A rising star in the weightless combat sport of zeroboxing, Carr “the Raptor” Luka dreams of winning the championship title. Recognizing his talent, the Zero Gravity Fighting Association assigns Risha, an ambitious and beautiful Martian colonist, to be his brandhelm––a personal marketing strategist. It isn’t long before she’s made Carr into a popular celebrity and stolen his heart along the way. 

As his fame grows, Carr becomes an inspirational hero on Earth, a once-great planet that’s fallen into the shadow of its more prosperous colonies. But when Carr discovers a far-reaching criminal scheme, he becomes the keeper of a devastating secret. Not only will his choices place everything he cares about in jeopardy, but they may also spill the violence from the sports arena into the solar system.

* * *

Write the Idea That Makes You Pee Your Pants A Little

The inspiration for Zeroboxer didn’t come, as you might expect, from Rocky or Ender’s Game. I’d been working as a corporate strategist at Nike for several years and scribbling on the side, and the idea came to me to write an action-packed story that captured the expectations, money, and public emotion that we invest in celebrity athletes. My brain infused the concept with two things I love—science fiction and martial arts—and the premise took shape: a young man trying to make it in the world of zero-gravity prizefighting.

Zero-gravity prizefighting.

Every once in a while, a creative idea punches your buttons so hard you lose the power to speak and drool runs slowly off your chin. When an idea strikes your writerly pleasure center with that kind of force, you damn well move it to the top of your project list. Some books come easy and some come hard, but the ideas that make you wet yourself feel easier, no matter how thorny your plot problem of the day is. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse could be at your door, and you would still run to your keyboard in the morning to work.

Marinate Brain Before Cooking

Before writing a single word of Zeroboxer, before even outlining, I made a list of the key elements in my nascent story idea: Mars Colonization. MMA. Genetic engineering. Living in space. Then I spent six straight weeks just reading and learning. I tried not to think too hard about how it would all fit in the story; I just let it all seep into my brain.

At the time, I was querying a previous novel without success. Imagine your spouse asking you about your day, and answering, “I picked up three new rejections this morning and then I spent the rest of the day watching UFC. How about you?”

When it came time to draft though, I felt so ready. Rarely did I need to stop research this or that, or feel unsure about how something would work. Those early weeks sometimes felt unproductive, like I wasn’t really writing, but I was.

Why Aren’t We On Mars Yet?

Seriously. There is a lot of information available on how we could feasibly do it. Like now. What is the hold-up?! Money and political willpower, you say? Dammit, I want my Mars landing and I want it yesterday!

(Yes, I know this is a long, potentially-contentious conversation, but I will give a nod to The Case For Mars by Robert Zubrin and Arthur C. Clarke, Mission to Mars by Buzz Aldrin, and The Mars Society http://marssociety.org)

Write What You Want… But Mind the Gray Zone

Before Zeroboxer, I’d spent a year writing a YA fantasy. As a writer trying to break in, I followed many of the writing conventions that I thought were typically expected in YA novels. I had two alternating first person narrators, one girl and one boy. I tried to give them YA voices and teenage romances. I set it up as a trilogy, because you know, teens love trilogies.

When rejections started coming in, I said, “screw it” to all that, and just wrote Zeroboxer the way it came to me: as a standalone story, told in third person, starring an 18-year-old male protagonist who fights for a living and falls in love with an older woman.

The story felt right to me in every way. When it came time for submission, though, it ran up against several editors who praised it but said it “just wasn’t YA enough” for them. It wasn’t quite “adult” either, though. In writing what I’d wanted to write, I’d ventured into a gray zone between publishing industry boxes, and I got slapped around a bit because of it. Luckily, Zeroboxer landed with an editor and a house that loved it and supported it, but it was a lesson to me: sometimes there’s a trade-off between what you want to write and what the industry norms are. Make that trade-off carefully, but know that it’s there and you may well run into it.

Worldbuilding Isn’t About What’s Different. It’s About What’s The Same.

Zeroboxer has been garnering nods for worldbuilding, but the truth is, at it’s heart, it’s a sports story about one athlete trying to make it while navigating difficult choices. Despite the presence of space stations, Martian colonies, and widespread genetic engineering, what makes the zeroboxing world real for me, and hopefully for readers, are the recognizable things: the loud fight announcers, the excited fans, the trash-talking opponents, the sponsor ads, the dedication and training and strict diet regimens of the athletes.

The familiar, wrapped in the new. The experience of looking through a fantastical lens and still seeing ourselves, unmistakably. That’s the power and the lure of our genre.

* * *

Fonda Lee writes science fiction and fantasy for teens and adults. Zeroboxer (from Flux/Llewellyn) is her debut novel. Fonda is a recovering corporate strategist, an avid martial artist, a fan of smart action movies, and an Eggs Benedict enthusiast. You can find Fonda at www.fondalee.com and on Twitter @fondajlee.

Fonda Lee: Website | Twitter | Tumblr

Zeroboxer: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound | Powells

So, yesterday I finished the first draft of a novel, and as I am wont to do on the last day of writing a book, I wrote a lot. A whole bloody helluva fuckbucket of a lot. It’s just a thing that happens as I get close to the end — I tend to write books that, ideally, move a bit like thrillers and by the time you round the bend on the last 10-15% of the book it’s like, whoosh. All the scree is kicked loose. It’s avalanche time. Rocks fall. Everybody dies.

I tend to publicly chart those potential final days of writing a novel — meaning, I talk about my progress on Twitter because basically I live on Twitter and basically I’m just a fictional digital construct of Twitter (seriously, ask my wife who is actually just an Apple Magic Trackpad if I’m real and she’ll say nothing because she’s just an Apple Magic Trackpad). I chart my word count as it escalates because it gives me an excuse to take a break from the story. It gives me motivation and momentum and it also serves as kind of a self-driven application of pressure born from the promise of telling the world: “Hey, holy shitkittens, I might finish this book today.”

At the end of the day, I wrote just shy of 10,000 words. Final tally: 9,826.

It was a big day.

I do not usually write that much in a given day.

In fact, after writing that much in a given day, my brain felt not unlike the long snarl of rotten hair you pull out of the shower drain after forgetting to clean it for about six years. It looked like the little girl crawling out of the TV in The Ring. By that point, it became a bedraggled, wretched thing. Dead and dripping. (And it’s why I went out afterwards and had margaritas and tacos with the family because that’s how I recharge my batteries. TACO FAMILY TEQUILA POWER. Woo!)

But here’s one of the responses I get when I announce this rather not-small word count.

I get people saying, “Wow, I only wrote [X] words today.”

And sometimes it’s accompanied by a kind of regret or self-deprecation (however jokey).

That variable, X, might be 100 words, or 1000, or 4,000.

But as long as it’s shy of 10k, there might arrive a sense of disappointment.

Horseshit. Stuff that disappointment.

Let’s realize something, shall we? I get to write 10,000 words in a day because I have a great deal of advantage. This advantage is not inborn — I did, in fact, work my buttpucker to get it. (Er, not literally. My buttpucker has no known skillset and no matter how much I demand it learn to complete even the simplest of tasks like chewing gum or using lightswitches, it fails to perform at every level.) It’s vital to realize, however that:

a) I’ve been working professionally as a writer for ~18 years, now.

b) I’ve been working on and off as a full-time professional writer, which means my (and my family’s) only money-making function in this world is to form the quantum entanglement between my ass molecules and my chair atoms in order to vurp words into the world and get paid for them. I do literally nothing else for money. Not even sex! I’ve tried!

c) I am now fortunate enough to have my own private SHEDQUARTERS / MYSTERY BOX / MYTH LAB, which means I have a writing shed (take a tour here!) in the woods where I can come and write and scream and drink and frolic about in whatever strange costume I have deemed appropriate on that given day. My productivity is in fact way, way up since moving into the shed. I moved into the shed at the end of December and I’ve already written two entire novels and edited two other entirely different novels.

There.

Did you feel that?

That twinge? That pinch?

When I said that last thing — “I wrote two novels since December” — you might’ve felt the same pang as when I said, “I wrote 10,000 words yesterday.” A twinge of jealousy, or panic, or disappointment in yourself.

Again, I say:

Horseshit!

Hog-hokum!

Baloneypants!

Flamingotrousers!

*shakes fist at you*

Word count matters to the professional writer because it’s the metric by which we measure the work. Freelancers often get paid per word. And most writing contracts stipulate not a number of pages or chapters or lines of dialogue or bad sexual metaphors but rather, those contracts demand a certain word count. (And different genres and age ranges will also require different word count targets.) Budgeting your word count and actually scheduling it out over a number of days can actually tell you (roughly) when you’ll start and finish writing a given book. Particularly once you really learn to start writing to spec — meaning, writing to meet the word count assigned.

Further, word count has value in that it measures actual effort. Sometimes, writing feels like an act of ditch-digging rather than art-making, and that means a single shovel-load of dirt, no matter how quality the dirt or shapely the hole dug, will not complete the job. You gotta dig a lot of dirt to dig up a ditch, so you measure the effort (the quantity) rather than the immediate result (the quality). Particularly since the quality of first draft word count can veer dizzily between:

THIS IS NOT TOO BAD

and

THIS IS A MISCARRIAGE OF LANGUAGE AND MAY BE AGAINST THE GENEVA CONVENTION.

But. But! But.

Be proud of the words you write, not the words you don’t or haven’t. If you write 100 words today, cool. If you write 1000 or 5000 or a whole 10k, fuck yeah. Jump up and high-five yourself. Yes, to be a writer, you have to write. But you also have to set realistic goals and be excited by whatever progress you make, big or small. Sure, you can push yourself — as long as you don’t break yourself (translation: check yourself, but don’t wreck yourself). Sometimes, writing is a game of inches. Sometimes it’s a act of great, clumsy leaps. You gotta take pride in the small steps as much as in the big jumps. (Bonus: my 350-words-a-day no-fuckery writing plan.)

Always remember:

Word count is not the most important or the most interesting thing about your story.

Writers tell stories, not word counts.

*drops mic*

*mic lands on a sleeping squirrel*

*squirrel is angry*

* * *

500 Ways To Write Harder aims to deliver a volley of micro-burst idea bombs and advisory missiles straight to your frontal penmonkey cortex. Want to learn more about writing, storytelling, publishing, and living the creative life? This book contains a high-voltage dose of information about outlining, plot twists, writer’s block, antagonists, writing conferences, self-publishing, and more.

All this, straight from the sticky blog pages of terribleminds.com, one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers (as named by Writer’s Digest).

Buy ($2.99) at:

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So, given all the Hugo hullabaloo this year, let’s hunker down and return to center and simply talk about awesome books by authors you dig.

This is pretty simple: drop into the comments, talk about one book you liked from the science-fiction or fantasy genres — the qualifications must be that the book had to have been released in (I know this isn’t the precise awards timeframe) the last 12 months.

Tell us what it is.

Tell us who wrote it.

Tell us why you love it so.

Forget sanctioned awards right now and just talk about the awards show that goes on and on inside your heart. (The awards show inside my heart is hosted by a Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, FYI. Unless I’m hungry, in which case it’s hosted by a sentient ham sandwich.)

In case you hadn’t heard, the Hugo Award nomination slate was co-opted by a slate of so-called Sad Puppies, a group of authors and fans who claim to want to bring the award back to its populist center and away from its literary leanings by drawing attention to popular authors who do not usually get award-attention. You might argue that the group’s true aim is revealed in its usage of such acronyms as SJW, CHORF, and SMOF.

(You will find the slate here.)

I will turn you toward the posts of some smart people.

Sarah Chorn writes in her post, “Hugo Awards 2015: A Lamentation:”

“I think the saddest thing is that, now, the Hugos really aren’t about art anymore. They are about agendas. Regardless of whether or not you believe that the awards were broken before, they absolutely are now, and everyone on this year’s shortlist will undoubtedly feel that keenly.”

And Elizabeth Bear writes in her post about the anarchy and resilience of fandom:

“…SF Fandom is a functioning, self-sustaining, multi-generational anarchy.  …This is not the first time All Fandom Has Been Plunged Into War. It will not be the last. But it’s also not going to break fandom.”

And me old hearty, Editor Lee Harris, says in his post:

“But the system is broken. It’s always been open to abuse, of course. But this year the abusers came out in force and coordinated their abuse.”

I have thoughts.

These thoughts are in no meaningful order.

But I give them out anyway because this is a blog and that’s what I do. I overturn my dung-wagon of opinions upon your head and you can choose to be disgusted or roll around in the sweet ordure.

* * *

It is important, first and foremost, to realize that awards are like the tallest building in a city.

It is said that you can tell a lot about a town or a city by what it places as its tallest building — a church steeple, a bank building, an embassy, a mega brothel where its citadel is shaped not unlike a saucy dong. This is probably true, to a point. A city of finance will have a bank building at its center. An old town in Europe might have a cathedral peering above all other structures. Eventually Las Vegas will just have a giant robotic cowboy stripper vomiting fake money and pornography pamphlets onto all who stand beneath its regurgitation.

But it’s also not a perfect representation. It suggests a glimpse at the dominant culture, but also misses so much about what really goes on and who really lives there.

Awards are like this, in a sense.

You can tell something about a segment of pop culture — maybe even quite a lot — by the nominees and winners of an award slate presented in that segment. Some like to pretend that the Oscars are utterly irrelevant, but that’s patently not true. It’s also not true that they’re a shiningly complete illustration of things, either. They demonstrate film culture, though they do so imperfectly. You could, looking back through time, make a not terrible judgment about the movies of the year by the Oscar slate, but it would also be staring through a narrow arrow-slit. You would get a sense of it, but you’d also miss a great deal — the fringe independents, the big moneymaker films, and certainly films from more diverse corners.

You can tell a lot by that part of the animal, but it’s still not the whole animal.

The Hugos are like this, in a sense. They’re the trunk of the elephant — a notable, memorable, perhaps most-talked-about part of the beast, but certainly not the entirety of the creature, either.

This year, the elephant’s trunk has been rooting around in its own shit.

And it’s just covered with the stuff.

The Sad Puppies slate (and “Rabid Puppies” slate, which is the shittier, angrier version) taking over isn’t precisely against the rules. It’s legit. You can suggest that they gamed it, but to do so you summarily have to recognize that this means they still played by the rules of that game. It’s like min-maxing in D&D — you found ways to maximize your character traits for the utmost benefit to your character sheet. Though, most RPGers know that min-maxing players are often the assholes of the table, and that’s pretty much true here, too.

See, while it’s not against the rules, it’s still super-crappy. It’s crappy because it’s not about which books are the best or which books have challenged us or not even which books have sold well but rather, it’s about which books are conservative enough, which books would most rile up the “social justice warriors,” which books run counter to the diversity that has been blooming in the field of SFF recently — and whose flowers popped brightly during last year’s Hugos. (And yes, you could argue that’s a part of a whole other “agenda,” but there, not an organized one, not one driven by any slate or rah-rah movement but rather, I’d suggest, simply as a demonstration of the way SFF is moving — toward a more inclusive, wider array of voices.)

It’s slathered in extra crap-sauce because, of course, this has the explicit fingerprints of GamerGate pressed into its clay — those charm-school rejects whose claim that it was all about “ethics in game journalism” has become a hilarious refrain, a joke meme with sinister permutations (because of course it was really about harassing women and being generally fucking awful). And here, just as the Sad Puppies claim it’s about one thing, it’s really about another.

What does all of this say about SFF and the state of SFF fandom?

About SFF, it says both quite a lot and nothing at all.

Science fiction and fantasy will continue on, unaffected by this strange shadow that has been seen on its X-Ray — fandom will see the shadow and panic for a while, as it should, though time and effort will either excise the cancer or reveal it to be benign tumor rather than the malevolent, malignant one we believe it to be. The Hugos of any year neither make nor break SFF in whole, nor will it subvert, co-opt, or diminish fandom in any meaningful way.

But the Hugos are still the Hugos, and like other awards they are neither utterly demonstrative or entirely irrelevant. They say something, after all, and as the saying that I just made up goes, that something ain’t nothin‘. And I suspect what the 2015 Hugos will say when we look back is that this is, like GamerGate, a perfect picture of dinosaurs losing their collective dinosaur shit and waving their tiny ineffective arms at the coming meteors (and subsequent mammal survival party). We are undergoing a social sea change right now — as we see marginalized people gain power and voice, we also see pushback by those who feel they are losing their power. This, I suspect — I hope! — is just that. (And in fact it serves as a pretty clear, if irritating, response to the Hugo Awards last year.) If I may quote author Alyssa Wong here:

“Those crying out against diversity in SFF are howling into the void, and ultimately, they will be soundlessly swallowed up and forgotten.”

(Some might say that it is silly to call them ineffective because clearly, given this slate, they’re very effective. I’d argue that being effective would mean actually winning the awards and actually changing trends in SFF and fandom for the future. Perhaps I’m too optimistic, but I don’t see that happening anymore than an overturned tractor trailer spilling pigshit won’t change the highway or the traffic pattern for more than a given day. A short-term effect is not a long-term change.)

Though, looking back, as io9 noted, this may also be the year the Hugos became explicitly political. A two-party system of agenda-driven slates bumping heads against one another.

What can you do?

Well, I dunno.

The easy answer is, “Buy a supporting membership and get voting,” but sometimes this is formed as criticism and it’s worth noting that plenty of folks (fans, authors, whoever) may not be comfortable to (or able to) spend forty bucks just to vote on a science-fiction award. Forty bucks is cheap to a lot of people. And expensive to a lot of others. There’s an argument to be made, too, that if SFF is to represent marginalized or under-served voices, then we may also want to recognize that those voices are often in possession of less filthy lucre than more privileged segments. And further, this argument somewhat explicitly turns the Hugo Awards into a capitalist pissing match rather than a popular vote — have your voice be heard and your vote counted is lovely to say as long as you don’t add to it, but it’ll cost you forty bucks, so write a fucking check.

Certainly this year’s slate is not purely a mouthful of snake venom — there are good people there and good books. Some of those people were on the Sad Puppies slat, though I’m sure those folks have found their celebration dampened a bit. Will there be a hollow pit in their stomach, a question forever asking, did I win because my book is good or did I win because of the concerted efforts of a gathered flock of noisy shit-birds? That would be a grave shame. And again, something that must be laid at the feet of these so-called Sad Puppies: they’re not fans, they’re activists. And they’re pissing all over this thing, and that urine smell is going to be very hard to get out.

Whatever happens, SFF and SFF fandom will continue on. It will be undamaged, though the dust from this will not settle quickly and will gather in all the grooves and low places for a time.

My best suggestion to you is:

Keep on keeping on. Buy great books. Advocate for great authors and for readers. Review them. Champion them. Not because of some agenda, not because of some political slate, and certainly not to take something away from anybody, but rather because you love books and the books that speak to your heart are books you should talk about. Loudly and frequently and with lots of wild gesticulations and yawps of great feeling.

The Hugos are not SFF. You are SFF. All of us! All of us.

This year, the tallest building in the city square is a crooked, broken, ugly thing.

But don’t worry — we’re tearing that one down and building something much cooler.

And on it we will tag a sign in colorful graffiti:

Keep calm and don’t worry about the dinosaurs.

I’m sharing an image with you.

You can use that image as inspiration for a 1000-word piece of flash fiction.

Or, you can share a link to a different image below.

(Please don’t share more than one image, and if it’s NSFW, please offer warning. And nothing triggery or weird, I don’t want this to be a road with a bunch of tire-popping potholes for people’s safety and sanity, okay?)

Then, write a story based on the image above, or one of the other images in the comments.

The trick is, please don’t write a story based on an image you have shared.

Be inspired by what something else has left for you.

That is, in many ways, how our stories work, after all.

Again:

Pick an image.

Use that image as the inspiration for your flash fiction.

Post the fiction at your blog, link back here so we can read it.

Due by 4/10, noon EST.

Working as costumed princesses at the local amusement park is a nice gig, but it’s not what Courtney, Amber, Tiffany, and Michelle want to do with their lives. These queens of high school have their own plans for life post-graduation, and they do not involve fixed games and fried pickles.

But when all their plans fall apart, what are the girls to do? Left with no other options, they decide to keep their part-time jobs as princesses — for the moment. But even that plan is threatening to fall apart, thanks to the sudden and increasing muggings plaguing the park and chasing away customers.

With their back-up jobs in peril, the girls have no choice but to fight back and take matters into their own hands. But the more they work to save the park, the more their part-time jobs become full-time, and the more their carefully planned futures get pushed to the wayside. Will these princesses ever get their lives back on track?

Will they even want to? 

* * *

Embrace Your Own Weirdo Process

I’m a wee bit obsessed with process, always bugging people about HOW THEY DO IT. I had this idea in mind that every book you write brings you one step closer to the ultimate, streamlined beautiful way in which you Do Things. When in reality, every single project I’ve done has morphed into some weird beast version of what I’ve done previously. For this one, I wrote out a full script first, then went back and thumbnailed all the pages as I viciously re-wrote the script. Then I sat on a lot of it (not literally) and then (okay my cat did literally) rewrote the whole middle to end. I didn’t know what I was doing – what I DO know is, if it fits, it ships! And by that I mean, if it works for you, it WORKS. Don’t stress yourself out trying to mimic someone else’s process. Figure out how you do, and roll with it – and don’t be afraid to keep switching stuff up if it’s not working. Write in that kitchen, write in that closet, write while only wearing THAT ONE WEIRD HAT. No one will judge.

Screw Outlines, Scenes are Where It’s At

One thing I’ve always super struggled with when I’m writing is having no idea how this durn story is gonna end. I used to think writing was all about a pretty, sequential outline that your characters magically flowed through in a linear fashion, exactly how you intended them to. I’ve tried to write that way, and it’s bored the potatoes out of me and everyone within a 50 foot radius. What I do like about writing, what keeps me going, is daydreaming about characters and the scenes and interactions they get involved in. I used to think this was must be the wrong way to do it – that’s just a big ol’ mish-mash that doesn’t go anywhere. But if you trust in the scenes, and minimally nudge your characters as you listen to them, they’ll get to an end. That sounded like a threat – oh THEY’LL GET TO AN END. And sure, you can tweak that end or throw SURPRISE bombs at them along the way, but if those scenes ring true and keep you interested, then the rest of the book will start to join hands and connect. Also, I recently read Stephen King’s On Writing, where he talked about coming up with scenes and characters first and BAM — I feel entirely validated.

Your Characters Will Beat You Up If You Don’t Listen To Them

When I set out to write PTP, I knew I wanted my characters to all be complete jerks. I struggled a lot with how this would work in a story. Obviously I wanted people to be interested enough in them to keep reading the story, and even root for them, but how to do that without making them LEARN A LESSON at the end and going against everything they believed in? In life I haven’t seen THAT much of a turnaround happen, especially with four girls who’ve been comfy being superficial jerks their whole lives. It wasn’t so much about creating the oh so hot-right-now anti-hero as much as how to let these characters have a journey without completely flip-flopping.

As I was writing, I discovered one of the ways I could make this change was by focusing on their interests evolving rather than their personalities. In the beginning, they start out wanting very much what a lot of little girls like me grew up thinking/being told we wanted — to be an actress, a model, a cheerleader (A PRINCESS). As these girls are forced to explore other avenues, they unwittingly open themselves up to other experiences and realize they have other potentials. That forces them to evolve, and their personalities get dragged along in the mud along with them.

Also, two of the characters let me know halfway through they were gay. They just flat-out told me, didn’t even let me guess. “Oh, do I have to go back and change what I wrote in the beg–” “NOPE, we’ve been gay this whole time, it’s in there”.

Make Yourself Do The Thing You Fear

I love drawing people. They’re crazy and have insane faces and they’re my favorite! However life isn’t just made up of crazy faces lining the streets, because I think we can all agree that’d be a bit unsettling. Backgrounds and sets and objects have to be part of the question, and do I enjoy drawing them? …. ehhhhh not so much. In the past I’ve specifically self-censored myself by having every character I’ve ever written only talk to each other in an empty field or in a room that has zero furniture. I’m smart enough to know that that wouldn’t fly for a story set in an amusement park. For a while I seriously considered self-censoring myself – I wanted to do a story set in an amusement park, but there was no way I could draw that, so perhaps I should ….. EFF THAT. The only way to get better is to do, and the only way to write the story I want to write is to get in there and draw that flipping ferris wheel. It might be ugly, you might hate it, but those characters (and your readers) NEED that background, that substance, that whatever you’re hiding from to ground them so you sure as hell better provide.

It also super helped me to check out a few of my favorite artists along the way and see how THEY made backgrounds lovely and enchanting. My biggest influence by far for this book was the work of Eyvind Earle. If you’ve never heard of him, check out his ridiculously gorgeous geometric landscapes – he’s the man responsible for one of the most beautiful sets of all time – i.e. the environment of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty.

How does this compare to prose novels? I feel the same way about drawing the things I fear as I do doing research. I’m AWFUL at research and I hate it. I’m awful at drawing trees and I hate it. But you know what? Once I shut up and got my nose into some research/trees (and Eyvind Earle), I found something fun, something interesting I could grab ahold of. And that got me through the drudgery that almost stopped me from plowing ahead.

For the Love of Spreadsheets

This is the unsexiest of all sexy writing parts, even if you’re like me and get a weird, sick pleasure out of tracking metrics. When I set out to start doing the physical drawing of my book, I mapped out how long each part would take me (thumbnail, pencil, ink, finalize), how many pages I had in the book, and therefore how many hours/weeks/months until completion. The writing part I pretty much rolled into the thumbnailing section, but of course I discovered I pretty much wrote the whole time, even during pencilling AND inking stages,

What did all this tracking do besides stress me out in OH DEAR GOD SO LONG TO GO? It gave me a way to physically SEE that I had, in fact, made some progress that I could proudly chirp to others. “34.5% today!” I’d yell at my coworkers and their blank stares. Of course, as I approached the end of the book I was spiraling down a hill with Westley somersaulting after me yelling “AS YOU WIIIIISH” and nothing was really going to stop me at that point, BUT man did minute progress reports help me in the beginning two thirds of the book. Plus it gave me something more concrete to tell people rather than (in 2012) “I’m working on a book!” (in 2013) “Still working on that book!” (in 2014) “Remember I’m doing a book? Stilllll goin’.”

The spreadsheet also gave me a physical date to tack on to when I’d finish my book, as long as I stayed on track with how many hours a week I planned to put into it. If I didn’t like the date that Google Spreadsheets spit out at me, then I knew I needed to get more done each week. For me, the spreadsheet was a way to add structure to a process that could easily become too overwhelming and brainstormy and trap me in its eternal web of edits forever. One of the best things I ever learned about ANY project was that eventually it must end. You chop it off, you kick it into that hole in the ground, you END IT, you end it before it ENDS YOU – you don’t poke and torture it by editing it to death. Plus, going backwards and lingering on pages rather than plowing ahead would’ve meant arguing with the spreadsheet . . . and you do NOT argue with the spreadsheet.

You do not argue with the spreadsheet.

Monica Gallagher: Website | Twitter | Tumblr

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