I'll freely admit I write slowly. Sometimes my fellow authors will ask, usually at critiques where they have work to show, "How's your writing coming, Thomas?" I feel the need to reassure them that I'm not just here for the curiosity, that I'm actually writing. After weeks of not showing anything publicly, though, I wonder if my honesty is called into question.

I'll sit and edit a story to death. The story can sometimes go stale. I lose interest. Or it can feel overworked. For instance, my recently-finished time-shift short story is about 5k. I've worked on it probably since the 10th, so around 20 days. That's right at 1 "perfected" page each day. I've heard of authors who work at this snail's pace, but most of them have been somewhat or outright established. And since I started my career late, I'm not sure if I have the luxury of slowness.

So:

• Should I embrace my slow writing speed, or
• Should I be concerned? If concerned,
  • Should I trust that, over time, my speed will pick up, or
  • Should I take definite action?

Probably the most important thing to determine first is whether my slow writing speed is a problem.

As I mentioned above, sometimes I feel like a writing loser when other authors who work faster then I do -- and in some cases much much faster than I do -- bring attention to my slow speed. But I believe my slow output bothers me more on a day-to-day basis than it does in those relatively rare moments. So, I'd say I have a problem. If I have a problem then embracing my slowness is not an option.

So the next thing to determine is whether I should act to fix the problem or allow time to fix it for me.

This is more difficult. On one hand, my writing is benefitting from looking so excruciatingly closely at ever aspect of a story, bravely calling into question each sentence, demanding more of myself and my skills. It's sort of a P90X mentality toward getting better fast. But, at the end of the day, I have less to submit and only submissions lead to publications and only publications lead to better opportunities and only better opportunities lead to success.

Do I see my speed picking up? Yes and no. 

I can tell that I produce more GOOD pages recently than I ever have, but I'm not producing MORE PAGES. So is that an increase in speed? Hard to tell when my goal is to produce MORE GOOD PAGES. 

Bottom line is probably this: I do have a problem right now writing slowly. But I write every day and, in so doing, I'm becoming a better writer. So, I'm sort of doing both things I mentioned one should do if concerned about his speed. I'm taking definite action, even if that action is not specifically addressing my speed. Likewise, I have faith that, over time, my speed will pick up as a result of writing every day.

Not sure what I've accomplished here, but it sure was enlightening thinking about it in such detail.

My wonderful filthy story, "Cochran's Navy Skirt," came up one place short in the 2010 NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge.

The contest started with 30 groups  -- "heats" they called them -- of around 25 authors. We all had two prompts, genre and subject, and two weeks to come up with a 1000-word story. Only the top two authors in each group/heat would move on to the 2nd and final round.

My genre was Comedy and my subject was A Gang. I dug deep and found a very obscure use of "gang" in the old Press Gangs that would force unfortunates into service in the Royal Navy. I also took a risk by making my main character an inordinately well-endowed loser, Cochran, who went by the nickname "Cock."

It was a naughty, fun little comedy.

When the results came in, I was hopeful. We had all waited a good long time, two months, to find out the results of the first round. I went to the site, clicked the link that would show the results in my group/heat and got excited. There was my name among the five featured stories. Seeing that, I was confident i had succeed. I posted on Facebook about my victory. 

A little later, I did the math. Five authors across 30 groups/heats. 150 stories to judge seemed pretty high for a final round. Curious, I returned to the results page that had given me such a boost. I read more closely and discovered that only the two top authors, the ones with the **FINALIST** next to their names actually moved forward.

As much as I appreciate the mention -- being featured IS nice -- by this time it amounted to a disappointing tease. Sad-faced, I reposted my error.

Maybe I shouldn't have gone blue, or at least light blue as the story wasn't overtly nasty. I could second-guess myself over and over, I suppose. But you can't win them all. The positive in this is I now have a funny little story that someone somewhere will buy. I don't feel defeated either. If anything, I feel heartened to try just a little harder next time.

For the last couple weeks I've been writing and tweaking a nice story that came to me at the end of a rare long session of sleep.

Like the moon missions where the United States's hand was forced by international politics to move too quickly and too soon, the protagonist is sent into time-shift before scientists and the agency for whom he operates has all the bugs worked out. But the nature of the threat calls for premature action. The story tracks this first recorded time-shift mission and the agent's experience: he doesn't know what the hell is going on but slowly figures [part of] it out.

I wrote the first draft in two days and have spent the last week tweaking it do death, patching holes and refining the language. Even though the story will likely not reach 3000 words, going is a little slow due to the science and the flow of events. Time is a little out of whack out of necessity. The antagonist force operates in a different time space.

Writing this story has been fun and helpful in a couple of ways. First off, it has allowed me to step away from the Head on a Stump story so I can return to it with a clear, fresh mind. Work on that had gotten a little too much like work. The more I write (generally) the more I can detect when I'm in an ineffective state of mind. Secondly, it has been fun to write outside my normal genre. Sci-fi is not something I've attempted to do before. Fortunately, the POV allows me to get away with not having to know too much about what's going on from a technical standpoint. As I've alluded to above, for most of the story, the protagonist is baffled and even when he does start to catch on, it's mainly deductive reasoning, not a textbook on how time-shift works. Finally, there are elements about this story that are inadvertently serving as study for some of the weird time handling I'm planning for Head on a Stump. Practicing keeping track of events on an alternate fabric here should prove useful when I get into the later stages of that story.

Time goes so quickly. For the first time since I started this blog a couple years ago, I let nearly a whole month lapse without a blog entry. I'm not sure if that's a good sign. If it were because I was writing so much I didn't have time to blog too, I'd say that was definitely a good thing. But I fear it was the Olympics more than it was binge writing.

Here's to doing better in the future.

My novel has another new title: The Tree of Rise and Ruin

Nice, eh? I love it. I met with my writing/critique partner, Beckie Ugolini, over the weekend. I had submitted The Tree of Ruination and Rise to her and she suggested Ruination and Rise were not parallel. Drop the "ation." Better.

In that same meeting, I had voiced concerns about how the whole of the novel should be handled. There are three parts that take place in three different times from the PsOV of three different men. I expressed my worry that I didn't have enough reading experience to choose between one of three directions I saw the story being told.

Beckie laid down some basic rules and shared her own experience blocking out one of her stories. She swears the system works.

The jury is still out as to whether it will work. I've been so busy and tired lately I haven't been able to complete even this seemingly easy blocking step, but it shows a lot of promise. Already, I can see one huge benefit, though. I have been forced to make final decisions on the flow of two of the three parts. Eventually, I'll have to nail down all aspects of the story. Until I started this, I hadn't realized how up in the air much of the story actually was. Knowing the story basically is far from knowing the story well enough to write it down without punching holes that may not be sealable later (without a great deal of work, that is).

Not long ago, I was certain my outline -- a traditional college-style outline -- was up to the task. Though I can see that step was necessary for fleshing out the broad strokes, breaking down the story's action in chapters defines the action to an altogether higher level. This must happen now, before this and after that. This character will be here while this other character, in a different part of the story, is suspended over there.

I can't wait to get to it again soon. I believe that once this blocking out business is all done, I'll be many times more confident in the actual writing. I've already made a number of changes to how I thought the stories would interact and I've taken a number of opportunities to elaborate on items I had only touched on briefly before.