Adjusting Those Variables for the New Year

 

This week at the SFF Seven, we're sharing thoughts about the changing of the year.

I like the reflection the end of one year and the beginning of a new one brings. You all know I'm into metrics, so the end of a year - however arbitrary a measure - provides me with a milestone to group data. I can look back at the past year, compare it to previous years, and make plans for the one ahead. 

Am I a maker of resolutions? Some years more than others, yes, but mostly I look on the process as adjusting my variables for the year ahead. Life is an ongoing experiment this way. We try stuff, see how it works out, then make changes accordingly. This is how all experimentation works: make a hypothesis, test it by gradually adjusting variables, and keep track of the resulting data.

I know a lot of people react negatively to the concept of new year's resolutions, especially given the daunting statistics about them. For example, from this article, after 6 months, only 46% of people who make a resolution are still successful in keeping it, and by the end of the year only 9% feel they are successful in keeping it.

Interesting to me, a third of the people who failed to keep their resolutions didn’t keep track of their progress and another quarter of them forgot about their resolutions. This may sound funny - I laughed! - but it's actually super easy to forget those aspirations in the tumult of daily life. 

One year I tried writing down goals for the coming year and sealing them in envelopes to be opened on New Year's Eve, so I could see how I did. People, I'm telling you: if I hadn't made myself a reminder to open the envelopes, I'd have forgotten they existed! Reading my goals from Past Jeffe of only a year before was truly eye-opening. It almost didn't matter which goals I'd met, exceeded, or fallen short of - simply comparing the reality with my aspirations taught me a great deal.

This is partly why I'm a believer in tracking all kinds of metrics about myself. Remember, a third of the people who failed to keep their resolutions didn't track their progress while another quarter forgot about them! That's 60% of the failures that might have been successes if they'd had daily tracking and reminders. 

So, I'm doing a series on my podcast this week about the metrics I keep - particularly regarding my writing process - along with the how's and why's. Feel free to ask questions! 

And Happy New Year to all!!

Those Who Have, Those Who Will

This made me laugh and I needed that. I figured I'd share the wealth.

On to the stuff I'm supposed to be blogging about. You know, there's a saying in boating. There are boaters who have run aground and those who will. I feel like that's the same way with writers writing themselves into trouble. Have I run aground in a boat? Oh yes. More than once. Have I written myself into a corner? Shockingly, not yet. I have no doubt that at some point it's likely that I will - it just hasn't happened yet. I put it down to one of the oddities of my brain. Sure. Migraines all the damn time. But in exchange, continuity issues seem to be a little bit of a weird and mostly useless (unless I'm writing) super power. No one else appreciates being reminded of what they said four years ago. I assure you.

I do have a situation right now in a WIP where I wish I could adjust a timeline. But I can't. So I have to cope. An acting teacher, talking about how to put up a Shakespearean play, commented that it's easier to create within the confines of a set of rules than it is to create in a void. Some days, I agree. Some days, I rebel. But one thing remains. If I write a series, there's a spreadsheet with all of the details I assume I'll need going forward. I'm frequently wrong and I have to go digging through earlier books to find some detail I half remember so I can get it right in the next installment. It goes in the spreadsheet at that point. But that's about the limit of my patience for guaranteeing that I don't write myself into something I can't write myself out of. So far. But. Like I said. There are those who have and those who will. 

Twists, Turns, Dangling Threads

Y'all. I'm phoning this in. Straight up. Dangling threads. Long series. Plot arcs. Right now, the dangling thread is an apartment so empty it echoes. The overarching plot is the work of getting my folks and their cat out of Washington State and down here with us. This series has been airing daily now for MONTHS with new twists and turns every damn day. 

Today's twist - the moving truck was delivered to the storage unit I had to find on short notice. Tomorrow at a time when most people are still asleep, a bunch of strangers I hired will show up to throw everything off the truck into the storage unit. Mind you. It took four people 10 days to load that truck. I fear for my life and for my breakables.

The OTHER twist is that someone has to fly Nicadeimos (Mom's cat) to Florida. Either I have to hop a plane to Seattle and collect Mr. Tuxedo, or one of my folks has to fly down and bring him to me and then fly back so they can finish up the house sale and then drive across country (to SEE things, they say) in freaking November.

Do you know how I handle all of these details and dangling threads? With a Bullet Journal. And in fiction, each book in a series has a notebook. This notebook is spiral bound and gets filled with notes about eye colors, names, places, things, editorial notes, scene notes - just everything. But after the book is done, while the novel is out for edits, my notes get munged into a spreadsheet for the series. Every ship name. Every planet. Every single detail that matters end up in that spreadsheet. Behold: The Series Bible.

Authors are weird. I cop to that. And we all have our bugaboos. Continuity is mine. Would anyone else notice it if I screwed up a detail? Probably. But unless it was major, I could probably count the number of people who noticed on one hand. BUT I WOULD NOTICE AND I WOULD NEVER SLEEP AGAIN. 

So I keep track. Am I organized? No. Am I thorough? Oh, yes. Oh very much yes. Because the sanity at stake is my own. And that's already only so/so. 

For my series to work or me, they have to follow a set order of precedence. Series arc rules everything. Each novel must serve the series arc while containing it's own arc. Each character must have an arc within each novel in which they appear and all of those arcs must serve the series arc in some way. 

Strangely enough, I find it doesn't matter where I start in the process of figuring out arcs. It's very chicken and egg. All that matters is that I start somewhere figuring out arcs and the rest emerge. Easy to say. Harder to do. Each book and each character likes to escape control just little bit. So it doesn't always go as planned.

And now, I'm taking this weary author off to sleep so she can face a day of schlepping boxes and heavy things without ending the day either in the emergency room or in prison.

Keep reading.