poems that I'd hate to loose. But I could never loose all of them in a single, catastrophic event because the bulk of them are backed up on pathetic.org and the earliest works are stored on floppy disks. And of course my Project Reach files are all on my laptop, desktop and on my USB flash drive. The completed chapters are further safeguarded by being uploaded online as Google Docs.

So after toasting all the data on my desktop, I just went ahead and installed Ubuntu on it and will work on moving my files over from the external hard drive this weekend or over Christmas break. So I'm all converted to Linux now. That's progress.

Having my head all junked up with tech, I wasn't in the right state of mind to write David, but I did work on a poem I began jotting down while at work. I haven't written a poem in more than months; it's been whole seasons since I've completed a verse. But this piece, although slightly disjointed, is good. It's not 'there' yet, and I'll likely make at least two more editing passes at it, but it felt really good to output some verse. I can feel MarLo in this one. Or maybe there's just a lot of me in MarLo.

I have been meaning for a few months to send out a round of poetry submissions, but never followed through on my intentions due to computer and printer issues. I was shocked to realize that I haven't published any verse since 2006, and even that was a piece from 2005. It's just ridiculous to think that I haven't sent any submissions out in over two years because some of my absolute best works (or at least my current favorites) came out of 2007 and 2006. I have a list of journals and magazines that I've checked out. It's just a matter of choosing appropriate pieces for the forum, formatting to the publisher's standards, taking that deep, sickening breath, and hitting the send button (or dropping the letter in the mailbox). I fully intend on seeking to publishing at least a half dozen of my better poetic works this coming year in an attempt to beef up my credits so that when Project Reach is finished and I send out queries to agents, mine will perhaps be slightly more appealing than those of other freshman novelists who maybe have no publishing credits at all.

It will be a big help during this submission push to have a functioning printer. I've gone years without a printer at home because my Epson, though technically still functional, was such a pain about the ink cartridges always being full and I could never afford to keep all seven of them in supply. Eventually the nozzles clogged to an insupportable degree and I just gave up using it altogether. But for Christmas, I bought my mother a color copier, printer, fax, scanner combo. One of her hobbies is to color copy her snapshots and cut them out to make collages. It's not even in the same league as scrapbooking, but she enjoys it immensely. She used to drive all the way into the next town to go to the offices of the local newspaper and pay 75 cents a page to make color copies on their machine. So I got her a Brother color copier/printer for Christmas. It's got big, back lit, mom-friendly buttons and only four ink cartridges, the refills for which are the least expensive of all the major brands. I keep it on my desk hooked up to my desktop computer upon her insistence, and I'm very happy with it.

In addition to sending out a round of poetry submissions, I also dream of applying to some local artist residency programs. I should fill out the applications I've had lying on my desk for over a year now. It would be good for me to sequester myself for the purpose of writing. I just find it so difficult to get anything written in the evenings when my brain is out of juice for the day. I did get to snatch a few minutes of time to write at work today. 36 minutes to be exact. This was broken up into about five separate intervals of varying lengths. But in those few short interludes I was able to fix a transition in Chapter 3 that had been bothering me and extend he narrative by about three lines. That doesn't sound like much, but it's a lot of progress in such a short time. I take it as further testament to the fact that I do my best work during the day when I'm working and not free to write.

David's Internal Dialog is Evolving

2008-12-14T21:34:00.003-05:00

I'm really happy with the direction that Chapter 3 is heading...finally. It's taken a long time to get it this far, but I have no complaints about the gestation period of a given chapter so long as the finished product is of a very high standard.

A few nights ago, I was making another editing pass of 3 and started beefing up the science content. It's caused me to have to put in some extra research time, but it has gone a long way toward solving the problem with David's tone that I'd been having. My readers and I both have been concerned that David's elevated vocabulary can get downright annoying, but I am trying out a new tack for David's internal dialog. If he exhibits his brilliance by drawing clever parallels between the science of neurobiology or cutting-edge cognitive research and his everyday experiences, then he won't have to exhibit his brilliance through words alone. The language aspect I have a handle on and don't spend as much time hunting through the thesaurus as I've been accused of having done, but the science is mostly new to me and it's a challenge to hunt down facts that fit seamlessly into the narrative.

In any event, I haven't been able to do too much in the way of writing this weekend. I've been learning Linux prompts and broke my text editor by trying to upgrade it. So now I will have to consult with my computer guru on Tuesday and make do with Google Docs for the time being. Which is fine anyway since I need to share docs between two computers and a thumb drive and can never seem to remember where the most current version is saved. Tonight I'm hard at it, trying to get Chapter 3, at least, sewn up. I'm a little discouraged at my writing pace and think continuously that if this turns into a war of attrition, then I might not have the stamina it takes to tell David and Claire's stories to completion. But determination is certainly a learned skill and may be one of the many lessons that writing has yet to teach me.

More Tools

2008-12-09T02:30:00.003-05:00

I should mention that I have acquired another new writing tool. For one thing, a friend of mine gave me a mini travel mouse to use with my Aspire One so that I can now avoid being overly annoyed with the track pad. For another thing, I've gotten a bed table for my laptop with a tilting top so I can type from bed more comfortably. Now I have absolutely no reason to leave bed on the weekends! Hopefully, the acquisition of the Aspire One and various accessories will help me become just a bit more productive. I certainly don't NEED any of this to write the story I have in mind, but having the right tools does help things along. Only today I got several paragraphs written during my lunch hour at work. That's much more than I got written at home during several hours of 'leisure' time tonight!

Progress vs. Productivity

2008-12-09T01:12:00.003-05:00

I've had a horribly unproductive week and weekend, but I'm not fussed about it. I'm making progress. Chapter 3 still isn't stitched together into a coherent whole, though the sections are getting consistently more excellent with each passing edit. Chapter 4 still needs the ending to be written. I've jumped ahead to record an interchange in Chapter 6, and Chapter 5 is mapped out in my head as is much of 7 and 8. Though I barely wrote even a single page this weekend, I made huge progress. The insertion of one simple sentence into Chapter 4 completely solved a huge dilemma I'd been having. And the addition of an extra paragraph in Chapter 2 revolutionizes the readers' early impression of MarLo. Six short sentences give us her academic history, hometown, socioeconomic standing, how she got her distinctive name, and the status of her relationship with both Claire and her own father. And I thought cramming David's entire childhood into one chapter was tough! I'm extremely glad to have found a way to integrate this information into Chapter 2, though, as it had been weighing on me. I just hate the feeling of the writer knowing more than the reader. It feels like a failure to me.

As for the next tandem of chapters, it's just a matter of finding the time to find the words. Or at least finding the energy. This weekend I had plenty of time and didn't take advantage of it because I was basically depleted. I have found that the more I pressure myself to be 'productive' the less actually gets done. I spend too much energy stressing over my expectations for speed and have precious little processing power left over to be creative. So I'm trying out a 'write when its right' philosophy. I now have my Aspire One with me everywhere I go, so I'm going to attempt to write when the words come to me as opposed to blocking out several hours of time in the evenings and on weekends during which I attempt to force myself to output words. The problem with this new philosophy is that I'm not a professional writer. I have to work for a living, and I can't just take a time out to write midday during my best hours when MarLo starts talking into my ear. The best I can do is to jot quick notes and refer to them later when I'm at liberty to channel my characters' voices. To date, I have stacks of notes that I haven't so much as glanced at. It's very frustrating. I certainly hadn't started out with the goal to become a professional writer, but it's fast becoming a sort of dream of mine that aligns so nicely and neatly with my current dream job that it's ridiculous to think it never occurred to me before. One can certainly be a contract book designer and writer of novels at the same time.

But, honestly, dreams are all fine and good (necessary, even) but I have to get some real writing done soon. I am very aware of the law of diminishing returns as I've had two abandoned attempts at writing a novel previously. I've learned from both of those failed projects, but David and Claire's story, I'm determined will not just be another 'learning experience' for me.

Re-Writes and Reach Readers

2008-12-03T01:42:00.005-05:00

I've just completed ANOTHER re-write of Chapter 2! That's right. Another one. I think I've finally gotten all of the rough patches ironed out, though. There were several pieces that just didn't fit as nicely as I'd liked them to. There was either too big of an idealogical leap between paragraphs or there was too much information in too few words or missing information that would need to be in place before we take on Claire's next chapter. In any event, I've gone over it all again, word by word, aloud, and it's a much nicer read now. There are a few sentences that I can feel David's influence in. They're too highly styled and verbose. But I like allowing Claire the occasional lush observation. She has the ability to comment on so many things that David just doesn't notice.

Updates on the Reach Readers group: Three of my first readers and I were discussing the first two chapters over dinner this holiday weekend when a friend overhead and commented that he'd love to read and critique what I've written. He's involved in professional theatre, and I've seen several of his short plays performed. I was alway very impressed with his stage writing ability, so I decided that his opinion would be really valuable. I just never knew he'd be interested in being a part of Project Reach, or I would have invited him sooner! He has just posted his comments and they're terribly insightful. He finds Claire 'insufferably boring' and I can't say as I disagree with him. I'm hoping that I can keep enough interest in her chapters through the intervention of MarLo and Decker until we get to the meat of her story, but it's a tall order. Claire is dull. One of my female readers is annoyed by Claire because she perceives Claire to be a control freak. This is possibly a problem. I was intending to illustrate Claire's great capacity for compassion and possibly her potential for strong leadership in her debut chapter, not her need to step in and control everyone's lives. But then, Claire is all about control. Self-control. I'll have to keep a careful eye on how I convey Claire's concerns so that Claire isn't misunderstood by the reader. All excellent feedback!

My theatre reader's comments on The Deck:

I can't tell you how much I enjoyed reading about the deli. EASILY my favorite part thus far. I want to spend the whole story there. Hell, I want to spend a DAY there. It's a character in itself! How unique a place like this is. In just a few short passages we get an entire history of the place, and each little tidbit was more interesting and entertaining than the last. It's a great frame for snippets of action, and allows you to do some great things with mood simply by changing songs - which you've done already! It's such a creative set piece, and I'm really impressed.

I, personally, thought the inception of The Deck was a masterstroke, but I'm biased beyond belief. It's very validating to have someone recognize your good ideas for what they are and very useful to have someone able to draw your attention to the areas that need to brought up to the high standards of those good ideas.

Progress Report

2008-12-01T02:03:00.003-05:00

Well, I've got a new tool! My Aspire One is up and running and networked with my desktop. I've written a bit on it. It's not impossible to type on, but it can be tricky. I'm very excited, as evidenced by the following exclamation points!!!

That being said, I performed some very minor re-writes of chapters 1 and 2, taking into account the feedback I've gotten so far from my Reach Readers. Chapter 3 is coming together slowly. It's still in several pieces that will need to be stitched together to form a coherent whole, but at least I'm not scrapping the whole chapter. Chapter 4 is turning out to be a fairly easy write. I've gotten the first three quarters of it written, pretty much in one sitting. The next bit is all in my head, but the challenge will be to get the words on the page. Chapter 5 is sketched out. Chapter 6 is also sketched out, and is where the story really begins. It's also where I'll have another big hangup requiring a lot of research and deep thought. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to put a lid on 3 and 4 about mid-week and then get a good start on 5 and 6 this weekend. I'm eager to post the next tandem of chapters for critique. I'm really excited to bring MarLo into play in Chapter 6.

For now, my pact reader is going to have to settle for incomplete chapters, though. I can't stick to a rigid bi-weekly deadline. I am far too concerned with quality prose and well-thought plot to rush myself. Admittedly, though, I should have gotten more writing done over the holiday weekend, but friends were in town to visit, so I spent more time socializing than I'd originally budgeted. It was worth it, though!

Chapter 4 Begun

2008-11-27T20:42:00.005-05:00

I haven't sewn up David's chapter 3, yet, but I had a sudden burst of inspiration last night and had to begin Claire's Chapter 4 right then and there. So I wrote the intro to Chap 4 by hand with pencil and paper last night from my bed as I didn't feel like booting the computer again. I hate writing by hand as I type much faster; and half the time my handwriting is so illegible that when I go to transcribe it, I spend most of my time deciphering instead of typing. Tomorrow, though, my new Netbook will arrive and I opted for a sleek Acer Aspire One running a light Linux operating system that will boot from power on in under 30 seconds. So when those sudden bursts of writerly inspiration hit me, I've got just enough computing power at my command nearly instantly. I'm really excited about this new tool!

So tonight I'm going to type out and edit Claire's chapter 4 and dovetail it with some material I wrote awhile back for inclusion at the end of Claire's Chapter 2 but ended up cutting to aid the perspective switch. The new order of things will gel nicely, I think, and I was really excited about what I wrote last night because it parallels with David's narrative in fresh and subtle ways. They both have a reason to tool around on a chalkboard, for instance, which is interesting as most of us do not find occasion to ever write with real chalk anymore since the rise of the hypoallergenic dry erase marker. One of my favorite aspects of alternating first person narrative is the opportunity to find disparities in perception of a single event and parallels in divergent experiences. I often surprise myself by the clever tricks I come up with to tie stories together, and I've been enjoying this aspect of my POV choice even though it's incredibly challenging in many other ways.

Having Elizabeth (David's mother) come for a visit was beginning to feel like a mistake and I was just about to despair of Chapter 3 ever 'working' and toss it in favor of a sans Elizabeth re-write, but when she connected up with Claire last night, things started falling into place. David just doesn't interact with people very well, and this causes me to dread having to write him in company with others. I was also finding it hard to allow Elizabeth to express herself properly because David is incapable of true insight into another human being. But I did find a concrete way for her to show her concern for David, I just haven't written it yet.

Also, I thought up (but did not write) my ending last night. I've had an image in my mind for about a month now that I've come to internally identify as the cover art for Project Reach. I never expected it to be anything more than metaphoric, but it suddenly became real and worked its way into the story. It's a very strong visual and nicely ties David and Claire's unique stories together in one simple image.

Also, I've been pondering heavily what David should eventually settle on for his dissertation research. I know that Dr. Feigner, David's main adviser, did his dissertation on the effects of different stress reduction tools on the human brain (hence his impressive collection of stress balls) and it would only seem natural for David to build on this. And it would fit seamlessly with David's interest in neurochemistry as well as his fascination with Claire, whose life is spent among foods of the comforting variety. Studying the effects of so-called comfort foods on stressed individuals is a worthy line of study that would have possible implications in obesity research as well. It would also give me the perfect excuse to use the above-mentioned cover image and one of my contender titles, The Comfort Foods Cure (which is, incidentally, a line I stole from one of my favorite poetic works). But I am highly averse to allowing a title to inform the story, as opposed to the reverse. I had originally wanted David to study the neurochemistry of love, but I now think I may have been trying to force David into a study of love, a choice I doubt he would have made on his own. Additionally, David, as a grad student, is certainly no stranger to stress. The study of comfort foods is much more natural for David than a study of the chemical processes of romantic love.

Chapter 3 Quotes

2008-11-23T15:41:00.000-05:00

"Even the infinitesimal weight of a key in the small pocket on the inside waistband of my running tights makes me feel unbalanced. After calculating the probability of someone attempting to enter my home during its half hour vacancy in the early morning hours, I have concluded that the annoyance of carrying a key outweighs the risk of burglary based on currently available crime statistics."

Things I Should Know

2008-11-23T13:55:00.003-05:00

David is such an alien creature to me that I find myself Googling the most ridiculous things. Things I'm certain I should know already, like "Do running shorts have pockets?" and "How long does it take an avid runner to cover three miles?"

I was explaining to a friend why Chapter 3 has had such a long gestation period, and she asked if I could just skip it and come back to it. I thought about that, actually. I could skip laying the groundwork and get right to the fun parts where MarLo, Claire, and David are already acquainted and I am free to write their interesting and often humorous interactions, but I'm not going to do it. I have recorded some dialog exchanges just so I won't forget them later, so those will eventually be integrated into the narrative, but those will be the easy writes, the reward for having gotten past all of the hard stuff. Besides, if I write a lot of material to fit into the later chapters before I figure some key elements out (like what I'm struggling with right now, working through where David is in his academic career and what his relationship with his mother is) and some things surprise me (like how David and his mother are on much easier terms than I'd originally thought, owing mainly to Elizabeth's sheer generosity of spirit) then I'll either have a continuity error that will confuse the tone of the book, or I'll have wasted a lot of time and effort on what will end up being an outtake that gets dumped from the final manuscript, and as I'm not a professional writer, I do not have the luxury of writing dross. So in answer to my friend, I simply said, "No, I can't skip ahead and come back to this later. These are things I have to know." The groundwork I'm laying now informs David's character to such a degree that omitting it would inevitably cause major confusion. It is central to David's dilemma. I am trying to relate that an astronomically high IQ, excellent grades and steady income do not guarantee academic success. So much depends on emotional intelligence, work ethic and self-motivation.

The Elusive Rosetta Stone

2008-11-23T12:51:00.003-05:00

Owing to a weekend more full of social interaction with my peers than I'd anticipated, I haven't gotten anything written which is slightly tragic as I stumbled across the Rosetta Stone for Chapter 3 while at work on Friday evening. I was thrilled about it, of course, and couldn't wait to get home and start transferring my pages of notes into narrative, but I made impromptu plans to go to the movies with a girlfriend, instead. I didn't think one quick trip to the theater would disrupt my writing too much, but I ended up running out to town on Saturday to drop off a birthday present at my friend's gallery, bought a new winter coat, and then got a call from a friend who was only in town for a very short time and wanted to get people together for a dinner, so directly after I got home I was out again and that turned into a late night of netbook shopping and meeting my other friend's fiance...all impromptu plans, of course. When I got home, I cracked open Twilight for the fifth or sixth time and hit the highlights before drifting off to sleep.

So today I'm hard at it! No football for me until I've at least sketched my ideas into what I already have written for Chapter 3.

Facing the Giants

2008-11-18T01:43:00.002-05:00

Well, I feel like I've accomplished something, even if it is just a few minor tweaks to Chapter 2! Chapter 3 is still stalled. I've really got to put some hard thought into the short transitions it's missing. I need to nail down the chronology of David's college career, first, I think, as every time I think about it, it shifts a little in my mind. Is it completely ridiculous to assume that he can complete all of his undergraduate and graduate class work between the ages of 14 and 18? He's a freaking genius with absolutely no interest in social affairs, so it's conceivable that with a full course load and summer classes he could have done it. I'm also assuming he was able to test out of some of the 100 level courses. I'll just have to put a lot more thought into it. Where I'm at right now, though, I have him having completed all of his coursework and a research assistanceship working with cuttlefish and has now been turned loose to work exclusively on his dissertation. He's turned 18 and received the trust that was put away for him after his father's death (which reminds me, I have a few points to add to Chapter 1 about David's father's profession) so he doesn't have to hold a job or worry about money. He is free to focus entirely on that hulking monster of a dissertation. Yeah. That's where I'm at with David. It's daunting. I totally get David's perspective as I sit here, facing down an entire novel. I'll have to keep reminding myself of that over the next few days, to write how I'm feeling about this project, only sanitized of emotion as only David can.

Reach Readers update

2008-11-14T02:39:00.003-05:00

I also think I should note that I guilted my first readers into giving me some feedback by including a section on my personal blog which I will excerpt here:

I haven't heard back from (my pact reader) yet. I'm not sure if this is because it was such a bad fragment of writing that he couldn't think of any constructive comments or if he's just madly busy as I have been myself. Regardless, I'm starting to give up on wringing any feedback out of people. I was fully prepared for negative feedback, but the lack of interest, the complete apathy, has me wondering. It's quite discouraging. If I were getting a lot of negative feedback, then I'd likely be much more motivated to make improvements. I'd be incensed, I'm sure. If I were getting positive feedback, I'd maybe build up some good momentum, being then freed from the self-doubt adherent to my style, story and characters. But nothing? I've been a little adrift. But I'm coming out of it. I'm beginning to pick up steerage way again after my first flush of enthusiasm died out. Now I'm settling into it.

Three of my five first readers contacted me within the day to make their excuses for not posting to the Google Group or otherwise commenting on the work I allowed them to read. I didn't intend the passage in my personal blog to be an appeal to them; it was merely a record of my personal feelings on the subject. I simply forget that my friends keep up with my blog. But I'm glad that it did end up jarring some commentary out of them. I have been privileged to have been asked by my friends to be a part of some of their major life events. I've been in their weddings, helped them edit academic papers, driven them to the airport, supported them as they launched businesses or new careers or relationships. I have considered it an honor to be entrusted with my friends' confidences and to lend them my meager talents to aid in their personal and professional advancement. When I decided to undertake writing a novel, I deemed it only fair reciprocity to invite my trusted friends along for the ride. I have enjoyed being a part of their journeys, and it was my hope that they would enjoy being part of mine. I firmly believe that it is not a huge time commitment as it generally takes only about a half an hour to read a piece, formulate an opinion of it, and record those opinions. As I'm interested in gut reactions, if it takes any longer than a half an hour to perform the function of a first reader, then someone's doing something horribly wrong!

But hopefully, I'll be getting more feedback from the Reach Readers soon. And if not, then I'll move down my list of potential readers and invite some fresh eyes into the group. I had previously chosen not to extend invitations to some individuals who had asked to be included, and I may reconsider their petitions if, after posting the next pair of chapters, my current panel does not begin discussing the material.

Learning Persistence

2008-11-14T01:22:00.003-05:00

Every day while I'm at work, I think of David and his Chapter 3 dilemma and how to get him from point a to point b in so many words while maintaining forward momentum and a reasonable amount of interest. I sometimes have flashes of insight, which I scribble onto a memo pad during my free moments. At the end of the day, I pull the sheet off of my memo pad and stuff it into my purse (which is bursting with them) and drive home, eager to sit at my desk in my home 'office' and commute my scanty handwritten notations into actual plot. Instead, I get distracted or discouraged and end up wasting time on Facebook or adjusting my Netflix queue. I haven't gotten much real work done on the chapter all week. I've sat at my computer with the working document open, staring at a blinking cursor and maybe adjusting two or three sentences before giving up.

I'm using the excuse that I got a flu shot and have had a mild but persistent reaction that makes me feel just unwell enough to be a little cranky, but not so unwell that I can't function normally.

I think a lot of the real problem stems from the fact that I have gotten to know the child David fairly well, but the man David is still so unformed that I find it difficult to imagine his reactions in the situations I have placed him in. This, in turn, makes it nearly impossible to write him. I'm not saying that David is an unformed character, because he most certainly is extremely multi-dimensional. I simply mean that he, himself, is in the midst of a very dynamic period of personal growth. It's difficult to introduce someone who doesn't quite have a handle on who they are. He is at a crossroads in his life and until he meets Claire, he has no clear direction. It would help if I had some insight into what the pressure cooker of graduate school feels like. I have found some rather helpful blogs, though, and will just have to keep at it until I break through. In every narrative that I've ever written in which I run up against a wall, there is always a single sentence that acts as the Rosetta Stone to unlock the rest of the story. Once that single sentence is in place, every subsequent passage falls neatly onto the page. But getting to that keystone is the problem. It takes a great deal of hard work to figure out what's missing and where and then to fabricate a linguistic fulcrum. I actually say aloud to myself, "There's always a Rosetta Stone." when writing or solving a Sudoku puzzle. It's my equivalent of Cayce Pollard's mantra "He took a duck in the face at 250 knots."

Oddly enough, I've found the "Luminous Fish Effect" episode of Big Bang Theory to be a bit of an insight into how David must be feeling. In the episode, genius theoretical physicist Sheldon gets fired and subsequently loses all focus and spirals into a sort of frenzied tail-chasing. It's an incredibly comedic account of what I think must be going on in David's head during this juncture.

Research Titles

2008-11-03T09:13:00.003-05:00

I have two new research titles of note to share. One is a delight to read and is highly creatively inspirational. It is A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman. Very nice bedtime reading. I've also picked up a copy of How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker, but I find it to be poorly organized and difficult to read without becoming bored.

Chapter 3 Quotes

2008-11-03T02:50:00.002-05:00

"I believe the usual advice in this situation is to ‘write what you know.’"

"I do not find that at all helpful as it applies only to those who, frankly, don’t know very much. If I were to ‘write what I know’, as you suggest, the product wouldn’t be a dissertation, it’d be an encyclopedia. Or at least something on the scale of Carl Sandburg’s six volume biography of Lincoln."

Chapter 3 progress report

2008-11-03T02:40:00.003-05:00

I've finally made some progress on Chapter 3. In this chapter, I've been exploring the rather unconventional relationship between David and his mother Katharine. She is visiting him, ostensibly in town on business interviewing a professor of political science for a feature article, but really she wants to make sure he's getting settled into his house well and isn't missing the dorms too much. She's surprised by his adaptability, as he's usually averse to any sort of change in his daily routine.

I knew this chapter was going to be very dialog intensive, and I'm petrified to write dialog...so no work was done on this chapter for the longest time. I got scared off by my perception of my own weaknesses. But once I got David and his mother in the same room and started them to talking (actually talking out my own frustrations) things started to come a lot more easily. It's a shame I'm so exhausted now and have to get to sleep so I'll be fit to work tomorrow, because I'd like to continue and build on the two pages I've output this evening. So now that I have a handle on how David and his mother interact, now I have to work through David's internal dilemmas doubting for the first time his ability to succeed in academia as he struggles to come up with a dissertation topic. He's at loose ends now. He excels in classes and as a research assistant because there is a set curriculum or procedure. When David is left to make his own choices, though, he drops into paralysis. Much like me faced with the prospect of writing large chunks of dialog!

So I'm hoping to keep up the pace and get two more pages written tomorrow. I think I was helped greatly by my pact partner who sent me three very short plays to read over for him. Plays are completely outside my area of expertise, but it was interesting reading them out and pinpointing their weaknesses and brilliant moments of clarity and comedy. I think it helped put me in a good headspace to write some serious dialog.

Hurdles

2008-10-27T23:52:00.004-04:00

I've been slogging through some major self doubt. I'm not into the meat of my story yet, which will begin during Claire and MarLo's Halloween party, and so it's been nearly impossible for me to motivate myself to go through the necessary setup and development to get to the good stuff. But I do have some direction for the next leg of my journey owing to two weeks of hard thought on David's relationship with his mother and how his inability to emotionally connect with others must deeply injure her. I have a good friend who recently married and now has a 6-yr-old stepson who is not an affectionate little boy. He doesn't hug or snuggle or cuddle, and this makes it very hard for her to connect with him. I've been observing them closely and trying to get inside of Katharine's (David's mother's) head, and inside David's head when he contemplates her. It's ... tough. It's alien territory. I haven't been pushing myself at all, though, and I don't think this is a bad thing. The relationship that I'm contemplating, that I will be exploring in Chapter 3, is a delicate one, very fragile, the kind of relationship that if one party pushes too hard on the other, the whole superstructure collapses like a house of cards. So I've just been trying to be a quiet observer to see if I can get a feel for how the mother and son interact.

I am going to re-read my first two chapters and see if I can't get at least a very rough and horrible sketch of Chapter 3 done as I will have to polish it up on Friday night and Saturday in order to get it to my pact reader on Sunday night. And I won't be able to work on anything all week except for Wednesday. I'm going to the opera tomorrow night and Thursdays are always booked up with a political discussion group...at least until after the election, then I'm going to a once a month schedule which will be a huge relief. It will take the strain off of my budget and free up a huge chunk of time, and hopefully will help me stop smoking once and for all. I can go all week without a single cigarette but Thursday nights at the pub kill me.

Baby Steps

2008-10-15T02:29:00.002-04:00

Only a small bit of writing done today during my lunch break at work. It's almost unbearably rough, but it's something. I haven't made much of an attempt to write this week as I've been preoccupied with my plans for a new sewing project to keep me busy during the long winter (as if writing weren't enough to keep me busy!) But I can't abandon all of my regular pursuits just to write, write, write. That would be an awful and frustrating existence. I need something to blow off some steam. I have been reading some Henry James, and his internal dialog is very interesting and might inspire me to get back to writing on Chapter 3.

Lagging

2008-10-12T23:37:00.004-04:00

Well, though I've invited my first readers to read my first two chapters, so far the response has been...nonexistent. I'm quite discouraged by this and I realize now that I'd been counting on some positive feedback to keep me energized for this next chapter, which I have not yet begun (having wasted the entire weekend refreshing my memory on all things Jane Austen and enjoying Jon Jory's delightful stage adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice" at Louisville's Actor's Theatre). I am starting to realize that I have to be careful not to let external factors control my motivation to write. I have to write for the pure joy of it, even when it's a trial to sit and type. So I'm trying not to be too disappointed that my friends aren't fawning over how brilliant I am. I know that one friend who has been desperate to read my work had some difficulties with the Google Group sign in and that prevented her from accessing the chapters this weekend. She will try again on Tuesday. The others have busy lives and I shall excuse them for their lack of enthusiasm. I cannot, however, excuse myself of my lack of enthusiasm. Tomorrow I shall start afresh and try to sit and write no matter the cost in terms of time or energy. Perhaps I'll even take a pencil and paper to bed and write longhand as a sort of punishment for my sloth this weekend.

Also, I've order my own copies of Emotional Intelligence and Mind Wide Open. They are such useful references. I should also like to get a copy of Proust was a Neuroscientist, but I'll have to wait for my next pay cycle for that indulgence, I'm afraid.

Chapter 2 Quotes

2008-10-12T11:21:00.001-04:00

"She attempts to throw a wet arm around my shoulder. She misses and punches me lightly in the ear instead. I study her through sleep-swollen eyes. She doesn’t look as if she’s had an amazing night. She looks almost as if she’d been waterboarded and enjoyed it. Her generous application of eyeliner and mascara stream down both cheeks, and her usually spiky hair is plastered to her forehead and neck in dripping tendrils. When I look into her eyes, there is no genuine mirth there. They are unfocused and filled with a dull horror."

Road Trip!

2008-10-09T01:19:00.003-04:00

Oh, to have a laptop! Procuring a laptop will become a priority very soon. I've planned an excursion to Bloomington in two weeks and will need to be able to have my computing powers on board with me as I travel. I'm going to double book the weekend since I will just be walking the campus to get a feel for it anyway. The plan is to rent a car (which will pay for itself in gas savings alone) for the weekend and head up early on a Saturday, stroll the campus and take a lot of snapshots, sample the local fare and soak up some atmosphere. Then I'll head out of town to a camp site and spend Sunday doing a lovely autumnal hike before driving back home and dropping off my rental. The fall foliage should be at or near its peak then, so I'm hoping for a gorgeous drive, a balmy day to explore campus and a breathtaking hike.

I've also discovered BloomingPedia, a wiki dedicated to all things Bloomington. Very helpful.

I'm ridiculously nervous about hearing back from my Reach Readers. I'm almost positive that everyone I've invited will come on board, but I am unsure of the reception the written material will get. I'm afraid it's still a little dense and, well, boring. And I'm still not absolutely sure that I have the talent to pull off alternating first person POV. There are so many challenges involved. Sigh! I'm going to log off and meditate and perhaps that will help soothe me.

Chapter 2 Revisions & Reach Readers!

2008-10-07T21:41:00.003-04:00

Completed a major edit of Chapter 2 last night. I can't believe how much it was improved by simply reordering some of the paragraphs and deleting some extraneous information. It's much more focused now and has a tighter, cleaner read.

This chapter took me by surprise. I had wanted to have Claire introduce us to her hopes for the future, but she never got around to it. Instead, the focus of the chapter became her concern for those around her. Chapter 2 is Claire's compassion (and a healthy dose of the history of The Deck and MarLo's academic career). And I guess it's a good thing that I have so much leftover material that didn't make it into this chapter, because I really hadn't put much thought into what I'm going to have Claire thinking and doing next. Her life is fairly dull for the time being, so I've tried to remedy the lull by having her focus on her friends and co-workers who have more active lives.

I'm excited to get started on David's chapter tonight because I have decided that his Mom will drop in for a visit. She's ostensibly working on a freelance science article and needs to interview one of the professors, but I suspect she really just misses her son. I have a lovely conversation between them planned that exposes the reader to David's emotional blindness. I wasn't
going to explain away his style of relating to the world, but I've come to see that it's necessary. And his mother is the perfect tool for me to use for this exposition.

But the most exciting thing is that I now have a completed pair of chapters to upload, which means (JOY) I can FINALLY invite my panel of first readers to the Google Group. It's taken much longer than I thought, but I'm not fussed about my writing pace. This is a marathon, not a sprint. As long as the quality is there in abundance, then I can take as long as I want to write the book...so long as I have it completed before I turn 30, because that's the goal! But there's no real danger of Project Reach stretch out for that long. I'm still working on some self-discipline issues, but I've made a pretty impressive commitment so far and I don't intend on relenting.

Reach Readers have OFFICIALLY been sent invitations now! I'm so excited, I'm sure I'll never get to sleep. Maybe I'll pick up some of the Henry James I recently bought at a library book sale.

I Don't Write Bones

2008-10-06T22:01:00.003-04:00

More writing than blogging, for once. Part of the reason, I'm sure, is because I have had precious little creative output total in the past week and a half, so there is little to spare as pure slush that makes its way onto the blog.

But after having written through the pain of writing poorly last night in order to make my pact deadline, I am feeling spectacularly artistically unrestrained today. I've even started work on a poem, but may not follow through with it as it will distract me from the need to set down David's second chapter.

I picked up a copy of Writing Down the Bones at the library book sale, and I must say it is an absolutely dreadful writers reference. Not only is it severely out of date (having been written before computers were widely relied upon) but it is inane and self-indulgent to an annoying degree. Also, the advice outlined in its pages is completely contrary to how I choose to write. I prefer, since I am not a 'professional' writer and have severe time limitations on my writing sessions, that I not waste energy with unneeded words that will later be edited out. My method of fully imagining a scene before I set down to write it saves me many wasted hours at the keyboard. I can imagine anywhere, anytime. I can even imagine while still functioning in the world. I can imagine at work or on the road. And so I do. In this way, when I do get a chance to sit down to the keyboard, the bulk of the prose is already written in my mind and all I need do is type it out and edit as I go.

I am informed by an Entertainment Weekly article that Nicholas Sparks writes 2,000 words in a day. I average just over that in two weeks. Part of me wants to believe what the world is telling me through articles like this and books like Writing Down the Bones, that I'm doing it all wrong. The rest of me wants to put aside self-doubt and believe what I know: that there is no wrong way.

Media Fast?

2008-10-01T01:10:00.002-04:00

I didn't even sit down to write until midnight tonight. This very bad. I may have to kill my TV again.

In the past, I have found it periodically necessary to go on a media fast. No computer (except at my day job), no TV, no radio, no cell phone, no Nintendo DS. Sometimes I will extend the fast to include printed media. I doubt I'll be doing that any time soon, but I will have to keep a sharper eye on how much time I spend watching television instead of researching or writing. I shall have to force myself to sit down and write instead of tweaking my fantasy football roster or trolling for flair on Facebook (two of my favorite time sinks).

And now I'm blogging instead of writing, so I shall have to cut this short and get cracking on Claire's chapter, which is coming along nicely after last night's revisions.

Chapter 2 Status Update

2008-09-30T01:44:00.002-04:00

Have all the thrilling and exciting discoveries about my characters and story already been made? I'm starting to wonder if the fun part is over and from here on out it's just going to be hard work. I've had a difficult time getting motivated to do any real work on Claire's chapter, but tonight I've thrown out old ideas, made some major revisions, and am pumping up the internal dialog. It's actually really good stuff that needs to be there. I need to show Claire being preternaturally perceptive of the physical and emotional states of those around her. I had a small flash of inspiration the other day and decided to have MarLo and Decker have an intermittent fling. It's not an on-again-off-again relationship, it's strictly casual physicality. I haven't nailed down how old Decker is, yet, but he's definitely MarLo's senior by a decade at least. Claire, of course, has no idea that this is happening, but it has given me the opportunity to leave MarLo at home with a hangover so Claire can worry about her AND I get to have Decker all hung over trying to come in to work so Claire can show us how she takes charge of the Deli right off the bat. And since she's got her fateful catering gig on the same day, we'll learn how well she handles stress when she's really under the gun.

I should pack it in and go to sleep right about now, but I hate to stop writing when I've got some momentum built up. Just a few hundred more words and a couple of hours worth of revisions and I'll have Claire's chapter finished!!! THEN I can finally invite my first readers to partake. (Not to mention the fact that I have a pact deadline this Monday.)

Interest

2008-09-29T00:54:00.003-04:00

No new character insights to share. I've been writing quite a bit, but none of it will be salvageable. I'm currently facing the challenge of stretching my first Claire chapter. I've found a great stopping point, but it happens to occur a mere 1500 words into her narrative. Not good. Must flesh out some things and give her internal dialog a richer hue. I've been working on this all week. I'm getting impatient to move on to David's next chapters as I've determined that his mother has come to visit him and will introduce him to her suspicion that he has difficulty relating emotionally to the rest of the world. This will be dialog intensive, which will be a bit of a workout for me, but the research I've put into the exchange is fascinating stuff. I can't wait to have the debate out on the page. But I have to inject Claire's debut with some sort of hook first. Her chapter is dull. I can't keep enough interest in it to continue writing, even! Bad sign.

Oh, I've devised a romantic entanglement for MarLo that should prove interesting.

Fast and Loose

2008-09-25T00:31:00.002-04:00

I got a few paragraphs written last night and a lot more reading done in Mind Wide Open. I forced myself to write rough and it wasn't pretty. It drives me nuts to just slop down a sentence just to get from point a to point b. But, by all authorities, that's the way to do it. I know they're called rough drafts for a reason, but I'm not a drafting sort of writer. I prefer to edit on the fly as I'm writing. That way when the re-read when I'm ready to do revisions won't be so painful.

I shall have to read some Henry James. Evidently, he wrote extensively on nonverbal communication and the cognitive realities behind the significance of one look.

Success!

2008-09-23T18:11:00.003-04:00

Huzzah! A little celebratory blog post. I just got comments back from my pact reader. He offered some criticism of my pacing (I expected this) and made all the right suggestions. He doesn't know it yet, but I am totally setting him up for a big jolt.

He went exactly where I wanted him to go with David. In the first chapter I scoop the child David up and dump him in college in a few short paragraphs. My pact reader was all WTF? and suggested I develop his transition into college and expound on the social and emotional pressures on David. PERFECT! This is exactly the view of David that I was hoping him to have. The aspects of his experience that David chooses to remember tell us so much more about his personality than having him live through those experiences in the narrative. They're extraneous to Claire's story anyway, so I give them a good glossing over. Also, David is, understandably, a little lost in subsequent chapters. If the reader is lost, too, then they're right there on the journey with David. I have created a sympathy between the character and reader.

And nearly every point that my pact reader comments on is asking for insight into what David is feeling. I nearly broke out singing for joy that I have successfully sanitized David's narrative of all feeling, because that is really, really hard for me to do. Basically, all of my character interactions take place inside someone's head, feeling from within, and it's a treat to have the challenge of writing a character who simply doesn't feel. So, good for me.

And there was one comment that wasn't made that I'm really happy about. There was no mention of the inflated (dare I say academic) voice of David. This is good as it means that my reader either, a) noticed the wordiness but it wasn't annoying enough to detract from the scene, or b) didn't notice it at all. Either way is fine with me so long as it's not going to turn people off.

I have made a few minor revisions that are crucial and that I just didn't catch, so I'm going to have a write a big thank you e-mail to my pact reader tonight.

One more thing, and this is the most important: my reader can't wait for more.

So I declare chapter one to be a success.

Storing up the Sunshine

2008-09-23T14:57:00.005-04:00

I bought a new notebook and some mechanical pencils today. I don't necessarily like mechanical pencils but I realize that they writing I do with them is more legible. If I'm in a real fury, I dull my Mirado Black Warrior almost immediately, and then have to result to the fat, loopy scrawl that accommodates the heavy line of a dull point. Mechanical pencils keep their sharp, fine point no matter how I abuse them. But I had to find the kind that click on the barrel. My pens all have to click at the top and my pencils all have to click on the barrel. I don't know why, but I like it that way.

And I got some contact lenses. I feel more writerly when I'm wearing my chunky, burgundy plastic frames, but they just don't do for some events and activities. So now I have options.

Right now I'm going to exercise the option to go lay in my front yard in the sunshine and read some more in my latest research title: Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson ("Emerging Technology" columnist for Discover magazine). So far, I'm as enthralled with it as I was with Emotional Intelligence.

To quote myself, I shall now go out and begin "laying away stores of sun-warmed hours
for the long months of short days". This is my last day off in my summer work schedule and I will now go back to my usual 40-hrs/wk. This mean that I get to sleep in for a whole hour longer, but I'm going to make a concerted effort to get up early anyway and put in a solid hour of writing every morning (or at least on some mornings) before heading out to work. It's sad but the sun will be down when I get off of work from now on. Really bums me out.

Chapter 2 Progress Report

2008-09-23T12:12:00.003-04:00

I feel like I should have MUCH more written with the amount of work I've been putting into Project Reach. But then I have to remind myself that I'm learning an entirely new field (and an abstract one at that) and that the acquisition of knowledge takes time. AND that I had to get to know Claire and David before I could distinguish their voices from my own prose. Not an
easy task.

The second chapter is stalled for the moment due to lack of insight on my part. I've been having a bit of a struggle allowing Claire to find her voice. What I do have written of Claire's chapter is nice and tight. It's great not having to deal with a lot of back story and introducing a character by sharing her hopes and fears instead of where she's been. Finding a way to tell David's back story without the entire chapter turning into a useless information dump was the biggest challenge I had in writing chapter one. The problem I'm having with chapter two is that Claire's life is rather dull. She's at work, thinking about her life...and it's dull. And I can't reveal any of the most interesting things about Claire, yet. I know something will occur to me that will solve the problem, but as yet I'm at a loss. MarLo would be a good ingredient, but I currently have her retching over a toilet bowl after a night out, so she's out of the picture for this chapter. (Poor MarLo. I hate to do that to her, but I needed to show Claire as a caregiver and give her an opportunity to worry through her darkest fears as soon as she's introduced to us.)

So, to avoid stalling out completely, I'm skipping ahead and am filling in some of the interactions between MarLo and Claire and writing a bit of MarLo's back story. It's interesting that Claire never thinks about where she came from, but she spends a lot of mental energy dissecting MarLo's history and her relationship with her father. And she spends a LOT of time speculating on who David is.

I might even start in on the pivotal Halloween party scene. I've had it running in my head for a few days now and I might as well record what I've imagined before it either gets lost or morphs into something different entirely. I am having trouble deciding what MarLo, Claire and David should be for Halloween, though. Hannah Montana 10 years from now, hooked on Meth for MarLo? David could be George Jetson, perhaps. Or maybe a scientist from the LHC. Claire might just have to be Eleanor Dashwood.

Accomodating Characters

2008-09-22T00:12:00.002-04:00

I've spent the day doing some re-writes in Claire's still unfinished chapter. I was hoping to get it finished, but I was too distracted watching Lost in Austen, an amazing miniseries out of the UK in which a thoroughly modern young woman switches places with Elizabeth Bennet...hilarity and heartbreak ensue. Of course, I'm a sucker for all things Austen, so I'm a bit pre-disposed to liking this sort of thing. But I really think the script is incredible. The question, though, is does this count as research for Project Reach? I say yes, though it probably shouldn't.

But to bolster my rather thin claim that I didn't waste the entire day, I have located this fine, scholarly article: Why Jane Austen was Different, and Why We May Need Cognitive Science to See It

My good friend Carly, on whom MarLo is loosely based, turned me on to Lost in Austen when I went to visit her on Saturday. I happened to make an interesting observation about the behavior of a mutual friend and Carly remarked that she loved how I worded it. I said, "I don't know why you're surprised at my command of the English language. I'm a writer now, you know." That was worth a laugh.

___

I'm a little mad at myself for not completing Claire's chapter this weekend as the few people I've informed are on the short list to be first readers are chomping at the bit to get at the fruits of my labor. I've always had a reputation for being very literary, but I've never had to produce any proof of being so. It's always just been accepted. I'm starting to get a little worried at the reception my characters and story will get when I finally unleash them on the panel (who I have affectionately dubbed the Reach Readers). Re-reading what I've written so far, there's a real danger of the prose being over-styled. I know that a lot of editors would frown on this. It may even be grounds for a rejection. Gasp. But I'm still hopeful that it won't be a turnoff to the casual reader because (and this just smacks of vanity, but I'm going to say it anyway) I'm a master of flow. I have been primarily a poet, after all, and so my sentences are very fluid and natural. They have a certain pace that makes them sound attractive no matter how over-stuffed they may become. Stupid simile time: My sentences are like big, squashy chairs. If you have a really, really overstuffed chair that is upholstered in hard leather, it won't be comfortable to sit in because the leather won't give enough and you'll feel as if you're constantly being propelled out of the seat, and because, well, after awhile you get all sweaty sitting on leather and you start sticking in odd places. But if that same chair were upholstered in stretchy velvet, then you'll sink right into it and remain comfortable for hours. (I warned you it was stupid!)

Luckily, I've designed a character who is a genius and whose vocabulary should reflect his immense IQ, so I'm hoping this will allow me to get away with my propensity for egregious use of bloated metaphors. I may have created characters who accommodate my writing style without having consciously done so. Just one example: my character are unusually taciturn, and I suck at writing dialog. Yay me.

Science and Psi

2008-09-20T18:16:00.003-04:00

My trip to the library was very disappointing. I have no new research materials of note, but am waiting on a few things I've ordered to arrive. I should not go to the library when I'm utterly famished, though, because then all I want to do is get out of there and get some food and a coffee.

After I got home, I was reading a rather unflattering review of Dennis Lehane's new book (his first literary attempt) and my thoughts turned to the problem of keeping the science and psi in Project Reach from overwhelming the story. It's tricky. I'll be relying on my first readers pretty heavily to let me know if the science and psi get too overwhelming. I'm fairly good at not letting ~~forcing~~ my characters to stand around and expound on weighty matters. I only worry that I don't write enough dialog into the manuscript. I hate dialog. And I'm not good at writing it. So I just leave it out, which is easier when writing from the first person because internal dialog is sometimes enough to keep reader interest. But your characters can't know everything. Eventually, they have to be told something and then they have to react to that new piece of information.

I think it's rather funny that my two main characters don't have an actual conversation until about chapter 6. By this time, they know each other, they've studied each other's habits, and they have a level of acquaintanceship that brings them into each other's company every day...but they've never spoken to each other. And their first conversation, as I have planned it, is mostly carried out by MarLo speaking for each of them in turn. It's a really comical scene (in my head, at least, who knows how funny it'll be when it gets written?).

___

I've just submitted my first chapter to a writer friend with whom I've made a pact to adhere to biweekly deadlines. This will be the first external feedback I get. I'm not nervous. I'm rather expecting him to like it, as I know his literary preferences fairly well. But I am anxious to know what areas he finds need the most development and what his initial reaction to David is going to be.

___

I've also been pondering the problem of Project Reach's identity. It can't stay a project forever. Eventually, I'm going to have to start calling it what it is: a novel. And novels need titles. I'm not too concerned with choosing a title. I assume that the title will eventually choose me. Something that keeps asserting itself in the narrative will eventually just jump out at me and that will be it, the title...or at least the basis of the title. Lux et Veritas, actually has jumped out at me. It's just a little detail on a building that David notices when he visits Yale. It translates from the Latin to "Light and Truth". It's on the Yale Shield and, incidentally, also featured on the Indiana University seal. Light and truth will certainly be major themes in the arch of the story, but I don't want a Latin title. It smacks of 'trying too hard' and pretentiousness. I will keep my title options open for the moment.

___

I have just explained to a friend of mine why I couldn't get any real writing done yesterday and how useful I am finding my newly acquired knowledge of cognitive and neurological sciences:

I was under an unusual amount of stress at work dealing with a new account and later on I got really pissed off at my oral surgeon's office because I had to wait for a long time. This usually wouldn't phase me a bit as I'm a patient person, and I found it odd that I was feeling so angry at such a stupid (and expected) thing. But then I was like, huh, I must have had a stress-induced surge of catecholamine and cortisol leading to a state of adrenocortical arousal which makes me more prone to get tipped off by stupid things like being forced to watch Ryder Cup coverage while waiting to see my dentist.

Once I identified the neurological processes at work, I was able to better control my mood. And THAT is called metacognition, a concept which is given a brief treatment in the very first chapter of Project Reach. Unfortunately, my anger and feeling of utter frustration lasted until bedtime and prevented me from getting any writing done last night. Alas, I am a slave to my amygdala.

Stress

2008-09-20T01:03:00.002-04:00

I had an awful Friday at my day job dealing with a new account, and then getting back late from my lunch break due to an emergency dental visit. Then I took a night off to relax with a girlfriend and soak in her new hot tub, paint toenails and watch a chick flick. But after all that, I'm still in an aggressive, frustrated mood from the bad day at work. I could use this to inform Claire's frustration in her life, but I'm not. I'm going to take some research reading to bed and maybe try meditating. I think I might try going for another run this weekend. Probably on Sunday, as my Saturday will be spent at the library and doing laundry. Not even blogging feels therapeutic tonight.

"Stress of all sorts creates adrenocortical arousal, lowering the threshold for what provokes anger. Thus someone who has had a hard day at work is especially vulnerable to becoming enraged later at home by something that under other circumstances would not be powerful enough to trigger an emotional hijacking. "
From Emotional Intelligence

Damn you amygdala-driven surges of catecholamines!

IdeaFest

2008-09-19T02:40:00.002-04:00

I love that Louisville hosts IdeaFestival! I have just discovered and consequently formed a bit of a crush on Jonah Lehrer who recently published Proust was a Neuroscientist which I am just now ordering and will read as soon as it arrives at my door. I'm considering taking a vacation day next Friday, driving my giant red truck into town and sitting in on the hour-long $15 discussion Lehrer is giving at the Intl Convention Center. I'll have to think it over. On the one hand, what would be the concrete benefits for me to take an entire day off for a single hour of talk, the entire contents of which I can likely glean from published interviews in a few hours of diligent web research? (Lehrer seems to recycle answers to some common questions, I have already noticed - as do we all.) On the other hand, I freaking LOVE IdeaFest and this is the only session on the agenda that's struck me as a must-attend this year. I'll have to weigh the pros and cons, and see if I can get Friday off at such short notice, of course.

If nothing else, I have gained an awareness of another talented author/scientist to place in my little Pantheon alongside Karl Iagnemma. And there's his The Frontal Cortex blog, to which I have now subscribed and will follow with keen interest.

New Claire Soliloquy

2008-09-19T01:10:00.004-04:00

I wrote a gorgeous passage last night lying in bed with my trusty Mirado Black Warrior and notebook. I didn't want to waste time firing up the desktop, fearful of losing the immediacy of the words. I now have two critical Claire soliloquies written that I'll fit in when they're needed. This latest inspiration revolves around Niagara Falls and it came upon me that this location will play a pretty important part in book 3 if I ever get that far. What I wrote last night is a bit of dialog wherein Claire tries to explain how her talent works and how it doesn't. How it doesn't work is how the current research being done in the field of remote viewing describes the process. It's completely contrary to all that, in fact, which is great for me because it frees me up from having to have a rigid procedure and using existing terminology. I get to create my own descriptions of it from scratch. Awesome! Or daunting since I also get to create all my own experiments for David to conduct...and I'm not on David's level of genius by far. And I'm not a scientist. So that's the hard part.

The easy part will be when I get to the point of describing what Claire can do that no one else can, it's going to be so much fun to write. I'm really going to get to stretch out and light up the page. But I'm not there yet, and I have to be extra careful to strip Claire's day-to-day activities to their bare, ordinary essentials with a minimum of color so as to make her extraordinary passages really pop and stand out from the rest of her life. That will take a lot of restraint for me. I'm worried about readers getting bored with Claire's life in the first oh, say, six chapters. Claire isn't all that interesting outside of her talent and her penchant for being a little dreamy and prosy. If I take out the dreaminess and prosy-ness to highlight her talent when it comes into play several chapters in, then won't those introductory chapters get dull? Maybe I'll force David to take the brunt of keeping reader interest. All of his interesting dilemmas manifest early on anyway, then he sort of drops away into his studies and doesn't reassert himself until...book 2, I guess.

One difficulty I'm struggling with is that David being a serious academic in the field of Cognitive Sciences and then going all rogue and delving into psi (however rigidly scientific his interest may be) is going to piss off a lot of cognitive scientists! I brought the subject up to my research partner and he thinks it's touchy. Cog Sci doesn't want to be associated with parapsychology as it's a young science and is still struggle for acceptance and funding and all that. So I'll have to tread lightly when David 'goes there'. Fortunately, it makes sense that his interest is piqued by Claire's talent, so I won't have to go to any extremes to justify it. One of my biggest fears, though, is getting the science all wrong. That would, undeniably, suck! I don't want a real scientist to doubt David's authenticity.

I might have to read some Jung for research. And Karl Iagnemma's new book. My list of research titles keeps growing!

Chapter Two Quotes

2008-09-17T23:23:00.008-04:00

"After weeks of summer drought, the rain sounds alien to me, but welcomed. It puts me in mind of a tender reunion between lovers, as if the sky were bending to kiss the parched earth in apology for staying away too long."

Lean chapters

2008-09-17T23:23:00.006-04:00

Hmmm...every time I doubt that there's enough material in my outline to pad out an entire chapter, something wonderful happens in the actual writing that takes my breath away. Details materialize, delicious interactions assert themselves...there is always so much for the characters to say and do that I should only worry about there being too little space to fit it all in! Of course, then I put on my editing hat and it all has to go! I'm left with a lean 2,500 words.

Back to work!

Drunk on Power

2008-09-17T23:23:00.003-04:00

Me plus Spiced Chai, plus ELECTRICITY equals a happy writer.

I am so thrilled to have electricity again. I am positively drunk on power. I've got several lights on, unnecessarily, and many appliances whirring away in the background just because I can! The remnants of Hurricane Ike swept through Indiana on Sunday causing a massive wind storm (or, as I like to call it, the Great Bradford Pear Massacre of 2008) that damaged every house and yard in my little town and wreaked havoc on the power grid. My weekend of 'writing and recuperation' was spoiled. All was not lost, though, as I did get a fair bit of research done. No writing, though. I couldn't bear to do it the old fashioned way with a pencil and a notebook. It's a good thing that Claire has a mild personality and hasn't been insisting on being written or it might have been a very frustrating week. I will have to get a lot of work done in the coming days, though, as I have a pact deadline looming on Sunday. So it's double-time for me! No time for blogging. Must write. (And tweak my Fantasy Football lineup.)

Claire's Chapter begun

2008-09-13T17:49:00.002-04:00

I was right about Claire's chapters coming along a bit easier than David's. Her voice is much more natural to me. I got a bit of work on done on her chapter today. It's still unbearably rough, but it's conceivable that I can finish it up tomorrow. There are some larger issues with pacing that I will have to address eventually, but they aren't critical at this point.

I'm all drugged up for the time being and am going to go pop in Dopamine to research.

Chapter One put to bed

2008-09-12T00:22:00.002-04:00

I have a lot of nervous energy today about my oral surgery tomorrow. I'm hoping to be able to put this to good use and get some writing done (maybe on Claire's second chapter as I can see how a skittish tone would be perfect) but I attend a political discussion group every Thursday, so that cuts down on my writing time. I didn't get much more than some revisions on David's running transition done last night. I am still unsure if the transition works or not. I'm going to leave it up to my first readers to tell me if it throws them too much or not.

But the first draft of chapter 1 is officially put to bed!!! (Does small happy dance) It's a start.

My little world population is growing, too. The Decade a Day owner is suddenly a much larger presence than I had anticipated. He's very hands on and feels himself to be very lucky to have Claire on staff (and don't we all want to be appreciated by our bosses ;). He trusts her implicitly and may suffer an illness and leave Claire in charge for a bit, which will give her a chance to show us how she shines under pressure. I believe his name will be Mr. Decker, adding further credence to the nickname The Deck.

__

My niece, who is 11 and in 6th grade, has a school friend whose mother recently died, so my niece decided to write her a poem. And she didn't stop there. Her teacher shared a story about her husband dying to help the kids understand their grieving classmate, so my niece wrote her teacher a poem, too. She shared these poems with me last night. I have a reputation in the family for being very literary. I thought, this is just the sort of thing a young Claire might have done. I realize that Claire may share a lot of traits with my niece. Perhaps I even based her personality off of my niece to some extent. It's even possible that Claire is an imagining of my niece as an adult. But not really. Claire is Claire.

Chapter 1 Quotes

2008-09-11T03:31:00.000-04:00

"The inside of my head was awash. It felt as if someone had dropped a stone directly onto my corpus callosum, sending ripples radiating outward to collide with my skull with an almost audible throb."

Chapter One Quotes

2008-09-11T01:55:00.003-04:00

"I find that physical exertion sometimes allows me to escape my intellect, as if I could outrun the nebulae of thoughts that pollute my cerebellum."

First Readers Forum

2008-09-11T00:53:00.002-04:00

I'm getting awfully close to sending out invitations to first readers. I think I would like to have five members of the panel. It seems like a lot of input, but then there will be a built in cushion if someone joins the panel and then later decides they aren't up for the time commitment. I thought about adding a sixth member to allow for an even number of men and women, but sometimes I place too much emphasis on symmetry. I'm very fortunate to have friends with diverse interests and distinct personalities. And they all belong to the right age demographic. Big smiles. I already have my 'dream team' in mind, but we'll see who accepts the invitation. A couple of my dream teamers are in grad school right now and might not have the time to nitpick my prose.

My Reach Readers will operate off of a closed Google Forum and will have exclusive access to a chapter by chapter Google Notebook containing key research data in case they feel the need to fact check me. (Seriously, the folks at Google Labs are geniuses. They make my life SO easy!) The panel will be able to post forum topics to discuss the work with myself and with each other. If they do not wish to have their comments made public, they may e-mail them to me. They will also have the option of downloading each chapter, notating and making corrections with the "Track Changes" function in Microsoft Word, and then uploading their revisions to the Forum. I will then retrieve these revised documents for review.

I will be sending first reader invitations in the near future (which I've been saying for the past few weeks, but this time I mean it.) By the time I've received responses and granted access to the forum, I will have Claire's chapter finished. I was right about her chapters being easier to write than David's, at least so far.

Q and A

2008-09-10T21:47:00.002-04:00

Q: Do you want to come over and watch the Colts game?
A: Nope, gotta stay home and write.

Q: Do you wanna go get some coffee after work?
A: Nope, gotta go straight home and write.

Q: Did you see the season premier of such-and-such show?
A: Nope, I was writing.

Q: Can you come over and help me with...
A: Nope, gotta write.

Momentum vs. Burn Out - a delicate balance. How to keep up the momentum without risking Burn Out...this question has weighed on me very heavily lately.

I'm trying not to alienate my friends by dropping off the face of the planet, but I've got a good start on Project Reach, I just need to follow through, get a little work done every day, and keep inching towards the goal. I try to put in two solid hours of research and writing every night, but it's difficult. It's almost like having a second job! I think it'll be easier to manage once I've gotten a laptop, but until then I have to try to remember not to hole myself up at my desk for too long lest I stagnate and run up against a block. Part of my strategy for avoiding the dreaded tandem of writer's block and burn out is this blog. Whenever I'm frustrated, I air my head out a bit right here instead of junking up the manuscript with observations that will end up being edited out in the end. I do worry about putting too much energy into blogging and not enough in writing, but that balance will eventually shift, I'm sure, when I've cleared more of the research phase.

Speaking of research, I'm a little mad at myself for not having read more of my research titles. But I have to remind myself that this is a marathon, not a sprint. I can't absorb everything all at once, and I just have to be patient. If I learn something that informs or negates a passage I've already written, it's never too late to go back and make changes! I have months and months ahead of me to dedicate to reaching my research goals. I have added some fiction titles to the mix, though, to help lighten the mental tax that research papers and textbooks have placed on my brain. "Stranger than Fiction" and "A Beautiful Mind" are on the list. I doubt I'll finish reading the Raymond Chandler book I started. It's served it's purpose for the time being, and I need to move on to something more illuminating.

I'm considering - since I'm switching my operating system to Ubuntu next month, anyway - making the leap from Microsoft Word to Open Office. I am comfortable with Word. I know it's capabilities and it's weaknesses. Learning a new software program might set me back for a few days, but it might be worth it in the end to have the ability to update my thesaurus and have a more dependable word processor. Word has been shafting me with auto-save fails that crash the program lately, and I would have to have to lose a hard-won paragraph because of a software error. I would be very, very unhappy if such a thing were to occur.

My sister told my mother I was writing a novel. She said, "Good. I hope you sell it and make lots of money." I do, too, but I think she's missing the most important point.

A friend of mine who follows the blog observed that:
Claire + David = Will Hunting

Haha! He's right!

Progress at long last

2008-09-10T03:04:00.003-04:00

Well, I've gotten three workable paragraphs in at the end of David's chapter. They'll need heavy revision, but they're lightyears better than what I'd had in place as of last night. The real reason I'm reporting in at 3am, though, is that I have begun Claire's chapter. It's not the street scene that I'd envisioned. I'm going to put that off until the next pairing of chapters. First I'm going to allow David to air his academic woes and perhaps have his mother come up for a visit to fill a few pages and give us an outside perspective on David's peculiarities (as only a mother can) since we won't have the benefit of having Claire's view of him until later. That should be good. I had been pondering where to fit her in anyway.

Now I've just got to fill up Claire's opening chapter with some an interaction with MarLo that I dreamed up on my lunch break today. I might steal some dialog that I've outlined for a later scene that I'd meant for David to witness, but it's not crucial, so I might use it up front to establish Claire and MarLo's relationship.

This is all feeling an awful lot like work. And I'm starting to really suffer from the sleep deprivation at my real day job. If I thought I were doing this all for vanity's sake, I don't think I'd deem it worth all the mental energy! If I were "writing solely for my own entertainment" like a lot of authors claim, I wouldn't even consider continuing. My entertainment is just not that high up on my list of priorities. But then again, that's the lack of sleep talking.

Also, the first person narrative choice is working out well. I know that it's absolutely vital to later aspects of Claire's experience, which is why I chose it in the first place, but it's turned out to have several other advantages, too. I'm starting to doubt my decision less, though I still have to evaluate how to differentiate the individual voices of Claire and David. Yesterday's revisions went a long way toward cementing David's voice, though I don't know how an outside reader will react to it, yet. It might be misinterpreted as style on my part. I guess I'll find out when I have my panel of first readers to consult on such sticky issues.

Chapter 1 revisions

2008-09-09T23:21:00.004-04:00

Sigh, I undertook another major revision last night instead of putting the chapter (and myself) to bed and giving Claire her say. I realized that I had stupidly stopped the narrative to go off on a tangential description of a completely insignificant character. So I cut all of that except for a few nicely worded images that I managed to sneak into later sentences (that, naturally, are meant to tell us more about David's powers of observation than to illuminate a disposable character). I've also broken the "never name a background character" rule...twice. But people have names. You won't remember them. But they have names all the same. So now the pace of the first chapter is much improved. I'm glad I caught those little gaffes, but wished there were more time last night to write because I just couldn't seem to get anything accomplished on the last few paragraphs. Wording is essential here, and by the time I'd gotten around to working on them, my mind was muddled with exhaustion.

I know I can manage the transition in just a few short sentences, but those sentences have to be tightly-worded and still read weightlessly. (That makes sense to me, I swear!) There's a lot of pressure on those few sentences to be perfect. They're critical.

Sigh. I wish that transition were already written. Claire wants to talk now. I can feel her voice getting clearer in my head. I'm going to spend my lunch break capturing at least a snapshot of her first chapter, then I'll plug away at David's transition later.

I'm also attempting to gather contact information for former military remote viewers to see if I can set up a phone interview with someone. I might just have to settle for reading their books. Sigh. The ones I've sampled so far are awful writers!

Oh, and a salient point: Claire thinks she's way more messed up that she actually is. She doesn't recognize her good qualities. David, on the other hand, never even guesses at how dysfunctional he is because academia tends to reward his particular brand of dysfunction. I have a feeling this may be key.

Oh, and I've re-envisioned the No Name Cafe. It will now be the Decade a Day Cafe (known locally as The Deck). They play a compilation of music from a specific decade every day. It's a casual theme. There are no costumes or elaborate decor. It's just the music. The owner had a vision of "educating" his young student patrons by exposing them to music they may never have heard. Claire likes to call out pop quizzes to diners: "Free coffee to whoever can name this band!"

Entertainment as Research

2008-09-09T00:58:00.002-04:00

I have decided that renting Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls is considered research. Evidently, the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale is featured in a chase scene!

Other movies I've watched recently for "research" purposes:
Premonition
Breaking Away
Stranger than Fiction
Jane Eyre

Next up:
A Beautiful Mind
The Cell
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Long Kiss Goodnight
Minority Report
**Dopamine

The Cognitive Sciences Movie List might just be my new favorite resource!

**=really excited about this title as it seems fairly pertinent to what I'm trying to accomplish.

Subtlety just smacked me upside the head!

2008-09-08T22:55:00.004-04:00

I want to make David into the kind of character you fall in love with because you want to fix him, to teach him how to feel, like Stephen Maturin in O'Brian's sweeping naval chronicles who is equal parts brilliance and dysfunction. Or rather David IS that kind of character, but I'm hoping to have the skill to write him as such. I don't know if I'm up to the task, though. There's a level of subtlety required that I'm not sure I possess.

Case in point: Most of what I wrote yesterday will be cut out of the manuscript immediately. I went on a run with David, and it's too much. It'll have to go. I had detailed the entirety of his daily route through campus. He pretty much took us on a tour, and THEN he went home and ate breakfast. UGH. It was awful! WHO CARES what David eats for breakfast?! (Actually, it's rather funny, and I will add it back in to the story if David starts taking himself too seriously and we all just need to laugh at him and shake our heads.) I realize that it's vital for ME to know all of these minute details about David, but it's completely useless to the narrative at this point, and really just an excuse for me to indulge in a glut of description. I had a DUH moment today and realized that I have an ENTIRE NOVEL to showcase my descriptive chops, so I shouldn't be in too much a hurry to exhaust my options.

That being said, the gods of subtlety and ambiguity must have smiled on me today, because an alternate close to chapter 1 occurred to me, and I think it will be far superior. I will just let David have his run...without stalking him every stop of the way. David needs his space, and I have learned to respect that need. He doesn't have to explain to me (or a reader) what he wants out of life, or where he's going, or how he ended up where he is. I will not force David to ponder the mysteries of his being as he runs. One thing I learned from my research run yesterday is that outside of the simple act of keeping my feet moving and my arms pumping and my lungs from exploding, which is all more or less automatic, I wasn't thinking anything. I was just running. It's a completely different animal than taking a walk. I didn't know that before. But now I do. (Yay for me and my hair-brained research ideas paying off!) So I will let David run. I will let him be free from thinking for a few moments of his day. It's a little like the "No games. Just sports" Nike ad in the movie What Women Want.

And part of this new approach to the end of chapter 1 is to test out how vague I can be without it being off-putting. I want to see if it's too confusing to an outside reader to leave David's present situation in the realm of possibility for a few pages. So I'm going to transition to Claire's chapter before revealing that we're now in Bloomington, and then lead the reader to infer that David is there with us. But I won't delve into David's academic status until a later chapter, perhaps before he runs into Claire on the street in the second/third chapter.

And I have only just realized that I haven't given a physical description of David. I myself don't even have a concrete vision of him yet. He has been so young and so changeable up until this point that it wouldn't make sense to waste energy describing the child David and then have to repeat the effort to envision the man David. His dominant feature is simply his youth. And of course he's an avid runner, so he has a runner's lean body, but that pretty much goes without saying. I think I'll just leave David's physical appearance up to interpretation, at least until Claire has a reason to take notice.

I've also determined that I've either inadvertently or instinctively chosen a good starting place for the story. We'll all have a chance to settle into the science and settings without jumping too quickly into any major conflict, but will some small relationship tension be enough to keep us occupied until we get to the conflict? I don't know yet. This is all very hard.

My writer's pact, I've decided, will give me a week to write a paragraph and then a week to tweak it. I'm hoping I can push myself to just get it all out in a week. That would be awesome. But then again, I'm worried about rushing myself.

Writer's Pact

2008-09-08T00:50:00.003-04:00

I did actually go on a run today. It sucked only slightly less than I expected it to. I nearly passed out twice, but it would have been somewhat enjoyable had my lungs not threatened to explode. I can almost see why some people like running so much, but not quite. Perhaps if my body were up to the task, I wouldn't view it as such a negative experience!

Today I made a pact with a writer friend of mine to keep a to a cycle of two week deadlines. He will submit 7-10 pages to me for critique and I, in turn, will submit a rough chapter to him. Hehe, I don't think he knows what he's gotten himself into, because I am a cruel editor. But then again, I've read his work before and he's not a bad writer, some minor style issues, perhaps, and there are always some things that need more development, so perhaps he won't have to have the nightmares about red ink that our mutual friend reported having after he'd allowed me to edit one of his works! Two weeks seams like a really, really short span of time, though! I'm going to try not to stress out about the deadlines and rush my writing, but I'm doubting my ability to keep up the output. This is probably a really positive pressure, though, so I'm going to give it my all! I would absolutely HATE to put all of this thought into Project Reach and then get lazy this winter and let it get stale to the point that I get bored with it and abandon the project altogether.

I would feel like I were letting Claire and David down if I didn't finish this tale. They deserve to have their stories told! Okay, so it's really Claire's story. I've determined that much. David doesn't have much of a story to tell beyond his interactions with Claire. So he will be helping me tell Claire's story from an outside, scientific perspective. His own story will be minor and will pretty much only serve to illuminate Claire's personality as she is the catalyst for all of David's growth as a character.

Another major development. I've finally nailed down my chronology!!! I'm essentially working within the confines of having a novel told in one semester, at this point. I will almost certainly extend the story to cover a second semester, but this story deserves it's own arch. There will be new characters and larger conflicts and the reader there will be additional requirements on the reader. The first book of Project Reach will have a lot of latitude in regards to reader skepticism. The second book will require some suspense of disbelief. The third (yep) will require a total suspension of disbelief. IF I write it correctly, that is. Now, I have no idea what kind of word counts I'll be dealing with, here, as I haven't been in the trenches writing the story for long enough to judge how many words will be required. These 'books' could be large enough to stand on their own, or they could be internal books in a larger volume. There's no way for me to know, yet. But the book 1 chronology is secured at long last. I knew it would come if I didn't force it, and I'm quite pleased with the layout as it stands. It seems natural, but stays compact.

I'm still tweaking the end of David's chapter, though. NFL Week 1 turned out to be too much of a distraction to get much writing done. But perhaps I'll sacrifice a few hours of sleep and stay up to finish.

Chapter One

2008-09-07T01:16:00.004-04:00

Is it possible to take a character from birth to 18 years of age in the first chapter without it turning into one massive information dump? I like to think so, but it takes a considerable amount of finesse. I've been hard at work, and three weeks and several hundred google searches later, I've got a single chapter from David's perspective.

In chapter one we travel with David from elementary school to the campus of Yale in four short years. And here's the shocking part, the chapter is only 2,212 words! I had projected 3,000 at least. But then again, I've gone in and tightened a lot of the narrative already. Oh, and here's another shocker: David speaks a grand total of only seven lines of dialog! It's perfect. He's just as reticent as I'd imagined him. He just never needs to say anything. And I was very careful not to have him feel anything, either. He isn't annoyed or confused or thoughtful...at least he doesn't name any of these emotions. He simply shows us how he's feeling by what he does. It's fantastic. I was really doubtful that I'd get this comfortable writing David, but in the last two sessions, I've made a real connection with him. Though, I have to admit, the last two sessions have only yielded a grand total of four paragraphs and a sweeping edit. At least they were critical paragraphs! But honestly, I should keep track of the time I spend writing, because I did nothing today but write and research and spent several hours last night writing and I've only got FOUR stinking paragraphs to show for it? That seems like poor output to me. But at least it's output that isn't going anywhere. I'd rather have four polished, critical paragraphs than two pages of discard-able drivel.

I'm really flying high. I just got done reading the chapter aloud to myself several times, and it's sounding really good. David sounds appropriately young, and yet appropriately brilliant. He's sufficiently unemotional and taciturn. In terms of style, I think I've gotten the tone right.

Now I'm struggling with the question of whether I should extend the chapter or not. I don't want to jump directly into Claire's head yet. I think I should stick with David and make the jump from Yale to IU with him. We're going to be skipping his entire undergraduate career. He'll go from 14 to 18 instantly, which might or might not work. I haven't written it yet, so I can't tell for sure. I have come up with a really ingenious transition, though, so I'm hopeful. The plan is to have the tail end of David's introductory chapter overlap Claire's introductory chapter, perhaps by only two to four paragraphs. I don't want the reader to have to relive the entire scene. I just want to get David and Claire's contradictory first impressions of each other in right at the onset because they're so wildly divergent from the truth that it's humorous.

But I'm not ready for IU yet. I've got a lot of research to do before I am comfortable with the IU campus. I have to figure out where David's house/apartment is, where the deli is, where the Cog Sci dept is, and the relationship between all of these locations before I can place my characters there with any confidence.

So that's the plan for tomorrow: to form a mental map of my little world at IU so I can write the tail end of David's chapter and start in on Claire's. I'd hoped to have two chapters done by this time, but if I'm very, very diligent tomorrow, perhaps I can still meet my goal and be sending out first reader invitations this week after all. But then again, it's NFL week one, and I'm not sure how well listening to the game and writing will co-exist in my brain. I can't really listen to music and write like most people can. It interrupts my flow and keeps me from finding the right word.

I'm having major dental surgery next Friday, so I don't know how much writing I'll be able to get done next weekend. Maybe I'll find the pain to be a motivator. Maybe I'll find the Vicodin to be a motivator. Who knows?

Happy Birthday, David!

2008-09-06T19:55:00.003-04:00

David was born on June 2nd, 1990 - the day 37 tornadoes struck Indiana, killing 8 people. I'm trying to nail down some pertinent dates like character's specific birthdays so I'll know their ages and all that detail can inform the narrative. I've decided Claire should be 23 or 24, perhaps as old as 25. MarLo will be 23, one of those fifth year senior types. David is 18, of course. I'm not sure how old Dr Feigner is going to turn out to be, but he's got a soft spot for David's mother who visits campus regularly to check in on David and because she misses him. Now that he's 18 and no longer living in the dorms, though, she visits less often, trying to give him his space.

David Made Me Do It

2008-09-06T01:01:00.001-04:00

Tomorrow, I plan to go for a run as part of my getting to know David research. David is an alien being to me. He's my exact opposite in almost everything, except our shared fascination with architecture. David is an early riser, waking at 5:30 every morning and leisurely performing a set routine; I wake up at the last possible second and rush through my daily preparations. David is a bit of a mathematician; I can barely do long division. David dislikes music; I adore it. David is a graduate student; I got an associates, tried to go back for a bachelor's and gave up. David never learned to drive; I commute for nearly an hour every day. David is an only child; I have an older sister. David is inexpressive; I'm, obviously, keen on personal expression. David can write computer programs; I can't, but would like to learn so long as it doesn't involve too much math. David is an excellent debater; I'm more into conflict avoidance. David is a runner; I. Hate. Running.

Now, in my quest for authenticity, I have been trying to get to know David. I'm learning all sorts of things about Cognitive Sciences. I've got an apt textbook and have listened through a couple of podcast lectures. I'm asking questions of actual graduate students about their general headspace, time commitments and so on. I added the numbers carved into the Women's Table sculpture at Yale, for the love of Pete! And tomorrow...I am going for a run. Because David is a runner.

Davis is a runner because he likes the rhythm. He doesn't listen to music as music has a tendency to bring out emotions and David is utterly baffled by his emotions, so he forgoes music altogether. Instead, he runs. So part of getting to know David involves going for a run. (Cursing under my breath, here.) I have always been baffled by people who love running. Are their brains addicted to endorphins? I just don't understand it. Running sucks. But I'm going to do it. Because I'm dedicated.

Confessions #1 & #2

2008-09-05T23:00:00.003-04:00

I'm getting awfully close to having the first chapter sewn up, which means I'll be sending out invitations to first readers soon, I hope! Progress has been much, much slower than I'd anticipated. I'm just now creeping up on five pages (single-spaced) and my normal pace is about that in a single session. I've sat down to write David's debut chapter several times now and spent hours and hours on it. I should probably keep track, come to think of it.

I realize that I definitely need to get better at just writing and worrying about editing later. But I just happen to be a pretty darned good editor, so it's hard for me to write below my own high standards for the purpose of just getting it out on the page. I need to work on this. Sometimes it's worth writing poorly on purpose to allow an idea to flow naturally onto the page in one seamless bolus of thought. I can always add color and fix weaknesses in a later session.

Confession #1: my favorite part of writing is actually the editing. I will usually jump the gun on an edit, starting to tweak a paragraph as soon as I pound it out. This is such a bad, bad way to do things. I'll add a colorful metaphor into the paragraph I'm focusing on, only to realize later that the page as a whole is entirely too colorful. Then I have the frustrating task of removing gorgeous sentences I spent perhaps 20 minutes dreaming up (or pilfering from one of my poetic works ;) Another drawback of this method is that it'll take me three weeks to finish a single chapter. Granted, that chapter is usually in pretty good shape, needing only minimal
revisions. I wouldn't feel embarrassed to show a friend an un-edited, finished chapter because I know that I've already scrutinized the whole of it during my writing process. There wouldn't be any major gaffes, just minor style issues and kinks in flow.

The good news is that I made a lot of progress yesterday. I fixed a minor continuity error, filled in a key transition and shocked myself with a really nice observation - so much so that I will no longer feel guilty about 'wasting time' doing Google map and image searches on every little thing when I'm at a loss for prose because it demonstrably pays off! Sometimes I hit upon a visual that sparkles in the narrative. David is on the campus of Yale:

"We followed her one block north on High Street and turned east on Grove at a tidy cemetery in possession of an imposing Egyptian Revival gate which bore the inscription “The Dead Shall Be Raised.” I felt like I had been dead for most of the day, buried in thought, and was now being resurrected to the present with each step. There was a distinct possibility I was marching toward my future. The urge to run came on me so fast that my legs actually twitched."

I am now really itching to take a trip out to Bloomington and just hang out on campus, get a feel for the architecture and the look of the place, who knows what just seeing will inspire! But I think I'll wait for the autumn. I have a suspicion that the campus is breathtaking when the leaves are changing.

You may have noticed from the excerpt above that David has developed an interest in architecture that I never consciously instilled in him. But it makes sense. It all stems from his love of structure. If he's feeling overwhelmed by his emotions, he'll look outside himself until he hits on some man-made thing or other upon which to fixate. He'll stare at a fountain, observing it's construction to calm his thought, and he'll just brush his feeling aside. It's too disturbing to him that he doesn't know what to make of his emotions. But the physical world, that he can understand. It is solid and quantifiable. Funny enough, though, this tendency could have led him to a love of nature, but it didn't. I haven't figured that one out, but it might just be because I have a thing for architecture and so that's what I gravitate toward in my description. I'll have to ponder this. But it's a good setup for my alternating first-person narrative scheme (that I'm still nervous about) because David will note all the environmental aspects of a given scene and Claire, being so in tune with the human element of any given equation, will be keen to observe the people who populate the scene. It's a nice balance. In theory. I've not yet put it into practice,though that's the plan for the weekend. Nail down David's chapter, move on to Claire's.

Confession #2: I have been researching agents. I know I'm way ahead of myself by prepping for the querying process, but keeping the ideal end product in sight helps me stay motivated. Besides, there is no such thing as being over-prepared, or over-educated about the industry. In all my research so far, I've discovered something rather remarkable: I'm not worried about writing queries and such. I'm actually very comfortable with it. Part of my comfort level may come from having been an editor before, albeit only for a short while. During my stint as an editor, I developed some skills that will be extremely useful to me as I prepare to shop the finished manuscript around. I'm quite good at distilling complex plots into compelling summaries, for one thing. And I have a courteous, professional tone. So I'm not worried at all about my outgoing queries. What comes back, though, will keep me up nights.

I fully realize that Project Reach may not sell. And that's okay. My original goal was to finish a novel before I turn thirty. Finish, not publish. I am coming up on my 27th birthday. An idea worthy of further development came to me, and I'm fortunate to have the time and the means to dedicate to writing. And so I am. If it gets no farther than my computer desktop, that's okay so long as I learn and grow from the experience.

Character economics

2008-09-04T14:40:00.005-04:00

I'm performing a re-write of my first David chapter. I've had to change a few things. One of the major changes I made is that I put David and his mother in the air instead of making them drive cross-country. This was strictly an economic decision. I have decided that David's dad is dead, through some accident that resulted in a large monetary settlement. David and Elizabeth don't have to worry about money for David's education. I'm not going to explore the accident just yet. I'd like to leave it open-ended.

MarLo, likewise, is well-off. Her father has a very high-paying job in Chicago. Perhaps I'll make him an architect. Once I decided that MarLo has money, it informed a lot of other things, like what kind of car she drives. I've changed MarLo's ride from a little red late '80s VW Rabbit to a late-model Rabbit. Perhaps a 2007. Still red.

Claire is of a completely different socio-economic class than David and MarLo. She's barely getting by.

I'm still working my way to the end of David's first chapter. There was an extensive amount of research to do to get his back story well-grounded. I'm hoping that the next two chapters at least are just narrative, uncomplicated by academics that I'm unfamiliar with and that would require hours of digging around on the Internet and in textbooks. I'm also hoping that Claire's chapters come along much quicker. There won't be any research to do on Claire, as I've lived most of her experiences. And when I get into the extrasensory descriptions, I'm just going to be making up my own brand of nonphysical perception so that won't require anything more than an active imagination, though I will be reading a lot of research done on the field of remote viewing.

The Case for 1st Person Narrative

2008-09-04T04:34:00.004-04:00

Well, I'm awake. Having gone to sleep early under the influence of cold medicine, I am now fully awake at 4am owing to the pain of an achy flu-riddled body. I have dosed myself again and am hoping to get to sleep before I get up at my customary time to decide if I'm well enough to try going in to work at my day job or if I'm going to put a call in to my doctor. The latter is sounding more likely as I seem to be an incubator for some malady or other and don't want to risk infecting my coworkers. But while I'm up, I wanted to get some work done, so I cracked open Remote Viewing: The Science and Theory of Nonphysical Perception by Courtney Brown. While ostensibly a scholarly work, the introduction has so far seemed...self-indulgent. I ran up against this line, though, which stopped me in my tracks and set me to thinking over some aspects of Project Reach that have been troubling me:

"Western science has never been able to place a stamp of approval on the notion that consciousness is not limited to the physical brain."

In context, this sentence occurs in a discussion that presumes the existence of the human soul. This resonated with a quote I had discovered only earlier today (on a piece of Facebook flair, no less) from one C.S. Lewis:

"You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."

These two quotes in tandem helped me pin down a key difference between David and Claire. David operates on the assumption that human perception is limited to physical input received from our bodies and relayed to our brains. Claire, on the other hand, has experienced nonphysical perception and is convinced of the existence of the soul. This seems a trivial thing. I interact with people who disbelieve the existence of the human soul and/or a divine entity or God on a daily basis, and this does not seem to have any bearing on my interactions with them. This small, fundamental mismatch in ideologies will have profound implications on the relationship between David and Claire, though. I'm sure of it.

It should be noted that I have, at least preliminarily, made a decision on the role that religion will play in Project Reach. I have given Claire the responsibility of leading a Bible study group comprised of freshman girls with the intent that this will allow her to develop to an outside observer her views of religion, the human soul, morality, femininity and whatever else the narrative may require without having to force her to just sit and ponder for the benefit of revelation. I have chosen not to have Claire 'live through' such a study session in the actual narrative (partially because I have little talent for writing teenage dialog - one has to know her strengths and weaknesses ;). Instead, we will join Claire on the walk home and listen in on her thoughts as she mentally reviews the evening's events (an interesting cognitive process in and of itself) or she will mull over her next lesson plan in her head while going about her daily routine at the deli in which she works. Having been a waitress and in possession of an active mind, I know how much leftover mental processing power can be spared for serious consideration of abstract spiritual concepts while still functioning in a given food service capacity. Claire will often seem dreamy and distracted. David considers the notion that she's a narcoleptic.

A very strong influence in my decision to go for first-person narrative is that it would allow me to present my personal views on matters such as the ones listed above without having to claim them as my own. I can simply instill these values in one of my characters and have him/her carry the weight of them. If a given reader is turned off by these views, perhaps this will translate merely into the reader's dislike of the character and not extend to a dislike of the story itself. My hope in having two main narrators is that if a reader dislikes the views of one character, their affection for the other character will be enough compensation to keep them reading. I am aware of the monumental difficulties this places upon me, the writer. I always did like a challenge, but I fear my confidence in my own abilities may trap me into an unworkable formula and force a later re-write.

I will present another argument for my decision to write in first person narrative (and do forgive me if my thoughts are disconnected at this point. I'm feeling the effects of cold medication). Charles Dickens. I always did dislike Dickens. My first experience of him was during my freshman year in high school when I was forced to slog through Great Expectations. I disliked it immensely, and learned enough about the story by skimming the text and discussing key plot points with my classmates to pass the quizzes we were given without having completely read the assigned reading. Years later, I again attempted to read Dickens, this time picking up Oliver Twist. It was better this time. I was older, a more tolerant reader by far, not nearly so concerned with being entertained by a text. I had also learned that Dickens was paid by the word, and this understanding made me a more forgiving reader. The man was just trying to make a living, after all. I never finished the book, however, and was deeply dismayed that I was still unable to like such a classic.

And then I received a 1918 edition of David Copperfield for my birthday. It was a beautiful old book. I was tempted into cracking the cover by the gorgeous leather binding. I'm a sucker for old books! To my utter astonishment, I actually liked what I read. I liked everything about it. I liked David, himself. I liked the story. I loved the settings and the description, though I took issue with the idea that such a young narrator would be so observant of human nature and his surroundings. My point being, though, is that first person narrative made all the difference. The style suited Dickens very well.

Colds not conducive to progress

2008-09-03T22:14:00.002-04:00

The First Five Pages came in the mail yesterday. I started reviewing it last night and continued on my lunch break today. It is not helping shore up my resolve to go with alternating first person narrative. I have a whole lot to say on that, mostly resolving around Charles Dickens, but I've come down with some sort of bug and am all hopped up on cold meds and am distracted by Sarah Palin.

The Coach Bag Chronicle

2008-09-02T23:20:00.006-04:00

Today was spent jotting small, random notes (mostly snippets of dialog between Claire and MarLo), transferring other random notes into my binder, and reading about Finite State Automata in my Cog Sci text book. I really need to take a trip up to B-Town to research, but Big Red, my older-than-me truck, may not be up to the task. I shall wait until the weather cools in the fall and maybe make a weekend jaunt and try to catch an opera one evening. This plan may be deferred by the state of my finances. There's always wiggle room in the budget for couch-surfing, though. And I might even camp out in a nearby park, if need be, make my excursion into an urban hike, just walk the length and breadth of the campus and soak in the feel. That's what I'm needing now. Later, I'll make my approaches to some official university types and see if I can instill enough confidence in the Project to warrant cooperation if not collaboration. Or I might go all out and rent a car, book a hotel room, write official letters to department heads to see if I can beg a guided tour.

I keep expecting that one of these days I'll just fall into it and get some incredible amount of writing accomplished. Like an entire bolus of tandem chapters will spring from my head like Athena emerging fully-armed and fully-formed from the head of Zeus. (Did I just draw a comparison between myself and Zeus? The ego needs a check, clearly.) Perhaps I'm trying to force too much productivity. My best writing always occurs in its own good time. I've been working on one poem for over two years now! It's brilliant (if I do say so myself) but it may never get finished at this rate. I've decided to let it percolate indefinitely. I'm worried that if I hold myself up to too high a standard, that I'll get discouraged. I have two models in mind when I debate this topic internally. Kostova and Meyers. Meyers wrote Twilight in 3 months, reportedly. Kostove wrote The Historian in no less than a decade. Interesting that these are both vampire books and that I don't necessarily have any undue fascinating with fantasy.

And now, the Coach Bag Chronicle:

It should be noted that I've dug up my old Coach satchel from where I stashed it years ago under my bed, an inglorious refuge for such a fine specimen of American craftsmanship. I retired it sometime in 2003 when I gave up on trying to take college courses and work full time and hid it away lest it guilt me by its presence. But I have a new dream now, one worthy of the solid partnership of my trusty old tote. So I've resurrected my magnificent satchel and filled it with my research materials and writing tools. It's a gorgeous thing, my satchel. It's old. I haven't been able to find out how old, but I discovered it in about 2001 under a rack of beaten-up backpacks at the Unique Thrift Store in the West End of Louisville. It looked roughed up, like a prize fighter ten rounds into a fight; but it was sturdy, being made entirely out of leather. I decided to buy it as I needed a more professional-looking tote to serve me at college in Minnesota. At the register I was informed it was priced at a whopping $12 when all the other backpacks were around $5. I almost didn't buy it. It was missing its shoulder strap, after all, and looked like it had already had a full life. I was such a poor college kid! But I thought, well, a new backpack would cost a little more than that, and I didn't care to browse through the whole rack of backpacks again. Besides, this bag 'spoke to me' on a level having little or nothing to do with retail. So I shelled out the cash and have never regretted it.

I promptly replaced the missing shoulder strap with a broken leather belt that almost, but not quite, matches the tanning. Somehow, at some point in time, I became aware of the Coach brand and discovered the registration number stamped into an inside pocket of my satchel. The fact that I had a valuable item was illuminated. Once, at a house party, a rather vogue young woman offered to trade me her brand new Coach bag (that she had recently bought for upwards of $300) for my old bag. Even though it has none of the desirable Coach emblems on its exterior, she said it had "street cred". I declined, but she was right on. The two aforementioned characteristics are nearly my favorite things about my bag. I don't care much about it's intrinsic material value, though. I love my bag for it's substance, for what it means to me and how well it has served me during my most difficult challenges. It's scuffed and soft in all the right places without loosing any of its rugged durability. It's all COW and BRASS and those two things are somehow very solid and American. It smells like a saddle, and when you rub your fingertips on the unlined suede inside, it feels almost like stroking a kitten ears. When I sling it over my shoulder, I feel empowered and look, well...writerly. It's exactly the sort of thing any professor on the planet would be proud to lug to class every day. I feel an attachment to it that is likely akin to the love a musician has for his battered sax case.

So I'm relying on my old stalwart bag to help me through this new project. I owe it this much for stuffing it unceremoniously under my bed for so many years!

Labor Day

2008-09-01T23:00:00.005-04:00

Labor Day! No work on Project Reach today. Made no notes. Wrote no words. Completed no sentences ;)

But there is this:

Bear in mind, this is an ACTUAL screen cap I took just a few minutes ago (at 12:08 am on Tuesday, technically). I googled Labor Day for a 'history of' article and of course went straight for the Wikipedia hit. This is what I found. I hit my 'print screen' button instinctively and then clicked to log in to Wikipedia to flag the page. By the time I'd logged in and navigated back to the page, the original article was already back up. I'm so glad I captured this little gem, though. I guess the moderators on Wikipedia don't take Labor Day off!

First Chapter Progress

2008-08-31T20:50:00.002-04:00

The first chapter is getting close now. But is it too much of a swing to have a character go from 10 years old to 18 in one chapter? Well, I guess it won't be if I do my job right. The backstory is what makes David likable at first because he's such a dry, clinical twit sometimes. Even in his own head. It's also good to know where he's coming from since he has no idea where he's going. Claire's intro will be almost the exact opposite in that her thoughts will center on her hopes for the future (both immediate and long-term goals) and nothing about her past will be revealed...perhaps alluded to in a subtle way, but no expository flash backs are planned for the first few chapters. I have just under two thousand words with another thousand to go before I move on to Claire's intro chapter. I'm at that "am I making a huge mistake with the trading perspectives" phase. Constant self-doubt. But I'll just have to work through it and see if the product is passable.

Highlight from the first chapter:

"It felt as if someone had dropped a stone directly onto my corpus callosum, sending ripples radiating outward to collide with my skull with a nearly audible throb."

Revised Plan for Saturday Evening

2008-08-30T18:34:00.003-04:00

I got some more outlining done in my notebook binder, made a bunch of copies and returned some books, renewed some others. Now I'm going to suffer through Sandra Bullock's acting in Premonition and then dig up the old VCR and pop in Breaking Away which was filmed in Bloomington in the '70s and stars Dennis Quaid. Research is no fun sometimes.

Revised Plan for Saturday

2008-08-30T01:59:00.005-04:00

Revised plan for Saturday:

I am packing up my old Coach satchel with essentials and am relocating to the public library for the bulk of tomorrow. Some of my research titles need renewed before the end of the month, and I've promised to pick up Phantom Tollbooth. I may be hijacking my sister's laptop for this expedition. Can't wait to get one of my own so I can take Project Reach on the road! Especially helpful for making the most of my lunch breaks at work. I've packed my research titles, a roll of dimes to make copies of essential pages, Pixie Stix, Mirado Black Warriors, notebook, index card binder, red pens. I'm stoked. I'm hoping a change of scenery will get the words flowing. Tomorrow evening it's back to my regularly scheduled programming, trying to induce a mental flow state and bang out the first two chapters.

Three-Day Weekends are a Blessing!

2008-08-29T23:37:00.001-04:00

Plan for the three-day weekend:

Get a healthy start on the physical outline by transferring my random notes into my awesome little notecard binder.
Completely rough out first two chapters, perhaps start on third and fourth if I get really ambitious.
E-mail two more questions to my research partner (perhaps send him link to this blog)
Draft invitation for first readers and mail them on Tuesday (IF I have the first two chapters sewn up).
Research, research, research.
Read through chapters 2 & 3 of my Cog Sci textbook.
Read some more Emotional Intelligence.
Organize Google Notebook.

I have concluded that watching Wall-E also counts as research. And perhaps Premonition. I've never seen it, but might have to pick it up and give it a watch.

Obligations

2008-08-28T16:14:00.002-04:00

Well, family and social obligations got in the way of my intentions to use my day off this week to write exclusively. Thank God for the three day weekend, though! I did make a few rather important discoveries today, though. MarLo is originally from Chicago. Claire's mother is from Central Barren, Indiana. A place I find funny because the name literally means Middle of Nowhere.

First Meeting

2008-08-27T23:41:00.002-04:00

I was deeply surprised today by David and Claire's first meeting. I hadn't had them meeting in my outline for two more chapters, but they just fell in step with each other on the street today, coincidentally and of their own volition. They didn't speak to each other, but the internal musings of both are (I think) highly entertaining.

And in this chance meeting, I've also solved the problem of when/how Claire should allude to her past experiences. Also, I've solved Dr. Feigner's involvement in their relationship as well as what initially draws David to the cafe.

It's a beautiful thing, writing, when gorgeous coincidences flare up in your mind and all you have to do is record them. Unfortunately, I was at work (my day job) when this little event came upon me, and was consequently not at liberty to explore the interaction. I would have really liked to have just sat down and written it out right then. Bing bang boom. But it couldn't happen, so I settled for sketching out the bones and will be adding the shading tomorrow, which is my day off this week. Well, I'll be diligently writing until I go watch Barack Obama at The New Albanian Brewery, that is! Every writer needs a sympathetic and challenging atmosphere. Some have coffee shops. Some have local bookstores. I have my pub every Thursday night.

Tonight, though, I'm going to finish the first chapter of my new Cog Sci textbook and perhaps read some more in Emotional Intelligence. Tomorrow I'm putting my flow state theory into practice and am excited to learn what results I can manage. On the blog front, I've added a bookshelf to help me keep track of research titles, reference materials and whatnot.

And I may be adding some SeepeopleS to the playlists. I caught them live at a WFPK show on the Waterfront in Louisville, KY tonight and it seemed to be pretty great writing music. Up tempo, easy to ignore, but some lines really jolt you. They're very emo. Very good live. Not my usual acoustic fare, for sure, but good. Good in a Keane kind of way, who I first heard in my pub then went right home and downloaded copious amounts of.

Not that Keane is emo, but I think I rather like emo music, which is good because MarLo likes it, too, and I've yet to give her a playlist. I'll have to explore that preference right after I'm done downloading a bunch of Twi-Rock, which I have just discovered the existence of this very evening. Sigh. How am I ever supposed to get Project Reach written if I can't get my mind off of Twilight? I want my brain back! And as soon as the Twilight movie madness has passed, Grey's Anatomy will be back on the air and then I'll really never get any writing done. I've decided that watching The Big Bang Theory counts toward research, though!

Word Count War! Round 1

2008-08-26T23:06:00.000-04:00

Word Count War

Blog vs. Book

Blog = 9278
Book = 2179

Creative Flow

2008-08-26T20:45:00.003-04:00

I've been developing a set of procedures to help me easily attain a mental state of flow so that when I sit down to write in earnest (as opposed to blogging about writing) I'll be able to sink into that gorgeously ecstatic, effortless, ego-less rhythm that is my favorite writing mood. During these times, I'm able to forget the outside world and forget my ongoing biological processes. I've been known to spend hours at work on a single project without remembering to eat. But research is key. If I have to stop writing to look up what the exterior of the Student Union looks like, for instance, I'll be dumped right out of my flow state. I have to know what I'm writing, be able to imagine it as clearly as if it were my own memory, before I can translate it into language. That's not to say that the creative dynamo set loose during a flow cycle doesn't sometimes surprise me. I've veered wildly from my outline in such times, always with fantastic results.

But I'm absolutely developing a set of procedures to help get me into flow more reliably than I've been able to achieve it in the past. I'm also trying to find a distinctive scent that I can associate with this set of procedures. Hopefully, with prolonged application, I'll be able to hotwire my mind to recognize the scent and steps and fall directly to writing.

Understanding the neurobiology of flow has been of great importance. Over stimulation kills flow. This has been what's been tripping me up. I've been trying too hard, attempting to force it. Also, I've been expecting results too quickly. My research to date suggests that it takes at least 15 minutes of concentration on a challenging (but not overly difficult) task to achieve the optimum neurobiological conditions for entering a flow state and another 45 minutes to get locked in so that distractions can't reach me.

So I'm working on a procedure.

Today I pushed my mental outline further into the future, into the realm of a second book, possibly a third. I'm still struggling with a few first chapter questions that need to be resolved before I go back to writing on them. For instance, how often should Claire allude to her past experiences? Should she just suspect her abilities or should she have absolute faith in them? How big of a role should Dr. Feigner play? How often should David's mother visit?

But I need to stop asking myself questions and start drafting questions for my generous volunteer!

Playlists instead of Progress

2008-08-25T23:15:00.004-04:00

Progress report: Reading, taking notes, attempting to translate thoughts into words and place words onto notecards to organize said thoughts into a real chronology. Sidetracked by Michelle Obama and Ted Kennedy. Painted my nails. Completed character playlists.

Claire's Playlist

David's Playlist

Character Playlists

2008-08-25T00:37:00.003-04:00

Not making much headway on my notecards/outline. I just can't seem to get motivated today. But I did order two new research titles. Remote Viewing: The Science and Theory of Nonphysical Perception by Courtney Brown and The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile by Noah Lukeman. It's not a how to write book, it's a how to present your work to a qualified agent book, written by a former agent. I look forward to perusing them at my earliest convenience.

But for tonight, instead of continuing to flog myself into completing the outline, I'm doing a character exercise, making playlists of songs on my characters iPods. It's a very Stephenie Meyer thing to do. I intend to listen to these playlists when I'm stuck in a David or Claire chapter and need a boost. Well, actually, I'm fairly certain David wouldn't listen to the sort of music that I'm putting in his playlist. But I'm going to perhaps put songs on there that describe what he is feeling since he lacks the ability to describe his emotions for himself. I have no idea what MarLo listens to because her taste in music and mine are completely opposite.

Love and Addiction

2008-08-24T14:23:00.004-04:00

Wow, so I just experienced a minor epiphany. I had mentioned that David was to be keenly interested in the neurological process of addiction...well, I was researching alexithymia and pondering why David hangs out at the cafe so much. His interest with Claire's physical effect on him would be passing, I'm sure. But what if he became addicted to his lust reactions? It's possible. There is a strong scientific research base for addiction to love. And then it hit me: David's real passion for Cognitive Sciences stems from his struggle to understand love. So he studies the chemical/neurological processes that occur when a person claims to be in love. Perhaps he scours the campus for young couples who can't seem to refrain from touching each other as they walk to class. Anyway, it's a terribly good thing for young adults to know about. They've been warned about drugs and alcohol and nicotine for years, but has anyone ever warned them against the brain-altering effects of erotonin, oxytocin, serotonin, vasopressin and endogenous opioids? I think not.

This may require me to re-write the first chapter wherein David first becomes interested in CogSci at the tender age of 14. Well, perhaps not a complete re-write. Perhaps just one small but vital paragraph.

The genesis of this line of thinking, I recognize, goes back to Steve Martin's fantastic novella Shopgirl and to several sermons I've listened to that outlined the addictive nature of sex for the purpose of discouraging pre-marital sex. Alistair Begg and Kyle Idleman are two preachers that I've heard give this type of sermon. I have added a new topic to my research notes "On Love and the Process of Loving" to keep my various resources organized. It's fascinating stuff.

From Shopgirl:

A woman needs to be held, even, and science has shown this, if its with someone she doesn't care about. Protective hormones are released, and the amount of hormones released depends on the degree to which she is held. The first and best is the complete surround. He wraps you in both arms, whispers how beautiful you are. Second best is the 'arm around.' He is next to you but with one arm around you. Third is he's just next to you on his elbow, but he rests his hand on your stomach and looks at you. Fourth is you snuggling up to him with your head on his chest, while he looks away into space. But when the first best happens, you feel completely, wonderfully like a woman.

And now I shall continue setting my outline down on paper. I've started putting key events onto notecards, an idea I stole from Penny in Stranger than Fiction.