Tag Archives: Writing

Summer Vacation Stats, Part 1.

Posted on August 23, 2008 | 3 comments

Unfocused Girl and I are testing for our yellow belts in Tae Kwon Do this morning, so I may have to split this post in two to get something up before we head out. Seems reasonable, since I’m covering a two-week vacation.

Number of days of vacation, departure to return: 16

Number of those days spent traveling or preparing for travel (packing, closing up the house, etc.): 4. We drove to the beach this year, ignoring the conventional wisdom to leave early by leaving late and driving into the night. We weren’t comfortable trying to do the entire 813-mile route all in one day this year; next year, we will. The kids will be a little older and better able to handle it, and we’ll be more confident ourselves. We also used one of our own cars, Mrs. Unfocused’s Mercury Sable, instead of renting a minivan, which is what we did the last time we drove. It wasn’t as comfortable, but it was about $1000 cheaper just by saving the rental, not to mention the better gas mileage from the sedan.

Number of dishwashers at our family beach house: 2 — Mrs. Unfocused and me.

Number of days spent practicing Tae Kwon Do:  almost all of them.  We bought a couple of gym mats and hauled out our pads.  Taking a two-week vacation right before our test could have really blown our chances of passing, but we worked pretty hard, especially Unfocused Girl.  No guarantees, but I’m confident we’ll both do well.

Breaking News!  It’s Joe Biden!  GREAT choice for veep!

Okay, more about me.  Where was I?

Number of words of Meet the Larssons written: 1898.  It’s not quite what I had planned, but I had a lot of things I wanted to do, and the vacation was about spending time with my family, not hiding in a cave by myself to write.  Also, the beach house doesn’t have a cave.  I’ve written more since.

The running stats will have to wait for after the test.

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Chillin’ at the Beach.

Posted on August 5, 2008 | 1 comment

We got here Sunday night after 13 hours of driving, split over Saturday and Sunday. The kids were great, even though we skipped renting a minivan and did the trip in Mrs. Unfocused’s Sable. We went to the beach with our friends the S family yesterday, and went hiking with them in the state park this afternoon. We got a little turned around, so our hike was about an hour longer than we planned, but everyone handled it well.

I got in a six mile run this morning, mostly on the boardwalk, before the heat went from hot to brutal. I’m registered for a 5K here this weekend, so I’d better get used to the heat.

So far I’ve spent less than an hour each day on my Blackberry or on the phone, which has been very, very pleasant. I wrote 723 words of Meet the Larssons yesterday, and 361 words tonight, so I feel like I’m getting the novel back on track.

But the coolest thing is that this afternoon, the martial arts mats we ordered arrived. Unfocused Girl and I are testing for our yellow belts the Saturday after we get home, so I promised her we would practice while we’re here. We brought pads and plastic rebreakable boards with us from home, and ordered two 4-by-8 mats from a nearly manufacturer, and set them up on the screened-in porch in back. The Unfocused Do Jhang is open for business. Unfocused Girl has a wicked roundhouse kick, but for the test, she needs to break her board with a side kick, which she finds much harder to execute. We’ll practice kicks and forms and the other components of the test every day while we’re here.

It’s a little different vacation than we usually have, but all in a good way.

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Going on Vacation!

Posted on August 1, 2008 | 5 comments

I’ve been pretty silent this past week, and with good reason: we’re going on vacation, and we’ve been knocking ourselves out getting other things done so we can go on the trip. At the office, I moved a lot of backed-up projects off the dime, and at home, the Mrs. and I were up until 3am taming the paper monster. We won, but not without cost.

Junior got his new, smaller, lighter, waterproof cast today – he picked orange, a color he has never expressed any interest in before, which is odd. The docs were concerned about our impending departure for the beach, since the cast isn’t sandproof, but it’s too late now — they should’ve said something four weeks ago, when the Mrs. first told them about the trip. We’ll have to make do with the cast cover and cross our fingers the kid doesn’t get sand in his cast — I can’t imagine anything too much worse.

Finally, “Test Tube Beneficairies” has earned its second rejection slip. It came in yesterday; I was glad to have the response before our trip. I don’t think I’m going to bother sending it to the third of the major SF magazines, since it really doesn’t seem like the editor’s kind of thing. Instead, it’s time to start looking at on-line markets. There are a few paying markets that will take a 13,000 word submission; if none of those pan out, well, I’ll just have to see.

Vacation! Whoo-hoo!

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1,423 Words Written, of the Wrong Thing.

Posted on July 24, 2008 | 2 comments

I wrote 503 words of Meet the Larssons today, again all on the train to and from the office. I still haven’t gotten through the dreaded scene, although I just learned something interesting connecting one character to another, so that’s fun.

After I put the kids to bed (the Mrs. was out at the house of one of the neighbors for one of those parties where women try to sell each other things; I don’t begin to understand those parties, but that’s off topic; for tonight, I’ll just say that I’m glad the Mrs. got out with some friends, which doesn’t happen much), I sat down to write. Did I open up MTL and start work again, under calmer circumstances than the Metra allows?

I did not. Instead, I started frantically typing up a short horror story I thought of at lunch. I wrote 1,423 words of that story tonight, which is at least half of the entire first draft (I estimate the final story will be 2500-3000 words). It’s sort of a Lovecraftian pastiche.

Yeah, I know: distracted by another shiny object. Sometimes, though, you just have to get the ideas out of your head.

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Progress!

Posted on July 22, 2008 | Leave a comment

I got 505 words written on Meet the Larssons today, all on the train. One of the things that’s been holding me back is the dread of writing a particular scene, involving a social situation in which I have next to no experience. So I changed the circumstances just enough that while it’s still awkward, I’m better able to put my head into the protagonist’s circumstances and think through his actions and reactions.

I have also finished revising the science fiction story I mentioned in this post, and submitted it to an online market. I caught Mrs. Unfocused chuckling a couple of times while she read it for the first time this evening, so I have some hope after all.

In other news, we did not win the Mega Millions lottery tonight, which means I need to go to work tomorrow.

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Summer Sunday Stats #2: Just Walk Away.

Posted on July 21, 2008 | 4 comments

Another long silence here at The Unfocused Life. Because, y’know, I lost my focus. My father-in-law had open heart surgery on Wednesday, and it’s been a little chaotic since with that added onto everything else that’s going on. The important thing is that he’s doing fine, out of intensive care, and charming the nurses. The latest word is that he’ll be out of the hospital in a few days, which is when the real recovery begins.

Summer Sunday Stats:

Miles run: 9.97, in 1:24:33. How does the same run vary so widely in distance every week? Bizarre. I was wrong in my post for last Sunday: my time was 1:28:04, so this was a huge improvement. The big difference is the speedwork I did on a treadmill on Thursday at the gym.

Weather: hot and muggy (welcome to Chicago in July), but it was overcast, so I didn’t have the sun beating down on me the whole way (another improvement over last week).

What was playing on my iPod: Phedippidations # 145 (Topic: Running Legend Frank Shorter), and Greatest Hits: Huey Lewis and the News. There are some great running tunes included in the Huey Lewis collection, although for me, the sentimental favorite is still Heart and Soul.

Words written in Meet the Larssons: yeah, well, it’s been a tough week.

Did you at least finish revising the short story you wrote on your Blackberry: shut up.

Time-sucking obsessive Internet search instead of writing: I’m so glad you asked. I’ve had this song going through my head nearly constantly since shortly after it hit the airwaves on WPLJ in 1984 (right before WPLJ betrayed every single one of its listeners and went Top 40, the lousy bastards). It started going through my head last night while I was trying to edit a brief, so I tried hunting it down. The song is Walk Away Renee, the 1984 cover by Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. I was surprised to see the song has its own Wikipedia entry – fascinating story, none of which I knew before last night. I bought the CD from the Jukes’ website, and downloaded the original by the Left Banke from Amazon. Here’s a link to a video performance of the 1966 hit by the Left Banke:

Don’t ask me why this song has been stuck in my head for 24 years. I have no idea.

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Oops. I Finished a Short Story.

Posted on July 14, 2008 | 9 comments

I didn’t mean to, honest. A few months ago, I started writing a short story by emailing a few paragraphs to myself on my Blackberry while I waited for my sandwich at Cosi’s. Over the course of a month or two, I emailed half a dozen bits to myself while standing in line to buy lunch or other mundane tasks. Then I lost interest.

Tonight, I opened it up to see where it was. I finished the job of importing the emails into Scrivener, and realized I was just about done. So I took half an hour (hey, it’s my birthday) and finished it.

The first draft of “Dear Mr. President” is 2,080 words long. I’ll try to finish revisions by Sunday night, and submit it Sunday night or Monday morning. There are a few online markets that I think I’ll try; I don’t plan to shoot for the moon with this one, but I won’t consider non-paying markets until I’ve run out of paying options.

Is it my best work? No, probably not. But I think it’s a fun little alternate history story, and there might be a place for it somewhere. I don’t have as much invested in it as I did in “Test Tube Beneficiaries” (no response yet to the second submission, but thanks for asking), which I hope means I won’t need to go through six sets of revisions before I can let it go.

But how about that? When I sat down tonight, I had no plans to work on this story at all, and now I’ve gone and finished the first draft. What the hell, though; it’s my birthday. Yay, me.

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Back to the Larssons.

Posted on July 12, 2008 | 2 comments

June, quite simply, kicked my ass. Between May 28 and July 3, I spent 16 days on the road, and generally worked my keister off the rest of the time. It annoyed the kids, (Unfocused Girl, in particular), messed up my running schedule, cut my week at the beach into a weekend, and dumped extra work on the already-overburdened Mrs. Unfocused.

It also, unsurprisingly, took whatever discipline I had about my writing and put a bullet through its kneecap. How bad did it get, you ask? I scrolled back through the archives to find the post announcing I had hit 75,000 words. Here it is: Spring Sunday Stats #2, my post from May 18. That day, I added 2,200 words to my word count, and finished at 75,945.

Where am I now? This evening I wrote just over 1,000 words, and finished at 80,718. In the last eight weeks, I have managed to write a little less than 4,800 words. Before 6pm this evening, that number would have been 3,800, mostly consisting of two or three hundred word bursts typed on the train during my commute.

The travel did most of the damage. I’ve had very little downtime on these trips — there’s been a lot of sitting around in conference rooms, but very little time when I’ve been off the clock — and even on the plane traveling to and from my meetings, I’ve either been working or catching up on my sleep.

Even when I’ve been home, though, I’ve had a lot of trouble getting back into Meet the Larssons. I think writing on the train, which I’ve been doing for months, has been part of the problem. Instead of using the train time to supplement my writing at home in the evenings and on the weekends, it became my primary writing time. The problem is that my commute is too short to give me time to think about what I’m writing, or to get my head back into the characters and storyline. Without the longer blocks of time at home, my writing on the train gradually decoupled from the broader arc of the novel, and it got harder and harder to keep going.

I finally figured this out over the Fourth of July weekend. When I realized what the problem was, I started rereading the early chapters of MTL, to try and get back into the book. It worked beautifully. I have a page of notes after reading the first four chapters, knocked out 1,000 words tonight that start bringing back ideas I had for the book back when I started writing it, and have half a page of notes for the next chapter. I may keep rereading, but these early chapters may have been enough. Now I just need to recapture the discipline I had developed back in March and April, and I may yet have this first draft finished by Labor Day.

Also, you may notice that I have revised my word count goal in the meter in the sidebar from 100,000 to 125,000. I think that’s more realistic for this draft than the 100,000 I’ve been working with; there are close to 20,000 words in the first eight chapters that I expect to cut in the first revision; they contain important backstory, but I don’t think they work as part of the narrative, and clearly I’m not 80 percent finished telling the story. 125K is a good enough estimate for the first draft, and I’ll try to take it closer to 100K in the next draft.

Finally, not that my comments on your blogs are anything special, but if you’ve noticed I haven’t been commenting on your blog posts, it’s because I haven’t been commenting on (hardly) anything. I just haven’t had the time or the energy. I have been reading your blogs, though, and will try to stop lurking and start participating a little more now that my travel schedule has slowed down a bit.

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Gotta Speed It Up.

Posted on June 26, 2008 | 2 comments

I ran a nice little four-mile race last Saturday at the beach – under 300 finishers, which is a big change from just about any race in or near Chicago. I came in sixth for my age group, at what was for me a respectable but not great pace.

The guy who came in third, though, was only 43 seconds faster than me — less than 11 seconds per mile.

I’m registered for two more races in the same series in August, and I am virtually certain I can knock 11 seconds per mile off my pace by August. I want an age-group medal, damn it, even if it’s for third place.

Except for one year warming the bench on my seventh grade soccer team, I never participated in organized sports as a kid, so I admit to some unfulfilled trophy lust. I have some hope of improving my chances for age group medals as I get older; I didn’t start running until my mid-twenties, so my knees should stay functional longer than some of these fast guys who’ve been running since their days on the high school track team.

That’s probably just a fantasy, though. I spent several years running — including training for and completing three Chicago Marathons — while 50 pounds heavier than I am now, which may have caused a little extra wear and tear on the joints. My knees certainly don’t feel particularly fresh, that’s for sure.

On another topic, I did not, in fact, get any writing done while traveling last week. The work part of the trip sucked up most of my time, leaving me essentially the weekend to spend time on the beach with the Mrs. and kids and visit with our friends. Tuesday and Wednesday were simply crazy at work — Wednesday featured an especially delightful 350-mile round trip drive to a 30-minute hearing. But today I grabbed my MacBook as I ran out the door and wrote about 400 words on the train to and from work. More this weekend, for sure.

It’s time to admit that I will not be finished with the first draft by June 30. I need to think hard about what a realistic revised deadline would be. An easy choice would be October 31, so that I’m finished in time to start something new for NaNoWriMo, but I think that gives me too much time. I’m inclined to try to finish it by the end of Labor Day weekend, which would give me the whole summer (including some real vacation time in August). At my original pace of 5,000 words per week, that would take me to 125,000-130,000 words total, which is probably where Meet the Larssons is headed (for the first draft, anyway), although I haven’t kept that pace for the last couple of months. I’ll give it a week to see how I’m doing before I set another firm (or firm-ish) deadline, but I have to get my pace up or MTL will end up gathering dust unfinished.

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Dear God, Has It Been 10 Days Since I Posted?

Posted on June 13, 2008 | 4 comments

Apparently, it has. I’d like to tell you it’s because I’ve been working on something really special for my 100th post, which is what my next post will be. I’d like to tell you that, but it would be a big, fat lie. In truth, I’ve just been working. Not on my novel, not on a short story, just on the stuff that pays the bills: representing clients (99% of my work time) and trying to bring in new ones (1% — anybody see a flaw in the way that breaks down?). I’ve been very, very busy, with a fair amount of traveling, and more to come next week.

Tomorrow is Unfocused Girl’s very, very belated birthday party. How belated, you ask? Here’s a hint: she’s seven, and this will be her first birthday party without snow on the ground.

This year, her party’s theme will be Warriors, and it will be her first slumber party, so I expect that by this time tomorrow night, our backyard will be taken over by a pack of girls ages 7 to 10 in their pajamas, running around in the dark and pretending to be a tribe of feral cats. And one four year old boy pretending to be Superman. This is going to be interesting.

Meet the Larssons has ground to a halt these last couple of weeks. The few people I’ve told I’m working on a novel have all asked me “Where do you find the time?” For the last couple of months, it’s gotten much harder, and the last couple of weeks, it’s been impossible.

*interruption*

Sorry about that – the kids were in the tub, and it was time to get them out. For the last half hour, Unfocused Girl has been singing “Snape, Snape, Severus Snape” from Potter Puppet Pals: The Mysterious Ticking Sound, and now my head needs to explode. The Potter Puppet Pals are funny, funny stuff, but I’m tired enough that my tolerance for infinite replay is something less than what it should be.

Anyway, I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to get back to the novel. What I need are a few days when I can spend an hour or more a day working on it in isolation. I had six days off planned starting next Tuesday, but an unavoidable business trip has popped up at the beginning of it, so instead I’ll get Mrs. Unfocused and the kids most of the way to my mother’s, then go on to my meetings; when they’re over, I’ll catch up with the wife and kids and we’ll head to the beach for a couple of days. Maybe I can get some writing in then.

It’s a Biglaw career I’ve got here, and sometimes (much of the time) it can be really hard to hang onto any semblance of a personal life. I know that’s true of other jobs, but this is the one I’ve got and the one I know best. I know I just need to get my butt in my seat in front of the MacBook on a regular basis, but sometimes the writing has to get back burnered. I’ve been beating myself up for not writing when what I really need to do is stop kvetching and find 15 minutes even on a bad day and just write.

Finally, I want to mention the passing today of a great American journalist, Tim Russert. Since we’ve had kids, Meet the Press has been a rare treat, but we used to watch it every Sunday morning, and we still enjoyed his commentary during MSNBC’s election coverage. Probably my most vivid memory of the 2000 election is of finally dropping off at 1 or 2 in the morning with the TV on, and waking up at 6 to find Russert still on air, in need of a shave and a clean shirt, with his white board and his red and blue markers trying to make sense of what the hell had just happened. He knew what he was talking about, he wasn’t one of the shouters, and I’ll miss his even-tempered commentary on this election.

Up next: Post #100! I can just smell the excitement. Or my shoes.

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