Wednesday, June 18, 2014

I'm still writing...

I'm not writing as often as I should, since the Writing Excuses dudes repeatedly tell me that I need to be doing it every day.  I agree.  But I am still writing.  I've started re-writing the book yet again.  I know it seems like I have that perpetual re-write disease, but I don't think I do.  I have made the following fundamental changes to the format that have required me to rewrite:

In the original version, I was writing it in epic fantasy style with multiple viewpoints (3), though I realized that this is really the story of just one person, and therefore a heroic fantasy.  I still needed other viewpoints, though, because things happen outside of the view of the character that are important for motivating the story.  I thought I would be clever with some dissemination of information, and then at the breaks between acts I would insert interludes to show viewpoints of others, which would then free me up to show some viewpoints from people you might not expect.  That was working well, but since the guy is a chronicler...I don't know.  It didn't feel right.  My current arrangement feels right.

Now I'm writing it in first person, as his chronicle.  I still need some other viewpoints, but I thought I would make the novel a collection of written artifacts.  It makes it more challenging, but potentially more interesting.  I'm wary, because I know there are a lot of people who will bail right out of a story that is told in first person perspective, and I worry over my ability to make the various artifacts interesting in their own right.  I think I should do some research.  I know a girl I could talk to about this, but she's all freshly in love so I don't know if I'll be able to reach her.  Oh well, I'm sure I could get on OK Cupid and wrangle a history Ph.D. student and get the information I needed about primary sources (and some new ideas).  But I think I'm onto something that could be good here.  We shall see, I guess.

But I'm on with the first draft in a form it'll end up being...finally!  :)

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Another year, another NaNoWriMo

So, this blog fell away, because I wanted to blog my writing in NaNoWriMo last year, but then it also ate up my writing brain to try to do it and made for incredibly dull reading to boot.  I'm going to do thins a little differently this time around.  SO last time I got 32k words in before I failed.  That was largely due to that I was in Germany, and November was going to be my last whole month there.  I tried like hell to get through it, and even had someone helping keep me motivated amazingly well.  I tried even to book a train trip to be trapped with nothing to do but write.  None of it ultimately got me to 50k words.
This year, I've been sitting and working on the same story.  I feel that it has gotten a lot stronger, and I've been writing.  My goal is to have a draft of about 100k words done by xmas that I can then go and edit heavily and then use that to find an agent or publisher.  When January starts, I'll be back in grad school, so it's do or die on this NaNoWriMo.
I should've had this book done already, but...well if you're curious to why I didn't get it done, you can go check out my other and much more popular blog: seeingmomout.blogspot.com .  I would suggest that you start at the bottom, if you do decide to give it a look.
So now, one of the things I'm going to do in this blog is to regurgitate writing tips, which mostly derive from the excellent podcast: Writing Excuses.  It'll largely be just for me to remind myself of things, but hey, if you get something out of it, then that's great too.
So, the very first thing I'm going to post this year is this little PDF image file I made that contains a lot of details on writing formulae.  I assembled this data from a great many episodes of Writing Excuses.  These are all useful, and in many cases (3 disaster, 3 act, hollywood formula, and 7 pt story structure) can all just be different ways of looking at the same thing.
So I present to you here, a big page of writing formulae:

Friday, November 30, 2012

Last Day NaNoWriMo - Words 32934

It's funny how all the NaNoWriMo pep talks I read/heard lately have been of the type, "So fucking what if you lost, that's not the point."  These have been good for me to listen to.

Okay, so I'm on my last day at work, which is also the last day of NaNoWriMo, and I sorta checked out a few days back.  My word count lately has been miserable.  There have been lots of reasons, but mostly it's just lack of time and a need for some quick pre-writing.  Well, I got all next week where I'll be in Dresden without a job, so I should be able to get myself to the end of the book then.  So I'll finish NaNoWriMo (maybe) just by displacing a week.  That's totally fine.  I really like what I've got now, though I realize that I write extremely sparsely and will need to go back and add detail and cleverness.  But I expect that Novel #1 requires a lot more revising than subsequent ones.  I have really enjoyed writing this.  It seems like writing a novel is one monumental undertaking, but it's really not.  I can see how some guys are cranking out 3 books a year.  I don't think I could do more than that, but I can envision that being something that isn't terribly stressful.  I think the big thing for me has been how to end every chapter with something provocative.  Usually I have some idea what that's going to be at the beginning, but there have been times where I've made the point I needed to make and then something very interesting shows up out of the blue and BAM I chop the chapter off right there.

I SOOOOOO want to go "All right, now I've officially lost NaNoWriMo, I am allowed to go back to chapter 1 and make it not look like boiled ass," but no.  The explosion of word count is the direct target of NaNoWriMo, but I think the real point is to make you finish a shitty novel draft and not go back and revise the fact that you used the word "brown" four times in two sentences until the whole book is done once through.  So, in that regard, it's been a success.  I realize how I write best (at least as it seems right now) is to have an ending and a few scenes and pre-write what I can, but then to retroactively pre-write a lot later.  I also figured out that instead of sitting around and coming up with a fully-fledged linguistics system in advance (esp. for naming) I can call my guys ***Bob and then just fix that later.  So I learned a lot.  I've got a lot more to learn, and I've got a novel to finish.

I also have a short story I'm dying to write.

I'll keep this blog updated as I do it.  I'll probably write more here now, since I don't feel like words expended here are crippling my chances at getting through NaNoWriMo successfully. 

Friday, November 16, 2012

NaNoWriMo Day 17 - Faceplant!

Okay, instead of the 1666 I needed to keep up with to be a day behind, I'm doing now more like 700.  In my defense, I got sick, and have been passing out every evening trying to make that 700.  But, Today it all changes (or maybe I give up completely)  I'm on a train to Hungary.  Let's hope my battery lasts long enough to do something amazeballs!  (Like writing 6000 words :/)

Sunday, November 11, 2012

NaNoWriMo Day 11 - 15237 Words

Starting the day LATE.  I am a bit hungover from an impromptu get together at Brandon and Kaitlynn's place.  So this weekend isn't going to get me way ahead like I was hoping.  Damn.  I so want to turn writing into a career in Europe.  Sounds weird, I know, but I like the idea of nice long train rides which I can use to work.  Ending up in some city and not having the travel actually matter.  Then I get to enjoy the city for a day or two and take a train back.  Okay, stop screwing around, me!  I have two days of writing to do, and I have a reasonably decent scene to write.  This should be a breeze.  Stay tuned for the next post where I complain how very wrong I was.

Saturday, November 10, 2012

NaNoWriMo Day 10

Ugh.  Writing scenes to bridge between the really awesome scenes can kind of suck.  I want every chapter to be doing something, and since I have only two POV characters at the moment and they are are traveling together I can't really just skip big huge chunks of the journey.  But I do have to fill that time with conversation and internal dialogue and try to make it work somehow.  I keep telling myself that this is only draft zero.  Now that they've been together for four chapters, I've cooked up a way to get them apart in the next one.  For a chapter.  But then that chapter leads directly to launching my third and final POV character (I think).  I actually recently thought that I could insert a fourth one, that would come in and break up some of the monotony of traveling, but that would have to be a draft 1 correction, and I'll have to think long and hard (and full of seamen!) about that.  Boy that joke doesn't really work at all when typed out.  My mother used to go, "Hey, tell them the submarine joke!" when people came over, which then sort of ruins the whole thing.  Anyway, digression complete.  Back to writing!  I have 3047 words to be done and caught up today.  Pretty sure I won't make that goal, but If I can get 2047, then maybe I can repeat that tomorrow and be ready to start slacking off and falling behind again! Wheeeee!

Friday, November 9, 2012

NaNoWriMo Day 9

I'm having a helluva time keeping this thing up.  I knew I'd need to jump way ahead in those first few days and instead managed to have a few problems and goof off a lot and all that jazz.  I still need to draw myself up a rudimentary map, so I can know what I'm doing.  Do I really need to have a map in the book?  I know it's one of those things that everyone thinks MUST be in a fantasy novel, but you know what?  I almost never give a shit about them.  Is there anyone out there who gets upset if there's no map?  I can admit that in some cases, especially when movements of troops and people and ports and whatnot play a huge role, then maybe they're needed.  I like seeing a map of the universe of A Song of Ice and Fire, but maybe that's partly because HBO has also built that into my brain with the intro to Game of Thrones.  No, I think it was there before.

Anyway, I'm starting to write more and more comments and type more and more placeholder asterisks--I do a little *** when I don't want to look something up, or don't want to have to stop my momentum right then and make up a place name or a cultural quirk--and I'm worried that I'm going to have to stop writing at some point and go back and do more prewriting.  Damn.

But I have been sticking to the NaNoWriMo mandate of not editing pretty well.  I did write one paragraph after a liter of beer and it made almost no sense, so I deleted that.  I also have been discovery writing now that I'm out of the outline I made and in that process I have discovered that I need to go back and edit some previous pages heavily to make a plot element reveal itself naturally but surprisingly.  I'm trying to end every chapter on a little bit of something that might make you curious to keep going, and sometimes that means going back a page and doing some alterations.  Right now, I'm just commenting it thoroughly.  But this is draft zero.  When I'm done here, I'll go write the first draft and it won't have any story-telling inconsistencies like it has now.

Okay, back to working, so I can be done and go home and get back to writing.  I'm about a day behind still.  I was a little over a day behind yesterday when I had to go to bed because I was dead.  Now I have a weekend coming up.  If I can get approximately exactly 6571 words in those days, I'll be back on track, and primed to start falling behind again during the work week.  Why the fuck does November end on a Friday?  To kick my ass, that's why!