The Learning Curl

Did you know that Canada won the first ever World Curling Championship?  According to wikipedia this competition was held in Falkirk and Edinburgh in 1959.  In curling there's a team member called the 'Skip'.  Essentially the skip is the leader of the team.  They're the ones that plan out the strategies and tell the team how they need to play that round.  They wear two different shoes while they play.  One that has a grip, that they generally use to push off from the 'hack' when delivering a stone.  The other has no grip, which they use to slide on the ice during the delivery, or to slide down the ice while sweeping.

Why am I telling you all of this?  Well, I thought I would share all the knowledge I'm acquiring for my current novel.

You see, I happened to see a curling game last Saturday.  Not in person, or anything, it was just on tv.  The thing is, though, I've never been remotely interesting in curling.  I've heard it mentioned before, and I had the vaguest idea what they did during the game, but it wasn't something I cared about.  Or ever even had an interest in watching.  So why was I so very captivated by this game?

I let it slide, though, thinking that it was just a one time thing.  I cared only because it was on, and once it was out of sight it was out of mind.  Which was generally true.

Except that I kept seeing games everywhere I went.  This probably had a lot to do with the tournament of hearts being in full swing, but every time I saw it, I wanted to stop and watch.  It hit me when I was sitting in Denny's trying to pay to the conversation, and was instead being distracted by the curling game that was being shown on the tv: it was my character that was making me care about it.

My character (a female werewolf assassin, in case you were wondering) is, apparently, a curler.  She's one of those people I was watching going out on the ice and throwing stones.  Not professionally, of course.  But she definitely does this on her off time.

For me, that meant one thing: research.  I'll admit, I'm not a huge fan or research.  In fact, if I could avoid it altogether, I will, and I have in the past.  I write fantasy novels for the simple reason that the entire world comes from my head.  In other words, no research needed!

Now I'm stuck finding out more about a sport that I never cared about before (though after this is done, I might care just a little bit more) all so I can accurately depict a hobby that my character enjoys.

In the meantime, though, I thought that you all might enjoy it if I shared what I had learned so far about the not so well known sport.  Like the fact that the team with the last throw has what's called the 'hammer'.  It's an advantage in the game, making it easier for that team to score points.  If the other team manages to get points instead, that's called a steal.

Oh, the things we do for our characters.  I suppose I should consider myself lucky for not having researched anything that will have some unknown section of the government thinking I'm a terrorist or the like...yet...

What have you learned about for the sake of your characters?

My Muse and Inspiration

I don't know about you, but I often find that I have a heard time sitting down to write.  I do everything I feel like I need to do in order to set up a good writing atmosphere.  I turn on music.  I turn off the TV.  I leave twitter running, which might be a bad thing, but I have to stay connected.  At least, that's what I tell myself.  Then I open up scrivener (my current word processor of choice)...and stare blankly at the screen.

Oh, I write.  At least a little bit.  I'll get some words down that I will glare at because they're not doing exactly as I want them to do.  Usually I get frustrated after about half an hour where I've written maybe a couple hundred words and I start playing a game to distract myself.  I tell myself it's to give myself time to think.  This is, of course, a lie.  I am doing anything and everything in my power to not be writing right at that minute.

Even time deadlines do nothing for me.  I've tried write or die.  I really have.  While it does pull more words out of me in a shorter time period, I can't quite force myself to continue writing afterward.  In fact, I think, I should do another session, and instead start watching a show or even reading, telling myself that I'm ahead and that thousand words I just wrote was good enough for the day.

There is something you should know about me.  Something I never knew about myself until November.  In fact, before November I actually believed the exact opposite of myself.  I thrive on competition.  And by thrive, I mean THRIVE.

In the same half hour that I would sit and get maybe 800 words staring blankly at my screen, by simply adding another person writing with me, I get 1800 words.  It's sad, but it's the truth.

Just so you know, I don't sit in front of my computer thinking 'I have to beat the rest of them!' actually, I really don't know what I think about while I'm #wordmongering.  It's as if my mind just clears and pours out the words that it refuses to give up without that competition.

Maybe it's my muse.  She is the most unreliable muse I've ever met.  Not that I've met a lot of muses.  This is just what I've heard.  She takes off at the most inopportune of times.  In fact for years she wasn't anything more than a voice in the back of my head that whispered maybe a couple days a year.  Now that I've found a way to keep her yelling, how can I stop?

#wordmongering has jumped my word count for my current novel to over 50k since May 1st.  Competition keeps me engaged with my characters.  Keeps me wanting to know more about the plot and how everything is going to turn out.  It makes me brainstorm so that I'm never without something to work on.  It makes me research.  Yep.  Research.  Rather ironic considering the fact that I decided to write a fantasy novel for the very specific reason that I can make up everything I'm writing.  And now I'm planning on spending Saturday in the library with a pile of books about 12th century weaponry and war strategies.

My point to all of this?  I found my inspiration.  The one thing that keeps us, as writers, moving forward.  As strange as competition for inspiration may sound, it works for me.  And it working is really all that matters.  As a writer, my sole objective is to keep writing.  Whether or not I ever get published has nothing to do with it.  As long as my muse thrives on competition (and my #wordmongering tweeps continue to provide that competition) I will write.  And that's all that really matters.