This story was written as part of StoryADay May 2017. It is being posted here as part of our annual StoryFest Showcase. It will soon be available in an audio version via the 999 Words or Less Podcast. Special thanks to author Phil Giunta, for the opening line.

Whatever happens, don’t die. See you Monday.

#

The note was tucked under a button-cover on the instrument panel.

#

The air pressure settled with a hiss. Unlatching my helmet, I wished, as always, that I had got rid of the ‘glamor girl updo’. Next time I’m shaving my head, no matter what the contract says.

The single viewport in the control room was my only window into open space. It had been three weeks and I was ready to drink it in.

But first, the light of the departing shuttle’s engine-burn had to fade. As it did, I squinted against the white-bright glare of the shuttle as it filled my viewport. I turned to watch the last unnatural shadow I would cast for a week creep across the panel behind me. When I turned back, the craft carrying the crew of the Opticorp Satellite Rotel had slid from view.

I was as alone as it is possible for a gal to be, in 2172.

#

Who signs up to be the lone caretaker of a between-bookings space hotel? The same kind of person who used to want to be a lighthouse keeper. A person comfortable in their own skin. A person at ease in their own brain.

People like that—people like me—make other folks uncomfortable.

And so we wall ourselves up in hermitages and lighthouses and libraries. Or we set out to circumnavigate the globe alone on foot, in coracles, dangling in gondolas from balloons, in prop-engined aeroplanes, strapped atop experimental rockets, or tucked inside the planet’s first permanent orbiting hotel.

#

The note was a joke, of course.

In all the PR materials they make it sound like important work: personing the station while it’s empty. In theory I’m all that stands between the company’s massive investment and an unforeseen disaster. The PRers even created a dramatic simulation of my digital double spotting some flaw and heroically correcting it just as the next batch of high-paying tourists pull up at the docking port.

Fake headlines spiraled in: Disaster Averted! Lone Hospitalitynaut Saves Station! Heiress Proves Her Worth!

Oh, didn’t I mention? I’m, like, the most famous person on (sorry ‘off’) planet Earth.
I’m Gaia. Yeah, that Gaia. No other name required, right? Daughter of Alandria Flores, the mega-trillionaire and former President of Pacifica. First quad-parented baby in history. Scrutinized, analyzed, and sometimes-fictionalized every moment of the past 24 years.

I’m good PR, but I almost didn’t get the gig. Alandria was putting some serious pressure on the company to block me, so her assassination couldn’t have come at a better time. For me, I mean. She was in the middle of an election loop, so it wasn’t great for her—on many levels—but when she went up in that column of smoke, at least it meant my dream didn’t have to.

I know. That sounds harsh, right? I imagine some of you have relationships with your various parents that are a little more nourishing than mine. I’ve read novels. I know it happens. I just can’t imagine what that would have been like with Alandria. I mean, let’s be honest. Can we? You knew that face. The set of her jaw. The way she calculated every move ten places further than everyone else? If you were a citizen of Pacifica she probably cared more about your welfare than she did about mine.

I’m not bitter. Just trying to explain how I can be so casual about watching my Primary Parent vaporizing on a livefeed.

Anyway, it worked out for me.

And no, in case you’re wondering, I had nothing to do with it.

But the ‘grieving daughter’ bit did play well for the cameras, and you can’t think that Opticorp hated that.

#

But you probably know all this. You’ve probably seen the documentaries.

So why am I writing this down?

Because it amuses me to think of an alien—either from another region of space, or a human so far into the future that they might as well be—finding this and reading my story, in my words. It’s an exercise in figuring out how I would present myself to someone who doesn’t know who I am.

It’s not an opportunity I’ve ever had. How am I doing?

Plus, I have about 167.5 hours to kill until this caretaker shift is up.

#

Whatever happens, don’t die. See you Monday

#

It’s a joke from the Chief Steward. But it’s a joke in more ways than one, because if anything did go wrong there would be almost nothing I could do, and less time in which to do it.

So why am I really here?

From the company’s point of view: PR.

And from mine? Well, let’s just say I put up with the ‘glamor girl updo’ clause in the contract because of the other clause. The one that says ‘no cameras, no livefeed’ while I’m on board.

#

Sometimes, the Steward told me, the guests take one look out of the offside viewports and that’s all they can handle. They think they’re looking at nothing. They slam the shutters down and spend the rest of the trip with their eyes fixed on Earth—a place they’ve mortgaged themselves to escape, for one expensive week. The vastness of it is too much: too empty or too full; too limitless or too oppressive. They feel too small.

Me? I spend my weeks here looking only outward, into…everything.

And one day soon, when Opticorp’s finished testing their long-range voyager, and are looking for the first woman to travel beyond the reach of human communication, you can guess who’ll be standing on the launch pad, helmet-in-hand, looking up.

###

One of my absolute favourite blogs in the world is WhoDunnKnit by Deadly Knitshade. It is funny, absurdly creative and did I mention funny?

I’m always inspired by the posts because in them I see someone doing what she loves, doing a really professional job, and committing to her art in a way that anyone with a passion would admire.

I’ve been subscribed for a while now, but today I finally read the ‘about’ page on the blog.

Read The Rest At StoryADay.org – and please comment, if you have an answer to the question I end this piece with.

But doesn’t it seem like warm-up writing will steal time from your ‘real’ projects?

Making Time

I’m always saying that no-one should wait until they ‘have’ time or ‘find’ time to write. You need to make time.

As a twist on that, warm-up writing actually grants us me more time to write the good stuff.

Time Crunch

Last year I took part in my first NaNoWriMo. I also had a part-time job and a family to look after. Finding time to write 1667 words every day for 30 days was a challenge.

At first I skipped the warm-up writing because it just seemed like such a waste of time.

Gradually, however, I realized I was still doing my warm-up writing; only I was writing it into the novel. Starting my novel writing every day was painful, stilted, creaky. Only when I got to about 750 did it start to flow.

So I started taking the 20 minutes to write my 750 words on things that didn’t matter.

Then, I would plunge into my novel, fresh and raring to go. Before I knew what had happened I was flying past my daily deadlines.

Of course, I started doing warm-up writing every day (OK, most days. I’m not that smart.)

So how about you? Do you do warm-up writing? if you do, what and where do you do it? If you don’t, why not?

It’s hard enough to find time to write. Then, when you finally do, you face the paralysis of the blank page/blinking cursor.

The most useful tool I have discovered for getting past that frozen moment of potential is to do some warm-up writing.

Morning Pages And The Truth Point

I first discovered this technique in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way in the form of her morning pages.

Cameron advises you to sit down first thing every morning and write three pages’ worth of nothing in particular, just to see what come out. She lets you get several weeks into the program before asking,

Have you discovered the Truth Point yet?

And I had.

I discovered that somewhere on the second page (if I was writing longhand), my writing went from being awkward to flowing. Try it. After a page or two, you’ll find something to write about or you might just find your descriptions getting more interesting, your turn of phrase more entertaining and natural.

After writing ‘nothing’ for three pages, you’ll be able to plunge into an actual writing project and be at your best on the first line.

750Words.com

Flash forward a decade or two, and the website 750words.com offers an online version of Morning Pages, complete with somewhere to do your writing in case you don’t want to write on your blog or in a notebook that someone might find.

The host of 750words.com credits Cameron with inspiring the site, and says that 750 words is the ‘truth point’ for many people.

I have writing friends who blog first thing in the morning just as a way of warming up. Other people write letters to friends.

Tips For Warm-Up Writing

The only thing I would add is that, like 750words.com, you should be free to protect your warm-up writing. It’s not meant for display. It’s meant as warm-up. If you’re happy posting your warm-up writing to a blog or posting it off toa  friend, great. But protect yourself as much as you need to.

And no sneaking off and reading Twitter or Facebook, or your favourite author, now!

Knitters, crocheters, yarn-fans everywhere, this one is for you:

You’re working on a project. You’re proud that you’ve almost finished but then, the unthinkable happens. You run out of wool!

What to do? You know you’ll never find the right colour or dyelot at your local yarn store, because this project has been on the needles for years.

Ravel It

Try looking for the wool in someone else’s stash, listed on Ravelry (you are a member, aren’t you? Aren’t you?!).

Lots of people have the odd ball of yarn in their stash that they put up for sale or exchange. It’s all in the database, waiting for you to find it.

Go here and enter your yarn name.

Check the  “will trade or sell” box (this means someone has marked the yarn, in their stash, as something they’re willing to part with)

Scroll further down to make other refinements to your search. (You can even  filter it by country too, to avoid int’l shipping rates)

If you can’t find it on Ravelry, you can also look on ebay, which often has a good yarn stash, but less likelihood that someone will simply swap with you.

“HAPPY NEW YEAR!”

Someone shouted. Colors exploded overhead. She picked up her gun and ran.

Outlining doesn’t have to kill creativity

(In fact, it can free you to be more creative.)

I read a great article about a month before NaNoWriMo ¹ in which a confirmed ‘Pantser’ ² discovered the joys of partial outlining. She realised — and taught me — that you don’t have to outline everything. You get a partial outline down and then, when it starts to feel like a slog, start writing. Which is something Daniel Pinkwater told me he does, in an interview years ago, and he’s pretty successful. But somehow it took me until now to get the message. Plus she went on to say that she feels free to start outlining again, once she reaches a point in her novel when she’s slowing down.

Lightbulb!

So that’s what I did.

It occurred to me that this is exactly what I do with short stories, it’s just that with a short story it is entirely possible to hold all the outline in your head. Usually I have an idea, and a sense of where the story will end, then I start writing. Once I’ve written a few paragraphs I get a sense of what kind of story it’s going to be, the twists will occur along the way and exactly where it’s going. But there is only one plotline; there are only one or two characters that count; and only 1-2,ooo words to cram them into.

With a novel I knew I couldn’t hold everything in my head, and that thought intimidated me. Until my brilliant new friend pointed out that outlines don’t have to be complete, restrictive or done by anyone else’s method.

So I outlined my book, with lots of scenes that I knew would happen at the start and vague ‘this sort of thing happens here’ for the rest of it. Every time I got stuck, or my word count slackened, I would take a day to outline the next section. Inevitably, the next time I sat down I’d be at my day’s wordcount and beyond it, before I’d even been to the cookie jar. ³

Inspiration Comes Second

Sure, you can wander around the world looking for inspiration, but I have found ⁴ that it is only when I start writing that I,

1. Start to write well ⁵;
2. Become inspired;
3. Find story ideas and bits of dialogue leaping out at me from all around.

There were days when sitting down and typing felt like — as they say in Scotland — pulling teeth. But because I was determined not to fall behind in my wordcount, I sat and wrote. Slowly. The first 300 words were torture. It took forever to reach 600. But once I was past about 750 words, things started to fly. If I could just get those first 600 words down, I knew I could reach 1667 ⁶

I came across a great passage in Russell T. Davies’ book about writing for the new Doctor Who series. I’ll quote it again and again because it is true and simple and brilliant. He’s horrifically behind on a deadline. Everyone is waiting for him to deliver pages — the production crew, the cast, everyone — and so he’s panicking and smoking too much and going for long walks, trying to solve the problems he’s written his characters into ⁷

Finally at some ungodly hour, he types,

“…I couldn’t work out how to do it, where to do it, when. All day, gone. Pissed off. Then I sat down to write, with no solution, and … thought of it! Immediately. Obvious. Simple. If  I’d started sooner…ah, the only way to write is to write. For all my banging on about what to do if you’re really stuck on something, there’s nothing dumber than sitting there writing nothing at all.” ⁸

Get Away From The Desk

And once I had my story up and running, going out into the world was an excellent thing. Grocery shopping let me overhear how people talk to each other, or dream up solutions to plot problems. Working lunch duty at my children’s school gave my brain a break from thoughts of my characters. Walking around town gave me illustrations of buildings, cars, posters, people, smells, trees, memories.

It’s all very well trying to pay attention to these things when you’re not working on a project (and if you’re a writer then you do, you must, you can’t help yourself), but they take on a shimmering urgency when you’re deep in a work. So get out into the world.

Ration Your Reading

Of course, the first thing any aspiring writing should be doing is reading, but it has to be the right kind of reading if you’re going to read and still have time to write.

I discovered that I was limiting the amount of links I followed to fascinating articles, even from people I respect and admire. I limited the magazine reading. I scanned Facebook, rather than plunging in. I didn’t check my ‘celebrity Twitter’ list for a month and we all got along fine. I did not read the back of cereal packets, the BBC news site, blogs or forums.

I did read a little on Wikipedia to help me out of a technical jam in my novel, but I resisted clicking on all the links in the article. And I stopped at the end. I did make time to read books by authors I admire and who inspire me to sit down and write. I did watch TV shows written by writers who make me gnaw the furniture with envy at their skill. Anything else, I deemed a waste of Time I Could Be Writing.

People Can Be Surprisingly Supportive

Tell people you’re writing a novel and they ⁹ get really excited for you. I have friends and family who were checking in and demanding to read the book when it’s finished. And I have to say I did not expect my wonderful husband to be so enthused about the project. It inevitably meant more work for him, as he gave me time away from the kids, took care of extra loads of dishes and laundry, tidied while I wrote. But he was genuinely excited about the project and didn’t seem to resent the extra work at all. (Actually I suspect he might have been glad to have me out from under his feet some of the time. He’s terribly organized). That’s not to say he wasn’t relieved when I took back some of the household duties at the end of November. But my point is, people can surprise you with their supportiveness if you’re doing something that makes your eyes light up.

There’s tons more that I learned, (I’ve made some notes for next time) but I’m stopping now. To get back to the novel.

Shouldn’t you be writing, too?

In the two weeks since then I’ve added less than 5K words to the novel, which is not finish. I left it in the midst of what I hope will be the climax, because I got stuck. Up until that point I had been free to write my characters into tricky situations with the thought that I’d deal with the solutions later. Turns out: dealing with the solutions takes time and thinking. That’s one lesson for next year’s NaNo. Here are some more notes.

• Keep the wordcount a little ahead of the game to allow for the creative slow-down towards the end of the month. Maybe tweak the wordcount targets, to allow for more words in the middle two weeks and fewer in the last week.
• Don’t get too far ahead because I’ll get lazy/ burned out.
• Do outline.
• Get main character interacting with other characters sooner.
• “Make your bastards loveable and your heroes weak” (RTDavies)
• Do take time during the challenge to outline the next section, flesh out character sketches. It’ll make the next writing block go faster.
• Do consider warm-up writing in the morning even if it’s not novel-text. Don’t spend more than 30-45 mins on it.
• Do have other commitments during the month. Preferably most days. At the same time.

I was so pleased with myself — having so much fun — last Thursday. I had written well all month so far, in the face of some adversity. I was hooked. This was it. This was what I was destined to do: write silly novels about adventures and mystery in a parallell world.

Then Friday rolled around. I took A to a doctor’s check-up, came home and tidied up the dishes, but by then it was time for lunch duty. After lunch duty I wrote a few hundred words but realized I had to tidy up the house a bit and do some laundry and I really ought to rake the leaves that all fell down at once two days before. The boys came out and jumped around in the leaves too, which made it far too much fun and there was no way I could force them inside and sit them down in front of something electronic so that I could write. No way. Then, when it started to rain and the boys were in baths, I realised I still had to make a snack to bring for the Ladies Christmas Ornament Basket Bingo night I had somewhat tentatively added to my schedule for that night. Plus I had stayed up past midnight the night before and I was tired. Waah!

The Ladies’ Christmas Ornament Basket Bingo turned out to be a lot more fun than I would have expected – especially when a small faction decamped to Molly Maguires at the end of the night. I ended up chauffeuring some of them home. Me! But there was another late night and no more writing done.

On Saturday morning I dragged myself out of bed and took A to his First Penance retreat at the church (it was a couple of hours of people talking and some candle-lighting and crafts, which kept the kids enthralled, along with a video of a guy telling a story about his kid which made all the grownups cry). Then home, lunch, an afternoon of sloth and an evening slumped in front of Doctor Who (Ah, DT how I love thee, but Russel T Davies didn’t half turn you into a wuss at the end, there).

I was starting to feel the pressure of two days with no significant word count by yesterday afternoon. Kevin very graciously suggested that I take the after-dinner portion of the day to plough ahead, so I cheerfully made said dinner (steak pie and chips, brussel sprouts and beans, thank you very much — molto bene!) and then scurried off and left the cleaning-up-and-boy-wrangling to him.

4000 words later, at 9PM, I emerged, blinking and victorious. OK, a few paltry hundred of those words were written over the previous days, but the bulk was last night. Woo-hoo.

So here we are, eight days from the end and, as planned I’m sitting at the foot of Mount Climax, looking up, nervously. Today, I have to take my characters and get them all in place for the final push. I have to gather them at the foot of the mountain and place ravenous dinosaurs behind them (not literally. No dinos in this book, sorry A.). Then I have to light a forest fire behind the dinosaurs. My characters must have nowhere to go but up – and quickly. I might hover a rescue helicopter (or maybe giant eagles. Giant eagles?! Honestly, Professor, was that the best you could do?!) over the summit, but it’ll be in the clouds, so they can’t see it. As they get closer they might hear it, but then the storm clouds must roll in so that they don’t know if it’ll even be there when they reach the summit or whether they’ll be stuck there waiting for the ravenous, scalded and pissed-off predators to arrive and devour them.

Sounds like fun. See you on the other side.

I’m slightly under a day behind on the word count targets and that’s only because a, I spent the day being sociable yesterday b, I’ve been fighting off strep/tonsillitis and c, I spent some time on Friday not writing by trying to untangle all the threads I have been spinning.

PROGRESS REPORT

In Week One the challenge was just sitting down and churning out that many words each day (must write an average of 1667 a day to meet the 50K word goal by Nov 30). I would write for three quarters of an hour and feel really proud of myself and then I’d check my wordcount and find out I’d written 358 words. Almost without fail. Getting to 600 words was torture. Then, somewhere around 750 words, things would start to flow and I would start to fly — and then I’d usually find I’d run out of time. A session later in the day pushed me well past my goal most days.

I am careful not to overshoot by too much because I know myself. If I ever sat down and wrote 5,000 words in one day I would feel so damn pleased with myself that I probably wouldn’t write anything meaningful for days afterwards (“Ah, I have a buffer. 358 words today will be fine!”)

In Week Two, which is apparently when a lot of people lose enthusiasm and drop out, I really started to feel like maybe I could do this. My characters and plot lines were coming together, I was starting to see how they interacted and what was going to happen to them. I was starting to find sitting down to write much easier, now that my mental muscles were warmed up.

DEALING WITH DEMONS

This is now, officially Week Three. I’m not sure what other NaNo-ers say about it, but I’m kind of wishing now that I had boosted my wordcount a bit in the past two weeks. I sense that things are going to go a little slower now. I’ve spend the past two weeks starting stories, setting my characters in motion, letting them roll along and explore their world. Now I need to start intertwining their stories. I have to make sure that timelines make sense. I have to get everyone to where they need to be, at the right times, knowing what they are supposed to know NOW and not a moment sooner or later.  Hmmm.

The demons I wrestled with in the earlier weeks were more of the ‘aargh, this isn’t perfect, the pace is faltering, this could be better’ type. I subdued them with a quick “Yeah, you know what? Tell me about it after the first draft is done” to the solar plexus. They were pretty easily vanquished.

This week I suspect I’m going to be wrestling a different demon and I’m going to have to find a similar move. How do i defeat the ‘you’re getting it all wrong. This is  a big mess AND you’re running out of time!” Demon?

Watch this space!