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  • Days Late and Dollars Short

    It has been a stressful, busy month, and I apologize for this post being a day late. I’ve been behind on my NaNoWriMo novel, as I expected might happen. I possibly have one of the lowest word counts of anyone within our region. Still, I haven’t given up, and in the grand scheme of things, I don’t think I am doing too badly.

    As I write this, I am at just over 19,000 words. That isn’t near where I would like to be, but is actually pretty good, considering. This year, I set a sort of unofficial goal for myself of 25,000 words. I should make that pretty easily. Perhaps I can finish the rest of the novel during Winter Break.

    The writing itself is going pretty smooth. Things are starting flesh out, and every time I think I don’t know where I am going next, the book takes a bit of a twist. Right now, I am working on an interaction between my investigator, Mac, and a young hacker named Pin in the vein of William Gibson’s console cowboys. Pin has stumbled upon a way to hack into the spinal chips that provide the residents of Heaven’s Edge with their personalized environmental experiences. Pin has been pushing it farther than anyone else dared dream, hacking into the last sensory moments of executed convicts. Mac has realized what Pin has been up to and is hoping Pin might be able to use his talents to get Mac a lead on the dead man in the penthouse.

    I still think it will be a short novel when it is completed, but I am happy to see the story coming together in ways I hadn’t previously considered. I know how this book will probably end and how Halo’s Slip should begin. First things first. I need to get Heaven’s Edge complete, and then I will worry about the rest of the trilogy.

    Grad school is still the priority. I’ve had plenty to do. Finals are coming up. However, my son leaves for his mom’s house for a week starting tomorrow, and I should have time to make some headway this week. We’ll see how it goes.

    I’m still in this, I am just going a bit slower than I would like. As Thanksgiving approaches, I am thankful for the progress I have made. I will keep plugging away until the book is complete.

  • NaNoWriMo Standings – Week 3

    It’s Saturday at the Confabulator Cafe. If’ you’ve been following things here during the month of November, you know that many of our writers are participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Without further ado (although, really, can you ever have too much ado?), we’re posting this week’s standings. Congrats to all our writers for doing so amazing!

    As of last night at midnight, here are our standings:

    Jessi Levine (47,710 up from 28,016 words)

    Paul Swearingen (47,599 up from 26,826 words)

    Jason Arnett (36,805 up from 22,267 words)

    A subsonic hum rose slowly all around them, holding them close, hugging them in the near-darkness. The entire room shuddered causing them all to take a step backward. Lily plastered herself to Albert. Marion made some arcane-looking gestures, trailing light from her fingertips as she did so.

    What’s going on?

    Yinmenmic is taking the city airborne.

    R.L. Naquin (35,546 up from 25,572 words)

    “Sara,” I said, looking over my computer at her. “If you ever accept another job from her, I will publicly humiliate you with the story about the Easter Bunny and the edible panties.”

    Riley perked up. “What? I want to know this story. I want it very much.” He leaned against the doorframe with his arms folded, waiting.

    Sara threw her empty paper cup at him. “You’ll get nothing, and you’ll like it.”

    Ashley M. Poland (34,239 up from 19,407 words)

    JQ wakes up to Rod leaning over him. He’s drinking a cup of coffee and still wearing his pajamas. “The household is on lock down,” he says. “The press is having a field day with you, sir. There’s footage of you leaping out of the windshield of a busted QR-2340 while holding a baby. People can’t decide if you’re a hero, or if Doctor P is a negligent cow for allowing a racer in her midst.”

    Christie Holland (33,473 up from 22,501 words) — Municipal Liaison

    Ted Boone (28,061 up from 16,941 words)

    New title: A Swiftness Beyond Night

    Aspen Junge (25,630 up from 14,850 words)

    Sara Lundberg (24,053 up from 12,602 words) — Municipal Liaison

    Only in hell would they keep giving you hope that there is more to life than monotony, more to love than heartbreak, more to the future than broken dreams…then crush it utterly just when you feel you’re on the brink of something good. Hope was Hell, so what was the point of an entire realm dedicated to constant torture?

    Larry Jenkins (23,716 up from 14,524 words)

    I turned my head and found the business end of a hunting rifle pointed at my face. So this is what it feels like to piss yourself, I thought.

    Kevin Wohler (21,948 up from 13,163 words)

    The magazine stories and newspapers didn’t do him justice. Max Fortune rippled with energy. Not just magic, but raw, sexual energy. Looking at him made me want to trade in my college degree for a small cottage in the English countryside where I could give birth to several masculine children and spend my days ironing his puffy purple shirts. If DNA from Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, and Cary Grant had been genetically combined into a super baby, it might have looked like Max’s uglier little brother.

    Jack Campbell, Jr. (12,430 up from 9,000 words)

  • Forgive me, Padre

    Forgive me, Padres, for I have sinned. And I will continue to sin, throughout the month of November.

    My confession?

    I edit. During NaNoWriMo.

    I edit every single day. Sometimes more than once. I probably spend as much time editing during November as I do writing.

    There. I said it.

    Now, let me explain. (shh, Padre, shh. You can assign me my act of penance later. First, an explanation for my awful behavior. The other parishioners can wait, dammit!)

    I have tried, over the last seven years, to adhere to the mantra (as an aside: there are virtually no rules in NaNoWriMo beyond 50k in 30 days. But there ARE suggestions, and some are more zealously encouraged than others. This is one of those) “DO NOT EDIT.” You will see these sagely words of wisdom repeatedly and with various means of emphasis during NaNoWriMo.

    The reasoning behind this school of thought is that your inner editor is, in almost every case, a man/woman with his/her hand on the brake lever, ready at any moment to pull a Full Stop on your writing progress. And, in the process, scream epithets in your ear about the utter uselessness and awfulness of your writing efforts during November.

    To wit: your inner editor is an asshole.

    So, during NaNo, where the goal is 50k in 30 days, many writers make the conscious effort to lock their inner editors away, in deep vaults under heavy mountains on distant planets, and throw the keys into the fiery furnace of the local star.

    No editing = no brakes, and no internal monologue of self-loathing.

    Does this work? For some/many/most people, yes, absolutely.

    For me? Nope. No way.

    My stopping mechanism is different. It’s not a set of brakes being applied by a hypercritical inner child whose parents never showed any affection or approval. It’s rusty, creaky, near-to-frozen gears of thought that need constant and lavish lubrication to allow the machine to even function, let alone move forward at more than a snail’s pace.

    What’s my manuscript-writing-machine lubricant of choice? My WD-40?

    Editing.

    During November, I write for a few minutes. Then I stop. I ponder. I reconsider. I go backwards. I tweak. I add words. I rearrange paragraphs. I interject conversations.

    I edit. Line by line. And while, on occasion, that results in the deletion of words, the net effect is always, always, an increase in word count.

    Unfortunately, this line-editing process does mean that I move slowly. Sometimes embarrassingly slowly. Last year (much to the perverse delight of my local WriMos) I wrote 67 words during a 15-minute sprint. 67. That’s…not fast. That’s the opposite of fast. Writing 1,667 words a day, words I’m willing to live with, takes me forever. So, when people say they’re busy during November, I tend to roll my eyes. Busy? You have no idea.

    It’s my own fault, but, yeah.

    The next day, when I first open my manuscript?

    I get sadistic.

    I reread my scenes, and then I kick my complacent characters down the stairs. Then I march down the stairs and punch said character in the head, steal their lunch money, and make fun of their hair style. Then I stand back and see how they react to my torture. If it’s boring, I go back in and do it again. With flair and panache. Rinse and repeat, until my re-re-re-read elicits an evil grin.

    Once I’m happy with my new, revised, dastardly scene, I rinse and repeat.

    Write. Line edit. Sleep. Torture.

    The end result has been, historically, a manuscript that’s passable. Not necessarily a first draft, but not exactly a zero draft either. Zero point five. Zero point seven, if I let my ego speak its mind.

    So, yeah. I edit. It’s part of my process, and for me, it works.

    Don’t agree with me? Cool. Have your own process that works? More power to you. And if anyone tells you your approach is wrong?

    Push them down the stairs.

     

    P.S. Two more quick things. 1. Square brackets are your friends! [insert something pithy here]. 2. Retconning during your own story is completely acceptable. There’s no WAY my Chapter Four can happen without completely rewriting Chapter Two. [Change Chapter Two in December] fixes that.

  • Zero Days & Momentum

    Yesterday was my first zero word day of NaNo 2012.

    These days exist. In some years more than others — like in Camp NaNo August, when I would go a week at a time without working on my novel. Sometimes life gets in the way. Sometimes you just need to lay on the ground and scrub your grout with a toothbrush and baking soda — because there’s nothing creative about it, and holy shit, did you know that your grout isn’t black?

    That Grout!
    This grout has been my life for a week.

    But that’s not in the spirit of NaNo. There a lot of goals for NaNoWriMo, and for me the biggest one is that I write every day. For the rest of the year, I write in spurts. I might spend a month on a project, and then write nothing creative for a month or two. I might start something small and silly, then file it away and forget it exists. (John Watson & Donna Noble broship fic, I’m looking at you)

    During NaNo, I shine. I don’t necessarily thrive under pressure, and like I said last week, the words aren’t always good, but they’re all mine. So when I have days like yesterday, when I’m stressed about my real life and wondering what I’m doing with this whole writing thing, it’s easy to just sort of… stop.

    I can’t take yesterday back. What I can do is write today. I can write tomorrow. I can regain my momentum, and remind myself not to take NaNoWriMo as a whole — Who writes 50,000 words in a month‽ Crazy people, that’s who! — but a day at a time.

  • Death Week

    Wrimos or NoWris? Anyone have an opinion?

    Crap. It’s Week 2. Death Week. The Week of flaccid attempts to go somewhere with the brilliantly (and last-minute) conceived ideas that started the month off so well. The Week where WriMos/NoWris drop like flies.

    Hi, I’m Jason.

    This is my fifth NaNoWriMo, I’m familiar with this week. So are you if you’ve participated more than once. I’ve had trouble with it and I’ve overcome it, too. This year, I’m taking a different approach, though.

    I think I’ve mentioned a couple of places that last year’s novel, after some serious editing and revisions, got a RR notice (Revise and Resubmit). I also believe I’ve mentioned here or somewhere (I’m all over the internet, I can’t remember what I’ve said where – whups!) that this year’s novel is a kind of sequel to last year’s. So as I hit the dreaded Week Two, I wanted to be ahead of the curve and I am. A good five days ahead of the curve. Yay, me.

    I wanted to be ahead so that I could split my time revising the first novel while I’m writing the second one.

    So far it’s working pretty well. I’m topping my personal goals every day for word count and making excellent progress on the revision. In addition, they’re informing each other. I can see where foreshadowing in the first novel informs the second and also I’m able to tie the second book more firmly to the first.

    Another bonus is that this year’s novel is better to start with. I’m not head-hopping like I was last year. Still writing too many passive sentences in the effort for sentence variety but that’s easily fixable. I’m also still avoiding a lot of -ly adverbs and that’s a trap in itself.

    But it’s all good. I’m managing to juggle the day job, writing, and editing all at once.

    So far.

    But you know – jeez, three jobs. And family and chores and even some down time.

    I’ll let you know how it’s going next week. ‘Til then, I’ve got writing to do.

  • No Mercy

    Week Two of Nanowrimo is supposed to be the Mighty Mountain of Doom. It is the hump, the long slog, the place where plots go to die. Where the trail is littered with the desicated carcasses of Wrimos who, upon discovering they lack the necessary fortitude, lay down to die.

    I thought I had dodged that particular bullet. Walking into the write-in tonight I blithely announced that my story was going great! The rest of my life was going to hell, what with the laundry and the dirty dishes and library books that have to be finished before I return them and the pot of inedible soup I made this weekend and the small electrical fire and needing time to write this blog post and an employer selfishly wanting me to work on their projects rather then my own, but the story was just fine. I grabbed some junk food, sat down, opened my notebook, and….

    I got nothing.

    Well, that can happen, so to jumpstart myself I began looking at yesterday’s writing to see where I had left off. And then I looked a little further back. And back a little more. And came to the horrifying realization that all I have written in the last four days is a couple of decent scenes glued together with a lot of brainstorming as I looked for a way out of this plot hole — excuse me, plot Grand Canyon.

    It’s a lot of words, but these are not good words. Mind, they count for Nanowrimo! They all add to word count! But they don’t advance the story.

    A farbled along for a few pages tonight, enough to meet my goal for the day, and with a heavy heart left the write-in pretty early. As I was walking home, I suddenly realized that these two characters are going to meet and exchange critical information because one is going to look up the other in the phone book. I had been brainstorming about psychics and hacking into the drivers license database and hiring a private detective, and all I need is a phone book? Seriously?

    So yeah. Week Two. Week Two has no mercy, and really nasty sense of humor.

  • Dispatches from the Trenches – Week 2

    NaNoWriMo 2012The second week of writing has taken its toll on my resolve, but I have not given up the fight.

    The first couple of days were rough. I barely made headway last Thursday, and Friday night was a wash. I regained ground over the weekend, barreling through 4,000 words on Saturday. But by Sunday, I was losing ground again. My hopes of hitting 20,000 words by Sunday night fell short.

    On Monday, I rallied and hit the 20,000 word mark. And though I was still on target, I could feel the Week Two NaNo Blues begin to overtake me. Luckily, I wasn’t the only one. The camaraderie I shared with my fellow writers helped alleviate some of the stress, but the words…

    Ah, the words. Alas, they did not come.

    (more…)

  • Week Two Sucks. That Is All.

    Well, here we are. The dreaded week two. Jane Lynch continues to scream abuses into my ear, but I have to admit, her voice is getting weaker.

    I’m currently well over 30k words, but the gap between the regular NaNo goal and my spazzy personal goal is narrowing. I still hope to catch up and finish this first novel by next Monday, though. Not quite a two week NaNo finish, but damn close.

    Still, this is about training myself to write every single day, regardless of whether I feel like it. Because it’s my job. Jane’s right about that, at least. I’ve had two or three days where I only managed to produce 1500 words, but other than that, it’s been 2-4k every day.

    Every book I’ve written has, at some  point, sent me into a spiral of self-doubt. Usually it begins right around the 30k mark. The fact that it didn’t hit me this time until about four chapters from the climax scene (at which point, it’ll be downhill, and I’ll finish quickly) must mean something. Either my ego has grown tremendously since the last one, or maybe, just maybe, this one is better.

    But I seriously doubt it.

    I look at what I’ve written up to this point and pound my chest in despair. It’s not funny enough. People expect me to be funny. This one is so dark. I’ve already cried twice since I started writing it. There are continuity issues that need to be fixed. One very important character doesn’t sound the way I want her to, except for rare one-liners. I have too many characters. My story has holes. I am the worst writer on the planet.

    And I’d rather set my hair on fire than write another festering word.

    And that, my friends, is the dreaded NaNo week two.

    So, yeah. My progress has slowed. But that’s okay. I’m still making progress each day, even if it’s not at the pace I’d wanted. And I will still finish about two weeks early.

    You know why?

    Because I need a two-week break from this piece of crap before I start editing it into something I can send my editor a month later without her falling into a dead faint.

    If that’s not motivation, I don’t know what is.

  • Still Not Writing

    So, as you can probably gather from the title of this blog, I haven’t suddenly converted to writing this month. Looking back on the past couple of weeks, there honestly wouldn’t have even been any time to write.

    But I haven’t been wasting my days away. I got older last week. I’ve reached the big quarter of a century mark and I barreled through it with pride. I cooked dinner for friends. It turned out a bit bland, which means I loved it and all of my friends suffered through it. I dyed my hair. I punched more holes in my ear.

    It turned out to be one of my better birthday celebrations. It was fairly low-key, but that suits my style just fine.

    So while everyone else here was slaving away in front of a computer, I was eating homemade cupcakes and drinking a glass of wine… or two. And that was just Thursday.

    Sometimes it really is good to be me.

  • Day Late, Dollar Short

    Hopefully none of you noticed, but my Cafe post this morning went the way my Nano novel has been going: slow, short, and late.

    Although here it is now. Better late than never, right?

    I’ve realized I’m juggling a lot more this year than I have in previous years – including school and a relationship, both of which are time consuming things.

    I haven’t quite found the right balance of time for everything. Unfortunately, that means everything is suffering slightly – school, relationship, sleep, and wordcount.

    It makes me sad to have to choose one thing over another, but I think my wordcount might have to continue to suffer while I apply some pressure to the other places my life is hemorrhaging.

    I’ll get caught up one of these days, though. I still have half of the month left to get back on track. With my insanely supportive co-ML Christie, and my amazing fellow Confabulators, I will make it through this month with my life in tact (if not my sanity).