Waiting For You in Dimlos Park

I can't count how many love stories use the dramatic plot point of lovers planning to meet at X location, only for unexpected problems to occur.  One of the pair might be late, or perhaps they both arrive but miss each other.  Or one of them arrives, breathless and starry-eyed, but at the wrong location.  Perhaps, for some reason, one of the pair did not receive the message about their dramatic meeting.  Perhaps it was intercepted; perhaps it was lost.  Other times, the one of the pair, or both, may have second thoughts about the meeting, and as the seconds tick down, we agonize, with the couple, over whether there will be a happy ending.

These moments happen in real life as well (you laugh, perhaps, but they do!), though when they occur, they tend to be quiet, private.  Unobtrusive.

They aren't always meetings in front of glowing fountains, at the top of skyscrapers, or in the middle of street as rain pours down and the lovebirds ignore on-coming traffic.  In fact, the moments aren't always between lovers.

It can be a broken promise between friends, a cruel act of betrayal between parent and child.  It can be one person reading more meaning into another's words than that person intended.  It can be an unlikely dream that shatters in one moment of clarity.  That moment of "coming true"...simply wasn't.

I'm really talking more about expectations, rather than the actual act of waiting.  One person has expectations, dreams, or hopes, and for some variety of reasons, they are not realized.  The message is lost or misunderstood.  The people you are depending on don't come through for you.  Perhaps a person you trusted didn't feel the same way about you, and you find out too late.

When we wait, we are, of course, expecting something.  We don't wait in lines without the intention of doing something or receiving something when we reach the front.  We don't sit down to people-watch without expecting people to come along.  We don't listen to music over the telephone without wanting to speak to someone at the other end.

In The Fracture of a Dream, Dek Sundowner is waiting under the willow tree in Dimlos Park.  What is it?  Does he find it?

Ren D.

But Those Distractions Are So...Shiny...

Focus, focus, focus!

While writing, it's so easy to pop open your web browser to "look up a word" or "do some fact-checking" and then, hours later, you find yourself still reading your Twitter feed, 'Like'ing things on Facebook, or lost in an endless maze of Wikipedia entries (darn them for linking to so many other enticing entries!)...where did the time go?

I'm not even going to get into the research on distraction.

Okay, fine, I will.  Just one article -- read this study on how checking Facebook even just once within a 15-minute period was enough to derail student productivity.

I'm easily distracted.  Even Microsoft Word is too distracting for me!  All those things to click on across the top?  Writing with my text surrounded by those huge margins, or trying to read anything that's double-spaced?  I can't do it!  Something about the empty space makes me lose my focus.

I used to do all my writing in Notepad, but it came with the added danger of no auto-save feature.  I could lose whatever I was working on if the power went out or if my computer froze.

All the advances of the modern world, and I can't even control my Internet-checking impulses, right?  (It's called addiction.)  Finally, I looked into distraction-free writing tools and tested out a few.  I wanted one that I could carry around on my USB drive to move from computer to computer, and I wanted it to be plain and easy on the eyes.  Naturally, as a starving writer, I also wanted it to be free.

There are many similar applications out there, so be sure to research on your own.  FocusWriter is the one I currently use.  It allows for some formatting (like bold and italics), so that I don't have to search through my text later to add it in.  It also auto-saves as long as I've saved the file under a name already.  I can even set it to make clacky typewriter sounds for writing days when I feel particularly old-fashioned.

Got suggestions for me or other writers?  Let me know in the Comments field!

Ren D.

Productivity, The Elusive

Oh, productivity.  You are as elusive as the ice cream man when I am craving an artificially colored, novelty-shaped popsicle.  Sometimes I can hear you, but I can't see you -- and that's as helpful to me as subscribing to weather reports for cities in which I don't live.

I heard that people do this.  I'm not talking about myself or anything.

I was trying oh-so-hard to work on The Fracture of a Dream while I was out of town last month, but I have to confess it really didn't work.  Every day, there were other things I had to do.  E-mails to answer, errands to run, people to see, requests for other urgent work to be completed...

I'm sure you know what I mean.

Even when I'm trying to write in the comfort of my own home, I struggle with the other tasks that come up.  Many people don't understand that I am working (and that I do not answer phone calls or reply to e-mails during that time) and make demands on me to complete some unnecessary task or another.  They perceive their work to take priority over my own.

I'm even guilty of abusing my e-mail's vacation auto-responder to pretend I am away on delightful trips when I'm actually not.  ("Just leave me alone" is a little rude, you see.)  I do still want to have friends, family, and colleagues once I am done with my current writing project.

Aside from using productivity software such as RescueTime (I used this while completing my doctoral dissertation) to hold me accountable for my time, I've had trouble sticking to a set-in-concrete writing schedule.  Sometimes, as much as I hate errands and other small jobs, they must be done.

Anyone out there in Internetland have some advice for me?

Ren D.

Uh-Oh, Editing & Rewriting!

Sometimes you're writing and writing and writing, and you realize what you've written previously doesn't work.  Maybe plotholes are blooming all over the page; maybe you've just got a tough inner critic.  (Oh man, what if that picky inner critic is right?!)  You hate the idea of scrapping it all and starting over, or you hate the idea of picking over your words to be sure you said what you meant to say (surely everything you write comes out baby-perfect?).  But it's okay.  Editing and rewriting can and must be done.

In my case, I can't always get the perfect word to come to mind at the "write" time.  (Yeah, dumb pun. You got me...I'm sorry.)  Sometimes I even get the meaning totally wrong.  When I read over older passages, I catch awkward phrasing and and overuse of the same words.  Sometimes a passage is clear to me, but upon re-reading, I realize it wasn't written clearly at all.  On the days when I don't feel like working on something new, I go back to what I've already written and examine it.  It requires my editor's eye to be alert, of course, but editing something that's already written is easier than filling up a blank page.

During my writing process for The Fracture of a Dream, I had to change several scenes because Dek, the protagonist, was not the dynamic character he needed to be.  Too often, he was passive, allowing things to happen to him and finding himself in situations rather than putting himself into them. I would personally hate reading about such a milquetoast character ("Do SOMETHING, man!"), so I knew this wouldn't do for my precious Dek.

I deleted some scenes entirely, changed the way his behavior and reactions were described, and reversed the dialogue for some of the other characters.  The way the final scene plays out changed significantly.

You may not agree with what Dek chooses to do in the end, and your interpretation of who he is as a man may vary, but at least Dek isn't the lost soul being pushed around by fate that he was before.

Back to work, friends!

Ren D.

Where I've Come From on My Writer's Journey

I've been writing fiction since I was a child, inspired by the thousands of wonderful books (and their authors*) that I devoured, flying from cover to cover, book to book.

I never got to take a course in creative writing.  I just knew writing was fun, and I loved to do it.

When I was in middle school (Go Cards!) and high school (Go Vikes!), I was fairly prolific and wrote pages upon pages of adventure stories, starring my friends in quirky situations.  I wrote about calculators, people's shoes, penguins learning to cook, purple monkeys, shrunken apple heads, and much more nonsense that I don't care to admit to these days.

I even won a handful of writing contests.  They don't mean anything to anyone now, but I'll always recall them with a little pride.

It was easier back then.  I remember summer afternoons jamming out pages of dialogue, single-spaced in the smallest font possible, laughing to myself as I got my unsuspecting friends in and out of bizarre situations.  I didn't overthink every word.

My audience consisted of my friends, so I didn't understand the concept of character development.  I didn't need it -- everyone knew the characters in my stories and what they were like.

And, GUILTY, almost all of my stories were left unfinished.  I even titled one of the stories "The Unfinished Story of..." because I knew I'd never finish it, even from the start.  Either I didn't know when (or how) to end a story, or as it often happened, I started writing with enthusiasm, only for that enthusiasm to peter out as I got more involved in schoolwork.

When I began thinking seriously about a writing career, I knew I would have to stop leaving stories unfinished.  As far as I know, most people don't like to be left hanging, wondering if their books are missing the last few pages.  Thus, The Fracture of a Dream started off with an ending, and I planned the major events and timeline clearly before I began writing.

Details changed as I began the actual writing process, of course, but having the structure of a planned plot has allowed me to write the story out of order and leave parts unwritten when the details were not yet clear to me.  It's worked out very well for me, and I completely intend to model future writing projects on this one.

Ren D.

*No authors were harmed in my childhood quest to read the entire library.  Lest you think I'm a cannibal, I didn't actually devour any authors -- just their inspiring ideas!