An Electrifying Saturday

We get plenty of rain in Seattle, but it’s usually in the form of a misty drizzle– the sort of rain where you’re not sure if it’s even worth the trouble of opening an umbrella. But a few times a year, lightning does light up the sky. It’s not very often, and the storms never last long, but whenever I hear that rumble of thunder, I immediately get excited and even somewhat nostalgic for the Southeast U.S. For me, there’s something therapeutic about ferociously bad weather, as long as I’m enjoying it from home and not, say, trying to drive through it.

Last night we got one of the best storms since we’ve moved to Seattle, and even though it was still relatively short (there were two or three brief bands of rain and lightning over the course of maybe two hours), it was nevertheless fun. I’ve been playing with a new camera (a Canon EOS 7D), so I took the camera to the overhang at the front of the building, set up a tripod, and decided to see what I could capture. Naturally, as soon as I did the rain and thunder faded away, but my patience was rewarded when another band of storms came through and I caught this picture, at about 1:30 am this morning:

That may be one of my favorite pictures I’ve ever taken. The overhang of my apartment is not exactly the greatest view– with a better vantage point I’d love to get a picture of lightning framing the Space Needle, or the downtown skyline– but given that it was my first attempt at lightning photography ever, I’m pretty happy.

Also, apparently taking that picture used up all my electricity-related karma for a while. When I left this morning to drive to Writer’s Group, I found my car battery dead. I took a taxi, and when I finally joined up with my fellow Wordslingers and turned on my laptop, I found it was only at half-power, despite having charged all night.

I got a measure of revenge on the universe by having this conversation on Twitter. (Warning: terrible puns ensue. Click on link at your own risk.)

Clarion West Write-a-thon Wrapup

On August 3, Clarion West 2013– and with it the Clarion West Write-a-thon– came to an end. Ultimately, I didn’t quite make my word count goal. My final tally was 36,247 words; my goal had been 42,000. I’m not disappointed, though. I got off to a good start on a novel that I’m still planning to finish by the end of October, and I learned a lot about the plotting of a novel, and about my own writing process.

From the beginning, my goal was not just to write 42,000 words, but 42,000 reasonably good words. I know I can write thousands of words of dreck quickly; I’ve done it before (my 2011 NaNoWriMo novel was 50,000 words of me fumbling around looking for a plot), so when I began to slow down near the end of the Write-a-thon I decided not to spend time writing a bunch of words that I was just going to have to go back and delete. I’m no longer interested in merely finishing a novel; I wanted to finish a novel that I can be proud of– even if it takes a few passes of revision to reach that point.

It wasn’t so much writer’s block that slowed me down, it was writer’s fatigue. Writing 1,000 words a day on top of keeping up with the dayjob, gym, and more than anything, suffering from frequent bouts of insomnia meant that I spent weeks barely managing to drag myself through the day. It was not unlike what I imagine new parents taking care of a baby feel like– a continued inability to get enough sleep to function. The insomnia itself was probably brought on by three things: (1)my apartment isn’t air conditioned, which meant even here in Seattle I was often too warm to comfortably fall asleep; (2)insomnia is a side effect of taking Zoloft (as of this week I’m actually switching meds); and (3)engaging my creative brain late at night often meant that the gears of my brain would still be churning for an hour or two after I left the computer.

Around the time I hit 35,000 words I began to feel like the draft was broken. Not seriously– mostly I felt like I was writing just to pad word count, taking the characters to uninteresting places so they could ramble. And I had several ideas of how to fix that, but doing so would have meant doing a lot of revising at a time when I was trying to make positive word count. And I was already exhausted enough that I just couldn’t try to maintain the 1,000 word a day pace and do revisions on top of that. Perhaps if I were less neurotic, I could have just kept going with a mental note to fix it later, but as stated before, I don’t need to prove to myself that I can churn out dreck. I know I can do that.

So caught between a rock and a hard place, I stepped away from the Write-a-thon and caught up on sleep. It’s a decision I don’t regret.

With the Write-a-thon over now, I plan to go back and revise the draft a bit– try to keep up better momentum, add a couple interesting twists to the plot, and rid it a bit of “Word Count Padding Syndrome”– then continue onward. I really like this idea and this world, so I want to keep the writing fun. If I feel bogged down, I’m going to listen to my gut and try to figure out where I went wrong. It’s possible that this approach will backfire, but I feel like it’s important for me to try it, for the sake of improving my novel-writing craft, and so I can learn what works and what doesn’t for me.

Thanks to everyone who supported me over the course of the Write-a-thon. For everyone else, it’s not too late to make a last minute donation and support the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop. Even though I wasn’t attending the workshop this year, I still had a blast attending the weekly readings and various social events, meeting the Clarion participants, and getting a chance to hang out with awesome folks. Maybe attending the workshop itself will be in the cards for me next year.

First, though, there’s a novel to finish. Onward!