podcast

January 2023 Updates

Update time! I still plan on going through the essays from NOVELIST AS A VOCATION. I'm still going through the the book, actually! But I figure it was time to check in again.

One of the things about blogging, and recording your process in general, is that when you have a lot of things going on that it can turn into just another thing that takes away from the time you could be using to create. So lately, I've been prioritizing actually creating stuff in the time I have available, which has resulted in some pretty great results.

First, my current novel project is at 36,395 words and moving steadily along. I'll go more into detail about this when I get to the relevant essay from NOVELIST AS A VOCATION, but treating my writing time as a more physical act that has to be accomplished every day has been very effective in keeping my numbers flowing.

One takeaway I'll share now, though, is something I'm tentatively naming "READER/WRITER TIME DILATION."

One of the things I struggle with in the writing process is chugging along and wondering if something is dragging on too long or is taking too much time. I don't want to bore the reader, and pacing is very important to me.

In the past, I've often struggled in continuing on in a project when I feel like I hit a lull in the story and what I'm writing is super boring. So then I pause and think about it, and hope that I can figure out why it's so boring and what I can do to change it. If I'm unable to do this within a certain amount of time, though, I end up dropping the project or letting it sit around until I can figure out the problem with it again.

With my new method, though, which helps me push the words out even though I may not be feeling it at a particular moment, I started to realize that there's a dilation of time in how I'm experiencing the events and vs how the reader will.

My current write speed is about 1,600 words per hour.

The average adult reads about 250-300 words per minute, which equates to 15,000 to 18,000 words per hour.

That means I'm experiencing the story TEN TIMES SLOWER than the reader will!

That means realistically when I'm laboring over what I'm writing and going "good grief, is someone really going to want to read this for an hour", I shouldn't be. They'll be through it in about 6 minutes.

So now I don't worry about how long it takes to write something.

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"Ayo, where's all the audio stuff though?"

It's coming. I've actually been working on another audio project on the side, something I don't think I've mentioned publicly. The only reason I've even mentioning it here is that it's almost ready to launch. So that's been cutting into podcast editing speed and scheduling recordings with guests etc.

I used to tear myself up about not being able to focus on one project at a time, feeling like I was letting people down because I wasn't treating one project or another like a job. But I'm just one person working on all this stuff. And if I start trying to change who I am, none of this is fun anymore.

And there's a real solid benefit for me, creatively, to jumping around a bit. The other day I was coming in from work and suddenly the problems in Jane 3 clicked into place. While working on other things, my creative subconscious apparently worked out what now seems to be a very obvious solution. So I'm excited to go back and work on that once this novel project is at least done its first draft.

I think that's all for now. Or at least that's all I can think of since my 4 year old is poking me in the back of the head asking me to pour her milk.

L8r sk8trs.

December Updates - Blog and Podcast

I am shocked at how quickly this month has moved along. I have had a lot of things working in the background - including a bunch of blog posts - and even though I FEEL like everything is moving at a good pace, time just...keeps going!

So there is more promised blog writing coming up, in particular my review of the essays found in NOVELIST AS VOCATION by Haruki Murakami. Murakami has been an inspiration of mine for years, his fiction is surreal and beautiful and makes me feel weird in a way that nobody else can, like I've woken from a dream that feels somehow very important.

But more importantly, his book WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING was one of my favorite pieces of non-fiction, so to have him dedicate a whole book to talking about writing as a career was really exciting. Thankfully, Nick was on the ball and told me about it (thanks Nick!).

I've gotten about halfway through it, and it was my intention to write a blog post about each essay after I finished reading it and dissecting it. The problem is, the first half has been so amazingly transformational for me that I started WRITING A NOVEL and that has taken a lot of time I would've normally been doing blog posts.

Also, if you're a frequent blog post reader, you'll note that a lot of my posts are drafted while I'm walking the dog. It has been too cold (for me, a Californian) to walk the dog some days (she's not a cold weather dog so anything below 45F (7C) is out of the question), and even if I do walk I don't have the willpower to dictate a blog post, since I'm spending most of my time thinking "wow it's so cold out here when do I get to go inside again."

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"Ah, a novel!" you say to yourself. It is not Jane 3. It's something else entirely, though it's composed of pieces of things I had been working on over 2021 when we were still mostly in lockdown (and some things from like 2010). I don't want to talk more about it. I'm very superstitious about my novel writing process, and one of my rules is that I can't talk about it until it's done.

I think it has to do with something about the mental satisfaction of the task. There was research about something one time that said that if you tell someone a cool idea you have for a creative work and they say "wow that's so cool!" that part of your brain has checked it off as "oh, okay, that's done then." Because you got the positive feedback you were craving as a creative, even though you didn't actually do any of the work.

I'm very easily influenced by that sort of thing, so I need to keep my mouth shut.

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PODCAST UPDATE!

If you're not a Discord member, then you don't yet know that Matt had COVID through November, and thus we ran out of episodes. I have some guest stuff cooking up and had planned on releasing it throughout December, but again December has sort of ambushed me. One of the guest episodes (it'll be two, actually) is already recorded and will be up for the yearly December 23rd release to help those of you who are travelling or need a distraction from all the other holiday chaos.

The second will probably drop in Jan, then I will need to record the other guest episode, and then hopefully regular recordings with Matt will resume.

ALSO, the first recording of STAR WARS BOOK CLUB will probably happen in January. I'm not sure if that'll be Patreon or main feed (probably start on Patreon and then eventually go to main feed) but I'm excited about that. Leslie, Nick, Seamus and I are reading the classic ROGUE SQUADRON by Michael A. Stackpole. I've been listening to the audio version, which is VERY GOOD. It has music and sound effects!

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That's it for now. Only one more day of work and then hopefully some breathing room for everything else.