I’m crazy, but my pen’s got a built-in laser.

It’s Tuesday night, and I’m at the library with a huge paper cup of Earl Gray (hot, milk, two sugars), a pen that has a laser in it, and a FREE JELLY DONUT.

Yeah, so Tuesday night rocks pretty hard.

If you’ve been reading for a little while, you’ll probably be aware that 2010 is a book year. This is my mantra, my raison d’être, and the thing that’s kept me sane through the month of March now that I am a wholly owned subsidiary of Dread Mistress Chloie.

For most of 2009 (and the earlier part of 2010), my life looked a lot like this:

- Find a story/prompt/market that appeals to me, or is inclusive of something that I’m already writing.
- Write the hell out of that thing.
- Submit the piece.
- Wait, freak out, wait, etc. until I get a response.
- Celebrate (if piece sells) or retool & resubmit (if rejected).
- Repeat.

I got really good at this. I enjoyed this. There’s structure and magic in the submissions process. It’s a roller coaster, it’s stressful, it reduces me to a gibbering wreck. A happy gibbering wreck with a goal, but writers? We’re crazy. I’m lucky that gibbering was all I got up to, really.

Last month (with the exception of one thing I knew I had on my plate), this stopped being the plan. Free writing, play, and undirected, non-project writing was the rule. I was, in no uncertain terms, evicted from my comfort zone until this past Sunday.

People. This was hard.

During the month of March I learned some really important things about myself as a writer, and as a human being who writes.

One, have a lot of my self-worth bundled up in the idea that I am writing for publication. I judge my writing by whether or not it’s something I can sell. This isn’t entirely wrong or unfair as at some point I’d like very much to make a living with my writing. Since 2008 I’ve given myself permission to treat it like work. I’ve got an office at home in which I write daily. It is, as we say on the Internet, SRS BZNS. Putting everything aside and just doing the thing with no end attached to it was incredibly difficult. Apparently I’m more result-oriented than I thought.

Two, except for the one submission I did send out, I was basically prohibited from editing, heavy drafting, or anything but putting words in lines that pleased me in the moment. Again, this made me crazy. Before, when I worked, I would edit all the time. I’d write on my netbook and go back and correct misspellings, change turns of phrase, and so on as I went. I spent a lot of March writing longhand. Which, oddly, is how I learned this next tidbit.

Three, I write more at a higher rate of speed if I write longhand. Which sounds wrong on every level to me because handwriting and I are not good friends. My penmanship is absolutely abysmal. On the other hand, the inability to go back and correct things and leave no trace also makes me faster and more resilient. I don’t like something? Fine. Mark it out and move on in the moment. I can always make changes when I type it up later.

Now, the purported reason for all of this is to get me in the chair (where I already was), to help me build a set of rituals (some of which I already had), to get me interested in writing (I do this 20 hours a week instead of watching TV so I’m either already interested or insane), and to get me accustomed to writing to quota (alright, so this was something I needed practice with). And I’m not complaining, but if you ask me, there’s something more devious afoot.

Because now I’m still not allowed to write to a specific end (though I cheat a little around the edges on a couple of gift projects I really need to finish), or edit, or any of that. Those rules remain in play. But now I’ve been directed to point this manic storm of random words at my would-be characters. Just write crazy, random stuff about them. Open their mail, let them drive to Detroit, whatever.

The payoff: a minimum of about 17k of potential raw material.

Look, the thing is, I know that Chloie is devious. She’s evil. And she’s brilliant in that “I really hope she never decides to do me harm” sort of way a lot of my friends seem to have. Meanwhile, my muse is up in here acting like the rats in Room 101. I’m actually a little bit afraid of my creative self today after hitting quota in just under an hour in spite of a fever and gut sickness last night. Yeah, alright, it’s killing me that I’m doing other work and cant go bounding off across the Internet to submit to this, but holy crap. I’m going to have 17k of raw material!

17k!

(But seriously. She could kill me and nobody would ever find the body.)

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com