Revving the Obsession Engine

[dr_pretentious]

An obsessive turn of mind is among my best assets. On mellower days, it manifests as a glacially long attention span, but on more frenetic days, it's like an engine that's always running hot. The tricky thing is to get all the gears to connect so that the project I need to make progress on is the one the obsession engine is linked up to.

For the past three weeks or so, the obsession engine has been revving, but it's trying to drive the wrong project. I love writing the Rugosa Coven characters, and their two novellas are not the end of what I mean to do with them, but dammit, I need them to let go of my brain for a while.

In the first year after I left academia, I wrote over 300,000 words of rough draft. Very, very rough draft, it's true, but I don't think the roughness I allowed myself is the reason I wrote so much then, while I've only hit 100K/yr since. I think it's that, during that first year, I wrote whatever scene the obsession engine was linked up to. There was no audience. There was no hope or expectation of a professional sale anytime in the near future. There was nothing at stake for me in steering the process, so I didn't bother trying to steer. It was like Nanowrimo every day, only without the stress and metrics. Now it actually matters which project gets my attention first. I miss the freedom of having no clue what the hell I was doing.

This morning, Dan read the first Stisele chapter over breakfast while I checked email. I was such a pest. Every time he laughed, every time he raised his eyebrows, every time he had any discernible reaction to the text, I'd interrupt him to say, "What? What?" (Have I mentioned that my spouse is a really good sport about this whole writing thing?) Stisele has a reader now. I wonder if that will help. If I could just will myself to slide into her skin the way I used to slide into Haldur's without half trying, there would be progress. Progress, dammit!

Comments

[shakti-lemaris.livejournal.com]

Hey, speaking of Nanowrimo...you gonna?

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Sorta. I can't bring myself to put down the Stisele project unfinished just because November rolls around, but then, I really enjoyed some aspects of Nanowrimo, learned a few useful tricks, and got a zero draft out of the process that has some real shiny bits. So my current notion is that I'll do Nano unofficially, aiming for the 50K/30 days production pace, and participating in the lj Nano communities. But I'm going to give the official forums a skip this year, and if I hit 50K in November, I'm not going to claim it as a win at the game, since I won't have started from scratch. I'm also not going to banish my internal editor, since I'm hoping to have a reasonably polished draft by Yule, so I can send out the partial and synopsis in good conscience before the calendar year is out.

How about you? How are your various endeavors going?

The information about the March Writer's Weekend (http://www.writersweekend.com) event in New Jersey is up. Tell me you'll be there. I'll be getting a room at the inn so I can do volunteer staff things, but if you want to crash at my house, the site is only about 15 minutes from my front door.

I had such a good time with you and your mom when you were down here. We both did. Do you have any relatives who aren't fabulous? Because you really seem to have lucked out in the blood kin department.

[shakti-lemaris.livejournal.com]

What I've been up to: Got a temp job proofreading for a market research company. I was explaining to Jeni last night that it's not so much a career, as getting paid for my one type-A obsession, kind of like her compulsion to pick pimples off all her friends. But it's a foot in the door.

I'm gonna do Nano similar to you. I'm thinking of working in my Book of Scribes universe, but without referring to any of my previous notes and scribblings. I've been oiling the gears lately by writing, and occasionally posting, some incredibly fluffy, often smutty fanfiction. It's a fun diversion and it keeps me busy. Plus I feel the need to give something back to a community that has provided me with hours of mindless entertainment.

Yeah, Helene and I had an excellent time in July. She thinks my NJ friends are great; she still talks about it. Yeah, my family rocks.

I am coming to Writers Weekend, dammit! It's in NJ for crissakes, I have no excuse. There, I said it.

[(Anonymous)]

DragonflyPie here. I wish I had the glacially long attention span for anything other than reading. I am on my second day of dithering around and wishing that my students' papers would grade themselves. Does this make me lazy, and therefore a bad person in this nation of the Protestant work ethic?

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Student papers are a special case, even for Protestants. As a recovering Protestant, I can assure you that all my Puritan ancestors would have regarded a stack of freshman composition papers with at least as much ambivalence as you do.