The Power of Procrastination

There are two things I'm good at.

1) Writing
2) Not Writing

Seriously. I am so awesome at not writing I could write a book about it. Which would be really freaking ironic, wouldn't it?

Today I said I would start the new manuscript, writing at least 1k words, which is my minimum daily word count goal. There were other things I needed to do today too, but since writing is my actual job I needed to consider doing it.

And I would.

After I changed the bedsheets.
Also I needed to write a blog post.
And defrost a whole ham.
And coffee would be good.

I sat down with the coffee and the laptop, the sound of the washer tossing my bedding around in the background. I answered some emails, did some tweeting, realized I didn't brush my teeth yet, and then my dad called.

A tree fell down and he needed another chainsaw handler to get the job done. The tree in question was in my grandpa's yard, and if I didn't go over there, Grandpa (who is 94) would pick up the extra chainsaw himself. Now, honestly, I think that would've worked out just fine (evidence to come), but I'm the kind of person who really enjoys physical labor so I helped chop up a tree in 90+ degrees.

We worked for a few hours, and finally Grandpa decided he was done watching and picked up a 40 pound maul and started splitting wood. Like, really effectively. We're talking single swings. It was impressive.

I was sweaty and smelly and covered in chips and sawdust, but it was time to go home. And who can sit down and write when they smell bad? (Note: I still had not brushed my teeth). So since I was already a mess I decided to do some touch-up painting on the cupboards that we redid in the kitchen, and once I did that I decided since I had the ladder out I might as well spackle the holes in the ceiling from the old lighting.

And since I had the ladder out and it was obvious we were going to have to repaint the ceiling, I might as well take down all the crown molding and wash the ceiling to prep it for painting.

Also I had to go find the paint floor cloths, which someone had peed on (not me, I suspect a cat) and so those had to be washed and hung out on the line with the bedsheets.

So while I was working in the kitchen I spotted that whole ham I set out in the morning to defrost, which I really should consider putting in the oven if we're going to eat tonight. 

And if you're going to make a ham then you might as well (I'm sorry) go whole hog.

So I studded it with cloves and I made a glaze out of apple cider and I put that in the oven.

And then I took a shower, because that was a thing that needed to happen. Also I did finally brush my teeth. So, it's 7PM now. I'm clean. The ham just came out of the oven. The boyfriend is cutting it up and I'm finally writing that blog post I sat down to create at 10 AM.

I did a lot of things today.

I did not start a novel.

I am so good at not writing.

Wednesday WOLF - Jaywalk

I've got a collection of random information in my brain that makes me an awesome Trivial Pursuit partner, but is completely useless when it comes to real world application. Like say, job applications. I thought I'd share some of this random crap with you in the form of another acronym-ific series. I give you - Word Origins from Left Field - that's right, the WOLF Er... ignore the fact that the "from" doesn't fit.

While jaywalking is a fairly laughable crime, it is in fact not legal to cross the street anywhere other than a crosswalk, or to cross against a traffic signal. Americans might have a laugh at it, but I actually did see a jaywalker get clocked when I was in Paris. Don't eff with the French.

Is it really that dangerous to jaywalk? While our speed limits and congested streets keep things pretty safe for footers, it hasn't always been this way. The first instance of the use of jaywalker was from the Chicago Tribune in 1909 (although it didn't make the dictionary until 1917). Back in 1909, people were adjusting to even having cars in the streets, and speed limits were a thing of the future. Horses and buggies kept a pretty calm pace, except when a horse flipped it's lid - and if it did, a sign saying, "Hey, not so fast, Mr. Horse," wasn't going to stop him.

So city streets in the early 1900's were actually pretty dangerous. Motorists pretty much did as they pleased - which made horses and buggy drivers mad - and pedestrians pretty much kept doing what they'd been doing... crossing the street wherever they felt. And while that might fly with Black Beauty, Mr. Model T didn't necessarily have the stop-on-a-dime that we do today - or a speed limit to tell him not to go so fast in the first place.

City dwellers caught on pretty fast - cross on the crosswalk or at your own peril. But newbies to the city and skyline gazers wandered into the road fairly often, earning the ire of those behind the wheel. At the time, rural folk and country dwellers were often called jays, thus anyone inexperienced in crossing a city street and foolish enough to walk in front of cars were... jaywalkers.

Tom Crosshill On The Meeting Point of Personal Passion & Public Interest

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today's guest for the blog is a seriously interesting person. Originally from Latvia, Tom Crosshill moved to the US as a teen and now lives wherever his adventures take him. A black belt in aikido, he has operated a nuclear reactor, worked on Wall Street, and toiled in a Japanese zinc mine, among other things. You can see why I like Tom.

Tom’s fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award (thrice), the Latvian Literature Award and the WSFA Small Press Award. He has won the Writers of the Future Award. In 2013, and was a resident at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa — where he started THE CAT KING OF HAVANA. To find out more about Tom’s fiction — and to read some of his short stories — visit his website.

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

As with most of my projects, CAT KING was born at the intersection of several inspirations:

-- Being a passionate salsero, I did a dance movie marathon one day and realized most were kind of bad. Entertaining, sure, but not particularly nuanced or true to life. I was inspired to write a dance story which, while fun and fast-paced, would also make dancers go -- yes, that's what it's like! (I also wanted non-dancers to go -- now I want to learn to dance!)

-- I was a nerdy non-athletic kid and it sucked. I wanted to help others in my position develop the confidence to get out of their shell and try some physical activities. More, I wanted to help kids discover the strength and passion required to keep going even in the face of the inevitable struggles and failures and setbacks. The story of a cat video geek who gets it into his head to learn salsa seemed like just the ticket!

-- I wanted to go back to Cuba, an island that has fascinated me since my first trip there, but I couldn't afford to. I figured writing a story set in Cuba would be just as good -- and would help my readers visit too!

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

I'm a big believer in structure -- in stories that have a beginning, a middle, and an end, with particular functions and requirements for each part. Before I sit down to write a word, I need to know what challenges will be set up for the protagonist in the beginning, how these will evolve through the middle, and what resolution the protagonist will (or will not) find by the end. 

With CAT KING, I had the story of Rick Gutierrez, a cat video tycoon who becomes obsessed with salsa dancing -- and with Ana Cabrera, this smart & cute girl he meets (beginning). 

Following both obsessions takes him to his mother's native country Cuba, where he discovers that love and dance are both a lot more difficult than he ever imagined (the middle). 

Then (the end) Rick comes face to face with Voldemort and must destroy the seven. . . oops, wrong book there. I guess I won't be spoiling the ending of CAT KING after all!

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

Absolutely, this happens a lot -- in fact, I believe that it should, otherwise you're not writing a living, breathing story but executing a construction blueprint. With CAT KING, I discovered a lot of layers I hadn't anticipated including in the story initially (such as the mystery of Rick's mother's past and the anti-government struggles of his cousin Yolanda). In your head, the novel is a shimmering ghost of a thing, full of promise but insubstantial. As you sweat and hack and struggle through the arduous process of dragging the story across the imagination/reality boundary line, you discover all sorts of unexpected wonders. 

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

Ideas as such come to me often, but ideas I burn to write about come by only once in a while. I know other authors have dozens of ideas they'd love to write at any given time, but I don't. I'd rather go dancing or do a business deal or read a book than write about an idea I'm only moderately interested in. I'll work to put together something that electrifies me and then get to work. 

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

Because of the reasons I mentioned above, this is typically not a problem for me. But generally I tend to look for the intersection of passion and public interest. Between two ideas that I'm equally excited about, I'll pick the one that I think more people will love reading about.

I recently got stitches in my arm and was taking mental notes the entire time about how I felt before, during, and after the process of being badly injured. Do you have any major life events that you chronicled mentally to mine for possible writing purposes later?

Sure -- pretty much everything, every day, from the time I broke my jaw to the time I watched Lehman Brothers go bust in real time on a trading floor, to that one time I was overcharged for a pound of chicken at the grocery store. I try to reassure acquaintances by noting that my characters are always compositions of several real life figures, seasoned liberally with imagination. Similarly, I don't lift scenes one for one but mix and match. But certainly, every mortifying conversation, every sublime experience of beauty and joy, every hilarious mistake, every medical struggle, every sweet little daily moment gets stored away for later retrieval.