#3 Tara's Writer Diary: Hitler Invades, Good People Doing Bad Things, and Carl Gets a Makeover
Monday, June 24, 2019
I realized yesterday that I had made the temperatures uniform in Campfyre, even though there are four different locations, one in PA, one in D.C., one in NYC, and one in Hartford. I have just finished going through what I’ve printed out so far and updated/altered the temperatures one to three degrees depending on time of night and where the scene takes place. The idea is that I will continue to make these alterations as I do this first read-thru.
The read-thru itself is going well. I had been wondering if I should make the edits I discover as I go along, or if I should wait until I’ve finished the read-thru and THEN make the edits. I have found some fairly big edit-needs, such as Carl’s character is flat, boring, and he doesn’t do much, nor are his motivations to do anything sufficient. Well, I was talking to a friend who, apparently, edits and loves editing science fiction! I asked what she thought of my conundrum, and she suggested it was better to do the read thru first in order to get the proper flow of the what I’d written so far. I might also find answers to my questions later in the script that if I stopped to edit as I go, I’d miss out on. So, problem solved!
On another note, I am nearing the ends of both V.W.’s diary and Vita’s “Saint Joan of Arc”. It is so inspiring, and awesome, filled with strong feelings to be reading two books, both of which the heroin dies at the end. Woolf kills herself a few days after her last entry. Meanwhile, Vita, Woolf’s girlfriend, writes of Joan of Arc who will meet the stake at the end of her book. I don’t know what this means for me, but I find it cool and it feels right to read both together. Also, V. is talking about Hitler in 1936 and all the political talk that is going on in her circle. She is hoping it will all blow over. I sigh and think that she died before getting to know that Hitler was eventually taken out, but not before he exterminated 6.6 million adults and children. I also didn’t realize, nor ever thought about the fact that, she lived during that time. So of course, it got into her diary, but here is a different perspective I have never seen. It is surprising, and quite interesting to see her opinion.
Thoughts on what’s happening with the children being separated from their parents and subsequently imprisoned:
Milgram’s experiments showed that people follow orders from authority when they can’t
explain why something is wrong. This is how the Holocaust was allowed to happen. . .the
dumbing down of America. . . . people did not like Milgram’s results and verbally attacked
him and his results. . . .the degradation of our school system. . . .class battles . .the same
education is NOT available to everyone. . .We are being dumbed down so that we can’t
explain why something is wrong, so we just listen to authority. I believe that is why
ordinarily decent human beings will choose to be ICE. The uneducated ones will just go
along with it. The educated ones got out of ICE once they saw what was happening and
they could not in good conscience carry out such abominable orders. I am left to believe
that any person who stays and carries out the inhuman orders of this administration does
not have higher education, but if they do, they are likely to be highly racist. This makes
them unreasonable (from a logic standpoint). How do you reason with the unreasonable?
Wednesday, July 10, 2019
I am steadily going through the first reread of Campfyre. In June, I wrote only 23.25 total hours, and that is deplorable. So, after a rough first few days of July, I got back on endeavoring to write 2 hours a day. Using the excel worksheet as my writing accountability is helpful in that I am able to look back over the month and see how well I did or didn’t do, just in my “butt in the seat” writing, not the quality of the writing.
As to the quality, I feel good about my progress through editing Campfyre. I’m still trying out that name, by the way, because I have known it as Vampyre for decades. As for the editing, I am finding the best way to do this is to keep reading, and making the adjustments in the script that are simple rewrites/edits on punctuation/spelling/grammar, etc. Anything that is complicated, even a little, is being held over until after the first reread. I’m also updating Questions for Reread so that the document can continue to be helpful, although there are now so many notes attached to many of the bullet items that I fear the document becoming confusing. So far, though, I feel it is not confusing. We shall see as I continue. My plan is to go through all of the notes in Questions for Reread AND Reread Notes, making the edits as noted. THEN, I can do a second reread.
Thursday, July 11, 2019
Doing good with consistently writing two hours a day. I feel like I can see the progress and that it might not take as long as I was afraid it would take to wrangle this beast into something coherent and good. I “thought” up this book and so many of its details long before I was ready to write it, and now I realize that I have been unpacking the details. The details were not “given” to me in a linear fashion, so unpacking has been slow, and I realize that this story cannot be contained in a single volume, so it is a three-book series.
I am up to 1938 in Virginia Woolf’s diary, and she went through hell to write The Years. It took so much out of her that she vowed never to write another novel again. I can relate. Writing a novel is an emotional journey, and worrying if it is all incoherent rubbish is the awful bat we beat ourselves over the head with. Will I go through all this struggle only to find that no one reads it or takes it serious? It is the gamble we take as writers. For me, I know that if I don’t write this book, see it through to the agonizing end, it will never stop harassing me.
I thought of this book when I was 18 years old. I worked on it back then, and got as far as I could, and then set it aside. I am now 46 years old and this book NEVER left my thoughts. It may have waited patiently in the back, quietly biding its time, but no matter how many short stories and plays and essays I wrote, this story waited. I finally picked it up again a couple years ago and have been struggling to first get an outline written, and then to write a first draft. Where I stand now is the first draft written with no climax, and a mountain of notes that need to be attended to: subplots to be weaved throughout the story, maps of the fictitious futuristic Earth, characters notes, form notes, etc. With the climax, I get to three or four chapters from the end and the notes get very thin and general. . .skeletal, if you will. Lots of bolded notes about what I’m trying to say and things I need to figure out, with no clue how to navigate my characters through the final pages.
Another note about V.’s diary in 1938. War is imminent and Hitler makes his way into her pages. She sounds scared, rightly so, about Hitler and his army and what war will mean to her. The biography she is writing about her artist friend who died, Roger Fry, is a wonderful distraction for her. “I’m thinking of Roger not of Hitler—how I bless Roger and wish I could tell him so, for giving me himself to think of—what a help he remains in this welter of unreality” (Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, p. 292).
Monday, July 15, 2019
In this first reread, I have discovered that one of my antagonists has a boring role, so I am working on his character and what he does in this book. Here are some notes:
Carl is to be a likeable character, even though he has deplorable ethics. We need to be mad at him for much of the book, but not hate him.
Carl’s likeable attributes:
· He is respectful of women. . . sees them as they are, not as he thinks they should be. He
has had a strong female presence all his life, and surrounds himself with strong women.
· He is broken by the death of his sister, Tandy, whom he tried to save using science, and
failed.
· He is heartbroken by the murder of his first wife, Phoebe.
What can Carl do that makes him sympathetic to reader?
· In the first water cooler scene, he can stand up for an employee who is being picked on.
This would require a rewrite for that scene, but could make it stronger.
Saturday, July 20, 2019
Ugh, I open this after a week and find an important note on my Carl character that I had forgotten about because I couldn’t think of where to put it that it wouldn’t get buried under mountains of notes. I get left with that feeling where I remember doing it, but no idea where I left it. Now I don’t remember what I wanted to write in this diary.
I am a few chapters from the end of the book, and the end of this first reread. Still no clue how to write the climax. I suppose I need more details about the technology. Perhaps if I figure out HOW the technology works, i.e. the Grid and seals, then I can see how it goes wrong, and who plays what part in making it go wrong.
Sunday, July 28, 2019
I am in the midst of one of my irritating moods where I’m not happy with anything; makes it very difficult to get any writing done. Rather than do no work on Campfyre, I am doing cleanup on Questions for Reread notes, and then will begin to go through the notes I made and make the changes/rewrites in the script. Part of the problem is that I don’t know which is the best order to do all of the many things that need to be done for this book.
I have finished the first reread and, as expected, it was very light on details and the science. My goal was to get a skeleton of the story arc, and I believe I have accomplished that much as least. I flushed out the dull characters and though I’m not sure yet how to fix Carl’s dullness (I do have ideas (10/8/19 Update: I’m wondering what those ideas were. Didn’t write them down, or if I did, I lost them.)), I was “reminded” of Art’s intended character profile. While writing the first draft, I let Art become a lazy, unfocused, neurotic mess. I made one or two notes on his character and suddenly the skeletal arc I wrote has promise for Art’s character and direction for the Less Five rebels. Now I just have to make sure I don’t lose the notes, as I am wont to do.
Wednesday, July 31, 2019
I got two hours writing done today, good editing/writing plus maintenance stuff. I was six and a half hours short of my 50 hour writing goal for July. I had a good block of two hours a day, and 1.5 hour days, but then there were half hour days, no writing days, and one hour days. However, that means I had 18 days of serious writing to 13 days of not as much as I’d like. Only 4 of those days were no writing, 2 half-hour writing days, and the remaining 7 days were an hour writing each day. I’ll take an hour writing, because that is a good enough chunk of time to get some serious work done. So all in all, I think I did pretty good. In order to make an attainable goal, however, I am going to lower my writing goal for August to 40 hours. I’m going on vacation, so I assume I will not write every day.
As for what I’m working on, I realized why I am having so much confusion. There are many elements of this story that require some amount of research, character work, system work, map building, etc. I’ve been in a circular pattern: I think I need to work on the Civil War, but then I realize the Grid hasn’t been worked out yet, for instance. I realized that I need the Grid work in order to put together a logical sequence of events for the Civil War. So I need to go through all which needs to be written and/or researched, and figure out the best order it needs to be done in. For things that do not need anything written or researched to do them, then I just need to do them. I may be babbling right now, but I think I understand what I mean.
#2 Tara's Writer Diary: Mayish 2019ish
In continuing to share my writer diary, here is May 2019. As I get more comfortable with sharing my story, I will share profiles on the characters and other details so that you, the reader, will have a better idea of what I am complaining. . . I mean writing about. In the meantime, let's keep going!
Wednesday, May 1, 2019
Let this diary be my accountability for working two hours a day on Vampyre. That said, I have a target writing goal of 2 hours a day. So far, I have written/edited for 1.5 hours. I am reading a full chapter, with all scenes, and then going over the Reread Questions to see if anything is relevant for what I just read. The work is slow but productive. I am finding notes that have been repeated in the Reread Questions, and am able to make notes of where else I found the same note, as well as what chapters I made additions to. Physical pain is an issue right now, so I’m going to leave my journal there for now.
It is now 6:23pm and I have done a half hour of map building Tesla. That makes 2 hours today!
Tuesday, May 7, 2019
How easy it is for days to go by without me recording in this journal. I’m not going to apologize; if there is something to report or record for posterity, then I shall. Otherwise, no one wants to hear about the boring minutia of my day, especially me, and I don’t want to record it.
As for Campfyre, I am putting into the script the changes I have made in the reread so far, which is through chapter 3: easy changes, that is. Some are things I have yet to do, per the Camp Continued list in Scrivener. Anything that I can do as I go through this reread, though, I will, which does include medium hard edits that only require me to write them now. It is slow going progress, but it is progress. I work 30 minutes at a time so that I never tire out and am always ready to keep working after a short or longer break. I’m going for consistency, not quantity.
Wednesday, May 8, 2019
I have given myself a quest to find out how to let my thoughts travel into a different medium and change shape and size but not change content, or rather, to have the same intent in the content even though it looks, hears, sees, smells, and feels different in this corporeal world than it did in the ether of my mind. Perhaps I do it enough already, perhaps not. What IS a single thought?
I have a concept for Vampyre, a concept that cannot be expressed in a single sentence, unless that sentence fills a whole page, punctuated with commas, semi-colons, and full colons.
Thursday, May 9, 2019
I fear that I may have to start video blogging. I see other writers doing this, and I know that helps readers connect with them. I still believe that if the writing isn’t good, it won’t matter how personable you are on a video blog or a regular blog. You can have the best website in the world, but if you’re writing sucks, you won’t be the next Virginia Woolf or Stephen King. Who am I kidding, though? This industry has turned into high school. Quality doesn’t matter anymore. It’s a popularity contest. How many successful authors do I attempt to read that have HORRIBLE writing styles? Their stories stink, yet they win awards? HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN? I don’t want to win a popularity contest. I want my writing to mean something, even if no one reads it. I guess I’m saying that I refuse to sacrifice my integrity. I’ll be the writing community’s best kept secret.
Saturday, May 11, 2019
I am editing. . .let me pause a moment to let the enormity of that statement sink in, and also the humor of feeling the need to say that considering I have been editing this book for literally decades. But, I am editing, going through the Reread Questions for the new Chapter 5, and I come upon a note for Ch. 9.3 in which I can’t remember Ed’s wife’s name. It goes like this: “[his wife’s name] happened to have taken a holiday without him.” I find this a humorous way of stating that you can’t remember someone’s name.
Sunday, May 12, 2019
I have gone back to the beginning of the script, going through and adding the parts that I highlighted. This means writing new scenes. Today’s writing is not as fluid as the past few days. Yes, it’s Mother’s Day, and try though I do to have it not affect me for the third year in a row, perhaps it is affecting me anyway. The important thing is that I have worked for an hour and a half on the script. An hour’s worth of writing a new scene with Sherrie going to a Revolutions meeting (Normal operations, in other words). A half-hour of working on the Tesla map. That was even slower going though, so I went back to writing, which, though slow, was productive.
Wednesday, May 29, 2019
I lost this journal for a bit! I was beginning to think it had disappeared into the ether as computer files are wont to do. But then I finally found it tucked away within the Vampyre file. On the bright side, I forgot that I had started another journal, just labeled Writer’s Journal or something, I can’t remember right now. I love what I was doing with it. I was writing fragments, weird and/or notable things that happened to me, six-word stories, poetry, and other “word experiments”. It is quite fun to read through, so maybe not a bad thing that I lost this diary for a time.
Anyway, the further into Virginia Woolf’s journal I get, the more scared I get, suicide-wise, which is a weird phrase: is suicide wise? Some would say no, but I suspect those are the ones left behind with questions and no answers. V.W. struggled with suicide for as long as she wrote a diary. I knew she had killed herself, but gave no thought as to how long these thoughts were with her. She gave us a unique insight, not only into her mind as a writer, but into her thought process and how it took her to very dark places. It shows us how she triumphed time and time again over those thoughts, but they still chased her until they finally caught her in 1941.
As for Vampyre, or “Campfyre”? Slowly but steadily. Work was cray cray busy for Memorial Day Weekend. I got as much writing done as I could, which did not amount to much. A half-hour here, an hour there. But that hell is done for now, so hopefully work goes back to its normal quicks and slow times. Currently, pushing through the re-read. I paused to fix a couple places in the script that required fixing before going on, and to update the Questions for Reread. I believe I am caught up, so started rereading the new chapter 7 yesterday.
Friday, May 31, 2019
Yesterday, when I reached two hours of writing for the second day in a row, I felt like I had worked hard. I got lazy for a week there and fell out of practice apparently. So, looking forward to getting back up to 2 hours a day and NOT “breaking a sweat.”
***
Excerpts from 2018 (my first attempt at a writer journal, and possibly . . . no definitely more interesting):
7/20/18
Today I’m going to add a copy of what I did for Vampyre. It’s work on the saboteur, and also realizing that I need to know EXACTLY what New America does and its own hierarchy of scumbag employees. Here’s the saboteur notes:
The company that opted out -- CEO Jules Crenshaw of National Bank
The underling turned informant -- Joseph Piles (48 at time of opting out), Technical Director for their computer systems (much more involved than that, but I’m tired, so good enough FOR NOW.)
The son of the underling -- Scott Piles (18 at time of opting out)
Sherrie encounters Joe Piles at one of the bars.
Scott witnesses the killing, unbeknownst to the killer, and goes to trade school to be able to get a job at New America in the technical department.
I found this in Scrivener, BACKSTORY -- “How the 5 Came into Power”
New America – Agricultural genetic engineering --> Subsidiary companies involved in human bio-engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence.
05/28/19
Six-word story:
“Country for sale. Must love Cheetos.”
-Tara McMillen
12:44am (PST) 9/6/19
#1 Tara's Writer Diary
Below is the diary I started writing in April of this year. I am using it to document my work on my work-in-progress novel, Campfyre, formerly known as Vampyre, as I navigate through this harrowing little thing called life. This week I am including posts from April, 2019.
Wednesday, April 17, 2019
“[This] hard knot in which my brain has been so tight spun” for me is Vampyre (Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, p. 167) I am trying to undue that knot this CampNanoWriMo 2019. It’s a tough knot, but I am persistent!
I accidentally typed Campfyre above, and now I am stuck on this name for the book. It could actually be the metaphor I have been looking for!
Thursday, April 18, 2019
Slowly but surely I am making my way through my notes, leaving “breadcrumbs” for myself and notating where I need to sync up notes. I am now pulling out bolded notes on subplots, timelines, time-frames, character work, and hard questions, and making separate documents for each. I have already made a couple of documents, like Hard Questions and for the Climax.
I am tired, and my body is reacting from sitting at this computer all day. Oy. I want to write poems about my book. How do I go about doing that?
Monday, April 22, 2019
I'm starting to get sleepy when I'm working on Vampyre, I figure because I've been editing so relentlessly that I'm tired!
Thursday, April 25, 2019
I’m doing the questions that Shelli gave me for deciding if school is the right option. As I open up Seattle University tuition pricing, I have discovered that not only was the original price more than $40,000, but it was $45,700 and after all of the books and fees the grand total is $65,000. Now, granted I have gotten all these amazing scholarships and that doesn’t change the price tag that I originally knew that I would be owing, which after it is all said and done would be $24,000. What is important is the crushing weight bearing down on my chest as I go through this. And this led to me considering going to the east coast for school and the conversation that Shelli and I had about how difficult full-time school is for me. If I had to do it part-time away from Seattle, that is just not going work for me. I can’t drag this school thing out for years on end just to do it part-time. Let alone how much more that would cost me because I would not have any scholarships or financial aid to help me as a part-time student. So I guess what I’m saying is that my best option for myself is to stick with individual classes that are geared directly towards what I want to learn. I have been learning that I can take individual classes in astronomy. You can take individual classes on pretty much any subject and not have the enormous price tag of the university. I guess I feel bad because I have put a lot of the schools through some considerable time trying to complete my applications and the end result is going to be me turning it down even if I do get in. I feel like I’m having them do all this work for nothing; however, this is why people don’t accept the school’s offer of admission right away, because they are trying to figure out if it’s going to work for them.
Meanwhile, on the writing side, I am no longer exhausted as I work on “My Notes, My Notes, My Notes”, however, I feel the enormous weight of this complicated plot as I go through the document for the third time. It means I’m doing something right.