Status Update #3

I have a cranky editor demanding my first draft.

"Reading! What are you doing reading? You should be writing!"

Today is the 30th.

I have been writing nonstop for 30 days.

No, I'm not quite done yet. I am a third of the way through my first edit. After that I'll need another polish.

This writing a book business, it ain't easy. So many things to think about.

Books

One thing about being a bum and living at home is all the books you get to read.

Reading is cool. Especially if you’re a writer. I’m amazed at how many ideas are in every book. Polished. Finished. Sold. It’s like a copywriter’s whole portfolio.

I’ve read five books in the last month. That’s more than I usually read in a year. It’s so good for my writing: I should actually keep this a secret. And if I were not about to write a book myself, I would.

Sea Monsters

We had heard of these giant creatures lurking under still water, circling and thriving in a cove near Donsol. Their legend had spread, in hushed whispers, to ears pricked for mystery as far as Canada.

My brother flew into Hong Kong from Vancouver. We caught a plane to Legaspi first thing the next morning.

Legaspi is the way a child pictures paradise: Clear blue skies with puffy white clouds, green palm trees and a perfectly conical volcano in the background with an omnipresent single soft plume of grey smoke. The whole town is surrounded by bubbly chocolate hills.

The next thing we knew we were bombing through the jungle in a van with a wild-eyed driver. The sun was beating down. The vegetation was lush and overgrown. The road was smooth and curvy and the locals had rice in tarps lain out on patches right there on the asphalt in front of us. We had to serve to miss them as we swung down the road to this sleepy little town. Here we would come face-to-face with the biggest sharks to ever swim the sea: The Butanding.

Jumping on a catamaran we set out to the open water with a guide and spotter at the helm. The wind billowed in our hair and the hot sun caked our backs. The ocean was still, but our spirits were soaring.

Soon, we spotted something: A huge dark shadow just under the surface. We piled to the side and circled round. And with masks strapped to our faces, snorkels in our teeth, and our hearts beating madly we plunged into the deep sea after the creature.

Bubbles. Thrashing. Someone screamed, “Over here.” And we plunged our heads deeper.

All was darkness. And bleak, until we turned in the crystalline murk to behold: An enormous shark mouth, only a few feet away, closing in on us.

The monster was massive. At least 20 feet long, with a maw the size of boat, a guillotine fin slicing the surface and massive gills on its neck that could suck up the whole sea.

It’s a good thing for us, the Butanding, or whale sharks, have no appetite for humans.

We swam with these gentle giants for minutes on end. Filming them, watching them, and they watched us back. And then they’d dive deep and we’d go back to the boat.

We swam with about a dozen sharks that day, never quite sure who was watching whom.

We spent the rest of the afternoon lounging in Donsol and then booked it back to Legaspi where we spent the night under the eerie clouds and a single gray plume of smoke from the sleeping volcano.

A Simple Solution

Okay.

Yesterday I was confused.

I was so caught up in target markets and reactions, that I completely missed the point.

When deciding what to edit out and what to expand upon, the answer is obvious.

It’s whatever I think is interesting.

Simple. If I like it, it stays, if not, it goes.

I Edited It

I’m in the editing stage now.

Trying to give this thing some cohesion.

There are so many things to think about when you’re editing a book.

What do you expand upon, what do you not?

How do you keep readers hooked?

Keeping readers hooked, is that always a good thing?

Of course it is. No it isn’t. Hmm.

Internet Cafes

Maria and I have to share a laptop, which means I end up doing a lot of writing in this Internet cafe.

There is always Canto-pop blaring in these places. I blast The Misfits or Ministry and write in the din.

Sometimes all this mania, it gets me going and I'm productive as hell.

Today, for instance, I wrote like crazy. I've gone to the end of my story and now I'm back at the beginning writing forward.

But sometimes these places are just too noisy, even for me. Around 3:30 all the school kids pile in and scream and yell.

That's too much for our poor writer, so I have to go back home and get started all over again.

All Work and No Play

I’m a little bit worried that this pace is going to be the end of me.

I’ve been writing like mad: 50 chapters in the last three weeks. Not to mention all the freelance that has been pouring in. (Yes, yes, short chapters, 3-4 pages, but still.)

All I do is write. I write every night until five or six a.m. And I run in the park. That is my life.

Writing. Writing. Writing. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter.

Fiction vs Non-fiction

I’m writing a story loosely based on my own adventures. This means that I am somewhat bound by things like um, historical accuracy.

While it may be much easier to write non-fiction in the sense that you already have the story all figured out for you. It is much more difficult in the sense that you have your hands tied by reality. Damn you, reality!

The Magnificent Mundane

Years ago I had conversation about advertising with one of my friends. I thought it was a great way to write all day, hone your skills and get paid for it. His concern was that you’d only learn how to make ads and it wouldn’t help your overall writing.

Years later, I disagree. One thing you learn in copywriting is how to make the everyday, unexceptional things around you seem extraordinarily interesting.

This is a good skill for a writer, I figure (I hope).



Justin, Brian's brother, send me this one.

What’s That in the Background?

I bought the new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album the other day. Fantastic writing. It’s my theme music at the moment: that and the new Portishead and some old Exploited.

Their Game. His Rules.

We just had the first typhoon of the year.

I went out for a run in Victoria Park and the cops watched me like I was crazy. The black rain was blinding and the track was slick and wet and shin-deep in places.

I did a lot of writing last night. Today, notsomuch.

Infernal Novels

I’ve hit a rut.

I'm pacing the rooftops of Hong Kong at midnight on a Friday because I've hit a rut.

At first, it was simple. I just wrote out the story as it happened: Chapter by chapter.

Now, I need to figure out a way to string it together.

I need to turn a book of short stories into a novel.

The easy part is getting the first draft down. I have a feeling making this coherent and seamless in the second draft might be a little tricky. Hmm.

Back to the roof.

Yes Ah

After a few days and nights of feverish writing, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I just went outside to check out the Lion Dance on Paterson Guy. What a crazy city this is sometimes.

Status Update #2

The sun is shining after four months of smog. So it's tough to get going today.

Either way, I think I'm roughly halfway though the first draft.

After that, a couple rounds of polish, and then, it's time to find a publisher.

Bing!

I have insomnia.

I never sleep well.

It’s 4 a.m. now.

At least when you’re toiling from your own little shoebox, you don’t need to wake up in the morning.

New Way? What’s This About a New Way?

Kerouac has a quote, maybe his most famous quote:

“First thought, best thought.”

The idea is that you don’t edit your writing as you go along, you just tap in and flow.

That, I think is cool. I like the flow, and the stream of consciousness. Without going all Jungian, I think there’s something collectively cosmic there.

But still…

I’ve completely changed the way in which I write.

After years of copywriting, I see editing as an absolute necessity.

Advertising is all about the details, and months upon months of revisions.

It’s a crazy business.

Either way, what it’s taught me is that editing is crucial to get a solid, concise, single-minded message through.

Going back through my chapters, I can see places where I’m tapped in, and it’s great. Everything else can use a couple of rounds of intense polish and craft.

Freelance Copywriting

I picked up some freelance work, which is great, but now I'm swamped.

I'll need to put the ol' book on hold for a few days while I make rent.

SEO Copywriting

That was fast.

As I mentioned before, SEO copywriting is a hobby of mine.

Through it, I've managed to snag the first four spots on Google for English copywriter in Hong Kong and three on the first page for English copywriter.

So if nothing else, I'm easy to find. I get tons of freelance leads this way.

I'm hoping to have this book finished by May 1st. So I had better get back at it.

English Copywriter in Asia

Here is my new logo courtesy of Maria the Marvelous Mouse.

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

That was a terrible idea. Talk about being paralyzed.

I am going to go back to my original plan. I'll just write, and get tapped in, and let the chips fall where they may.

Then, I'll go back and retro-fit.

I think having structure works wonders with fiction. Non-fiction, it's a nightmare.

The Client has Changed the Brief

Aha! And oh no!

After feverishly writing for the last eight days, I just realized: I need a brief.

It is one thing to write away like a madman, and allow the story to go where it may, and quite another to have some structure, to make it like, you know, readable.

So…I’ve decided to put the ol’ Strategic Planner/Account Guy hat on to figure out how to organize this sucker.

This means I will probably have to rewrite most of what I’ve written, from scratch, again. Argh.

Sure enough, one week from now I’ll probably decide that a brief is stifling and that I was better off with stream-of-consciousness-type beat prose, which is where I was to begin with.

Hmm. It seems the right brain and left brain are back at it.

Either way, a brief can’t hurt. That’s my plan for the day.

Status Update # 1

Right now I am caught up in the spirit of momentum. I have written 20 chapters in the last 6 days. Some of them are incomplete, some of them, I am sure, are nonsense.

This matters not. Flow is key. I will go back to fix and correct afterward.

Between chapters, I am reading Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and Travels by Michael Crichton. I don’t believe there are any two authors who are more contrary in their writing styles.

Miller is all about emotion, and feeling, and the wild rush of being tapped in. He is magic.

Crichton writes like a copywriter. He is methodical and calculating and factual.

My style is somewhere in between. In my prose, there is, and always has been, a mismatched mix of mania and precision.

My Rooftop

There are red tiles spattered
With pink and dark paint
Perfectly set in shoddy gore
And smeared with a sludge of smooth concrete
That always looks wet on the floor.

There are clothes hung out on nylon cords
The kind of stuff no one wears
Across the harbour under a cloak of smog
Kowloon is gasping for air.

Ships sail, cars wind, and buildings sprout up like mould
I sit in the sun and drink whisky drys
Reading Henry Miller
Writing what I’m told.

KAM FUCH, SOGO and FUNG
In big blue block letters are sprayed
Directly across the fluorescent SOGO sign
Here come the Filipino maids…

They fill buckets from the hose
Or take down their clothes
I sit on the broken white lawn chairs.

Behind laundry-less lines
On Paterson Guy
In this putrid pink place
Under harsh UV rays
In my knock-off Chanels
Ah, what the hell,
I can’t think of anywhere better.

Momentum

I was on a pretty good roll there for a while: writing three chapters a day.

But yesterday, I didn't do anything. I wanted to spend some time with my mouse. Now I'm having a hard time getting going again.

Momentum is key, even if it's only a few pages a day.

The Skeleton

The plan is to write the whole thing as fast as humanly possible. Get the bare bones down and then go back and edit.

When I'm rolling, I'm rolling. So when the flow is right, I have to keep it going.

Everything else, I'll fix up in post.