The Golden Hour

The Obliteration Room by Yayoi Kusama

Way back in 2011, when Paolo Bacigalupi was my pro at ArmadilloCon, I mentioned that I was worried about keeping up with my blog. He said, "Don't worry about your blog, you're a writer not a blogger, right?" This is seriously good advice, and it’s only taken me four years to begin following it.

I have had a productive spring, and find myself with over a dozen stories in submission – more than ever. The more stories I write, the more I value my fiction writing time. That said, I still need a place to park my random musings, so this blog isn’t going away. But, I will be updating less frequently.

THE GOLDEN HOUR

Even letting my blog slide, it’s a daily a struggle to carve out writing time. Anyone who’s tried to fit their creative endeavors around the beautiful chaos that is life knows that some days (or weeks or months) this harder to accomplish than others. When I get busy, I fall back on what I’ve come to think of as my “golden hour.”

In medicine, the term refers to the first hour after a trauma or medical emergency. The theory is that if the patient receives treatment within that hour, their chances of survival are significantly increased. A neglected story is like a casualty laying on the side of the road, vitality ebbing, waiting for the ambulance to come roaring up.

If I get caught up in the day-to-day and ignore my current story for too long, it dies a kind of slow death. When I come back to it, I have to backtrack, retrace my steps, rereading until I can revive it. This is time that would be better spent on the next story. Also, Something important happens when I touch the work daily. A story in progress is a living thing inside my head, and I need to keep the characters, the tone and emotion present.

I’ve found that one hour a day is enough to keep a story vital, present and workable. Luckily, since no lives are actually at stake here, I’m free break this hour up any number of ways. I’ll jump in for 30 minutes in the morning and grab another 30 while my kids watch videos in the afternoon. I’ve done four 15-minute chunks of revising. I plunge into the work quickly and immerse myself for however many minutes I have. 

During busy times, my golden hour is the lifeline that will keep my story alive – one hour at a time. 

Illustration from Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid

BTW: My dark mermaid story, The Gyre, was mentioned on K.Tempest Bradford’s column on io9 alongside two other fantastic stories – one written by the award-winning Ken Liu! So, that is thrilling and an honor!

Order vs. Chaos: Writing a Story a Week

Check out more Order vs. Chaos pictures here!

Order vs. Chaos, the Yin and Yang of creative life. I've always come down on the order side of things. I like revising  at least as much as writing. Around the house I'm a neatnick, which is just another expression of my compulsive need for order and routine. While my family may think my pick-your-shoes-up-and-make-your-beds habits extreme, in the context of previous generations, my standards are pretty lax. I don't wash the inside of the kitchen cupboards like grandma did, nor do I annually take down the curtains and drapes and wash them, and all the windows inside and out, like my mom.

Things have to be in order for me to concentrate.

Here's a story that sums up my family's housekeeping ethos: One day my grandma was visiting my mom and dad (she lived next door). She said she wasn't feeling well and walked across the lawn to her house. When mom checked on her a couple hours later she could see that the house had been cleaned top to bottom.

"I thought you said you weren't feeling well, why did you wear your self out cleaning the house?" my mom asked.

Grandma's answer: "A clean house rests me."

I know exactly what my grandma means by that. But when I'm writing, over and over I get the lesson that I must allow a mess. I know this, but that doesn't make it any easier. The only way to become okay with this is to practice making a mess. That's the biggest lesson so far from my story a week project.

Having a one week deadline, not just this week but every week, made me realize just how much I was revising during the first draft and how it can really screw up the CHAOTIC FLOW of the work. I can see now that whenever I hit a tough spot, I slip into revising as an avoidance measure. You know, I'll just tidy up a couple of these paragraphs or move some things around. Pretty soon all my writing time is gone, and I haven't moved the story forward from where it was the day before. Now, whenever I catch myself reading around and tidying up, I put my cursor back at the bottom of the page and force myself to work on the next scene, or any unwritten scene.

I've written two stories (not finished but ready-for-revision drafts) this month. This week I'm working on my third. Something that was supposed to be a flash story, but is looking like it will come in at about 3,000 words. Today it's still a mess, but that's okay.

Laundry's folded, let's get to work.