Technical Writing

A question for you!
Photo by Oberazzi

This blog is all about my creative writing life, but really, that’s only part of the picture for me.

As some of you may know, I’m a technical writer by profession/employment. I have been working in the field for many years now, and have learned many interesting and useful things along the way.

So my question to you all is: should I start blogging about the stuff I’ve learned as a technical writer? Would you like some insights from someone in the industry? Is it something you folks would be interested in? I know, it’s my blog, I should write about whatever I like, but it’s always good to check these things before I start babbling into the void.

If you would prefer that I didn’t start talking about tech writing, I’d love to hear why.

If you don’t want to comment directly, feel free to use any of the buttons on the end of this post. I will take all of them to mean ‘yes please’ (because I know you’re all polite like that). Comments are always gratefully received, whether made here on the blog or by email.

Thanks for reading. 🙂

Fighting the spiral

Watching life zoom by
(picture by Norma Desmond)

For the second time in a month, I’ve had to delay Starwalker posts. Not by one week, but by two.

I hate it. I hate missing deadlines, I hate letting my readers down, and I hate the way I’m sliding into being one of those unreliable writers who can’t keep to her own schedule. I don’t want to be That Writer.

It’s not because I’m worried about losing audience or what people might think of me. My readers are wonderful, and their messages of patience and understanding lighten the load from me. I am more grateful for them than I can say. The hardest person on me is me, and I know that.

It’s because I’m better than that. Being reliable is a part of who I am. Being a writer who puts her work out there is a big part of my life. I can do better than that.

Except lately, I haven’t. I have stared at the Starwalker post that’s two weeks overdue now, over and over, and it’s still not done. There are several reasons:

1. It’s an action scene, which is hard, and I’m still working out the logistics of what exactly needs to happen.
2. Things at home went sideways last week when my brother got some bad news (nothing dire, but not ‘good’ either), and now my mother is flying over to the UK to help him and his little ones out.
3. My health has been getting worse over the past few weeks.

I could probably deal with any one of those on its own. Number 1 is something that I can usually handle without too much problem; I work my way through it, rewrite it two or three times (sometimes from scratch), and generally beat it with a stick until it looks like something I like. However, it requires some focus and attention to achieve, and that has been lacking lately.

Number 2 came out of left field for us, and has meant a lot of stuff to organise and think about around my home life. My mum flies out tomorrow, and it’s going to take the weekend (and possibly some of next week) to iron out the pattern of my life while she’s away. She’s probably going to be with my brother and his family for the next year (a few months at minimum), so my dad and I need to work out a sustainable schedule.

This was complicated recently by the cam belt in my dad’s car going ‘spang’ and taking the entire engine out, which means we’re currently sharing a (my) car. It’s not a problem we can’t work around, but it means that I’m less flexible and mobile than I used to be. It’s another mental overhead to add to the pile.

Problem number 3 is the thing that makes all this worse. I’ve had some tests done into the digestive issues I have, and I have a list of conditions (which I won’t go into) and medications to take. So far, I’m seeing varying success, but it’s going to be a few weeks before I see any real improvements. So plugging on there.

On top of that (and possibly related), the chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is getting worse. I can usually push past it and do what I need to do, but not in the last few weeks. It is a weight that is pressing on me more and more, chipping away at the edges of what I can do in any one day. I am struggling more and more to write during my daily commute to work; in the mornings, I tend to doze and try to charge up before I get to the office. It has been getting steadily harder to summon up the mental energy to be creative. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been too drained to even write on the way home (and I am usually my most alert towards the end of the day).

I haven’t really talked a lot about what the fatigue is like. I’ve talked about the impact that it has, but that’s not quite the same. Maybe I’m more aware of it now, because the physical symptoms are cropping up again (I was mostly free of them for the past couple of years or so). It makes my whole body heavy and hard work to move, as if the world is treacle that I have to push myself through. It gives me exhaustion headaches that work their way down my neck to my shoulders and back, and knot up all the muscles. They can last for a day or more, through the night, even waking me up in the middle of it (there’s nothing more annoying than being woken out of a deep sleep by an exhaustion headache). I ache randomly, or tingle all over. Sometimes I feel dizzy and weak, or tremble. Sometimes, my heart will beat weirdly, or I’ll get random chest pains (it hasn’t got that bad lately, thank goodness).

The worst part for me are the mental impacts (I tend to be able to push through the physical stuff, at least as far as being productive and writing goes). My short-term memory is the first to suffer (I wind up writing a lot of notes to myself). My mood can be affected: when I’m around people, I can get silly and irreverent (I’m hilarious when I’m exhausted), and I’m generally more emotionally reactive to things when I’m tired. My attention span suffers, thoughts bouncing from subject to subject. It’s probably related to the memory issue, as I attempt to check that I haven’t forgotten anything important. Usually, I am most productive when I multi-task and bouncing between things works well for me, but when I’m exhausted, my work becomes fragmented and I struggle to focus well on anything. It’s an effort to finish things (I’ll probably save the draft of this post and wander off several times before getting close to finishing it).

It also becomes hard to be creative. I’ll want to, but getting into that zone is much harder. Right now, summoning up the energy to create the right mood and produce good words is just beyond me. I could force it if I had to, but that never goes well. Some days, it’s borderline and if I push myself, I can do it and it’s fine. Lately, most days, it’s just not going to happen. It’s hard to explain it. Sometimes it’s just the wrong mood for me (trying to do a high-energy scene like the current space battles is particularly challenging), and other times I just don’t have the mental space. It gets hard to step away from the distractions of my life; my brain bounces too often back to real-world stuff and I lose the train of what I was writing.

I’ve heard writing fiction as renting space in your readers’ brains. Well, first you need to create that space in your own brain, build it up and live it in, before you can push it out to the world. With CFS playing up, it’s lucky if I have a shoebox in there to spare, and having a cluttered life brings it down to a coffee tin.

Life with CFS is a game of weathering the ups and downs of your energy. It’s about balancing what I want to do today with how much it will cost me over the next several days. For those who’ve heard of it, the spoons metaphor is an apt one. Lately, there have been more downs than ups, and my general energy level has been low. I’ve had less spoons to play with.

I’ve had chronic conditions my whole life, and I hate when they restrict what I can do so much that they rule my life. We all have things that we have to deal with and work around every day, to do what we want and need to do. That’s fine. But I despise when the condition tries to take over and takes away my ability to live my life.

Let me be clear about one thing: I’m not depressed about it. I have never been depressed about it, even when I can barely get off the couch or stand up without going dizzy. Even when I’m so tired that I can barely think straight and it’s all I can do to put one foot in front of the other to get to the nearest bed/couch/chair. Even when I hurt so much I want to cry but don’t because my headache is bad enough, thanks very much.

I’m annoyed and frustrated. I work hard to support my family and make myself a comfortable place to lay my bones down at the end of the day. I’ve got dreams that I fight to work towards. I don’t need this shit making it all harder, and yet here it is. I take a break to try to catch my breath, but it’s not enough any more. I never truly get back up on my feet before I slide down again.

This is where the spiral comes in, and this is the part that frustrates me the most. I do less to try to rest up, but can never reach that previous level of energy, so try doing less again, and then less some more, until I wind up scraping by, sacrificing everything but the bare minimum of what I need to do to earn a living and eat. I’m not there yet, but I have been down that slope before and I don’t want to be there again.

It’s true that I’m doing more these days. I’m pushing myself harder and reaching for more things. I have a lot of balls in the air, juggling like crazy. Maybe I have finally reached that level of ‘too much’ and I need to cut back – okay, I’ll do that. Maybe it is time for something to give. But lately, I have cut back on everything, even wound up taking sick days off work to rest up because I simply couldn’t function well enough to be at work, and it’s still not enough.

Truth is, maybe I’m a little scared, too. I don’t want to lose everything I’ve worked so hard for over the past five years, building the life I have here in Australia. The friends I spend time with, the writing I do, the communities I’m involved with, the events I organise… I love it all, but all of it together is too much right now.

I think it’s time for a change. Nothing major – certainly not as drastic as shifting country – but it’s time to look hard at the factors in my life and see what I can change to make it work. It’s probably time to go back to the CFS specialist I was seeing for a while (though I’m not sure I can afford that at the moment). I need to re-evaluate the priorities of the things around me, and figure out how to do what I want to do in my heart. It’s hard, because I want to do everything, but sometimes reality just gets in the way.

I’m still slipping down this spiral and I don’t know the answer yet. But I’m damned if I’m going to let it swallow up all the good things in my life. Time to change the tempo and see if I can’t hammer my life into the shape I want it to be, one way or another.

Wish me luck. It’s probably going to get harder before it gets better.

Frazzled

Brain kerblooey.
Picture by karindalziel

I was going to write this post at the end of last week, but wound up too frazzled to. Plus, I had a fun announcement that I wanted to make, and let’s face it, we’d all much rather read something like that, right?

But I want this blog to be about my writing journey, and a part of that is talking about the stuff that makes writing hard.

Right now, my health is rearing its ugly head again and playing havoc with my ability to write. My energy is fraying and I’m struggling to get writing done on my usual commute to and from work. Sometimes I just need to nap; other times my brain just can’t cope with trying to be creative or even reading text. I often write posts for this blog on the train (once my weekly Starwalker is done), and that’s a struggle sometimes, too.

Part of it is most likely caused by the amount of things I have going on right now. There’s the Writer’s Asylum to organise (taking more steps in this all the time!), and the Writer’s Retreat is ticking along in the background too (which I have to chase up soon). I’m currently scoping out costs so I can put together a crowdfunding campaign to get Starwalker published over the next year or so.

Then there’s the non-CFS health stuff that is getting in the way. I’m in (albeit mild) pain and discomfort at random times most days, and that is wearing me down, too. I’ve got some exploratory tests coming up to track down the cause (and investigate a dodgy diagnosis I had about 8 years ago). They’re going to put me out for the tests, which I’m not looking forward to (I have an unhappy relationship with anaesthetics and have no idea how I’ll react to being knocked out completely), and that plays on my mind from time to time.

I’ll be very glad once the next couple of weeks are over, because the tests will be done and I’ll hopefully have some information to move forward with.

In all of that, I’m entering the final chapter of Starwalker’s initial story. I have the pieces I want to play with in mind, but I’m still juggling the logistics of the chapter and I’m not entirely sure how it’s all going to pan out. I want to do the story justice. I want to upset the apple-cart. I want my readers to hold on for the ride and be grinning (and maybe crying?) at the end. I kind of want to write the entire end before I start posting it – to make sure I get it right – but that’s not how my web serial works. Nope, I’m going to just dive in and swim along, and see where it takes me. No retcons; I hate retcons.

I’ve had chronic conditions for a long time. I’m used to pushing through and refusing to let it stop me living my life. It’s getting harder to keep doing that, but I’m not going to stop yet. If I put my life on hold for this, when would I get it back, y’know? Damned if I’ll let it stop me being me.

There’s a lot going on in my head right now. I’m trying to keep up but it’s taking its toll. Wish me luck, and hopefully I’ll catch the upswing again soon.

Pictorially relevant

So, I’ve been thinking about how to spread my words a bit more. Reach new eyes (and through them, minds), build that ‘author brand’ thing, extend my online presence. I’m trying to keep up with a few blogs. I’m commenting on places. I’m even looking sideways at Tumblr and wondering if Tumbling is something I want to do (online).

Self-marketing is tricky for me, partly because I suck at it (I don’t talk myself up well), and partly because I just don’t have a lot of time to play with. I work full time and my online time outside of work is pretty limited, either due to writing or because I’m so drained that I just want to sit down and play a game until it’s time to sleep. My ability to pay attention to a community, forum, or blog is variable at best, and wildly sporadic most of the time.

I’m trying to get better at it. I’m also trying to put more stuff up here, both regularly and of a wider scope, so that it might be of interest to those of you who drop by. I’ve tidied up the site a little bit, too, removing dead links and other stuff that no longer worked. I’m not quite ready to change the theme (I still love this one), but small changes are good too.

I’ve also been pondering the text-only nature of my posts. Visually, they’re not all that much to look at (though I strive for ‘easy to read’). Pictures tend to attract attention and help make it look nicer, so maybe I should do that?

Now I feel like the Riddler.
Photo by Oberazzi

It’s a bit of a quandry, because finding relevant pictures for every post takes time, which only adds to the admin around putting stuff up on this blog. Do I want to increase my overhead? Is it worth it? Oh look, here are a pair of awesomely appropriate cufflinks.

I added pictures to the previous couple of posts, too. I kinda like how they look. I have no idea if I can keep this up, though.

So what do people think? Will this help? Is it nifty and awesome, or a waste of time?

Back on the horse

It has been a long, hard year. Health up and down (mostly down), financial worries, work headaches, more stress than I care to tally up… but we’re almost to the end of it now. I have to say: I’m glad. I’m ready for a fresh start.

The relief shows. Here I am, writing on this blog again after two months’ absence. Apologies, faithful readers; I didn’t mean to go away. I am striving to be back, to write more, to ponder more, and to grab some of that energy back in my wording, even if I don’t always feel it in myself.

I started by writing up the amazing journey that was this year’s NaNoWriMo; you may have noticed Part 1 go up a couple of days ago. There are 4 parts in total! Yes, there was that much to say about it. I’m spreading them out a little bit, to give myself time to edit them properly and so I have time to write other stuff too.

One thing I’ve been pondering a bit lately is the way that ideas work when I put projects together. This is partly because I’m attempting to get the robot brothel story set up and ready to start writing, and it’s fighting me a bit. So there might be a post (or ten, who knows) come out of all that.

As part of a discussion with some writer friends on ideas, I was quoted in a blog post! How cool is that? I feel accomplished. I feel like I have Things To Say and people who are willing to listen to me.

Also, it’s nearly the weekend (hooray for Friday!), and Christmas is soon, and it’s all good. Right now, it’s all good.

🙂

(Of course, the world is supposed to end today – whoops, nearly forgot about that. But at least I’m ending on a high note!)

Rejuvenation

A few weeks ago, I took a little time off work. When you book vacation time, people always ask ‘where are you going?’. My answer was the same as usual: ‘nowhere in particular’. I haven’t been away on holiday in a very long time; the last time I did anything like that, it was a one-way trip to Australia.

No, I just wanted a break. I’ve posted several times about how stressful the past year or so has been for me. My day job has been a big factor in that. I have a tendency to care about my work and, honestly, that’s not a healthy attitude. Stepping back and letting go is hard for me.

So I took a break. A week away from the office and the job and everything that makes up that part of my life. I spent time at home. I played games. I opened my mind to other projects and ideas, because I had time and space to let them in. I sorted out the terrifying Writer’s Retreat. I caught up with friends and let my hair down.

It was fantastic. It was what I needed. It wasn’t the rest I got (I wound up doing so much that I got little physical rest at all, and the first night’s bad sleep undid all that anyway); it was the mental side that made the difference. I was able to catch my breath and truly relax.

Now, weeks later, I’m still feeling it. I started posting on this blog again, and thinking about other projects. (I’m trying to keep up the momentum on this blog, but as always, results may vary.) I’ve got ideas crawling out of the woodwork and waving at me. I signed up to write for a couple of anthologies. I’ve started writing Starwalker shorts. I’m getting stuff done.

I feel like my focus has shifted, but in a good way. I even got the urge to write while I was at work the other day, because I was itching to get an idea down, and that’s something I haven’t done in a very long time. It’s a good sign. My attention is shifting towards where my heart has always been: my creative writing.

They say a change is as good as a rest. I completely agree. Now excuse me, I have something to go write.

Pushing on

As I recently splurged all over this blog about, writing has been a bit of a struggle lately. I haven’t been able to plan and smooth things out as much as I like to, and the write-and-post fervour of getting Starwalker up each week has been a challenge to push through sometimes.

Part of what I love about web serial writing is the discipline of it: it would be easy to let myself slip and slip and wind up not writing at all. Also, I’m stubborn, and not going to let the fact that it’s hard stop me from doing it. If that was the case, I never would have started in the first place.

I’ve got a long history of pushing through the things that try to hold me back. I’ve had many reasons to give up in the past, all health-related. I’ve had arthritis and other joint issues my whole life, and I could have let it stop me from doing all kinds of things. Sports, trips, playing in the snow. I was a district high jump champion when I was 13. I’ve been skiing (I sucked at it, but I went!). I learned karate at uni. The issues were always there, but I dealt with them.

Nowadays, my biggest challenge is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I could have let it stop me doing all kinds of things: things around the house; going out; working. I could have let it stop me writing. I’ve had to make many compromises to live with this condition – and I still do, every day – but I’m stubborn too. I manage it. I work around it. Sometimes, I accept my failings and flagging energy, and I have to deal with that, too.

But I refuse to let it be an excuse. If I had, I never would have succeeded with the Apocalypse Blog and written a post every day for a year. I wound up writing three novels that year while working full time and doing everything else that fills up my time. (Sometimes, I still wonder how I pulled it off!)

If I had let CFS be an excuse, I wouldn’t be writing my current web serial either. It is a struggle, every week, to get the posts out at the moment. It’s harder work than I like. But I push on.

I still love it. It still works, even when I don’t think it will. I’m mentally drained this week, and I only had a vague idea of what I wanted the post to be about the day before I was due to start writing it, so I was facing this week’s writing with a note of despair. Then, just before I went to bed, an idea popped into my head. It was one of those lightbulb moments and I knew exactly what the scene needed to be.

It fought me. The two characters talking in the scene don’t rebound off each other well and they took some convincing to play nice. It was a hard conversation, for me and for my main character, but that’s part of the point of it (it’s no fun if it’s easy, after all). And at the end of the scene, Starry turned an unexpected corner. It blossomed out into an unexpected realisation for her, one that fits perfectly with the kind of emotional journey she has been moving through lately. It was more than worth the fight.

Sometimes, things just work. The post ended on the kind of note I wanted, and the ship is swooping in towards the next post, which I can’t wait to get to. (It’s one I’ve had in mind for a while.) I love it when a vague, half-formed plan works itself out right in front of you.

So here I am, pushing forward. I aim high, knowing that I’ll at least achieve some of what I want, maybe even most of it. Aiming for the stars is a good way to fly, even if you only clear mountains.

Featured Post: Plotting a Web Serial

Not-so-recently, I was asked to do a guest post by the lovely Khaalidah, a web serial and indie author. I was greatly flattered and pleased to agree! Recently, I managed to actually put fingers to keyboard and write something.

Thanks for your patience, Khaalidah, and for hosting my guest post. It was fun to write! I managed to get my thoughts about how to write a web serial by the seat of your pants down in text, which is one of those exercises I always find interesting and illuminating for myself. I hope others enjoy reading it!

Go check it out, everyone!

Where I’ve been

2012 has been a rocky year for me so far. One of the most obvious signs of that is the lack of posts on this blog. I keep coming back here and lining up things I want to post about, but finding the time and brain-space to actually post has been out of my reach for much of the time.

I won’t go into detail why. I’ll just summarise and say that my day-job has been very stressful (more so than it ever had before). I don’t deal well with unreasonable expectations, untenable positions, or problems I’m unable to fix. I’m under a certain amount of pressure at home as well (most of it financial and none of it anyone’s fault – life just gets that way sometimes). Couple all of that with CFS (which is made worse by stress, of course), and, well. Let’s just say that it has been a strain to get anything productive done in my ‘spare’ time.

This blog is usually the first thing to fall off my radar when I get busy, as it’s the one I have least commitments to. So, to those of you who read this blog: my apologies, and thanks for your patience. It’s not that I love you least! I’d make more of a commitment to updating here if I thought I was capable of maintaining it!

Sadly, it has also been affecting my current web serial. I’ve missed posts, delayed things, mostly due to health reasons. I despise doing that. Part of what works for my web serial writing is keeping to a schedule, and missing that schedule means I’m letting myself (and my readership – more on that later) down. However, I have to be realistic and recognise that it’s not always possible to keep it up! And I’d rather not put up a shitty post just for the sake of posting.

All the same, I think the quality of the writing has probably suffered. At least a little. It makes me sad to know that (I take a great pride in my work, and I consider the web serial ‘work’, not play). It also makes me look forward to editing Starwalker! (Whenever that may be.)

However, it’s not all dire news. Firstly, I’d like to say that I have the most wonderful readers. They have been nothing but understanding and supportive, despite the amount of ‘sorry guys, there’s gonna be a delay on the next post’ messages I’ve had to put up so far this year. I’ve had so many wonderful comments, letting me know that it’s okay to take the time I need, and even emails offering more support and advice.

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate those messages. You guys are why I write. You make it all worth it!

I work to live and live to write. I push myself to write more and write better because I love it. I have so many ideas, so many things I want to do, so many stories I want to share with the world. Running around in my head right now:

• Starwalker (in progress!).
• Apocalypse Blog shorts (shelved but not forgotten).
• Vampire Electric, the steampunk novel (along with a couple of non-vampire sequels).
• Screw Loose, the robot brothel (the next web serial? Maybe!).
• Starwalker spin-offs (I have a few in mind, including the villain shorts, the story of the Carapace, and something centred on the consciousness of stars).

I can’t wait to get to them all. I can’t wait to share them with everyone. I can only focus on one thing at a time right now (between working full-time and fatigue), but I hope to get to them all eventually.

And then there’s all the other writing stuff I’m involved in. I’m still running my Creative Writing Group every month, and the Monthly Write-ins are where I get a pile of writing done! Planning for NaNoWriMo 2012 started a couple of months ago and is already galloping ahead.

On top of all that, the ebook sales for the Apocalypse Blog are going amazingly well. (I’m hoping to do a post specifically about that; fingers crossed I’ll get to it soon!) I got my first cheque for ebook sales in this week! I can now say that I’m a professional, (self-)published author.

So, yeah, it’s been a hell of a year so far. But I’m just finishing a week’s holiday from work and I’m feeling better. I’ve caught up on a few things (this blog being one of them!). The work of dealing with the stressful parts of my life continues, and they’re being weeded out steadily.

Writing posts like this is usually an interesting exercise for me. I know I’m ambitious with everything I try to do. I know I push myself hard (mostly because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t get anything done; it’s too easy to let CFS be the excuse that stops you from doing or being what you want).

Today, I look at everything here and I think: I’m actually pretty awesome. I’m holding it together and I’m getting there. I’ll come out of the other side of this rocky patch better than before.

Most of all, I’m grateful. For the friends who listen to me whine, who hug me and make me laugh. For the family who love and protect me. For the budding MLs who are helping me with the NaNo stuff this year, and my previous co-MLs. For the readers who enjoy my work, both those who let me know and those who visit silently. For those who spend their money on my work, both through donations and buying ebooks, and help me know that they believe my stories are worth paying for.

You all know who you are. I love you and thank you. I’m lucky to have you in my life.

Time to press onwards. Hopefully you’ll hear from me soon! Be well, everyone, and I’ll try to do the same.

Featured post: New Digital Storytelling

I’ve been featured on a digital writing blog! How cool is that?

New Digital Storytelling is a blog that examines the emerging, developing world of electronic word-art, collecting examples from all over the internet. I’m flattered and happy to be a part of it!

Thanks to Bryan for asking me to contribute. Here’s to hoping I can do more of this going forward.