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.

T Minus 3 Days to NaNoWriMo

Welcome to the inaugural post in my writing blog.  So it is the end of October, and I'm rolling up on my last month in Dresden, Germany, and I thought, What better way to spend my last month in Germany than to be chained to my laptop trying to bang out 50k words in 30 days? I had no answer.  But I've decided to become a writer.  I was once a technical writer, and I spent a lot of time translating ancient Greek, so my technical ability should be as flawless as I need it to be.  But I know that when I write fast and don't edit, my writing can be horrible, and the endless editing that comes from wanting something that I feel represents me and my abilities makes the process take forever.  So NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is a exercise in self-restraint and possibly self-inflicted torture.  But I'm trying to think of it in terms of the other art that I create, and this is going to be my underpainting.  Nobody looks at an underpainting and says, "Wow, that's great and totally finished."  I probably will go ahead and polish the shit out of the first chapter, just so I have something I can show people, and because I'm pretty sure that won't be changing much.

So what have I done in preparation?  Well, in typical cart-before-horse fashion, I brainstormed, pre-wrote, and then couldn't stand it any longer and wrote chapter 1.  Then I stopped.  I had to stop, because while I had about the first four or five chapters planned, after that I had tons and tons of big question marks, and not the type I think I could discovery write my way out of.  I'm going to use all the lingo I picked up from the Writing Excuses podcast, so while it may sound like I know a thing or two about creative writing, it's largely just me parroting things I've heard on those shows.  If you're writing fantasy or science fiction, and to a lesser extent, anything else, it's a great podcast.  It's 15 minutes long, so it doesn't ever get too far off track, and what's more is that at least one of the guys goes from being an unpublished writer to a professional novelist in the course of the series, and Brandon Sanderson goes from writing like mad and publishing to taking over the Wheel of Time books and publishing so much he has to leave the show to go on tour from time-to-time.  So anything that you read here that sounds like I know what I'm talking about, I got there.

So I guess I'll share a little about my first novel and then I'll get to work on physics, which is what I presently get paid to do.  So, I had a great idea for some scenes and a few characters and all sorts of different scenarios, and I decided to try to write this.  I grabbed those characters and wrestled them into place and when I would think I was getting close, something would pop out of alignment.  Wait, if this guy does X that means there would've been no reason for Y to happen...  I really wanted to write these scenes and characters, but the problem was that they weren't in a story.  And then something hit me, which was an idea that was almost completely fully-formed at the time.  It had just a small handful of characters (only three viewpoint characters), a hook that I think isn't half shabby, and a clever, yet inevitable twist.  I have been prewriting and brainstorming to thicken this stew since probably back in August.

So here's my idea: There's a prophecy, and a hero is chosen to fulfill it.  He sets off with his chronicler, a bookish kid that the hero used to pick on.  The hero is going to save the world; his chronicler is going to keep a record of the events so that there will be an eye-witness account of the deeds in this pivotal time.  This chronicle is also a dissertation of sorts.  It's his way of becoming a Keeper (that's just a placeholder until I can come up with something I like better).  The problem is that the hero goes and gets himself killed.  Now it's up to this academic to try to get the job done himself, but to keep it a secret lest the world be plunged into further chaos, and finally to falsify an ending to the chronicle so he can pursue his own studies.

The first of the other two characters is the hero's betrothed.  A woman who is on the verge of losing her claim to a throne and has agreed to marry the hero to secure it.

The second is the 'relationship character' if you're talking in terms of the Hollywood Formula.  I'm actually having trouble with this character's main motivation.  He's an actor.  As such, he's good at spotting lies and even better at telling them.  I've got some trouble in that I currently have some motivations for him that feel contrived.  I guess I have 3 days to work something out, right?  That should be doable.  I'm actually not far from really hammering this guy out, I think.  I just have to really sit down and work at it.

All right.  That should be enough meat for a first post.  I hope to find enough words to blog a few lines every day or three about my NaNoWriMo experience, and then later, of course, how I pick up an agent and a publisher and sell two copies for every person on the planet and buy the moon...  But I'll go ahead and start with 50k words.