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?
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?
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:
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:
I don’t know what it is, but there is something about Tuesdays that are hell on my wordcount. Last week, if you recall, I only managed to write 139 words. This week I pulled in a much more respectable 439. So by this logic next Tuesday I’ll write 739 words.
I’m still ahead on my word count, but only by a day and a half. That’s a bit scary.
It’s also pretty impressive because in the past week I had two days where I did not write a single word on my novel and another two days where I was behind on my word count.
It wasn’t week two blues if you were wondering. Nope, I planned to be ahead so I could take off time to celebrate my birthday. (In case you were wondering, my loving family purchased me amazing blankets and sheets… in addition to books). Now that my birthday high has settled down, it’s time to get back to writing. And I did. I pulled two three thousand word days in a row.
But yesterday I just wasn’t feeling it.
Hopefully today I will write more. I need to remember to take my computer with me to work. If nothing else, I need to develop an outline for where I’m going with this novel from here on out. Maybe start thinking about an ending.
I’m over halfway done guys. And that’s both amazing and terrifying.
I can’t help but compare this years Nano to last years. If I was less lazy, I would go to the Nano website, look at the chart for last year, and compare it to this year. But I already know what it will show. Last year I was either ahead or close to on pace to finish my novel on time. This year, I am not.
Last year, I wrote with a purpose. I had a specific goal in mind. Maybe some day I’ll even share that goal. This year, my story doesn’t really have a purpose. Or rather, it does, but it’s vague and hard to grab onto and more general then specific. I’m finding this to be a much harder way to write a story.
Actually, the writing is fine. It’s the giving a crap about the story that’s the problem. Without a specific focus to achieve, it’s hard for me to write, even when, like now, I’m sitting at my computer with nothing better to do.
I am a panster. I say that often, and I say it with pride. Most of my literary heroes, such as Bradbury and King, are pantsers. I write from the seat of my pants, and often I have no idea where it will take me. This year breaks with my past process because my NaNoWriMo novella is inspired by a short story that I had already written. I withdrew it from an anthology short-list in order to take a chance expanding the narrative into a longer work.
I have a short outline, created from the sequence of the story, with a few bullet points added in for scenes I felt I would need to write in. In reality, I have yet to use it. I’ve discovered new things about my character and the things that happened to them. I have yet to feel lost or confused or frustrated. The writing is going well, yet in large bursting chunks. I don’t think I have written a word outside of the sanctioned write-ins.
There are just too many things to do. Last week I read The Turn of the Screw, analyzed Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, read the 1818 text of Frankenstein, and began a unit on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This week will involve an essay on ambiguity in The Turn of the Screw, reading Dracula, and various discussions involving both. If your eyes have glazed over, trust me, I am with you. I also worked three evenings this week, in addition to my normal day-job schedule, and submitted a third-person bio for a short story titled “Flute of the Dead,” which will be appearing in Bete Noire Magazine very soon. Yet, the hardest part has been shutting off my narrative for Mama’s Little Boy while working on my literary criticism. When I am working on a piece, it sneaks into my head at weird, random times, which can be distracting when trying to closely read other works of Gothic fiction.
That being said, I’m not too far behind the 50,000 pace, and am in good shape for my targeted 25,000. Most importantly, I am enjoying the writing, and have never gone to the keyboard with any sense of dread, outside of the normal dread that comes with being a working horror writer, anyway. I’ve been having a lot of fun. It’s been good to see so many friends and so much interest from the Lawrence community. A special thanks should be made to the Lawrence Public Library and the Lawrence Journal World, both of which have brought us a lot of good exposure this year.
It’s been a good month so far. I can’t want to see what the next week brings.
I was supposed to post this yesterday but things conspired to help me forget. Nothing bad, though, just life which gets in the way of everything that needs to be done, right?
At the beginning of this I set a daily word count goal of 2000 per day and as an average I’ve hit that. However there’ve been a couple of days when I didn’t make that mark. Luckily there’ve been several days when I far exceeded that mark and thus I’m at 21,767 words in nine days. Not too shabby, eh?
Yesterday, instead of posting here as I was supposed to, I wrote over 3100 words which made up for one day where I only wrote 1300 and one day I wrote 1700 plus a little extra. At the end of the day I checked my progress this year versus the last couple of years and I’m on pace, or just a little behind, where I’ve been. The conclusion I came to is that when I’m in NaNoWriMo, blasting away at the story that will eventually be shaped by revision, rewrite and rethinking into a novel, I’m pretty consistent.
So that’s the process part of where I’m at this year. How about the story? I can hear one of you ask. (more…)
