Author: jcampbell

I did it. I conquered NaNoWriMo with a few days to spare, aided in part by vacation and in part by a sickness that kept me home from my day job for two half days and one full day. The benefit of writing as an occupation (or preoccupation) is that you can do it even when you are sick. There are many writers who talk about writing every day. Stephen King famously writes every day (although I call bullshit on how strict he claims to be about it). Other writers have said every day except for Christmas. There is a range of scribe diets out there, but it is possible to write well when you are ill. You are sitting down. You can take breaks when needed, and you don’t have to worry about getting anyone sick.

Aided by medication and sheer willpower, I finished my novel, writing between four and five thousand words each day towards the end. I am happy with the first draft, overall. It clocked in at right around 54,000 words. It’s more the skeleton for the book than the book itself. I started out as a screenwriter. I tend to be a bit too sparse on description and sensory experience. I go back during the rewrites and flesh all of that out. The final book will probably be closer to 70,000 words, which is a good length.

I like where the story went. It took some turns that I didn’t really expect, and there is a lot of work to do to clean up that mess and make it all work together. I’m not happy with the way I used present tense, and I changed a character’s gender about a third of the way in, which will be messy. Not to mention, this is a Lovecraftian novel, and the guy didn’t exactly pick common names for his deities. I can’t wait to see what a travesty I made of some of those names.

That being said, December will not be a time to revise this book. I like to leave some distance between the first draft and my revisions. It helps me to see the book from a more neutral place and not fill in gaps automatically. I have several short stories that I would like to revise, as well as a novel and a novella from previous NaNoWriMos.

The hardest part about NaNoWriMo, I think, isn’t November, but December. In November, you power through the draft by thinking that December 1st is just around the corner. Then you get to December and lose some of that steam. That’s fine. It is bound to happen, but I think the goal should be to lose less of that steam every year and carry that momentum forward in to a writing habit that will foster your creative productivity until next November. Easier said than done, but I am going to give it a shot.

There will be short stories to write, and I have half a novel from a previous half-NaNo. Then, there will be revisions. Endless, tedious revisions that will remind me that the real work of writing isn’t getting the words on the page, but getting them to make sense to anyone else.

Today, however, I can bask in the bliss of victory, knowing that I accomplished a goal, and that I have once again earned the right to be called an author. With that, I wave goodbye to Very Dangerous People, with the promise that I will return to it again, when I reach another end that demands another beginning.

The Homestretch might seem like a better title for last week, the stretch of NaNoWriMo that I got to spend at home. My NaNo vacation was not quite what I expected it to be. I had a hard time forgetting about work. I was on the phone with work pretty much every day, so it was always on my mind, rather than being able to pretend I was a full-time writer like I originally planned. Additionally, our family dog, who has been a near-constant presence for me ever since I started writing, died on Friday. You can read more about her on my blog. Overall, I would say it is the worst NaNo vacation I’ve had in the four years I have been doing this.

That being said, despite my generally cynical outlook, I did meet my writing goals for the week. I wanted to average in the neighborhood of two to three thousand words a day. I wrote a little over twenty thousand words during the week. As I type this, I am less than five thousand words from winning NaNoWriMo. There is little doubt that I am going to win, barring any unforeseen catastrophe.

In many ways, NaNoWriMo is a lesson in the writing life. There are going to be a lot of days when you don’t feel like writing, when you don’t have the time you expected to have. You are going to be trying to write happy scenes when you are depressed and depressing scenes when you are happy. Your novel is not going to care about what is happening in your life and the relationship between the writer and the work starts to feel parasitic. There isn’t much you can do about it. Just keep pushing forward and hope for the best.

Neil Gaiman says that you write when you are inspired and you write when you aren’t, but when you look back you can’t tell which words you wrote when you were inspired and which ones you wrote because they needed writing. I think about that a lot in my approach to being a productive writer. NaNoWriMo is a good way to learn that sort of persistence. It is so easy to fall behind if you stop for even a day, and a few days away can quickly add up to what seems like an insurmountable challenge.

In November, I face my busiest month of the year, holidays with friends and family, inclement weather, and a host of other things that would easily be excuses to not get in my fifty thousand words. In the end, I have always reached my goal, and I am very proud of that.

Five thousand words. It seems like nothing now, as if I could sit down right now and hammer them out. The torture of the blank page, of not knowing my story and wondering if I can sustain it, has changed in to the bliss of reaching the climax and discovering how it all turns out for my merry band of professional killers.

I am excited to reach the end. Things have taken shape that I didn’t expect, and I think the final scenes will be a lot of fun to write.

Current word count: 45,000

Did I mention that November is Hell?

This November has been the worst I can remember in terms of demands upon my time, even more so than the grad school years of 2012 and 2013. This week brought another 55-hour work week at my day job, which left very little time for keeping up on NaNoWriMo. The half-way party also meant another lost day. My writing came in large chunks, especially day 10 and 16, which encompassed over 6,000 words of my count for the week.

I am on vacation from the day job this week. I like to take a few days off during NaNoWriMo and fall in to what would probably be my normal full-time writing schedule. I am hoping for between 2000 and 3000 words each morning with editing on other projects in the afternoon. I am only a day behind as I write this. By the end of the week I ought to be sitting pretty going in to week four. It will be nice to do nothing but write, even if it is on a temporary basis. I think that is the fantasy of a lot of writers. So few actually get to do it. It will be nice to pretend that I am one of them for a week.

Very Dangerous People is going well. I made a discovery that will have a profound impact upon my story’s conclusion, a secret that I can’t share. I need to save it for any of you that may read the book in the future. That is one of the joys of “pantsing” (writing without an outline). I’ve had a character change genders on me, and now another character has an agenda that I never knew was there.

I’m happy with the story, and while I know there is going to be a lot of work to do after November, I have high hopes that the novel will be worth it. This should be the best NaNoWriMo yet.

Week 2 of NaNoWriMo brought a revelation that I have possibly blocked out since last year. November is Hell. It is the busiest month at my day job, with fifty-plus hour weeks being the norm. On top of that, I have this Baty guy who seems to think that I need to pound out fifty thousands words to prove to myself that I have what it takes.

That is what November is really about, trucking my way through Hell. This year has been particularly bad. My job has never been more demanding for such an extended period of time. I come home exhausted, sometimes after working all day and all night, only to find a keyboard waiting for me, along with that stupid little NaNoWriMo graph that is mocking me, calling me worthless and questioning my dedication to my art.

“You call yourself a writer?!”

Screw you, you little piece of digital graph crap!

So…things are not going well. Today I wrote over 3600 words and I am still about a thousand behind the pace. The story is going well. I am excited about Very Dangerous People, and I am having fun now that I am working in the Lovecraftian elements, slowly adding a supernatural element to what has been a straight-forward world by this point. I have no problems with the quality, or lack there of (it is a first draft, after all). I just wish I had more time to invest in it, more time to think about the story and develop it away from the keyboard instead of chasing it down at roughly 70 words per minute.

This week is another of hellish proportions before I take a week off to do nothing but write. Obviously, I should be able to make up any work that I am behind over the time off I will be getting between vacation and then Thanksgiving the following week. That being said, I have a hard time psychologically with behind behind or being late, and the sooner that I pull myself back into the expected range, the happier I will be.

I’ll see you all on the other side of Hell.

Current word count, as of Monday night: 15,827.

NaNoWriMo is often a lesson on how hard the life of a writer can be. A lot of our deadlines are self-imposed. Unless you have a multi-book contract or have something you’ve sold that is currently in the editorial process, you work on your own. NaNoWriMo presses upon us a one-month, fifty thousand word deadline. Usually, in this career, you get paid for such an experience. In this case, though, it is all in fun.

This month has been rough from the get–go. I have a very demanding day job, and it has been a nightmare time-consumer over the first week of November. I am a very productive writer, and a quick-typer. Even with those things going for me, I have only just kept my fifty thousand word pace. It’s required some quick typing, not wasting a moment, but it has also required getting up early, working my entire lunch break, and variety of other tactics.

At this writing, a post that was supposed to go up Monday, mind you, I stand at 5,700 words. I’m not totally happy with the quantity of the writing, but I have been happy with the quality. I am three chapters in to writing Very Dangerous People, and I am enjoying it, so far. The supernatural elements that will be a big part of the story haven’t come in to play, but will probably be showing up in the next chapter. I’m comfortable with my protagonist, and his “origin story” worked out pretty well. I was surprised by some of the things that came up.

The first three chapters have been the easy ones. It has been a free-flow of ideas to the keyboard, because they were all my ideas. However, this novel is not one containing only my ideas. Very Dangerous People is the story of a social group of professional killers who get caught up in a plot to release Lovecraftian elder gods upon the world. As a horror scholar, it is important to me to do the mythos justice, and to also write a good story.

I imagine that the pace will slow for me as I enter into the realm of Lovecraft’s creations, having to weave them in to the world that I have established in present-day Salem. However, I think the story has a lot of potential and will have some surprised in store for me.

I look forward to seeing how Dick and his band of killers deal with a dark Lovecraftian cult and the monsters that they release upon the world. Hopefully, I will be back on Monday with good news about their efforts, which in the case of fiction, often means bad news for my protagonist.

Week 1: 5700 words