NaNoWriMoFriNum2

In an unprecedented move, I took the day off from writing yesterday. Boy, did that feel nice. :)

On Monday and Tuesday I missed my word count by about a 1000 words each day and the writing felt like it was the thing I would chose to be doing with my time if strep throat wasn't available.

Today, some 5000+ words behind, I got back to it. Writing was fun again and everything flowed. Not counting taking the day off yesterday, I made a sizable dent into the 2000 word debit. The best part is that on the 1st I started writing at midnight, took a nap and then got back to it at 6 a.m. so that I would hopefully get one session ahead so that I could take a day off and still meet my self-imposed 100k word goal. I had planned on that day being Thanksgiving, and I still do - I just have to have a few more days like today and I'll have an extra day again.

At the end of the twelfth day, I should be at the 40,000 word mark, and I'm just shy of 39,000 words. Not too bad, even if I do say so myself.

NaNo NaNo

I've been slacking in the blog department the last couple of days. I actually wrote one on Monday and didn't like how it turned out, so I deleted it. I haven't updated my wordcount on the NaNo site either, but for a different reason. Every time I have visited in the last couple of days, the site has been slow to load, so I get impatient and move on to another site. (I'll update today, I promise.)

We're a third of the way through the process of this month-long write-a-thon. But am I a third of the way through the novel I'm writing? If my calculations are correct, and of course you will never know if they are unless I tell you at some point, I'm about half to two thirds of the way through the first third of the story. At 35k words, that means the final result will be around 200k words. That seems about the standard fair these days.

I don't hate the story yet. I did go through a day and a half of thinking that my writing wasn't worth the effort, a little lapse in self-esteem. I'm wont to have those now and again regardless of whether or not I'm in the middle of a writing project, so I didn't let it touch the story. I just kept telling myself, "I might suck, but that doesn't mean these characters suck." Well, a couple of them do, but they're supposed to be kinda sucky. :)

My story has three main characters that are alternating telling the story (which at this point is still disparate as they haven't met each other yet). I think the final story will make sense in this format and it allows me much greater control over the pacing of the story. But, I've been thinking that it might make more sense to write all of the chapters from one main characters perspective and then move on to the next and then the last. This is one time that having an outline to work from is to my benefit, as I know where I want to go with each character. I just think that it might be easier to stay in the character's mindset if I'm writing from the perspective of one character day after day instead of every other or every fourth day.

the background of this story lays out a 'world' in which Chinese, Indian and Brazilian culture has surpassed American and Western European as the standard. But it is also a post-national 'world' where the real political power rests with "multistellar" corporations - who maintain there own police forces, militaries, hospitals, etc. Because I have chosen to write a science fiction novel far enough in the future where not only has society greatly changed, but technology as well, I'm inventing a lot of new things, mostly gizmos that will be obvious rip-offs of todays technology. This all means lots of new words - words borrowed from the three cultures mentioned above, borrowed from science, and a whole bunch made up by me. Thank goodness I'm maintaining a glossary as I go.

Finicky Friday

It's the first Friday of NaNoWriMo, and I had set myself a really ambitious goal of 20,000 words by the end of the day, which I met instead at 11 this morning. Yay me! But, today brought the first trouble in writing paradise, something inevitably happens to me, by usually not until much later in the project. I wrote approximately 3500 words today in a chapter without getting to the first point in the outline for the chapter. That doesn't mean that I shouldn't have been writing about what I was writing about, just that I finished my writing for the day and didn't even move a single point in my outline.

speaking of outlines, I didn't end up with the detailed, first draft quality outline I was going to try and do based on the book I read and reviewed, "First Draft in 30 Days" by Karen S. Wiesner. I'm still glad I read the book, but her workflow is different from mine. I initially spent a week trying to follow her plan and cram my style into it, but I just ended up getting stress headaches. I don't write to bet headaches, I write to avoid them. Or something like that. :) The one issue I have with Ms. Wiesner's plan is that she allots very little time to research, and as a writer attempting a science fiction novel that is based in real science, well, let's just say I had a whole hell of a lot of research to do before I wrote the first word of an outline because I had to know ifsome of my proposals were even remotely feasible. And since starting the actual writing, I have had to add in two additional research sessions. I think that perhaps if I were to write fiction of the sort that Ms. Wiesner wrote or mysteries as she also writes, I could have made her system work.

Maybe I'll put in some more writing tonight - if not to finish the chapter, then to at least amend my outline. :)

NaNo update for 11/4

First things first, if for some reason you've never read the blog of my dear friend Kristy Billuni, stop reading this, follow the link to The Sexy Grammarian and read some entries. :D

The fourth day of writing is pretty much done and I'm write on target - five chapters and 16k words done. I don't hate the story, and in fact am really looking forward to how some of it is going to continue to unfold in a way I hadn't planned in my outline. So far I think I've managed to capture all the new names I've added and put them on my master character list with a little blurb explaining how they are, the same for new places and group entities.

I'm still waiting for the first snag, I know it's coming - it always comes. The snag is that point where the outline doesn't seem to make sense, and you can't string one word after another to save your life. The story just sits there, the cursor blinking, as a mild panic takes over your brain. hopefully the first snag won't stop me for long - this year I'm ready for it. Our local library sells magazines donated to it for a dime apiece. That right there should be enough, but I've actually bought about a dozen magazines, ones that I know contain some amazing pictures, and I suspect some equally amazing articles, that as are yet untouched by me, waiting for that moment when I need to get out of my head space for a little bit. The "Dirty Dozen" is composed of five National Geographics, three Scientific Americas, two Smithsonians, and one each Popular Science and Popular Mechanics.

The only setback I've had so far, and it's not really that, just a time-suck as I had to stop what I was doing to get some more research done, came when I invented some new forensic sciences techniques and had to hastily check to see if the foundations were sound. I think you know you have perhaps watched too many episodes of CSI when you start throwing around terms like "Alleles" and "Heteroplasmy". I am writing a science fiction after all, and I"ve fot to get the science right if I want to give the fiction a chance. :)

Day 2

The second day of Novermber is a much better barometer than the first for measuring how your NaNoWriMo experience is going to shape up. Each day is better than the previous up until about the fifth, and then you know that you can make or that you won't. But, the second day is still a pretty good measure. And it tells me that I'm going to have a good month.

I've been thinking a lot about necessary conditions for writing a book, hopefully a good book. I think first and foremost, you have to fall in love with your main character(s). You might hate some or maybe even all the things they do, but you have to love them. If the author can't love them, then how can the reader be expected to care about them? It is obvious why you (the writer) would love a hero or an anti-hero, but why you need to love the villains is not as obvious. Doesn't it make sense that the worse things the villain does, the more diabolical and dastardly she is, the more you would hate her? No, because you don't want to write about things you hate. I know that I don't. But, if I make the villain someone I can love, but hate all of their acts, well, that is someone I can write about. I'm not just playing a semantic game here, though I do like semantic games, especially multi-player semantic games. Loving a villain is taking the time to make them a full character, not a one-dimensional version of a character. Also, I think in many ways, evil acts seem even more evil when they are committed by someone I can identify with, because I can imagine that they could choose not to do evil.

[I'm using good and evil as illustrative terms, and not necessarily as to mean the extremes that are implied - more like good is anything more good than neutral, and evil is anything more evil than neutral.]

I was talking to someone who I almost got to participate in NaNoWriMo this year and she commented that she writes at least several thousand words a day in comments on forums. Wow! I probably write 500 to a 1000 words a day in forums, and I find it to be such a slow process because in my case it's dialogical. But, I got to thinking about forums and blogs and if I could harness the energy that I put into those things and stick it in a novel... I'm not really going anywhere else with this idea. I just think it would be cool if I could do this. :)

Okay, back to the novel. I want to do at least another couple of hundred words before I update my daily word count.

Happy Freakin' November!

To say that November is my favorite month of the year would be an understatement. I love walking in the morning when the air turns crisp and the leaves turn color. Who doesn't love Thanksgiving? Mostly, I love November because it's the "No" in NaNoWriMo. :D

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) where writers all over the world set out to write 50,000 words in 30 days. This is no small task, let me tell you from personal experience. Writing 1667 words per day for a whole month can be one of the hardest things you ever do in your life. I should know, I'm doing this for the seventh time.

It's never to late to start if you've ever wanted to write a book, but have just been waiting for the right motivation. Visit the NaNoWriMo site, sign-up and check out the many wonderful resources and forums for inspiration and commiseration. There are forums for pretty much every part of the U.S. and many locations around the globe as well.

This year, because I'm extra crazy, I'm trying to do double the damage and write 100,000 words during the month of November, which breaks down to 3,333 words per day, which with the way I write is a commitment of two and a half to three hours on a good day and maybe four or five hours on a slow day. In an effort to get ahead of the game, I now have a tradition of staying up late and starting writing at a couple minutes past midnight on the first of November. It's a tradition only two years old, but one I like. I don't "pull an all-nighter", I just try to get in a good hour or two to kick things off and set the tone. This year went quite well until the computer mysteriously crashed at 2:22 - can that time be a coincidence? Fortunately between my obsessive saving and OpenOffice.org's automatic back-up I only lost about a hundred words, which I replace with 3oo before going to bed. So, take that Microsoft.

With several hours more of writing planned for after dinner, I am sitting at the 5,484 mark as of htis posting. Viva le NaNo!