Drawing from the Well
Queries: 48 (+0)
Rejections: 33 (+2)
First Eighth
Chapter 1 of 89
Scene 4 of 498
Word Count: 996 (+0)
I knew that when I set a daily goal of 1000 words per day the very next day I would fail. And that’s okay. I intend to do some after I post this, but this is the second attempt at this blog post so we’ll see how I do. I’m not getting myself down, though. The words will come.
And yeah, two more rejections suck (as I described yesterday). It hurts but I’m trying to take it in stride as a part of the process. My next stab at submissions is the Twitter Pitch Contest coming so soon I can taste it. My focus is there.
Two days until #PitMad.
Filling the Well
The Bible: 76%
Blue Lily, Lily Blue: 24%
Tunnel of Bones(!): 6%
The Handmaid’s Tale: 2%
I forgot that Tunnel of Bones came out today! I’ve already chewed through the first chapter and it has such a strong sense of place and character. I could do a case study on V.E. Schwab’s work. I love everything she puts out. I can’t wait to read more.
As for The Handmaid’s Tale, the first couple of pages match the opening scene from the show verbatim. It’s frightening knowing some of what’s coming and having such a clear picture in my head thanks to the show. I obviously didn’t have that back in high school. In a wholly different way, I can’t wait to read more of this too.
Polishing the Well
Hurricane watch is in effect as we wait to see what Dorian is going to do. My heart and prayers are with those in the Bahamas as this storm tries to wipe them off the map. We’re mostly unaffected where I am, but I worry for those on the coast.
Well Chat
Catching and Caging Story Bunnies
This was something I tweeted about today. Inspiration strikes at the strangest times and Shiny Object Syndrome can take over in a blink. This can even happen within a story you’re working on where the story goes down an unfruitful path for the sake of exploration. These deviations are what I call bunny trails. When it’s a new idea, like I had today, I call it a story bunny. So let’s talk about herding rabbits.
Avoiding distractions from story bunnies all about figuring out how to catch and cage them. The buggers are fast and chasing them is what leads to a major distraction (salute!). The key is to bait it back.
Okay, I know this is a lot of metaphors. Let’s talk brass tacks. When you get a great idea for a story or a thread within a story, it’s worth satisfying your curiosity to take a few moments for it. If you don’t, it’ll nag at you until you do and only serve to make you less productive. Those few minutes are your bait. That’s where you let your brain create and explore temporarily so that you can contain the story bunny.
Then you catch it. You either use a time limit or an imposed word limit or some other limitation to pull YOU back from the brink of running down the bunny trail. For me, this is getting the “kernel” down. This is not THE idea. There’s a lot more to it than that. For me, the root of an idea always starts with the magic system. I have a dozen files of magic system kernels to come back to later.
The way it happened today was that I read something that inspired a magic system. So I took just a few minutes and thought about the idea itself and put some notes down. Four phrases came up so I jotted them down. When those ran out, I ran out of steam on the idea. That was the limit. My story bunny was contained and stopped. So then I caught it. I saved the text file, put it in a folder tagged with a project name, and got the folder out of sight.
My curiosity was mostly satisfied (I still want to self-sanction some time to follow bunny trails exclusively) and the story bunny was caught without LOSING the idea. This is what some people would consider taming their muse.
Now you can use this same tactic for whatever is distracting you. Give it a moment or a few minutes, long enough to stem the initial surge of excitement from stumbling onto the distraction, and then disengage. I hope it helps.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG