Bo-Bo Knows I'm Toast

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah-bity-blah blah. 
"Blah?" 
"Blah," blah blah.
Blah blah blah blah-by blah--blah blah-dy blah blah! 

The novel and all those other Big Ideas (not the capital letters) I had for December? They're making about as much sense as this blog post.

Bo-Bo Knows Mama Has No Business Making Wagers

After the first week of operation wacky writing wager (the use of the word wacky has more to do with my addiction to alliteration than anything wrong with the wager itself) I'd like to report that Stephen and I are locked in an epic horse race, but what we're actually in is more of a snail's race. We've both got a trail of slime stretching behind us that we've made an empty peace with calling our works in progress, and as you might imagine, neither snail is exactly hearing the Chariots-o-fire theme song as we race INCH toward what seemed like such a skimpy goal when we made this wager oh so casually in the comment section of this blog not so long ago. 

You can read about Stephen's dark night of the soul (aka his wicked writing woes--more ws!) here in which he whines that he's only got 7 pages finished. Only. Oh boo-flippin'-hoo, Stephen. Poor you.

You know how many pages I got if you only count the stuff that's pretty and perfect and ready to go?

Zero. As in none, nada, and if I knew how to spell it, bupkis.

But what I do have is a 20-page long hand page first draft of the first version of my revised (read that totally gutted and absolutely new) opening scene. It detours and tangents in the way my first drafts always do (I can't be the only writer whose first instinct is to take her characters from Boston to Cambridge by way of Timbuktu), but somewhere in the detours my imaginings have wrought, there's a faint heartbeat that tells me this might work. Keep chipping away at it. And please ignore the tantrum that your inner child is currently throwing about why oh why this convolutedly crazy craft style of yours (note the cs!) remains your process.


Because you have a wager on. And right now you're losing. Except in the one way you're winning: before the wager, you were stuck, and now you have a pile of prose poo (ps!) with a beating heart. Which means this wacky wager you've made has shaken you out of your revision paralysis and put you safely on the revising path.

So, no, Stephen. No fist pumps and booyahs here. But in my own way, I do think I'm winning. Even if I end up buying you a drink and toasting your superior output, I've won.

Bo-Bo Knows It's On...

I threw down a gauntlet and it was...picked up? Matched? Accepted? Whatever it is that the person being thrown down in front of does when accepting a challenge (and let's just say it's pointing a finger in the air and wagging it with all the nuance of a silent movie, cause that makes me happy), my friend Stephen Dorneman over at Barking at My Shadow has done it, and the race is on:

First person to 30 pages by the end of the year gets a beer on the slower writer's dime. 

 Except Stephen says beer isn't special enough.

So if I win he'll buy me a Boston Cream Pie Martini (if you think those letters should be lower case, obviously, you've never sipped such heaven) over at the Omni Parker House, and if he wins, he picks. And if you could hear the sports announcer doing the play by play in my head, Stephen is the front runner.

This weekend he let me know he was already five pages in while I was still navigating the family loop that is the long Thanksgiving holiday in my house.

And today's no more auspicious. Because I didn't just tell him 30 pages. I said 30 pages of the new opening of my book. And so far the new opening has arrived still born. But not much because there's a martini at stake. And a little something called the future of my novel. Right. I'll just get right on that and, um, mmmmm chocolate-cocoa-lined rims....

Why is it so much easier to picture the martini than it is to dream up an opening for my book?

Bo-Bo Knows Dirty Limericks

Metered Angst

A Limerick by Catherine Elcik 

When tracking my writing it's hard to ignore

when my hours shrink back to less than half four.

I say that I'm fighting 

To prioritize writing

But then dole out my time like I can simply make more.

Bo-Bo Knows Beginnings

Thirteen hours and 8 minutes this week. Could I have pushed out two extra hours? Sure. But it would be make work for the sake of hours. Because Monday through Friday I spent rereading the opening, making notes about how to revise, and just generally getting myself to feeling like I knew where to start. By Saturday I needed to let it simmer for a couple of days before starting in on the actually redrafting. Simmering is work, too, but it's hard to quantify. So I don't. I just know that I had at least two hours of simmering and I leave it like that.

Also, a blog note: watching hours tally does not exactly make for the world's most riveting blog, so I'll just keep count in a little column at the right. I'll add the hours weekly, though I suspect I'm the only one who will care much.

Happy writing! 

Bo-Bo Knows Limbo

My inner librarian slave master is well pleased this week. Not because I punched in my time plus some--15 hours and 48 minutes this week!--but because those hours brought me to the end of the draft I've been struggling with since I finished the rough draft longer ago than I can admit without embarrassment (I only missed the three-year mark by 48 hours).

Does this mean if I hit my 15 hours work week again this week I'll finish the third draft? No? Well, what fun is that?

Tomorrow, I dive into the third draft. As a person who feels anxiety in the limbo between completing one chapter and breaking ground on the next, I'm expecting to experience some fear at the start a new draft; to counter the anxiety, I've earmarked Friday as a writing retreat with a fellow sufferer writer.

In "On Writing,' Stephen King offers a permission slip for wary writers:

"You can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will."

Change that 'if'' to a 'when,' and I think I've got myself a new mantra...

Bo-Bo Knows How to Earn a 'C' (and be right pleased about it)!

11 hours out of 15 this week. Thought of one way, that 73.3 percent. A 'C' grade.

Thought of another way 11 hours is 5 more than the 6 I managed in week one. That's an 83 percent increase, or a solid B!

Thought of in yet another way, 11 is 183 percent of 6 which is like and Attttt!

So while 11 is not 15, it's closer, and that's a good thing.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a job to do...

Bo-Bo Knows A Period of Orientation

Inauspicious. That's the word that springs to mind when I sat down this morning to see that I worked on my book for only 5 hours and 54 minutes of the 15 hours I just hired myself to put in every week.

The inner mean boss likes that word. Because inauspicious has just the right blend of pretentious haughtiness, don't you think?. It brings to mind the image of a nasty old lady, arms crossed, eyes staring at me over the world's ugliest reading glasses. Everything about the posture of this woman tells me I'm a failure. And when I calmly explain that work got crazy, that I took two days off to spend time with my husband, that I managed to do an hour a day on my busiest days to compensate, she just sniffs at me:

"And how many episodes of Dr. Who did we watch, hmmm?"

Fair point, I guess. Though I would argue that one of the episodes was "Love and Monsters,"  a fine example of bloody brilliant story telling.

But  although I'm no stranger to treating myself as a metaphorical whipping post (do better, do more, you suck you suck you totally suck!) I've decided thinking like that is just not helpful. Pas de tout! Which if I remember right means not at all, but even if it doesn't, so what? What are you gonna do, little librarian boss lady that lives in my brain? Stare at me to death?

Did I have the kind of first week I was hoping to have? No. I had just a little south of 40 percent of the week I was hoping to have. But it's a start I'm deciding to think of as "orientation." And it was useful time! I entered last week stuck on the epilogue. This week I got six pages in, realized it was totally wrong, berated myself for (yet again) not getting it right the first time, and then pulled out a fresh piece of paper and planned out a new take on the scene that (miracle of writing spoiler alert) works better! Yes, I wrote pages, scrapped them, and ended the week with "just" an outline of what to do this week. But that's kind of why the revision process is all about putting the time in and not the page count. I could have done more--perhaps I should have done more--but I've decided that as far as orientations go, it was a brilliant first week:

• Eased myself into a new habit? Check! 
• Created a plan of attack for moving forward? Check! 
• Generated excitement for the possibilities of the new ending? Check! Check! Check! 
• Ready to commit to finishing the epilogue this week? Well, no. Not check. 

Because though I'm committed to getting my 15 hours in this week, who knows what that time will bring. The scene I'm working on now will likely thrive, but the scene after that? I'm done with the crystal ball sorcery of writing goals I can't control, like "finish a scene" or "write an epilogue" or (gulp) "finish this draft." Because after looking into my future (read that as glancing at my day planner),  I can be reasonably assured that I'll eke out 15 hours of work this week. If that brings me to the end of this revision,  fantastic. But if it doesn't, some  other week's hours will. Because progress, however slow, will lead to a finish line eventually. Isn't that the first commandment in the church of writing or something?

Plus, if I don't pull my shit together this week, my inner librarian will come at me with this  message:




And nobody wants to die at the hands of a  Dalek sucker thingy because--let's face it--death by Dalek is kind of lame.

Bo-Bo Knows Accountability Mondays

So a little more than a year ago, I ran a marathon. Let's ignore for a minute that I've gone totally soft since then and can't actually remember the last time I ran (today's as good a day to begin again as any, I say).

The important thing about this marathon is that I did it. Me. With a body that has almost always looks better suited to competitive eating than running did it for one simple reason: I found a training program set up like a to-do list that was like crack to my type-A step-by-step mentality. It helped that I loved my cause (Grubbies 4 eva, and all that) but having the heart to do something only gets you to the starting line. To cross the finish takes a clear understanding of the neuroses you have to co-opt for your cause.In my case, an addiction to crossing things off a to-do list in exactly the same way I'd cross off four training runs a week.

You know what you can't cross off a to-do list?

Finishing the (expletive deleted) novel, that's what!

I'm not talking about your daily email-so-and-so-and-pay-the-mortgage-and-call-that-client-and-go-get-groceries list but the larger to-do list in your brain. The finish-the-novel line item just sits there, taking up space, like a house guest that made you giddy the first year she stayed with you, but is still there years later, sitting around, like an un-cross-off-able lump.

I know the solution is breaking the novel down into drafts or chapters or pages or word counts. But then the to-do list monster rears its head, and the math seems painfully clear: if you write you'll cross off one thing, but if you send that email, pay the mortgage, call that client, and get your groceries, you'll not only cross off FOUR things, but you'll also eat.

You know.

At a table in a house that isn't heading into foreclosure. 

The thing is, the writer in me is sick of being shuttled to the bottom of my daily to-do list. So I'm doing the only thing that I know has worked in the past. No, not page counts. When you're working on revision, a full day's work might end in a negative page count. Page counts are evil for revision. You can't see it, but I'm holding my fingers up in a cross at the words "page counts" on the screen. 
Nope. I'm doing something a little more weighty. I'm taking on writing as a part-time job.

What's that you say? Hasn't writing been a part-time job for me for years? Well, you'd think. But have you ever known me to blow off a job--freelance or salaried or what have you--because I needed to go grocery shopping? Have you ever known me to blow a deadline when someone--besides me--was actually waiting for something? No. Because I'm a doormat when it comes to the promises I make. I need to work on that, I really do. But not before I co-opt that doormat attitude for the one project I'll tell anyone who listens is the nearest and dearest to my creative self.

So I'm signing a contract today:

I, Catherine Elcik, on Monday, October 17, 2011, agree to take on the position of part-time writer, defined herein as 15 hours a week for 50 weeks (a girl's gotta have a couple weeks vacation!) for a total of 750 hours in a year. Kay. Thanks. Bye. 

Some part of me looks at that number and thinks 15 hours seems like such a drop in the bucket compared to all the other things I do with my time (my full-time job, walking Bo-Bo, watching Dr. Who like a freshly converted addict...) But if having a tangible goal actually gets me to add drops into the bucket, I just might have something at year's end. If not a finished novel, perhaps a finish line in sight. The part of me that's wondering if I really want to publish this post at all knows that it's not only going to work, but it's what I need. Deep breath. Hit send. Write. Wish me luck!


Catherine Elcik is a writer in the Boston area. Watch for "Accountability Monday" updates here or on her Twitter feed (#accmon) every Monday.