Have a Pet

The stereotype of writers having cats is a venerable one. This article talks about Dickens, Poe, Walpole, Sir Walter Scott and Harriet Beecher Stowe; here is the cat colony at the Hemingway Museum; Colette, Samuel Johnson, Mark Twain and Robertson Davies were all Cat People, and so am I, but for some reason any work I get done is in spite of Jamie and not because of him. His persistent inability to understand that my lap, though capacious, will not hold both a ten-pound laptop and a fifteen-pound cat is one reason.

Today, I took him in for an abdominal ultrasound, in an attempt to pinpoint the cause of the puking hobby he started up this summer. He's diabetic, so they've been pretty much assuming pancreatitis, but a cat with pancreatitis who barfs between two and five times a week for three months would be in much worse shape than Jamie, who is fat and lustrous and actually managed to gain a quarter-pound since the last time we were at the vet a month ago.

My personal opinion is that Jamie has grown to understand conversations about money, and is using this secret skill to torture me. "My, my," he thinks. "A wide-screen TV? Graduate study abroad? A down payment on an apartment?! I'd better get to work on that extra money they seem to have lying around." So he throws a $500 veterinary emergency, and home electronics are forgotten for another fiscal quarter.

Through rigorous monitoring of his diet, we've come close to eradicating this summer's problem. I will have to have a serious talk with him though; the victims of Hurricane Katrina will need my extra money a lot more than he will for the foreseeable future. The Red Cross for the human animals, Noah's Wish for the rest -- get out your checkbooks if you haven't already.

I must say this blog has already proved its worth in the matter of keeping tabs on myself. It would have been really easy not to work on my novel last night -- who am I kidding; it's always really easy not to work on my novel -- but the thought that my mom and the other two people reading this will think I'm a complete loser if I don't get up that word count carried the day.

Word Count: 24,765 (+1,191)

Stare at a Blank Screen

One of the biggest mistakes I consistently make is to try to sit down and type words directly from my head into the computer (you might recognize this activity as that which normal people call "writing"). Generally, for first-draft fiction, I dictate into a microcassette recorder; this allows me to get the words from my brain into a neutral holding facility without allowing me to second-guess them until later, when I'm transcribing. Otherwise, I'll no sooner type a subordinate phrase without wondering if it communicates anything, if it communicates too much, if it moves the story forward, if it reveals character, if there's any point to the whole exercise, and if I shouldn't just give the whole thing up and start watching Fear Factor in my newly spare time. Result: gridlock.

Last night, due to peevishness and sloth, I dictated 486 words instead of my usual thousand and change. I thought, in the naivete to which I so desperately cling, that when I got to the transcription stage I would become inspired and meet my thousand-word goal. It goes without saying that I was wrong about this. I extracted another thirty words as though I was paying cash for them, and called it quits.

Word Count: 23,560 (+516)

Start a Blog

Because nothing says "I'm committed to my novel" like committing to something completely different.

My name is Kathy Monahan, and my novel is called The Amateurs. It's my seventh "first" novel, the other six being The Chaste Planet, The Secret of Pyewacket Island, The Odd Collective and Untitled #1, #2 and #3. The others were aborted somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 words, but this one, I'm going to finish. Really. Oh, come on! What are you shaking your head like that for?

Since I have such a distinguished history of slacking off on my fiction writing, I conceived of this blog as a way to keep tabs on myself, to document the evolution of my particular style and process, to bitch comprehensively about whatever is going wrong and, hopefully, to be of use to other writers who are experiencing the same thing.

Today, Monday, August 29, The Amateurs consists of 23,044 words of first-draft composition. Whenever that changes, which ought to be somewhere between two and five times a week, I'll post the new word count along with whatever thoughts I have on the process. And occasionally, when Daily Life or the World Out There intervene interestingly enough to make them worth writing about, I'll do that too.

So that's it -- on with the show!