Here it is: 2019 and my first official season of Weeknotes. I’m mixing up the usual format with thoughts about the whys and the wherefores of what I’m trying to accomplish with these. This is as much for me as it is for anyone. Welcome to season 1, episode 1!
WRITING PROGRESS. I’ve got a backlog of stories to finish writing, and got’dammit I’m going to finish them. This isn’t a New Year’s Resolution, i.e. not some big thing that just sets me up for failure. No, this is about going back to the grindstone, or back to the woodshed. It’s project management, really. So I’m going to be a little more public with my process, maybe throw in a stat or two now and then.
- Longest Writing Chain This Week: 2 days
- Short Story 01. I’ve been working on this since I rediscovered it in my backlog late last year, which technically makes it the first story I’m working on in 2019. Hence, “Short Story 01.” It suffers from the way my first drafts usually go: an interesting start, a few plot points along the way, but really unsure of where it needs to go.
- Comic Script 01. Another thing I’ve been picking away at for the past few months. I’ve got a long-range outline, but it’s still just something I’m just getting down into a puke draft.
READING. I read a lot. Mostly, in a haphazard manner. It was a relatively light reading week. I pulled M. Rickert’s YOU HAVE NEVER BEEN HERE back out. I’ve read each of these stories before, except for “The Shipbuilder” which I just finished. Also, I’m picking through a flash fiction anthology, NEW MICRO which I happened to buy at a bookstore in Saratoga Springs where I once saw Mary read!
THERE’S A STORY IN HERE SOMEWHERE. Lots of people post a link roundup, but this link roundup will be of things that I feel might have a story in them (i.e. for me to eventually write) even if I have no idea what it might be, regardless of whether anything comes of it.
Not much of a roundup from the past week, but here’s something: I listened to the first episode of season three of the SERIAL podcast. I’m way late to this party, but this is one season taking a look at “A year inside a typical American courthouse” in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. Or, as I know it, “The land of my birth.” According to what I’ve read, it’s not set in Cleveland because of the DOJ’s Consent Decree or anything like that. But “…because they let us record everywhere — courtrooms, back hallways, judges’ chambers, prosecutors’ offices.” They mean it, they recorded everywhere that wouldn’t be a violation of attorney/client privilege.
HOW I’M WORKING. I do tweak how I work. The thing is, I can be stubborn about clinging to old ways, but I’m trying to be better. So, whenever I have a thought or idea about my process and how it’s working or not working, I’m going to talk about it.
I talked about how I worked to move my writing workflow wholly into the Google ecosystem from Dropbox. Basically, using Keep and Docs allows me to use almost any device I own or have access to with internet access. It took a bit of thought to mimic my old workflow which was just about as software/OS agnostic as it could be. Using Google takes me a step away from that, but with a little bit of thought and some setting up, I’m probably as close to “ultraportable” as I can get. If I don’t feel like carting around my ThinkPad X1C, my 8.4″ tablet with a foldable Bluetooth keyboard will serve just fine. Either way, I generate content exactly as I always have–brainstorms, ideas, lists are spat out into Keep and get copied and pasted into something. It’s how I wrote the first couple of drafts of this entry.
Docs has its formatting limitations (it’s not MS Word or my tool of choice, LibreOffice Writer). For short stories or comic scripts, a little creativity is needed but I can produce almost the same MS-formatted output as I could with LibreOffice. There’s a rule of thumb about switching off Widow/Orphan protection, which I can’t seem to do with Docs. But given how a lot of venues accept submissions these days–some of whom don’t like MS format or want you submit as plain text, or whatever–it might not matter much. And when it does, I’ve still got LibreOffice.
My submission format of choice, right after Whatever the submissions editor wants, is straight-up MS format in an .rtf. I might need to do a little more tweaking, because exporting a Docs file into .rtf makes the headers look funny. I do not appear to have this problem when exporting to .docx or .odt files. Maybe my preference for .rtf files is something else I need to let go of. (I don’t necessarily have to though–converting a downloaded .odt file and converting to .rtf with LibreOffice seems to work. I told you I was stubborn.)
IN THE WILD. I’m fascinated by the ingenuity of local reuse stores. This reminds me that while I’m trying–again–to do things I’ve tried to do before, life still has to go on and there’s no reason not to make the best use of what you already have.
It’s interesting–and perhaps a little narcissistic?–to think I see parts of my story, and the stories of other Filipino immigrants and children of immigrants I know, even the ones who didn’t go through what Vargas is experiencing now. The themes Vargas uses to categorize his experiences living, in his words, as an undocumented citizen in the U.S. are: Lying, Passing, and Hiding. I look at some of my family’s and others’ stories of adapting to life in these United States (not only the ones who were tago ng tago, but them too), and see those there elements in them, as well.
