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I don’t think I’m going to win Nano this year.

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.

(more…)

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.

• It is day 20 (nearly 21), and yet I have day 16’s word count.
• I’ve stopped doubting my ability to write this novel; I can totally hit 50K this month.
• I refuse to allow myself to suck.
• I’m too awesome to suck.
• When I explain my novel conceptually, it’s actually pretty fucking cool.
• I’m beating my nemesis; this will be true every midnight for the rest of the month.

Carry on.

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