I am a chronic sufferer of procrastination. No, that’s not right. That makes me sound like a victim. I am a chronic procrastinator. But I’m sneaky about it. Instead of rooting into a couch cushion trying to use cable television to drown out the call of various things needing my attention, I instead manage to make myself look very busy at the computer.

Oh, I know what you’re thinking:  Big whoop, lady. Who hasn’t logged on to the Internet under the pretense of checking their email only to come up for air hours later with nothing to show for it except for a handful of useless oddball news tidbits and videos of baby ducks and puppies being best friends?  (Whew!  Long sentence!)

Well, I do that too. But I’m not talking about the Internet. I’m talking about butt-waggling. Yep. That’s how I waste most of my time…butt-waggling.

What is butt-waggling, you ask? Simple. You know how foot races depicted in cartoons show characters toeing the line, rear ends in the air waggling in anticipation? Well, that’s me. Only I’m journaling. I have this sick, addictive need to journal before I sit down to do my work. It’s actually one of my most favorite things to do. I like to plan out the month, the week, the day. I like to work out ideas, poke around my five-year plan, figure out new goals.

So I’m forever toeing the line, checking my position, butt raised high in anticipation. But instead of eying the distant finish line on the horizon, I’m looking down, checking the line drawn in the dust. Are my hands in the right position? Are my shoes tied tightly enough? And I’m obsessive compulsive. I check these things over and over again.

I’m also planning. Once I get started, I’m going to wave to the crowd at that first turn, or I’m going to kick it into fourth gear when I reach that first set of bleachers. I’m so damn busy planning what I’m going to do that by the time I’m ready to race, the sun has gone down and the fans have returned home.

As you can imagine, my perpetual butt-wagging has done nothing to advance me forward in my goals unless I get to include in my daily word count hundreds of pages of journaling, planning, and daydreaming. (There’s nothing wrong with daydreaming as an activity; however, there is a time and place for such things, and neither of them should be during work time, I’m finding.)

This is a condition I have wrangled with on and off for quite some time now. Recently, things have gotten worse. There are stories to be written, revised, workshopped, sent off! There are a thousand house chores calling my attention! There’s another work project looming black on the horizon!

In response, I have written and journaled and daydreamed and even schemed on how to accomplish these things. But now I’ve reached the end. There’s nothing more to figure out. There’s nothing left for me to do except take action.

And that’s when the Awful Truth makes itself known: THINGS HAVE GROUND TO A HALT DUE TO MY EMPHATIC AND STUBBORN-HEADED REFUSAL TO GET OFF MY ASS.

Anyway, now that there’s no denying it, I have decided to take serious and unprecedented action. I’m quitting cold turkey. (Not forever, mind you. Just a few days. Just until I get caught up. Besides, I can quit anytime I want.)

But by confessing, I have decided to hereby reveal my habit and its true nature; self-indulgent and completely recreational. It’s to be considered from here on out as a decadent treat to be earned, like frozen Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. I get to partake just as soon as I get my day’s work done.

In that spirit, off I go. I’ve made some headway today — the first sign of progress in days — and I want to keep up the momentum.

P.S. I also managed to get a blog post done…<g>

My last blog entry was on December 11, 2008. At that time, I was just about seven months’ pregnant with our first child. My due date was February 21, 2009. The next day I fell off the face of the earth.

On December 12, 2009, at 2:02 p.m., Leia was born via emergency caesarean section. She was 3 lbs. 8.4 ozs. To say we were unprepared would be a huge understatement. We didn’t even have names ready. Our first child was “Baby Girl” for the first four days of her life.

What followed was four days of hospitalization for me, six weeks of hospitalization in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) for Baby Leia, and then another six weeks of staying with my parents in a nearby town before I was able to come home with the baby. While I stayed with the baby at my parents’ house, my husband completed most of the renovation projects in our house and wrapped up the loose ends of a business we had just sold.

(To say the Universe moves in mysterious and serendipitous and timely ways is also an understatement.)

I am just starting to come up for air. Our baby girl Leia (yes, like Princess Leia <g>) is doing wonderfully. She’s a good eater, and at three and a half months, she is now a little over 12 lbs. Our little butterball. She’s a wonderful baby, just beautiful. She’s got a great temperament.

Now that we are home, I am eager to get back to writing. I stopped writing at first for obvious reasons. I was at the hospital constantly, my eyes fixated on this wondrous little person. I didn’t want to blink and miss anything.

There was this one moment right at the beginning, when I was first allowed to hobble down the hall by myself to visit her. I was staring at her little face through the plexiglass of her temperature-controlled isolette, and that’s when I got it. I just got it. And I thought, wow, if ever I could capture in words this feeling I have, this experience of becoming a parent, a mother, and do it justice, anyone who read those words would make sure they became parents too. Because if I could adequately describe how beautiful, how soul-moving that moment was, nobody in their right mind would want to miss out. And if I could do that, I’d be one helluva writer.

I’ve always had a thousand reasons for wanting to become one helluva writer, but now I’ve got one good one. Her name is Leia.

And so now we’re back, from outer space….

I’ve been plugging away at the novel like a good little girl.  But I’ve been thinking a lot about methodology as well.

Seems as though there are writers from two different schools of approach:  the Organic and the Outliners.

To me, Organic writers are the ones that sit down with a little tiny pearl seed of special, throw it down on the paper, add water (or coffee), and follow its tendrils of story to the end as more of a delighted first reader than as a creator.  It sounds absolutely magical.

Now, I have been fortunate enough to be blessed with these kinds of stories.  I love it when it happens.  It’s almost like getting caught in a dust devil unexpectedly.  It takes your breath away.  When you look up from your keyboard, it’s like getting dropped off in front of your house after an unexpected adventure with friends.  You’re a little disoriented and a lot happy.

I must confess, however, that I’ve always had a sort of stereotype about folks who write from outline…even though I am one of them.  I can see myself with thick, black government-issued eyeglasses, carefully constructing my story structure out of building blocks; characters, metaphors, situations, themes, et cetera.  Once I’ve got the darn thing erected, then I push my glasses up my nose with my index finger and begin to fill in the skeleton with word-flesh, moving from the first section, to the second section, and so on.  Very methodical, very scientific.

I’m not sure where this idea of mine came from.  Perhaps it’s from those organic experiences where I felt whisked away, my hair whipping in the wind.  Perhaps it’s simply from the stereotype that many people have regarding the writer as the artist.

I was having some problems with the beginning of the book.  When I say, “some problems,” I mean, the beginning wasn’t happening.  Even when I decided to force it — which felt like forcing a piece of delicate electronic equipment only to hear the plastic gears crack — the beginning lay like two-day-old dead trout wrapped in even older newspaper.  No bueno.

So I decided to return to the basics, which means pen and paper.  Old school.  Ink and fiber.

This is what I discovered:  Organic definitely exists in Outlining.

I sat down and made a list of what I knew about the story and what seemed to be tripping me up.  The trip-up list is what helped me.  I listed four story-specific items, questions that I needed to answer.

It was the first one that helped the most.  “What is the conflict that your protagonist is facing right now at the beginning of this story?”

My problem was my protagonist, who is on vacation with her husband, doesn’t have any conflict right away.  The “inciting incident” wasn’t scheduled until later on in the afternoon.  Boring.  They just seemed too perfect, too happy.  The beginning scene was boring to write.

But after I dug around, I got her husband to piss her off right off the bat, which opened up my eyes to a lot of her insecurities.  And then I found myself looking at an open can of serious character development worms, which I spent many happy hours chasing down and rounding up.

The great thing about it was, once I solved that initial issue and started setting down sequential scenes I wanted to see included, things started falling from outer space right into place on the page.  I found myself going, “Perfect!  That’s exactly what happens.  Because if she doesn’t know about this, then this will happen this way and that will just screw everything up for her…poor girl!”

In other words, ideas began to flutter in from the ether, fitting into the story in ways I had not previously planned or imagined yet.  That’s when I discovered the process between the Organic writer and the Outlining writer is not so different.  It’s just where in the order of things we practice our, um, organic-ness.

It was a good trip for me to take, a good reminder that it’s really not important how we writers approach our craft.  We just need to remember that a trip is a trip, and we should simply enjoy it while it lasts instead of scrutinizing it to see if it’s like anything another writer experiences.

At least, that’s what I decided when I got dropped off in front of the house, disoriented and happy. <g>

…”DO NOT TAKE UNTIL POWDER IS COMPLETELY DISSOLVED.”

This is what the side of my Arm & Hammer Baking Soda box says.  How do I know this?  Well, one of the lovely surprises that my advancing pregnancy has brought me is some raging heartburn.  Man, I thought I was in the clear, having reached my seventh month eating all kinds of spicy numminess with seemingly no consequences.  Now, we’re in the world of long, burning burps.  Oh, my!

I have a friend whose favorite thing to do — his words, not mine — is to eat as much as he possibly can, then go straight to bed, no passing “Go.”  So this is his realm.  He understands the world of heartburn.  He recommended making what he calls a “baking soda shot.”  Dissolve a little in some water, down it, burp twice, and you’re good.

Fortunately, the box has more specific instructions.  I’m just a little concerned about the “serious injury” part.  It sounds volatile, explosive almost.  Should I be worried?  Maybe my stomach will pop.  Or my husband will get blown out of bed.  That might be worth the look on his face.  <g>

Apart from heartburn, I’ve had a really lovely day.  I’ve basically ignored a pending work assignment in favor of writing.  Yesterday, I had such a hard time with the book.  It was like trying to catch a shaved, greased guinea pig in the bathtub with the lights off.  Only worse.  I decided to give up and try to work it out longhand instead of persisting in pushing out constipated, wooden words.  It helped.  It gave me an inkling of what I needed to pursue.

Then today, I headed over to Starbucks, music list at the ready, headphones clamped firmly over ears, determined not to leave until I figured out what the *&^@ing problem was.  3,800 words it took me.  But I’ve got it figured out.  I’ve got my compass reset.  My needle is pointing north again.  I feel absolutely triumphant!  I was afraid I was trapped in the NaNoWriMo Triangle, doomed to sail featureless seas of unproductive, unexciting prose.  Now I spy sunlight on the horizon, at the edge of the storm.  My sails are trimmed, the wind is picking up….whee!

Can you tell I had a good writing day today?  Yay!

Well, the God Murphy swooped in and smote me with lightning bolts right before the Thanksgiving holiday dashing any chances I had of making my 50,000 word goal for NaNoWriMo.  Now, I’m not blaming it all on Mr. Murphy.  I understand had I spent my time better, I would have been able to withstand his heartless blow.  So I take full responsibility for that.  But as it stands, I had a pretty good excuse, as far as excuses go.  An expedited work project landed on my desk at the last minute, something that I’m still working on trying to finish a week and a half later.  (The bane of court reporters is trials that you reported two years ago and can barely remember can be ordered up by the Court of Appeals on an expedited basis when you least expect it.  Blech.)

But I am undeterred.  Who says it’s gotta be done in November, gosh darn it?!  I have decided to seize authority and move NaNoWriMo to December.  (But for everyone who completed it in November, CONGRATULATIONS!  YOU GUYS ROCK!!)

My goal for this month will be to finish my 50,000 words by Christmas.  I would like to have a rough draft ready for my husband to read so he can see I’m not just going to Starbucks every day to sip chai tea lattes and listen to jaunty tunes.  I actually do write.

So I will start posting word counts starting tomorrow.  I swear!  I’m this close to being done with this crazy appeal transcript.  <snort>  And I will try my best to post daily on this blog.  I hate to disappoint my legions of fans. <lol>  I kill me.

…and I’m on the verge of full panic mode.  Well, not quite.  I tend to like to wait until my toes are dangling over the edge before I start to panic.  But I’m preparing to panic.  Give me another few days.

October turned out to be rather fruitful.  I didn’t make all of my goals, but I ended up doing good work, which ultimately was the goal.  So for that, I’m happy.  Much, much better word count than the few months previous.  And I’ve got a few more stories in the works that I’ve put on hold in favor of NaNoWriMo.  So those will get restarted in December.

My project for NaNoWriMo is an idea I got from something Neil Gaiman said a long time ago in his blog after a trip to Venice, Italy:  “I suspect that Venice is full of ghosts.  Not of Venetians, but of all the visitors who came, and fell in love with the place, and promised themselves they’d be back, dead or alive.”

The thought sparked an idea I thought would make a fun short story, so I did a bit of brainstorming on it last fall.  Well, the more I thought about it, the more the characters clamored for a larger stage.  I finally gave in.  “A novel it is,” I told them, “but don’t disappoint me.  I don’t want any wandering about.”  They agreed, but we’ll see.  Right now, they are on their best behavior.  But seeing how they’re set loose in Venice, a little money in their pockets, who knows?  They’re already steering me down different streets, completely ignoring the itinerary.  But it’s wonderful traveling with them nonetheless.

As it stands, I’ve got a quite a bit of research ahead of me.  I’m trying to write around those bits; I can fill in certain things later.  The goal is to reach 50,000 words by the end of the month.  I’m trying to keep my eye on the brass ring.  I’m loving the story idea though.  I sincerely hope I can translate how I see it in my brain to the page intact.  I want to do the story justice.  As far as genre goes, the best way I can describe it is “the extraordinary happening to the ordinary.”  I love that kind of story.

Speaking of which, I’m completely in love with the new television series “Life on Mars.”  Love, love, love this show.  This is the kind of stuff I dig, and I’m not much of a media worshipper seeing as how I’ve gone most of my adult life without television.  Anyway, the show has two thumbs up from me.  Check it out.

Anyway, I’m off to see what my characters are up to.  Carnevale in Venezia has commenced, the Costumi are out in their glittery droves, and I’m anxious to see what happens.  I will start posting word counts (as soon as they aren’t shameful <g>), and will do my best to post progress notes…just so people know I’m not goofing off.

Good luck to all of my fellow NaNoWriMo-ers.  May the word count be with you!

…mostly because I pull two 12-hour shifts on Friday and Saturday nights at the bar.  It was my birthday on Friday (yay!), which meant that it was superbusy.  It always seems to be busy on my birthday.  But it worked out okay.  We had a pretty slow month in September, so it was nice to have a busy weekend.

And happily, I received two gift cards to Barnes & Noble, so you know where I’ll be tonight. <g>

But because I tend not to get to sleep until 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning on the nights I work, not to mention the sudden change from summer to fall temperatures these past few days, I spend most of the day asleep.  I’m not proud of it, but I can sleep 12 hours at a time.  Well, actually, I’m a little proud of it.  But nowadays, I blame the pregnancy instead of my own penchant for laziness. <g>

So I ended up playing catch-up today on my word count.  But it didn’t turn out too bad.  I finished my first short story of the month.  It weighed in at a hefty 46 pages, 10,437 words.  Whew!  In definite need of revision, but I’m glad to have it finished.  Plus, I’m looking forward to diving into the next one.  It’s a little on the lighter side, totally different.  And I’m anticipating the next one will be much shorter.  I don’t know why my “short” stories have been leaning towards the long side, but hopefully revisions will correct that to some degree.  I’ve been trying to keep the editing process separate from the writing process, which seems to remove a lot of the hesitation that can plague me at the creating stage.

Anyway, I did good work today, so I’m off to B&N to collect my reward. <g>

Yesterday was a full day, a very girlie day.  I caught up with my friend Gris for tea, which is always fun, considering I’m not a very girlie girl.  Really love those little sandwiches.  I could eat a baking sheet piled up high with them.  But it wouldn’t be very ladylike.  Instead, I restrained myself to what was on my plate and held my pinkie high and proper when I drank my tea.

There’s a lot to be said about restraint, I’m discovering, especially when it comes to trimming your own bangs or reacting to a family member’s heated, emotional outburst.  This is really nothing new to anyone, I’m sure.  Actually, it seems to be a lesson that I find myself having to learn over and over again.  But I’m proud to report that this time around, I’m not afraid to show my bangs in public, and I didn’t make a family issue worse.  Yay me!

As for tea sandwiches, I’m still unconvinced that restraint is the way to go.  They need to put the goodies out in man portions!

Later on, I met with another friend and we had a nice dinner, then off to a local coffee house to try to get work done…me with my writing, and her with her college studies.  Unfortunately, coffee houses just don’t stay late enough for nocturnal folk like ourselves, and so I found myself with a measly 157 words before it was time to wrap up.  Then we gabbed at my house until my husband came home from working at the bar, around 2:20 a.m.  Yeeks!

This is why I didn’t blog last night.  I was ashamed.  I sorry.

Therefore, I vowed to prove my worthiness today by writing 3,000 words; 1,000 for yesterday, 1,000 for today, and another 1,500 just to get me closer to my month-end goal of 31k.  And I’m proud to say I managed 3,352.  Yay!  This public posting of goals really helps, I gotta say.

Which reminds me, Leo Babauta has an excellent post up at Zen Habits about motivation, including tips such as positive public pressure and pacing.  Still working on the pacing bit.  I tend to work in spurts and buckets.  But even still, this new approach of writing about 1,000 words a day seems to help as it always leaves me knowing where to pick up the next day.  And in a very short span, I’ve got a 30-plus page story.  Revisions will hopefully pare it down to a more marketable length, but it still smells like accomplishment to me.

Tomorrow or the next day, I will be able to type “The End” to the current story.  I’m really enjoying writing this one.  Nothing like a monster-in-the-backyard story to make you afraid to go outside at night.  I’m really looking forward to writing the next story in the queue though.  Love, love, love magic realism, and I haven’t written one of those in a while.

Ah, well.  To all the writers out there, may your daily word counts overrunneth your cuppeths.

Until tomorrow, nighty-night.

“Howdy” seems to be the vernacular in these here parts, so howdy it is.

This is my first blog post.  I have been surprisingly nervous about this whole blogging enterprise, despite the fact probably nobody will notice its debut for quite sometime, as is the way with new blogs.  But nervous I am.  So be it.  As a good friend recently told me, “Just start one, for Goodness’ sake.”  So here’s to Goodness.

I’ve decided to start a blog mostly for the incentive of having a “credible threat.”  This is not a new concept, by any means, but it’s explained magnificently in Tobias Buckell’s blog post:  http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2007/01/02/some-ideas-for-achieving-your-goals-in-2007/

Basically, I want to be a professional writer, a successful published writer.  This is a long-time dream, something I’ve carried with me since a child.  It’s the very reason I went into court reporting; I thought given a good-paying vocation and flexible hours, I would have more time to devote to writing.  And though my court reporting career — and subsequently, my current gig as a co-owner of a karaoke bar — has yielded much in the way of dialogue and character study, I am still an unpublished writer.

I’ve spent an awful lot of time writing short stories and bits of novels and screenplays — and even one draft of a novel — here and there; however, obviously not enough.  Mostly, this is due to a lack of discipline.

So I thought it was high time I set out my goals a little bit more publicly (as in beyond telling my husband and a few friends), in the hopes of eventually getting folks to check in on me and my progress, and kick me in the ass when I need it.  And maybe in this way, I’ll find some like-minded folks to cheer on as well.

In keeping with Mr. Buckell’s insightful post as linked above, I have to agree with the mistakes he thinks many people make when making goals…especially the vague bit.  How many Januarys have I set the goal of writing this book or that book, or this many stories, et cetera?  I can’t help this, you know.  For some reason, when it comes to blind ambition, I was first in line and given more than I could carry.  So I am burdened with the knowledge I am capable of accomplishing EVERYTHING, but knowing I don’t because I just don’t feel like it right at this moment.  😛   My mom likens me to having my paws jammed in too many “hunny” pots.  Just the way I’m wired, I suppose.

Anyway, I’ve decided to post my goals online in order to hold myself publicly accountable, a credible threat, if you will.  And one of the things I’ve decided is to start out with bite-sized goals…at least by my terms of accounting.

So here are my goals for October.  And I will try my bestest to post updates daily.  Anyone who comes across this, feel free to send me a kick in the ass via the “Comments” section.  Anything from “Have you written today?” to “Bend over, fatty,” will do.

1.  I will write 31,000 words of new short fiction this month (which equates to 1,000 words daily).

2.  That means 4 new short stories (one a week).

3.  I will polish and submit 4 short stories (I have a good backlog).

4.  I will upload 1 short story to my online writer’s group OWW.

5.  I will critique 4 short stories in my online writer’s group.

6.  I will write one of my new short stories using Liquid Story Binder (to see if I can get past the learning curve and determine if it’ll be helpful for longer works).

7.  I will find and gather all of my story notes, research notes, and various other bits and drafts into one collective pile.

8.  I will prepare a project idea for next month’s NaNoWriMo (www.nanowrimo.org).

I am giving myself until October 31st to meet these goals.  And although I feel I’ve really scaled them back on the ambition scale, I realize that realistically, it’s still quite a bit of work to embark on.  However, considering I’ve already written over 16,000 words in my journal, and 4,042 words of new fiction (I didn’t start until the 5th, so I’m a few days behind — don’t worry, I’ll catch up!), I think it’s feasible.  I’m up for the challenge.

Right now I’m in the midst of a horror short story tentatively titled “Animal Control.”  I started out writing mostly fantasy when I was younger, but it’s progressed to slipstream, magical realism, science fiction, and now horror.  Horror seems to be a nice color on me as of late.

In any event, <whew!> my first blog post is done.  Now I’m off to get some work done.

– Ang