#JanPlan: Getting It Done

On New Year's Day, someone retweeted something into my stream that caught my eye. Something called a JanPlan. What the heck is a JanPlan, I wondered? I clicked through to this post from Christa Desir to find out. The basic idea is to take some project you've been wanting to finish, and finish it!

I liked the idea of setting some kind of goal for myself for this month, and there are a lot of things I want to get going, so I decided to jump on board.

I've already had this feeling that 2013 is going to be my year. I don't know in what way, exactly, but I see success in my future. With any luck (and a lot of hard work) this will be the year I quit retail and make my living doing something writing-related that I enjoy. Therefore, my JanPlan will help me tidy up a few things that need to be done to start me on that path. This month I plan to:

• Launch my transcription website and start seeking out clients
• Follow up on some freelance opportunities I've come across
• Continue work on one of my fiction manuscripts that I had set aside. A stretch goal would be to finish the draft of that manuscript, but that would be a pretty big stretch. :-)

Do you have something you want to finish this month? Join us on Twitter and share your #JanPlan efforts.

Consent is Sexy--Dialogue, Not So Much

Every year on my Facebook page, I post an erotic short story. Just for fun. This year it took me a little longer than I would've liked to get the story written and posted. As in, I only managed to finish writing and do a quick copy/paste so that it was up at 11:59pm on New Year's Eve.

I always forget how much longer it tends to take me to write erotic scenes than I think it should. But this year there was also something else dragging it out, and I think it was the dialogue in the story. I've written previously about how much I obsess over dialogue. I pare it down as much as possible and can't stand to have more than a couple lines of it without some sort of supporting action.

This year's story was heavier on the dialogue than I like to be, generally. But I couldn't help it. The nature of the story demanded it. The story, appropriate titled Consenting Adults, focuses on explicit consent in sexual encounters. The idea struck me, but I didn't want to make it overtly political or preachy. In order to show consent as sexy, it required a lot of dialogue.

A lot of repetitious dialogue.

Lots of yes and can I and would it be okay if...

I think it took me so long to get the story written because I was just trying to avoid writing all the dialogue!

Anyway, I finally finished it an hour ago and hastily posted it to my FB page. Didn't even spell check it. Eep! I know some writers are appalled at the idea of letting anyone read the rough or first draft of anything. Obviously, I'm not one of those writers. If you'd like to read the story, you can find it here. I would love to hear from you about whether you think I made consent sexy, or anything else you'd like to comment on. I wouldn't mind a little 'like' on my page while you're there, too.

Do you ever have a "message" in your writing that you try not to make too preachy? Any tips?

And at what point do you feel okay letting people read your writing? If not the first draft, which one?

Goodreads Giveaway for The Fall

Fellow Elephant's Bookshelf Press author Judy Croome is sponsoring a giveaway of 20 print - yes, PRINT! - copies of The Fall: Tales From the Apocalypse.

Hop on over to Goodreads to enter. Ends January 1, 2013.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Fall

by Matt Sinclair

Giveaway ends January 01, 2013.




See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter to win

On a Trans-Atlantic Flight

I was thrilled to get a message from a fellow writer the other day who had just finished reading The Fall. He said he really enjoyed my story in the anthology. It's flash fiction, really. It's quite short. We talked for a little bit, and the conversation turned to the fact that my first published short story also had a flight theme. The story was originally published online with Divine Dirt Quarterly, which is now out of print. So I thought I'd post the story here for you all to read. If you like this one, I'm sure you'll enjoy my story "Flight Plans" in The Fall.

On A Trans-Atlantic Flight

I used to think I could see God in the clouds. Not in an indefinite expanse of clear blue, calm and crisp and quiet, desperate in its infinity, but somewhere up there, among the water vapor masses between us and eternal sky. Not in gray and grumpy nimbostratus, nor fine feathered cirrus, but in a fair weather cumulus blanket and the sun beams like knitting needles that pierced it, the ends of which, I was sure, illuminated some somber earthly occasion - corporeal cessation. But certainly God was in the clouds, sending forth that sun vector to call an angel home.

Necks craned and twisted, bodies pressed forward against restraints just for a glimpse out of the small windows of a 757. My first flight. Even as we lifted from the ground, the Earth tried to pull me back, urging me not to endeavor to things for which my body was not made. Or perhaps the weight on my chest was God, knowing the human race was too curious for its own good, placing a firm hand of protection, holding us close, leashing our titanium bird lest we flew too close to the sun.

My head swam, unsettled by artificial air pressure, though it may have been the sight of the clouds that did it. Nerves and terror and elation and uncertainty coagulated in my stomach. Expecting a breeze, a mist, a warm breath on my cheek, I considered holding my breath, eyes squeezed shut, as white opacity filled the tiny bubble windows. Curiosity, though it may or may not have killed a cat, overtook my timidity, prying open my expectant eyes just as the clouds broke.

Did you know the sky goes on forever anyway, that you could follow it and it would never lead you anywhere, not to peace, nor to happiness, nor to god, and did you know that the sun knits blankets of cumulus clouds to shield my fragile and naïve heart from such despair? I used to think I could see god in the clouds. But there, above it all, atop a secular cumulus quilt, I saw that my geometry was all wrong: the gilded shafts I had been certain were line segments, with an Alpha and Omega – originating from the hand of a benevolent god and ending far below, soul escalators bringing the dead into eternal bliss - were instead rays, of all things, capped at one end by the stinging sun, extending onward forever.

On a trans-Atlantic flight, I searched urgently for validation, winged hope. I found only science and weather, impressive but not divine, water vapor polluted by a need to push our limits, to stretch, to disintegrate our mortal restrictions. Puffs of little substance whose mass is no match for the hard nose of human determination, pierced by a persistent sun whose light will outlast even the clouds as it is reflected back, changed by the tangible clutter of temporal curiosity, fractured, bounced, splintered, and so on, et cetera, ad infinitum.

I may never fly again.

L is for Loser

I got this crazy idea this year... I had a new novel project that I was ready to start, and November was quickly approaching. Sounded like a great opportunity to try National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) for the first time.

I'll admit, I was a little worried about it because November is a crazy time for me with my day job in retail. I had recently been promoted to a full-time position, and that left precious little time and energy at the end of the day. Still, I thought, why not? It would be tough, but I could handle it. So I committed to it.

Then my manager quit. Which left me on my own and floundering at work for the first two weeks of the month, trying to do a job I was hardly trained to do, as well as the job she would have been doing (which I REALLY was not qualified to do). Lots of long days doing surprisingly physical work, plus a good amount of overtime sapped everything out of me. Stressed doesn't really cover my precarious mental state during those two weeks haha. Needless to say, I wrote very little.

There are still ten days left, but I'm calling it: I'm a NaNoWriMo loser. There will be no 50k words for me. But I wouldn't really call it a bust.

I did get a little more than 1700 words down the past couple weeks, and I still plan on attending my local area write-in on Friday to write some more. Those are all brand new words. I haven't written anything close to that in the past several months. I was mostly doing edits and revisions on old projects before starting NaNo.

My muse is also starting to whisper again. I know everyone says you can't be a slave to your muse, writer's block isn't a thing unless you let it be, you have to be disciplined about your writing, etc.... But that only goes so far for me. Maybe it's my nature as a pantster. But there has to be at least a little bit of inspiration, and that has been lacking of late. After getting some new words down on paper, though, that has been changing. Of course, some of the ideas my muse is whispering about aren't relevant to the project I want to be writing at this very second, but I'll deal with that.

I also got to meet up with some local writers. Even though I'm not going to win NaNo, I think I'll go to the last write-in because I've found that is a great motivator for me. It helped me to carve out a time and to prioritize my writing process. Having other people involved made it feel less like a selfish endeavor (because sometimes I feel that way, and that can discourage my writing process) and more like a group effort that I couldn't shy away from without letting other people down. It would be awesome if some of these local writers would like to continue meeting up even just once a month to have similar write-ins.

If I'm not in retail this time next year, I may give NaNo another try. We'll see. I'm not sure I'd win even under more favorable personal conditions unless I was really feeling inspired. I have no doubt about my ability to complete a novel. I've done it twice in my life already. For some, NaNo is an exercise in doing just that - finally sitting down and writing that novel you've always talked about. For me, it was more about focus. And I really wasn't able to focus on writing with my day job wreaking havoc. I have no idea how people with full time jobs and kids still manage to crank out novels the way some of them do. Props to them, because I couldn't do it.

If there's one thing I'm learning, it's that I simply do not belong to the don't get it right, get it done camp. Which isn't surprising, considering I don't operate that way in any other part of my personal or professional life, either. I'm a perfectionist, and I don't apologize for it. I'm sure some people may consider this blasphemy, but here it is: I don't believe in the shitty first draft.

That's not to say that my first drafts are perfect, because they aren't. It does take me longer than many other people I know to write my first drafts. But for the most part, I tend to spend less time revising than a lot of those same people do. I would much rather get it right (or as right as possible) the first time than to just get something down and spend a lot of time and effort making major revisions later. At work, I've had to do a lot more of getting it done, only to go back later to make it right than I would like and it has driven me absolutely nuts. I feel like I'm doing twice the work and it sucks. I refuse to approach my writing that way.

So if you're like me, and you can't quite get into the groove of churning out a quick and dirty draft that you can go back and edit to death later, don't worry. You aren't alone. I'll wear my L for NaNo Loser proudly. It'll take me a little longer, but I have no doubt that I'll be a winner in the end.

Are you doing NaNo this year? What has your experience been?