JM Bask

writes and writes...

Tag: writing

Frozen…

June 6, 2024 /

…And not in a good way. Not in a self-discovering, ice-castle-making, singing-on-high kind of way.

I’m currently working on my second(?) novel(?) with double question marks, because the story I am currently writing I did not intend to be anything but a short story but, as stories often do, it took on a life of it’s own and recently passed 15,000 words with no end in sight.

And with no end in sight and a meandering fifteen-thousand word tale, I had an epiphany of how the story should have began. That beginning would change the whole story and I would have to start anew.

I know what I’ve written so far isn’t very good.  I know it is directionless.  I know it is something I was writing just to keep writing and prove I could finish it (eventually).  And I know for that reason I should start over. But, that’s also the reason that’s making it hard for me to start over.

See, if you know anything about me you know I have been writing for 30 years, and only started finishing things three or four years ago.  Yes, that’s right, nearly three decades of half-done stories, novels that didn’t go more than three chapters, and several that had tens of thousands of words…and then just stopped.

I just recently proved to myself that I could finish things. And I’ve only finished something so lengthy once (finished first draft of first novel in March of this year).  So I’m afraid if I start over, I’ll be falling into old habits and this will just become one more thing I didn’t finish.  I also know what I’m writing now isn’t that great, and what I would write, if I began again, could be awesome.

I’m frozen, a big ball of anxiety.  I hope I figure it out soon, because I tend to only draft one project at a time.

Anxiety is a Bad Storyteller

June 21, 2023 /

Anxiety, for me, is a bad storyteller.  It’s half your brain, telling you bad stories all the time. You don’t want to hear them, but can’t help but listen.

One of the most famous writers of all, Stephen King, has said that he doesn’t plot, but instead uses “what-if” scenarios.  “A strong enough situation renders the whole question of plot moot. The most interesting situations can usually be expressed as a What-if question: What if vampires invaded a small New England village? (Salem’s Lot). What if a young mother and her son became trapped in their stalled car by a rabid dog? (Cujo).” –Stephen King

Well, anxiety is your brain telling you “what-if” scenarios all the time. However, they are simultaneously weak plots and yet, also, the kind that will send a person into a panic spiral. For example, it’s been raining here for three days so here are some of the what-ifs my brain is giving me: “What if you get another roof leak?  What if you get a leak, but it’s really water seeping into the house and it’s really slow and you don’t catch it right away? What if that imaginary slow leak causes the walls to fill with mold? What if you catch it, but your home insurance won’t pay for it? While you’re busy worrying about the roof, the walls, and the whole house leaking, what if your car is leaky too?”

None of these things would make a particularly good story.   (Okay, maybe the one with the mold, but only if the mold is sentient and starts talking to you).  But I hear this kind of thing in my mind, all the time. It’s my brain’s response to everything from one of my kids sniffling to someone driving erraticly in traffic. What-ifs, what-ifs, what-ifs.

It’s not all bad.  I tend to notice bad drivers, and stay well away from them.  I’m sure to catch any leaks, should I get one in my roof.  But it’s hardly a super-power.  It’s just more worry about things most people are able to brush off.

Now, I know what you’re going to say, which is probably going to be something along the lines of “Just don’t think like that.” Person Reading This, I have tried.  Have you ever had a toddler follow you around and ask you questions and you can’t shake them, no matter what?  Sometimes you give them a cookie and they go quiet to eat it for five minutes but then they’re back?  That’s anxiety, except the toddler is IN MY HEAD.  And that toddler is insistent.  But, thankfully, also like the toddler, if I give my that part of my brain well-reasoned answers–“we checked the ceiling already and there are no signs of leaks and there has been no wind to cause damage, so it’s fine” or “No the basement is not going to spring a leak as it would take a lot of water to soak through eight inches of cinderblock”–eventually it will accept them and take a nap, for a little while at least.

And, like most storytellers, every so often that half of my brain comes up with a “what-if” I can turn into something…besides anxiety, that is.

This blog post was brought to you by my brain not being able to sleep at night and coming up for with this idea at 1 a.m. thanks to Anxiety!

Imposter Syndrome, It’s Coming For Ya! (Or My First Story Got Published)

June 18, 2023 /

Back in mid-March, I received an email every writer longs to get. You know, the one that starts with “Your story has been accepted…”  and follows up with said writer’s utter disbelief.  My personal favorite story, “Doran” had been accepted by Allegory Magazine for publication in their May issue! And there was even token payment involved!  I didn’t scream. I did shout at my family very loudly and very excitedly.

You would think that would solve that imposter syndrome, that finally having a story published would make me go, “Yes, I am a talented writer.” Instead, even as I signed the contract, wrote up and sent them a bio (I hate writing those by the way, and should you go read the story, I almost want to hear what you think of the bio more), and waited for publication day, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.  For the magazine to fold, for the editor to tell me it was a mistake and they meant the other story about a swamp child by the other J. M. Bask.   But nope, my story got published (and yes, it’s at that link up there).

But the imposter syndrome is still here.  My brain is convinced no one has read it.  My brain is convinced no one will publish anything else of mine.

And you know what I do?  I tell my brain to STFU.  It doesn’t work, not really.  Those thoughts come creeping back. Every time I send out a story it tries to tell me I’m wasting my time.  Every time I pick up a pen to work on my novel, it literally asks,  Why are you doing this?  I can’t get it to shut up, but sometimes, if I shout back loud enough–Because I want to! Because I AM good at this!–that stupid part of my brain that wants to see me fail will at least go hide in a corner for a little while.  And if that’s enough for me to keep going, then I’ll take it.

Untitled Project from 2010: Chapter Two Excerpt

February 14, 2023 /

In 2010, I had a lot of free time in my hands. I had no kids, was newly engaged, and worked a slightly more than part-time job.  So, in November of that year, I took an half-baked idea and turned it into a half-baked novel. That’s right folks. I did NaNoWriMo. And I won. If, by won, you mean I hit the fifty-thousand word mark. I never finished the novel (and never will).  Reading back over it, there are parts that don’t suck, so I’m going to polish them up and post them here.  This is the second excerpt.  You can find them all, as they are posted, by searching the tag #NANO2010  and each will be individually tagged by order, so this one will be tagged #2010ExcerptTwo, and the next will be tagged #2010Excerpt Three and so on and so forth.

 

It had been a back and forth summer, the kind where one day the air was dry and static and so crackly it made the hair on her arm stand on end. Then, the next day, violent gray clouds would roll up out of the hills on a hot wind so quickly that she’d barely get the last window shut before fat raindrops would begin to rattle and sizzle their way across the roof and rumble down the spouts.

Just before lunch on an August Monday, another of these storms sped in hard, and Adrienne had a feeling it would end by mid-afternoon the way they always did, with a cool mist creeping out of the woods and the temperature of the whole house dropping a few degrees, making a perfect afternoon for working in her attic studio. With a few hours to wait before that, she decided a BLT and a book in the corner of the library was a good way to waste a few hours. Taking her sandwich and a glass of milk, she curled up in her favorite spot, an old wing chair with cracked brown leather and an ottoman to match. It had it’s back to the room and it’s face to the front of the house,
so Adrienne could read and watch as the storm crept back down the hills much moreslowly than it had come. With a hardcover edition of a giant Tad Willimas tome open on her lap, she fell into the story like it was the first time she’d read it, rather than the seventh. Within moments, nothing but crumbs of the sandwich remained and engulfed by familiar words, a fully belly and the sound of the rain,
Adrienne started to drowse as Yogurt crept on to the open pages of the book and settled himself in, a warm, purring mass.

* * *

Schhhhppppt. Adrienne startled awake to the familiar sound of one sheet of paper sliding against another, just behind her. She jumped up from the chair, letting the book slide from the lap to the ground with a solid thump. She hoped it would be worth it to catch Yogurt messing around on the bookshelves, a place the cat knew he wasn’t supposed to be. However, when she stood and turned, there was nothing, not a
movement, not a breath, not a whisper. She had expected to see the cat flying downfrom one of the tall library shelves, to at least see his pitch-black tail darting out the library door like a shadow, but there was not even the sound of paws beating a fast retreat down the hall. There was nothing but the stillness of an empty house. Adrienne realized she must have been dreaming of paper as she had so many times before and immediately felt a bit silly that her mind had automatically jumped to the cat, who’d never bothered with the library shelves before.

Still, as she picked up and closed the book, she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that the library was just a millimeter different than it had been before. When you lived alone for a long time and nothing ever moved without your guidance, you became familiar with rooms like they were parts of your body. Adrienne knew something had changed, something  subtle, like a single hair going gray overnight. She put the book down on the table beside her plate and half-empty glass and began to pace around the room, glancing over the bookshelves and all the paper sculptures upon them.

Nothing jumped out at her. Every book was on the shelf exactly where itshould be and so was every paper creation. She’d hoped for a trail of cat fur or telltale paw prints in the thin layer of dust on every shelf, but there were no such clues. Finishing a lap of the room, Adrienne picked up the dirty dishes and, smiling a little at her own silliness, she made her way toward the door. Stopping to pull it open with her
foot, she paused, something catching the corner of her eye.

On the last shelf beside the door sat the entirety of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and there was that brown paper wardrobe she had made a few years before, but the legs were no longer visible beneath the wardrobe’s door. It was as though, after standing still and
silent for so long, the little paper Lucy had finally decided to crawl over to the land oof the lamppost.

 

Read More? Screen Less?

February 7, 2023 /

All of us writers, we say it all the time: the two best ways to become a good writer are (of course) to write, but also to read anything and everything you can get your hands on.  I’m going to leave alone the writing part for now and I’m going to focusing on the ‘reading more’ bit.

It’s so hard isn’t it?  It used to be easy.  When I was twenty, I’d go to the library and get ten books, and read most of them in a week, often switching between two of them, at night before bed. I would read at work.  I would read on the toilet.  I would read at dinner. I’d read on the bus, in the car (I didn’t drive then),  in the tub. 

Then screens happened. Little computers in the palm of your hand that have all the information in the world! And all the books! But let’s admit it: we’re reading Twitter and TikTok about books rather than actually reading them. It’s so hard. Sometimes I find myself in bed at night, reading a book–a good book! An engaging book!–and my hand will creep over the coverlet to find my phone. The next thing I know, that tiny computer is back in my face and the books been thrown to the side like a piece of trash. 

Well, I’m trying to change that in 2023, so here are my tips for reading (a little) more. 

 

Photo by Florencia Viadana on Unsplash

First: Don’t bring your phone in the bathroom with you.  Seriously.  Don’t say you don’t do it. We all know that’s a damn lie. Leave it in your purse or on the bed or in the kitchen.  Now, put a book on the back of the toilet or a magazine with short stories or poems.  There are lots of great short fic magazines that could use your support such as: Fantasy, Nightmare, F&SF, and Apex to name a few.  Remember when we used to read on the toilet?  Yes? Well, go back to doing that.

Second: Find that spot in the day where you tend to pick up your phone and stare at it. Maybe it’s on your lunch break.  Maybe it’s when you get home from work, drop your keys and lay on the couch.  Maybe it’s during your morning coffee.  Now, put a book there. Put a book in the bag you take to lunch. Set one next to your coffee pot. Lay one on the coffee table next to that favorite chair. Whatever place you end up staring at your phone for thirty minutes at a stretch, put a book there. Now, pick up the book instead.

Third: Most importantly, the book before bed!  I’m pretty sure all of us readers try to read before bed. It’s relaxing, it’s not a screen, it’s supposed to be good sleep hygiene.  But as I said, that hand takes on a life of its own and goes sneaking over to the phone. The fix for that? When you walk into your room to get ready for bed, plug in your phone far away from you.  Put it on the dresser. Plug it in on the bathroom counter.  Put it wherever it needs to be that is far enough you won’t be tempted to rise out of bed to go ‘just check it.’ If anywhere in your bedroom is not far enough, order yourself an old school analog alarm clock from Amazon, and leave your phone charging in the kitchen when you go to bed.

This has honestly been the biggest help for me. I have been reading more since I started doing this, because I hate getting out of bed once I’m cozy.  It has also had the neat side effect of improving my sleep because I’m not turning off the lights and then immediately picking up my phone to ‘check Twitter one last time’ for an hour before I go to sleep.

Fourth: A final tip for all of the above: if you don’t like it, don’t finish it. This one is hard, I know. A lot of us writers feel like we really have to give our fellow authors a fair shot, and we end up slogging through a book we aren’t enjoying because we feel we ought to.  Well, you ought not to.  Give the book a fair shot–read a quarter, thirty percent, one chapter–whatever amount you feel should have engaged you.  If it hasn’t done that, put it down. Go find another book. If you don’t like that one, rinse and repeat.  Keep going until you’re enjoying yourself.  You’ll read a lot faster if you love it, I promise.

(And of the guilt ridden of us, remember, just because you’re not loving the book right now doesn’t mean you won’t love it later.  You might just not be in the right ‘mood’ for that story or genre right now. And that’s okay. So if you feel really guilty about not finishing a book, tell yourself you’ll come back to it and put in back in your TBR pile.)

 

Welp, that’s it for this list. If you only do one of the things on this list, do number 3. It will benefit both the time you spend reading and your sleep habits.  And if you end up staying up all night to read a really good book, I guarantee you’ll feel a lot less guilty about it than if you’d stayed up until one a.m scrolling the same Facebook posts over and over and over.

Until next time.

 

-JM

Setting Writing (or Other) Goals for the New Year

January 24, 2023 /

My first rule of setting goals for the New Year is obviously going to be that this is not a big deal. This is getting published in late January, so the  main thing you need to know is to not put a lot a pressure on yourself. This should not be something you agonize over, because that will make you not want to do it. This leads into my first actual tip:

  • Make your goals doable.  If you read my last blog post, you’ll know I made about 100 short story submissions in 2022.  For 2023, I set my goal to half that. Why not set it higher? Well, first, my hope is that some of those will get published and, therefore, cannot be re-subbed.  Secondly, my goal for 2022 was to make 25 submissions, so 50 is actually doubling that.  I know it’s achievable, and I’m still improving on the previous plan, but I am not setting myself up to fail.
  • Write your goals down. Seriously.  Scribble it on a sticky note.  Make a detailed graph with plot points. Do a spreadsheet. You do you, but write them down. Studies have shown (but I’m not looking them up right now because I’m lazy) that people who write down their goals are considerably more likely to achieve them.
  • Make your goals for you, and NO ONE ELSE.  That writer over there might write 1,000 to 2,000 words a day, but maybe they have a cushy job or a rich spouse. Maybe they don’t have kids. Maybe they do have kids and they neglect them.  You know what you have going on in your life–be it school/work/family obligations/a need to rewatch the entirety of Parks & Rec once a month–better than anyone else. You also know whether you’re a major procrastinator or not, so factor all those things in when setting your goals.

Much like making goals, the tips for making goals are pretty simple. Make them achievable, write them down, and make them for you and no one else.   That’s all I got.  I don’t want to agonize over this post anymore than you should agonize over those goals.

Oops…NaNoWriMo Was It?

January 17, 2023 /

Hmm.. *checks notes* It looks like my last post was way back in November, saying that I was going to write 30,000 words of my novel for NaNoWriMo, and finish it by the end of the year.   I also said it was going to be, and I quote “a busy damn month.”

I wasn’t wrong about the later.  Kids got sick. School (for me, not them) was more overwhelming that I expected.  I discovered that I really like reading and analyzing fiction, but do not enjoy writing essays about it.  Then, there was Thanksgiving, which we hosted, and Christmas shopping.  And all the things that come with the holidays when you have kids, like baking cookies and making sure the house is decorated.

That 30,000 word goal was a stretch to say the least.

I didn’t do too badly though.  I could have hit it if I had kept going.  I got seventeen thousand in less than two weeks and then…honestly I don’t know what happened.  The last half of November and all of December were a blur of brightly colored wrapping paper, holiday spices, and reruns of Call the Midwife.  

Now, school is back in (for me and the kids), and things are returning to normalcy and I am hoping to be more productive in the coming year.  I have set some writing-related goals for the New Year, and they are as follows:

  • Write seventy thousand creative words. This is about what I wrote in 2022, so if I actually finish said novel and write some stories, should be doable.
  • Finish that novel. I don’t expect it to be good.  I just want to finish it to prove that I can, as well as for practice.
  • Make fifty or more short story submissions. I made almost exactly one hundred this past year, and none of them got accepted, so this one is definitely doable, considering I have at least two stories from last year that haven’t even been typed/edited yet, in addition to all the ones I will write, and all the ones that have not yet found homes.
  • Post here more.  If I’m hoping to actually get published and have my bio for that link here, people have to have something to read, right?

Just going to throw this out there that I’ve been a little depressed, which is has been a huge contributor to my lack of writing (and to me watching over half the seasons of Call the Midwife in less than three weeks).  Not a lot depressed, just the kind where one feels like being more of a couch potato and less of a productive potato.  I think trying to do so much just overwhelmed me into submission.

I’m going to try to not spread myself so thin this year.  You shouldn’t either. You deserve to be a pat of butter, not a smear.

Fits and Starts

October 29, 2022 /

It’s almost NaNoWriMo time.  National Novel Writing Month, that is.  I think 2010 was the last time I participated.  I ‘won’ and hit the fifty thousand word mark…but I never finished the novel, nor was I even close.

Why was 2010 the last time I participated?  Well, in early April of 2011 I got married and, by the time November rolled around, I was about six weeks pregnant with my daughter…and puking so much I could not do anything but sleep or be sick most days.  And most Novembers since have been the same. Not morning sickness but dirty diapers or a stomach bug going through the house or teething or…

It’s hard to write sometimes when you can only write in fits and starts. Even now, with my kids 8 and 10, I have spent the last half of October dealing with multiple sicks days (one cold, one sinus infection, one fever from a vaccination, and one case of vomiting). And November will be more of the same, with a holiday thrown in and, likely, at least one trip out of town, and Christmas shopping and all that.  (Oh, and school, can’t forget school.  I’ve got at least one boring essay to write).  But I’ve got 20,000 words of a novel-thingie written that I told myself, way back in summer, that I would finish by the end of the year.

And then I didn’t write a damn word from August to mid-October.  So I’m in on the WriMo this year (kind of).  I won’t be doing the traditional NaNoWriMo (since that would require me to start a new project).  But I’ve set a goal to get another 30,000 words on the book by the end of November.  I’m probably going to have to write it around the aforementioned holiday and weekend trip and a sickness or two (and that boring essay). I might only get a few hundred words one day, and have to cram in a few thousand on a free Saturday.

It’s going to have to be done in fits and starts.  But I don’t like to lose, even to myself, so I guess it’s going to be a damn busy month.

Map Days

October 8, 2022 /

There are some days you trudge through your writing and each word on the page takes effort and consideration.

There are the good days where you get in the spirit, and the writing flows freely enough to keep the fingers typing or the ink flowing.

And then there are map days. Map days are when the story unfolds before you like a map, and you’ve got to jot down the directions as quickly as possible before the paper blows away.  These are the days where the ideas come so fast you have to go from actually writing the story to just sketching the quick details of each scene before they fade away.

For me, it’s like watching a movie in my head, and I’ve only got a few seconds (and words) to describe each scene. These are my favorite days because, when they happen, they usually unfold the rest of the story for me, so even if I don’t finish it that day, all the directions are already laid out, like a paint-by-number just waiting to be filled in.

Today was a map day for me.  The kids were away at the grandparents, and my husband was chugging away downstairs on his own work.  I’d done the dishes, folded some laundry, worked a little on my day job, and had just finished Neil Gaiman’s last Masterclass video, and thus had no excuses keeping me from writing.  So, I grabbed the story I’d been working on the night before and told myself I had an hour.

It was hard at first.  It’s always hard to start writing, at least for me.  Inspiration always seems to come when I’m as far as possible from being able to pick up a pen. When I sit down to write, it seems like a chore at first and I’m often talking myself into starting (even though deep down it’s something I __want__ to do).  By the end, it’s usually something I’m glad I took the time to do.

I chugged out a few paragraphs. I crossed out a few lines. I did it again. Crossed out an entire paragraph.  Then, suddenly I was on page two, and then on page three, and then my hour was nearly up, and the map was before me and I was scribbling the rest of the story on sticky notes as fast as it came to me, which was pretty damn fast. I didn’t have time to write the whole first draft, but the whole story is there, just waiting for the minor details.

Days like this are why I keep writing.  Days like this are __magic__.  Writing is the only thing that makes me feel this way.  Writing is the only craft I’ve ever done that gives me a feeling of __foresight__.  I painted and drew for years, but I was never able to ENVISION finished paintings the way I can sometimes envision stories. It really does feel like a muse is guiding me, like I’m pulling something from the other side of a veil.

I never know when my map days are going to come.  With some stories they don’t, and with some they come when I least expect it. (I barely liked this story when I started it yesterday, today I love it).

I hope every writer or artists reading this has some map days of their own.

Man, this is gonna take some work.

October 7, 2022 /

It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these. A website that is.

Isn’t that the damned thing about doing anything these days? If I want to be a successful writer, not only do I have to write stories and then edit those stories (I really hate that part) and then send out those stories, but I’ve also got to do this kind of stuff. Write about writing. Write about my life. I’m probably going to have to start an Instagram at some point. Boo.

Well, here’s the first post. Hopefully, it won’t be the last. Please excuse the mess while I’m figuring out how I want this thing to look.

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