Blood & Ink

There isn’t much about writing in this post. However, it does happen to be a story about ink.

I now have a tattoo, thanks to Nick McEvoy, an artist from Good Faith Tattooing. A real, painfully applied, not-at-all-temporary, tattoo. A discrete design, small, and on my left inside bicep, a placement where it is usually covered up even by short sleeves, although with some shirts the tips of it are visible. This is my first tattoo, or ‘symbolic image’ as we’ve been calling it at home, and here’s what it looks like today.

It is still raw and scabbed, the skin around it inflamed and red (in some ways an appropriate symbol in and of itself). It is a wound after all, or rather a series of many small, manageable, wounds. The lines you see will become more defined as the surface blood recedes, and the blue segments of the star will change most dramatically as it heals, clearing and becoming a much lighter color.

This design, a two-color pinwheel, is known as the Nautical Star, and tattoos incorporating it are frequently associated with membership in the United States Navy. My late father served in the Navy during World War II, so I’ll lay claim to that related bit of symbolism, but only as a secondary meaning.

For me, the primary meaning of my star is as a navigation guide, as it traditionally was for sailors, symbolizing true north and harking back to the design style used on a compass rose. In particular it represents my guide through life, the light that keeps me on course both day and night, and that is my wife, Penelope Dorneman.

When we learned that Penny would be receiving tiny tattoos as guides for her breast cancer radiation treatment, I volunteered to get a tattoo of my own in sympathy. The dark blades of the pinwheel remind me of the surgeon’s scalpels, the light blue reminiscent of the scrubs of all the medical personnel involved.

(Penny says the blue matches the color of my eyes, and means clear skies ahead.)

Stars are also the origin of all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, and sources of radiant energy in and of themselves.

We are all, as Carl Sagan said, made of star stuff.

Oh, and the little paw print? As readers of this blog may recall from my last post, our dog Ellie has recently been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, and she’ll be undergoing her own surgery and follow-up treatment beginning next week. The paw print that symbolizes her is tucked up close under the arms of the star because Ellie follows my wife, no matter what Penny may be doing.

Follows her even in this.

Thanks for Reading,

Stephen

Steel or Twine

Some days, the things that hold you together - your work, your family, your writing, your health - are solid guy-wires (pun intended), steel cables anchored in concrete, supports that you know you can rely on through good times and bad.

Then there are the other days. Maybe it starts as string of little things – you go to the grocery store for cream because your dog woke you up at two thirty in the morning with an urgent desire to go out, so now you need the cream for coffee to wake you up, and then later, for a white Russian when you can't sleep, and as you're about to enter the store the fire alarms go off and they clear all the patrons before you can buy anything.

Or maybe the string is not so little. You're still struggling with nerve pain from the case of shingles you had back in January. Nobody wants to publish your old stories, and your writing group tells you the latest one has a point of view that's all over the map. Your dog has thyroid cancer. Everything you think you need to do costs money.

Your wife has breast cancer.

So you start feeling that your supports look more like this.

Twine happens.

But after a while you think about things, you talk it over with your wife, and you realize that the cables are all intact – they might be stretching a bit in the storm, you can even hear the steel humming in the wind, but the coiled, tempered metal is strong, the bases heavy and solid.

You have health insurance, from a job where you can sometimes work from home, and a patient, understanding boss. You haven't even touched that emergency fund in the bank. Your dog is under the care of the city's best canine cancer specialists, and most important, your wife's cancer is Stage Zero, which means it was caught so early that some medical authorities don't consider it to be 'worthy' of being called cancer at all.

So you buy a large coffee at Dunkin' Donuts, and contemplate having a glass of wine with dinner. And there's time tonight to rewrite that new story and fix the wandering point of view, and you send those other stories out to a set of different journals.

Steel, not Twine.

Thanks for Reading,

Stephen

Darkness and Light

The days have over fifteen hours of light from dawn to dusk this time of year, and I'm loving it.

It's not that I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, at least not that I've ever had diagnosed. But there is something about getting up to go to work in darkness, and then returning home in darkness, that is at least as cold on the spirit as New England's February winds are on the body.

Mid June, the light itself wakes me up, even through our double curtains, and yet I find that doesn't bother me at all. I've never been truly a morning person, but these weekend mornings I feel I can be an absolute flurry of activity before nine o'clock, even if said activity ends up consisting of playing games, reading a few chapters of a book, and updating my Facebook status.

And in the evening? Early evenings it's light enough to go out running after seven o'clock, and even after doing that, I can still walk the dog in the gloaming, and we end the day smiling at each other.

My writing, however, waits until dark. Perhaps in some sad corner of my psyche I am ashamed of what I do, and I need the night to hide my illicit practice. Or perhaps the only way to tap into my own darkness, a necessary ingredient for any fiction writer, is on a shadowed stage.

Or maybe it's only a habit. I will admit that I am, as are most of us, truly a creature of habit.

***

Shade or sun, morning or night, today on the calendar happens to be Father's Day. There was some darkness in my father, Donald Roy Dorneman, particularly when he was suffering from cancer at the end, but even then, and always before, there was much, much, more light.

Happy Father's Day.

Rest in peace.

Thanks for reading,

Stephen

Sekrit BoNoProMo Bonus Post

Yes, I summed up my BoNoProMo experience this month only two days ago, but I'm back again, for a couple of reasons:

1. To tell you that I did indeed finish out the entire month, by adding on an hour and a half of writing both yesterday and now today, and

2. Because in truth, I worked on my current fiction project for only a little over 45 minutes this evening before reaching a point where I wanted to ruminate on the next scene before plunging ahead. So, I actually needed the time it's taken to write this final BoNoProMo blog post in order to make #1 above true.

It still isn't easy for me to sit down and start pulling words out of thin air (or even, as some might assert, out of certain nether regions). It never has been - that's why I started this blog in the first place, five years ago, as a New Year's resolution of sorts. So in a way, with BoNoProMo I've come full circle.

Perhaps the writing habit will never fully stick.

But I am confident now that if I do take the time, make the time, to put my butt in the chair, that the words, at least some words, words in sentences that can later be broken apart and then put back together again, which is something that you can't do without words in the first place, those words and sentences, they indeed will come.

And right now, gaining that confidence is good enough for me.

Thanks for reading,

Stephen

Snap Back to Reality (with apologies to Eminem, and a coda from Maya Angelou)

Back to reality, pulled out of the writing, reading, and relaxing hours of a holiday weekend by the inexorable gravity of, well, the work week. Thankfully I was able to keep to my #BoNoProMo schedule with the help of those extra weekend hours, and with only three days left in the month, I believe we will soon be successfully concluding the experiment.

Now the research committee, also known as my inner critic and personal noodge, begins its questioning. So, Mr. Dorneman. You say you've written every day this month, for ten hours a week or more. What exactly do you have to show for all that time expended?

Good question. But first let's look at the project charter. It says here (if I may paraphrase), that BoNoProMo isn't supposed to be about the output, but instead about the process, and about instilling good writing habits, and understanding what does and doesn't work for any given writer.

Well, on the process front, we shall see how much of a habit I've instilled. I have learned that ten hours of writing a week while working full time and dealing with my ongoing pain issues is likely four or five hours too many. I gave up at least a couple of hours of physical exercise each week for writing, and I'd like those back. (The lost television hours, not so much.) But 30-60 minutes per day is looking very doable.

I also found out that given more time to write, and by that I really mean closing the web browser and giving the butt more time in the chair while staring at a blank Word document, that the words will come.

This was never guaranteed, and comes as a rather pleasant surprise.

During the month I've already completed multiple-draft versions of two short stories, both around 3,000 words (10 pages), and multiple drafts of a 350-word flash fiction story. I've written thirteen pages, let's call it a chapter or two, of a new long-form project (The Text That Cannot Be Named). I've started three stories that went nowhere after a page or two each, and a fourth that is the current project, now at four pages and counting. That's a lot of words, at least for me. 

(I'll let others be the judge of their quality.)

Oh, and the weekly blog posts. They count, too. With bonus Transformers pictures.

You remember the official #BoNoProMo writer Transformer, of course:

Well, the picture below is of the above writer's best friend, now turned mortal enemy (or is it the other way around?), a.k.a. The Critic Transformer. Note how the pen has been replaced by some serious cutting equipment.

Let the epic battle begin.

Thanks for Reading,

Stephen

“History, despite its wrenching pain,

Cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage,

Need not be lived again.”

Maya Angelou, 1928 – 2014.

(From “The Rock Cries Out to Us Today.”)

Stay on Target - I Copy, Gold Leader

The home stretch, the final run at the Death Star, Mile 26.2, the end of May, whatever you call it, it's almost upon us. And by IT, I mean the last ten days of #BoNoProMo, of course. 

(Random wacky-but-related aside, when you Google "BoNoProMo," you'll likely come across one or more of my recent blogs in the results, maybe below the fold, but that's still a little cool. But I am particularly amused by the fact that when you click over to search for BoNoProMo Images, you first get various random product brand names painted on walls using that self-same product (Nutella, Colgate). Don't ask why. Then, you may get the image that Grub Street used in Lisa Borders's original article. But what I'm talking about is, if you continue to scroll down a little bit more, you just might find the Transformer image that I appropriated for last week's blog entry. (The self-same image that I am using once again this week because, you know, SEO.)

Apparently, my friends, THIS is the face of BoNoProMo:

End of wacky aside.)

So, how's it going?

Well, thanks to my wonderful wife saying something like "Hey, you want to get some writing done, so how about we go to the airport five hours early and hang out there, instead of having fun sightseeing with my friends?" I am indeed still on track, consistently logging my ten hours a week writing, if not more. And that writing included the above-mentioned airport session being rocked out across a dozen narrow-ruled pages of Old Skool pen-to-paper (and yes, my hand is still tired):

 

So, what do I have to show for all this... activity? (I mean, aside from a hefty pile o' words, which isn't a bad thing in and of itself.)

Well, I already have produced yet another new short story, my second of the month, now ready for my next writer's group meeting. I think this is a stronger story than the previous one I wrote already this month. Why might that be? 

Here's one theory: At the Muse & the Marketplace, Walter Mosley said that each day you write, when you're in the habit of writing every day, you go a little deeper into your own subconscious (and he also noted that each day that you fail to write, you slip a little bit back backwards). I'm not sure if I've gotten very deep under my own thick skin yet, but I think I can see progress.

If my beta readers can't, don't worry. These aren't the droids you're looking for.

I've also produced quite a few pages of something longer, something that, for now, we will only refer to as The Text That Cannot Be Named.

But whatever the results at this point in the month, I know I need to Stay on Target. The upcoming vacation weekend, with us having no serious plans other than to read, write, recover (from traveler's colds), and relax, should help. Which brings me to my...

BoNoProMo Schedule for the Last Full Week of May:

Thursday - Only 1/2 Hour, or possibly Zero (one step back). Because I'm off to hear some live music at the Middle East Upstairs, retro sixties-style rock and more, damn it - anybody with me?

Friday - Two Hours

Saturday, Sunday, and Monday - Five to Six hours, spread out cross the weekend however they fit (Has anyone else noticed these schedules getting less rigid as the month has progressed? Not to mention my increased use of mixed numeric expressions.)

Tuesday - One

Wednesday - One to 1.5, or whatever is needed to add up to the big 1-0. 

That would take us up to the 28th, leaving only the rump end of the month to deal with. I'm not seeing the exhaust port to fire the torpedoes down yet, and that Death Star still looks awful big, but I can tell we're getting close. I'm not going to Use the Force, though.

You're not supposed to Force writing.

Thanks for Reading,

Stephen

Another Week, More #BoNoProMo, Time Banditry and Transformers

Another week, and again I've kept to my #BoNoProMo schedule, more or less, with some minimal juggling around as to which day I wrote one hour versus two, and such.

How is that possible, you ask? (This is particularly asked by those of you who know me well, and/or regular readers of this irregular blog.) Ten hours a week is quite an achievement, he says, patting himself gingerly on the back, considering that I have been regularly going to that pesky full-time day job, you know, the one that pays the bills, and the fact that I really, really like to sleep. Where does the time come from? They aren't making any longer days.

Well, I stole it.

Not like these guys, however.

(If you don't recognize the pic, get yourself on over to IMDB, and consider watching the movie referenced in today's blog title rather than downloading Transformers: Dark of the Moon again.)

I stole it from myself, of course, from evening and weekend activities that I would more normally spend my time on, if I weren't writing as much. And I haven't taken any of it from work hours, with the exception of half of one lunch hour when I sketched out the chapter structure of an urban fantasy novel something that I won't talk about again, unless it becomes something more than a sketch.

Some of those things that I've stolen from in the past week are good for me, and I miss them.

One externality, my wife being out of town, simply gave back a few hours of what would have been quality together time, and I definitely miss that (I wouldn't steal from my wife). I haven't exercised more than once or twice this past week, and exercise is my healthiest stress reliever, on top of all its other benefits. And I haven't read nearly as much in the past two weeks as I normally do. I even shaved off a little bit of sleep.

These are sacrifices.

But other things that I've given up may feel a little like hardships, but on reflection, I think I'm better off without them. Although you may not believe it, I'm spending less time on social media. I still spent plenty of time there last week, however, and you probably didn't miss those minutes that I did take back. I've never watched that much television, but now it's been even less. (However, that also resulted in less Daddy/Ellie time on the couch, and that we both miss.) A couple of hours of random gaming and internet surfing gone, no problem. It all adds up.

Time banditry. It's the only way a writer with a day job can survive #BoNoProMo. And if the habit sticks, well, we'll see who the real Transformer is.

I think that's a fountain pen in his right arm, don't you?

Schedule this new week: 1.5 hours for Thursday and Friday, three hours split somehow between Saturday and Sunday (doing some quick plane travel, which might be good, might be bad for the writing), one hour Monday, and 1.5 each for Tuesday and Wednesday, when it'll be blog time again.

Until then, thanks for reading, and writers, keep on writing.

Stephen

BoNoProMo Update, and What Color is Your Aura?

I do love those Google-powered miniature moments of research that I get to do while writing - "How Much Does It Cost To Start a Taxi Business?" (answer: outside of a big city, as little as $20,000) and "What Do Different Aura Colors Mean" (answer: purple people are natural mystics and good with animals, while reds are energetic and quick to anger). What did we all do before the internet? (bonus answer: accumulate shelves full of reference materials, and make a lot more trips to the local library).

Well, if you've been following along at home, the above rambling probably indicates that I am, indeed, continuing to write. In fact, I've been sticking to my previous-detailed BoNoProMo schedule of ten hours (in total) for May 1-7 pretty closely, although on any given day I might have been plus or minus as much as an hour. The result? One new short story written, of a little under 3,000 words, that will be critiqued come this Friday at the next meeting of the Bay State Scribblers. It's certainly not submission-ready (yet), but I must admit I'm just pleased to have already brought forth something with a beginning, middle, and end. So far, the experiment is a success.

Thanks again, Lisa Borders.

Not really sure what's next in line, however, and that could be a problem. The above-noted Google research was for a story opening that takes place in a setting I like, but the first couple of pages basically consist of two rather boring characters trading some witty dialogue, without any real conflict. Oh, but they're having "relationship issues." Bah. We'll see what happens, but I suspect I'll abandon that piece, and then flail about in my notebooks and (computer) files touching a variety of abandoned story beginnings, odd scenes, dialogue snippets, or character names until something sticks to my (virtual) fingers. I know my own writing style, and I go through a lot of false starts before finding that stickiness. This may be a week full of them.

What's the schedule look like? Well, with Penny happening to be out of town, I can go full-on hermit crab mode if I want, or if I have to, but let's try this on for size:

• Thursday, May 8 - 1 hour.
• Friday, May 9 - 0 hours (writer's group meeting). Maybe sneak in a half hour.
• Saturday, May 10 - 2 hours (somebody's wife's birthday, but we don't celebrate those).
• Sunday, May 11 - 2.5 hours.
• Monday, May 12 - 1 hour (back to work).
• Tuesday, May 13 - 1.5 hours.
• Wednesday, May 14 - another 1.5 hours, and time for your next update.

Hey, if you're a writer participating in #BoNoProMo (follow us on Twitter!), what's your schedule been like? How goes it so far?

(My, there have been a lot of parenthetical digressions in this post, haven't there been? Anyway...)

Thanks for reading,

Stephen

BoNoProMo, Update Zero: Tomorrow It Begins

So, tomorrow comes the merry month of May, and that means the beginning of BoNoProMo. (Confused already? Click here, or, for the real thing, there.) The rules, Lisa Borders says, are supposedly simple: “that you schedule a minimum of ten hours of writing time a week; that you stick to that schedule unless it’s truly impossible; and that, if you don’t get your work done, you analyze what went wrong and do your best to create a more workable schedule the following week.”

But let's go ahead and complicate things, breaking them down a little before building them back up.

May has thirty-one days. No wimpy February-without-a-leap-day-exactly-four-week-month to work with here, so there's Complication One. And since a number of BoNoProMo participants have decided to stay away from Facebook for the duration, meaning there's no easy place to post my schedule and then the success, failure, and analysis of what I did right or wrong when I did/didn't meet that schedule. Complication Two.

(Side note: Easiest part of the whole thing for me? Analysis of failure. Practice, y'know.)

And then there's Complication Three. Actually doing the writing.

Still, with the exception of Complication Three, it's all manageable. This blog right here will be where I'll be posting my schedule and updating the week's results. (Guest writer updates welcome, Lisa Korzeniowski.) The thirty-one day thing? Break it down, and the goal is 1.43 hours a day, or 44.29 hours for the month. (Note to self. Investigate the feasibility of scheduling a two-day, no sleeping, writer's retreat, at the end of May.)

So, let's play. Part one is the schedule.

Schedule for Week 1. (Which is May 1- 7 for me, unlike people taking off that weekend for the Muse and the Marketplace conference. Me, I hope to come home from the Muse and, in a fit of inspiration, scrawl out a few words before falling asleep exhausted and, quite possibly, drunk.)

All writing to be done in the evening unless otherwise noted, although I may try some daytime writing on the weekends after the Muse.

May 1 - 1.0 hours. I hope one and a half hours will be my typical writing day, although I may end up having to ease into it with a smaller number at first. Hard to take the old jalopy from zero to sixty, I know, but I'd like to try and push it. Preferably downhill.
May 2 (Friday, first day of the Muse) - 1.5 hours.
May 3 (Saturday, second day of the Muse and a get-together night for the members of my writer's group) - 0 hours.
May 4 (Sunday, final day of the Muse) - 2.0 hours.
May 5 (Monday, day after the Muse and time that I'm taking off from work to decompress and recharge, introvert that I am, as well as to write) - 3.0 hours.
May 6 (Back to work) - 1.0 hours.
May 7 (A week from today, and what should be time for update blog one, the first week's recap. Note that in my BoNoProMo, blog writing time definitely counts.) 1.5 hours.

Which if my math is right, brings me to a total of ten hours, and which, with the schedule complete, also brings me to Part Two (a.k.a. Complication Three, for those of you paying attention). The writing.

It all comes back to the writing, doesn't it?

And that's the part that scares me.

Happy BoNoProMo-ing, and thanks for reading.

Stephen

Still Pain, Some Playing, and What the Heck is a BoNoProMo?

Well, it's been a month and a half since my last blog post, and we are clearly into the postherpetic neuralgia stage, which is to say, my silly nerves think that I still have shingles, and they don't hold anything back in letting me know that. All day, every day. And despite my brave posturing back in March, I have to admit I haven't been doing all that much writing, or that much exercising, either. However, 'not all that much' is indeed better than nothing. All is not lost.

My exercising is usually running, except when New England's Spring imitates Winter, sending the wimp that I am inside to find a free elliptical. It took me a while to get back into the habit, but now I'm scheduling myself for an exercise session every two to three days, and for the past week that's a schedule that I've been able to stick to.

The writing is harder. (For me, it always is, as I'll use exercising as an excuse to not write.) There has been some rewriting, which definitely counts, of a longish piece for taking to my writer's group, of another piece now in the very last stages of final polishing before submission, and, most recently, the tightening up of a flash piece for an audio submission to the Drum. (The Drum has open author recordings/ submissions at the Muse and the Marketplace conference, which I will once again be attending next weekend. This year's Muse is the culmination of Grub Street's Lit Week 2014.) But aside from a couple of aborted first pages, and an idea or two jotted down on a subway trip, I've written nothing completely new in quite some time. And I've gotten completely out of the habit of daily writing.

That, my friends, is something I'd like to try and change. Luckily, I won't be doing it alone.

In her Grub Street blog, the wonderful writer and teacher Lisa Borders has proposed a month-long challenge for writers with day jobs, writers who want and need to create a schedule that works with their lives, but who need that extra push to actively put writing front and center in every day.

She's given this challenge, declared for the month of May, the rather ungainly name of BoNoProMo, for Boston Novel in Progress Month -- but writers not in Boston can participate, and in my case, rather than work on the rump of a novel I started back in November, I intend to be working on creating a few new short stories (as well as polishing up and sending out some pre-existing works). Call my version BoShoStoProMo, or better yet, don't.

Here's the challenge. Ten hours of writing a week. I'll confess, that scares me. Even when I WAS writing daily, it was 30-60 minutes a day, not 85.71 minutes a day (and yes, I've done the math).

Thirty-one days in May. The countdown from 310 hours begins on Thursday.

Anyone else want to play?

Thanks for reading,

Stephen

Playing Through the Pain

I didn't want to write this blog post today. In fact, I didn't feel like writing anything today.

That's nothing new. I haven't written anything of substance outside of the day job for the past eight weeks or so. It's not that I haven't had the time to write, or been blocked, or any of the other reasons I usually use to not write. (If you're a regular reader of this irregular blog, you've heard them all before.) No, the reason I haven't been writing, or doing much of anything outside of the aforementioned day job, is because I've been sick. Sick and tired.

More specifically, I've been in pain, and constant pain wears you down. And the medicines they give you for constant pain may help, a little, with the pain itself, but they will also make you drowsy, or dizzy, or a plethora of other unpleasant side effects that all leave you not in much shape for writing either.

The pain is the result of shingles. Not the roofing kind, although sometimes it feels as if roofing nails are being pounded into my armpit, but rather the herpes zoster kind. It's a viral infection of the nerves that anyone can get as an adult if you ever had chicken pox as a child. (Talk to your doctor about the shingles vaccine, particularly if you're over fifty. This has been an unsolicited, wish-I-had-known-about-it-and-done-it, endorsement.) And now that my rash has faded, it's quite possibly the postherpetic neuralgia kind, which is the technical way of saying that there can be long-term nerve damage from shingles that lasts long after the infection has run its course.

How long? "The natural history of postherpetic neuralgia involves slow resolution of the pain syndrome." That's a polite way of saying, we don't know how long it will last for you. Days, weeks, months... Years. Nobody knows, because it's different for everybody.

Bottom line: it still hurts. Hurts every day, all day, to some degree. But I'm not going to whine about that any more – really, I'm not. I've done that for eight weeks now, it doesn't make me feel better, and it's certainly no fun for you to listen to.

Instead, starting yesterday with a half-hour of exercise (also something that I hadn't done for the previous eight weeks), and starting today with the writing of this blog, I'm going to take back my life. I'm going to write, to run, to have fun, and do many if not all of the things that I haven't been doing because of the pain. Oh, I may not do them as well as I've done before. It may take longer to accomplish certain things. But I'm going to do them anyway. I'm going to enjoy the game of life, even if I'm playing through the pain.

If Kafka could write with turberculosis (not to mention the Brontës, and George Orwell with not only tuberculosis plus a bullet in his neck, etcetera, etcetera), I can write with shingles pain. I'll continue to hope it ends soon, and continue to work with my doctors for long-term and short-term pain management, but regardless of all that, as of this weekend I'm going to continue to be me. To live life, to write, and to have fun.

I'm playing through the pain.

Thanks for reading,

Stephen