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The Business of Creating

29 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by in Art, Music, My Journey, Writing

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Last night I managed to get to the 50,000 word target of my fourth year of NaNoWriMo. Huzzah! I was so pleased to have been able to get it done, two days early, and with only a couple of thousand words worth of story to go. I’m going to wrap it up today and tomorrow and then put it away for a little while to stew.

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I’ve had some conversations in the last little while about my plan for the future. The only problem is I don’t really have a well thought out and detailed plan. What I want is a job that I like well enough, that’s part-time so that I can do my creative stuff on the side, and possibly one day I’ll get a job where I can use my writing skills, but maybe not. That’s the plan.

At the moment I have a job placement which is three days per week doing Human Resources. It’s a refreshing change from the basic office admin job placements I’ve been doing recently so I’m really enjoying getting stuck in. It’s only until the end of the year though, and then I’ll be back to looking for ongoing work.

So here’s the new plan. Starting from now I’m going to work one day per week on my writing. Now that NaNoWriMo is finished for the year I really need to start doing something with my older manuscripts. The one I wrote last year, in particular, needs a whole bunch of structural edits and additional sections.

I’m going to do what I’ve heard other professional authors do, for example Dawn French and Fiona McIntosh, that is set myself a proper 9am to 5pm day of work for my writing. In the morning I will spend my time researching writing opportunities, applying for jobs, finding writing competitions, magazines and periodicals and blogs that are taking submissions and do that. This will be my time to work on this blog. I will also look into networking possibilities in the industry and short courses in writing that I might like to do.

In the afternoon I’m just going to write (and rewrite). I’m going to start with the manuscript from last year’s NaNoWriMo, which needs some big stuff done to it, and spend a couple of hours a week just going through it and fixing it. Editing has never been my strong suit, I’ve always be much more interested in coming up with new material, but I must spend the time revising and reworking. Maybe I’ll set myself a deadline of the end of January to have it done and I can start sending it to publishers.

Some of you may have noticed that that only adds up to four days work. You’re right, and the other day I’m going to keep for my band. We meet once a week usually, and rehearse for 4 or 5 hours. That takes up most of one day of the weekend. I will spend some of the time on the other weekday practicing and the rest of the day getting the chores and life admin stuff done that I would have done on the weekend. We’re also going to start looking for performance opportunities in the new year so I’ll schedule those in too.

My aim in this is to get myself into a routine. I’m not studying anymore and I hope to have a solid, ongoing job by early next year. It’s time to get serious about the business of creating and make sure that going back to uni was not just a frivolous escape from being at work.

Poetry Group V2.0

23 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by in My Journey, Writing

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Recently I started attending a new poetry writers’ workshop type thing. The organiser was looking for new members and she asked the organiser of my other writing group to pass on her details. I was interested to try a new group, and this one was specifically for poetry, to get some different feedback on my work. My beloved writing group, BWI, consists mainly of prose writers and they often protest that they don’t have the expertise to critique the poems I bring along. I was also interest in getting a different perspective on my writing. The people in BWI are very supportive and nurturing, but each of them brings a particular set of skills with them, and their criticisms seem to follow a pattern based on these skills. This isn’t a bad thing, but surely getting a range of feedback is important for my growth as a writer.

So I went along to a meeting of this new group (I’m going to call it GCP even though it doesn’t really have a name). The first meeting was weird, which is to be expected. I took along two poems, one was a free verse, fairly angry sort of poem about love, and the other was an attempt at pentameter that I wrote after having read a lot of Milton’s Paradise Lost for uni. Once we were all settled in, we started work-shopping some of the existing members poems. There were four existing members and four or five new members. When it came to my turn I chose to do the free verse poem. The process was a fairly standard sort of thing: when it gets to your work, you read it out aloud and then the others have a chance to offer you constructive feedback. I was quite anxious as there’s something extremely vulnerable about asking for a critique of a poem from people you don’t know. People can be very cruel, often without really meaning to be.

Most of the group were cautious and constructive in their feedback, they made some insightful comments about my use of particular words, and had only a few suggestions for changes. I was so relieved. But at the same time there was one guy, and there’s always one guy, who insisted on having the last word on every piece. Who insisted on saying his bit about everything, and often disagreeing with the feedback that other members of the group were suggesting. Many of his criticisms were very picky, like concerns about whether a comma or colon was required. He got my hackles up from the very beginning of the meeting and made me feel wary of what he was going to say. I’ve spoken to a few people and they’ve said that there is almost always one person, usually a white man of a certain vintage, who behaves like this in any poetry or writing workshop.

Last Monday I went to my second meeting of GCP. This guy was there again, and again he was nit-picky and spoke significantly more than any other member of the group. I was not impressed. I guess the question I’m facing now is whether I want to keep going to this group or not. On the plus side they’re all poets and are, for the most part, very encouraging, knowledgeable and have some great insights. But this one guy really colours my experience of the group.

I feel like this isn’t a story that’s exclusive to me. I know a lot of people, particularly people who are not white-men-of-a-certain-vintage, have this experience. It makes me both a bit sad and a bit angry that there are still people out there who insist that their voices are the most important voices in the room. It makes me more sad and angry that these voices almost always belong to the same group of people.

I guess I’m just having a bit of a rant, I don’t really know what to do about the whole thing. I’m going to miss the next meeting because I’ll be in Europe gallivanting about for the whole of August (woo, more on that to follow). Maybe I’ll reassess how I feel about this group when I get back. I’ll give them one more try to see if I can separate any value I get from the group’s feedback from the bad feelings I get from this guy, but if I can’t or if the bad feelings outweigh the good ones, then I guess it’s a case of another one bites the dust.

2014 – A Year in Review

31 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by in My Journey

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Last year I wrote a post outlining my goals for the year. These were the things that I had on my list:

  1. Submit my second novel to publishers
  2. Finish adapting the second novel into a screenplay and send it to some local film companies
  3. Plan my next big trip (this one is just going to stay on the list every year)
  4. Write something for young adults
  5. Submit something for Lot’s Wife (this is the student publication for the university I attend)
  6. Perform my work at spoken word events (I’ve already signed up for something in February, and I look forward to more)
  7. Finish the mural for my house
  8. Win NaNoWriMo 2014
  9. Talk to strangers
  10. Exercise (I’m pretty good with this generally but it doesn’t hurt to put it on the list right?)
  11. Read (all the things, I joined a book club to help with this, but so far it’s just added more books to the ‘to read’ pile)
  12. and most importantly just keep writing; anything, all the time!

For the most part, I did pretty well at achieving the goals I set for myself.

One was fairly straight forward, I sent off my manuscript to any and every publisher that I thought would be even vaguely interested and I had no response. That’s about what I was expecting, it’s a super competitive market and I think I would probably need to be pretty lucky to get picked up, but it was a bit disappointing none the less.

On to number two. I rewrote Adventures in Mediocrity as a film script, which turned out to be much harder than it sounded (requiring quite a different skill set if I’m honest), and I ended up with something that was way too long and boring. I haven’t made time to go in and slash it up in the way it needs to be. I’m counting that one as done, but it’s still a work in progress. I also didn’t send it out to anyone, because as I say it’s still super long and boring and will need some very serious attention in order for it to be worth sending to anyone.

Three, plan a trip, was meant to be just that, plan something. But in mid May (or sometime near there), I decided I needed a holiday sooner rather than later and I very quickly organised a three week trip to India. The trip was a real eye opener in so many ways. I’m very glad I did it, I learned a lot about myself and about life but it was often extremely challenging. Tick for that one!

Number four was a carry over from 2013, and again I didn’t do it. I wonder if maybe young adult is something that doesn’t come naturally to me, and it might be better to put this one on a bucket list for something I want to do at some point rather than trying to force it to come out in a particular year. I think young adult could be really fun to write, but I also have loads of other project ideas so I’ll get to it one day.

Five was submit for the university magazine. This one is a bit dissatisfying because I did submit two items, one was a satirical quiz, in the vein of the Cosmo/Dolly quizzes that many women will remember having done in high-school, and the other was a response to the Ilsa Vista killings in May. Both of these items were rejected and I wonder whether as a mature aged student I don’t have quite the right perspective for what the editors want. I dunno, maybe they just suck at diversity.

Number six was amazing. I would like to thank Little Raven Publishing for providing the avenue for my to perform my work to a beautiful and receptive audience. I performed at Velvet Tongue events a couple of times, and at the launch of Little Raven 3, an erotic anthology in which one of my stories was published (woot!).

Speaking of published, I also had two of my works, one story and one poem, published in my writing group anthology, and another story in a different local anthology. It’s been fantastic to be able to work with my writing group, a group of people who are both critical and encouraging, and to have that bear fruit. My writing group also had a workshop day in October, one session of which was a panel on poetry that I was invited to moderate. I really appreciated the faith in my ability, and the opportunity to try a new skills, and the positive feedback that I received for the session. I would certainly be keen to do something like that again. That one wasn’t on the list, but it was certainly an achievement worthy of being recorded.

Seven was finish the mural for my house. This one was an utter failure and the main reason for that is that the relationship between myself and the housemates in that particular place disintegrated completely and I moved out. I’m not going to count that against myself, because sometimes things don’t work out, and that’s ok.

The next one was to win NaNoWriMo again, which I did, so yay! But as was discussed in my last post, I haven’t finished the story, so that’s a bit annoying. I will finish it though – that’s going on the list of 2015 goals.

The last four are slightly less measurable, but I’ll attempt to review them. Talk to strangers has been going really well for me, it has resulted in meeting Seth, who invited me to join his band/jamming buds, and also meeting Alex, who is now also part of the band/jamming buds. It’s resulted in meeting the boys from Destrends, who I’m totally obsessed with and love a lot, and it’s meant that I’ve had some awesome, sometimes challenging, conversations with people that I wouldn’t have met otherwise.

Exercise has been consistent in my life generally over the year, I’m still working out at the gym two or three times per week, and I occasionally venture into other types of exercise too. My housemate and I are hoping to get into a routine using some free weights and some boxing pads, so that will be a good addition to my regimen.

The ‘To Read’ pile hasn’t really changed; I’ve read a bunch of books this year, but I’ve also added a bunch to the pile, so the pile is just as big, if not bigger than it was at the start of the year. The book club went well for the first half of the year, but when I went to full time study, with three literature subjects, I didn’t have the time to read another book a month. I finish my degree mid next year, so perhaps I’ll venture back to the book club in the latter half of the year.

Finally, keep writing. I have written a lot this year – I’ve written poetry, and short stories, most of third novel, and erotica and horror and lots of things in between. I’ve blogged, I experimented with reviews, and challenges, and I would like to blog a bit more regularly in 2015. My skills in editing will probably need some work in future, it’s really not my strong point and I feel like it might help with getting a publisher’s attention if I were more willing to kill my darlings, as they say.

2014 has been a really busy year for me. I’ve done a lot I didn’t think I would do, I’ve done a lot of things I wanted to do, and I haven’t done a few things I thought I wanted to do. I’m happier, healthier and more settled now that I was a year ago. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with my life, but that’s ok for now. Maybe at the end of 2015 I’ll be able to report that I know what I want to be when I grow up. But if I don’t then that’s ok too.

I’m going to be following this post up with a new list of goals for 2015, so be on the look out for that, but for now, I want to wish you the very best for the New Year. I hope you’re able to set yourself some goals and achieve them. I wish you happiness and growth, to be surrounded by people who love you, and the courage to love yourself.