June, 2010:

Seriously, not a fan of stress. I have this nasty tendency to get stressed out by utterly ridiculous crap, usually work related.

I have a fiery little ball of stress that radiates between my shoulder blades, and it is very difficult to quell. When you work all day in a soul-sucking corporate BS kind of job, it is really tough to come home and churn out the words. In fact, I spend most of my night trying to relax so I can visit the awesome land of fiction writing in the first place.

It’s a vicious cycle.

Today was so wretched that nothing seems to be soothing the fiery ball of stress. Oh well, all I can do is write through the pain, I guess, and hopefully, I will achieve victory in a first draft of this week’s episode of Scurvytown.

Diving into Scurvytown now, hoping the waters are relaxing, warm, and not actually pee. You never know in Scurvytown!

There is something to be said, I think, for find a great place to write. There is a lot to be said for that, actually, but I don’t plan on saying too much. (Ha, I don’t often plan on saying too much, but I go a little Motormouth Magee more times than not.)

On that note, after a slacky Magee kind of week, from a writing standpoint, I absolutely had to hit up the bar until I finished this week’s Scurvytown. I really don’t know what it is about HD Beans that keeps me going back. I suppose I have just sort of found my writing comfort zone there.

I think next time I’ll sneak a few shots of the bar and post them here. Maybe.

Tonight was cool because they were running $2 happy hour specials, and I cracked up the entire bar (okay, 3 people) when I ordered two beers, stating, “There’s no shame in double-fisting!” Two beers, their amazing chicken salad croissant, and a cinnamon latte = awesome. I wrote like a freak because the sammich was on the line, meaning I played a game of, “Hey fatty, you want that sammich, you better write for it!” And I was really hungry after spending lunch break getting cat food and some sweet discount stuff at the Tri-County Target, so yeah, believe it when I say I wrote like a freak.

Then, instead of going home and getting to bed early like a good girl, I went over to my friend’s house. We’ll call her Buffy since I recently got her addicted to BtVS like a good little Whedonite. We chatted for awhile about this and that, and then, whoosh 10pm came around and, well, I realize now that when I said “Yeah I can handle a latte at 8pm,” I was full of shit because here it is after midnight, and I am wired.

Stupid.

Anyway, I may have written like a freak tonight, but the writing was not my best. I’ll have a lot of work going into the weekend on getting episode 5 ready to post. That’s okay, though. I think my problem is that I have this great new character I’ve created and I am so ready to launch into her story, but I can’t until I’ve spent the next few weeks telling the story I’ve started. It’ll get better, though, I just need to write it all out and honestly, be funnier.

So, now, time to punch myself in the face* until I fall asleep. I have to be at work wicked early in order to get FREE BACON. Yeah!

* I don’t actually punch myself in the face, that’s a joke, and not even a good one. See? I am totally off my game this week.

Thanks to some advice/criticism from an awesome friend of mine, I have retooled a couple of things in episode one of Scurvytown. Well, that is to say, I added two small paragraphs which I think help unmuck a couple areas of confusion for first-time readers.

Getting this advice/criticism was a very good thing. I suppose, really, that honestly means that I took the criticism well. It is, after all, only meant to help, and it meant getting to do one of my favorite things in writing, which is to write myself out of a problem. I think it also helps when the person doling out the criticism is a person whose opinion I greatly value and respect.

I can recall from the creative writing class I took in college, how painful an experience it was to be told your “Final Draft” was no such thing. I guess it took a good ten years of writing, re-writing, and generally growing the hell up to learn that even the word “final” can use some revision. You should always generally be careful when dealing with absolutes.

I also think I owe a lot to NaNoWriMo, for making writing such a fun experience for me for the past seven years I have been a participant. The jury is still out on whether or not I will put myself through that this fall, what with grad school and everything, but I will know more about that by October. NaNoWriMo has helped me to learn what kind of writer I am, because I’ve always known I was a writer, but finding my favorite format through which to express my stories has been a struggle. I also have NPR to thank for finding myself, not only through submitting my stories to Three-Minute Fiction, but because of the great storytelling that happens on the radio every day.

Finally, I knew, I wasn’t just a fan of writing; I am a fan of storytelling. I believe that my sort of storytelling is somewhat different than what you’d find in a standard novel. NaNoWriMo taught me that I love episodic fiction, as many chapters of my novels seemed to have a television episode vibe to them. I have to thank The Decemberists for teaching me the word picaresque, because that is truly the way I love to write.

I know, in a typical fashion, I have veered away from what I started to say. I do a lot of this, even when I try to tell my silly stories, which in a way can be a fun outcome. It’s certainly been an enjoyable experience so far in writing Scurvytown.

Anyway, I have gone full-circle with criticism since my college years. While I once dreaded it, I now look forward to it. The reason for this is that I know my writing can always be improved, and I am open to whatever criticism might fall my way, because it gives me guidance in how to write better and more effectively. In short, it teaches me to become a better storyteller. And I hope I never stop learning more about that.

All this said, feel free to comment on episodes of Scurvytown: what you like, what you don’t like, things that need cleared up, jokes that don’t work for you, things that have been alluded to and then cleared up in subsequent episodes, but probably should have been made more apparent from the start, etc. Thanks to another friend, I spent a good 30 minutes trying to figure out how to open up comments on each episode, and now that they are open for business (like the state of West Virginia), please, by all means, comment away, my friends and, I dunno, like, four faithful readers.