The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: NaNoWriMo

  • NaNoWriMo #6 part 5

    Woo-ha! I got you all in check.
    Woo-ha! I got you all in check.

    So this is the fifth and (almost) final post about NaNoWriMo for me this year.

    I won as I noted last week. I’m over 60,000 words for the month and I’m happy with that. The book is about 60% finished and I know what’s happening next and what happens after that. I know the end.

    I’d hoped to be around or even over 70,000 words for the month but that didn’t happen due to some unforeseen though preventable circumstances. I lost access to my computer for five days and I took up handwriting the manuscript. Because of this I have a newfound respect for anyone who’s doing this every day, every year. (Hi, Aspen!)

    Writing a novel is a helluva lot of hard work. Don’t let anyone tell you any different. If you’re still writing then what the hell are you doing taking time away to read this? Get back to it! When you come to the final write-in tonight – sponsored by the library, no less! – you can relax if you’ve won. If you haven’t, bring your stuff and we’ll cheer you. We’ll run sprints with you.

    Keep going until it’s done. Don’t give up.

    Finally, I need to say thanks to all the crew who helped and inspired me to keep going this year. I didn’t make it to as many write-ins as I intended but that’s more an issue with my work schedule than anything else. I worked at home a lot and always worked as if I were in a room with all of you.

    Okay, last thing: I’m coming back to post regularly in the Cafe starting in December. I need a day and time from the Boss but I’m feeling like I can be here again especially while I’m finishing up writing the first draft of the current work in progress. And then editing it.

    So thanks for reading these updates. I’m glad you did. I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.

  • Sitting Pretty in the Winner’s Circle

    Crap. This is going up pretty late. Sorry guys.

    But hey, I had a valid reason for forgetting.

    Okay. I lied.

    Basically, I “won” on Saturday and now words are a thing other people do. Which is pretty much the exact opposite of how you are supposed to treat NaNo. Learn from me. Don’t give up just because you passed 50k and you’ve validated and your bar turns purple.

    At some point I will finish my novel. It’s close. I can probably knock it out in less than 5k. But I don’t want to. These are the hardest words to write on this novel, because they have to wrap everything up. Even though I don’t plan on doing anything with this story (I have no plans to edit it into something more readable), I want to finish it right. And that requires effort.

    And I’m not ready for that commitment.

    If you need me I’ll be eating ice cream from the carton while convincing myself that I have no responsibilities.

  • December is Coming for You! NaNoWriMo Week 4

    It’s November 25th, the last week of National Novel Writing Month. Are you panicking, yet? Actually, I think the last week of NaNoWriMo is one of the easiest. A lot of people are winning, which pushes you to finish, and if you have stuck with it this long, then you are probably going to make it. As for my rebellious NaNovella, it is about where it should be. I’m only 4,500 words away from my planned 25,000.

    I’ve always been pretty good at the pacing aspect of writing. I generally have a set word count for stories, and I rarely miss it by more than a few words either way. All of the pieces have fallen into place, and we have come to the climax of my story. All the right people are dead, all the pieces, save the final one has fallen, and my protagonist has just settled down into a groove. He has made a grasp for that has handhold over the abyss his life has become, and he thinks he might be able to hold on. Now, I get to take his handhold and beat him over the head with it.

    I’m still very busy. I have a lot of projects coming due at once, but it looks like I am going to make my 25,000 words. More importantly, I think I will have something good to work with during the rewrites. I also have a little bit of pent up jealousy against the people who are doing 50,000 this year, and a bit of disappointment that I won’t “officially” win NaNoWriMo and get my winner’s badge. That being said, this was a good project, and a good learning experience for me as writer.

    But next year, I’m coming after that winner’s badge.

    NaNoWriMo Word Count: 20,500

  • NaNoWriMo #6 part 4

    2013-Winner-Vertical-BannerSo as of this morning I’m a certified ‘winner’ of NaNoWriMo for the sixth time.

    Yay me.

    Really, I’m proud that I’ve done it. Again. I just wish there hadn’t been something that happened on Friday night that kind of made me struggle through the weekend and thus unable to post on Saturday like I’d planned. So, I’m late here. Again.

    Anyway, what happened was – well, it’s not important. Suffice to say that it involved my computer – where all my writing for the last year was stored and stupidly, STUPIDLY, not backed up anywhere else. Except for a few things on my Google Drive and the last addition to the current novel last Thursday.

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  • Leading by [poor] example

    Every year I find that I challenge my local WriMos to do things the right way, despite the fact that their ML (that’s me) doesn’t.

    “Turn off your inner editor!” I tell them, while continually editing, revising, and amending my writing from the previous day, hour, minute.

    “Write quickly. Just let it flow!” I agonize over every word. (I’m renowned for writing 67 words during a 15 minute sprint. Believe me, that’s not far from the norm for me)

    “It’s never too late! Don’t panic if you fall behind!” As I race forward as rapidly as possible, utterly terrified of falling behind in my word count.

     

    This year, I find myself in a very strange position. I’m still up to my usual tricks—constant editing, plodding daily progress, panic at the idea of not finishing with at least a few days buffer.

    But.

    I AM behind. Or barely ahead. It depends on the day. I have no buffer.

    I HAVE turned off part of my inner editor. I still tweak words and phrases. But there are major plotlines that are wrong in my story, and…I haven’t gone back to fix them yet.

    Now that’s peculiar, especially for me.

    I’ve also had my very first epiphany day, which usually strikes much earlier in the process. Last night I managed to dream up some very clever ideas for my story, for both things already written, and things yet to hit the screen.

    But unlike other years, I haven’t done anything with the ideas for revision other than wake up, write down copious notes (make sure you have a way of recording your sleepy ideas during NaNoWriMo. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve woken up, thought, “Eureka!” and then fallen back to sleep, only to wake the next morning with the brilliant idea gone). I’ve not added those ideas. I trust that they’ll be added eventually. But for now, I’m letting them marinate for a bit. I’m staying the course, writing forward, and resisting the urge to fix what’s already done.

    I seem to be following my own advice, at least a tiny little bit. It feels very, very odd. Freeing. Frustrating. Different. But not necessary wrong.

    And it only took nine years to get to this point.

    Who knows? By my 20th year of NaNoing, maybe I’ll be letting punctuation and spelling errors slip past as I type pure stream of consciousness at one-hundred-plus words per minute.

    Yeah, right!

  • Week 3, Still Writing

    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.

  • NaNoWriMo 2013: Excerpt from “Among the Savages”

    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.

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  • NaNoWriMo #6 part 3

    2013-Participant-Square-ButtonHello 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.

  • Life Is Laughing at My Intentions

    I love monsters. I love pancakes. I see no reason why we can't move forward with this combination.
    I love monsters. I love pancakes. I see no reason why we can’t move forward with this combination.

    I don’t even know where to start.

    Okay, let’s start with last Friday. I took the day off from NaNo. Ran some errands. Did the laundry. I know. Crazy.

    Saturday, my husband and I went out into the world, claimed a spot at a coffee shop and wrote our fingers to the bone. Go us!

    Sunday, not as much. I wrote some.

    Monday, full of good intentions, I met a few Confabulators for breakfast and then writing. I was about 2300 words behind. Not bad, actually. I could make that up in no time at all.

    We talked a lot, which I needed. I ate pancakes, which I also needed. We wrote some. We talked. And then it happened.

    BOOM!

    Line edits for book four landed in my inbox. I think Sara and Jack probably thought a friend had died or something the way I sat wailing and holding my head in the restaurant. Line edits. And I have a week in which to get them done and sent back to my editor.

    Seriously.

    Originally, I thought I could do both. I should learn to multitask. I really should. And maybe I could multitask–write one book for part of the day, then edit another the rest of the day–if the two books weren’t chronological pieces of the same story. Writing book five while editing book four is too hard for me. I get confused about which events go into which book.

    Last night, depressed over my stagnant word count (I’m now about 8k words behind and the gap is growing), I considered going back to another story I’ve been working on. I had to set it aside for this one. Maybe I could switch over? My brain might multitask better if the stories were completely different.

    I sat and edited for nearly eight hours straight yesterday, and I’m only a third of the way through. The thought of writing more words in the evenings after that makes me want to cry. Also, I think my eyes are bleeding.

    So, no. I’m not writing right now. It’s not likely I’ll win this NaNo. We’ll see what happens. Maybe I’ll do a half NaNo or 40k. That’s still halfway to the end of the book.

    On the bright side, I’ve figured out how to avoid the dreaded NaNo Week Two–ignore it.

    So. Next week. Will I be desperately behind on word count or exhausted from a stubborn need to catch up?

    Who knows?

    Every NaNo is a new adventure.

  • NaNoWriMo 2013: Day 13

    My outlook on NaNoWriMo hasn’t really improved in week two — which doesn’t surprise me, really. I finally had a bit of an aha! moment in the chatroom the other night, which gives the story some direction. I can see it hitting 50K, maybe even my lofty (impossible) goal of 70K overall.

    That said, my stats look like this:

    Ashley Word Count - Day 13
    Par? What’s par?

     

    This is pretty atypical for me. On an average year I tend to hit par within a couple of days and then stay on top of it. My writing tends toward large bursts, so I keep up alright, and usually give myself a safe buffer to work with. In years past, I’ve been done before Thanksgiving so that I could focus on creating awesome food — which I do much better than writing, apparently.

    Some of my reticence with the writing is still feels and bullshit, which I’ve already mentioned. I even had a friend give me permission to stop writing for a while longer if I wasn’t ready. I wanted to yell, “But I haven’t in months! How much longer is that supposed to take‽” I’m really rather tired of myself at this point, but I still feel small and angry in the time between when I start to type and when I finally get involved in the writing.

    I’ve also developed this nagging fear that I’m rewriting the same story over and over and over again with tweaks to the setting.

    • There’s always a character at the cusp of making a large decision that affects other people more than it does them.
    • There’s always a character who has dual identities that are sometimes at odds.
    • There’s always some sort of social class dichotomy in the setting that keeps characters at odds.
    • There’s always some sort of dystopian/social unrest element that moves the story.

    It seems like no matter how many changes I make, I keep coming back to these things. I like writing them, but if I’m just rehashing the same shit over and over again — is there a point to pursuing this? I generally believe that there’s nothing truly unique to be told — we’re all writing Star Wars, guys — but I could at least tell slightly different stories from the ones I’ve already told.

    I’m not engaged in my main character. I’m literally plotting a climax that kills every single main character.

    I recognize that the purpose of NaNo is do something rather than to complete something, which is 10% of why I opted to do it this year. But it’s hard to write this while thinking, There’s nothing of value in this narrative. I don’t know when I got like that.

    That said, I’ll keep plugging at it because I really can’t fail at this too. I also want to beat my nemesis. He hates his story too and is slightly more prone to apathy than I am, so I think I can pull ahead of him soon. The stats have my back; he had a 3K lead at one point, but as of this writing he’s only about 1200 ahead of me: