This Is Getting Humorous....

A writer. What does that mean?

I write everyday, emails, blog posts, white papers, summaries, reports... my career is reading and writing. If I don't do either I don't make a living.

Geek to Author was not intended to be the career side of my writing but the transition into fiction writing. Storytelling. Expanding beyond my realm of comfort. The biggest challenge has always been the balance between career, home life and the pursuit of which is categorized as luxury.

I don't need to write. I do have an inner spark that is telling me to. Although I have not been writing and putting out works as regularly as I want to, I still have been studying on the practice. Ironically and against everything I have read it's easier to read and study for 30 minutes than to get quiet time for that amount.

Now that the career has calmed down. Kids are older, less 24/7 focus. I have more free time to work. Acquired new tools and a new approach to writing will change things for the better as well. As a career technologist, when you have a dynamic and mobile life as mine you need to have writing tools that are as dynamic and mobile as you. Pen and paper are fine, if you like to write that way, but I don't. Now I have tools, mobile, laptop, desktop that are all the same, interconnected for collaboration and synchronization. I can work on one, pick it up on another and continue on.

The prove it I will talk about the next big short I want to write called Fear of God. It's a story of a newly haloed angel visiting New York and meeting Satan who proceeds to tell him the true power of God.

Write everyday. I now know that. Reading about writing is fine, but not if you write. Everything put on paper doesn't need to see the light of day, in fact, most shouldn't.

Time to turn the page.

New Story - Chance Encounter

I'm on a roll. I added a new story called Chance Encounter to my Wattpad collection. Go check it out and let me know what you think.

I have been writing more fringe sci-fi or at least those are the ideas that have been brewing the most. Not quite futuristic but not quite modern either. Trying to wrap the plausible into the reality you know. It's something and I am writing almost everyday. 500 words a day is the goal and if I go more I write more. If I hit a block and I hit my goal I stop and sleep on it. Usually I can pick right up where I left off without skipping a beat and without banging my head on the desk for an hour trying to get to the next step.

Let the brain work, don't work your brain.

Time to turn the page.

NaNoWriMo Is Almost Over And I Failed

EPIC FAIL. That's me. Terrible, awful, no excuses although I did my best to make them up. Last year I completed the NaNoWriMo with my project Perspectives. Almost 60,000 words and looking back on it the draft is crap, but it has a shell of a story. Long and drawn out but a story nonetheless.

This year I have nothing to show for it. Nothing structured anyway and no where near 50,000 words. Only myself to blame, words ain't going to write themselves.

However there is a bright, white light. I had an epiphany that may be my gateway to getting something solid and perfected and I owe it to my 6 year old son. He has taken to reading like a duck out of water. He's reading at a 3rd and 4th grade level with near photographic memory comprehension... he's in 1st grade. He is bored with the books his age, refuses to read 'picture' books and only chapter books yet we haven't found a series he likes yet. He has read two American Chillers books which are not really horror genre because the 'horror' is a setup joke to take away the real horror. They are about 150-180 pages and he'll read them about 5 chapters at a setting. He' reading who cares, right?

Anyway out of the blue he asked me to write him a book and he will read that. What a great idea! His 6 year old mind of absolute insane imagination and processing would be a great source of material and flow for a story. Tell me what you want to read about and I will fill in the blanks. I have even began to record him in the morning to describe his dreams from the night before, sometime they are the scariest things I have heard. To him it's as real as life but to me it's a starting point to wrap a world around and aim it to a sub-10 year old mind.

Yes! Exciting.

I don't need NaNoWriMo, I just needed my purpose. I think I found it.

Time to turn the page.

Writing About Writing

NaNoWriMo 2014 is approaching and I have no idea what novel idea I am going to tackle. Last year I wrote, or began to, write my Perspectives book idea. I was successful and completed the NaNoWriMo goal but after that I looked at it and realized what a pile of disorganized crap it was and left it. I haven't touched it since.

What to do now? Do I go back and re-write Perspectives with a straight storyline approach or continue with it on the compilation of novellas? Episodic or novel. Even though I did produce 50,000 words toward the project am I better off abandoning it altogether and starting with a new idea. Learning from the lessons of the past and pressing forward with something new to maybe someday coming back to finish the first real work I have created. The more I think about it it is becoming more and more clear that I start anew. Fresh and clean.

Nov. 1 is right around the corner and in my writing thought journal I have lots of good ideas for stories that could be built to novel length most require significant research to get the details right. This then pulls me back into the struggle I have been wrestling with for years. An over analytical mind trying to be creative. I have a passion for writing, I hate doing it but I absolutely love it and I don't do enough it of it. There's a fire inside of me to do this and I don't know where it's coming from, all I know is I have to quench it.

Geek to Author was supposed to have a published book by now. Something. Instead I have short stories I am not happy with, continue to re-write and nit-pick, I am afraid to show them to anyone or post them to any site for critique even though I am members to the major ones. Struggle after struggle and it all resides in my own mind.

Time to get public, get the support, find the others who are in my position and work together to get our work out there. I write for myself but if one person come back and says that my story was good then it all was worth it.

Write to write. Write everyday. Write without borders or obstacles and no matter what anyone says about your efforts, like all arts, opinions are subjective and matter very little.

Time to turn the page.

Keeping Your Writing Organized Across Many Devices And Mediums

The world is full of devices. Phones, laptops, desktops, tablets, notebooks of all shapes and sizes filling out bags and our desks. Write everyday, that's the goal. But like me, a full career, family, babies having the time to write let alone writing in the same place is hard to come by. So I use many methods to write but I have made my life far more complicated trying to keep it all straight.

I started out and still have a leather bound notebook where I put my story and character ideas into. I have a whole shelf of other notebooks standing by as I fill this one up. I also write a significant amount on my iPad using a few different apps that all sync/save to Dropbox. For the finalization I use Scrivener on my Mac. In Scrivener is where I pull in my Dropbox files and transcribe my scribbles from my notebooks and scrap papers into various project binders within the application.

However, it's inefficient now. The ideal method to use one computer, one app for all the writing doesn't work for me. I don't know where or when I will get a change to put down a few hundred words.

The other problem is if I am not working on a solid project, I may be starting to drafting out ideas for a few others. Some ideas look good in a summary but until you get into the flow you as a writer won't know if you can 'feel' it or not.

Get a central location for consolidating your work, for me that's Scrivener. Use templates for character development and expand the templates as you expand your skills of character building. The same goes for settings and plot flows.

No one can tell you how to do it, your brain works differently than mine. What I can suggest is whatever system of creative organization you adopt, be consistent. Because you may end up doing what I did and am still trying to shake off. You'll spend more time trying to organize your creations and realize that you aren't spending enough time to create to use your system.

Write, organize, produce.

Time to turn the page.

Writing Everyday Exercise - Write about Red

WRITING EXERCISE - Write about the color red without using the word 'red'. Describe it to someone.

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This exercise will really push your mind to the limits. How do you describe something that no one else knows how the other sees it. How do you know that your color red is the same as what other's see? We assume but that's it. Perhaps in our brains the shades are identical but the actual color processed is blue for you where it's red for me.

Another twist on this exercise is thinking about try to explain a car to someone from the 1600s.

This exercise was a good one and from the challenge was the lowest word count productivity that I have done with these 10 minute sessions.

How will you do?

Time to turn the page.

Writing Everyday Exercise - Headline

WRITING EXERCISE - Daily Headlines. Read the first word of the first story headline in today’s newspaper/website. Write that word at the top and go for 10 minutes from there.

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The first story I saw on the Star Tribune website was Caught In A Dark Cult's Embrace. The story was about a nationwide manhunt of a Minnesota native who was a leader of a religious cult. Messed up. For the exercise I used the word caught.

Thinking of the word caught the only logical connection was to catch something that target must be moving, running or doing something to avoid capture. I wrote about a woman on the run. What she was running from or why I didn't get into the details. I eluded to her overall purpose of running, to free someone she knew that was captured by the same group years ago, but never said why.

In 10 minutes you can get the cloudy form of what you were going for but not the details. As I do these exercises I find myself writing about common themes, political thriller, escape, action, which is all fine and good but as you do these exercises I think you also need to change your topics and genres as well. Do these in styles and forms you don't normally write about, truly exercise yourself, go outside whatever box you have built for yourself and you will find more value in doing things like this.

My two cents on the matter, it's working for me, it may not for you but unless you try you will never know.

Time to turn the page.

Writing Everyday Exercise - What time is it?

WRITING EXERCISE - What time is it right now? Take the time and write it down at the top of the page. Create a story around the time. 10 to 20 minutes.

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1:35 PM was my time. I started off with a story of a guy called Wally Plugman being asked for the time. From there I spun out of control and the short turned into a pair of terrorists ready to attack a train station.

I am currently back into political, military thrillers so I had that on the brain. Either way I started off with one idea and I freestyled myself into something completely different. That's the point of these exercises. Break the analytical mind from the creative side and let your creative processing take over before you stop and analyze if it makes sense or not. These exercises aren't supposed to make sense. They are designed to get your brain out of the processing ditch of normality to work in new and fast ways.

Don't think, just write. Your brain will figure out the rest as you go.

Time to turn the page.

Writing With A Hectic Life

What the hell am I doing? I am trying to expand a creative hobby that is one of the most time consuming and lonely. I have posted many times about false starts, lack of this, not doing that. Life getting in the way. Excuses upon excuses.

I have broken the cycle. Ironically the birth of my second child, that's right a newborn in the house on top of all the rest, her arrival has helped me focus. Routine, structure, scheduling, rinse and repeat.

When you have a baby you suddenly lose all the enjoyments of being lazy anyway. TV, video games, going out with friends, all of that is restricted. So run with it. When the older child is off to bed and the baby is close to winding down before she goes to sleep, write. If she's in the swing or bouncy chair, have her do it in the office while you write. Don't sacrifice cuddle time but you can't and shouldn't hold a baby 24x7 anyway. That's when I write.

Generally I can get a good 30 minutes of hard writing done, if I am lucky an hour. If the baby wakes me up after 4am I get up for the day. Get her back to sleep, the wife is up getting ready for work. I slide downstairs, make a quick cup of coffee from my Kuerig, and write in the silent dark of the pre-dawn morning.

Now I am working in writing sessions at the office. Instead of eating lunch at my desk and browsing the web I will sneak off to a conference room and pound out a few hundred words. You know what? I am writing. I have several stories completed that I have set aside as I create new ones, then I go back and edit.

This blog I am putting out the exercises and tips that I have been told or read about for the rest to see and maybe use in your journey. I wish I could get 4 or 5 straight hours to pound out a few thousand words toward a novel but with a career, family, and everything else that comes with it that is very, very hard to come by. I am just making sure those are no longer excuses and it's working.

My goal is to bump up my daily targets to close to 1,000 words a day, no matter what it is. Although I am not sure blog entries should count, but putting words down in any format is still putting words down.

Now go write something.

Time to turn the page.

Write Everyday Exercise - How Does It Taste?

WRITING EXERCISE: How does it taste? Look around the room you are in right now. Take an object that may or may not be edible and describe how it tastes. Good or bad be as descriptive as you can in 10 minutes.

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This one I had some fun with and grossed myself out writing it. I was in a conference room at work and the only object that was in there worth trying to eat was the whiteboard eraser.

This exercise is more challenging the less edible the object is. Flex your brain, stretch your imagination and put those into words.

This probably won't spawn into your life's work but who cares, you are writing.

Time to turn the page.

Write Everyday - Nearby Streets Exercise

WRITING EXERCISE 

Fun with addresses. What are the three streets that border your neighborhood? List them. Take the there names only, numbers for streets, and write something silly with them. Keep writing.

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Writing is writing and not every exercise has to make sense. Let go from your norm and have fun. This one is designed for just that. Take the streets around you and go nuts with silliness. 

The streets around me are full names, not numbers, so I created three characters and made a goofy short about them meeting in a universal fate angle. At the end, in the 20 minutes I spent on it, I tried to build up that their meeting was for a reason. At the end they bumped into each other on a street corner, said excuse me and went about their day. The silliness was with the characters I created. The first was an accountant that collected bottle caps but only ones that have been removed, dented, by a bottle opener. The second guy was a pierced out bike mechanic in his mid 20s that dreamed of having children running around his house one day. But when he hangs around the Children's Museum staring at the boys you could see he is not getting a family through marriage, a little morbid but I blame the news tonight from that idea. The third guy is a monster of a man, Russian circus performer, that is currently the bearded woman but looks forward to his promotion to dwarf tosser. 

Silly enough? If you are going to go silly, might as well go silly.

Time to turn the page. 

Everyday Writing Exercises

Writers write always. Whether it's a blog post, journal entry, a letter to mom. As long as words are being put on paper it's writing. Now, I say that if you are trying to be a fiction writer then you need to be writing fiction everyday on top of the other compositions you may do but that's me.

Geek to Author is a slow go. Finding time to write is very difficult, especially with a full career, wife and 2 kids, coaching baseball, etc... but I see people do it all the time and they are writing books! Why can't I? Why can't you? I know the answer, commitment. Dedication. Failure to build a structured routine.

I came across a resources, several actually, that is specifically targeted for writing with a career. The common thread is ease into the routine but build into your day that you sit down and write. Period. I am going to share these writing exercises for everyone else as well as give an insight to my methods.

I haven't been blogging here much, but that's because I have been writing. Not putting anything out there for consumption yet, but I am writing. Short stories mostly but I have a very rough draft of 50,000 words toward a book. So I am doing it. The second part, editing my work, is where my analytical OCD is battling me. Tweaking the stories, expanding them, changing the dialogue instead of fixing the grammar and flows.

Each exercise I do I will start to publish them here. They are not ground breaking and most of them I tweak around to make them more creative and challenging for me. You don't have to follow them verbatim but use them in your own way for your daily writing. I have found it's very liberating and frees the mind to break away from your stories and structures and freestyle write about nonsensical topics as creative and in styles you may never use again. Experiment.

We only learn from failures.

Time to turn the page.

Geek To Author - Wattpad

I Blog To Update Not To Create A Diary

My blog has always been to chronicle a journey of a middle aged guy, sick and tired of BS from the American Corporate world, work toward honing his creative craft of fiction writing. For a long time I have struggled with this blog and figuring out how much to write and what to write about. Do I post every time I have an idea? Do I update when I get 1,500 words written in a day? What's interesting, what's boring, and what's coming across as egocentric?

Since the NaNoWriMo my second child was born so that has been the focus of a majority of my time and the drain on my energy to keep up the pace that I did during the NaNoWriMo. I have a 50,000 word draft of a novel sitting in my Scrivener binder ready to be continued. I am working on finishing another short story called Chance Encounter, actually I will finish it today.

I am writing more and more I am just not blogging about it as much. The main reason is that blogging takes time, time that I could be spending writing. Blog writing is very different than fiction writing and I want to craft the latter. Blogging is just a nice way to stay connected to whatever regular readers are curious enough to read my posts.

During the NaNoWriMo there was a website that I was introduced to called Wattpad. If you are a serious writing either by hobby or trade you are probably familiar with it. Instead of sharing my stories on my own blog I will be using Wattpad to share to the community. There are a few other writing websites that attempt to do the same thing but not as nearly as popular and I will be pulling out of those and going all in with Wattpad. Here's a link to my profile.

My resolution in 2014 was the year of productivity. A new baby in the house makes that more challenging but not impossible. I am using my disgust and frustration of the bureaucratic BS of the world I built my career around as fuel to build worlds and tell stories my way without someone who thinks they know better to suggest it's done this way.

Stay tuned, I will be updating well thought out constructive posts from now on rather than posting for the sake of posting. At least one a week for the rest of the year, maybe more if the week has activity.

Time to turn the page.

Re-Editing Already "Published" Stories

I have written several short stories, some that I have put out to the public on various sites. In the complete redesign of my approach to writing I am pulling these back out and re-looking at them. As I re-read them and from what I have learned and how I have 'grown' over the last year of writing I am see that those stories really need some work. I am a fiddler by nature, always tweaking, improving, adjusting. With writing you need to get to a point and let it go and move on, but not when the stories are fundamentally flawed in the English language. I am not adjusting the story itself but working on improving sentence structure, expanding details, clarifying explanations, improving dialogue flows.

The two stories I am putting my effort into are Temporal Enforcers and The Devil's Nest. The two stories thus far I am most proud of. Even thought they are my first true short stories of any length. There are two problems I have with both, the first was that they were written for a site with a hard word limit and I cut corners to get the word count down. The second is that I never had anyone else look at them with an editing mindset. The feedback I have received from them is more about the story structure and plot points than how it's written. I am going to go back and fix them.

With Temporal Enforcers this may grow into a nice novella project. The main feedback I received on this one was to get more background with the old man and younger apprentice. How did they get to where they are? I touched on it, but there is more to it in my mind but cut it out for length. No rules but my own, right?

In The Devil's Nest I lied earlier. I will be changing the plot a tad bit. It needs to be expanded and I need to go through an exercise of setting description of painting the Nest more vividly. Secondly, I need to alter the fight scene in the prison. I foreshadowed too much to not have the ending twist be as strong as I intended. I will be doing that as well.

Then I will be done and let those children go. I want to get back working on my Perspectives project, I have another short I have planned up called The Murder Of Mr. Tipton, and continue planning a novel length story.

Plan, plan, plan, write, write, write.

Time to turn the page.

Blogging About Story Ideas

As a budding and wanna be writer having this blog about writing. I blog about writing and write about blogging. When you start to cross over and want to get personal with writing about your writing you start to cross into the area of idea sharing without a product. Let me explain what I am trying to say.

I have a journal, several now, full of scribbles, thoughts, story ideas, plot lines, characters and scenery. My over analytical mind I try too hard to build the world first in a sketch mode then write around that instead of building the world with my words... any tips to help me break this cycle please let me know.

Anyway, I want to start writing about these ideas but as a business man I feel I could potentially be giving away ideas without a story behind it for others to take. Do I or don't I? That's the struggle.

For example let's take my Perspectives project idea. I want to get communal conversation around it, heck even having multiple writers working on it would be awesome and true to the Perspectives concept... side note - that's a GREAT idea actually... hmmm, let me chew on that one.

Anyway, if I detail out too much I fear someone else will take it make it their own, claim it as their idea and take it. Although all the blog posts and paper trails will protect me in a lawsuit, which I would fully pursue, but either way do you get where I am coming from?

How do you get your creative juices flowing on an idea before you start writing about it? What if it's so far off and stupid why waste the time on that one where it could be spent elsewhere?

Let's get some feedback... comment away!

Time to turn the page.