Woo!!

NaNoWriMo Progress: 50,151*.

Yay! Across the finish line! Now we are just waiting for you, kerowack! You are so close. And for all of us, the main thing is that we all wrote and wrote and learned something wonderful from the experience. I think we've all written more than we had ever written for one project before and gained some insight into what works for us and what doesn't. Some of us made headway into projects that had been kicking around in our heads for a while. All of us produced something more than we had previously thought possible. What more could you ask for?

Some stats:

• Total Hours: 32.05
• Avg Words Written Per Day: 1,857
• Ave Hours Writing Per Day: 1.19
• Avg Words Per Hour: 1,564

*The official NaNoWriMo wordcount verifier is a little more generous than Word and says I have 50,205 words. :)

Plot: Snarled. Mood: Optimistic

NaNoWriMo Progress: 38,115.

My plot has not magically made itself known to me. I'm really confused as to what the right thing to do is right now, but as I noted on the TGF forum, my typing speed has gone way, way up. It's really like my Inner Editor, who had been duct-taped, gagged, and locked up unconcious in the closet, has died, so I no longer even hear her grunting and trying to move around in there. I suppose that is good in some ways, as I feel a lot more freedom now, but I worry that what I'll read later on review will be horrendous. Ah, that worry must mean that the Inner Editor is not in fact dead, but just taking a nap. Good.

I think Seppo's crossing the finish line might have lit a fire under my butt. Literally. Ouch. Someone get a fire extinguisher. Only you can prevent a forest fire.

See what I mean? The Inner Editor is so doped up.

Reflections from the halfway marker

Today is the 15th. We are halfway through NaNoWriMo. I can hardly believe it.

Seppo and I have both felt like things have gone awry from earlier, more frenatic and insanely productive times. Around this time in the project, as I hear, plots gang aft agley (while some just start pulling together in perfect ways) but I'm sort of at a loss as to why things have happened the way they have. We talked a lot in the car on the way home, and hit upon these pertinent points:

• We both feel the story better when we are exploring characters in unforeseen and unpredictable situations.
• When we write about situations that we can't relate to, it's no surprise that those parts of our books lag and do not flow like the other parts.
• When we have preconceived notions about the plot or characters, things seem to happen more awkwardly.

Given this set of points, it's clear that we should write about situations we can relate to, that we don't expect the characters to find themselves in. That's sort of difficult, but having this new challenge in front of me gives me some motivation to push on. I want my character to tell me what they want to do once again.

How is it going for the rest of you? What are you learning from the process about yourself, how you write, and what you are good at? Any tips for the rest of us?

WOOHOO!

NaNoWriMo Progress: 10,274!


Ehem. While it's nothing compared to some of the other folks doing this thing, I finally broke the 10k mark... only to realize I forgot to set a 10k prize for myself. :(

The one thing that helped this last day or so was the fact that I realized I could use my BlackBerry to write while on the bus. I hate writing by hand, and my laptop is too monstrous to be of any good, but I realized that I could simply write myself an email and copy/paste it into my story later. w00t.

Running in the dark

NaNoWriMo Progress: 24,624.

Adding to my inconsistent set of metaphors, I am now running in the dark with my plot. I'm going very quickly, but I have no idea how this works into the plot. The characters are taking on more and more unique characteristics and revealing their backstories, but I am not sure how the main plot may or may not use them. I have two main male characters, and I still can't tell which one is going to end up with the main female character. Who knows; at this stage, the two males might even decide to be gay and leave the female character with a broken heart.

I really, genuinely have no idea. But currently, the words are flying onto the paper and I'm hoping that at the very worst, I can pick up some threads for short stories from them, even if they don't work in the bigger novel.

Resetting rewards

• 5K: Wear my NaNoWriMo shirt in public. Done.
• 10K: Go see Walk the Line? Get two shirts. Done.
• 17K: Buy a book I like. Have too many books I haven't read. Replace with what? Done.
  
• 25K: Nice dinner out. This could be as early as Sat night.
  
• 35K: Buy a DVD? Which one?
• 40K: TV series? New jeans.
  
• 50K: Nice coat or sneakers? Nice cut and color for hair.

I'm not sure what I want to do for the milestone I just hit. Clearly, I should stay within the price bracket for a book.

Another difficult climb

NaNoWriMo Progress: 20,791.

Yay! I crossed the 20K line. Unfortunately, I notice that I didn't plan a reward for myself for this milestone. Boo. The next one is at 25K. The content was... rather weak today. I think I threw my pacing off because I spent a lot of time working on two scenes that should only have been about a couple of hundred words per scene because I wasn't sure what I wanted to do next or how to get to the other scene I have planned. Oh well. Progress is progress, both in wordcount and plot, and I did get some in both.

This is supposed to be the hardest week, and I think I'm feeling it.

Catching back up

NaNoWriMo Progress: 18,091.

I lost yesterday (zero wordcount), but I wrote a fair amount today, for about two hours and ten minutes. I'm still not back to my old pace, but an doing quite respectably. The story is a bit sluggish right now, but I think I am setting up a situation that will develop nicely over the next few chapters.

But seriously, the first couple of hundred words today were so painful to get through.

Slog, awesome, slog

Had a really mixed evening of writing. The wordcount was good - 2,847 words in ~1:30. Got a little stuck trying to figure out how to move my character out of the city, and tried something with reasonably unfortunate and uninteresting results. I got really just "stuck" writing in what felt like a sort of state of just incompetance. Nothing I put to the page felt right, or compelling. I think this is the first day where I've really felt like I had to turn off an internal editor completely just to keep writing.

Still, I cranked out about 2K words before giving up the ghost, and calling it a night. I was feeling a little sick, so I took a bath, and just let my mind wander. I ended up coming up with some (I believe) interesting backstory for some otherwise standard villanous characters, and I slapped down another 800 words, in the middle of my boring crapulence, in about 15 minutes. So that was satisfying, but it's unfortunately bordered on either side by crap.

Anyway, the moral is to keep at it, but taking breaks to think about stuff ain't bad, either. Had I not continued, I would never have been forced to confront the problem tonight, and had I not stopped, I would never have realized what I needed to do to turn this section of story around.

Yeah.

YAPMU*

*Yet Another Progress Meter Update.

I thought these looked nicer. :D This weekend, I am going to try to write a parser for the word count api that NaNoWriMo provides so that the progress bars automatically update from the profile page on their website.

I hope these look ok. Seppo said he will make mini participant icons so we can throw them up at the top of the page.

You can't trap me!

I refer only to myself. I wrote myself into a bit of a corner yesterday, and stupidly, didn't write myself out of it before quitting for the night. I would make that my first tip, if I'm qualified to give such a thing. Don't leave yourself in a bad spot, where you don't know what's coming next, or have a problem to solve. While you might think, "I just need some time to think this over," that's exactly not what's going to happen. What's going to happen is that you'll say, "Well, I don't have a good enough solution to this yet. I'll start later," then you'll put off writing again, because your "solution" still isn't up to snuff.

Just write. Write even if it doesn't make any sense, or if you think it's complete crap, and will throw it away later. But move your story on, even if you have to completely cut the scene off and start somewhere else. Then write for a bit, until you can stop when you have some momentum, and are excited to start again.

Rolling off a log

NaNoWriMo Progress.

Rolling off a log, falling down a well. Whatever. Whatever the happy thing is, it's happening to me now. Woo!! I only wrote 1,768 tonight, juuuust a touch over my daily minimum, but not my daily goal, but as far as "stuff" that happened, it was glorious. Things just fit together. I fit in an apocryphal story about an old lady whose corpse is found partially eaten by her starving cats, as well as an S-M-R-T reference, and somehow managed to advance the plot in a very "check" then "check mate" sort of way -- aah! The joy! In short, I am very pleased and had the sort of giddy silly time I remember having last year.

Yay!!! I hope you guys all have this giddy silly time at some point. I am sure that at least one of other of you have had this feeling during this month, from what I can garner from the comments.

Encouraging Words from MLs

i just got "pep talk" emails from the Municipal Liaisons from SF and the South Bay. There are tidbits that apply to all of us in some manner, so I thought I'd repost some parts here, with added emphasis by me.

From the South Bay ML:

Finishing up with week one, many of you are well on your way to noveling greatness with the hundreds or thousands of words you’ve written. Some of you may have already crossed the 10,000 mark which is really awesome.

For those of you who are feeling behind, don’t despair. It's not unusual to get a slow start as you throw your internal editor to the curb, or have life throw a few objects in the way.

The important thing is to keep writing.

If you find yourself hating your current story or feeling that a particular plot thread has completely unraveled, then I would suggest that you insert a random plot ninja, as in “On the way to Bhangra class, Cliff Brooks was attacked by gnomes and mercilessly beaten to death…” which can then completely take your story down a different path.

The important thing is to keep writing.

Remember that coherent plot lines aren’t a requirement and besides, that’s what NaNoEdMo (National Novel Editing Month) was created. You can fix that pesky plot later.

The important thing is to keep writing.

From the SF ML:

We're almost through with week one of NaNoWriMo 2005, and by now you're hundreds or thousands of words into your 2005 Nano novel. A couple of you are tens of thousands of words along, and that is great.

For those of you who aren't, don't despair. It's not unusual to get a slow start as you kick your internal editor to the door for the 30 days that are NaNoWriMo. It gets easier as you go along. You should find that if you put two hours a day into it, you'll get into the groove. And you may surprise yourself.

I can offer a bit of advice for your wordcount preservation. If you get stuck and absolutely can't go on with your story line, you can start over, but don't delete what you've already written. Remember that cohesion and coherence aren't requirements of NaNoWriMo. Just put a line across your document and start over. You can go back later and wrap it into your story--maybe a character finds an old manuscript he was writing and reads it over. Or just leave the story fragment there. It's okay.

Weekend numbers

NaNoWriMo Progress.

"hapacheese" (heh) came over Sunday morning as usual, but instead of he and Seppo talking about game concepts and design, the three of us sat down at our laptops to work furiously on our books. I spent almost 4 hours writing yesterday, but not all in one block, and managed to push my daily average almost back up to what it was before I faltered in Friday and Saturday.

Seppo proved to be of extreme help in getting me to feel good about abandoning my former story. The more I spoke to him, the clearer it was that for me, preconceived notions about character and scenes were not conducive for having fun while writing. Speaking with him highlighted the points I enjoy and the parts I don't, and infused me with a variety of ideas that I could pick up and use. It's great because now I have this mental bin of little ideas but haven't committed to any specific one thing, and as I write, I can shake up the little bin and pick something out to work with. And if I don't like it, I can just pick out another idea.

I think the three of us really made a good push on our stories, even though it was an informal gathering. Perhaps all four of us should meet officially for writing dates? Just an idea.

Not so much with the good

In the last 48 hours, I have written a grand total of 447 words, bringing up my total wordcount to 8,768.

Egads! But I can't really complain, as I've spent some great time with a friend I hardly ever see and am always really happy to hang out with. Yay! :) Not only that, but we were treated to some really awesome homemade food by other friends of ours. How can we be this lucky?

But back to the story (meanwhile, back at the ranch), I have completely (sort of) abandoned the "story" I had been working on and have started anew. And I think I am already having a decent time of it -- all 193 words of it! I had been severely crippling myself by saddling the project with old characters who didn't necessarily have a "starring material" quality about them. And the story I thought I wanted to tell was in fact too convoluted.

The new story will have a very simple plot. And start with some very simple characters. And I will spend lots of time exploring who they are and figuring them out as I write, instead of just before I write and getting frustrated during the writing when they didn't obey the rules I had set up for them. Really, the essence of it was that I was suffocating the characters and story. So tomorrow is a whole new day, full of exciting new opportunities.

I am keeping the wordcount that I had accumulated so far, because in the best case scenario, I will be able to incorporate the people and scenes I already have in a supporting role in the new plot.

Write on, writeous soldiers.

...

Sorry.

Tell me a story...

For the last day or so, I've been struggling to get out of a bit of a rut - I felt like the story was dragging a bit, and stuck in an area where I don't really have any clear notion of what's going on, other than that these actions were getting my characters from one place to another. As a result, it meanders quite a bit, and really doesn't say much. I'd managed to pull myself out of the rut yesterday, when I accidentally deleted 800 words, effectively tossing me straight back into the rut. Writing last night, trying pull myself out of that rut again, I just couldn't do it - I couldn't find the rhythm, or the music I'd managed to conjure up while writing at work earlier. Today was largely another day of trying, step by step to get out of this bog I was in. Writing was like walking through mud.

But I think I'm finally at a point where the world has opened up to the main character, and the possibilities of where the story could go, and the action that will happen, has been ratcheted up a notch. It's right at the cusp of the transition, and I'm really excited to see where it will go. There was a whole section of this guy's "quest" that I'm pretty sure I'm just going to dispose of, because it was essentially just a questy-quest when this was an RPG, and doesn't serve to advance the story much (which may have been a pointless exercise, then, even as an RPG). So, I think at this point, I'm going to have the "real" plot pick up, where the main character begins to become embroiled in the events of the world, and have the current of the larger story sweep him out to sea.

Fucking FUCK.

Fuckity fuck fuck. I just lost 800 words, because I'd downloaded the goddamn doc from Gmail, written a bunch, hit save, figuring it'd prompt me for a save location, saved, then realized only after I'd fucking closed the doc that it had saved to some fucking obscure temporary directory that I have no fucking clue where it is, or how to get back to it, and it's not listed in Word's recent docs crap, or anything. God damn it.

Updated icons

NaNoWriMo Progress. I updated out icons on the right from the wordcounts we have reported on the NaNoWriMo website. I know some of you aren't updating that number everyday, but that's all I have to work from. I'll update them everyday if the numbers change. Oh, and the order of the icons corresponds with the order of the auto-blogger-generated "contributors" list. I have no idea what algorithm is used to order that list.

Do you want an icon, kerowack?
/obligatory name-dropping

ETA: I added kerowack's intimidating word count icon to the right.

Day Three

NaNoWriMo Progress I didn't hit 12K, but I also did better than I thought, and stayed ahead of the curve. I think I've hit my first sort of break in momentum, in that for at least one scene, I felt like it dragged. Now, I'm sure all my scenes drag, but this one, *I* felt like I was wading through mud. Tomorrow, he goes fishing, learns some information, and begins a trek with a caravan to a market at a nearby village, so it should at least provide some interesting material. So... yeah. 11,447. I'm on to you, Kerowack. I should be past you in less than a week! Fear me!!!

Comparison, Part II

I did a few things this year differently from last year, all of which is making the writing more difficult.

• Last year, I didn't start with pre-crafted characters, so they could do whatever they wanted. This year, because I'm reusing some characters, I find myself reining them back in if they behave "out of character" but this is inhibiting the natural flow of the scenes.
  
  
• Last year, I introduced the female character in her current day setting, gave some background, set up the plot hook, then immediately introduced the male character in a separate scene. This year, because I already "knew" the character, I didn't spend any time introducing her or giving background, so it's... weird.
  
  
• Last year, I had a non-outline outline which said things like "1/6th into the book/my total wordcount, the two protagonists should have their second meeting." This year, I didn't even have an outline, just a list of scenes I thought would be interesting to write. Turns out that the prepped list of supposedly interesting scenes are really boring and only the random scenes I write are any fun.
  
  
• Last year, I tried to stick to the classic romance structure and had a great time. This year, I have been trying to deviate from the classic structure and am having a horrible time. I think I'm going to revert back. I don't know enough about writing yet to forge new paths.
  
  
• Last year, I wrote at a fairly slow, contemplative pace for the first few days (taking up more hours to fulfill my quota), taking more time to "craft" the scenes and dialog, until I could get inside the characters' heads and feel more comfortable with the setting. As time went on, I was able to write faster and faster because I "got" the world and could "see" it. This year, I just dove right in and started to write at my finish line pace of last year. It's been disasterous. I am going to have to slow down and simply take more time to write for the next few days so that I can find the story.
  

Lessons learned. At least this is only the third day.

Day Two, so far.

NaNoWriMo Progress

Chugging away at this whole writing thing for another evening. It's turning out ok, so far. It's no Kerowack, say, but it has a sort of rhythm of its own, and I'm still amused by how much the story tells itself. Maybe that's an indication I'm a terrible author, but who knows?

So far, there's been a long flashback, which serves to basically illuminate the main character and his best friend, and set up the events that trigger the beginning of the larger story arc. I got to the point where the next scene is that beginning, and decided to wait until tomorrow to see what happens with that. My goal tomorrow's to hit 10K, which, I suppose, earns me my NaNoWriMo shirt. Yay-ha!

Comparison + Mini Tip

This morning, on our drive in to work, I compared this year's experience with the first day of starting NaNoWriMo with last year's. It goes something like this:

Last year, it felt like jumping down a really deep well. I was terrified to start, and the very beginning was frightening beyond all belief, but within seconds, I was like, "Yay! Free fall! Woo, I'm flying!" This year, knowing what it was like last year, I jumped in with far less hesitation, but immediately slammed into the sides of the well and tumbled from side to side on my way down for a long while. After that, I started to free-fall again, but I was rubbing my sides and grabbing my broken ribs, going, "Oh... yay... free fall... Woo! Ow!"

Heh.

One thing that works for me when I have a relatively low wordcount for the day and am feeling bad is checking my wordcount over and over after each sentence. At first, it's depressing when you don't have as high a number as you wanted to, but seeing that number get bigger and bigger with each sentence is a morale booster. After several sentences, I have a new paragraph, and it always amazes me how many words even a short paragraph adds.

And having Seppo so far ahead of me is also a huge incentive, as is having the chart of my progress from last year right next to me. I have to beat myself at least, right?

5210

I'm calling it a day for day 1, and at 5210 words, I think I'm off to a pretty good start. It's a nearly completely tangential start to things, but it's sort of a backstory that ideally, illuminates the characters to some degree. Or at least gives me, personally, a feel for a.) writing, and b.) who they are.

I've gotta say, it's difficult to read back on things, because having read Kerowack's writing, it's literally on a completely different level. I feel like a third grader to his Michaelangelo. Maybe that's a little over-the-top, but genuinely, not that far off, IMO. So, it's a little demoralizing in some respects, but in other respects, I'm having a ball. I know I'm not a great writer, nor do I even really aspire to be one. It's a fun process, it makes me think about what makes a story, and it even works to help develop this RPG concept that's been bouncing around in my (and others') head(s) for a while, now.

Good stuff.

Tip of the Day: Back Up

NaNoWriMo Progress

For the love of all that is good and fuzzy, BACK UP. Last year, at the end of each day just before midnight, I filled in my daily progress in my report card and sent my gmail account an email with my most current Word doc. This meant that at the end of the month, I had 31 (since I did it in December last year) perfect little snapshots of each day's work. It was gratifying to be able to compare the versions, as well as rest in certainty that my work was not going to be lost.

Whatever scheme you adopt to back up, make sure you do it each and every day.

Off to the Races

Started writing at midnight last night, and knocked down just over a thousand words before hitting the sack ~40 minutes later. Got up this morning, and am currently at 1,766 words. I have no illusions that it's anything other than crap, but it's an interesting process. I've basically been just letting whatever happen happen so far, because really, I just need to be able to get into the heads of the characters, and figure out what kind of world they inhabit. So far, at least three things that I had no idea would happen have happened, and the story's gone off on a complete tangent, that I think is necessary.

No dialogue yet, largely because I'm scared of it, but also, because so far, none has really been necessary. Sounds like someone will start talking soon, though, or this whole thing's going to be very tell, not show. :D

Fun!