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Rough Day to be a DogPosted by dhoffman on February 19th, 2010

So, I took this week off with the idea that I would (a) relax, and (b) get some time to write.

The relaxation thing didn’t really happen as I lost my voice on Friday night, then either got sick or just overwhelmed with mucous (aren’t you glad you asked) as my body tried to lubricate and soothe my ruined throat.  It was Tuesday before I could reasonably speak again, and Wednesday before I felt like a person.

So, of course, I had to go and tank Thursday.

To be fair, Thursday wasn’t bad for me, per se.  It was bad, however, for Jack the Dog.

Poor guy had a rash on his belly.  He was licking the rash so we took him to the vet to get a salve or something.  Maybe one of those doggie cones that gets satellite radio.  An off-hand comment from me, however, turned a routine visit into Jack the Dog’s Bad Day From Badsville.

Hey, his breath has been stinky lately.  Anything we can do about that?

I feel Jack the Dog would have preferred I keep my mouth shut.

Suddenly, Jack’s getting knocked out and having X-rays done.  Two teeth had to be pulled.  He’s doped to the gills, staggering around the house, with a look on his face that says, “I was having a nice day.  Why did you do this to me?”

Well, both teeth were cracked.  And infected.  Guess we could have left them in there but to my mind, the poor guy was probably suffering just having them in there.  So he’s a mess now but in a day or three, he’ll be facing life with a whole new outlook.

This is what I’m telling myself.

His appointment was at 10:30am.  He was supposed to be home for 2:00pm.  I figured, okay, I can do that and get some writing done afterward (yes, this is the part where I tell you how worrying about my dog distracted me from writing.  If you don’t want to hear it, skip to the part where I tell you I might have FINALLY cracked the start of Chapter Six and am cautiously optimistic about the direction I’m going in).

2:00pm turned swiftly into 5:30pm.  We brought him home and he was basically a fuzzy puddle.  I held him in my lap for a while, then we tried to feed him.  No dice.  Jessy held him on her lap for a while and we tried to feed him again, with some success this time.  What this all amounts to is we spent the later parts of the evening caring for our poor, sad, pain-addled, doped up puppy dog.

Around one in the morning, Jack the Dog had clearly parked himself on the couch.  We figured that was a good place to let him sleep, so he’s there now.  Out like a light, the poor little guy.  Jessy’s spending the night in there (the cat practically lives on that couch and while I can hang out in there, to sleep there the whole night would kick my allergies into overdrive — plus, I think she (Jessy) is digging that she was Jack the Dog’s choice of humans for his evening of recovery.

For my part, I spent a long time staring at the computer screen tonight.  I’ve written and re-written the same 5-10 pages probably fifteen or twenty times this week.  Wasn’t clicking.  Tonight I did my thing and tossed out the preconceived notions and started from scratch.  What I came up with — essentially jumping in a few hours later in the narrative than I’d been doing — feels pretty good.  Tone is working, I’ve already got a few jokes in, with a couple more jotted in the margins.  Might actually work.

So, I got some writing done, after all.  I’d hoped to be more productive this week but the truth is this: if I’d spent the entire week to only get a single sentence down, if that sentence was good, and right, it would have been worth it.

If Six is working, that means I can push forward.  I know what I want to be happening in these chapters, I just didn’t know the right way into doing that.  An open door, a cracked window, a jimmied skylight; it’s all about finding that right opening.

Still, no matter how good my words are for the night, it was one rotten day, I think to be Jack the Dog.  Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Two Hours, and Then . . .Posted by dhoffman on January 22nd, 2010

Yesterday was one of those days where I run around like my head’s come detached, do the best I can to sort out where I’m supposed to be at any given moment, then brace myself for the resulting confusion.

Usually, days like those are not conducive to writing.

I was determined, though.  When I’ve been able to write, of late, I’ve been really pleased with what I’m getting.  Animals was, at the start of the evening, something around 12,000 words, and though it was work getting there, I’ve been feeling good enough about things that I started to wonder, wow, could this book actually end up being readable?

So, last night.

I got home late, ate late, had a crazy dog and a crazy cat looking to beat me up.

So it goes.

Jessy took Missy into the great room and did her best to entertain the fickle thing with a new catnip toy and one of those plush, accordianing kitty tunnel.  Only problem was, Jack the Dog decided that was HIS kitty tunnel (there’s a ball inside, I guess), so we had to lock him up with me.

This was all something like 9:30 at night, or so.  Late start and all that.

I spent a good two hours working on this one section with Jack the Dog on my lap, sleeping the sleep of the just.  He weighs about twenty-two pounds but when he lets go and conks out, he feels more like fifty or sixty pounds.

Two hours.  Good, but hard.  I suppose, in the moment, writers don’t like when it’s hard, but after the moment, that’s very satisfying, indeed.

On around midnight, I got to a place where (remember, this is the Second Draft) I felt like I’d caught up with the actions from the First Draft.  So, I moved from the left side of the screen to the right and proceeded to read one of the bits of story from the last go that I’d really, really liked and had been really, really, really hoping I was still going to like.

I didn’t like it.  I loved it.

I won’t go into much detail, but it’s basically a section I sweated like hell the first time around.  It’s two of the main characters meeting for the first time, the kind of dialog I usually figure I’m going to screw up — either being too clever to too laid back (out of the fear of being too clever).

What this was, though, was just what I’d wanted.  Just what I’d hoped it would be.  A single conversation flows through a half-dozen scenes, as they move through the city.  Body language works with the dialog.  The sweet bits don’t make me gag and the funny bits are just funny enough without feeling like they’re pushing for it.

I’ll need to go through the section again, making notes and changes — it wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination.  But what’s there is solid.  Very solid.  And it’s one of maybe three or four sections in the story that needs to be solid, which is nice.  I was ready to rewrite it from scratch, if needed, but I’m quite pleased to find that I may not need to.  May not need to make major changes at all.

So, that was nice, then.  Rough day, good night, and my 12,000 word novel, with the “new” pages in it, is now more like my 23,000 word novel.

And that’s nice, too.

The Dog, The Cat and The RavenPosted by dhoffman on July 14th, 2009

Tonight was a good night for writing, though it certainly didn’t seem like it would be, at certain points.

Jack the Dog and Missy (the cat) were complete maniacs tonight.  No matter how many times we broke out the laser pointers or plopped her down on her little hammock by the window, the pair of them kept coming back to yowl and bark at me.  I tried closing the door to my office and that just put them on the other side of the door, pacing, yowling, barking and making it generally tough to concentrate.

Ah, pets.

What wound up happening is I got a nice bunch of paragraphs in while they were behaving, earlier in the evening, then spent about two hours wanting to strangle the both of them, then managed to somehow get them to settle down so I could write for another two hours or so.

So it goes.  I was productive and that’s what’s important.  Actually, i stuck with it and pushed through their bratty interruptions and THAT’S what’s important.

A good start for the week.  The weekend was horrible, so I figure I was due.  Here’s hoping for continued success as the week draws on.

And, as a closing note, my buddy in Toronto sent this to me tonight.  We agreed that the music was a bit much, but not enough to ruin something like Chrstopher Walken reciting Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven”:

Turnabout is Fair Play?Posted by dhoffman on November 21st, 2008

An interesting day.  I spent most of the morning working — that’s “day job” work — and then suddenly it was late afternoon and Jessy was leaving for Boston and now it’s me, Jack the Dog and Missy (who doesn’t feel comfortable being referred to as, “Missy the Cat”) left to our own devices until Sunday night.

I need to buy a lamp.

I did write today, ~2,400 words, which technically puts us over 40,000 words but I’ve moved some stuff around and integrated some other ideas and so I don’t want to give myself credit for the “old” stuff until it gets integrated into the “new” stuff.

I started writing today and, well, if you want to think of this as the second half of the story, that’s probably not too far off.  Go back in the blog a few posts and you can see I’ve been fighting myself a bit, and I’m hoping things brighten up soon.

To wit: I started writing one thing today and quickly found myself writing something completely different.  Nikki, for her part, gave me the finger and said, “this is what I’m doing so suck it down.”  Not very nice of her, I must say, but there you have it.

So, now I’m working on writing my way out of a corner.  Once I get past that — it’s a small corner — I have a significantly larger corner to write my way out of.  Probably an even bigger one past that (not up to even thinking about that just yet).  Once I get past all that fun, things should be relatively easy.  Unless they’re not.

I need to polish off this chapter and see what I’m doing with the next one.  I’m hoping Nikki behaves herself a bit but, to be honest, I don’t expect her to accommodate me.

God knows I’ve inconvenienced her enough.  Figure she just thinks its my turn to get kicked in the teeth.