I am not much of a classic movie buff. I don’t watch many movies in general these days because of the time commitment, unless it’s for “research.” But “Dial M for Murder” was on, and I was curious, and my TiVo has lots of room, so I plunked my headache-y self down on the bed and watched it. I was amazed.

I thought Grace Kelly did a really great job with her role, much better than her male counterparts. She sold the story for me.

What always amazes me about Hitchcock, though, is how nothing is wasted. Camera angles, little fidgets, everything — it combines so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It was truly amazing to watch it all unfold, to know somewhere in the back of my mind that so many people gave something to this production, and that Hitchcock was able to mold and craft all that into this emotional and intellectual experience.

No, I don’t want to direct. Managing a program is more than enough of being in charge for me. But it’s been good to imagine that, some day, I might be part of a similar experience.

One of the fine-tuning aspects of writing is finding those words you over-use while writing, the written equivalent of a nervous tic. “Sort of” and “only” are two culprits I’ve seen other people try to conquer.

It would appear that mine is “back.” This was one of the words I overused in Bubba Cthulhu’s Last Stand, which I excised before submitting. I will have to black-list the casual use of this word from my writing. It should definitely NOT be appearing more often than “said.”

I like this tool. There are several other tools out there on the web that will list the words used most often in your work. I used one of them on Bubba, which is why I knew there was a problem with “back” to begin with. However, the Wordle tool puts it up there in big, colorful letters. When “back” is bigger than “said,” you know there’s a problem. A nice, visual representation of it.

Permuted Press, publisher of horror and apocalyptic stories, has accepted “Bubba Cthulhu’s Last Stand” for one of their Cross-Genre Cthulhu anthologies. Judging by the cover art, the anthology inspired a wide range of story moods. In Bubba, an angry unicorn takes on the evil Bubba Cthulhu and his brother Scooter.

I’m not sure yet which of the anthologies I’ll be in, though I think Bubba fits much better under the second cover. Still, I’m so overjoyed and excited!

Sometime within the last month, the memory stick which holds my writing disappeared. I have searched everywhere that I can, but in the time between it going missing and me noticing, I had a week-long trip to Indonesia, so there are a lot of places I can’t search. It took me about a week, but I finally came to accept the loss.

It was very overwhelming, especially because it came on top of lots of other stress in my life. All my work for the last few years, just gone. I felt like an idiot for not backing it up, but how often do we hear this sort of thing and think “I should do that” and never actually make back-ups?

Fortunately, I have a couple of friends who have saved a lot of the things that I’ve sent them for critiques or to print or whatever. So most things are recoverable. The biggest lost is the screenplay. I was on version 11 or 12, but the most recent version I can find is version 4. Alas.

On the plus side, it’s something of an excuse to do a few of the edits to the beginning as I try and recreate it. On the downside, I was really happy with some of the scenes that I’d been working on.  It’s still stressful, but I’m trying my darnedest to not let it be a breakdown point. There are plenty of other things to be stressed and miserable about when writing.

In conclusion, go back up all your writing RIGHT NOW!

One of the most common questions writers are asked is where they get their ideas. Many writers find this question almost impossible to answer. Answers range from “a little old lady in Newark” to “everywhere.” Both can be true, at least for me. I’ve had a couple of ideas over the last few weeks. Some ideas are characters. One is a reaction to all the vampire detective TV shows. One is a reaction to the sad news of Heath Ledger’s death. But that doesn’t help a new writer, and that’s because it’s the wrong sort of question to ask.

In the end, it doesn’t matter where the idea comes from. It can be from a newspaper, from a random snatch of dialog, from a dream. You have to learn to trust the idea. I don’t, not always, but the hot ones, the ones that set off a fizz in my brain, that I can’t leave alone even though I don’t know what else to do with it, because it’s not a whole story, just a character or a situation–these are the ones that I am learning to stick with. They’re the ones that excite me, that make me want to write, to explore the emotion the idea creates and to try and share that with other people.

In the end, it doesn’t matter where you get your story ideas. It matters that you care about them. Eventually, as you write more, you’ll learn to tell the sizzlers from the fizzlers; learn whether an idea is enough to stand up on its own; and learn to trust that you can carry off the idea. And, if you’re anything like me, that last part will always be the hardest.)

I’m something of a social writer, I’ve decided. It’s much easier to write when there are people around to bounce ideas off of and to read passages I think are cool. Especially people who will nod and smile and say, “Yes, that’s a good idea, now get back to writing.”  The one problem with this is that I’m less inclined to write on my own. I still need to work on that.

This Saturday, though, I had a very productive stint of social writing. I got around four hand-written pages of screenplay done. With my handwriting and style, that  could be anywhere from two to five pages once I type it up. Not too shabby.

I’m still running into the problem of my protagonist not being pro enough. However, I think I’ve identified part of the problem. I know it’s not going to do any good. He’s going to be searching for one thing, and it’s not the thing he should be looking for. So I don’t want to waste time on that. It’s boring, and in my head, the viewers will think, “What’s he doing? Obviously this isn’t where things are. What an idiot.”

Viewers in my head are much more critical than I think any of us ever tend to be in a theater.

But even as I write this post, my brain is working on the problem, and I think I might have at least the beginnings of an idea on what the “wasted time” scenes can do, in addition to just establishing the main character as the driving force. Though, of course, he’s not the only one. All of these characters are convinced that the story is really about them!

As a last note, though, I begin to understand why so many movies and TV shows have more than one writer on a project. If I can choose writing alone or with other people, I’d take other people.

The critique is over, and, as often happens, several people had completely opposite opinions. The facilitator summed it up by saying “I agree with everybody; it’s too short and too long.” My gut reaction is “Pick one!”

But I’m learning to listen properly. Being critiqued is hard, because you get a wide range of opinions, and not everybody can articulate why something did or didn’t appeal to them.  (Heaven knows I struggle with this one!) Why do they want it shorter? Why didn’t they like this character? Should I really put tentacles in?

I’m actually rather pleased that people said they’d like to see some of it shorter. I had to chuckle, considering all the sweat and blood that I put into lengthening it. Still, I can see the point. There’s a lot of repetition, and just a lot of words in general, where not very much happens. I have some good ideas  on how to address the issues, which makes me pleased as punch, because sometimes I get critiques and know I have a problem, and have absolutely no idea how to deal with it, just as I don’t know how to end this extremely long sentence.

But I’m still not putting tentacles in.

I’m something of a nervous person. I can always tell you at least two or three ways something can go horribly, disastrously wrong. Which is part of the stress of being critiqued. My writers’ group will have their way with a short story tomorrow, and I’m absolutely terrified. As always.

I’ve been in this group since its founding seven years ago. (Minus breaks here and there.) Short stories, screenplays, novel chapters–I’ve submitted them all. Yet every time, I get a little knot of tension building up in my stomach. What if they don’t like it? What if this is the time they finally say what they’ve been meaning to say all along, which is that I should give up writing and, to be going on with, living?

Yep. It’s mostly irrational. If nothing else, they’re all far too nice to tell me to give up living. But what about the writing? No matter how many nice things people say, I always see the flaws in my own work. And, because I have issues with thinking in only black and white, that means it’s all bad.

Each week leading up to a critique and each day after the critique are lessons to me in accepting imperfection. That’s not to say I don’t take the criticisms to heart and work to better myself. But I need to learn that criticism of the story doesn’t mean criticism of myself. I think that’s the issue “at the heart” of my critique stress.

Writing is hard — because it makes me deal with these issues. I have to confront my own black-and-white thinking in order to try and come to terms with my work, to decide it’s “good enough,” and to not beat myself up if it gets rejected. This is not encouraging to others, I suspect. Nobody wants to face their issues. Issues are scary and hard to deal with. But it’s the only way I’m going to progress, both as a writer and as a person.

Every now and again, though, I give myself permission to go curl up in a ball and whimper.

One of the most common bits of advice you’ll hear from successful authors is to write. This seems like a “no duh” sort of comment at first. Of course writers write! Why are you wasting my time with this advice?

But once I sit down to put words to the ideas in my head, it all becomes clear. Writing is tough, and let nobody tell you otherwise. I don’t know anybody for whom the entire process is a fun dawdle along the beach. Even the most prolific of my friends have their bad days and aspects of their work that frustrates them until they want to tear their hair out.

The latest project of trying to edit my short story a few paragraphs at a time is on hold. Sort of. I went through the whole thing, actually, but I know I was rushing things by the end. I’m hoping it’ll just come across as the action rising, but my internal editor has some very nasty things to say about that particular dream. However, I’m going to try not to worry about it, as I’ve submitted it to my writers’ group for critique. Instead, I need to get back to work on the screenplay. It’s languishing. Because, well, hard!

As part of my effort to not be so dreadfully sparse in my writing as I am wont to be, I’ve got a good, kind, and wonderful friend sending me a paragraph now and again that I am to expand. I sent her a bunch of my old stuff for her to start sending me bits of my worn writing, as I find it much easier to edit other people’s work than to edit my own. So today, she sent me just a couple of sentences, and I duly expanded them and sent them back.

It was harder than I expected. I vaguely remembered what else was going on during that part of the story, but not well enough that I was getting distracted by what I knew was coming before or after. Maybe this is how I will have to do a lot of this editing. Hopefully, of course, it will eventually become instinctive, and I can stop going to ridiculous lengths, but until then, this piecemeal method seems to work.