Sharp Words

It’s Over

It’s been nearly three weeks since I decided to give up and leave you.
Things just weren’t working out any more.
I realised that you were never going to be everything I wanted you to be;
You could never fulfil my dreams.
It was all too much hard work, with too little to show for it.

But time with you wasn’t time wasted.
I’ve learnt from you; I’ve grown.
I know now how to sift out the good from the bad.
These past few years haven’t been completely for nothing.
I don’t have to repeat my mistakes.

I do miss you though.

© 2009 C Sharp

This is a true poem. But before you all start wondering if I’ve left my husband or something, let me reassure you – this poem is dedicated to my former Work in Progress.

I came to the conclusion the other week that what I was writing just wasn’t going in the right direction, and wasn’t going to be something people would want to read. So I decided to reboot, with a new central character instead of the one I’d been writing about for the past 3 or 4 years – because yes, this novel has been languishing for that long! Immediately, I saw how to tighten the plot (which does still remain, in its essential parts) and how to separate out the chaff. What’s more, I did this without too much sense of regret or disappointment, and that pleases me almost as much as the sense of hope I’ve regained.

So now I just need to finish rewriting my outline, and do up some more character sketches, and then I’ll be ready for November…

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I’m still alive. Still around. Not blogging much (evidently) except to update The Wombat’s adventures.

Still writing? Well, that’s a yes and a no. I’ve had a busy (non-writing) August, with trips away and a lot of work to do, but back in July I created myself a wiki for world-building purposes. I churned out around 2000 words of background material (and have included those words in my total) but there’s still a lot of work to do. I could write without having all the background set up, I suppose, but I know from my roleplaying days that having a framework within which to set a story makes the story-telling and character development a lot easier.

There are still a lot of words to go for me to reach my target (which doesn’t include the 50,000 I intend to churn during November, as part of National Novel Writing Month), but now that I have most of my backdrops and backstory all set up, that writing is a little easier.

I haven’t written – or read – as much poetry as I’d hoped though. I also had a bit of a setback with a hard drive failure that lost me 4 or 5 poems I’d written this year; on the other hand, they weren’t ones I was particularly attached to, and I don’t miss them. I don’t think they were the sort that I could have come across in a few years and thought ‘Oh, that’s better than I remembered’ about. So no great loss, really… (And they were already counted in my year’s total.) But I think I need to make myself a regular date with my brown paper notebook, and just pick a subject at random, if the ideas aren’t going to arrive spontaneously.

Really, I need to get back into the habit of writing regularly, no matter what sort of writing it is that I do. I have a few ideas for blog posts stored up, not counting the usual Word- and Quote-of-the-Day type. And as November gets ever closer, of course I’ll be blathering about NaNoWriMo.

Keep an eye out anyway, dear readers, and if you don’t hear anything from me within a week, give me a kick!

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The bad: I’ve only written just over 2,000 words in 7 days, and to be honest, most of that is my outline/plot/synopsis. And my next task is to write character outlines, with brief bits of physical description, personality and background/history – and possibly their relationships with others – so that I can keep all my characters straight. Those will run to a few hundred words each though for my primary characters, so that’s adding on the words. (It’s a holdover from role playing that I like to have good character information written up, though I certainly don’t have a problem with my characters evolving with the story.)

The good: Even though I’ve written so little so far, and only a few hundred words has been actual story, I’m determined to keep going. I’ve managed to get myself into a little of the NaNoWriMo mindset, where I can look at the spreadsheet documenting the words I’ve completed and the words I have yet to write, and think ‘Well, I’m not doing great – but I can still get there’.

So I’m going to keep battling on. Because I’m continuing a story that already exists – and has been floating round my head for about 5 years now – it is hard to get really stuck in and write without expectations. I’m starting to really understand why NaNoWriMo recommends that you start something new rather than continuing an existing work.

But for the first time, I have a good, pretty tight plot (thanks Marion, for letting me bounce it off you), and I know what I want to do, how I want to do it, and how I’m going to get there.

And if I’m ‘cheating’ by including my outlines and character info in my target 50,000 words… I don’t care! They are all words that need to be written so that I can really get into the meat of the story.

I’m feeling optimistic, I’m feeling full of ideas, I really like my story… What can go wrong? 50,000 words, here I come!

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It’s been a bit of a mixed month for me, as far as my writing goes.

I’ve completed four poems and written several bits of others. These include an unfinished sonnet which came to me during my drive home the other night, and which I recorded onto my MP3 player while driving – and I’m glad I did, else I would have lost it completely.

I revised an old poem and an even older short story, and entered them for competition – which was a new thing for me. Next, I want to finish up another short story or two, and pick out some poems to submit to magazines.

I wrote barely anything of the novel-in-progress:  a mere 378 words, most of which were done today! Although I did do some serious thinking about it, and made some plot and character notes. I’m reducing my goal for next month from 8,000 words to 5,000. That’s barely a weekend’s work in NaNoWriMo terms – if I can’t manage that, then I don’t deserve to be trying to write a novel.

I got a lot of lengthy, content-full blog posts written, including a trilogy for My love affair with poetry. I hit my goals of 2 book reviews and 2 Tech Writing Tuesday posts.

I was nominated for an Irish Blog Award – I don’t expect to make it even as far as the long list, never mind the short one, but it’s nice to have that logo up in my sidebar anyway. (Thanks Susan!)

All in all, I’m not dissatisfied with my writing progress this month. I’ve had frequent mad random bursts of creativity, and lots and lots of ideas. And importantly, I wrote most of them down for future use!

And as usual, if I hadn’t read so many novels, I might have done better…

So my main goal for February is going to be to keep up my momentum, and to make use of what I’ve written so far. I’m headed off home to Wales for a few days, from the middle of next week, so I might get some writing done while I’m away. We’ll have to see.

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Wow, I haven’t written a Work in Progress post since October, although obviously, with NaNoWriMo, there was definitely some writing going on.

I didn’t get much done in December, thanks to the usual post-WriMo feelings of sloth, closely followed by the holidays. However, January is starting very well for me. I seem to be full of interesting ideas (maybe thanks to all the weird dreams I’ve had while I’ve been ill) and more importantly, I seem to have the motivation and interest to follow them through.

As mentioned in my New Year’s resolutions, I’m aiming for a poem a week, and I’m tracking them in the Work in Progress section of my sidebar. I’ve been diligently writing down any random inspirations I get (while driving, in the bath, half-asleep, in dreams – the usual places) which means I’m getting a stock of poem ideas together for when my inspiration dries up. And prompts, such as those on A Thousand Words or Sunday Scribblings, are also very helpful.

One of my other writing goals for this year is to submit things for publication or competition – this might not sound like much to those of you who routinely do it, but it’s a step I’ve never taken before.

But now I’ve done it twice in two days! When the deadline was extended for the short story competition at Daily Writing Tips, I took it as a sign that I should do the final revision on a short story I wrote many many years ago (and have occasionally tinkered with since). It took me all of thirty minutes to do the revisions and another twenty to retype it (with further edits); then I needed another ten minutes to cut it down to under a thousand words. It was done in just an hour – which made me wonder why the hell I waited so long!

AND I’ve actually submitted one of my old poems (recently revised; never published even online) to a paid competition. I’m a litle bit nervous about commiting myself  financially… It might be a mistake, but the competition itself seems sound enough (it’s with the Writing Club website). Even if nothing comes of either of these entries, at least I’ve finally taken the plunge. (Although I suppose if nothing comes of them, I might just get disheartened… Nah, everyone has to go through the umpteen rejections to get anywhere.)

I’m aiming to get something submitted for the Brian Moore short story competition this year, since guess what? I missed it last year due to procrastination…

Actually, the Emerging Writer blog and the Creative Writers Network newsletter are brilliant at passing on information about competitions and magazines looking for poetry and stories, and I’ve started to write deadlines down in my diary. So I might yet manage a few more this year.

I haven’t yet started work on the novel though, for which I promised myself 8,000 words this month. There’s plenty of time though, right?

But I did get a bright idea for a short story – or at least the start of one – so that’s also on my to-do list for this month. I’ve made a start by handwriting the first couple of hundred words in my funky new notebook (not the brown-paper one shown in the picture; that’s my poetry notebook) which was one of the good things to come out of Woolworths’ closure…

[Note to self: buy a new kitchen timer. Writing while dinner cooks in the oven is a great idea, as long as you remember that it has to be taken out before it burns...]

The blogging is definitely going well though! I need to pick a book to review for next week (I’ve read plenty this week, so there’s no problem there) and then Ken and I are tackling Neil Gaiman’s latest, The Graveyard Book, later this month. And I have several ’serious’ posts planned, as well as the usual fluff and nonsense. And I’m writing a lot of them in advance!

All in all, I’m having a great January so far – how about the rest of you?

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Although generally, if you were to ask me what I do, I would reply that I’m a writer… I don’t feel like I can claim that title at the moment. Technical writer, sure, that’s my job description and my career; but I haven’t done enough other writing in the past six weeks or so, not even blogging, to make me confident of really being a writer.

I’m not fishing for reassurance or compliments or anything by the way. Just stating my current personal truth – which will probably have become something else by tomorrow.

Anyway, Susan at Stony River Farm has today written a great post about making the choice to write, that has made me feel rather shame-faced about my utter lack of progress over the past few weeks. OK, yes, I did start a new job; OK, yes, I did get married, both of which are fairly momentous events!   But I’ve barely written anything fictional or poetic bar a quick Sunday Scribbling or two. I did get some fresh words done, and some old ones revised, during the three weeks in August that I was staying in a Belfast hotel, but that seems like a very long time ago now.

On the plus side, November is National Novel Writing Month, and that means an enthusiastic 50,000 words and more (at least I bloody hope so). But then what? My half-written novel gets left to languish, just like all the others. It’s only this year that I’ve resurrected my 2003 novel – which isn’t actually that bad – and finally given it a title and some more chapters. My aim for October is to get at least another 5,000 words written of it; that’s only 3 days’ work at NaNoWriMo speeds, which really isn’t a lot at all. I also have a couple of poems in my head that I very much want to finish.

So, going back to Susan’s post and the way it made me embarrassed by my own procrastination skills: today I’m going to sit down with my beautiful new brown-paper-paged notebook and my lovely new Parker fountain pen, and WRITE. One poem for definite, because it’s one I’ve been wanting to finish since June; and also then some novel-words (although those will be in gel pen in my not-so-beautiful notebook). I need to get back into routine, and it’s definitely a good idea to do that NOW, before I’m launched into the utter insanity of November.

And no reading anything till this evening. I’m fairly sure my total of 29 books read during September has something to do with my lack of writing…

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