Blogiversary: 14 years blogging and I’m still here

arizona tate university 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle
Fourtheen years later, we still do jigsaw puzzles every year over the holidays! Although there was a bit of a SNAFU this time when my parents’ cat stole one of the puzzle pieces…

So I actually missed noting this by a few days, but I posted my very first blog post 14 years and four days ago.

The topic, btw, was jigsaw puzzles and how much I love my family. “Working a jigsaw puzzle,” I wrote,

is a way for a few people you care about to gather around a table and share something, which isn’t the puzzle but your time. You’re facing each other — unlike when, for instance, people watch television together. You talk about whatever comes up, serious topics or lite topics or just how you’re certain that the particular piece you’re looking for is surely lost. You laugh, a lot. And if you pay attention, you realize how much you love each other and how comfortable you are together.

Coincidentally, I was back east over the holidays and yep. And we did a jigsaw puzzle :)

Meanwhile, however, over the last several weeks, I’ve been doing something else.

Tackling a long-overdue job: website cleanup

I’ve written nearly 1200 posts over the years (!).

And in all that time, I’d never gone back over them to do things like remove broken links or clean up taxonomies.

I had good reason to procrastinate: it was a lot of work. Dozens and dozens of hours’ worth of work.

But as of today, I’ve accomplished quite a bit. I’ve paired the published posts down to around 750 and fixed links. I re-categorized some posts and cross-linked them where needed to better capture updates on specific topics.

The exercise also served as a major explore of the ol’ memory-lane.

That time period — the mid 2000s — was a the golden age of blogging…

I can still remember how incredible it felt to be able to write about anything I wanted to write about, and publish it, without having to navigate any gatekeeper or satisfy anyone but myself. It was so, incredibly freeing. I’d been working as a contract writer for years, I’d co-written Outwitting Dogs, I was working on a novel that I hoped to sell to a publisher. Now, all of a sudden, I could just write.

All of a sudden, I could hit a button and be out there for anyone to read.

I discovered WordPress. I taught myself a little php coding so I could modify its default Kubrick theme (remember Kubrick? Oh, that blue… oh, how thrilled I was when I made my site turn green!)

Comment spamming became a thing. I told them to go away and wrote an ode. I discovered Akismet — phew :)

It’s impossible to understate how life-changing it felt to be able to blog.

And I wasn’t alone. I was part of a blossoming online community of people who appreciated what I published, who would link to me, comment on my blog — and of course I did the same for them. (The right-left divide was there, btw, but it didn’t feel as dire and insurmountable. It wasn’t vicious. We were still trying to understand each other.)

Many of us coalesced around our respective communities. I wrote a lot about Rochester, New York, where I lived at the time, and exchanged links and information with a dozen or so other Rochester-area bloggers, many of whom are gone, now. Mr. Snitch. Zinnian Democracy. For some topics of local interest, like Rochester’s proposed Renaissance Square, my blog could arguably be considered an important contemporaneous record.

Many of the sources I quoted about that project are no longer available online.

And then there were the other aspiring fiction authors.

We linked each others’ posts. We shared ideas and advice and writer resources. This started a year before Amazon launched the Kindle, before the indie author became a thing. One of our favorite subjects was literary agents: how to query them, what they liked, what they hated, which ones to avoid. (Remember Miss Snark?) (Her stuff is all still online btw.)

And then came 2007 and Kindle Direct Publishing — another moment I will never forget. Because, when you think about it, indie authors were to books what bloggers were to online journalism / opinion essays. There was that same sense of loosening and freedom and “now I can write what I want and put it out there and who knows? Someone might actually read it and like it.”

Writers who had focused on courting literary agents suddenly rushed to self-publish their books on Amazon…

I was one of them. I self-pubbed my first novel, ran a giveaway, and watched it climb to the #11 spot on Amazon’s Free Kindle Ebooks store.

Heady times…

Word had been spreading in the lit-o-sphere about National Novel Writing Month and I participated a couple of times (before deciding, ultimately, that the format doesn’t work for me).

And naturally, scammers began to emerge to prey on authors who dreamed of writing fiction for a living…

And Then Came Facebook

Oh, what a temptation it was! So much easier than running your own site, courting readers, vying for eyeballs. You could write a face book post and suddenly everyone you knew would read it and comment.

I fell for it. I essentially abandoned my own blog. Instead of publishing hundreds of posts per year, I’d do maybe a dozen.

Well, you know the quote, right? “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer. You’re the product.” It’s a concept that has been around for a very long time. And yet, strangely enough, we don’t seem to have fully wakened to the implications.

Products are things. Ergo:

If we let ourselves be turned into products, we can expect to be treated like products — that is, like things.

So why are we surprised to learn that Facebook would sell us out? Why shouldn’t it? We aren’t “people” to Facebook.

By definition — as soon as we agree to the Facebook TOS and start uploading “content” — which includes not only our words, our personal diaries (!), our insights and links and information-sharing but also all that “data” about ourselves, our likes dislikes comings going relationships, which in aggregate is essentially our selves in a very important sense — our virtual avatars — as soon as we enter that transaction, we agree to be treated like objects. Commoditized. Bought and sold.

It’s little wonder that there’s been a backlash against the platform. We’re slowly beginning to grasp what “a Facebook” is and how “a Facebook” is going to treat us.

(It’s no coincidence, either, that as a platform Facebook feeds political divisiveness and vitriol. We don’t treat each other like people on Facebook, either.)

Of course, when you’re a writer, there’s another nuance to this as well.

Writers create content. Content has value. Why should we give it to Facebook?

Of course, writers give our content away all the time. I do it. I run Amazon giveaways. My novel The French Emerald is available to read for free here and on Wattpad (where it recently broke 16K reads!)

But the difference is that in these instances, I am interacting with you, my reader, directly.

So when you find my blog and read a post, our shared experience belongs to you and I. It’s direct. It’s not beingi mediated by a third party.

I have the kind of control that a content-creator should have. If I want to pull The French Emerald off my site, off Wattpad, format it, and sell it instead, I could do that. It wouldn’t be a violation of anybody’s terms of service. It’s crystal clear that I own the copyright to those words and can do whatever I want with them.

I’m still on Facebook. I have a page for promoting my novels. I go on the platform from time to time to catch up with friends and family. But I no longer invest time in posting content.

Instead, I’ve recommitted to my home: this blog. I didn’t publish a single piece here in 2016 or 2017, and only did a handful in 2018. But in the last month of 2019 alone, I put up around 8 posts.

Will anyone see them? Who knows? I lost a lot of traction when I abandoned this site for Facebook four+ years ago.

But I’m good with that. In a way, it’s like it was back in the beginning, in 2006, when I first hit “publish” and put a little piece about doing jigsaw puzzles out there for the world to see. I don’t care if “I’m read.” I’m a writer. I write. That’s what matters.

Happy New Year to anyone who finds this.

And thank you, thank you, thank you for reading.

a NaNoWriMo debrief

So I “finished” my NaNoWriMo project — working title, Dr. Forst — on Sunday. That’s three days early, for anybody who’s paying attention.

Notice I’m not calling it a novel — I’m calling it a project.

Because what I have now on my hard drive is not a novel by any stretch.

I’m very glad I participated. There are a lot of things about writing a novel that are pretty intimidating, of course, but one of the biggies is the sheer volume of words required. Starting a novel feels a bit like standing at the foot of an impossibly high, impossibly steep mountain, and wondering how the hell you’re ever going to get to the top. And of course, the answer is “one step at a time,” but you also know that a lot can go wrong on the way, including spectacular falls from precipitous heights ;-)

Participating in NaNoWriMo forces you to push through that anxiety. And then, 30 or so days later, you’re at the top of the mountain and you realize: hey. It really wasn’t that hard.

That’s the kind of experience that you internalize even if you don’t do anything else.

And I’ve got proof. As I neared the last few thousand words of Dr. Forst, I found myself suddenly thinking of another novel I’ve drafted, Loose Dog. I like the book, but it needs a major edit. And I’ve been putting that off because the job seemed so enormous.

Hey, that doesn’t look too bad from here . . .

Now, all at once, the job doesn’t look so huge. I’m excited. I’m going to start working on it as soon as I catch up on a few other non-NaNo responsibilities.

I have some other thoughts on the benefits of NaNoWriMo which I’ll share at some point (about 4,500 words’ worth! A longish essay :-))

But part of what I also learned is that NaNoing isn’t 100 percent compatible with the way I, personally, need to write fiction.

As a result, the output I’ve generated this month is a bit of a mess.

Now granted, I haven’t gone back and read it over, and yes, I know there is probably some decent writing in there, and probably plenty of salvageable bits.

But pushing to get to 50K in 30 days just didn’t give me the gestation time I needed to solve certain problems that came up as I wrote.

And these are structural problems. This may be the height of folly, but with Dr. Forst I am trying to combine a golf novel (whatever that is) with a loose retelling of Faust (as you may have guessed from the title) (hey, I know lots of golfers who would do a little deal, wink wink nudge nudge, in exchange for a single digit handicap!) with a lightly satirical whodunnit.

I have no idea if I can pull together such a hodgepodge into a cohesive story.

But I do know that I can’t pull it together in a month.

There just wasn’t enough time for the bits of my mind that connect things together to discover and bridge the connections.

So instead of a novel, I have a . . . a kind of jackalope.

Or, say: a jackalope so poorly stitched together that it’s not going to fool anybody.

I also suspect that the voice/tone of the novel changes in the course of the book — which is partly a symptom of the same issue, but is also a result of the NaNo process. Usually, when I am writing a novel, I go back through what I’ve already written from time to time. This helps keep the voice consistent. I couldn’t afford that luxury with Dr. Forst, and I suspect the book suffers for it.

So will I ever do NaNo again?

Maybe.

But what I really hope I do is to retain the feel of constant production that the NaNoWriMo process instills.

I have my eye on a certain other mountain.

I don’t necessarily need to climb it in 30 days.

But I’ve noticed it looks a lot less steep than it did before . . .

NaNoWriMo is here!!!

Set my alarm for 5 a.m. cuz if I don’t make extra time for this in the morning no way am I going to keep up :-)

Here’s my opening sentence. YES it’s rough — it’s supposed to be! But I don’t care, I’m so excited :-)

Most suppose golf is about life, not death—it is, after all, supremely difficult to manage a golf shot while dead—but death had been very much on the minds of the members of Crumbling Bluffs County Club the past few weeks, ever since Sly Burbank’s body had been found off to the side of the 4th fairway. And it was on their minds that night in particular, because they’d learned, that night, the results from the coroner’s inquest.

NaNo on, dudes!!!!!!!!!!

Nanowrimo. What’s a realistic time commitment?

What’s a realistic time commitment?

To get to 50,000 words in 30 days, you have to produce an average of 1,667 words every day. No question, NaNoWriMo requires a time commitment! The question is, how much?

I know about how fast I write for the day job, but for that I edit as I go — which is a NaNoWriMo No-No.

So I decided to get a quick reality check — I posted a question on the NaNoWriMo forums to ask veterans how much time they typically need to keep pace with that 1,667/day output rate.

Click the link to read peoples’ answers, but here’s my takeaway:

  • Most people should figure to set aside about 2 hours a day writing time. But note the caveats below!
  • There’s a huge variation in word production speed! Some of the fastest can churn out 2,000 words/hour. The slowest do 500/hour or less. It might be a good idea to run a “test” on your own writing speed before Nov. 1 so you know about how fast you can write.
  • People don’t always write at the same speed. Sometimes the words flow quickly. Other times they don’t. Don’t be surprised if your writing speed is slower at times–and you might want to set aside some extra chunks of time to “catch up” afterward if you hit a slow period.

One last thing: writing time is only one piece of the time commitment. You may also need some planning/thinking-about-the-novel time. I know I write much faster when I have a map in my head of where I’m going . . .

Personally, I’m going to get up early the entire month of November in order to make sure I have extra time I’ll need to keep pace. After all, who needs sleep? ;-)

NaNoWriMo 2011 planning update…

My NaNoWriMo prep is moving along nicely. I now have a dozen characters: two major, three supporting, and seven minor.

I have a sense as well of themes, which include pursuing perfection/perfection as the enemy of the good — literally! Think Dr. Faustus ;-) — and the tension between trying to live from the head vs. trying to live from that other Self, whatever it is.

My characters are all golfers, which means the book will probably get pegged as a golf novel, but my goal of course is for it to split the seams of any genre. There will be romance, and there will be comedy, and there will be Big Ideas if you care to look for them. If  even non-golfers will find it fun to read, I’ll be the happiest writer on the planet.

Can’t wait to get started :-)

NaNoWriMo, or: Just because it’s stupid doesn’t mean I’m not going to try it

National Novel Writing Month!

Fifty thousand words in 30 days. Because what could possibly go wrong?

Just because it’s stupid doesn’t mean I’m not going to try it

If you’re a writer . . .

Or have even thought about being a writer . . .

And have spent any time at all kicking around the Interwebs over the past several years . . .

You’ve probably stumbled across this: the phenom known affectionately as NoWriMo.

National Novel Writing Month!

It’s a movement. It’s a website. It’s a community.

It’s a way to invite public shame if you fail to crank out 50,000 words in 30 days.

I tried NaNoWriMo once before — in 2006. I lasted five days. Posted my progress each day on this blog ’til my effort met its early and ignoble end.

I have a new strategy, this year.

You’re allowed to lay some groundwork — an outline, for example — before you get started.

As it happens, I don’t find outlines helpful for writing fiction. Either the outline has to be so complete that it is basically the entire novel, or it has big gaps — and big gaps are the enemy of NaNoWriMo success, at least for me, because that’s what slows me down: I hit a gap and don’t know how to fill it and freeze.

So I’m going to try something different.

I’m going to pre-create a bunch of characters. (Already started, little buggers are wandering around in my head like they own the place.)

I’m going to create a handful of predestined events. (Got some of those already in place, too. I know there’s going to be a guy dead on a golf course — maybe it was an accident, maybe not. I know there’s going to be a member-guest golf tournament. I know there’s going to be people who fall in love ;-). And I know there’s going to be a winning lottery ticket. At least, there will be someone who think it’s a winning ticket — only he can’t remember where he put it. Think “where the heck did I put my car keys?” only a tad more urgent.)

And then, on November 1, I’m going to turn the characters loose and report what happens to them as they knock into those events and each other.

So we’ll see. Perhaps I’ll last only five days again . . .

But maybe I’ll be a bit more successful this time.

So how about you? Have you ever tried NaNoWriMo? If not, why not? And if yes, how did it go?

“My characters rebelled”

China — who is actually delivering on her NaNoWriMo promise — hit a slight glitch yesterday:

Today’s story tidbits: My characters rebelled. A simple conversation between the MC and a character I’ll refer to as “T” turned into a demand for the return of a precious book. Which left ME asking, “what book?”

LOL

Dontcha hate it when that happens???

LOLOL