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. 

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 :/)

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.

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!

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!

NaNoWriMo Day 6

Ha!  You thought I was just going to update on odd days.  So I'm a day behind, but it feels like two, because if you stay up a whisker past midnight to catch yesterday's writing goal, it looks like you shit the bed again on word count.  So that's what I did.  I updated about thirty minutes after midnight and so my words didn't go on that day's account, but they went on the day's before.  So now I have to write my ass off tonight before midnight so I can stop looking like I'm two days behind when I'm not.  I mean I'm a procrastinator, sure, but I don't want credit when I'm not actually procrastinating yet.  That's an insult to my true skill.

I'm officially hitting the end of my four-chapter outline.  We'll see what kind of corner I write myself into now.  At least I do have all the pivotal scenes figured out in some sketchy manner.  I'm not sure exactly how to stitch them together, and I'm also not sure how to end those chapters in ways that force you to keep reading against your will.  I'll do my best though.  I think I've hit that note okay for the endings of the first three, and maybe not every one of them has to go that route.  Later in the book, it should get much easier to do that.  As it stands, I'm working with only two POV characters, and they are together. I have to tell you that makes it a giant pain in the ass to figure out whose head I should be in now.  They're going to be traveling together for some time, I guess maybe I need to figure out a reason to split them up a bit to make it not feel so eenie-meenie-miney-moe-ish, and give a real reason I didn't just make this book first person.  I know the answer to that, and the answer is that I wanted to, but so many people have this deep aversion to first person perspective.  I know I do, at least if I don't like the character.

So, I have 1000 more words to write before midnight tonight to be caught up to where I should've made it yesterday.  I may skip lunch and write some at work again, but I am a little ware about doing any work on this while someone else is paying me.  This way they're technically not (really so, since i'm only getting paid for half-time, but working full time), and I don't think that even if anyone knew they would come and say, "The German government demands the $0.40 you owe us for the dismal ebook sales of this novel you self-published while working on our dime."  But on the off chance that it ends up being a hit that makes J.K. Rowling look like she's working for small change, in that case I don't want any evidence linking me with anything fishy that might lend credence to a claim like that.  In fact, please forget that you read this entry.

NaNoWriMo Day 5

Woops!  Yesterday I managed to squeeze in a mere 120 words or something.  It's my first stumble.  And today is my first day of having to work and then write.  Time to pick it up now that I'm starting today 1447 words behind.  I have consoled myself with the idea that 50,000 words does not a novel make, so, if necessary, I can write the fantastic scenes I've got in my head, and then go back and fill in the gaps to string those together.  I haven't written a novel before, so I don't know if this would be good or disastrous for me to do.  I do have some concerns about how to correctly develop characters while jumping around, but what the hell.  This is my draft zero, so I'm fully expecting to have to heavily edit things later to have anything remotely worth reading.  I'm fine with that.

NaNoWriMo Day 3

I'm over 5k words, which was my target for today.  Hooray.  Nevermind that I had to drag myself kicking and screaming to get there.  This is especially true after I goofed around and left myself a few hundred behind yesterday.  I really need to get off my ass and get way ahead, but I just don't work that way.  I need the panic.

So I'm on my second POV character now, who takes over in the third chapter.  I am apparently fond of re-writing part of a scene from another perspective, so where character 1 ended is not where character 2 began.  He started a little before that.

Pacing is a little weird.  I'm making tons of notes in the column for shit I need to go back and clean up.  I also keep marking off stuff where a character needs to swear uniquely, and I even made the dopey move of introducing a local dialect.  Now I feel like I need to go make a document about it somewhere so that it will be consistent.  Alternately, i could just make sure the characters never return to this region again.  That's the lazy option.  We'll see, I guess.

Okay, I'm off.  Karaoke tonight, and before that I have a tutoring session, and before THAT I need to go shopping for a brunch tomorrow, and then I am supposed to hang with someone tomorrow evening.  And in all that I need to write another 1.7k words.  Better get crackin'!

NaNoWriMo Day 1

I'm up to 1710 words today.  So far I'm ahead of the event schedule, but way behind my schedule.  I got up and got working, but I did it an hour later than I really should have.  That was fine, I got all my goofing around out of my system then.  Then I went to work.  Since I was hung over from a Tuesday night halloween party, (everyone in Saxony had Wednesday off) instead of spending my day last day before NaNoWriMo pre-writing, gathering together everything I had planned, and drawing a concrete map of the relevant bits of my world, I slept on the couch all day.  Then I did some errands and went to a dinner party.  So I had to spend a little while reading over notes and gathering things together.  No problem, I did that, and I think it focused me.

Then once I was really hammering words out, I looked and realized that my laptop had stopped charging.  The cable I brought was on the verge of death, requiring me to frequently wiggle it to get the  light back on.  And today it picked my most productive period to totally die.  So I got up, went down to the Altmarkt Gallerie and got a new one from the Apple Store.  I also picked up some lunch and came home.  Then I goofed around, listened to Howard Stern and took a nap.  That is a way to kill a day.  I decided I should write myself back into writing the novel by making this blog entry, so here I am.

It is so hard not to look back through what I've written and edit a little. Thoughts like, "oh god, I just used this word three times in two sentences, I know I'm not editing, but I can't let this travesty slide," crop up constantly.  But that's really what NaNoWriMo is right?  Permission to write a draft zero in order to really get that novel into a form that's out of your head and onto paper so that you can polish it.

I don't even have a complete first chapter yet, but I'm very close.  I'm probably about 300 words from it.   I was hoping to get through the first two chapters tonight, and work on 3 and 4 tomorrow, since they're from my other point-of-view (POV) character.  In the end, I should have only three.  I guess that makes this Heroic Fantasy rather than Epic Fantasy, but I'm okay with that.  I want something I can bite off and chew for a first novel rather than something that sticks in my throat and strangles me to death.

Okay, I've procrastinated enough except that I might need to order a pizza or something.  I'm starving again.