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Finished my book yesterday. It really didn't end like I thought it would, and unfortunately, it did confirm that most of the "good" is going to come from the editing process, if that ever happens. The major *themes* of the story that I'd tried to create were totally either lost, or hamfisted. The ideas, I think, came out okay, but it's just that they didn't cohere in any real way. Oh, well - next year, I know if I want to do this again, I need to plan more.

I'm not sure that I'm going to do it next year, though - maybe a break next year, spend the month while Ei-Nyung's writing trying to plan or something, then try again the following year. Maybe I'm just burnt out from this year, and next November, I'll be itching for a challenge again. Who knows? But for now, I'm done, and I'm happy.

30K

I just barely dragged my tired old body through the 30K mark. It was damn hard. The last few days haven't gone very well.

Tonight's work felt really... stilted. Like I was trying too hard. Like it was too self-consciously trying to be funny or quirky. Worst of all, it came off sounding pretty phony.

There are still 13 more days to pick it back up. I know I can do it. I'm just stuck in a bit of a funk.

Changed my mind

I thought I had decided on my format for the rest of the book.

But after rereading what I've written so far for the boy's part and getting copious amounts of constructive criticism & advice from Seppo (all solicited and welcomed), I think that I am going to have to change the structure of the book.

I just can't do a reasonable first person of the boy. No matter how I try to talk in a believeable gender-neutral way, which I think I can do for my third person narrator voice, it is really hard for me to capture the feel of what it was like to be young, to fall in love, to grapple with issues of growing up and struggling family life, in the voice of a boy.

I find it especially difficult to reasonably portray a boy that is crushing AND lusting after a girl at the age of fifteen/sixteen. It always sounds like me as a girl, instead.

On the Road to Recovery

Passed the 30K mark today. It went quickly - I started writing the other "side" of the story, which is weird, because in theory, it's the part that requires a certain amount of research, but I think it's ok if I wing it for now. The details in that regard aren't really important except that they set the stage for what the main character's doing.

I think it's weird, because right now, I did a huge marathon on the "Game" side of the equation, and now I'm doing a big chunk on the "Politics" side of the equation. Ideally, the two will have merged more smoothly, and you'll get a better sense of what kind of person this guy is more gradually, instead of HERE'S A! NOW HERE'S B! But I can't write like that in the first pass anyway, so it'll have to be a little clunkier, because I want to get coherent thoughts out, not interweave a complex narrative. That's the sort of thing that I think happens more in the editing process - this pass is to get the ideas out there.

So, it's sort of strange, because last year, even though there were parts that were crap, it sort of read in the order I imagined it ought to. This year, it's definitely *not* reading as I imagined it might. The "real" way it should be is much more A/B/A/B, instead of ALL A/ALL B.

We'll see how it turns out.

Halfway!

Four days after Seppo, I've hit the halfway mark! W00t!

The main girl character's story took me to about 21K words, and the second third of the story (another 20 or so thousand) will be the main boy character's story. The first third of that will overlap pretty solidly with the third third of the girl's story, then take them further along.

I'm not as confident about the boy's part, but I am feeling pretty good about how the story is heading out. I am almost positive that I can't get to the end of the story by 50K words... it'll probably really come to an end around 70K, I think.

I figure things will come to the central conflict will come to a head at around 50K to 60K, then cleaning up the aftermath and wrapping things up will take another 10K or more.

I'm not sure if I'll get to finish this month. I'll definitely hit 50K. I'll try to finish this up durin the Christmas holidays while sitting on the plane to visit the family, I think. :)

Burnt

The NaNoWriMo project's been going ok - I'm still on pace to finiah early, but yesterday I only wrote about 700 words, and I wrote absolutely nothing today. Friday, I realized that the combination of doing NaNoWriMo and having a job where these days all I do is write is causing me to essentially burn out.

Basically, I'd get up, go to work, write for between eight and nine hours, then come home, eat, and write for another two, in a completely different style, in a completely different universe. I thought maybe the distinction would be enough to keep them from piling up on each other, but Friday morning, I went in to work and wanted to do just about anything other than write anything. I had no ideas. I couldn't get into the right mindset.

I spent about five hours doing something that normally takes me between two and three, then spent the rest of the day plus an extra two hours trying to deal with assorted other crap.

I think the story's ok - it's not really good by any stretch, but there's potential there. The book so far's a lot of anecdotes, and rantings - if the pace were really radically tightened up, I feel like the story, as a whole, has some potential. I certainly haven't read anything like it before (that's not to say it's some work of genius - holy crap, it's not - it's just different).

Anyway. Hopefully I'll get back on the horse tomorrow, but today, I'm just relishing a day where the only thing I've written all day is this.

Halfway!

Passed the 25K mark last night! More than halfway done! w00t w00t!

Week Two is teh suck

Week Two always sucks for me and why should this year be any different? Bleh. So slow. Dialogue feels forced, scenes seem too long.

But I did discover that the boy likes to sketch! Nice. He just showed up in a scene with a notebook full of little drawings. I'm hoping that this will tie in nicely with the rest of the story. Note to self: I'm thinking this will affect which colleges he will want to apply to. We'll see.

Update

Still chugging along. At about 21.5K words right now, which isn't too bad, but election returns are coming in, and everything I've written so far tonight has been garbage. I know the internal editor's off, but seriously, I'm just not into it right now - too nervous about the whole election thing. So, that's it for tonight, but aside from a horrific night tonight, it's going alright so far.

Addendum

The one other thing is that today was the very first day of working on NaNoWriMo, this year and the two previous years, where I didn't really even pay attention to the word count. And three thousand words flowed out of my fingers in two hours. I hardly noticed the minutes go by.

Pain

Tonight, as I wrote, I wept. Over my keys, I typed and the tears rolled down my face.

My writing isn't necessarily good. I don't claim that at all. It's not like I wrote something so grand that I moved myself to tears over it. I don't even have enough distance to know if the words I wrote actually convey the depth of meaning I hope that they do. It's more that I have a picture of a story in my head that makes me feel, even if it doesn't do that for anyone else.

I hope the end product is good. But there is nothing I'd give to trade the cathartic experience of tonight. I talked to Seppo about it. It was confusing, emotional. I think that it's being able to write about a fictional character who is not me but with whom I emphatize that is so helpful to me. To recount your own past hurts and happinesses feels a bit too self-indulgent, but being able to give my all to writing the made-up stories of this girl's life is something I can unleash myself on without any conflicting feeling of self-pity or self-aggrandization.

It's going well!

I think. Wordcount at the end of Day Four is 9,356 words with just over seven total hours.

Plot-wise, I think it's moving along how I thought it would. The focus seems to be shifted away from the first love aspect of things to the familial relationships, but I hope to shift it back and really try to get the feel of falling desperately and crazily in love for the first time.

Character-wise, my main character is a little less shy and moody than I thought she would be, but I'm glad for me.

I'm a bit worried that there is too much of a shift in mood from scene to scene, but generally, I'm happy with how things are going. I feel like this reads more like a coherent, flowing story than anything else I've ever written before. I'm both exhilarated and painfully worried for it.

Progress & Serendipity

I started out this project having some idea of what I was going to write. I thought that'd be enough to sustain me until I got into the swing of things. The first day, I realized that though I had what I thought was the basic overall structure, I had *no idea* what any of the actual writing would be about. No characters, no plot, no nothing. So, I started writing what I knew - games, and hoped that something would coalesce in teh time it would take me to get the characters established, or figure out what the setting was, or *anything*.

Today, it began to come together. It's not really anything, in particular, but a direction simply appeared, and it made sense what I should be writing about. I'm actually not certain I've got the chops to pull off a story this complex, but I think it's worth going down in ambitious flames if need be. Besides, there's really nothing else to do - I don't have a story otherwise.

It is kind of interesting, though - the main character, Eric Wilcox, is definitely a lot like me, but clearly not. I think he's basically me, if I hadn't met Ei-Nyung, and was a little less restrained than I am.

Anyway - so far so good. Pace is as good or better than it was last year, and the weird little twists and turns that come from writing almost randomly are as fun this year as they were last year. Maybe even better. Good times.

Is in only day three?

It seems astounding to me that it's only day three.

When I was plotting this project, I worked from the perspective that this novel was going to be a Young Adult novel. But the closer I got to the start date, the more and more I was thinking this could fall into the giant bucket that is known as "Literary Fiction". It's because I was seeing it more and more as a retrospective of an older person reflecting upon one of her life's crucial crossroads.

When I sat down to start writing, however, the story flowed naturally as a Young Adult story. The voice is that of a person who is living being a teen everyday, not someone that has learned from it. There is a feeling of immediacy, of having blinders on, that I think works well for the character.

I'm feeling pretty good about the story. It's definitely not about me but I do use little events from my life to color in her life where it makes sense.

Ask me in a week how it's going. :D

Kick off!

I have just reached my daily goal for the first day. I'm a little ambivalent about the tone of the beginning of the story, but I trust that I'll be able to fix it up as I go along.

Here, I am listing all my wordcount widgets just so I have a place to keep track of all of them.

• Mini graph


• Regular graph


• Participant icon


• Word war w/ Seppo (as if it's even a contest)


• My progress report

Come on, we can do it! I'm gonna take a bath now and go to sleep.