NaNoWriMo: Day 22
Current word count: 41,040
I lost two days to the stomach flu this week. It put me behind on work, but helped me get ahead on my NaNo wordcount and allowed some time for me to start my editing final.
It’s all downhill from here for me. I hit 41k words yesterday, which leaves less than 10k words to write. I’m no longer afraid that I won’t win NaNo.
See, usually, by this point in the season, I like to have a nice, healthy buffer. Realistically, this never happens. Not even one. I try and over-type on the weekends so that I can a buffer going into the weekdays. It’s a great idea on paper, but when my weekends are consumed with things like “Attend Greek Ritual as an Alumnus” or “Break my Car”, it gets pretty hard to get motivated. Well, that’s not quite true. Getting motivated is pretty easy. The trick is staying motivated for more than an hour or two at a time. It’s not an issue during the weekdays, when that’s about all the time I can allot to writing anyway. During the weekend though, if I’m having to constantly interrupt myself? My productivity sinks.
It probably doesn’t help that I’m not caught in that Catch 22 cycle of “I would focus better if I were well rested” versus “I can’t write anything when I am asleep.”
At least I like my novel this year? I’m not sure how long the middle section is going to be. Event-wise, I need to strike that sweet spot of “enough foreshadowing so the big reveal doesn’t feel forced” versus “there is so much foreshadowing that I may as well install giant flashing banners that read ‘plot twist next three chapters’.” Honestly, I don’t care if my Red Herring character is even remotely believable to the reader as a villain. He just needs to be plausible to the readers. It’s the antagonist reveal I’m worried about.
We’ll see how that all pans out. I should probably, you know, finish the dang thing before I start pondering stuff like that. I’ve yet to actually finish any of my NaNo projects (all two of them), so hopefully this will be the one that gets completed.
Not that I’m looking forward to editing out all of the shrugs and eye rolls that frame the dialogue, but… again, cart before the horse. I haven’t thought about publishing yet, though, so that’s realistic, at least. Not that I don’t want to get published eventually, but… that cart is a forest, and that horse is a gleam in the stallion’s eye.
I think I’m rambling by this point. Sleep deprivation will do that to a guy. Well, whatever.
I think the character most like me is my antagonist. Which is a bit awkward. It’s also fairly impressive, given that all of my characters end up as bitterly sarcastic and intelligent people of varying levels of social confidence. So, you know, they’re pretty much all like me anyway.
I should have them rant about philosophy more. That’s always good for words.
One of my secondary characters ended up gay for the sole reason of being otherwise one too many straight white guys in my novel. I don’t treat it as a big deal, so it probably isn’t one, but the inner editor buried deep within me is screeching “Using one token gay character is more offensive than not including any at all! Where is the ethnic diversity!” I’m still not sure what to think of it.
Whenever my characters talk in computer code, everything gets mashed together with underscores and other such punctuation. It’s very convincing looking, but I’m pretty sure it takes 7-10 otherwise perfectly awesome words and jams them into one word, killing my word count. It’s tragic.
I’ve got this post set to auto-schedule. I wonder how much of it I’m going to remember writing.
I’m going to bed now.
Oh hey, look at that! It’s Wednesday.
Carry on.
Guess what guys? I broke the Tuesday curse. Yeah. You heard me. Tuesday ain’t got nothing on my word count.
Want to know how? Why, thanks for asking. I broke the Tuesday curse by having a really crappy word count day on Monday.
Still, as of last night I was a full six days ahead of schedule. Yeah. You heard me right SIX DAYS. Except now it’s Wednesday, so it’s only five days. But that’s okay. It’s a new day and there are words to be written.
My goal is to reach 50,000 by Sunday night.
Ooh. I’ve said it. It’s official now. This is a bit terrifying, especially since my writing time will be limited on Thursday (I’m taking a time out from NaNo to see the Hunger Games) and again on Saturday (Doctor Who 50th special!). But still, that’s less than 2,000 words a day.
I got this.
While I type this, I can’t help but think that every word here is a word not being added to my nano novel that is several days behind. Oh well.
When a bunch of us writers get together, and there’s some new blood in the mix, the one question that always gets passed around the table is “What do you write?” I hate that question. I envy those that can answer with “Fantasy,” or “Young Adult” or “Post-Apocalyptic Disestablishmentarianism” or whatever. For me, genre’s not important. What’s important are the characters, what they do, and why they do it. The “where” is less important to me.
If the novel I wrote last year ever hit the bookshelves, it would probably be filed under “Sci-Fi”. There were aliens in it, giant bug things that swarmed the solar system, draining it of all its resources. They weren’t the story though. There are no bug-alien characters. In fact, if I recall correctly, the protagonist only gets close to a live alien once. The rest of the time he sees them at a distance, or as lights in the sky, or the devastation they leave behind them. The aliens aren’t the story, the alien invasion is a catalyst that puts the story in motion, sending our main character on his Hero’s Journey, where he has to overcome many obstacles that have nothing to do with aliens or spaceships or anything else commonly found in Sci-Fi. There’s no high-tech doodads, no sentient supercomputers, just a guy treking across the country on a bike during a disaster to find the woman he loves. But aliens = science fiction, right?
This year, unconsciously, I decided I would show just how ridiculous genre can be. My main character exists in our every-day world, a sort of stream of consciousnesses narrator going through his day to day life. There are three other stories though. There’s a Game of Thrones inspired medieval fantasy story, a science fiction space war set in the relatively near future, and a contemporary Fast and Furious inspired criminal story. All three of the alternate protagonists are persona’s of the main character, showing off different traits he is unable to see in himself. The plots follow the same basic structure of boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy loses girl. Each story focuses on a different aspect of the way relationships work or don’t work, and when put together with a little bit of extrapolation, they show the history of the main character and why he is the way he is.
I’m learning a few things while writing this. First, this is way to complicated to do without outlining. I was a fool. A fool I say! Second, I am enjoying all the different stories I’m telling. Even the main character, who annoyed me to no end at first, has become more tolerable as more of his backstory is being told through his alternate personas.
I’ve never felt the need to write a sci-fi story, or a fantasy story. When I start out with a story idea and all I have is a genre, you can bet I’m going to be very bored with it very quickly.
And there are 550 words that could have been in my nano novel. Meh.
November means two things for me this year. NaNoWriMo is the obvious one. It’s why you are here. The second, and slightly more important, is the end of the last Fall semester of my Master’s degree. This week meant a lot of writing, just not the kind of writing that I would like to talk about here. I wrote around 6,000 words of academic writing. I read a lot. The Turn of the Screw and Frankenstein. Dracula is sitting on the coffee table in front of me, waiting to be picked up. I’ve already read over 100 pages today. I watched Jack Clayton’s Turn of the Screw adaptation, The Innocents, and analyzed it for visual symbolism. Then there was a bibliography due for the final paper in my adaptation class. Did I lose anyone in all of that? I’ll just stop there before we get into the article I had to summarize on the children in The Turn of the Screw as they relate to Gothic liminality. Don’t know what liminality is? Neither did I until this week.
Long story not so short, this week was about a lot of things that didn’t have anything to do with NaNoWriMo. The little writing I got to do went very well, and I am sad that I got out of the habit. One of my favorite things about NaNoWriMo is the day-to-day grind. I enjoy it in some sick way. Hopefully, I will be able to clear some time to get back to it this week before I get too far behind. I’m still in good shape for my expected 25,000 words. I just can’t have any more weeks like this week.
Be sure to check out www.ljworld.com/nanowrimo2013 to keep up on all the updates from the local newspaper coverage of the Lawrence region.
NaNoWriMo progress: 14,346
It’s the end of week two and I’m still hanging in there to get my daily word counts in, (1,667 is a much bigger number after two weeks), but it seems that in my frenzied wailing on the keyboard I’d completely forgotten to post an except last Sunday. NaNo claims yet another deadline, ah well.
This except is from my third short story, Among the Savages, a dairy from a man sent to convert a tribe of savages to his religious order so that his country (run by said order) can use the resources of their land without resorting to killing them.
Again, I feel obligated to warn you that this excerpt is raw from the field with nary a spell check to comfort it. You may want to turn away now if you have an uncontrollable urge to correct grammar or continuity errors.
Hello again. Here we are, having survived the dread week two of National Novel Writing Month and deep in the mushy middle of the book I’m writing.
As I type I’m 35,000+ words into the book, which is planned for 100,000 or so words. The first third is behind me and I’m still liking the book. I’ve done some terrible things to my main characters so far and one of them is still fairly unlikable. But that’s on purpose. Also, only two people have died. One off-stage and the other in front of my eyes. I won’t lie, it hurt. It was necessary to move the plot along and lays some groundwork for the end. Others may die along the way. We’ll see when we get there.
When I’m not working, I’m writing or holding a cat in my lap. Even when I’m at work I’m thinking about what I could be writing. This year counts as a major success for me so far not because I’m way ahead of the game and hitting a higher average daily word count than I aimed at, but because I’m balancing work, exercise (which is more important than ever), family life and the writing all at once. Somehow it’s coming together again.
That didn’t happen last year. The first time was in 2011 and that novel is maybe the best thing I’ve written. Until this year, anyway.
It’s going well, some parts are easy and others not so much. Familiar characters and settings are fun and putting them through their paces is even more fun. I like trying to figure out how they’re going to react. The best part of inventing the future through stories is finding the difficult bits and working through them to the easy ones.
Now I’ve got writing to do. Talk to you next week. Hope your novel’s going well, too. Tell me about it if you want.
By the time this post goes live, it’s very possible that I will be two days behind on my wordcount.
Wednesday night, I had the honor and privilege to meet Chris Baty, founder of National Novel Writing Month. The Johnson County Resource Center hosted him, and he talked about NaNo for an hour then opened the floor for questions, and then autographs and talking one-on-one. I made my normal impression that I make on anyone even remotely famous of being a gigantic tool, so I left feeling slightly depressed, but overall, his speech was informative, motivating, and hilarious. I wrote down some of my most favorite Baty-isms, so I’ll have to share them one of these days.
Another week down, and I am starting to stagnate. Mostly I’m just getting bogged down in scenes that never want to end. This is one setting I’m pretty darn happy with, and for once I’m happy with both the conflict and the antagonist. I’m not likely to run out of plot anytime soon, so I shouldn’t have any issues coming up with enough content to make it to the glorious 50k mark. I just need to get through this section, I think. Well, and also, it would be nice if I could get some time when I’m not feeling sick, hungry, or sleep deprived at some point… but now I’m just talking silly talk.
Chronologically, usually I don’t start hitting the traditional NaNo slump until sometime next week. People talk about the infamous Week Two, but for me that doesn’t normally come into play until later on. That is, assuming I can make generalized statements about my pattern based on only two prior years of novelling. We’re going to pretend that I can, and move on. Yes? Yes. Good.
This is the first time I have ever been this far behind in my word count. Granted, two days is nothing, and it is totally doable in every sense of the word. But I’m going to complain about it anyway, because this is my post and I really don’t know what else I have to say. The only thing worse than bar graph failure is the “At this rate you will finish writing your novel on” date showing me early December. Which, again, I am fully aware that I’m not even remotely the worst off when it comes to word count deficits. It’s just that it’s never happened before. (Hypothetically, I may have cheated during Week 3 of my first year, but if I did, it was only because my time schedule was shifted from everyone else’s by five or more hours, and I still wrote those words before I went to bed, and well before the region totals were tallied.)
It also makes me nervous, because I’m not really known for my ability to write massive amounts of words in one day. Usually I hit my 1.7k, and then completely lose all of my attention span. That’s not the way to come back from behind. Raising it up to 2k is way too inefficient. No, I’m actually going to have to put effort into this if I want to finish on goal. How tragic is that?