Madeleine Feels Overwhelmed

Have I used that title before on this blog? I must have! It could be the title of the blog.

The holidays are over, readers, and I have had this week off from work. I am working tomorrow, unfortunately. Also unfortunately, I had planned to rewrite the first story in my book--my completed first draft--this week, while I was off, to build some momentum going into the new year.

No rewrite, no momentum.

What happened? I don't know. Perhaps, as Our Dear Reader said yesterday, I just needed some time off. Perhaps. But now I am feeling the pressure.

What pressure--or pressure from where?

I am putting that pressure on myself. I know this but I can't seem to stop it! I think it was a mistake to tell people that I finished the first draft of my book. I was just so happy to have finished something, so pleased with myself, but now I feel like everyone is waiting and expecting something in the next few months.

Who's waiting? I KNOW, reader, NOBODY is waiting. Again I am setting myself up. Etc. etc.

These are the conversations I had all day long in my head...

I am most afraid of falling into bad habits again. Our Dear Reader is also most afraid of that.

I decided yesterday not to rewrite until January 1st (which is Sunday!) but still--NO rewriting until then. Instead I am reading draft one, from beginning to end. I read about 50 pages today. I have so much work to do. It is daunting. But there was a moment today when I suddenly felt excited; I suddenly felt that I was thrilled to see how this will all work out over the next few months, how I'll be able to revise these stories.

Then that moment passed.

I was reading some other blog, a food blog, and she was writing about deadlines and writing, and how she's finishing up her new book and she's so nervous about it right now, but she's come to realize that she only calms down when she's writing. I think (I hope) it will be the same for me.

I've set up a schedule, a number of pages to get through each day. I'm trying to be as concrete, as exact, as I can be. That's how the word count worked in Draft 1. Sometimes I hated the word count (oftentimes) but in the end it got me where I wanted to go.

Agnes is home! Blog writing must cease!

Today Is the Day Madeleine Begins Draft Two...

But now the day is over; it's evening, cocktail hour, and I just began my revision. I began it by reading the first few pages of my book. Then I decided that I needed to write on the Mildred--right now--so thus far I have only spent 10 minutes of my day revising my book. The rest of the day was spent rearranging my apartment with Agnes and creating my new office space, having lunch with Agnes and Our Dear Reader, visiting Our Dear Reader's apartment, returning home and catching up with the day's news, checking my email, balancing my checkbook, and talking about starting my revision.

I am recording my day's activities here on the Mildred because I want to make sure that too many days are not spent this way. Or lost this way.

Good news is that I liked the first few pages of the book that I read. "Liked" isn't the right word, really, but after reading them I felt like I could fix them and wanted to work on them. Of course I didn't work on them, I wrote on the Mildred instead, so...

This post is annoying me. I am going to end it now.

Madeleine Knows...And Feels Relieved

I know what the end of the story I am currently slogging through is going to be, by which I mean that I figured out what is happening and who is involved in the last paragraph of the last story, which will also be the last paragraph of my book. I am relieved!

This is not to say that the paragraph won't change when I actually write it--I haven't written it yet, but I've taken notes--but at least I know where the last story is going. And it is uplifting, I think, this paragraph. Uplifting for me, anyway.

I just remembered writing about the "dreaded paragraph" for quite a time back when I started the Mildred with Agnes. The dreaded paragraph must have been in Story 1. This paragraph did not turn into a dreaded paragraph, which seems to me progress.

I am trying to think of this story as just another story, but it's difficult, because it's the last story, and this will be the last paragraph people read of this book, if anyone ever reads it, and it's bound to carry a little more weight than most other paragraphs in the book.

Again, I am relieved. No more sadness or bleakity for Madeleine. For now...

Madeleine's (Sad? Bleak?) Thoughts on Her Latest Story and Her (Sad? Bleak?) Life

It's not working.
I am not enjoying it at all.
It is so flat.
I am forcing it.
I want it to be short.
I want it to be unlike the other stories.
I want it to be uplifting, but only at the end.
The last paragraph will be uplifting, but not too uplifting.
I can't write uplifting.
I don't mean "uplifting," I mean something else but don't have the word for it.
That's the problem--I don't have the word for it.
The opposite of bleak.
Writing this blog post is so much more enjoyable than writing the story.
I don't have a title for it.
I don't like the title of this blog post.
The other stories had the title first.
Maybe I should come up with a title first like I did with the other stories.
Time is passing and I must meet my self-imposed deadline.
The second draft is going to be really hard.
What if, after all this, I can't finish the second draft?
I will feel awful.
I am feeling awful about it already.
I know, Dear Reader, I should not think that far ahead, stay in the now, etc., etc., but it's hard not to think about it.
I have spent all this time and I've told people that I'm almost finished with draft one and that draft two will be finished in April.
I told them to make it more real, but I shouldn't have told anyone.
I will feel like a failure.
I will be a failure.
Agnes will still love me, possibly.
No she will love me, but she will be disappointed or at least she will be the opposite of proud.
That's a good title: The Opposite of Proud
Another good title I thought of this week: Please Don't Bring a Guest
Neither of those titles work for this story.
I never meet my self-imposed deadlines.
Think of something positive, quick: I know what happens in the story.
The story does not have to be long.
The story functions more like a coda, or should function that way.
The second to last story is the more important story, and the story before that is even more important.
This last story is not so important.
If I could finish this story, then I could move on and start rewriting.
I have been wanting to rewrite for months now, I love rewriting, I love polishing sentences, but I have to come up with a new process for rewriting, and that will be hard.
I don't want to fall into the old traps, i.e., take six months to rewrite a story.
I have two weeks to rewrite each story.
Is that enough?
Quick, another positive thought: I know what my next book is going to be about.
It will be a short book, and I will write it fast.
I just thought of a title for the story, but it's an old title, and I really don't like it. That's why I didn't use it the first time.
The book, the current book, I mean, is about time passing and I am thinking about time passing.
It's about time.
I have to give this post an uplifting ending, because it will make me feel better.
I have so many pages written!
I wrote so many pages!
Even if I change every single page, at least I have those pages to change.
That uplifting ending sounds forced.
I want the ending of my book to be like the end of Penelope Fitzgerald's novel, The Gate of Angels.
I remember thinking 15 pages from the end of that book, how is she going to get to the inevitable end, and then she did it, and then the book was over.
Endings are hard.

Madeleine Builds Momentum (Or Tries To)

I went to a lecture last week given by a novelist whose work I've never read, but I've heard good things about her, and I was in the mood; I had worked at my office that day, and I needed some uplift. It was billed as a craft lecture, on building characters in novels, or something, but it turned out to be a talk about what inspired her as a writer, which was basically everything from her childhood. She was charming, but the lecture wasn't very informative; it certainly wasn't a craft lecture. But one thing she said which I've been thinking about since then, and especially this morning, was the importance of momentum when writing a novel.

She said she had been working on a book for years, and she was bored with it. She felt like she had nothing more to put into it. She didn't quite hate writing it--in fact, she might return to it eventually, she said--but she wasn't excited by it, either.

That's when a friend asked her to write a short piece for a collection she was editing. It was completely unrelated to the novel she had been writing, and she enjoyed it. She realized that this was the story she wanted to write now, this was what she was excited about, and she called her book editor and told him she was abandoning her long-in-development novel to write about this character and situation. The editor was appalled, but the author assured him that she could write this book and still meet her deadline, and she did.

I feel like I've lost momentum lately, just from doing other things. I've had to work four days at my office this fall instead of three, which was good financially but bad creatively. Also, thinking about the story I am writing now as "the last story for draft one" has been daunting. It's been good for me up to this point to aim for finishing the first draft of the book by Thanksgiving, having a target date (which I am going to meet), but I still have a lot of writing to do, i.e., draft two, which has to be completed before I can show the book to anyone, which is also a little daunting. (Not showing it to people--I am dying to show it to people--but having to write another draft. Actually I am excited to write another draft. What's daunting is that I want to get it right.) I had such great momentum all spring and summer and now I've lost it a bit, but I'm not going to abandon the book (oh my god can you imagine?); I'm still excited about it. I chose an epigraph the other day--actually I chose five--and that started to get me back into it.

I'm also using the Mildred as a way to build momentum. I'll try to write on it most mornings, certainly on mornings like this one, when I have to go to the office. (And now I'm going to be late.)

Incidentally, Agnes is STILL not smoking. Oh how I wish she'd write on here again...

Madeleine Returns Again

I laughed when I saw the headline of my last post. (And, really, it's been that long since I posted?) But this time, dear readers, I won't wait six months--no seven months--to post again. I am not going to make any excuses, though, for not posting. I read an interview with an artist a few months ago (an artist whose work I don't like very much, frankly) and he has a blog that features postings from other blogs in which people apologize for not writing on their blogs as much as they should.

That was a bad sentence, but hopefully you know what I mean. (That is not an apology, either.)

I thought it was a good time for me to return to the Mildred, because I am writing my last story for draft one of my book, and I am having a difficult time with it.

You read that right, readers. My LAST story. You might have thought that I stopped writing on the Mildred, because I stopped writing my book, and I was ashamed or nervous or embarrassed, etc., but I have not been writing on the Mildred, because I have been writing my stories. I found it impossible to do both. I have written nine new stories since March 2011, plus other shorter stories which will also be part of the book.

The last story is tough! I can't get into it. It occured to me yesterday, as I was slogging through my daily word count, that perhaps writing on the Mildred again would help me finish. We'll see.

Madeleine Returns

Agnes just came home from work, and I was telling her everything that I had accomplished today, a list that did not include writing, and she interrupted me and said, "Did you write on the Mildred?"

It surprised me, because we haven't talked about the Mildred in a long time, but I was ready with a response: "No, not yet," I said, "but I'm going to," but that was a lie, because I was most definitely NOT going to write on the Mildred today. I have lots of other things to do, plus the Mildred is a lot more work than people think! But then I felt guilty--not about lying to Agnes, but about the fact that I have not been writing on the Mildred--and so here I am.

At least I can say that I stopped writing on the Mildred, because I have been writing a lot. I have a new process, thanks, largely, to Our Dear Reader, which involves word counts and focus and writing every day--but this leaves little time to write on the Mildred. After writing at my job, then writing my daily word count and revisions, the last thing I want to do, the last thing I feel inspired to do, is write on the Mildred.

But part of the new process is also about inspiration, i.e., you can't sit around waiting for inspiration if you want to finish things. I think this applies to the Mildred as well. The Mildred was a way of keeping track of my progress with my stories in a public way, an effort to not get bogged down in my process, or--that's not quite right--an effort to make my process public and thereby less fraught. (Am I saying that right? Am I being clear?)

This entry isn't particularly inspired or fun or clear, actually I'm finding it quite frustrating, which is the way I feel most days when I write, which is why I should be writing on the Mildred, etc. etc. Plus I made a deal and I have to see it through. Agnes saw hers through--she is still not smoking, yay for Agnes, though she talks about it often...

Anyway, I think it's important that I get back to the Mildred. So I am going to make more of an effort at doing so from now on.

Madeleine Decides...

I am not going to waste my life!

At Long Last Madeleine

I had a dream last night that I was at a restaurant or café or someplace like that—there was no food on the table, but we were in public somewhere—for a meeting with three other fiction writers, one woman and two men, and we were going to write a collection of stories together. Actually, we were going to pair up and write stories together and then all of the stories would be put into a collection. We would be working with similar characters and themes and styles; in the end, the collection would seem as if one person had written it. I think, perhaps, the plan was to have a pen name for the group—one made-up author. (Perhaps Madeleine Moorhead? That’s an aside, Readers, not part of the dream.)

I was familiar with these other writers; we had been brought together by friends that we had in common. The other three writers were published writers, more well-known than I was, but they thought I was talented and were treating me as an equal partner in the scheme. Perhaps “scheme” is not the right word, perhaps “project” is better, though the purpose of this arrangement was so that we could write this collection very quickly, certainly quicker than we would have been able to write a complete collection of stories on our own. (Yes, this sounds like a dream I would have, doesn’t it, Readers?)

The other writers started talking about prose that they admired; they were all in agreement. They liked beautiful descriptive phrases, long sentences with many, many words—in essence, they all liked the kinds of writing that I despise. I stayed silent. I feared that if I disagreed with them, I would reveal myself as a fraud and get kicked off the project. And this would be a very public humiliation; I would be rightfully ridiculed and then tossed out of the diner.

That’s all I remember….

But not much mystery there, right, Readers, as to what it all means…

January Madeleine

It's January...

You know what? I'll do this later...