An On the Brain Update

Despite the fact that work has been sapping away my time and energy, I've actually had writing on the brain quite a bit.  First, my boyfriend and I are working on finally putting together our office room.  My dad and I painted it a bright bold teal a couple of months ago, and we are narrowing down our decisions on furniture.  As of now we basically use the room as a laundry drying room--though the closet is also full already, but I am hoping to sort of commandeer this room at least a little bit as my own little inspiration room.  He's letting me hang some of my fairy prints on the wall (he owns the house so final say is his ; ]) and I plan to also hang either a white board or cork board so I can story board like I used to in college.  I know it doesn't exactly work this way, but I am sort of hoping that having that space where I can sit in the quiet by myself, or stare out the window, or listen to music while I write might help me to write a little more.  That maybe having a space to go that is "writing space" will encourage me to carve time out of the busyness.

The second reason I've had writing on the brain is because of a special little project I'm just beginning.  I'm hoping (because it needs to) that it happens like I want it to and wraps up rather quickly, but for now it needs to stay a secret project because nosy kittens like to play in these here parts and I can't have them unravelling the ball of yarn just yet. [/stretchedmetaphor]

I have not yet decided whether I want to participate in April's A-Z challenge.  I attempted it once when I blogged a few years ago and I did not do so well.  I just can never seem to keep up with blogging every day.  But I haven't ruled it out just yet... so maybe.

Last, I want to give a gigantic thanks to Shell Flower for nominating me for the Inspired Blogger Award.  I promise to actually do the Inspired Blogger post ASAP, but alas as it is past midnight and I am actually quite sick right now I shall save it for a time when my brain is more coherent.  At the moment I am finding it difficult to even fathom how my blog could possibly be inspiring, but I'm super duper stoked about it nonetheless. : ]

I have such good balance the floor and I often high-five...

I've never been very good at balance.  Of any kind.  I once had a doctor tell me, after observing me trying to stand on one foot, "No one your age should have that bad of balance."  When I manage to drag myself to yoga class, I am always the least balanced by far.   Maintaining balance in other aspects of my life has also been consistently challenging.  Throughout college I would spend three days straight writing one paper just to have to scramble to get another assignment done that I had "forgotten" while doing the first.  The lists (for the ADHD) helped with this a bit--reminding myself I had many things to attend to--but still certain things often slipped through.

Writing has always been one of the first things to go.  I used to go through periods where I would write all of the time, every day, at least a couple of hours a day.  Then it would be months since the last time I had picked up a pen and notebook.  I started this blog as a challenge to myself to not allow the second to happen when the most recent period of the first had faded.  Since returning to work my writing time has dwindled faster than a birthday candle, and my muse has hidden herself away in protest of my instant neglect.  My brain has still been processing and imagining what I plan to write next, but I haven't actually sat myself down and written anything for days.

Next week I am starting a second job.  Chances are high that between both jobs I will end up working over 40 hours a week.  As aware as I am that many people work this much, as a person with terrible life balance I'm not yet sure how I am going to handle it.  I am fully preparing myself for it to be a disaster.  I am hoping the two jobs is not necessary for too long, but for now, it is.

Last week I celebrated my 24th birthday, and over the weekend lived out a childhood lifelong dream of having a Harry Potter birthday party.  My incredibly attentive & amazing boyfriend got me all kinds of Harry Potter things and even put them in this amazing little trunk--a mini-HP trunk.  But because I (gleefully) immersed myself back into my first writing inspiration for most of the past month preparing for my partay I have been thinking about all of my unfinished fanfics much more.  Now, I know that writing fanfiction is not necessarily productive per say, but writing in general can only strengthen my writing skills, right?  I've been thinking about using my fanfics as sort of writing exercises when I am lacking particular direction or inspiration for my originals.

Questions for those who may have made it this far.... How do you balance life with writing?  Do you ever do writing exercises of any kind?  For fun?  Practice?  Another reason?  I always love to hear your thoughts and advice.

Listing for Focus

You know the saying, "You would lose your head if it wasn't attached"?  Well, that saying was quite possibly designed for me.  I have often argued that there's some sort of "faulty wiring" in my brain... where it makes certain kinds of connections, it just doesn't quite fire properly.  As a kid, I constantly forgot my school stuff at home--gym shoes, gym clothes, homework assignments, papers printed and left on the printer, textbooks, lunch.  Everything you could possibly need, I forgot at least once.  Throughout middle and high school my mother would run stuff to school with a glare and a scolding, wondering how I could possibly forget such things.  Thankfully, I went to college only an hour and some change away, so when I would come home to visit and leave medicine, glasses, my phone... my parents would again, with a sigh and roll of the eyes meet me halfway to get me my things.

Psych majors are always diagnosing ourselves.  My best friends in college and I even laid around one evening when most of us were currently in Abnormal Psych and assigned ourselves each with a personality disorder--hey, it helped us learn the material!  But I also realized (as I had considered through high school as well, but my mom adamantly disagreed) that I might, in fact, have ADHD.  My mom thought because I wasn't hyperactive, I didn't qualify.  In my junior year of college I took her to a seminar on adult ADHD and throughout the entire thing she would look at me with wide eyes and knowing looks.  I never got officially diagnosed, but I started trying to find ways to cope with it, one of which was to start making lists.  I don't always necessarily follow my lists, but writing things out, detailing what I need to do, or should bring to something, or absolutely have to remember seems to help that faulty part of my brain work more like it should.

I suspect my difficulty focusing on any one thing for long periods of time contributes to my shifting attention in my writing.  I know several people encouraged me to force myself to focus on one story until it's completed, but trying to do so frustrates me when I get bored or stuck.  I think switching between my different worlds will work for me so long as I continue to make progress on each and provided I don't start anything NEW until I complete one of the stories I am working on.

So my writing list for today:

• Read the beginning of a story I am reading for a friend.  I am considering this as part of my writing list because I need to include more reading into my free-time schedule.  I used to always be reading some book or another, but in the past few years I barely read three books in a year and I think my lack of reading has affected my writing skills.  So incorporating more reading into my life should hopefully give my writing a little bump.
• Outline the rest of Story#1.  The first maybe third of the book is written, but I think making an outline (like my lists) will help me focus on where the story needs to go to get to the ending that is already partially written.
• Continue setting up Story#1 in Storyist.  Storyist is an amazing program that I would encourage all Mac-using writers to look into.  I am a very visual person and it allows me to create character profiles and set images for each character, outline using "notecards," and it even gives you tips on how your manuscript should be setup for publication submission.  As a still rather new and young writer, I find the program to be extremely helpful.
• Finish typing what is already hand-written for Story#1.  I very much prefer to write by hand.  I don't always, but whenever I do hit a block typing, I sometimes switch to pen and paper and that helps.

Are transitions REALLY necessary.....

I mean, exactly how necessary is it for the story to actually make sense?  *cough*  One of my biggest challenges in writing has always been, and continues to be, transitions.  Whole scenes pop into my head, particularly dialogue between characters, and I write them as they come... then end up with a whole bunch of disconnected scenes.  At the beginning of a story I typically start out alright, good descriptions intermixed with the dialogue... it flows.  Then the scenes start flooding my brain and I write, write, write... and have no idea how to properly join the various sections.

In the story I recently unearthed once more, the main character is a high school girl and the first part of her story takes place in sort of four rotating settings.  Her time spent with the girls she has long considered her best friends, though they have been steadily growing apart, her time with a boy who has befriended her and is quickly becoming her new best friend, the time she spends at home in conflict with her mom and step-dad, and her time with the girl she is falling in love with.  Is there a particularly effective way to string together different scenes like this?  This is what the majority of that document looks like (these are just the last and first lines of each scene):

“You’re an insane person.”

Liana laughed at the intended insult.  “Of course I am, darling, I’m friends with you.”

“And that makes you insane?” Andie raised an eyebrow.

“Certifiably,” Liana confirmed.

*   *   *

“We should hang out sometime,” Nate suggested.

Andie shot him a look.

“I’m not asking you out—unless you want me to.”

Rolling her eyes, she replied.  “No, I don’t.  And I’ll think about it.”

So, erm, suggestions?  I know for some pieces I just need to include some more descriptions, and fill in some thoughts and reflections of Andie's that will tie some sections together.  And I think adding in chapters eventually, as this particular story has none yet, will help take care of some of it, too.  I would still love any advice or thoughts any of you might have to offer on the subject!

A Post About Not Posting About Writing While Not Writing

Today, instead of writing a blog post, I'm just going to write.  I've skipped the last few days, occupied with taking care of a sick boyfriend, returning to work!, and actually exercising for once (aka excuses)... and as I sat down to write a post, filtered through the writing related topics on my mind, and started typing, I realized instead of talking about what I'm thinking about what I'm not doing, I'm just going to do it instead.  So, after that excessively long run-on sentence... Here's to getting at least a few hundred words (remember, I write at the pace of the slowest snail) written before work.  Cheers!

Oops, I Did It Again....

Okay, aside from having Britney on the brain (hazard of putting iTunes on shuffle)... I am more so referring to that story I mentioned in my last post.  Over the past three-ish years that I've been attempting to write original fiction (as opposed to fanfiction) I have started about half a dozen stories--gotten farther with some than others--but I have yet to FINISH one.  The first one I ever started that I got far enough to even believe I might finish is the story I referenced in my last post.  It's the closest of any of them to being complete.  I also started writing a prequel to it, as a way to get the main character's backstory concrete in my mind, and ended up actually really loving THAT story, too.  So, I've got the two of them, and with the prequel, it's filling in the middle and the other one rewriting the early middle and then the very very end.  Even though I've started other stories since the two of them, I always go back to them both.  Open up the Word documents from time to time, add a bit, edit a bit, put them away again.  For the past few weeks I have been working exclusively on the newest of my stories, the one I started for NaNoWriMo in November, but I made the mistake of TALKING about Andie, and now I just had to dust her off and start to polish her up again.

I added a pretty decent chunk (okay, for me that means maybe a thousand+ words in a night) last night and read through and surface edited what I have written for the prequel.  I started looking at the other one, but I have a bunch of stuff written by hand for it somewhere that is MIA and until I can find it, I want to hold off on that one.  But now my brain is back in Andie-mode, and I want to keep working on her story while it is.  Part of me doesn't think these books will ever make it past my own laptop screen--how many people actually publish the first novel they ever write?  Haven't I heard you usually have to write a few before you really start to hit your stride?  Or some such thing.  But the other part of me thinks that this story has been some of my strongest writing.  Clearly, this is an issue for future Kas to debate once both stories are complete... and in the meantime, I may just give Andie the attention she is demanding.  I'm still working out some world creation details for the NaNo story (magical limitations and whatnot) so maybe this will give me an opportunity to let those ideas bounce around in my brain while still actively writing as well.

[[ In other news... I was unexpectedly offered a new job today!  I had been in training for the boring, very part-time, pays next-to-nothing job that I took because I was desperate, but a family friend owns a business to which I had stopped by and given my resume a few weeks ago, but didn't think they had any openings for me.  Lo and behold, something in guest service opened up, and I am officially guest service, and probably part-time hostess, too!!  It's a pretty cool place, bowling alley with FULL restaurant AND bar, rentable space & lanes for private parties, etc. and I'm excited!!  I have high hopes that this is a good change for me.  ]]

Living (and Writing) in a World of Perception

When I was fifteen I leased a pony for a year so I could show her.  I had been riding her for a couple years before, but you had to lease to show.  She was a cute little thing--medium brown, white socks and stockings, a big white blaze, the shaggiest, fluffiest little mane and tail, and a hard to see white splotch on her tummy.  The woman who owned her had rescued her, and when she first laid eyes on her standing at the top of a hill in the distance, she thought, "Look at that Clydesdale..." and then the little pony came galloping down the hill up to the fence and she saw that, in fact, the Clydesdale was not so much eighteen hands as just thirteen.  Perspective is amazing.

Throughout the earning of my psych degree my fascination with perspective grew.  We are products of our perceptions, we live within them, grow based upon them, and relate to people as our perspectives either meld or clash.  And have you ever tried to explain your perspective to someone when it clashed with theirs?  Oh man.  You know, the person who clings so hard to their beliefs that their knuckles turn white and their face turns purple, and they start to hate you for trying to show them anything other than what they already know?

Now, this may just be my perception, but as readers and writers, I think we generally tend to be more open-minded.  We read in order to understand other perspectives, to experience what we might never have had the opportunity--or may have been so blessed as to never had--to experience.  What I'm wondering, is how often do writers set out to change perspectives, or does it just happen sometimes?

The first original story I ever really intended to finish--the one that's closest to being complete--explores the story of a girl who is bullied in school for being gay, but when she comes home, she is bullied just as much by her religious parents.  She ends up running away from home.  I started this book over three years ago, but I keep coming back to it adding some more, editing, intending to finish it.  Even if I never try to publish it, I feel compelled to write it.  To complete her story.  To share it with someone, anyone, who might relate or feel less alone by reading it.  I didn't start writing it because I wanted to change anyone's perceptions, but because once it was in my head I felt compelled to tell it.

Do you ever write to enlighten a potential reader to a new perspective?  Have you ever read something that changed something you thought or believed?