This year, I am participating in the NaNoWriMo challenge, and I am inviting you all along on the journey! Over the next several weeks, we are going to go through the process of bringing a project through the full writing cycle: from prep work, through plot development, to conclusion. As we challenge ourselves to writing 50,000 words in the month of November, let's take the opportunity to learn a little more about how to streamline and strengthen our writing!

Hello Cip Stack Readers and Listeners,

For those of you who have followed this publication as I’ve attempted to turn it into a daily writing newsletter over the past several months, no doubt you have noticed some inconsistency in my publication cadence lately.  I partially addressed it with my hiatus notice two weeks ago, and after struggling to find my footing I feel the need to address it again.

Transparently, I am facing some steep uphill challenges in my personal life that have begun to bleed into my writing.  Those challenges are painful and emotionally draining, and I’ve noticed that my passion for writing about the technical and inspirational aspects of writing has flagged.  The kind of energy, humor and thrill that I normally feel about writing has lost some of its spark in the face of those challenges.

When I began writing the Cip Stack, it was in an effort to bring value to the writing community online and inspire and teach others.  I have been writing intentionally since penning my fantasy saga, Krög the Battle Prince, and continuing for the last ten years.  In that time, I have learned a lot about publication- especially self-publishing- the art and craft of writing, and the community and culture of writing.  Those are things I wanted to share with the broader community, especially newer or first time authors.  Especially given that I am an ardent believer that the world absolutely, without question needs more storytellers in it.

So I embarked on a little sidequest to get up early every morning, pen a brief newsletter about a few writing related topics, record it as a podcast and vlog, and put it out to the world.  And I’ve enjoyed the heck out of it!  For a while, the enjoyment of the act itself was enough, and it helped me fall back in love with the process and habit of writing- something I had fallen out of practice with.

Lately though, the daily effort of writing a valuable, instructional article, recording it as a podcast and a video cast, uploading all of those things and promoting them to social media along with my other pursuits has become a strain.  In the midst of this, I am still working a full time job (the great excuse of content creators everywhere), pursuing my creative writing, and I’ve had a very active travel schedule thanks in part to my relationship.  Along with roadbumps in that relationship and stress from increased pressure at work, I’m having a hard time feeling inspirational.  Not to mention trying to maintain an active social media presence that I have become increasingly unsocial in.  Putting too much thought into every post instead of just cutting it up and yacking about stuff I enjoy… you know, being social

In times like these, there is a place I turn to for comfort and solace: writing.  My mind has been on fire with new project ideas, and the need to write creatively is overwhelming.  I feel words flying out of my fingertips, and increasingly that is where I want my attention and energy going.  My writing.  The thing I want to share with the world more than anything.  Stories.  I have more to tell.  Wild-eyed fairytales.  Creepy but satirical folklore horror.  Poignant science fiction.  And rollicking fantasies.  I have so much I want to write in this moment, and I need to put my full weight behind the words.

At my best, I keep writing pars around 2000 words a day, and writing a daily newsletter has eaten into that.  Again, not that it hasn’t been enjoyable!  But I need to prioritize my creative writing for a while, not only to have more to share, but also as my coping mechanism.  As I encourage everyone else to do… I need to write.

What does that mean for the Cip Stack?  Well in the immediate, it means I need a short break.  At least a week or two to get my mind right and put some effort behind other projects.  Outside of my writing, I do host another podcast, the B-Siders, and we are finishing up our first season but I still have a lot of work to do editing the remaining episodes and getting them out on time.  You may not know it, but I also pretty regularly run Spartan races, and my training has collapsed- as evidenced by a particularly difficult race this past weekend that I am still pretty bruised from.  I need to get physically back in shape.  And I do have other hobbies!  Reading and chess, and I’d like some free time and mind space to devote to those as well!

So I’m taking a few weeks off of this newsletter while I recenter myself and reassess my own writing journey.  That’s not to say I am abandoning it completely.

November is the infamous NaNoWriMo event, and I have committed to joining a few other writers to attempt this feat.  I will not be writing a novella I have been aching to write for a while, and I am truly very excited for the prospect of the challenge.  During that time, I am going to update The Cip Stack with progress reports and learnings from the process.  My hope is that by taking you through the journey of cranking out a novel in one month, I can teach you all and inspire you further in your own writing efforts.

It does also mean, however, that updates will likely come a little more slowly and on a less regular cadence.  The rigidity of daily content creation has started to feel constraining, rather than inspiring.  And frankly, I never wanted to be a content creator- I want to be a writer.  And writing, good writing, takes time.  It can’t be rushed.  It shouldn’t be rushed.

On the other side of this, I do hope to bring you all some new storytelling projects.  I’m very close to relaunching The Lemonade Stand Massacre, an online pulp fiction zine that heavily features sarcastic speculative fiction.  While I used to write it with a team of writers, I am taking it over as a solo project- just somewhere to put up stories for people to enjoy.  Ultimately that feels more in line with what I want to be doing as a writer anyway.  Plus I will soon begin working on a podcast version of the first book in my fantasy saga: “The Mythical Mystical Magnificent Adventures of Krög: the Battle Prince, Volume 1- Beyond the Great Hall.”  That’s something else I am truly excited about.

At the end of the day, I am not a writing instructor by trade.  I just happen to have a lot of knowledge in that arena to share.  I’m going to start sharing it differently.  That’s the crux of this letter.  And hopefully, in a little time, I’ll also have more stories to share with you as well.

But for now, a pause.  What feels like a much needed pause.  After the New Year, I may return to instructional writing on a daily basis, but right now there just feels like too much going on to really put my f*****g soul into this- and that’s what I want to be able to do.  Write things from my soul.

So I’m gonna get back to that.  And YOU should get back to your writing.  We’ve got stories to tell.  Let’s get down to it.

Thanks everyone.  Be excellent to each other.

Slightly late edition this morning as I am prepping to record for my other podcast shortly! If you are at all a fan of aggressively average movies, you should consider checking out the B-Siders- we’re pretty funny.

All that to say, some mornings are an absolute crush of preparation, recording, writing, and editing. Before the 9-5 comes the 5-9. It’s invigorating, but it also demands a lot of focus and discipline. And some mornings, that is easier to muster than others.

Pour another cup of coffee and crack your knuckles. It’s writing time!

Demystifying Language: Pausing Punctuation

There feels a certain peril to the punctuation of pauses and their proper implementation in prose, poetry and… some word for ‘academic journalism’ that starts with ‘p.’

Alliteration jokes aside, one of the most common questions I see floating around on writers’ Twitter is, “do you know how to use a semicolon?”  And it’s a fair question.  Periods, commas, dashes, and semicolons all seem to have pretty nebulous rules.  Utilizing each effectively can help dictate the pace and tone of a piece.  The funny thing is, our mind instinctively knows how to read something with each one of those punctuation types, yet when we try to write them, it introduces a host of questions.

So let’s shallow dive each one and take a moment to examine how each of these punctuations should be deployed.

Today’s writing demystification: punctuation.

Periods:  The period is the simplest and least confusing of the ‘pause’ punctuations.  It comes at the end of a sentence.  We talked a little about sentence structure in our examination of the split infinitive, but let’s quickly review.  A sentence is a series of words conveying a single thought.  Grammatically, a sentence should contain a subject and a predicate, though, in some storytelling and artistic prose, this is not strictly necessary.  Sentences can vary in length, and several like ‘clauses’ may be linked together with modifying words like ‘and’ or ‘though’ or ‘however.’  When the thought is completed, it is ended with a period.

That’s it.  Put a period at the end of your sentences.  Not super confusing.

Commas:  So this is where things start to get a little more mercurial.  In the context of this article, we’re strictly looking at the comma as a pausing mechanism, or as a linking mechanism.  We won’t be looking at how it is deployed for lists.  This includes multiple adjectives, dates and times, and geographical locations- those are ideas for another day.

When it comes to correct comma usage, it is critical to be able to identify the clauses within a sentence.  The easiest of these to identify is when you use a linking word, such as “and,” “but,” “or” and others.  When using a conjunction, the comma comes BEFORE the joining word.  So if you are adding additional detail that directly modifies the initial thought, or clause, of a sentence, drop in a comma before your linking word.

Commas can also be used to offset additional information to a sentence that is not strictly necessary.  Sometimes this is confused with correct parentheses usage, but parentheses are typically best saved for more “informational” asides, such as dates, locations, etc.  Whereas comma asides add more descriptive information that isn’t critical to the sentence’s key thought but adds flavor.  Think along the lines of: “My robe, made from synthetic silk, had fallen off its hook and was crumpled on the floor.”  It’s not necessary that you know what the robe is made of, but helps you better picture how it might look crumpled on the floor based on its material.  A comma aside helps with this.

It’s best to think of commas as linking tools.  In grade school, I was taught that commas were pauses in a thought, leading to some really unhealthy comma usage on my part.  While we do tend to pause when we arrive at a comma, this is almost always an artifact of linking multiple clauses together.

If you want your readers to truly PAUSE, you should probably be using a period.  The great danger of linking too many clauses together with commas is the run-on sentence.  Be wary of this.

Dashes:  For the context of this article, we’ll be speaking to dashes as their use in asides and abrupt pauses, not to link like words (a hyphen) or when a word gets cut off in dialogue.

Like commas, dashes can be used to separate out information in a sentence that is not strictly necessary.  The difference between when to use dashes on either side of a separated thought versus commas is a little tricky.  Dashes tend to be used when the presented information is considered more emphatic or even surprising.

This is where dashes are more or less a matter of opinion than hard, fast rules.  You are still creating an aside; however, the information in the aside is likely to be of a more unexpected nature, or something you really want to emphasize.  If we use our example from before, let’s change a single word and use dashes instead of commas.

“My robe- made of chainmail- had fallen off its hook and was crumpled on the floor.”

Holy cow!  A chainmail robe!  THAT is surprising!

Dashes are ultimately more informal and far more likely to appear in artistic works or storytelling prose than in professional or academic works.  For that reason, their true usage is a little vague.  Just be careful not to OVERUSE them; otherwise, your prose will come across halting and jerky.  Just as we pause when we read a comma, we pause when we read a dash.  We just pause a lot more, which ultimately slows down the pace.

Semicolons:  Goodness me, the freaking semicolon.  Grammar’s Rubik’s Cube.  Only I can solve a Rubick’s Cube.

Okay, so the semicolon is not nearly as intimidating as it seems; it just has very specific rules that require a little thought.  I’m going to preface this by saying: if you are debating whether to use a semicolon, you are probably just as well served dividing that sentence into two separate ones.  That will lead to quicker-paced prose.  But, if fast-paced is not necessarily your goal and you want to have those nice long, cursive sentences, let’s discuss semicolons.

The semicolon joins two independent but related clauses in a sentence.  In place of a colon and a conjucntion word (remember when we talked about and, but, or, etc?), we use a semicolon instead.  Semicolons are often followed by qualifiers like ‘however’ or ‘otherwise’ but this is not strictly necessary.

It is important to note that if the two clauses you are joining are DEPENDENT on one another.  If the first half of a sentence directly informs the later portion, a semicolon cannot be used.  The two ideas must be independent of each other- but related.

For example: “Although my MLA Handbook is extremely useful for writing; Tobin’s Spirit Guide is not.”  This is INCORRECT semicolon usage, and it’s pretty obvious why.  These two clauses are dependent on one another and should be separated with a coma instead.

Conversely: “The frying pan is still hot; however, we need to clean it quickly.”  These two ideas are related but independent of one another.  They are joined together by the semicolon and the modifier ‘however.’

When you’re reading through your work and wondering if you should use a semicolon or a comma, ask yourself the following questions to pin it down.

Are these two ideas related to one another?  Are they independent of each other, or does one require the other to make sense?  Finally: would this read better as two sentences, or does the flow become too choppy, and therefor these should be joined together?

Semicolons.  Good luck.

That’s all for today’s dive into pausing punctuation.  If you have any additional questions or want more clarification on these topics, let me know!  I’d love to do a follow-up on some of the nuances of a few of these and really deep dive into their proper usage.  Hopefully, though, today, you are walking away with a clearer idea of how to deploy each of these tools.

Since this article is a little longer we are going to skip our writing prompt for today and look ahead to tomorrow.

Happy Friday everyone- I hope you are headed into a wonderful weekend. Be excellent to each other.

Thanks for reading The Cip Stack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Thank you for reading The Cip Stack. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Today we continue our study of writing mechanics with Passive Voice: how to identify it, when to use it and when to avoid it. Tune in for a shallow dive on how passive voice can be employed effectively, but also learning to keep sentences in active voice to preserve pacing.

Thanks for your patience after last week's unplanned hiatus. We are continuing with our Writing Mechanics series by demystifying some of the stranger, opaque rules of grammar, and today we are specifically tackling the Split Infinite. What does it mean to split an infinitive? Did you realize I just used an infinitive in that last sentence? Tune in for more!

This week, we are discussing some of the basic mechanics of writing, but with the approaching of demystifying them and making writing feel more approachable. We begin with paragraphs, and how to structure them in a cohesive, fluid way.

Today we discuss what the week ahead holds for The Cip Stack, and reflect briefly on what connection brings us when we connect genuinely with our community.

We conclude our series on the 5 Essentials Every Writer Needs with the humble pen, and an ode to its absolutely limitless potential

Time management is a critical aspect of your writing journey, so every writer should have a small kitchen timer to help them isolate their focus time and really zone in on what is important: the writing.

Next on the list of essential tools needed by all writers is the Thesaurus: my favorite reference guide for learning all the dozens of ways to say exactly the same thing. That way, the perfect word for the perfect moment is always right at your fingertips.