The Confabulator Cafe

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  • Goodbye, Gloria. Rest in Peace.

    My grandmother passed away last night.

    It seems like the kind of thing you should say at the start of an article like this.

    I had already made a mental sketch of what I was going to say today, but that seems to have gone by the wayside now. For those of you curious, NaNo is still going well for me, and I expect to cross the finish line this year. If anything, writing is a welcome distraction at this point.

    In the days ahead, I’m hoping to dive in and disappear and let the world around me dissolve into whatever hell it chooses. I’d like to believe that I can make an active choice not to think about things that I know are going to be unpleasant, but that’s not going to happen. When I don’t talk, my characters do, and this will undoubtedly come up in a chapter or a story soon.

    (more…)

  • I’ve been robbed!

    Two weeks in to NaNoWriMo, and it has not gone as badly as I feared. Time has been an issue, but  I haven’t fallen behind as much as I thought I would. In order to manage that, I’ve had even less downtime than normal. All of my free time has been spent on homework and writing for school. My novel has been written in big chunks, three thousand words at a time.

    The sad part of this year is that it robs me of the greatest part of NaNoWriMo. This is supposed to be a month of daily writing, of working on a project in a near constant stream of consciousness. Last year, when I was not writing, I was thinking about what happened next, what my characters were like, what they were thinking, and what they were doing when they weren’t involved in the story.

    This year, when I am not writing, I am thinking about how part one of Alice Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman provides a parallel display of life cycles that will become a predominant theme in the rest of the book. Instead of wondering what makes Mac so sarcastic and cold, I am comparing Aristotle and Hume’s concepts of aesthetics. What is the role of critical research within the arts? Apparently, the role is to delay my fiction writing.

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  • NaNoWriMo Standings – Week 2

    For the month of November, most of our Cafe writers are participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Therefore, every Saturday, we’re posting a scorecard of their current work. We’ve asked our writers to submit their current word count and a favorite line they’ve written.

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

    Jessi Levine (28,016 up from 4,793 words)

    Paul Swearingen (26,826 words)

    She stood gracefully, walked towards the stairway, and turned. “But even though I may not be as pretty as Esther, I still have bigger boobs!”

    R.L. Naquin (25,572 up from 8,018 words)

    He bared his teeth at me in a hideous grin. “My brother and I can catch anything together. I think, he does. He thinks, I do. Think-do, do-think.” He cackled. “I said ‘Doodoo.’” He threw his head in the air and howled again.

    Christie Holland (22,501 up from 6,209 words) — Municipal Liaison

    Jason Arnett (22,267 up from 5,445 words)

    The impossible parade trooped on past the parked cars and through the trees toward the golf course. Albert stood up straight, looked at his water glass and finished it in one draught. He sat on the couch, twirling the glass in the palm of one hand and tried to assess the entire experience from the moment of the first earthquake to what he just saw. None of it made any sense.

    Ashley M. Poland (19,407 up from 2,892 words)

    He shrugs and runs a hand over the smooth metal of the car. He wants back in his craft. He wants it to be the birthday race now, right this second, not still almost a month away. “I’ve got shit to prove,” he says finally. “And you don’t prove ’em wrong by being anything but the best. I’d rather go out flashy than fall into obscurity.”

    Ted Boone (16,941 up from 2,666 words)

    Which would be worse, she thought, burning, or suffocating? I wonder if I can control my breathing so that both events happen simultaneously? Nima let out a slow, controlled sigh, and then turned the cocoon opaque again. All she could do now was wait for her imminent demise, caused either by atmosphere or the lack of atmosphere, whichever struck first.

    Aspen Junge (14,850 up from 2,475 words)

    Larry Jenkins (14,524 up from 3,776 words)

    I made the executive decision to put on pants before answering the front door. It turned out to be a very good move.

    Kevin Wohler (13,163 up from 4,988 words)

    Even for a Tuesday, my little part of New Chicago was suspiciously quiet. “Too quiet,” I heard myself whisper. The little guy playing the soundtrack in my head added an ominous “Da-da-dum!” on his piano.

    Sara Lundberg (12,602 up from 3,514 words) — Municipal Liaison

    By the time the demon scouting parties that had been sent after her caught up to them, she had, in fact, assembled an army of madmen. “So f***ing insane it just might work,” Merle conceded. Her sentiments exactly.

    Jack Campbell, Jr. (9,000 up from 4,800 words)

    Lady, I already gave up booze, coffee, and cigarettes. You aren’t about to get me in to a pair of yoga pants.

  • Brilliance and Awfulness

    Ugh, this is terrible. Just atrocious.

    No…wait just a minute, wait just a…Yes! This is awesome! Pure perfection! Woo hoo!

    No…no, it’s terrible again. Really, really terrible. Oh, man. What’s that stench? Ugh.

    This is my typical experience during November. Some days I’m lucky, and it’s a reasonably equal mix of highs and lows. Rarely, when I’m really lucky, I’m soaring on inspired writing and amazing plotlines. Most days, however, I’m down in the trenches, trudging through the dreary doldrums of limp, lifeless writing.

    Anyone that writes creatively has certainly experienced these peaks and valleys. I think it’s probably more pronounced during NaNo because of the breakneck pace. Getting 50k completed in 30 days means you don’t have an opportunity to pause and reevaluate your story and characters, or to think three moves ahead and plan out every step, every consequence, every eventuality. All you can do is keep moving. And that often means falling off the cliff of genius into the morass of mediocrity.

    Sometimes that’s a good thing. It forces you to plough through the Troughs of Terribleness at full speed, whether you want to or not. Inevitably, you come out the other side. You may have left a swath of completely unusable words, drivel of the highest order, but NaNo forces you past that moment to climb back up the slope towards better and better words, until you reach that pinnacle of, “Eureka! These words are absolute genius!”

    NaNo teaches you that there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel, if you persevere long enough. And that light is pretty darn sweet.

    Of course, the sweetness and light part doesn’t last very long. But to me, those peaks, despite their rare, ephemeral quality, make the valleys worth it.

    Totally worth it.

     

    P.S. I’m learning, over time, how to make the valleys a little less deep, and a bit less long. I do so by violating one of the major tenets of NaNoWriMo: I go back to the lowest of my valleys and with brute force I jack them up out of the murky darkness and back up into the sunshine via a magical little tool I like to call “editing.” It’s a big no-no during November. I deserve a wrist slap for my impertinence. I’ll talk more about this next time.

  • Sometimes, Words Suck

    This NaNo has been off to a weird — but strong — start.

    First off, our region had four write-ins in four days, two of them on the first. So we were hammering out the words there for a while. It’s probably the strongest I’ve ever started. (Because I’m telling you, people — community!)

    But there were a handful of factors that slowed me down come Monday. Way back in April I signed up for a big bang challenge, and that was due on the fifth. I did almost nothing NaNo related on Monday — just one sprint — which means I had plenty of time to sit around and panic. This novel sucks. This isn’t what I envisioned. I’m never going to be able to write a coherent novel. There’s no plot in this. SOMEONE GET ME OUT OF HERE.

    In addition to all this, I started rereading my NaNo novel from last year in my down time, like before I go to sleep or when it takes the child an hour to go to sleep. In the last 20 pages of the novel, in the middle of what is supposed to be a tense moment, I found a line that made all the panic better:

    Maybe this novel is awful, Ashley, dear god — why are we supposed to even like this character? Moving on.

    Ladies and gentlemen, not all NaNo words are good words. Sometimes, they’re just the words you need to keep going.

    My first 10,000 words of this story are not good words, though most of them were necessary. There’s a lot of exposition. A lot of character exploration and setting exploration — things I needed before I could get into the meat of my story, which is supposed to be more of an action piece. (Full of UST, because this is who I am.) Most of those words are going to be thrown away come time to edit.

    I’m writing this post Thursday night, before I’ve actually begun to work on my novel for the night. (The chatroom is sprinting RIGHT NOW and I’m like, “Hmm, no, I don’t think so.”) My word count is sitting at 15,802, and I have a plot now. While watching movies at my nemesis’ apartment Wednesday night, I finally figured out some of the trickier problems I was facing, and I actually got to writing the action of the novel.

    Things started happening. It just took 10 or 13 thousand bad words to get there first.

  • The (Off) Day Off

    This DeathBar comes from the NaNo website and pulls its numbers directly from the ones I feed there. It keeps me honest with its DeathBar-iness.

    I’m a little over a week into NaNoWriMo. You can over there by the NaNo Death Bar that I’m doing pretty well. 17,294 words. As I write this I should be at 13,336 eight days in.

    I averaged 2882 words until yesterday, the day after the presidential election. I blame hangover from my political junkiness for not writing the full complement of 1667 words. I only got about 1,000 that day. Essentially a day off.

    Every writer needs a bit of down time. Stepping back a bit and taking to heart what’s already written is a good idea. The first two years I did NaNo I was petrified about being able to get back into the groove so I didn’t take a day off from writing in November. Consequently, the two books were awful. I mean terrible. (Well, not really but there were problems too numerous to fix at the time. Regardless. Moving on.)

    So last year and this year both, I’ve planned for a couple of days when work or life will likely get in the way and I won’t be able to write. Over the first weekend of NaNo I wrote 8,000 words. That’s not as much as some people (one buddy of mine wrote 11,000 in one day) but it’s pretty good for me. I can get that done a couple more times and I’ll make the 50,000 in 30 days in order to be a winner.

    The thing is, I’m writing on the same pace as I did last year and even with the day off this week I feel good. So far I’ve had one major surprise and I’ve written some pretty solid prose.I’m already a winner as far as this book goes.

    So looking at that 17,000 words in the DeathBar I can tell you I’m almost a third of the way to the NaNo goal, but only about 17% of the way to my goal for the novel.

    I’ll probably take another day off before too long. But now I’ve gotta get back to writing. See you next week.

  • Writing in the Cracks

    There are two things I do every November. One is National Novel Writing Month. The other is to serve as an election judge for my county. In theory, this is a perfect marriage.

    In theory, there is no difference between theory and reality. In reality….

    Nanowrimo is about learning to write in the cracks of time. If you have fifteen minutes left in your lunch break, you write. You show up early to the dentist so you have an extra ten minutes in the waiting room to write. If you can steal half an hour between the end of your workday and coming home to dinner, kids, and a spouse who wants to talk about the toilet, you pull over in the grocery store parking lot and write.

    Election day is a day full of cracks. You get up at oh-dark-thirty, pack a “nutritious” lunch of caffeinated soda and Girl Scout Cookies, drive through the darkling, still streets to your assigned poll, spend a frantic hour setting up, remind the waiting voters that the poll opens precisely at seven and not a minute more and I don’t care what your watch says, and once the before-work voting throng has dissipated you crack open a sleeve of Thin Mints and settle in for the day.

    I figure in an average election day there’s at least five hours of aggregate time-in-the-cracks. Most voters, once you check their eligibility and hand them a ballot, want to be left alone. A perfect time to get ahead on word count, right?

    Oh, hell, no.

    A poll is a minefield of distractions. If the voters don’t have questions, it’s your chatty fellow poll workers. The county has called to see how things are going; a journalist has stopped by to ask the same question. A voter needs to find the correct precinct. A kid asks for a sticker (of course you can have a sticker!). Do we want to order a pizza? Where’s the other box of cookies? Are there Samoas? I moved across town this summer, can I vote? I never registered, can I vote? I live out of state, can I vote? I don’t feel like driving across town to vote at the precinct near my house, can I vote? I just landed a flying saucer on the lawn on my way to Beta Centauri, can I vote? [0] A poll is a time-distortion field; two hours in you feel like you’ve been there all day, but as evening approaches you have no idea where the day went.

    I can knit in this environment. On a slow day, I can even read. But I cannot write. This year, I didn’t even try.

    [0] These are actual questions.

  • Dispatches from the Trenches – Week 1

    NaNoWriMo 2012The NaNo War has begun.

    I’ve been here since the writing began a week ago. Most of us are still in the thick of it. Some are waiting for inspiration. Others have thrust themselves headlong into the fray, hoping for a chance to make a run of it and achieve victory. It’s been hell.

    At kickoff, I met several of my fellow WriMos. Some were veterans I knew from previous wars, but we also had some green recruits. Things looked promising. But that was before the writing began.

    The horror. Dear God, the horror.

    (more…)

  • Drop and Give Me Fifty

    Jane Lynch from Wreck-It RalphWelcome to Bootcamp, soldier. You will hate me by the time this is over, but deep in your lazy, pathetic heart, you’ll also thank me.

    I see by your record you wrote a book last year. And one the year before.

    Who the hell cares? Look around you. You see all these people sweating over their novels? You see them losing sleep, downing sugar and caffeine just to get another 100 words squeezed in? They’re writing a novel each year, too.

    And you know what? They have jobs. Classes. Small children. Spouses who aren’t doing this with them. What’s your job, soldier? What do you do every day?

    Oh, you’re a writer. I get it. You stay home all day to write because your husband makes it possible. For your career. Sure.

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  • Watching the Frantic Masses

    So, to most of you it has only been a week since I gushed about my plans for NaNo and confided to all of you about my fears. For me it’s been three weeks and in those three weeks I realized something.

    I may pretend to be crazy, a lot of people maythink that I’m crazy, but I’m really not. Or at least, I don’t want to be.

    I decided to sit this NaNo out. What’s that mean for me? It means that I’m getting eight hours of sleep. It means that I’m able to maintain a social life. It means that I am responsible for cooking my own meals.

    Hmm… maybe it’s not too late to change my mind again… I was really looking forward to having all my meals catered.

    All of that aside, I think sitting NaNo out was the right decision for me this year. I haven’t had any down time since May and it was beginning to show. If I have some extra time, I’ll flip through my novel from last year. Maybe with a fresh set of eyes I’ll be able to get it scrubbed up enough to start sending out. But if I don’t this month, that’s okay. I’m not going to stress about it. I’ll be the well-rested one at the write-ins. The person who isn’t guzzling coffee at ten pm.

    Aren’t you jealous?