Winter Resolutions

As my life still works on a school-year schedule, I do not do New Year’s Resolutions (it would be kind of silly, since I have all that time off before New Year’s). So here are this year’s Winter Resolutions.

Winter Break is December 13th to January 9th.

• Write at least 3 scholarship essays (it must be done).
• Do at least 80 minutes of Russian per week. Yes, I am still trying to learn this.
• Write at least 3,000 words per week. I know it’s low, but I’ve been really out of practice lately and I don’t want to set an unreachable goal.
• Write at least 1 fanfic chapter every two weeks.
• Finish the stack of unread comics sitting on my desk, as well as the pile of books I bought for a dollar each when Border’s was going out of business. Or at least make a dent in them.
• Finish the steampunk charm bracelet I’m working on.
• Finish that danged short story that I forgot about for three months.
• Get back to my regular blogging schedule (and lose a few pounds. Both of these things are equally unlikely).

Whoo! That should be enough for now, shouldn’t it?

Holy Crap

I just realized that I am spinning a lot of plates right now. Like a lot a lot, as the non-English inclined say. This realization came about when I finished and submitted a short story to the Writers of the Future contest (probably the best sci-fi writing one out there) and was looking through my documents folder and found a short story I had begun, nearly finished, and then forgotten all about. Holy macaroni, how did I do that? I’d spent like ten hours on that project already!

So of course I put it on my “To-Finish” list, which now looks like this:

Three novels: Project Carson, the Revolutionaries, and my new Project AOGHR (which will be getting a better codename soon, I promise).

Two short stories: Mercedes (which is connected to the Revolutionaries) and T.M. (the story I’d forgotten about).

One semi-serious comic script project, although I really only work on this periodically: Project J.

One mega-fanfic series: Gateways

One English essay needing revision (on Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”) and one to write (on Frankenstein)

Four scholarship essays to write to keep me in funds.

Sheesh. And right when I found a fun new game too. On a completely separate note, check out Glitch, a fun little computer game in beta right now. I really enjoy it.

Housecleaning

This post was supposed to be a dissertation on race in fiction, but seeing as how its 9:55 pm and I am trying to stick to my Wed/Sun schedule, that will be pushed to Sunday and instead you all get me rambling.

Today I noticed a disturbing trend: I really haven’t written these past two weeks. Sure, I’ve done a few hundred words here and there, and I’ve managed to keep up my fanfic schedule, but in my “real” projects I haven’t made much progress. Here is where I try to track the problems and solutions.

Problem: School’s started. I have less time, my favorite TV shows are back on, and quite honestly after classes I’m damn tired. Solution: Well, suck it up, basically. And schedule. Scheduling writing is magic. As, do drafts in notebooks while in class.

Problem: All I wanna do is write fanfic. This one is slightly worse, because I know why it’s happening. My two other main projects have hit the boring patch, and my new third project (Project J) is too new for me to be really into it. Also, I loves the instant gratification of fanfic. Solution: Save fanfic for it’s scheduled day (Thursday, in case anyone cares). Write myself out of the boring patches of my other projects, and spend at least an hour solely on Project J to get it up to speed.

Problem: I’m just not feeling creative writing-wise lately. I’ve hit one of the periods where I’m really into aesthetic beauty (architecture, graphic design) but I can seem to make my sentences fit together in the style I like. It all reads awkwardly to me. Solution: I honestly don’t know. I’m thinking of giving myself this week off, then next week really doing the old kick-in-the-pants and setting a strong daily word count (I’m thinking maybe 300?). But for right now I think I need a little space from my projects.

 

 

The Ever-present Mystery Girl

I was digging through my stuff today (continuing from when I attempted to clean but got distracted by all the lost things on my computer), and of course I found more things–namely, my first three “novels”.

The first is about eight pages written in purple magic marker on a third-grade dare. It’s called Angle Kid (because as a third-grader I couldn’t spell “Angel” apparently). The first line is “Cam (short for Cameron) was again daydreaming.” The rest of the story (or the 2 1/2 chapters I completed) is about Cam making friends with a mysterious girl who lives in the forest by her house.

The second is from fifth grade, around 30 pages this time. This one was titled Children of Fate and began, “New York City’s Central Park. An area for fun and nature. Unseen, however, are hints of other things. Poverty, hunger, and unknown magic.” This one is about a rich boy who meets a girl who lives in Central Park, and they go have an adventure in a magical land.

The third (and last) of my childhood novels is called Legion and is the only one that’s actually finished–if you count 114 handwritten pages as ‘finished’ but I digress. I thought I’d lost this one until I found it in a box of random papers under my bed. It’s the tale of a gang of superhero teenagers and essentially follows what you would expect from a comic book put to paper. And yes, there was another metahuman whom they discover–a mysterious girl.

For awhile I tried to resist this character, but the stories I wrote during that time were never quite as important to me. Eventually I matured a bit (or hopefully a lot), and finished my first novel. And then I promptly realized that that book’s leading lady was just Mystery Girl named Becky instead of Anya. Holy crap, can I not get rid of this chick?

I put that novel down and started my three most recent projects (Project Carson, Project Karen, and The Revolutionaries).  Karen failed. The other two, in one way or another, both have forms of the Mystery Girl in them. Not always main characters, but they’re there, darn it.

Augh.

So I guess I’ve got to accept that this weird green-eyed chick keeps invading my stories. Some writers have themes (Andrew Clements and child empowerment, anyone?), or settings, or heck even weirdly specific genres that permeate their body of work. Maybe I’ll get famous someday and years afterward English students will curse my name because they have to analyze the significance of the green-eyed girl, and how she evolves throughout my fiction.

(Well I can dream at least)

 

 

Forgotten Things

Today was cleaning day, meaning that the piles of tiny paper shreds containing the titles of books that I’ve forgotten why I wanted to read were all consolidated into three sheets of notebook paper and my desk no longer looks quite like a disaster zone. I still have some random sheets of poor cursive that I wrote when I didn’t have access to a computer (those need to be typed up) and some very overdue library books but for the most part things are in order.

I also went through the files on my computer and flashdrive. I deleted most of the crappy poetry I’d written in a high-minded phase and the entered the murky depths of the folder entitled only “Other.”

Basically, the “Other” folder is where I’ve put everything that wasn’t a mostly-finished story, poem or other easily-definable document. And never looked at them again. For six years.

I found several one-sentence story beginnings, several half-finished nonfiction articles, and a file marked only CPAC which contained a list of names. For the life of me, I have no clue what CPAC stood for or what the names were supposed to be. I googled them and they are apparently not real people, or at least not anyone Google thinks is interesting. They don’t even seem like appealing names to me, so it’s not like it was a character list or anything. That I just deleted.

I also found a story by someone else that I had apparently halfway reviewed. I don’t know whose it was or why I was editing it. It’s not even very good, and it’s definitely not mine because I never write in single-space, or fourteen-point-font. I read about half of it and no bells went off in my head.

Other things I’m just befuddled of, like a file where I guess I was collecting random words and song lyrics. No idea why.

I saved some of the files, some I deleted. Some I’ve kept because they were password-protected and I’ve now forgotten the password (take it from me –write these things down) so I’m going to try and figure them out.

Still not done cleaning. Ah, well.

Marijuana of the Nursery

Wow. I honestly didn’t expect to find such…interesting…photos in my Comics Scare research.

Some of this stuff is really weird. For instance, psychologists came up with the “authoritarian man” during this time–the idea of the weak-willed people who lent a charismatic leader his power. American was literally terrified of becoming Nazi Germany (Red Scare anyone? It’s the same principle). And yet here we were burning books in schools because they were “deviant.”

It’s crazy. America became everything it feared (paranoid, propaganda-filled, scared) because of that very fear. What’s more, while the Red Scare is still a relatively well-taught era, the Comics Scare doesn’t even have an official name. During Banned Books Month, no one remembers the thousands of people who never worked in comics again, or the hundreds of small presses that were forced out of business.

People laugh at how silly and dumb the 1960′s Batman TV show is and yet none of them realize it was that way because there literally was no other choice. The entire reason Batwoman was invented in the 50′s was to assure folks that Batman and Robin weren’t gay. Heck, you couldn’t even show a black man sweating (why, exactly, was lost to history–this certainly wasn’t an era known for its civil rights, at least not yet).

A Very Tedious Project

It seems to me lately that I’ll be sitting down to start doing everything I have to do before I can write, and then I’ll look up at it’ll be 8:30–and I’m only halfway through homework, let alone being able to write my stuff.

A friend (who was doubtlessly tired of hearing me whine) suggested that if I was so upset about not figuring out where my time went, then perhaps I ought to go look. So for the whole week, I am recording every single word I write. I am also trying to cut down on the amount of online “waste time” I have.

Noble goals, however I am not known for achieving them.

Let’s see how this goes. Hopefully at the end I’ll have some interesting statistics as well as a multitude of spiffy pie charts.

Just a little example of all the things I’m working on right now (I tend to call my novels by the first name of the main character, and yes I know I’m weird):

• Carson (novel, cop-noir)
• Karen (YA semi-superhero novel)
• The Revolutionaries (near-future sci-fi novel)
• Teach Me (short story near completion, near-future sf)
• a term paper on the comics scare of the 1950′s that I’m hoping to turn into a multimedia thing.

So much to do, so little time.

Words written so far today, for everything: 998

For my actual projects:  483