Balance

I finished "Pink Lemonade."  Originally I'd written it in third person the day after I'd experienced most of it.  My friend Chris and I had gone to Unos, as usual, before the Red Sox game, and...well, you'd have to read the story.  I didn't like it in the third person, so I spent a few days revamping it into first person, so Foster's voice could be part of the story.  Just sounded too mechanical without him.  I finished 99% of it Thursday, then did the rest today, and then spent a few hours more editing it, tightening it, fixing a few discrepancies.  Then I posted it to my writers group.  Two days before the group meets, awesome group member that I am.  After a few comments there, and maybe some more editing, off it goes to pound the internet pavement.  That one, and two others I still have to send out yet.  The last story I got published, "Hide the Weird," I sent out before my time came around for the group review, so that it was accepted by the magazine, and then the group reviewed it.  That was unusual.  It's too late to try that now, but I do things--even somewhat ridiculous things--when it's been shown to work.  The story wasn't accepted because it was sent out before the meeting, but still...I'll send the next one out before the next meeting...

This is a good problem to have, but it's frustrating to be completing projects and then not sending them out.  The Man gets in the way, doesn't he, when you have to create and do the business end of creating?  Sounds ridiculous, but it's true--there is a business end to creating.  It takes more time, in fact, than the actual creating.

I hope that tomorrow I can finish the job's requirements early, so I can send all that out.  And the actual life stuff, like laundry, dishwasher, picking up the entire house?  That'll all have to wait.  I need an assistant.

I would be very interested to learn how to better organize my time, so that I don't feel as impossibly rushed and frantic as I do--which isn't good for the creating process, nor the business end that goes with it.  How do you write a lot, work a very busy day job that is in itself very draining (though rewarding), and yet still meet life's other requirements?  I wake up much earlier than I used to, seven days a week, and I go to bed as late as I used to, which, being an insomniac, was always late to begin with, anywhere between 1 to 3 in the morning--to wake up and be at work just after 7.  And yet the house, the office, and, well, myself, all need tidying up a bit, all the time, and the work for the day job and for my writing never seems to be completed.

Anyone have any advice about how to better complete things, or to be more balanced with everything?

Pink Lemonade

Photo credit: Ruzova Limonada (Pink Lemonade) by Honza Groh from Vlastni Fotografie (Own Works)

Right now I am admiring the technology that allows me to type on a Mac at a Dunkin' Donuts, yet still connect to this blog and share my ideas and writing situation.  Truly--what a world is this, that we can so easily connect to others, and yet still so often don't.  Sometimes I think that the connection we forge with others over the net--most of whom we don't even know--come at the cost of those whom we see every day.  We connect, yet we drift...

Well, anyway, I mostly finished another Foster short story that I can submit to my writing group and then, after changes, send out.  The rough draft was written awhile ago, after a friend and I had returned from a very drizzly night at Fenway.  We'd gone to the Unos that's really there, that's also in the story, and we'd really run into--or, more accurately, profiled--the same two people depicted in the story.  One major difference is that we'd shared our thoughts and suppositions with our waiter, who'd also served them, and we had him in hysterics.  We had ourselves in hysterics, too, I have to admit.  My friend had dared me to share our suspicions with the waiter, and so of course I had, because I have brass buttons, for some reason, on our Unos excursions before hitting Fenway.  Our most famous incident is another story, maybe, for another blog.

Anyway, the food items--the salad, the chicken fingers--are all the same, as are the drinks: Sprite for her; pink lemonade for him.  She really did pay the bill, as in the story, and they really did look exactly as described in the story.  And, ultimately, especially after we noticed the pink lemonade towards the end of the night, just like in the story, we had the waiter in agreement with us.  He thought we were so cool and hilarious that he bought us a round of beer, each.  Very cool guy.

So we drew the same conclusions for the same reason as Foster did, and I admit now, as in the story, that people-watching is unbelievably amusing and interesting, but not altogether fair because of the conclusions you sometimes draw, often in spite of yourself.  As Foster says, profiling is not an exact science.  But you play the odds, and so by definition your suppositions will be right--most of the time.

I hope this story gets accepted and published quickly, so that I can share the link with you, and so you'll know what the heck I've been talking about here.  So I wrote the rough draft literally the next afternoon, in a few hours, but I did it in the third person because Cursing the Darkness, the novel on my website (see above) where Foster is the main character, had been in first person, and I wanted to see if a Foster story could survive well without him telling it.  In other words, is it the story that makes Foster shine, or is it his voice?  I decided that the third person with Foster was too mechanical, that the tone was lifeless, and that I needed him to tell it.  And so today I re-worked the whole thing in the first person, and I was 95% of the way done with it before I lost concentration, couldn't get it back, and so spent the next couple of hours catching up on work for my day job instead.

But not a bad night--finishing an entire short story by drastically changing the POV and voice, making the hard decision to do so (see an entry below; writing decisions are hard), and then catching up on work that really needed to be done for my job.  I could've been derailed by losing that creative focus, but I managed to salvage the night and get a lot done.  I tell you, for writers, that's rare.  Very rare.

So now I feel good.  I got a coffee for tomorrow, and an iced pumpkin latte for my better half, and soon I'll go back and hopefully finish the last 5% of the story.  If not, there's tomorrow.  But definitely tomorrow.  Then I'll have yet another story to send out--adding it to the other two.  This weekend, after I finish the rest of the work for the job, my next priority is to send out those stories.  Wish me luck!!!