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.
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