Write what you know

    I sit here a  changed person.
   Not even five minutes ago, I stood in the backyard of the farm I live at.  Technically it's an urban farm on a tenth of an acre, but I digress.
   We have ten chickens, three ducks (Two of which are laying possibly fertile eggs, so ducklings may be on the way.), and now four goats.  Our Nigerian Dwarf just gave birth to two frakkin' adorable female kids.
   From the beginning I intentionally kept my distance.
   See, I'm the guy that kills stuff.  A duck and eleven rabbits to date.  Some of you may realize how odd it feels to be able to write that.  You will also understand why the moment I saw those two adorable little shits, I shut down.  I shut the fuck down.
   I can't even go into pet stores.
   I knew I had to keep my detachment.  Who knew what the future held for these two?  Sold?  Kept?  Processed?  Processed by me?
   Could I even do that?
   Before today I would have said yes.  Now... I honestly can't answer that question.  The entire reason we have the goats is for one reason.  Milk.  Now that the goat (Pebbles, just FYI.  And her kids are Easter and Lilly.  I call Lilly Le Leche, because her coloring makes her face look like she is a little Luchadore.) is producing said white gold, we had to separate her from the kids.  For about twenty-four hours now we have been trying to bottle-feed the girls.  A-a-a-a-and the stubborn little shits weren't having it.
   Until tonight.  For the first time the little ones ate.  Not just an ounce or two, but a good meal.  An I-can-feel-it-in-their-bellies good.  And I was part of it.  I have processed animals, and now I am part of helping new life to survive.  While Brandi held the girls on her lap (First Lilly, aka the stubbornest little bugger, then Easter, and Lilly again for a second helping WOOT WOOT!) I ran my hand down their chests and could feel them calming under my hand.
   So, I tried to keep my distance, but, yeah... kinda fucked that one up.  It finally dawned on me yesterday just how much work these little ones were going to be, and I knew that there was no way I could do what I needed to do and retain that distance.  So, from their first feeding I was there, helping to get them used to my scent.
   Tonight under the light of a head-lamp and a three cell Maglite (A big torch for my UK hommies.) I helped ease the anxiety of two babies so they could eat.  And eat they did.  Because as Weird Al once wrote...
   Girls just wanna have luuuuuunch
   Holy crap once they got going, the littles started chugging it like first year university students.
   Write what you know is one of the most contested bits of writing advice.  I think the best understanding of it came from author Chuck Wendig.  For the sake of brevity I will sum up, but I highly recommend you read it.
   Write what you know is really not meant to be taken literally.  Joss Whedon does not know what its like to a teenage-girl, vampire slayer.  Jim Butcher does not know what it's like to be a wizard private detective (Or so he would like us to believe.).  So the obvious idea is to know more things aka go O-U-T and learn shit.  Experience thing, live life.  Participate as 'Perks' so succinctly put it.
   Watching Easter and Lilly feed was one of the most beautiful moments of my life.  I never would have experienced that hiding in my room.  Get out.  Get up, get out of your room and do things.  It's a damn sight better than staring at the walls going insane.  Seeing something like that is healing in a way I have no words to describe.
   I can't wait to start writing.
   Speaking of which...

Deep Cuts

   I've been trying to decided where to pick things up again on this blog.  Over the last few months there have been a lot of changes in my life.  Moving to another state, adjusting to living with new people.  And if I tried to encompass all the new stuff I've learned since December this would be an encyclopedia not a blog (That old adage 'Write What You Know' makes much more sense to me now, but more on that later.).  But one subject in particular has been weighing on my mind.

   This last November I participated in NaNoWriMo for the first time.  I didn't think I would hit the goal of 50K words, but damned if I wasn't going to give it my best.

   Plunking my ass down in front of the HAL (My laptop, don't ask.) I ended up cranking out over 20K words and adding three chapters to my book.  For me this was a huge deal.  As of late I had been lucky to put out a chapter a month, much less three.  I also hit a point where on a few occasions I spit out around 3K words a day.

   And the work was good.  My Alpha reader dug the new material, and in an even rarer event I was happy with it.  Being a writer I often think a meth-addled Howler Monkey would do a better job, so being satisfied with my own work was a treat.

   After moving back to Arizona, I sat down with my editor and we finally discussed what I had been eagerly waiting for.

   The first thing she told me was the new material had to go.

   This was not the response I had expected.

   It wasn't that she said, "It's crap, cut it." or told me the material had to go and left it at that.  She liked what was there, the problem was that it did not work.  She saw right through what I was trying to do in those chapters and pointed out why it didn't work.  The material itself, though good, was transparent and obvious.

   Fortunately I went into this with the mindset of rewrites make the world go 'round.  To my greater fortune my editor did not leave me hanging, but pointed me in the right direction with how she thought the scene might go.

   Even with the mentality of 'rewrites good' it was more than a bit of a struggle.  Characters that had died were now alive, and the entire timeline of my story now ceased to exist.  I think the biggest hurdle though was getting over the NaNoWriMo thing.  I had not truly expected to hit 50K, so getting as close as I did, I was awfully damn proud of myself.

   A habit I have yet to break myself of (And from what I've read online, one I share with many others.) is seeing someone else's daily word count and feeling bad that my own is nowhere near it.  Of the authors I follow on various social media sites, the lowest daily word count I saw was 1K.  Some were hitting 5-10K.

  Putting out over three thousands words on my own, and doing over 20K in one month made me feel for a time that I really had what it took to be an author.  My own word counts were still nowhere near those numbers, but like seeing a difference in your body after busting your ass working out, I felt that I was on my way.

   Easy as it would have been to dismiss my editor's opinion (Much, much, much easier.) it also would have been fucking stupid (Very, very, very, fucking stupid.).  I didn't ask her to be my editor to dismiss what she had to say.  So I forced myself to start thinking in new directions and one word, one paragraph at a time, moved forward.

   It has taken me nearly three months to get back to where I was before the cut and I am happy to say that while I still maintain the old work was good; the new material is much better.  Even my Alpha reader who liked the old stuff, has told me how much he enjoys where it is going now, and how much of an improvement he has seen in the book itself.

   I'm going places with the story that never would have occurred to me otherwise.  And while I had to cut over 20K words, not all of it went to waste.  I at least had the sense to save everything I cut (For my fellow newbs out there, a good piece of advice is NEVER just delete what you cut.  Make another file and save it, you never know when it may be used or in what way.).  It was usually a sentence here or paragraph there, but I found myself dipping into that material on several occasions and it not only saved me time, but made it feel like less of a waste.

   In the end the book is better for this deep cut, and I (As a writer.) am better for it as well.  I've experienced other rewrite moments, ones that seemed much larger than they really were at the time, but none as visceral as this one ended up being.  Author Jim Butcher once wrote in his blog that it was much easier to cut 20K words than to add 20K.  I now know this to be true.  Cutting that material felt like I had been set back months and the road in front of me now seemed much longer.

   But if you are lucky enough to have a good editor (Or in my case lucky enough to have good enough friend/editor.), you will at least have someone there to walk that road with you, and thwap you upside the head when you try to make a wrong turn.