Joseph Little

A Bad Week, Doubled

October 24, 2016 by Joseph Little

Last week was a bad week. I wrote maybe 500 words. I may have imagined them. The week before wasn’t much better with something in the neighborhood of 2-5000 words written.

What was wrong? Well on one hand I have my outside pursuits: Destiny – a video game I play with my wife and several friends; HirstArts – imagine Legos, but you literally make the blocks, glue them together, and paint them to make castles and dungeons; and just general laziness. On the other hand I really didn’t feel … I want to say ‘valued’ or maybe ‘capable’, but I think instead I’ll just let the sentence be, “I really didn’t feel.”

Was I depressed? Likely. But I have a crippling level of self-doubt and some major Imposer Syndrome going on too. Plus right now I don’t really like my job, despite loving it, the company I work for, and the people I work with. And I feel like I have no close friends, despite having many to whom I’m likely a poor friend yet they still call me friend. So yeah, depression is the most likely reason for some of my lack of writing.

I was likely on the verge of giving up, for a while.

A week or four, tops.

Probably.

And then I received an email from my writing coach, Erica Wright. I met Erica through OneRoom, which I pay for so you know she’s going to be supportive. Yet it took me two days to read the email.

I was pretty sure the email would say something like, “God Damn It, Joe! Get off your fat ass and write, or I’m passing you off to someone else who doesn’t give a shit.” Instead the email basically said: “You seem to work better with word counts as a goal. I have some suggestions on the OneRoom page. Check them out and let me know how I can help.” Pretty straightforward stuff.

I still wasn’t sure the “help” on the OneRoom page wasn’t going to equate to what I feared the email might say, so I dragged my feet and waited another four days before reading. Mind you I was still in the mood to give up. For a while at least. Probably.

Erica maintained an upbeat and positive message for me, and it was exactly what I needed to hear (or read … or whatever). Suddenly I was out of my writing funk. I vowed to renew my writing over the weekend. Glory be to Erica.

During the weekend I didn’t write, but I did plan a lot. I returned to my story, and I reexamined it from the ground up. I know it has significant holes, and I know I am likely to veer from my outlined path, but damn it if I’m not happier. I feel the story again. At least for now.

I later reread Erica’s message out loud to my wife so that she might hear the gloriously uplifting message from my coach. Honestly it fell flat. It was almost as if upon sharing the message from coach to student, the potency of the message was diluted, was dissipated. A secret shared is no longer a secret. That was weird, BUT I must say, the impact of the message remains.

IF you are like me, maybe you could benefit from a writing coach. OneRoom is probably not the only player in town, but it is what I discovered. So far I’m happy with the results, as it has likely saved me from a wasted month or three. Plus my coach’s (to date) unwavering support keeps my eye on the prize more than it has ever been.

Thanks Erica!

Proud Papa

October 3, 2016 by Joseph Little

I have always had difficulty spelling. Always. It is almost a learning disability for me. I have been incredibly embarrassed for most of my life because of this “deficiency” in my skills, but I am over it now. Mostly.

Today part of my daughter’s homework assignment was a mock spelling quiz. She received her words today. I called them out to her and she spelled them one by one in her journal. There were a few she had never heard before. She got them all correct, even the ones she had never heard before. *I* had to double check the correct spelling on a couple … you know … just in case. I totally knew how to spell them.

I am very proud of her.

And I have to add that there is an amount of relief I feel knowing that one of my greatest hurdles in school, hell in life, is not one of hers.

Questions

July 19, 2016 by Joseph Little

At what point does one throw in the towel? To admit defeat and move on? To simply quit?

As of this writing, I have 49000+ words written on my novel Charlotte. This isn’t my first attempt at a novel, but it is my most successful. And it is a total failure. Complete rubbish.

Well maybe not complete rubbish. I still like the basic premise, and Charlotte herself is mildly interesting. I also have a few secondary characters that are just starting to become more interesting. I have hints of a backstory for my heroine and a constant turmoil that she must endure as she simply seeks for a normal life. But the story so far simply lacks a plot. It is a day in the life sort of story told episodically through diary entries.

I like it, my wife likes it, my friends kind of like it … but it’s horrible. Just horrible. None of us would finish the book if we found it lying on the seat next to us on the train one day. Not unless we had a macabre desire for nightmares before bedtime. Currently I can’t even back that one up. In all honesty the reader would more likely drift off to Slumberland due to boredom. We would all wonder how it was that we came to be on a train however, as none of use live anywhere that train travel is readily available, but I digress.

My lead has no major flaws other than the inability to face her past. She’s only mildly proactive. Mostly she goes out looking for work each day and tries not to eat people. Kind of interesting, but not really. Right now my half developed secondary characters are more interesting: a roguish young man who seems rebellious but who is loved by the tenement children because he cares for them; a foreigner shopkeeper who has hunted vampires, was almost burned at the stake, and who is currently a mercenary spy; a manservant with a grinding voice who does vile work for monsters, yet gives his victims honest advice in what few words he speaks. The most interesting thing my heroine has done is set her own compound fracture. Ouch, but yeah … that’s it. Oh and my villain? Meh! Right now he is a vague outline of a man who wields a whip while wearing a beaver top hat and has a thuggish toady to do his underhanded bidding. And maybe he had an affair with the heroine’s mother … and maybe he’s her biological father. Other than that though … nothing!

So I’ve determined that I have to restart. It is inevitable. I need to make an actual plot, and I have an idea. I will make my heroine more flawed and start before she becomes a monster. She will have a purpose but no ability to follow through. Then she’ll take a “job” that will kill her and begin the process of making her a monster. She’ll wake from her death and fight that transformation. At this point she will have power, power to follow through on her purpose, but she will find that she doesn’t have the skill to use the power. Enter the mentor who will guide her and become like family until his inevitable death. There, on the cusp of accomplishing her purpose, my heroine will now be cast down once more. Her descent will lead her to fully become the monster, but just before she does the one thing that will ensure her monstrous transformation, she pulls back from the brink with help from her friends. Her purpose largely fulfilled, she reasserts herself to a new purpose, one that will be far lasting and potentially redeeming (possibly ensuring future stories / serialization).

The above plot is significantly different than my current rough draft. There are scenes I can keep from my current work, but I feel like I should complete my current work before restarting. On the other hand I have a very difficult time telling myself to write something I know is going to be completely removed from the next draft. So how do I progress?

Options before me:

Continue writing my current rough draft and just plow through with my original idea. I might be able to save something somewhere.
Stop immediately, create a structured draft of the new story, and start again.
Combine the two – sort of. Continue with the current rough draft but write as if I’m halfway through already.
Delete everything. Get rid of it all, pull the hard drives and drill holes through them then pass the platters through some industrial shredder, delete all of my social media accounts, take online hypnosis classes and hypnotize my friends and family into forgetting I ever thought about writing, and then silently weep at night when no one is around until the pain goes away.

Options 1-3 are all pretty close in my mind, but currently 4 has the lead.

Does anyone that’s ever done this before have any advice?

Back in the Swing of Things

June 6, 2016 by Joseph Little

I’ve been dormant for several months. There are reasons. The reasons don’t matter to my writing, but they exist. The real problem is that I’ve gone cold. It isn’t that I have writer’s block so much as I have writer’s don’t-give-a-fuck. I’m not sure, but I think that’s worse. Anyway, deep down inside I know that this is a temporary thing. I just want to ensure that it is more temporary than not, so I’m trying to force things along.

My new writing routine will be slow at first. What I’m aiming for is that each day I do two of the following:

Read Something
Journal Something
Write Something
Learn Something

I’d like to do each of those everyday, and I hope that eventually I will.

I’ve also decided that I have to do some writing prompts, if nothing else, on my writing days. I’ve resisted those for a while because I felt like, “If I’m not going to try to publish it, why would I ever write it in the first place?” But now I think I see that I’m just being foolish. I need to be able to write some throw-away stuff. Hell my entire first few years of writing is likely to be thrown away, so why worry about what it is? Additionally, maybe there will be some scraps of awesome in those throw away items that I’ll reuse later, or maybe I’ll get inspired by a throw away item to work on my novels or short stories. Who knows? I surely won’t if I don’t at least try.

Flash Fiction – That Moment

May 17, 2016 by Joseph Little

When I first heard about the attack, the terrorists bombing the mall, of course the first thing I though was, “Is he OK?”

I was worried. Incredibly worried.

Really, I was. He was supposed to be there after all.

After hours of no news, I was falling apart. So out of desperation, I considered the worst.

“What if he is gone?”

“How would things be different?”

“What would life hold for me now that I’m older?”

That was when it hit me.

I didn’t want to be married any longer.

I wanted that life of freedom and uncertainty. I wanted it partly because it was dangerous, although not too dangerous since we are financially stable and the kids are grown. But I also wanted it partly because it was something new. Something fresh. Something exciting!

Once I considered all the implications … really considered them …

All I wanted was to be free.

Procrastination is a Lie

February 23, 2016 by Joseph Little

My daughter has difficulty with completing her homework each night. She’s more than capable, she just doesn’t like doing the work. She also doesn’t like lies or liars. In fact for the longest time she didn’t like many of my jokes because they were predicated on some form of lie, but now she understands the difference between lies for the sake of a joke and lies told in an attempt to deceive someone in a harmful way. I still don’t think she gets “white lies” but I’m not pushing her on that regard.

She’d had a bad day with her homework one day, and her mother and I asked her why she hadn’t finished. ‘Procrastination,’ was her honest answer, but then she blew it off like procrastinating was just something that happened to people, like traffic or allergies. So in an attempt to get her over her homework hump I told her something I thought would get her moving or at least thinking.

“Procrastination is a lie,” I said, and as soon as I said it, I believed it to be true, because it is.

She was thoroughly confused with what I said. She thought I was calling her a liar because she used procrastination as her excuse. No, that wasn’t the case I assured her, and I laid out my reasoning.

Procrastination is a lie. It is a lie we tell ourselves. The lie suggests: “I will be happier if I don’t do this now and do it later.” “I will feel less burdened if I don’t do this now.” “I will do this later.” “It will be easier if I do this later.”

Those are all lies.

If procrastination tells you that you will be happier or less burdened if you do something later, that’s a lie. You might feel an instant sense of relief, but deep down inside you know that the task lies just over the horizon. The task becomes a distraction and worrying about the distraction or the impending task becomes a burden that you may feel. The truth of the matter is that if you simply buckle down and complete the task as soon as you can, when you have completed it, you will have no distractions, no limits to the remainder of your time. Burdens are shackles and true happiness comes with freedom.

“I will do this later,” is my favorite lie to myself. I always get more accomplished if I simply do something as soon as I think about it – assuming I have the time. There is one caviot to this however. One needs to ensure that s/he is not procrastinating on a harder, less enjoyable task by taking on a simpler or more enjoyable one. I often do this, and I never complete any of those tasks. If I focus on getting things done and avoid putting off tasks as they come, I get more done. Later is a lie. Now is a house in which truth dwells.

“It will be easier if I do this later,” is a lie that can occasionally be true. Unless something is literally keeping you from a task, finishing will usually be quicker if you simply start something as soon as possible. Sometimes some event happens that makes the task much easier. I encounter this on occasion at work. An individual might read email and add information regarding a task I have assigned to me. That information often helps me narrow the scope of my research and achieve completion of the task more quickly, but in reality this happens less often than not. Most problems I solve at work are the result of my starting from square one and working to find the solution. Sometimes additional information is a distraction, and until you’ve done the work to understand the full scope of your problem, the information is just more junk to sort through on your way to understanding. Therefore most often, it has been my experience that one should start work as soon as possible. If new information comes along that makes the task simpler or more correct, then give thanks for your good fortune and get the task done, but if you wait and new information never comes, then you have simply wasted valuable time for no good reason. The possibility of help is usually a lie. You can only count on yourself to get things done.

I’m sure there are more lies that procrastination tells. If you think of any, please share in the comments.