I have started the novel over. yes, again. This means I have thrown out a 120,000 word draft of this thing, and then thrown out another 15,000 words (or not, depending.) I think I don’t know if I hate the book or not, at this point, but it clearly hates me.

I am taking a breather and working on some short stories. Some of these aren’t going any better, but at least the drafts aren’t so long.

I did not even pretend to do NaNo this year. At some point in the last couple of months I started getting really concerned about my writing, which then made me afraid of it a little bit, so the thought of writing 50,000 words in one month, or trying to, sent me into convulsions. It may be that I need to adjust my meds. I didn’t used to be this much of a pussy.

I’m declaring December a get shit done month so I can finally make some headway on all these projects, and wrestle the opening of the novel to the ground. Once done; I’ll feel much better.

It gets better after you break through the wall, right?

I got about halfway into revising the book and discovered that the plot makes no sense. I’m sure it made sense at the time, but when I really thought some things out it all fell apart. I mean, I know what I meant, but it just didn’t work. There were a lot of things I liked about it. Some wordbuilding details, some of the big ideas. I came to the conclusion that I liked these things and loved the characters, but thought they needed to be in a better story. So I decided to set fire to it and just start over.

It’s liberating, really, when you make that decision. It allowed me to incorporate about a hundred new things that had occured to me as I slogged my way through version 1. It also allowed me to cut a whole lot of clumsy exposition and focus on what happens and who does it. My beta readers (saints as they are) will have to let me know if it’s working or not.

I blame Julia Cameron. I’ve been reading my way through The Artist’s Way, her twelve week course on higher creativity. I say reading it because I haven’t actually been doing it as completing every exercise would mean doing nothing else for twelve weeks. But I’ve been doing the morning pages, which consist of three pages of freewriting every day. They’re supposed to be done in the morning, per the name, but I’ve been cheating and usually doing them around lunchtime. It’s by freewriting about that book that I discovered my problems with it, and the ways to fix them in version 2.

The Artists Way popped up on my radar because of Mur Lafferty and I should be Writing. It sounded interesting and I made a mental note to seek it out. Then I was shelf-reading during my volunteer hours at our local library and there it was. Synchronicity, Cameron would call it.

One of the things she talks about is all the excuses we make for ourselves to not be creative. We decide we can only be creative if we have certain things, i.e. alcohol, or chaos, or, in my case, Mania.

I had tracked down my most creative periods of my life and found that Bipolar hypomania was a factor in all of them. My recent hypomanic episode had left me with an entire novel (yes, another one) loaded in my head. I had begun to despair of being able to be creative when I wasn’t having a manic episode. And mania, for me, always starts off just fine. There are a pleasant few days, an increase in energy, I don’t need to sleep, etc. But then it goes toxic and I end up in a mixed episode where I’m nothing but angry and stressed and tense twenty-four hours a day. So you can see why I’d like to opt out of mania entirely and not rely on it for my creativity.

And I can’t say it’s been a magic bullet, but reading the book and doing some of the exercises, and doing the morning pages did help me recreate the book in my head and get started on rewriting it. I can’t say I’ve been mania-free during that period, but it’s helped me show up on the page no matter how I was feeling otherwise. I’m no longer waiting to ride out the neurochemical storms.

Someday, probably when I’m done with this book and am waiting to start on the next, I will return to the Artists Way and do it the right way. In the mean time, I’m jazzed about the book again and think I can really do it right this time.

We’ll see what happens.

Despite that, it hasn’t been a very productive couple of weeks. My Three hour writing day hasn’t had a chance to happen because of schduling and doctor’s appointments, and all that stuff but also my own complete lack of energy and focus. But these are all just excuses … bad writer! Bad!

I did manage to get a chapter edited and out to first readers, so that’s something. And this week is not totally non-crazy but isn’t totally crazy either, so it looks better. When talking about this schedule and my new determination to light a fire under my own ass and get things done, I was expressing my concern about doing it all and my wife had this little nugget of simple wisdom … you’re just going to have to get better at managing your time. You think?

Sometimes you just need the people you love to see through your bullshit.

One thing that was holding me back (at the risk of layering on more excuses) was the fact that I was having a lot of sleep issues, which meant I was just dead during the day. I had a couple of sleep studies done and at first they diagnosed me with sleep apnea (which made zero sense) and then they took it back and told me I was grinding my teeth in my sleep and had an acid reflux problem, both of which were waking me up for forgotten micro-seconds and keeping me from getting really deep sleep. So now I wear a mouthguard and take acid reducers. Yes, I am now the type of person who needs gear to sleep, but it’s better than that CPAP mask they tried to convince me I was going to have to wear. It took me a while to get used to the mouthguard, but it does seem to be helping.

This is all separate to my other sleep issue, which was week-long bouts of insomnia. This, I’ve learned, is a result of hypo-mania and I started taking one of my meds at bedtime so that all seems to be going better.

So this week my goal is to, yes, manage my time better: get another chapter edited, keep snowflaking the new thing, and get one of my stories out to another market (to get rejected again, probably, but still).

If someone wants to come over and clean my house for me, I wouldn’t turn it down …

Not much to report except for writing writing writing, at least this past couple of weeks. I did a half0hearted attaempt at Nanowrimo, hoping to complete a novella in that month, even if I didn’t write an entire 50,000 novel. I even started it, got out my little moleskine notebook and everything. I can’t really explain why it never went anywhere but there except to say that I just didn’t have it in me this November, so I gave myself a break and moved on. I still have the novella rattling around in the back of my head, but it’s not ready yet. I’ll write in when it is.

So I spent November and December pretty bummed out and finding myself not able to write anything. I made some edits on the novel but didn’t really get anything done at all, and I wasn’t really sure why. I was just in a funk, I guess. It happens.

Then the new Year hit and things still weren’t happening and I was getting more and more bummed out about it. I started doing a little better, got some more chapters edited and out to first readers (shout-out to Mel and Jon).

There’s a post in here somewhere about Bipolar disorder and how it relates to the creative process, but that’ll be another aside later.

At the end of January I joined my wife in her “great activity challenge.” Now, in the past sixth months she has been on a fitness and weight loss journey that so far has resulted in the loss of 70 lbs. Knowing the exercise was getting a little challenging for her, she created a facebook group and challenged all of her friends to do 30 minutes of activity every day, and keep each other accountable. There’s even a cash prize involved. I joined the challenge with the goal of training to run a 5k. I know that seems like a ridiculously small goal to anybody who runs at all regularly, but it’s my goal. I want to be able to run with my daughter at her next 5k event.

To keep myself motivated through long, boring hours on the treadmill, I (my wife, actually) set up a laptop stand so I can watch movies while I run and do incline hikes. Currently I am alternating disks rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Farscape (I didn’t say I was proud of it). My running capacity, though still embarrassing, has been improving and I’ve kept the asthma attacks to a minimum.

And as I did that, I started writing more. I finally finished the two short stories I’ve had half-completed since September and started sending them out (Lightspeed magazine rejects REAL fast, people). I got back to work on the novel, and as I got my butt back in the seat things started happening again.

Last week I had an idea dump, fully-formed, into my head (see, mania can be fun sometimes). I’ve been looking for my next project, thought the novella was going to be it, but then this happened. It’s a YA concept, which I’m especially excited about because I used to teach middle school and I would love to write for that audience.

But wait, you say. If I start working on something new and exciting doesn’t that mean I’ll abandon the novel? I can’t abandon the novel mostly because my wife will kill me if I show myself, once again, unable to finish something. And I don’t want to. So what I’ve done is set myself up with a real writing schedule. I try to write three hours a day. One hour is on novel edits. One hour on snowflake outlining the new thing, one hour on short stories and other projects (like blogging). I can’t always do three hours a day, but almost always I can get at least one in. I have no day job so I really have no excuse. It’s been a week and a half of this and I’ve gotten four chapters edited, and a good start on having the YA project completely mapped out. I also started a new short story to go out there and bounce around with the others.

Tonight I realized I now have the first third of my novel edited, so I printed it all out and put it in a nice binder under the book cover I geekily designed. That’s over 200 pages of work done now. I needed it all printed out so I can refer to it as I continue to revise, but it’s nice to know that it’s hefty enough to be used in self defense if it should come to that (those rabbits can get pretty uppity sometimes).

So that’s the state of the Chad as it is right now. I plan to update this blog more often. I have it on the schedule and everything.

But the whole experience got me refocused on important things. Family, yes. And seeing what everyone else was doing with their lives inspired me to try and get more done with mine, which meant an examination of why I’m not accomplishing as much as I’d like to and I came to an uncomfortable conclusion: the problem is me.

While it’s true I have several cognitive challenges (snerk!) that complicate my ability to get shit done, I also am more than willing to let these things kick my ass far longer than is absolutely necessary. Working with my team of professionals, it has become obvious that one of my main problems is the lack of any imposed structure. Now, I may need structure, but I am pretty much unable to create and maintain it for myself. What I need is a caregiver. Or maybe someone like Charlie from The West Wing.

But I’m going to try. If I want a viable writing career I’m going to have to write a lot more than I do. A lot of it will be crappy, but in doing so I will get that crap out of my system and move on to better, non-crappy work. I also have a novel I’ve got to revise and get out there, mostly because my wife will kill me if I let this one get away and I let all that work go to waste just because I lost it in the second round. So, I need to come up with a schedule that works and get shit done.

Have I mentioned I have two children at home all day right now (see, there I go with excuses again)?

Anyhoo. The plan for the rest of the summer is to get myself on a regular writing schedule. A big portion of this will be simply getting my ass out of bed early enough to get a start on the day and not start out playing catch-up, as I am wont to do. I am lucky in that I really only need to get about six hours of sleep to be ok. This will also mean not caring that the house is messy as much as I do right now and maybe even getting the kids to clean up after themselves more ( I Know!). A couple of rabbits may starve to death.

I’ve been trying it this week and have revised two chapters and started work on a new short story, but this week is atypical as my wife is out of town and one of the kids has been outsourced to grandma’s. But if I can get a running start this week, it is my hope that it will carry me through until it all solidifies into something manageable.

Did I mention I also decided to start running again? This is not as foolish as it seems as running tends to rewire my brain and help me get more sense-making out of it. The time … I still haven’t worked this out yet.

But it’s good to have goals, right? And it’s good to quit falling back on those old reliable excuses and spend some time kicking your own ass before other things do. It’s the only way anything is ever going to happen.

My daughter is exactly like me. Her adhd is a little more severe than mine waswhen I was a kid (and undiagnosed), but for all intents and purposes, it’s the same thing. She’s the dreamy artistic one who doesn’t quite live on the same planet as everyone else. While I took solace in comic books and writing, she draws and scrapbooks and obsessively organizes her legos. Different expressions, same impulse. She even looks like my side of the family. She’s short like I am and has really gorgeous coppery hair. We’ve spent a lot of time together over the last year and I’ve been struck by exactly how much she shares my impusivity and propensity for running off bunny trails to find an interesting deer trail and then a side road leading to the freeway. Let’s not even discuss our organizational skills.

My wife and her brother were totally different, highly academically skilled (it’s both wonderful and intimidating being married to someone smarter than you are, just sayin’) and possessed of a deep ability to focus on a particular task in a way that seems very alien to me. My son is the exact same way. He also shares their inability to endure frustration. So much comes easy to him that when he hits up against something that is just a little bit challenging,he has to go through a rather lengthy tantrum phase before he can muscle through it. He looks almost exactly like my brother-in-law did at that age.

My son and I share similar interests and my daughter and I have the same personality. My wife and daughter have similar interests and my son has her personality. It works out despite that lack of genetic ties. Make of that what you will.

But there’s one issue emerging that’s going to take me a little bit of adjustment. I am not now and have never been a sports guy. I could never quite click with the rules of various sports enough to really understand them. My dad wasn’t a sports guy either, and my attempts to play always ended up with the other kids yelling at me because I didn’t know what I was doing. Coaches and PE teachers never really tried to help, either.

So, of course, my son is a sports guy. He’s good at baseball and wants to be on the school team. He goes to basketball camp and I am told he’s really quick and a good shot and has a lot of potential. He quickly rises through the levels at gymnastics. This stuff is easy for him. I can’t relate.

But I’m going to. I’m even a little bit excited about it. I will go to his practices and his games and pretend I understand what is going on until I actually do. And I will watch him grow up into a six-foot tall athlete who is also really good at math, and wonder how it was that this happened.

But I’m still going to encourage him to join the drama club.

But it’s a first draft. This was no particular call for submissions for this so I had to sort through the chaos myself to find something that worked on its own, which could be a good or bad thing, depending. My three sales have all been written to specific prompts, so take that for what you will.

But I still like the idea of the story, and the characters, and the basic set-up. I just need to make sure it pays off at the end, not to mention makes sense somewhere outside of my own head. This last part is the biggest challenge, since I have trouble coming up with a grocery list that makes sense outside of my own head.

One of the questions was, if I understand it correctly, why do we write for the traditional model of publication? Why not just write and put stuff out there on your own, on the internet, or through self-publishing, etc?

For me, I submit my work for traditional publication because I think the gatekeeper is valuable. I want another person’s eyes on my work because if I don’t get that I don’t have any way of knowing if it’s any good or not (fun fact: all writers secretly think their work is terrible). And it’s the only way the work can get any better, having that other person helping with the process. This is, again, where I talk about what a wonderful editing experience Destination: Future was, working with Z.S. Adani. Sue Blalock supplied the best way of summing all of this up: validation. Having someone actually pay you for your writing tells you that, maybe, you don’t actually suck ALL the time.

Another subject was (and I can’t remember if this was a direct question or something that just came up), what parts of writing flow easily, and which ones take a little more effort. Jay Lake says that all writers come with a few cards already in their deck: plot, characterization, dialogue, setting, etc, and spend the rest of their careers developing skills to complete the set. For me, Character and dialogue seem easier, but I am still really hopeless with plot. I can come up with characters and a situation, give them obnoxious things to say to each other, but when it comes time for the action to start they just kind of look at me waiting for something. The novel I’m currently revising was a direct result of my trying to get good with plot and at this stage of the process it’s still a bit (?!) of a mess. The story I’m trying to finish right now is having similar difficulty coming to a sense-making ending. There are times when it’s really temping to lay out all the options and get out the ten-sided dice, but I’ve actually done that once, and the result wasn’t pretty.

All of this to say, I still can’t believe that sometimes I get to go to bookstores, read my work, and sign books. It’s only through the spazz-wrangling of my wife and some pretty good pharmaceuticals that any of it happens at all.

Oh, and I need to mention that awesome parallell parking job my wife did with a mini-van in the miracle space right in front of the bookstore. Parking in SF can be it’s own kind of horror.

Indiana Jones didn’t like snakes either, so I feel no guilt for my decidedly girly phobia about them. I knew I was a parent when my daughter was 2 and we found a little garden snake in the backyard (totally harmless, yes I know) and I actually stepped over it to go get her instead of screaming and diving under my grandmother’s lawn chairs.

I’ve also recently become the kind of person who gives pills to a cat, of which I am not proud. I took him in because he’s an old cat and was just kind of laying around and not eating and I was afraid that it was just his time and we would have to put him down. $200 later we came home with some better flea meds and a regime of antibiotics for some infection he’d picked up (where? I do not know. he never goes outside) and after a week he’s actually getting up once in a while and starting to get fat again. It was hard to tell how well it was working at first because he’s not exactly the most active of housepets anyway, which was probably why it took me so long to realize he was sick. But we couldn’t just have him put down.

When our daughter first came to us (gack! ten years ago) she had a pretty severe respiratory inssue stemming from the conditions in which she’d lived, and had to be kept separate from the other foster children in the house, so we had her crib set up in our bedroom. Caligula would sit under her crib and come get us whenever she made noise or woke up. We started calling him “lassie cat.” So I really can’t complain about having to do this now, since I figure we owe him.

But I wouldn’t mind if he would make it easier to shove the pills down him, and quit trying to gack them up as soon as I give them to him.

Stubborn as I am, I just used the lawnmower. In a backyard with lots of mole-holes, and a sprinkler system that may or may not have had parts sticking up out of it. I realize that none of this is recommended. I had hoped that my darling son would accompany me on this task and for a while he teased me. I taught him how to use the lawnmower (what? he’s 7! it’s time!) but in something that could only be considered a bad sign for any free lawn care of was expecting to extract from him in the future, he got bored with it. My attempts to give him the rake and have him rake up the grass behind me met with similar results. I guess I’ll guess I’ll have to give him until 8 before I make him do it all himself while I supervise from a lawn chair, which is, of course, the dream of fathers everywhere. Since I am not a misogynist, I will try to enslaverecruit my daughter next, but she was gone today, conveniently.

It proved to be a good exercise, cleaning out some of the gunk, both mental and spiritual, in my head. Yesterday I got past a hurdle and went ahead and scheduled my IT certification exam. I was waiting for appropriate test dates to be scheduled, but I was also fighting back a panic attack at the thought of taking it, since my instructor had the audacity to teach us by letting us take apart and rebuild actual computers and doing real-world problem solving, instead of doing intense online test prep. I’m nervous about it, but have a couple of study books and probably thousands of sample test questions to review endlessly, so I’m confident that I can study enough and do well. As a former teacher, I know how tests can concentrate on the ephemera because they are easy to put in multiple choice questions, and that’s what I’ve heard about this test from people who’ve taken it. It certainly seems so from the questions I have read. But it’s good to have a date and time in front of me to focus on.

In all of this, I haven’t gotten much writing/editing done. Hoping to get a better restart on that this week. I have two chapters edited (well, one of them edited on paper, needing to have the document updated), so there has been some progress.

I wish I had a pithy saying or life’s lesson to share to wrap all of this random-ness up, but I’m fresh out.

I will say that some things are hard for a reason, and some fights are tougher than you think they will be even as an upward curve can be jagged in places, with lots of places for the lawnmower wheel to get stuck and kick up mud all over your legs.

See, I tried it and shouldn’t have.