February 8th, 2010 by Neal

I notice a continuing pattern. Monday I say BAM! What a bloody great day! And Friday, I get down on myself on how much work I’ve done. I am still working hard, but I do believe I just may have discovered a correlation between working for most of a week and… get this… being tired!

While I write that glorious piece of thought up and submit it to a leading journal, I also produce this, which pleases me:

4,070. Not a bad day. I was aided, I will admit, by writing in the tone of another character’s voice. It’s the first time narration occurs via another character in a Hal book, in the form of a found note. Very fun.

February 5th, 2010 by Neal

A less powerful motivator when you can’t write or don’t feel like it.

Every day I spin the wheel of destiny and try and figure out whether I can write on a given day. Monday started good, at 23,000 words, and this week ends at 34.7 K. That’s better than two thousand words a day, and yet I still feel like a wastrel.

I was 54 pages in, now it’s 84, and yet I go into the weekend feeling as though I haven’t done enough.

I did, however, triumph against an awful darkness the wilderness brings, and had my problems sharply ratcheted into perspective last night. Slow but steady, and there are more important things in this world that may miss you if you keep your eyes shut and your blinders on. I regret that.

Even if I keep this pace, the novel will be done by the end of the month.

February 2nd, 2010 by Neal

Yeah, today. You thought you’d get me, didn’t you? Started out with utter despair, unmitigated funk, and then I turned you around and pounded out three thousand words. What you got, today? Nothing!

EVIDENCE.

Now I must turn off my phone, because if I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that bragging about turning a day around leads to dogs dying, guilt calls, or bad news.

But thank you, Muse, for saving me today from myself. I was in a bad place.

Writing really does keep me alive. If anyone really understood the depths of that, I might not catch so much shit from 9-5ers. But at any rate, living is its own reward in that capacity.

There really is no better feeling than thinking you’re going to lose a day to the funk, and then suddenly not. Usually there’s a catalyst. Today it was my new wall, on my desk, which I’ll post about soon. It basically has a graffiti area where I can write lines that come to me, and I popped a couple up that cheered me and pushed me forward. Stupid shit, but it works. Today’s work is brought to you by the line:

“Stop being sad. Just kick against the pricks. Trust me.”

Courtesy half me, half Johnny Cash, but it works either way.

It’s not an optimistic song, and it’s a religious song, making it a strange song to save my day. But it’s also a song about misery coming to reap for the best man in his world, and a good enough man for any world, by Cash’s context. It’s a song about eventual success in the wash of a wave of destruction. It’s a song that acknowledges our peril of death, but puts forth the hope that somehow all will be right, even if the process may not always be what we want or our interpretation of truth. That’s conflict. That’s life in the midst of death.

February 1st, 2010 by Neal

I introduced the major subplot today, about sixty-five pages in. For the last two I’ve put them in in the first fifteen pages. It just speaks to either the nature of the larger dilemma in the book, or to the eventual length of this piece. I see both as positive things, given that there is now more motion to the plot, but I feel I’ve justified the longer time spent establishing the narrative. In the first two books, Hal was fairly far away from me, and in this book he gets close, so there’s more to say there. By close to me, I mean he’s experiencing more qualities I have experienced through the victim he’s exploring, so there’s more to find and say about the guy’s life and the people around him, which is kinda meta and fun.

All in all, another good, inspired day. It started slow, but I’m pleased with how it ended.

January 28th, 2010 by Neal

A powerful motivator.

I felt bad for taking yesterday to build, and the fact that I’m cutting out early for a RPG this weekend, so I put in a 4,000 word day.

I can already tell that this will be easily the longest Hal so far, and it might just exceed my 110,000 word goal. Most of the reason for this is that it’s not a causal mystery, where a series of events leads to the solution directly, but rather something I’ve patterned more in the Block style. One thing Block is very good at doing is having the character do his thing, with all of the pieces, and pick up one little bit here and there, with a lot of malarky to throw you off, stuff that seems like it might mean something but ultimately doesn’t. It’s a subtlety I’m trying to learn and improve on.

Now I gotta go get that ink I meant to get before it rained two days ago, and eat. Yeah. Eating is good. Necessary.

January 27th, 2010 by Neal

Because I spent most of today busting ass and creating my new desk. It isn’t even finished yet, but it’s close. It’s much bigger than the last one, by a factor of about ten square feet. It’s also lower, which allows me closer access to the keyboard and more distance to the monitor, which is nice, given the diagonal. It also opens up the room, along with giving a sense of satisfaction having created my own workspace. I’ve still got a few more steps, but I’ll finish up tomorrow and put it all together, then probably post pictures on Monday.

I’ve finished the workspace, but I have yet to add the two columns, two shelves, the 4 inch PVC pipe wire trench, and the hinged, ramped, two foot tall dog bed so Hunter can watch me work at eye level.

I do not fuck around. Bwa ha ha ha!

My only regret is no space for the left rear speaker, but soon my front speakers will be hanging higher up, for better sound quality, and my two guitars will also be hanging from the pillars.

I’m going to recycle one of the old desk sections for use as a keyboard area, and I’ve already got plans to move all four of my writing room bookcases (ugh). Fen shui for the addlepated mind.

January 26th, 2010 by Neal

For the first time since 2006, I need to buy ink. Yeah, I think I made a good choice with my printer, heh. That’s about, what… five novel’s worth of printing? Brother HL-2040, if you must know.

More research today than I expected, so I only got 2,300 words, but it’s good enough for me. I’m gonna go for a walk and buy printer ink.

January 25th, 2010 by Neal

That’s how we do it.

Last night I pulled out an old journal and found the “Dream House” I designed when I was twenty-three. This novel, unlike anything I’ve ever written before, is an examination of what writing has meant to me. Of course, this is all gussied up in concepts of character and hidden behind a story, but novels essentially help me work through things. Before it was high, lofty concepts. The last two were me saying to myself that it’s all right to be optimistic and to fight evil and to do what I do with utter faith. This is more of the same, with the added benefit of, having found my optimism, being able to look back and see where I went wrong, and where I went right in ways that were unfeasible to survival. It’s kind of a love letter to that, with a nod to the consequences. Hard to explain this without telling the story, but that’s what’s going on. Sometimes I think I should just post these entries after the book is done, but eh. That’s what an archive is for if anyone cares that much.

At any rate, the house. I’ve been taking it, putting it in Google Sketch-Up (which is a shitload of fun) and putting it all together in a real-world model. I did it with the desk I’m building for myself, too, and I’m having a lot of fun creating what is essentially sculpture with this shit. I’ll share it at some point, but for now, it’s showing me how awesome and impractical the dream house is.

When I was 22 I resolved to work on houses until I was thirty, and, according to my fairly honest rough figures, I would be a millionaire and have the house of my dreams, which I then sketched. At that point, it was economically feasible to believe that every third house you repaired you would owe free and clear, and on the theory that a fifty percent mortgage paid off would allow you the money to fix a house and/or build a house, the math was there. All I had to do was scrimp and save through the first house and fix it.

The plan went well. On paper, I had 250,000 in equity at one point. But see, that’s the problem. I went bankrupt, and my house will be auctioned on the auction block on the fifth of next month, and yet I still technically have about 70,000 in equity. But then, I have comics that are worth 500 dollars… in theory. Things are only worth what people will pay for them, and like comics, real estate dried up.

The rich stayed rich, and the poor learned a lesson they’ll pay off for the next decade or so.

At the time I designed it, the lumber for the dream house to build it myself (and at the time I could, but now I cannot) would run about 120,000 dollars in material cost. Now, my dream house is more like 260,000, which puts it more and more out of reach. That’s also disregarding the cost of land, the fact that I am now happy in the city where before I wanted to run away, and the fact that if I had a shitload of money now, I wouldn’t spend it on a house. Not for a few more years, anyway.

But still I putz on this CAD-like thing, making rooms, adding trapdoors and Ashcroft hatches, the rope swing, the descending floor, the gun safes with bananas in them, the roof that opens to the stars. It’s a lot like writing a book, because it’s a world you’d like to be a part of but never can. Like the world of the rich, sometimes.

For all I know I’ll strike it rich with writing. For all I know I’ll die poor and alone. But the things that can keep you alive in either case (and the subject of Blood on the Keyboard) is that it’s far more important to be satisfied with what you do as you are doing it then the end result, necessarily, because life is a fleeting thing. The old punk ethic of “Why would you ever do something you couldn’t stand behind, no matter how asinine it seems to others?”

Dreaming isn’t about whether you can really fucking fly or punch a moose to Nebraska.

I’ve been here:

January 22nd, 2010 by Neal

SUCKED. The Fear had me. Hard to describe to anyone else. The worst thing about The Fear is that it 1) Cannot be described to anyone else in a way they will understand 2) Involves a great deal of the mind saying you’re fine and should be producing when really, you need nothing but Two and A Half Men or something equally brainless, maybe a shot of booze, maybe a goddamned bike ride or long walk. Not that it worked yesterday, anyway. Anyway, point of bullet point is that your brain recoils in horror, rebels, and tells you things that aren’t, in fact, logical or with point. 3) It is usually a product of paranoia and is unpredictable given its similarity to laziness and lack of corollary (often) with exhaustion. It grips you and makes you second-guess things eternally, everything, and I am absolutely positive it is the result of the beaten-dog syndrome I seem to have whereby I can’t trust anyone since I’ve been hit so many times for trying to do normal good things like eat, clothe myself, or be kind.

Usually it comes with a bout of sleep loss, random crying, and the screams. Last night was fortunate. I had new shoes and new socks and a few things to cheer me up, so it only came with a few jags and I went right to sleep, mostly because I realized the day a loss and calmed myself with six hours of reading. I still lost most of a day of work. Good to note, even the worst of the jags now come with about 1,000 words, which is enough to give a college student the runs.

At any rate, the reason I share these deeply personal things is that they are a necessary part of the process, often, and in the end, when you come through them, they often inform the work in ways, making them better. Sometimes they make them worse, but usually, if you bork a whole chapter, you find one line in there from your day you “lost” that is one of the better ones of the rewrite.

I woke up today feeling much better, and managed this thereby:

I can now go into the weekend happy, and let all the bad shit go. That’s as it should be. And now I can go for walks to vent it out, thanks to the shoes. That’s an undoubtedly good thing.

There is something fucked up to be said for how wrong artistry can be when one can produce two novels in a year, successfully survive a barrage of atrocities, and even manage savings, and then immediately go into a spiral fear of failure. I think it’s something in the brain chemistry, part of what makes people write. Then again, many, many people are successful writers who never experience such things, so maybe it’s a product of dysfunction. And maybe, ironically, the thing that makes me wonder why I am not more successful than I am at the age of thirty is the very thing that has stopped me from being a success at thirty, my paranoia, my dysfunction in myself from the way I’ve lived. The Fear.

But like I’m always told when I point out that I’m afraid of being a bad father because I’m worried I’ll fuck it up, and as I advise others, that fear alone is the first step most others don’t dare to take, and thereby, perhaps, I will be able to triumph.

Hope springs anew.

January 20th, 2010 by Neal

(”Letterbox” From the first draft of my first novel. One of the few things I still think funny, even though you have to be VHS era to get it. Yes, it is intentionally cropped. These are the jokes, try and keep up, ah say ah say ah say…)

When writing a novel I feel and act through what my characters are feeling and acting through. It’s kind of like method acting, I would suppose. I don’t need to be on Saturn to write a dude on Saturn, but if he’s mourning the loss of his wife, I feel that to my core. If I couldn’t, I’d discard the scene and rewrite. That’s how I know I’m doing okay.

The death at the opening of Hal three is profoundly sad, and the exploration of it is even more so, on a personal level. That’s why yesterday was blah. In addition to the natural fear of the beginning of a new novel that still comes even after I’ve done more than a half dozen of the damned things, I was struck in the head by the loss of what feels like an old friend.

I plumb the depths of old stories to find stuff for new stories, and one thing that’s for sure is that my first two novels will never be published without significant revision. Nonetheless, I am continuing a character from the first novel in a way that will not at all necessitate said original novel, and nonetheless, I know this kid.

Anyway, now that’s out of the way, and I feel I can get moving more, and take more joy in it. Part of the fun of a great character, I’m learning, is the optimism that springs from despair, as opposed to before, where I was solely confronted with surviving despair with at minimum four limbs. The idea of triumph over it makes writing more fun.

At any rate, I am pleased with the progress this week thusfar, and yesterday made it feel like it might be an utter bust: