Spinwork Blog

There are always going to be times when you write where you find that you can’t, and not because you don’t know what to write. Right now, I’m pretty distracted by a lot of stuff going on in my personal life. Most of it is really too trivial to talk about. The real stuff keeping me from writing these days is school work and my job. And even when I get free time–which isn’t often–I’m usually discouraged by how I have to rush through everything. Right now, for example, I’m working on some stuff for class and I can’t get into it because I know I won’t have time to dedicate myself to it.

At the moment, my goal to close out 2008 is get some pieces done for the site. There’s a new design in the works that I’ll reveal when I’ve got enough done. At the moment it’s not in code yet. Heck–I started it last night. Hopefully I can get a blog-skin working for this thing, too.

Every autumn, without fail, I get into this mood. It’s had its variants over the years, but one thing has always resurfaced consistently: the urge to write an autumn-themed sappy romance with violent indulgences in fiery leaves, scarves, pumpkins, apple-pies and other things that would make anyone who knows the gist of my more serious work want to vomit. I’ve tried this in various degrees over the past three years. One was called Salamander, which inadvertently burgeoned into an epic high fantasy, Autumn Waker, which no demon of any religion or spiritual concept can get me to talk about, and then A Whispered Eulogy. Each one crashed and burned rather spectacularly in one way or another–one collapsed under it’s own weight, another was glanced at by several editor friends who promptly drowned in the hormones and were never seen again, and the last was glimpsed by some before I promptly deep-sixed it somewhere in my folders.

The root of this dreadful disease actually comes from something I experienced in 2004, days before I started the original Hellion (parts of which suffered heavily from autumnitus in its own right). Part of me has been toying with the idea of sitting down and just bloody writing what actually happened that day. Some people have even recommended that I do. But several things are holding me back. I think the biggest one is that the experience still makes me hurt, even four years down the line. Not so much because of anything anyone did, but just the raw intensity of the events. It’s good, I suppose. People have said intensity is the strongest part of my writing. But what do you do when the feelings are so uncontrolled that you can’t think of the idea, even though you love it?

This is a story that’s been trying to escape me for a while. In each of my last works–Salamander, and A Whispered Euology more-so–the story pretty much relives the experience vicariously. There are scenes in the latter that were lifted almost verbatim from what I remember in term so feeling and execution. Part of me wants to open up the document again and throw it back together. AWE isn’t terrible. It’s just written terribly and suffers from “teh sap.” Most of it was extracted from my unconscious in the midst of a writing slump so there are parts where it feels really forced. But then again, most of the good crap from AWE are in The Lantern Fly now. So I really can still write it–and I’m going to.

If I can find the bloody time! Raaaaghaghaghagh.

Another thing about this time of year is that it makes a hermit of me. When I’m in full writing mode–which usually happens in the fall for some reason–I usually shut myself away from everything. That’s difficult when you’re either making lattes or doing homework.

Onwards, upwards.

Still sticking to my guns about writing in this once a month if I can. This semester has officially begun eating me alive, one piece at a time. Even finding time to write is becoming difficult–made worse by my old over-sized Dell kicking the bucket a couple weeks back. Fortunately, I was able to pick up a new one almost immediately, only this time instead of sticking to Dell, I got myself a Macbook Pro, and I have never been more pleased. I’ve always been a hot-key dork, and this machine seems to beg for it. If this thing had any more sex appeal, I’d–well, I’ll spare you.

Writing-wise, I’ve been trying to narrow my focus to one project, two at best. So far that’s been going about as well as it can given my schedule. I haven’t had much of any time for anything writing-related lately. At the moment, I’ve got The Lantern Fly, Endoflux Theory for my projects, and several short stories. The post title is actually a quote from one of them, which spends a bit of time mocking wordiness and purple prose (I am suspicious I’m really mocking myself). All of them are in various states of completion–some needing to be reworked completely (Pennies, And the Silence Screamed), with others needing edits (Unwound) and to be finished (a few untitleds). No idea when they will be done–but when they are, it’ll be nice to have something for the site.

Other than that… not too much is going on.

So far, I’ve been surviving my hell-semester with minimum incident. Not much writing, either–just some edits to Endoflux Theory’s prologue, Stagnancy, which is now posted in Seventh-Element’s Underground. So far I’m really proud of how that’s working out and the responses I’ve been getting. I don’t know when I’ll have a chance to launch into Part I (I have so much freaking back story work to finish ;_;).

Just a quick update, really. I’m waiting for a train to JFK to go back up to Vermont.

Already I am starting to see how this semester is going to cause problems for my writing. Not only am I taking 5 classes and a lab, I’m continuing to work at Starbucks 20 hours a week. This leaves me virtually little to no time to do any work. On most days, I won’t be able to sit down at the computer until after 8-9PM, when chances are I’ll have homework to do. I do however, have Friday nights, and weekends totally off, which is usually when I do most of my writing any way during the school year.

This leaves a few things open to happening. One, is that I’ll lower my hours at work to 15 hours (Five hours makes a massive difference at this job–you would be surprosed). Another is dropping a class and taking it over the summer. Worse still, is pushing back ET until next semester when I’ll hopefully have less classes. I’m counting on the lab class not being that bad–if it is, I’m screwed. But at least it’s out of the way.

On the writing front, I’ve been scrounging up time to work on Endoflux Theory lately. The writing is really good for the most part. The problem I’m running into is that the first page doesn’t lead into the main character the way I want to. The result is a lot of rewriting as I struggle with finding an easy-to-follow way to get readers into the story without confusing the shit out of them. The past couple days I’ve been breaking from that to get some work done on characters and plotlines.

Although I’d rather avoid pushing back ET, it remains a possibility. The upside is, I’ll be able to spend my wayward time working on Hellion. It won’t be until a few weeks into the semester when I’ll know for sure, and heavily depends on how much editing I can get done before plunging into the week. We’ll see.

http://spinworkstudios.com/endofluxtheory/

As some of you might have extrapolated, I’m about ready to begin posting ET in September. I finished the prologue of the story a couple of days ago. In a few days, I’ll begin editing and finalize the details for the first “Act” of the story. Since ET is pretty much being written for the internet the chapter structure and updates will be different. Given how difficult it is for some people to read stuff on the computer, I’ve shortened the updates to three pages (A4/8×11 size).

As for the preview: What you see is a first draft with a lot of the prose removed. I did it more or less for the “wow” factor. I know there’s some awkward phrasing there. I’m pretty sure it’ll be changed in the final version.

It’s been a chaotic couple of weeks for writing. I haven’t had much time to do any work on any of my projects, but I am intending to find one to settle into within the next week or so–probably with either Hellion or Endoflux Theory. I have soft spots for both projects, but I’m pretty sure since Hellion is physically further along, I’ll be working on that. =)

I’ll try to write a better update when I’m not horribly crunched for time (ah, family vacations).

Today I figured I’d sift through my notes and material for Hellion for my antagonistic problem, and got hit by a nasty case of OMGWTFDIWT-itus (Oh my god, when the fuck did I write this. -Itus). By the time I finished reading the notes–which were only from around May, actually, I was about ready to start dancing. Turns out the problem was really close to being solved when I got a job and set my work aside for a bit.

This–and I stress–is the reason why freewriting and note taking is so important for a writer. Life’s a chaotic thing, and there are times where you will be writing one thing and suddenly you’ll have to go take out the trash, only to come back and not remember what you were working on. I have to say, I had absofuckinglutely NO recollection of writing this stuff, although reading it over did remind me a lot of my train of thought when I did set it down. To be honest, I was about to set off on a different direction with the story entirely, and without it, who knows where I’d have ended up.

Now, if I can only stop being distracted by all these effing dolphins that are swimming by the beach outside (I mean, come on, fucking _dolphins_!), I can finally get enough work done on these concepts that I can pick up on that scene again.

Inspiration is a weird thing–weirder than anything I think I’d experience if I was in any other field. I’ve always had the issue of “project hopping,” but lately it seems to be getting back into that phase where I want to shoot myself everytime the hamster like voice in me goes “IT’S A.D.D. TIME!” and throws me back at another project. Realistically, I have a backlog of about five projects not counting short stories, three of which I keep close to me at any one time. By “close” I mean I’ve  been making notes here and there, not actually writing. I’ve done very little of that lately.

As far as plans, I really only cater to my interests unless  I either have a finished draft or severe writers block. My plan has always been, “write a draft, work on something else for a while, come back to it, edit” so I don’t have to worry about burn out. That’ll be all well and good while I’m doing this semi-professionally, but when I actually start going in for publishing stuff, I’ll need to really rehash the way I work.

Lately, Hellion has been driving me bonkers. There’s a whole swath of plot in my head that makes perfect sense, but the road to that plot is very indecisive and incomplete. Its not writers block in the respect that I don’t know what to write, but that I have to kind of stop dusting the crap off fossils with a brush and grab myself a pick axe. Antagonistic elements are getting the scrutiny now, especially since for the first whatever portion I’ve written, it’s the environment itself that acts as the antagonist. What I need to decide if this will suffice, or if I need to give it a more singular face.

I guess I’ll figure it out.

After what could be described as some epic fails testing some Twitter crap out for the blog, I’ve decided that for the moment, I’m going to keep this blog set-up as is, if not change the skin to reflect the overall design of the site (I hate having a different design here than on site).

The new site’s been up nearly a week now, and I’m still puttering about ideas with how I want everything to work, whether or not the site needs a forum and what work I want to get up here. I’m still working hard on Pennies and And the Silence Screamed to post, but with the way Endoflux Theory is going, I think it’ll be some time before we see any of the two shorter works.

I’ve been getting IMs from people for the past few days asking what Endoflux Theory is and the plot. I’ve always been really bad about explaining plot lines, especially when I have to do it nine or ten times a week, because the plot changes so much that I find myself telling two entirely different stories to some people. I’m going to hold off on describing the plot at the moment, since I’m just reaching the point where I’m laying out plot lines and figuring out where my vision and the story are going to meet. In reality, when I write a story like this, plot lines are the last thing I worry about since so much of the story relies on the characters and their chemistry.  That’s not to say I don’t have ideas–but they’re still in that phase where everything’s a big ball of multiple threads of yarn all tied together that I’ve yet to unravel and work out the knots and stuff.

The one clear thing is that in many ways, ET is a bit of a departure from my other attempts. It’s a lot lighter and a lot darker in many ways than Hellion is (if I were to describe Hellion as neutral colors, its a light is more of a muddy yellow and dark is a mucky dark brown, where ET to me feels like various shades of ground up chrome and ball barings swirling around in light and dark vortexes), and a lot more open in terms of possibilities. Since this is going to be published online in a serialized format, it gives me a lot more freedom to explore from installment to installment. All in all, ET is an experiment and I’m not planning on judging very quickly.

Besides that, I’ve got some people who have agreed to help me along with the site when it comes time to get things rolling. My roommates Dan and Mike have agreed to help me out with design and coding respectively so I can keep things rolling more efficiently. For those of you who frequented SE, Dan was Knowyourenemy. You can check out Mike at Over the Pond, his blog.

That’s all I’ll say on that for now.

In other news, I’m finally out in California on vacation. Since 2006, this has really been the time where I’ve taken what I’m working on, whether its a concept or actual manuscript and ran away with it. This is where I really hit stride with Salamander and wrote the concepts that made going forward with Hellion possible. Sitting in a place where I can stare out at the Pacific Ocean whenever I get a block is more than a help :P. As an aside, since I work for Starbucks now, I get a 30% discount on all my purchase. Cross that with drinking the much-cheaper iced shaken green teas, and getting free refills for them, I pay as little as a dollar-forty for the first go, and thirty-five cents per refill.

In short, I am a happy writer