Tag: NaNoWriMo

The Novel Progresses

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Update

So once again, it has been ages since I updated. I always feel the need to give a mea culpa for that, or an explanation. This time, I will simply attribute to an upheaval in my life that continues to upheave. I suppose that one can say that there’s always going to be things distracting us from work, and if we want to do something we will. I have, instead of posting here, been actually working on the book I dedicated myself to finishing.

The book I’m speaking about is the project I began for NaNoWriMo this past year in November of 2010. I achieved the word goal of 50K that qualifies you as a NaNo winner before the end of November, as I had done for a few years. However the novel itself, whose title is still in flux, was not finished. With 50K in the bag the book was only half done. So I decided to say NO to starting a project and leaving it half-finished. And so I decided to pick it back up.

It has taken me until now, with the massive nonsense in my life, but I’m at 92,779 words. It has taken me over six months to add another 42K and change to the book, but it is on its way to nearly completed. It will need massive editing and a staunch head-shake from me on a number of issues, including my pacing, but it’ll be done. I refuse to leave another project half done and waiting in my laptop’s depths for me to ‘come back to it someday’.

So the update stands like this: NaNo Continuation 2010 = 92,779 words, three sections (plus interlude) and many, many chapters.

I’m going to finish this one before the Office of Letters and Light (NaNo’s parent company) launches their summer program this year. They’re calling it Camp NaNoWriMo and it’s a second shot at the 50K party for the summer. I’m excited to give it a shot, and I even have a novel concept. But I will not start it before this one gets done. So? It means crunch time. Working on a deadline will give me the focus to get this finished. And I want to check off ‘Completed a Novel’ from my list of things to do category. After that, all I’ll have to do is get this published for another achievement unlocked.

Word Count Reached- Work Not Done

by Shoshana, posted in Uncategorized

As of 10pm tonight, November 24th, I hit word count for my 2010 NaNo. The project I’m calling ‘Prisoner Sixty-Three’ is by no means done but the minimum word count is done and I am damn pleased.

I am also aching. I realize the joke about writers not taking care of themselves doesn’t just extend to not eating right, not sleeping, drinking to excess or drug use. Hell those are dangerous but does anyone preach about the dangers of forgetting to get up and leave the computer every once in a while? The back aches, the muscle tension, the neck cramps, the eye strain, the carpel tunnel!

I sound like a whiny old woman but I am singing the praises of weary joints today! Lots of typing and forgetting to stand up and stretch make me hurt. But man who wants to interrupt the muse while we’re doing our thing…?

There is still more work to be done on this story- I stopped mid-chapter tonight to save my eyes the damn strain but otherwise this story has more coming!

Way to Kick Word Count A$$ (Or, I pat myself on the back)!

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Testimonial

So this year, NaNoWriMo has not been a labor of love. It has been a 14-hour delivery in which the doctor did not want to give any pain meds and you’re birthing the old fashioned way, screaming and choking and wishing ‘oh god oh god why did I ever want to do this in the first place’…

Yeah, “who the hell thought this was a good idea” went through my head a few times this year. Let’s just say, life has been very difficult lately for me so things have been driving me absolutely batty and therefore away from my writing. So, since that has been making life harder for writing, I fell way behind in NaNo until I thought I’d never catch up. I would lug my laptop all over town and then sit somewhere, staring at it with forlorn eyes for ages.

Until today. There are times you just have to fish or cut bait and today I just said I was going to sit myself down and do it. So I found a few things that made me able to write and man, did I hit my word count with a stick. How many words did I type today? Why, 14,036 in one sitting. Six hours of work, two teas later, I can’t feel my legs, I have a crick in my neck and I have to pee like mad (TMI, I know) but whew.

Total word count: 44,720. Nearly there folks, nearly there!

Plus, the story is finally coming together. This little crazy 14-baby that wouldn’t come out is finally turning into something that might actually be worth calling a novel. Loosely called “Prisoner Sixty-Three” as a codename, it’s my attempt at an alien abduction story and yet, as some of my friends know from my descriptions, it’s a lot more. I’m not going to talk a lot about it until it is DONE but lets just say it’s a whole lotta weird and it’s a different writing style then I’ve ever tried before. But, it’s also showed me a few tips about my writing that I didn’t know before. So here is what got me through the ridiculous word count jump, take this for what it is:

  1. Smut helps: Okay, so you’re stuck in a part of your story that honestly is so boring you want to cut your own feet off just to do SOMETHING interesting. Your characters are sitting around talking and honestly, you have no idea what the hell to do next. You’ve got another chapter where something has to happen, and you want to introduce a spooky element that you need to push the plot along. Okay, need to be spooky? Need to introduce some info? Mix in some smut. I know it’s cheap. I know it’s taudry. But why not, right? Sex happens in real life, and as long as you’re not making it too gross (as in not making it too out of awful left field or too wine and roses OMG I LURVE U high school nonsense) and write it well, there’s no reason a sex scene can’t make your story move a little bit where it’s getting a little saggy… And I just used saggy in the same sentence as sex. Moving on.
  2. Find a Place to Write You Like: This is meta-story here, but I cannot tell you how serious this one was to my state of mind. I had been trying to write all over town for the last week, everywhere from my room (NOT going to happen, with family drama to distractions from the cat to my PS3) to the local Starbucks (the playlist is SO irritating). I kept dodging around trying to find a place that was a writing haven until, low and behold, I came upon the right place. I just sat down and thought “where is the place where I have felt the most creative” and “where have I thought I could write the most when I walked in there”. The place I ran into was a place called Argo Tea in Manhattan and oh BOY did it work. Two teas later, I was settled in to write, relax, and work and oh boy, did I.
  3. Accept That You Will Not Always Write: Again, this is a meta-story thing, but I was kicking the garbage out of myself for the last few days that my writing this NaNo has been coming in fits and starts. I have been going from big word counts to four/six days of NO writing. And that’s awful. Then I’ll have a day like today when explosions happen, and you know what? That happens. Life happens. You’re going to have things that come along and eat your time, your energy, your attention. Have fights with family, get distracted by good books, go out with friends and talk about the nature of life and the universe – that shit happens. But don’t forget to come back to writing – it does NOT make you a bad writer that you can’t write some days. Just try to show up for the work. If you don’t make it that day, don’t give up.  You’ll still have explosion days, and you’ll still have show up days. I managed to get at least a few words in here and there a day, just to make myself feel connected, and that kept things alive.
  4. Don’t Just Kill Your Darlings, Love Your Detestables: I have often had serious problems appreciating certain kinds of characters in stories. Like weak female. Oh BOY do they make my fingers itch for the slappin’ (listen to me rant about Bella from Twilight for a while or Harley Quinn- whoo boy). Anyway, the problem is, if you try to write a story, the idea is you have to write some of these to round out your stories and if you don’t like them, sometimes you’ll jam up your writing mojo because you’ve got a hate on for your own characters. I did this in my NaNo. There’s a character I wrote in that I wanted to include, a kind of weak woman character and the minute I got to the chapter for her? Bam. Stuck. So… what did I do? I had to learn to love my detestable character. I had to get in there and learn to get into her head and write her in a way that would make her interesting to me while still keeping in the spirit of what I had in mind for her. I had to understand her, get to know her, and in the end? I ended up empathizing with her, getting her where I needed her and it turns out? Making her one of the main villains of my piece! Who knew she had it in her! Still the way she was going to be but now, much more useful and dynamic because she’s not cookie cutter and all because I didn’t let the archtype get in my way anymore.
  5. Just Let it Ride: So after all the stress and craziness, I wandered around some bookstores. I thought about writing, and I came down to the most important thing that was holding me back: I was stressing. I was stressing that I wasn’t good enough, I was having aggita, and had to stop. So what did I do? I just put it aside. I decided that if this book doesn’t matter, if I burn it at the end, if I delete it, if it never sees the light of day, I needed to give it its due. I sat down and let it see the light of day because I promised myself that it deserved its due. It chose me as the vessel by which it was coming out and by God, I was going to let it Ride. So here I am, letting it ride, and to hell with what happens next. Next is editing! Next is second draft! This is the ‘Get the hell out of me you enormous monstrocity!’ part. This is just the Let it Ride. And I will not stress it so much.

So that’s it. Tips that got me through these last two weeks of OMG. Class dismembered. I’m going to soak my fingers, I typed too much today!

NaNo Update: The 4AM Candle Burning Session

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Update

So apparently, my muse jumped out and mugged me last night. I sat down at 11PM and said I was going to write for an hour or so after watching walking dead. I have the day off the next day, why not, right?

It’s after 4AM. I’m still wide awake. And my word count from yesterday has jumped.

Day One= 4,060

Day Two= 11,847

Yeah, it’s like that. mugged in a dark alley by the muse. Whatever, the story is shaping up wonderfully. The main character has just made an appearance, or at least… well, I’d say the main subject. One of the main characters has been going strong since the first page, and his section of the story is now done. I go on to the next one very shortly. The story has a few characters which you flick through to chase the subject of the story and… well, it’s complicated but I’m enjoying teh hell out of it. And like I said, one character down. Now I’m onto the next one.

Only my sleep schedule is shot to hell. I’m going to bed.

It won’t go to my head, promise…

by Shoshana, posted in Uncategorized

So apparently, there’s a little more to this writing-dangerously win in NaNo this year. I got contacted tonight to be featured on the NaNo website’s Q&A section, picture and all. Here’s a link:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/node/3471186

It kind of amazes me that I got put on the website and everything. Getting recognized for writing or for anything related to writing still feels strange to me. I really appreciate what they’ve done with NaNo and giving people a little boost, when they’re struggling to write, is an amazing boon. I actually turned bright red when I read the email asking me to do the Q&A. What a nice surprise!

It’s just redoubled my whole confidence in my writing, honestly. Not that I need someone giving me funny viking hat prizes and such, but as I said before, it’s nice to have someone point at the work you’re putting in and say ‘hey look, you’re working hard, nice one!’ I appreciate that so much from them.

The magic of NaNo and the Glory that is Victory!

by Shoshana, posted in Uncategorized

So there is nothing better in the world, I think, receiving a little bit of praise for something that is not often noticed or recognized as an accomplishment. That’s why I love NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) – it gives writers a chance to bust their chops to produce something in the month of November, 50,000 words in one month, and then get a little bit of a celebration for their accomplishing their goal. When you get down to it, writing is often a thankless creative outlet that can bring nothing but frustration and sleepless nights. This time, however, it has brought a little bit of fun and frolic along with the bouts of rampant creative-inspired insomnia.

For this year’s NaNo, I decided to try a different novel idea than what I had done previously in the past. The last three years, I wrote a trilogy of novels set during an apocalypse with demons and angels in them. This year, its a modern world with ancient and crazy gods. You can see how my  brain works, of course, to destroy the world blatantly in so many ways. I went for something a little more subtle, though, this time (and yes, I can hear you wondering – how are crazy gods actually less destructive? Oh they are!) and the result is a novel called Emerald Fires. This is the working title, of course, but for once in a long time… I think I have something here. I think I have a solid, creative idea that is actually a new take on something old and well-done to death. So the stats go down to this:

As of November 29:

  • Word Count: 52,972
  • Page Count: 149 (in manuscript format)
  • Chapters: 15

This new story is one I’m hoping to continue for the next little while, so I’m postponing the work I planned on doing for the other two huge projects of mine, Exeter and Big Pete (my monstrocities, as I call them).

Oh, and update! So instead of lugging about my current writing machine (two-year-old 15 inch macbook pro), I have decided to go much more portable which is a Dell Mini – I have gone to the land of the PC for a netbook. The little thing is driving me nuts, though, because the keyboard is smaller than my frickin’ hands, but we’ll see how it works out. I’m looking to upgrade my Macbook Pro anyway, so that will make my old machine a stay-at-home anyway… I just plan on making sure that writing for me is the most painless process possible, and lugging around a 15-inch macbook pro when you’ve got back pain like me? Not painless!

Speaking of painless, for any Mac user? Check out a program called Scrivener for writing. It is fantastic – helps compile everything into manuscript format for you, and on top of that? Helps you keep your research, old drafts, everything. I heartily enjoy it and it made NaNo-ing this year a dream.

Anyway, that’s it for now!

The NaNo Madness Has Begun!

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Update

So naNoWrMo began four days ago and already I’m off to a running start. I’m bleary eyed and tired but I’m off to an incredible rate. I’ve already buried 15,000 words out of 50,000 and it’s only day 4. My justification is that I want to strike while the anvil is hot but the truth of the matter is, I always write in bursts like this, be it for short stories or for larger works. I work while things are inside my head and then I can get into long stretches when I’m not in the least bit interested in looking at a blank Word document for anything. You can’t get me to write when I’m not in the mood for anything in this world. So for that reason, I’m on a bit of a jag with this one.

This isn’t new with writers. A lot of writers get on these long writing jags that can last for as long as the muse wants to make you her bitch. I, for one, will not complain. I started to hit a bit of a bump in the jag road this evening when I was trying to write one part of the story but I managed to punch through it. If I go too long without writing this, I’m afraid it’s going to go back into the recesses of my brain wherever it comes from and I’m going to lose it. Twenty four pages down, however many left to go.

The name of the story is “A Walk in the Dark” and I can’t decide if that’s dorky or not. The story centers on a character from one of the previous NaNo’s that I wrote who gets visited by the angel of death and the two go for a walk to talk about some stuff, including the end of the world. I’m too edgy about getting this work done to talk more about it but needless to say its going to deal with a lot of the things I wrote in the other two installments of the NaNo story which has become a three year saga to complete and will deal with some new stuff including more spiritual discourse and things like that. This one is going to be more cerebral, less action, which I think I like. I don’t know why but I have a good feeling about this one, I really do.

More later. Now I have to sleep.

Approaching: NaNoWriMo 2008

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Testimonial, Writing Update

Two years back I took on the challenge of doing a National Novel Writing Month. That meant attempting, in one month, to write 50,000 words of a novel and getting it knocked out by the deadline. In 2006 I did it with three days to spare, if I remember correctly. In 2007, I did it with two hours to spare, punching out 12,000 words or so of it in one sitting and driving myself to the point of delirium so I didn’t miss the deadline. This year, November’s coming up really quickly and I am literally petrified at the notion of doing this again.

This year is different than last year. Where last year, taking on NaNo was difficult because I had just taken on a new job to which I was just acclimating, this year I have even more work. I am going to school, working, worrying about my future potentially in the police department, and trying to find time to run a full-scale live-action roleplay game and write in my spare time. Call me crazy but that’s a damn full schedule. Oh yes, and I’d like to sleep, eat, and maybe see my friends in between. It hasn’t been a fun ride so far since the semester started and now… NaNo.

I’m by far sure I’m insane for even considering this malarky; adding a deadline of 50,000 words by the end of November to my already hectic work week is not something I’m sure I’m ready for. Yet there is a tradition for me to uphold and frankly, it might drive me to get in more work. So I’m going to give it the old college try. To me, it’s worth kicking in some extra work to make myself meet the deadline. It’s good practice for forcing myself to sit down and write. 

Now if only I knew what the hell I was going to write about this year…

NaNoWriMo gives props to its writers.

by Shoshana, posted in Random Aside

So apparently, my little rant about how I kicked NaNo in the butt last year got on the NaNoWriMo Blog! It’s kind of ridiculous to me that I googled my name (yes, everyone’s done it, don’t lie, you have too) and this is what popped up in the top slot. It was linked to other groups and other blogs!

http://blog.nanowrimo.org/node/125

Check that noise out. It kinda blows me away.