Patterns, Sanity, and an Author’s Mind

So, guess who forgot that they needed a blog post until an hour before midnight again?

*Raises hand*

Yep, me. I’m such a ditz when it comes to remembering these things anymore. Or, rather, I remember I need a post for all of five minutes and then POOF! Suddenly the thought is gone and the next thing I know I’ve either missed it or I’m scrambling to get one in on time.

Didn’t I say “later” was a word I wanted to stop using, too?

Part of my problem is work, of course. The other part of the forgetfulness is the fact I hardly ever know what the hell I’m writing about until it becomes another rambling post, such as this one is turning out to be, because I’m running out of time to think of something concrete to talk about.

Are you seeing a pattern in this? Because I am.

Hmm… Patterns…

Maybe that’s my issue, and also my solution.

Perhaps my problem of never knowing what to write about stems from the fact I have no patterns to work off of. And by patterns I mean the struggle of getting myself moving on the things I want to do so I can create a habit or pattern. If I was more consistent in my work and writing and all that good stuff, I bet I would be stumbling across all sorts of topics I could talk about and I wouldn’t have this issue.

So perhaps my problem — a lack of patterns — is also my solution:

Finding a pattern that works for me and sticking to it.

Easier said than done, I know, but hey, it’s a start at least.

In other news, I did get my butt moving some more the past two days and managed to write. I think I’ve added about 1.8k to Clockwork Heart over the last two days. I was hoping for a LOT more — considering I was off yesterday — but I just kept getting really distracted in completely odd ways.

(I’m quite sure on a scale of 1 to 10 in hyperness — 1 being completely meh and 10 being a puppy on speed — I was probably a 20. I’m also quite sure my friends thought I was a lunatic yesterday for the fact I was laughing hysterically over saying one simple word, or one simple thought, or even just one simple look, or even over nothing. Hell, I was seriously questioning my own sanity for a good couple hours, and I’m an author! I know I have very little sanity to begin with!)

So I didn’t manage to get to the end of Chapter 2 on the story like I had hoped for, and I’m not even done with Chapter 1 — though I’m close. On the bright side, I had two little bits of scenes yesterday that had me laughing my ass off for a good five minutes each. (I hope they weren’t just funny because I was cuckoo crazy off life at the time.)

Picture this: a character who can’t feel or understand any kind of emotion and who is pretty much just robotic in the terms of living because they aren’t human trying to explain the “death” of their kind like it is simply taking a walk in the park.

It came out both eerily disturbing and completely hilarious in my opinion. I’m not going to spoil how though, and I’m not going to spoil the other bit that had me laughing. Wait, the other two bits that had me laughing. I forgot about one.

I’m thinking this story is going to shape up quite interestingly, and it’s turning into a lot of fun, which makes me want to write more. And more. Then work gets in the way, and GAH!

I’ll figure it out, as long as I can fend off the new idea jumping around my head from a description a Sleepy Hollow character gave me tonight.

Seriously, is there ever an off switch for the writer’s mind?

Welcome To My Madness

So I took the plunge after all.

I know I had been debating and debating over doing it and then my fingers suddenly decided for me at the last possible moments of October 31st that I was going for it despite everything. (More like an hour after midnight, because that’s when I finally set the book up on the site.)

And ya know why?

Because, dammit, I want to finish this book this year. I want to be able to say I finally accomplished an actual goal I set that did not have a deadline I couldn’t change. I may not get through all the notes for my concordance like I wanted to within the final month of 2016, but if I can say on New Year’s Eve that I finished the first draft of this novel, that’ll be good enough for me.

Ultimately, that was my biggest goal of 2016, to finish this novel so that next year I could edit it. Of course, another one of those big goals was to have my license, but, well, I got half way to that goal so far.

So yes, I took the plunge into madness for another month and have signed myself up for NaNoWriMo. And ya know what else? I know the holiday season in retail is hard to begin with, and I know it was going to get harder with one of our stores going out of business January of next year and everyone else is refusing to help them, leaving only my store (mainly me because I’ve done it before thanks to an ex-boss requesting me to help that transferred to said store, though ex-boss is now gone) to help that one out, but I’m not doing it this time.

I’m putting my foot down this time.

Yeah, I feel bad for that store and its struggles right now, but I’m not comfortable enough to be dealing with their madness when I don’t know what their madness is. I know my madness at my store, I know how to deal with my madness, I don’t know theirs. I’ll do maybe one or two days to help if they don’t find a solution before Christmas rolls around, but I will not do it in November, and I will not do it during Black Friday.

And frankly, NaNoWriMo is important to me, writing is important to me, finishing this novel this year is important to me, and I will not let work ruin that for me this time. I don’t want to be stressing over a store I’m not very familiar with to deal with their madness on top of my own store’s madness and on top of writing.

Not this time.

I haven’t quite figured out how I’m saying any of this to my boss yet tomorrow, but I will figure it out. (I’m horrible speaking my mind face to face unless I have totally lost it in the pissed off or upset department. That’s the introvert in me speaking, and probably my father’s work ethics and genes as well. Oh, and if anyone has a suggestion for how I tell my boss this, I will not dispute dropping a comment below.)

Anyways, now that you’ve listened to me ramble on for 500 words of self talk and epiphanies let’s talk about NaNoWriMo!

This month, like every other NaNo month I’ve done for the past two years, I’m working toward finishing Fated to Darkness. (I swear, I write more words in three NaNo months combined than I do in the other nine non-NaNo months put together. This is why I need more NaNo’s, then I might have finished this book awhile ago, or maybe more than one.)

After looking at the Word doc yesterday, I have broken 400 pages and I’m probably now about 1k away from breaking 200k for the whole novel. Like I did in April’s Camp where I somehow managed to write 63k in one month, I’m aiming for a personal goal of 5k on my days off, and 1.5k on days I have to work. I know I probably won’t have nearly as many days off this month as I did back in April, but it’s a good rule of thumb that seemed to work for me so I’m sticking with it. 1.5k is actually less than par for each day (1,667 words is par for each day) but this is just a nice round number to go by, and it also is a little more manageable for the crazy work days. My days off and whatever other cushions I build in the feverish moments of writing will make up for that 200 word difference.

I’m praying this novel doesn’t take another 50k to finish — I’m thinking it won’t, but one never knows with my characters — and if it doesn’t I plan to jump into an older novel depending how many words left I have to write. It’s probably going to be Breaking Point I jump into, but it’s also been a long, long time since I looked at that novel so it may not be the best choice. If I don’t jump into Breaking Point, well, then I’m not sure what I’m finishing the month with. Perhaps I’ll start something new, or just turn a flash fiction work into a story.

Or I could write the sequel story to The Black Lake. I could expand on The Beast, too, or turn Shapeshifter Wings into the novel it’s supposed to be. I only have one chapter of that written so it wouldn’t be hard to catch up on it and totally pantsy the rest of it. That could work. But I won’t worry about that until — if — I finish Fated to Darkness before I hit 50k for the month.

(I’m really, really praying I finish FtD within 50k words though. If not, I’ll be pushing over 250k for the whole novel and that means it won’t be done this month and I’ll have to find another way to push myself to write in December. At least with NaNo months I have something I push myself for: the win and the badge that says I did it. Okay, and the self accomplishment, and the fun of it, but the badge is a real seller. LOL)

Anyways! I had taken the first day of NaNo off so I went for my 5k goal. I would have loved to have done way more, but since I started late in writing and only got 500 words before bed, I have to settle for this. Actually, I would have settled for just 2.5k today because I FINALLY finished the horrid Chapter 28 I’ve been stuck on since July’s Camp. (See what I mean about the NaNo months and non-NaNo months productivity?) I’m ending the day with a total of 5,430 words, but I also work the next four days (that I know of, not sure about Sunday yet) and they are all morning shifts. Which is half nice, it’s better than the afternoon to close shift that I get absolutely nothing done on those days because I have literally no time for anything. But that also means I might be pretty tired from staying up and writing at midnight.

I’m kind of hoping to do 1k after midnight before bed every night so it helps to cushion the loss of writing time for whatever I have to work the next day. Except for Wednesdays… Wednesdays are going to be real pains in the asses this month. If you follow this blog you know I do a Wednesday Word flash fiction piece from P. T. Wyant’s blog, and I still plan to do those through NaNo. But Wednesday is also horseback riding day, so there’s a chunk of…two to two and a half hours of time out of my day already. And of course, most Wednesday’s  I still work some awful morning shift which takes away any of that time, leaving me with not much left to work with for the day. Which sucks monkey balls. (Don’t ask, I’ve had sugar.)

What I plan to do is write my Shard before I go to bed and have it up and posted everywhere I put them, then I can sleep and go to work in the morning if I have to, then come home and go straight for riding, then finally that night perhaps I’ll have time to crank out at least a thousand words for NaNo. That’s gonna be how I have to do it. Unless I go for doing the NaNo writing of 1.5k at midnight instead and do the Shard after riding since that’s less words to write, but I’m also pushing the clock on those posts sometimes when I do that soooo…

I think I just have to play around with it tomorrow and see what works.

Okay! I really need to end this or I will just keep going, and going, and going, and going. (Friends did used to call me the Energizer bunny when I was a kid for a reason.) So that’s the plan for NaNoWriMo this year, along with keeping up with Snippet Sunday’s and my other weekly sharing post, and my flash fiction, and of course work and the holiday…

What is sanity again?

It’s going to be an interesting month how I pull this off, I can say that much. There’s a method to the madness in my head for it but I’m not sure I could explain it without looking crazier than I already do. LOL.

Right! Yes! I need to be signing off, because I need to finish setting up Sunday Snippet posts for this month that I did not do last week, and in an hour I’ll have a Shard to write.

Welcome to my Madness for the next four weeks, followers! I promise it’s going to be an interesting ride if you stick around, and I hope I don’t scare any of you off.

Captive To My Mind

Do you ever get so wrapped up, so lost in a plot or storyline that you just lose focus of everything else in life? Do you ever get so wrapped up in it that you feel as if you are floating in that fantasy land even while you walk through reality? As if you are only half there to the world around you, the rest of you lost in the scenes, sounds, voices, feelings of the world you are imagining?

It’s like it holds you captive and you find yourself staring off with a clouded gaze while you watch it play through your head and listen to the voices. It invades the waking and resting hours of your day, never giving you a break. It’s all you can think about, all you can play out in your head.

It’s like when you become so engrossed in a book that you forget the world around you, and no one realizes the emotional turmoil you just suffered at the hands of a paperback fictional story.

Only this time, you’re without the book.

Does that ever happen to anyone else?

Time just suspends itself and you are trapped in the world in your head. The gatekeeper waits for you to pay the price of your sanity, or perhaps your sleep, or perhaps your focus for days before you are freed back to the land of the consciously thinking.

That has been me for at least two days now, trapped inside this fantasy as if I was caught in a trance. My gatekeeper has refused to open the gates from this land yet, despite the price of my focus, and my thoughts.

And the thing is, it isn’t even my own stories doing it this time.

*Shakes head*

Anyways, that is where I am right now. Trapped in a land that is not my own, and I’m still paying the gatekeeper to try to get out to be able to focus once more. I guess I can only hope that I am freed soon for everything around me is taking a serious hit on the productivity scale.

Then again, when doesn’t that scale take a hit in my life?