Category Archives: Writing

Day 3 – A pic of me and my friends

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I’m the groom in this picture.

On the far left is Mike, seated next to his brother Kevin. Behind them (again from the left) are Jeremy, Olson, and DonSlice.

The bride is Sarah. Seated next to her are Jenny and Melanie. Behind them are Beth, Adrienne, and my sister, Karen.

I don’t have any other pictures on my laptop, and I’m writing this from Starbucks, so I’ll just give a shout-out to everyone else: Denny, Matt, Autumn, Tim, Kate, Dave, Dana, James, Amanda, Joel, Holly, Troy, and anyone I may have forgotten because I haven’t seen you in a while (we should get together sometime). And of course Krista, who I stole these prompts from.

Day 2 – Meaning of the blog name

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When I game, my handle is typically StanManX. In grade school, “Stan” became a communal nickname that I shared with two of my friends (no, I’m not telling the story of how that came about), but in junior high one of those friends bestowed it upon me. “Stanman” was guaranteed to be taken at all websites, so I stole a little from Mega Man X.

Offline, most people call me Stan — friends, coworkers, some of my friends’ parents – so it makes about as much sense as calling it “Matt’s blog” or something.

Day 1 – A recent picture and 15 interesting facts about me

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me and the girls

Aeris, Mikenna, me

Fact #1: I loooove me some brownies.

Fact #2: I have a BA in English, which basically only gets used when my coworkers are arguing about words and they need an official ruling.

Fact #3: I have been playing guitar for over 16 years. I’ve also spent some time on drums, bass, and vocals.

Fact #4: I am currently taking voice lessons from Maria Rose of Maria Rose and the Swiss Kicks.

Fact #5: Final Fantasy XI was the first MMO I played. I quit because it got repetitive, but occasionally I have dreams about signing up again.

Fact #6: Actually, I occasionally dream about doing a lot of stuff that I quit doing, like karate, guitar lessons, or playing in a band.

Fact #7: I get really stressed out at big social gatherings, even if I know and love everyone involved. My heart rate elevates slightly and I start feeling warm. I have found that deep breaths help quite a bit — especially if you follow them up with talking to someone.

Fact #8: I wear glasses because the thought of putting something on my eye gives me the willies. Someday, though, I will try contacts, because I’m really starting to hate glasses.

Fact #9: I have a younger sister.

Fact #10: I like anime. When I was a teenager and pretty obsessed, I couldn’t afford to buy the stuff I was interested in, but thanks to the magic of NetFlix, I can finally enjoy the stuff I wanted to see so bad in 1998.

Fact #11: I like reading, but I don’t read nearly as much as I say I would like to. I’m hoping to remedy that this year.

Fact #12: I hated cats until Sarah brought Aeris home. It was an instant transformation.

Fact #13: Speaking of Sarah, we bonded over discussions of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, a single-player RPG. Now we’re playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, an MMORPG, together.

Fact #14: My senior seminar was a class on James Joyce. No, he doesn’t make any more sense after taking that class. Dude had too much time on his hands. If anyone wants to fund me for 17 years, I’ll bring you the next Finnegans Wake.

Fact #15: I still really want to learn to play the piano someday.

Prompt-stealing

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I’m going to steal some prompts that my friend Krista is writing from this month. Hopefully it will reactivate sections of my brain that seem to have gone dark. Here they are:

Day 01- A recent picture of you and 15 interesting facts about yourself.
Day 02- The meaning behind your blog name.
Day 03- A picture of you and your friends.
Day 04- A habit that you wish you didn’t have.
Day 05- A picture of somewhere you’ve been to.
Day 06- Favorite super hero and why.
Day 07- A picture of someone/something that has the biggest impact on you.
Day 08- Short term goals for this month and why.
Day 09- Something you’re proud of in the past few days.
Day 10- Songs you listen to when you are Happy, Sad, Bored, Hyped, Mad.
Day 11- Another picture of you and your friends.
Day 12- How you found out about blogging and why you made one.
Day 13- A letter to someone who has hurt you recently.
Day 14- A picture of you and your family.
Day 15- Put your iPod on shuffle: First 10 songs that play.
Day 16- Another picture of yourself.
Day 17- Someone you would want to switch lives with for one day and why.
Day 18- Plans/dreams/goals you have.
Day 19- Nicknames you have; why do you have them.
Day 20- Someone you see yourself marrying/being with in the future.
Day 21- A picture of something that makes you happy.
Day 22- What makes you different from everyone else.
Day 23- Something you crave a lot.
Day 24- A letter to your parents.
Day 25- What I would find in your bag.
Day 26- What you think about your friends.
Day 27- Why are you doing this 30 day challenge.
Day 28- A picture of you last year and now, how have you changed since then?
Day 29- Your favorite song.
Day 30- In this past month, what have you learned.

Good Storytelling Requires Effort

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Resurrecting a blog at the beginning of NaNoWriMo was probably not the best decision I’ve ever made.

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that this might be my last year doing NaNo. I’m at the point in the month where I’m frustrated and insisting that “This is it!” and after this month I’ll be done forever, and I want to capture some of my thoughts so I can evaluate them and see whether they’re legitimate, or if I’m just whining.

I spent a good six weeks creating characters and coming up with a rough plot. I did a moderate amount of world-building. November 1 was tough; it took a few days to hit my stride, and I did so by treating each segment of the novel as its own short story, which I could theoretically stitch together later. Though I was getting further and further behind the target wordcount, I was happy with what I was writing.

Then I hit The Middle.

At least one other person I know has experienced this phenomenon. The beginning? Easy. The end? It’s all in the notes! Now, let’s put them together…

Uhhh…. what?

It’s the same kind of indecision you face when you’re trying to pick out a quart of ice cream. There are so many flavors! They are all ice cream! Ahhh!

It didn’t help that I went to a multi-region writing marathon and wrote 4,000 rambling words for the sole purpose of getting caught up (you know, the thing I said I wouldn’t do!). The random ideas are all getting stuck in the door, and what I need now is a good six weeks to sit down and plan out the next section of the novel. Unfortunately, that’s not how NaNo works. If I want to “win” NaNo, I need to bang out thousands of additional words, even if I know that every single one of those additional words exists to be destroyed in the rewrite.

That act, the desperate flailing to build a tower of letter blocks only to knock them down when I do my Godzilla impression, that is what stays with me when the month is over. I don’t remember that I was genuinely excited about the project I was starting, I only remember that all writing is futile and a waste of time.

So, I’m reining it in. Taking it slow. Falling ridiculously far behind once more. One of my throwaway characters proved to be really interesting, so I want to take the time to explore what’s going on from his perspective while my heroes are out gallivanting. Even if it doesn’t make the final cut, it’s better than the panic-babble because it builds my world and enables me to keep track of what’s going on off-camera.

And I’m doing my best to have fun with it. For this particular story, I don’t aspire to publication. It’s purely for fun. I’m seeing how well I can handle science fiction in the hope that it will help me when I try to fix one of the fantasy novels I wrote and abandoned… or write a better one. Or maybe it won’t help and I’ll end up with a pretty okay story that gets buried on my hard drive. Whatever. But I want to do it on my terms, so if that means I won’t hit 50,000 words this year, I don’t care.

The purpose of NaNoWriMo is to get people to quit wishing they had more time and to start writing. They have succeeded in getting me moving again, but I don’t think the format is ideal for me. If I continue to participate, I’ll proudly be one of those people who signs up, gets to 20,000 words, and then disappears, dragging the region’s average down.

November 1, Round 4

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This will be my fourth year participating in National Novel Writing Month. I “won” in 2008 and 2009 — I reached 50,000 words — but bombed out pretty early in 2010. The first time was awesome because it gave me a huge self-esteem boost. I wrote 50,000 freaking words in one month, despite having a full-time job, a wife, Thanksgiving with the relatives, and whatever other excuses I was using to not engage in creative activity back in 2008. I felt like I could do anything.

A few months later, I went to edit that novel and realized that if I wanted it to work, the whole world would have to be rebuilt from scratch. I opted to leave it alone and started playing around with other ideas. I won NaNo again in 2009 with a different story, which felt a lot less ridiculous than the first one, but there was so much excess garbage in it that I never bothered to try and clean it up.

See, one of the downsides to NaNo is that, in the name of reaching word goals, it is very easy to engage in shoddy writing. I don’t mean things like focused freewriting in order to feel out where the characters want to go. I’m talking about crap like naming your character “That One Guy Who Has The Dark Hair And Who Might Be Gay, Please Figure This Out For Draft Two” or writing unrelated nonsense that will be excised on December 1. After NaNo 2009, writing just became difficult for me because I had polluted my style so much that I hated everything I wrote. I didn’t do much writing in 2010.

When November 2010 rolled around, I hadn’t done any planning. I figured, what the hey, I was good at BSing my way through a story. After typing “Screw this, THE END” for the fifth time, I decided it wasn’t worth it to try and finish.

This year, I’m taking a different approach. Rather than just thinking about a story ahead of time, I’ve done actual work. Characters, setting, back story, all kinds of stuff is done in advance. I have a rough plot outlined, though I won’t be upset if I deviate from it. I have also sworn not to deliberately write anything that I’m going to cut. That means my characters all have names and if I get stuck on a particular plot point, whatever un-sticking trick I use will leave me with words that will benefit me in the rewrite (i.e. I may switch to a different character’s viewpoint to figure out what is going on behind the scenes while I sort out what my viewpoint character is going to do next). I’m not going to do things that are going to create even more work for me when it comes time to revise.

We’ll see how this goes. This might be the last year I do it. It was good for me in 2008, but every year since then it has been a speed bump on an otherwise productive road. Speed bump? Maybe a pot hole. One time I hit a pot hole and got a flat tire. However, if I don’t let it be a pot hole, I bet it could provide quite a boost. As I said, we’ll see.