Author Archives: A.L. Schultz

I’m in a pretty good mood right now, preening from the satisfaction of having actually sat down for more than fifteen minutes at a quarter after midnight to get my daily dose of fiction writing in.  I’ve finally admitted to myself that, as soon as I kick off my shoes and crawl up the spiral staircase to my loft office (loftice?), I become mentally unhinged from work and end up vegging out in front of YouTube—no matter how many times I calmly and rationally explain to myself that it’s a waste of time. This evening, I chopped the cycle off at its knees, stopping by the library after work to spend an hour and half with my child-friendly laptop.*

The other decision I came to before plotting my way over to the library was to use the time to focus solely on Pine&Meyer, rather than fartin’ around with 800 other vastly more interesting stories. I’m at that point in the novella where I don’t even like it anymore, which is incentive enough to make myself get it done anyways. This was an excellent plan, save that I forgot my latest version of the story on my apartment desktop.

However, instead of using the excuse to give up and go home, I managed to focus anyways, working only on the florists (whose story, as a point of interest, has nothing to do with flowers). Chalk me up for a couple thousand words on “The Florists,” Boonder, and about thirty more on “Pine&Meyer” from the night before.

Finally, as an aside to both IT Guy and my editor: right after an indoor soccer game last night (knees raw and scraped, and still amused by a guy on the other team snappishly yelling at his own teammate mid-defensive-showdown, “She’s a girl, Brandon!”), one of my teammates turned to me and asked, appraisingly, “You grow up with brothers?”

“One,” I said, holding a finger up to demonstrate. (Why I felt the need to illustrate the point is beyond me.**) “And a sister. But we all played pretty aggressively growing up.”

Team Schultz, REPRESENT.

*No, seriously. This is my laptop:

Image yoinked from www.expertreviews.co.uk/laptops/ultraportable-laptops/1402967/hp-stream-11-review/page/0/1.

The only other color option is purple, and many of the reviews assure me that’s its perfect for their fourth-grader. Which also explains why it came automatically installed with Windows 10-S, the closest an operating system will ever come to being a literal baby gate. After a lot of enraged yelling, I figured out how to destroy that noise, feeling like the Genghis Khan of computers.

**Perhaps Mr. Bimble told me to.

I reworked the first nine paragraphs of chapter 6. Again. Because I can’t quite get the feel of this section of Pine&Meyer right. Still, it’s better now, and time to move on.

#that’sallshewrote

Tonight I have the kind of headache that makes me want to take an auger, find that perfect spot in my temple, and quietly drill a hole through my skull to help release the pressure. I get headaches often enough that, if they didn’t run through half my family, I’d be on Google right now, discovering that I have a brain tumor or an aneurysm silently counting down to my inevitable demise; so thanks for the reassurance, Mom, IT Guy. I don’t always know what triggers them, though I do have a general checklist of possibilities: not enough sleep, not enough water, caffeine dependence, hair too heavy, hair too tight, stress, hunched shoulders from typing all day, there’s a rolling storm front affecting the air pressure in my tires, or maybe I pretended to have a headache for enough hours that it actually became true. Which, yes, I did once when I was an elementary school (though that’s a story for another day).

However, I do know where this one came from: dehydration. I drink water about as frequently as a camel does, and while my body has adapted to the fact that these are arid lands, if I throw off the ecosystem by suddenly sweating more than usual — soccer, in this case — the desert handles that by politely forcing my brain to shrink and pull away from my skull. Ew. One of the lesser known benefits of having frequent headaches is the fact that getting one isn’t automatically debilitating (proving, once again, even though no one asked for the proof, that you can get used to anything), but dehydration headaches are always a drill-hole-in-head exception.

I was then going to use this absolutely riveting intro to segue into a rundown on why I like to injure characters by talking about how I cannot do it when I’m injured, sick, or hurt myself, even though it’s one of my favorite ways to force a protagonist to change/prove themselves/not prove themselves/find out how much people care about them. I can only wish pain on others when I can’t remember exactly how bad it feels, which is a surprisingly easy thing to forget. I’d call it empathy, but where exactly do I think these people exist in real life?

Ah, that’s right: in my head. And tonight my head hurts. So since my auger is in my other desk, I’m going to bed.

Pine&Meyer: 8 paragraphs

I didn’t track any of my words this weekend because it gets kind of annoying when I’m working primarily on story and/or chapter outlines. There’s usually a lot of deleting and rearranging involved, which makes counting the new stuff an overly difficult waste of time. Instead, here’s the projects I worked on through Friday and Saturday, when I should’ve been focusing on one thing at a time:

• On the Corner of Pine & Meyer
• Froggy
• Alex Byrnes is a Double-Crossing Weasel
• The LacWitts
• The Florists

Plus a single-eyebrow-raised nod to “Whistler” for the addition of the line: “May she rest in pieces.”

I have no idea what to talk about today. I’ve really got to start jotting down blog post ideas throughout the day (or take an afternoon to sit down, write down a batch of ideas onto separate post-it notes, fold them in half, and then mix them into a hat like I’m prepping next year’s Christmas gift exchange) if I’m going to keep this up, or every single one of my blog posts for the next three months is going to start with “I have no idea what to talk about” before it inevitably devolves into something random; like using my relative’s names for my own nefarious purposes or repurposing my hats to sort and store my ideas, rather than wearing them on my head.

Also, why did I start this blog post with my father’s brother’s nephew’s cousins’ former roommate’s quote?

I have no idea.

Word Count Report: Added two exchanges of dialogue to a story about another sad orphan and then went into the hole for my word count after massive cuts to Pine&Meyer chapter 6. Which, appropriately, begins with the line: “Sunday crawled, and by 10 o’clock that evening Jon had written nothing.”

(Officially negative 1,600 words, give or take a handful, but it still counts I tell you because I’m closer to completing chapter 6 than I was before I started deleting. Oh, and I added scene progression notes.)

(Also, I’m tired and going to bed.)

It’s been a sad but good couple of days. Barely making it through the last verse of “Abide with Me” with my niece a boneless sack of potatoes in my arms; crying quietly as they lowered the casket into the ground and then choking down a laugh-cough as my nieces and nephews enthusiastically threw flowers in after it; accidentally making my father’s cousin cry when we talked about how you can see each of the Haas sisters in the faces of their families; my oldest nephew greeting my brother and his wife — as soon as they walked in the door — with a distinctly proud, “I puked on Friday!” (chorused by a litany of “puke puke puke puke puke” from his little brother, only just learning to talk and still trying out his words, and answered with a politely rising, “Ohh,” from my sister-in-law); arguing with my parents over whether my grandmother would have appreciated or been stiffly scandalized by all the jokes in the car on the drive to her funeral; watching my brother, standing alongside the other five pallbearers, cry after they bore the coffin to the graveside; sitting across the table from my oldest niece’s baby doll at lunchtime, staring at me unblinkingly as I ate; cleaning up hot chocolate and wiping away tears and laughing so hard as we traded old and new stories that we had to pull out the Kleenex box again.

Thanking  God we can weep in both joy and sorrow. Knowing that what has been robbed from us by dementia and now death has already been stolen back again. For I know where my Redeemer has taken my grandmother.

Home.

Word Count Report: Another half page of handwritten notes last night, and another couple of sentences just a few minutes ago.

I wrote one piddling sentence (12 words, to be exact) on Friday. But the rules of the ongoing challenge I have set up with my editor are that I have to write something every day (except Sunday), and that counts.

Saturday was much more productive, but all written by hand on the tray table of an airplane, so I don’t have a word count. Just seven pages of my awful, tiny handwriting:

I admit: I have had to listen to complaints about my handwriting for years, generally from the recipients of my thank you letters. “What’s this say? Ooga booga bunga?” “Uh…thanks again, love ya.” They’re Rorschach inkblot tests and plausible deniability all rolled into one: that thing that you think you read that offended you? Clearly you’re pessimistic by nature. I definitely said something else.

It also makes for an excellent security feature. Can’t steal what you can’t read. (Because obviously loads of people are out to steal my ideas; can’t be too careful.) And yes, I have locked my own dingus self out of my ideas before, during those absolutely rare* situations in which I’ve failed to translate my own chicken scratch into readable English–especially when an indecipherable word or phrase happens to be the key to understanding the full sentence.

That is, however, less creepy than those times when I can perfectly read something that I don’t remember writing. Nothing like discovering that the stranger writing mystery notes in your handwriting is you. My favorite, to date, are the words “Mr. Stripper” I found in the margins of an old college notebook, written next to a smiling stick figure.

I once took one of those highly accurate “Which Disney princess are you?” quizzes in university (What do you like the most? A.) Sleeping, B.) Reading, C.) Apples); probably while I was supposed to be doing homework, but that’s besides the point. The point is the result–or why I remember this quiz out of the hundreds I’ve used to procrastinate over the years. Not the princess (who I think was Belle because, duh, B.) Reading) but the description that followed her: a bunch of positive things about my brave intelligence, and then the warning, “But be careful! You tend to live in your own world.”

My roommate, when I read it out loud to her, laughed–a kind of surprised bark. “You don’t live in your own world,” she explained, grinning. “You live in several.”

Mr. Stripper probably agrees.

*absolutely