NaNoWriMo 2017

If it is not obvious, managing nearly eight different blogs and working three full time jobs has eaten away at my blogging abilities. But that wasn't the reason my NaNo got derailed at all this year. As of today, I did cross into 50,000 territory. I had initially started out aiming for 61,000 words. On Thursday last week, my anxiety crossed new boundaries. There was no reasonable way for me to make a personal best this year. 

I don't talk a lot about anxiety. I've had it for years. But on Thursday, after one of my regular jobs, I was informed I would not go in on Friday. The entire employee base was denied entry to work for safety and the seriousness of the situation. Police barricaded all entry points. For the first time in my life, my worse fears were at my feet. Where could I go? This still has not resolved and the police action is valid. I'm personally prepared to return to work, I know on Monday I will have specific information that I will not be able share on social media but marching orders are what they will be. But on Friday, while I was managing family and work from the car, I broke. The idea of looking at a personal best was impossible. I have never written a sentence of NaNo from my car on the side of a road, but this year I did. And while I did so, I couldn't look at my characters. I wanted to cry. I wanted to be anywhere but useless. And in my car, with my laptop open, I was officially useless. I decided 

I could not make 61,000. I would have to make 50,000 and just write a few extra days. And like that, my anxiety leveled off.

What did I learn?

• I have gotten better at describing a single situation. I still need to work on my chapter transitions. I really have good scenes built up when I think about the things I want to hit. 
• My main character is very much an introvert. They relish in their solitude, but do not resent the people that pull them out for snippets of time. My introverts value the world they have to navigate but in their solitude, they shine. But the world is unkind at times to introverts and it seems so much bigger than they are.
• If i keep working at my major plot holes, I eventually do find a great way to fix them. 
• Using real life events are a bad idea. This year because of some situations beyond my control, I went with a "solution" that then became front page news. I cannot publish this story. Fictional pain that then becomes real pain, even by coincidence is not a real plot point. See my entire paragraph of anxiety above.

NaNo goodies are now mine for the taking. I will write all thirty days, get my first thirty day badge. Then back to work.

Stalled out but not down

So I've been puttering around with no less than twelve pretty serious works in progress.
I had settled that my last year's NaNo would be cut down into a short story, but then I stalled out into making some serious decisions for my characters and I just did not feel like that was organic enough to address.
Then I have this huge math book project and I couldn't decide whether or not to put work samples in or not. But that was actually a 'little' problem compared to getting information in there correctly. That project is slowly coming together.
I have six geography projects in progress. The problem there is trying to gather enough research to be credible. Plus all the map illustrations are currently still in progress.
Then there's my newest Stick Figure book. Yes! I have another Stick Figure book in progress. Today's breakthrough there was actually really profound. I'm partnered into an art class this last part of the term and today we introduced proportional facial feature drawing. And all the information I learned nearly twenty-five years ago came back. Unlike my last Stick Figure book, which was based on Shakespeare, it's a lot harder when the same character is at the center of the story and his outward appearance changes because it's literally years of abuse his body takes in the story. So how do you know it's this guy and not another guy? It's the face. It will always be the face. I finally had a breakthrough about facial shapes looking at the options given. I reviewed classical proportions, appropriate due to the content of the book, and was reminded the stress of facial expressions had in classical sculptures. On the plus side, it's also encouraging me to draw larger, which is all right, I can have a few views of much more detailed faces.
There are assorted works of fiction and non-fiction all demanding different attentions from me and I still have yet to address them all. But I will. And I need to publish this summer because I don't know when I'll have a chance ever again.

Those mid-NaNoWriMo reminders

I am 34,000+ words into this year's NaNoWriMo. Again, I aim for 60,000 words. Other than being seriously sick last week, 60,000 looks like it may just be in the cards again. Except for a few things.
One of the pieces of advice I recently took to heart was looking at making sure the characters did not always get what they wanted. And I realized, part of my current NaNoWriMo is boring because I am literally letting my characters get what they want. On the plus side, however, I have been re-working scenes (read I re-wrote them) and getting to those roadblocks.
Other things of note: I did not realize unto recently how lonely all of my characters are without associates in their lives to help guide them through life's journey. I get my characters happy with being in the lives of someone else but no one else is in their life at all. No sage, no friend, no comic relief. This is why my stories stop-start so abruptly. I need to work on that.

And I need to get back to work. I am too old to be doing this on a Friday night.

Lessons from NaNoWriMo 2015

So this year, I returned to the short story. I have found that I'm actually a lot better at short stories than trying to directly apply myself into a huge novel. There is something mentally relieving when I can switch gears if I am not feeling the characters I'm working on at the time.

One of the struggles I really could not compromise on was the fact that I was working on some ideas  in my stories and I had no purpose for the characters. I just had these one or two phrases to write the story and it made being a "pantser" (writing by the seat of my pants), a lot less appealing for the first year. I can be flexible with my writing and accept if there should not be something I should push with my writing, but without traditional literary themes (exploration of 'riches', emotional contrasts, political statements, emotional growth) I found my first draft stifling. My characters turned wooden and were hardly moving. I was really disappointed in that fact. Previously, most of my characters were characters to be proud of. And this year, while I had interesting stories, I did not have interesting characters.

In the case where I had an interesting character, I felt shackled by an uprising in the writing community to avoid some types of story lines because they are all too easy to use as "ways to make the story work." And while normally, I ignore that advice, I thought I should try for once just to see if I could look at the tasks faced by my characters and come up with less common tasks for my characters to overcome and that are just as emotionally shackling as some more traumatic human experiences. And they are hard to fathom. Most of these struggles are deeply pained sorts of losses and with out exploration, they continue to eat away at the character, stripping them to their basic level and no one really knows how to rebuild from the emotional destruction better than the character.

So for next year, I'm going to do more than just "try to write more". I want to commit back to writing more like once a week for a full hour. I want to make sure I address more basic literary themes, based on leaving them in the dust this year, I realized if I had addressed them, my stories would have been stronger. And finally, I want to remember that the characters come first in fictional writing. It is not just their world I am building, I am building them.

When You See Characters Go Wrong

Originally, when I was composing this post, I was thinking of a specific movie. A cartoon that recently came out. And as I thought about it, I wasn't ready for the emotional backlash that would come with mentioning the specific movie, so I thought I'd talk around the issue at hand.

I'm looking at the composition of the male v. female balance in media as drawn out by the Geena Davis Institute and also considering the Bledchel Test when I write these days. One of my newer projects is larger in scope than initially anticipated because it is non-fiction and crosses over several issues with regards to race and gender. But that ignores characters, fiction, where my heart lies.

So in the aforementioned movie, the character is forced to physically change to take on the challenge that is placed before the character. The character does so reluctantly. And the character gets the challenge and wins and everyone celebrates. And in the sequel, because what is life these days without a sequel, the character changes physically yet again.

What I object to: a character having to physically change. Emotional changes come and go, and yes, sometimes they physically change because of the emotional change, but the removal of some part surgically. Apparently the only way to achieve your goal is to change physically. And it's not always about getting to feeling attractive, or having someone in your life, or being accepted. But here it is, the story as it is laid out.

So how do I respond as an author?

• I look at the character I have in my folders and try to make sure that should they need to physically change that it may be against their will. 
• I have characters that do physically change because they age or are gravely ill.
• I have characters that understand the physical changes are permanent and there is nothing to reverse the changes
• My characters see the benefits and succumb to the evils of their changes.
• My characters find their happiness without the physical change.

As for gender balancing, it is hard, my primary fictional work usually has a romance component. It is easier in family stories as I can always find a model family, regardless of gender balances.

As for addressing the diversity of characters, I find this probably the most challenging. I find there is little I am interested in outside of the creation of a period piece and even then, because of my lack of first hand, or even second hand, knowledge, my worlds are sometimes too ideal in the diversity world.

I have three major projects in my lap right now. I seriously wrote my opening scene in my newest work into a corner and so I decided to look at my characterizations. And I realized I had no motivation beyond very simple old hat tricks and I wanted my character to be better than that.

Hopefully, my character will change. I will find the answer eventually. Characters are those voices that speak to me, they may have a path I can see for them, but they have to get on that path and go. If I chose the wrong character, I'll find another.

Writing is demanding. I have more to finish.

Diversity in Writing and Television

I spent a chunk of my morning today watching a Charlie Chan movie. If you've missed them, Charlie Chan happens to be a man of Chinese descent with thirteen children, a wife, and is a well versed homicide detective. One of the trademarks of Charlie Chan's character is that he speaks in an accent. It is easy enough to understand, but there are nuances that are built into the Charlie Chan character that are a part of the world of the 1940s.

There are parts of me that would love an updated Charlie Chan. Charlie Chan, as a character, was not easily fooled. Even when his older children, and eventually his grandsons, tried to help him, he was not at all bothered by the mess or noise that came with the world of excited youth. But, making a movie or even a television remake might be mired in misdirection these days.

Which leads me to other considerations of diversity. I'm a huge TV watcher. Thank goodness for the development of the DVR. I can write and work on watching some TV all at the same time. But there are two shows I spend a lot of time on, that sometimes I wonder about.

The first is "Two Broke Girls". The girls are working as waitresses in an up and coming neighborhood in a diner run by a man who happens to be Asian. This man is a recent immigrant to the United States and over the four seasons has been the subject of many jokes the least not of which is his height. I can promise you it has been demonstrated through the show multiple times that both the man and the two women that they mutually care for each other, the jokes are a part of how they show affection. But initially, and even if you step away from that, it does look like they are going round for round in the quest for who can be the most cruel.

The second show I watch is "Jane the Virgin". Pushing aside issues arising from the main plot line of the story, again here is a show about diversity in the world. I appreciate this show because Jane is a worthy character in her world. Ignoring her pregnancy and the plot lines involving directly to her pregnancy, she contributes and wants to contribute to her world. She views the world with both feet planted in thing that is most important to her: her family. This is in direct contrast to a Pilot episode of "Cristela", also of Latin background, that exists on another station. I'm annoyed at Cristela because while I can accept the family dynamic, Cristela is disregarded at work as just someone who happens to not be white. Cristela has a lot to contribute but her contributions are the punch line. I realize in the same breath of contrasting directly to Jane and Cristela: Jane is a telenovella, a drama, Cristela is a half hour comedy. But where Jane is valued and even when all the things she wants does not work out; Cristela is a series of gags at Cristela's expense.

And then this leads to the mid-year replacement of "Fresh Off The Boat". I saw early trailers for this TV show, and frankly, I will be surprised if it makes the rest of the season. An Asian family leaves their mostly Asian community and moves to a community where they are the minority. There are several culture clashes, namely when the oldest son goes to school and the smell of his lunch puts off his classmates this leads to the son asking for a more American lunch. While I think some of the interactions beyond the home in this comedy prove to be useful and not intentionally limiting, as an entire show, I don't know how to place value on this contribution to culture.

I am reminded of one of the first Asian family comedies: All American Girl with Margaret Cho. And that show completely resonated with me. The desire for cultural conditions that did not exist in with the complexities of traditional Asian American expectations. While I was much younger and some of the nuances did probably fly past me, the show was great at not isolating the family. 

But why bother with looking at these issues? Partly because I have been following the work of the Geena Davis Institute. They are primarily an organization that tracks and shares data on the equality of gender in the entertainment industry. They've done exhaustive research on the number of male/female characters and executives making shows in all sorts of shows and movies. The study that caught my attention was one that recently discussed the impact of non-named characters in shows. That the camera panning around a room setting the scene has not been 50/50 male/female. Even the perception of a charcter's gender in a background is default selected as male. The problem that this leads to: little boys and girls do not get a chance to see themselves as those characters. Not just in shows that are aimed at the kids, but shows their parents watch that kids might walk in on or hear their parents talking about.

Does this matter to shows I watch that take place in history? Not at all. If the goal of a historical drama or comedy is to represent that era then there is nothing wrong with the show not necessarily reaching the same benchmarks. There are more subtle, historically correct, manners to accomplish a certain goal, but social awareness should not the end goal of historical fiction.

So this leads into writing. I admit I have been profoundly affected by my mostly white washed upbringing. There is nothing wrong with being of European descent. The majority of my friends are from some European country, several generations ago, some as recent as having been made citizens in their life time. But I also know that there is nothing out there for me: a multi-ethnic person. So while shows like "Fresh Off The Boat", "Two Broke Girls", "Jane the Virgin", and "Charlie Chan" all have given snippets of truth in my life they have not been able to classify my experience through drama or through humor. And I put a lot of stock on humor.

So how do I help contribute? I really find it off putting to describe someone's physical characteristics. I think that's one of my weakest points in my writing. Even if I were not to be blunt about the physical features of my characters and more poetic, I know as a reader: I ignore those tidbits. And then the role of a person by ethnicity matters too: roles of leadership, roles of cleverness/intelligence, and roles of fear are not limited by ethnicity, physical ability, mental ability, or gender. But for me as a writer: all of these aspects have to be natural. They cannot be formulated like a boy band. Unlike the rules for a hero's journey or aspects of a continual plot, characters know no limits. At least in writing, unlike performances where I am limited to the types of people who have come forward. I am not shackled in my imagination.

I really do hope, one day, television will be better about social equality in modern settings. As a writer, I need to work on being more inclusive in my characters.

The Post NaNoWriMo Blog Wrap-up

My NaNoWriMo has been validated. And an impressive 55, 118 words was the final count.

What I learned this year: I have gotten rusty when it comes to fiction. I am not reading enough different materials anymore and I am not developing my characters the way I need them to develop into deep creatures of habit.

So what I may end up doing next year is finding characters I have already worked on or at least tried to work on previously and finding a deeper story to provide the depth and the generous story quality I know I can create.

I also happen to know that I am not creating those moments for my characters, moments that I hold in deep emotion. Those have been harder to create this year.

The best news: the growth out of the deep dark that I can write was not nearly as bad this year. I could write a dark, emotionally haunting scene, and as an author I could walk away and not feel the emotion boiling over limiting my ability to recover.

I don't know if that is a reflection of maturity as a writer, or the fact that I did not care about my work this year.

As for my company books that are pending: I have five or six books lined up and I just need to get them to be organized.

So new goals:

1. Write more. This isn't a quantity, this is a discipline. And more in fiction.
2. Remember that I can only improve. Or at least that is my goal to continue to improve.
3. Ignore the goal of publishing. It would be great if I was worth lots of money from my writing, but it is not the only thing I can do.
4. Know that I am in this for the long haul. I like writing. I always have. 

NaNoWriMo 2014: done. And now a little time to relax while I prepare some books for my company for publication.

More Rantings from the NaNoWriMo Side

I don't think I've ever blogged so much in one month through this account. Let me tell you something, it's for a great cause.

So to date: at this moment I've written 12,001 words. That last word was a hard won fight.

Here's why: I realized that I'm telling a story about a character who has no likes or dislikes. She has no attachments, and her relationships last only as long as a few breaths.

Shouldn't she be a secondary character?

The character challenge. Building characters because they have nothing is pretty key here. Not because they rise from nothing to become nothing, but the character who cannot do anything, shackled by oppression...it's almost 18th century French or Russian literature...And then they drift into the aether of existence.

I didn't know that when I chose this character to follow. I thought I had another story here. Wow. I love this journey.

Near future: I need to cross into 16,000 word territory to make up for the 2 nights this week I've skipped writing. I need to focus on the world around my character more. I'm excited and giddy. Right now I'm also worried that my goal of 60,000 with being happy cracking 55, 000 is going to be too much. But I'm going to try. I've got nothing to lose right?

And now, for a little fiction

I don't remember when I wrote this. But I apparently did so.

My first love has never been non-fiction, it has always been fiction. Characters, emotion, descriptions. I love writing for that simple reason. Those elements don't exist anywhere else in life, but through imagination I can perceive a variety of different worlds, all vastly different from my own.

But this, I'm not sure why I had started, I am cross posting this from my personal blog today because it speaks to the way I start--typically with one character's voice.

So, I give you about 50 words of my mind from I can't remember when..

---

He asked, "How would I know if you loved me?" With saucer eyes and a muddy shirt.

I thought for a minute and put him on my knee.

He kept going while I stalled for my answer. "Mommy loves me with the kisses and the way she makes my lunch. and Daddy loves me with the way he shows me how to do things to help him. But how do you love me?"

I was silent I had never thought of this answer before.

"I love you because I laugh at your jokes, even the ones you don't know that I know. I love you by the way I turn a blind eye to letting you get away with mischief."

"I love you in the way that I answer the problems and you know my work is as important as you are in my life."

"I love your smile when things are just perfect in the world as you see it."

"I love your curiosity."

"But most of all I love you because you remind me of the potential of the future that I still want to work at."

There was silence for a few minutes. I worried that I hadn't said enough. Finally, "I would like it if you loved me with less words."

It Takes A Community

I want to say, as a writer: you can't write what you don't experience. You can anticipate emotions, but you might not know the depths of despair or the heights of plateaus truly until you have lived through it. A few years back, one of the short stories I wrote for my NaNoWriMo was a collection of letters written by fictional parents to their unborn children. I don't think I really captured the depths of worry, sorrow, and fears that parents could bring as well as the joy and the hopes that parents often have. Just around the corner, a co-worker of mine would be a parent for the first time the following year. And then in February, we got a letter from the co-worker about the baby, the baby was going to have a pretty serious birth defect. We rallied around her. And when the baby was born extraordinarily premature, we were as supportive as we could be. When the baby died a few days later, we all came together and helped the family out the best we could.

Again, at my feet lays an experience I never wanted to have. A good friend of mine from high school lost her little boy on July 4th in an accident. And I've challenged some thoughts in another blog and he was a wonderful little boy, but again, the depths of loss leave me floundering for the words to share the truth that community comes together, even a small one for this little boy.

This taints my look at things. And yet today, something else came my way that was much more mundane. One of my NaNo groups had an author who was flustered over the fact that his work was lacking in gender diversity. I am not sure how old this author is, but I was struck by how much he was troubled by this conceptually. He had tried adding more characters, even supporting characters but they weren't nearly as interesting and they were only shells as he had described them. He wanted fully participating characters.

As an author, and especially one who participates in NaNoWriMo, I usually don't give a rip what genders my characters are. Gender eventually comes to the surface and it all balances itself out, though admittedly: I have never written a gender neutral character or a transgendered character. But again I could not ignore the idea that an author had wanted to make sure that his story lived in a gender balanced world.

I look at my own constructed life: I spend a lot of time with women, but I have spent a lot of contact time with men. But each individual representation had elements of stereotypes on both sides of the gender. However, my last 3 published stories all had main characters that were female, with a heavy dose of women surrounding them. The stories that have yet to be published that contain male main characters are surrounded by men. But that is also a result of things that I know about how deep secrets are comfortably shared within genders. A greater trust has to be met to share across genders be it marriage/partnership, siblings, or a long time of friendship.

I sometimes wonder that my own writing is too lacking in diversity due to the fact that my world is the world that I see. To be honest, I have only know 3-4 practicing Muslims, and only 1 Pagan. Of those 5 people, I think only the Pagan would list me within their good friends (a significant difference of best friend). I also do know that in my experience, I am all too aware of the contrived racially, gender balanced writing (High School Musical and upcoming Teen Beach Movie--I realize that these are screenplays, but they address the same things). There was a presentation to me that discussed the limitations of popular media with regards to racial equality (that there is no equality for races), but I am also struck that I know of shows that are specifically targeted at certain ethnicities and yet they are not at all racially balanced. 

As a concept: diversity I'm flummoxed by it as a writer. I know diversity, I've lived it most of my life even in its limitations: I socialized with people with multiple ethnic identities and religious choices, I know the difference between being the leader and knowing when to take a supporting role, and I have friends, good friends of several genders and gender preferences. I'm lucky: I live in a state that has a lot of representatives of both mainstream and minorities.

This becomes a sticking point though as I am on the precipice of preparing materials for social sciences to be used with students with developmental disabilities. I know it's the point of educational materials to be as politically correct as possible and be the introduction to the world beyond the four walls of school.

And then I take a breath.

It's the community that will give rise to the work. Both fiction and non-fiction. I can strive for the diversity without purposely putting it to task. I can ask myself to consider to have my characters step outside of prescribed stereotypes, that they will rise to the task. And I know they all will be okay. Because my friends have 2 special angels on their shoulders. And I have more experiences, albeit, experiences I hope no one ever has to see.