Days of Shades

[x-posted from tumblr]

The last week or two has seen a significant decrease in my creative output (as tracked on my super nerdy spread sheet!)  and, while there are some good excuses -- a trip to Seattle, working on the studio -- a lot of it is that I hit some serious stumbling blocks with my writing, and lost momentum summoned in the nigh inevitable crash. I do tend to a bit of a go-go-go-go-STOP cycle. I can be very happily almost overloaded with projects for quite awhile until I feel them all crashing down around my ears. I don't want to get stuck in the low spot, though, so I've been really, seriously working at pushing through.

Monday night I cancelled my normal game time with Emony42 and used the time to make a decent dinner with enough for lunches, fold some laundry, write, and practice voice for twenty minutes. It was only twenty minutes, but making myself get up from the PC and go do it was hard. That's the crash -- I don't feel bad, exactly, I'm just seriously craving real downtime, preferably in front of a video game. That's really all I want to do.

The spreadsheet is helping me push through, though, with that reminder that even fifteen minutes nets me a little bronze-star reward. It's what got me out of the chair Monday night, and what's keeping me pushing on with writing, especially over the rough spots.  I usually don't have a lot of writing-oriented self-doubt, but there's something different in what I'm doing right now -- it's more plot focused, with more changes to canon -- and I'm getting less of the motivating review-crack. More importantly, I'm now getting negative responses, especially this one over-zealous person who seems to want me to write an entirely different story. It's hard to stay motivated when that's the first response you get every time you release something new.

On t'other hand, writing the Giant Thing seems to help motivate me for other projects. It's probably related to the go-go-go-go-CRASH cycle -- when one thing's workin', everything's workin'. Episodic fiction also lets you get something 'in the can' regularly, which helps give little rewards for a long project, and those little rewards help push everything along. Which again explains why having the little reward fall through (either because something just didn't work or because of negative responses) is so demotivating, I suppose.

I feel like I've been doing a lot of whining here lately, so here's some slightly more cheery news:

1. My mom's office regularly has summer interns, who need temporary housing, and she's given the people in charge of coordinating these things my info. A summer grad student intern would be a perfect renter for my space -- all I'd have to do is get it minimally furnished, which basically means begging my parents for stuff from one of their guest bedrooms, which they've pretty much already agreed to.

And she emailed me! YAY!

2. I made actual factual progress on my mailbox last weekend. I feel kind of idiotic about it, because it was one of those art lightbulb moments where you realize you've been doing it all wrong for the last day/week/month/year, and doing it right takes... fifteen minutes. STILL, progress!

Basically, I was trying to work up the same super-rich color layering that I do for my Sheep in Space, which require even painting of translucent colors, and I was finding the size of the thing plus the quicker-drying properties of the medium I'm using (to make it adhere to the metal) really, really annoying. I just couldn't get it even, and it took FOREVER. Adding drying retarder just made it all MORE translucent. Then this weekend I remembered that I have a 1 inch sash brush -- a house painting brush -- and I took my new wet palette, dumped a TON of paint on there, and loaded up. I'd been using a 3/4 inch art brush, but the giant reservoir in the housepainting brush means it delivers a lot of paint at once, which means it stays WET, and suddenly I had the final color. In ten minutes. After painstakingly spending an hour doing a few inches at a time.

I could feel the Walrus* standing over my shoulder, laughing at me, but it was totally worth it. I got it all so-deep-it-looks-black**, repainted Mars, and added the bottom half of Marvin the Martian (top half to come. I got distracted by dinner).

3. One of my good neighbors wants to rebuild the fence between our lots, and while it's a bit legally complicated (technically it's in the alley right of way), it'd be pretty cool to have a section of the fence done, and she's easy to get along with and I imagine will be fun to work with.

4. I've finally been writing, albeit in a one step forward two steps back kind of way.

*The Walrus was my uni painting teacher, and he was a big proponent of big brushes. If he knew he'd give me so much crap for trying to do things the hard, stupid way.

**Some people would have just painted it black, but I say FAH!

I just read 25 Ways to Unstick A Stuck Story.

One of the reasons I'm bad at coming up with plots is that I don't like giving characters the Idiot Ball.* It may also be the reason I find subplots much easier; I have no problem making a character make a stupid decision if it's a stupid decision they would actually make, but if they're prone to making stupid decisions about the Main Important Quest then they're probably not a competent character, and I love competent characters. westrider and I have talked at length about Competence Porn. One of the sure-fire ways to make me love a character is to have them be good at what they do (my characters tend to appreciate other competent characters, too. Turtles all the way down).

In aStSHB my two protagonists are in competence lust with each other (as well as in love, duh). They are not going to fuck up The Main Quest -- that's their job, and they're damn good at it; it's the foundation of both their relationship and their individual characters.

In the sequel there'll be a point where Rhi makes a Stupid Ass Decision with regard to relationship stuff, though -- part of her character is that she's not really done the long-term relationship thing before, and she's under a lot of stress. So, subplot tension comes from the character's failings. Since it doesn't come out of the blue, it doesn't feel like the Idiot Ball, and I still get my dose of competence porn.

You could perhaps say the competence thing is a bit of a foible and I should branch out, but I think it's really related to whether I'm interested in reading a story at all. If the hero doesn't have SOME area where they're competent, it's just an exercise in frustration. It leads too easily to being passive rather than proactive, which is one of the big things that makes me frustrated and/or depressed as a reader.

Maybe 'good in their area, but totally out of their depth' is the next logical step.

Now, to figure out how to be totally out of one's depth without having monstery booglie-boos from the far reaches of time and space threaten all of humanity, because I'm kind of worn out on All Stories Having To Be Epic.

*Warning: TV Tropes!

Anyone who doesn't follow ursulav (and you should, on general principle) should go over and read her recent post on the kind of book she'd like to write.

It's interesting (and amusing, which goes without saying for her), and the comments are both interesting and heartwarming. I feel happier just reading people talking about their 'it makes me feel good' comfort reads.

In some ways it's the antithesis of all the conversation I've had with westrider, when we're trying to figure out what makes certain books depressing. I've thought about that a lot, because I try to avoid those that might send me into a depressive spiral (I get very caught up in books, and I don't need HELP feeling miserable). Maybe what I should've been doing is thinking about why any given book makes me happy.

It's not that my comfort reading doesn't have bad situations; a story with no conflict is boring. They don't always end perfectly happily, either -- they're never tragic endings, but they're occasionally bittersweet. Reading the comments, I think I've got a bit more handle on some other parts, too. I've always said that having a protagonist who's proactive is important to me -- I hate feeling trapped in the narrative, feeling like the protagonist and I are just buffeted by events. But for comfort level books, I also want to like, not just relate to, the protagonist. And I want them to behave reasonably. They don't have to be perfect, but if I'm cringing as I read and saying "No, no, god, don't DO that!" the book isn't going to be on the comfort-read shelf.

It's not exactly about Competence Porn -- they don't have to be particularly good at what they're doing -- but they better be trying the best they can with what they've got, and not making really painfully bad decisions.

There are other books that fall on the same shelf just because of when I read them -- Heidi (from when I was a child) and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (first read when I was dealing with medical misery) are there because of that. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (Joan Aiken) is another one from my childhood. But more current examples are a few of the Dorothy Sayers Lord Peter Wimsey novels (especially the ones with Harriet), much of Bujold's writing (especially Curse of Challion, the Cordellia books, and the chronological middle of the Miles books), and... y'know, this list really ought to be longer. What are yours?

[by the way, on Saturday Erik and I are heading to Connecticut to spend a week with his parents, so if you throw titles and authors at me I may see if I can find them at a bookstore for travel reading].

I explained my space-travel dillema to my housemate madalchemist, and he sent me a link to Atomic Rocket, which is a whole bunch of stuff about STL, FTL, weapons, propulsion, and you named it, all aimed at Sci-Fi authors.

Granted, the page is dedicated to Heinlein and refers to him frequently, but since it's in the context of "appreciating a modicum of accuracy in the physical sciences" and not "Having the faintest clue how people and societies work", I'm willing to overlook the Heinlein-fanning.

The things I shouted either at the screen, my housemate madalchemist, or twitter while playing ME3 (only up to the first tour round the Normandy, so not far).

( Spoilers for tiny stuff; nothing major )

Okay, off to work on star edits so I can play again.

I recently read part of a fanfic in which someone "Whelped in surprise." I can only assume they were so shocked that puppies tumbled out of their mouth.

Of course, being wary of throwing stones and all that, I have to admit that I recently posted something in which I used "roll" when I know damn well it should have been "role." I told the person who pointed it out that I actually meant dinner rolls, which in context would have been a much stranger variety of kink than the very slight d/s role I was actually referring to. :P

EDIT: And yes, I thanked her and fixed the typo. :P

I don't feel like filling a year end meme, but if you care to read my meandering introspection, jump to the bold subject that interests you most (or bores you least).

Mass Effect Fandom has been one of the defining points of 2011, which is odd since I haven't been a part of any fandom for over a decade. I dove in because I was inspired/upset by a disability issue that hit me much more strongly than I expected. I've met some really cool people (hi, masseffect!), jump-started my flagging creativity, and gotten more involved in broader social-justice-in-media discussions in numerous venues.

It's also been one of the most disappointing parts of the year, since my particular issue... isn't fairing so well. It's strange to not actually share the excitement about the upcoming conclusion to the trilogy I'm a fan of. I'm still interested in seeing parts of it (especially side character development; I've always preferred character-driven fiction over plot-driven, so the fact that I care more about characters than the end of the world should be no surprise) but I'm not enthused. The story I care about isn't happening there anymore; it's happening in my head.

...and I've been writing the story in my head. I've learned that I CAN write that much, that people seem to like it, and that I can turn fiction into a vehicle for things I think are important without turning into an author rant. It feels like options opening up. Now, when I have an idea worth writing, "can I do this?" won't be the thing stopping me. I know I can, and I know roughly how.

By the time it's done it will have taken at least a year of consistent work. That will make it my most time-intensive creative project yet, claiming the record Quartet has held since 2005 (the four paintings of Quartet took about nine months).

I also think my writing has improved, though strangers are the better judge of that.

I've realized I'm a sucker for instant gratification feed-back. It works for me as a motivator. If I hadn't been posting fic chapter by chapter I'd have abandoned the story months ago. I suppose it's a weakness I should try to get over, but meta-gaming my own weaknesses seems to make for better results, so until I discover a secret trove of willpower, I'll just find ways to get feedback at regular intervals.

Creatively, it's been a good year. I haven't done nearly the things I want to do, but I'm moving again. I've let some old over-worked ideas lie fallow to focus on new things. Experiments are happening, ideas are fermenting in the compost pile of my brain. It's a promising feeling.

I've been trying to abandon the perfectionism that says something isn't worth working on unless it's going to be great. Fandom helps, as does the Creativity Challenge and the discussions around that (thanks, stasia), and all of you who give me that feedback I so adore -- which encourages me to let go of perfectionism long enough to post absolute crap on LJ, so that I can get crit, so I can keep motivated.

I know it's a battle I'll have to keep coming back to, but at least I'm fighting on the right side at the moment. I'm still working on the problem of making time for art when I feel like art is play and should come last. I may try a stricter 30-day type challenge sometime in 2012 to try to break that.

I played a lot of music this year, though it doesn't really feel like it. Pinniped continues to get better and try new things, at our own slow pace. I don't really feel any pressure for it to go faster, which is fine by me. As long as we're growing, I'm not worried about the kinds of gigs we are or aren't getting or how soon we can make a CD. I don't think I'm growing as a fiddler as fast as we're growing as a trio, but after almost twenty years of playing music, I'm okay with the fact that my enthusiasm for personal practice is cyclical.

I got more done on my yarden than I'd expected to (patio! Raised bed! Tree!), and less done on my studio. Most of the hold-up is due to indecision. I knew what I wanted for the yarden; I'm still perfection-paralyzed with making decisions about the studio. I've finished other, smaller house projects, though, and hopefully I'll make more progress on the big one now I've pinpointed the culprit.

On other fronts, year-end summaries don't seem productive. Work is work, family issues are family issues, my sweety is not really food for the blog (though I have to say, we've butted heads less this year than ever before, and he's been far more supportive of my random creative endeavors than I'd ever imagined -- I suppose since he's working on a full-fledged conlang for no particular reason, he's too geeky to throw stones). In 2012 I'll have a few more hours at work and therefore a bit more money, which is nice, but the only thing I really need to deal with on my end is that I've gotten absolutely awful about getting up early enough to get to work on time. THAT has to change to accommodate the new hours.

In short -- No life-changing events, but I'm not stagnating. I'm pretty sure I even leveled up in at least two areas (writing and wiring. Apparently I sort skills alphabetically), which is a pretty great feeling. There are things I need to be better about, as there always are, but I'm looking forward to the New Year.