The Art of Procrastination

I should be writing, but what the hell.  This is fun.

I have been mourning the disappearance of Community since it’s hiatus was announced in December, just the other day it was announced it was coming back… that was when I discovered this: in 1980, Chevy Chase released an album.  And I now have a link to a streaming archive.  OH YES.

It’s bizarre, but it is also funny.  Not all of the tracks are ones you’re going to want to listen to over and over again, though a few… I admit I listened to a few on loop.  Some highlights:

Track 4 - I Shot the Sheriff: You’ll recognize the tune, and the first line.  That’s it.  Chevy goes on to shoot just about everyone in his town stone dead.  Then he shoots his elbow.

Track 5 - Let It Be: This is done entirely straight, with one exception: they’ve sped up Chevy’s voice until he sounds like Alvin, from Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Track 7 - Sixteen Tons: This song is done entirely straight.  It turns out, Chevy Chase has a decent singing voice.

Track 8 - Wild Thing: The arrangement of the song is a bit weird.  It took me a second to recognize it.  Then Chevy started singing… and sobbing uncontrollably.  

Track 9 – Rapper’s Plight: A parody of Rapper’s Delight that quickly devolves into a sketch about a party, featuring Chevy doing four separate characters that all sing their lines along to the song.  Lots of drug references here, and halfway through someone that left the party earlier comes back because he’s lost his wallet, and his briefcase.  Then has an argument with his wife.

Burn It All Down

Sometimes, when I approach a story, I can’t pin anything down. I flail, throw something on the page; I hate it, I grind my teeth, and then I do it again. Nothing sticks. I feel like a hack, but I keep hacking away because if I stop writing, then I’ve not written anything. As far as Things That Are Bad in the Writing World, not writing is the only thing that’s worse than being a hack. If you’re not writing, then you’re not a hack anymore — you’re not even writing, which is a Problem.

So sometimes, draft zero happens. And the results are often overblown, appalling, tepid crap. (At least with me. All of these writing posts are about me, even if I say ‘you’.)

I finished the zero draft of my newest story the other day, at 15k words. SERIOUSLY. It’s supposed to be a short story but I just couldn’t get my hands around it, and I overshot my target by 9,000 words. That’s a whole lot of flailing. I knew that I had to go in there with a machete if I was going to salvage it. So I did; yesterday I waded in, banged out 1,500 words that I thought were a nice improvement (but not great). This morning? I caught up on my Twitter, ate my breakfast. When I finally got down to it, I couldn’t write squat. And it was because I hadn’t killed enough of my darlings. I’d hung up the machete, and went with a whiffle bat instead. I was still twisting the same trap that had made me vomit up those 15k words in the first place.

Once I realized that I’d missed a few darlings, the first thing I did was get a headache. But then, the fixes also stood out like bland, over-described nails.

I ripped out a character, axed an entire location, swapped in a new personality for another character, and burned the main character’s original story arc to the ground. I opened a new draft folder inside my Scrivener project, and moved the previous draft to the trash. All of a sudden, the story is doable again. The impossible? Now possible.

The headache, though? That didn’t go away for a few hours. Little bastard.

 

Drawer Cat Wishes You a Positively Charged* Saturday

Because nothing says comfort than a dark corner filled with clean shirts. And static electricity.

Hey, it’s not my place to interpret what Drawer Cat says. I’m just the messenger what wears the static-charged clothing given unto me by the Drawer Cat. It’s not my place.

(At one point in time, it was my place. The entire house was, in fact. But then I got a cat.)

 

*Or negatively charged. It can happen both ways, guys.

Good Advice

Charles Stross is currently traveling, so he’s got Cat Valente handling guest-blogging duties while he’s away.  She’s written four posts covering some thoughts on writing, and if you’ve got a writer’s itch, then you need to read them.  All four fall under the heading of advice for young/aspiring writers, but she does her best to eschew the cliched stuff and gets right to the meat.

I love these posts.  They’re going into my Instapaper, and will live there until the heat death of the universe.

I’ve been working pretty hard recently, trying to find my equilibrium as a writer.  Since college, I’ve spent a lot of time ignoring good writing habits, creating bad ones, and generally slacking off.  I’m out of wack, and it doesn’t help that the time that I’ve got to write is between the hours of 5am and 7:30am.  Sometimes the coffee works, sometimes it feels like I need to inject it into a vein.  Sometimes I feel like I’m making progress, other times I want to kick the monitor off my desk and go back to bed.  My time in front of the keyboard is difficult these days, and it’s my own damn fault.

Forcing myself to relearn this stuff has sucked.  It’s easy to forget the joy of the thing after a while.  Cat Valente’s posts are the remedy for that.  If you don’t remember the joy, then you end up marching through a word count that amounts to very little.  Or not as much as it could, at the very least.

This line from the final paragraph of Post Numero Quatro is going to stick with me for a while:  Write as fast as you can because someday you’ll die and if you didn’t tell all the stories you had in you it will hurt.

I wrote that on a piece of paper, and stuck it to the corkboard over my desk.  Tomorrow morning, I will go forth, and kick ass.

So Long, Old Friend

This is the T42 that has served as my writing machine for the last five years.  I’ve written dozens of short stories on it, as well as the bulk of Achron.  It’s seen a lot of keystrokes, and has held up remarkably well under the strain of running my word processing apps while at the same time listening to music with iTunes.  But at long last, this steadfast machine is retiring to a comfortable position as the kitchen recipe computer.

The T42 has been a faithful companion and writer’s tool over the years, and I wish him the best of luck in his new endeavors.  I also wish that he would kindly stop reading this post RIGHT HERE.  There really is no point for him to go on; the rest is just tidying up a few things.  Loose ends.  Boring stuff, really.  There really is no need for any aging IBM laptops to continue reading after the break; you’ll just put yourself to sleep.