National Novel Writing Month 2012

Awesome thoughts, guys. I'm really glad it's able to inspire you.

Love this quote from the above link: "We discovered that novels aren’t written by novelists, they’re written by every day people like us who give themselves the time and permission to write novels."

I think nanowrimo has beat me. My story is going off the rails and I can't make my ideas work. I also think my prose is way too cold and without feeling.

Is it wrong of me to see two words that should be hyphenated, but not do it because if I don't hyphenate it, then it's an extra word?

Don't answer. I already know I'm pathetic. Just really bumping the thread. Get your word counts, people!

While writing for NaNoWriMo, I do not use contractions.

All my characters have four middle names, and I use their entire first, middle and last names on each reference.

Now these are all writing tips I can really use!

I had a tylertoo moment last night, looking up at the clock, trying to get past the word limit before midnight. I ended up sailing past with more than 2000 words, none of them contractions! Okay, a few were. Now that I'm past 40,000 words I realize I am nowhere near the end of the story. The last few scenes will probably amount to glorified stage directions to meet the deadline and finish this. I'm okay with that.

Curiously, I'm more eager to return to the draft of my 2009 NaNo effort once the end of the month arrives.

Whatever happens, though, I have reconfirmed that I can crank out words, many of them in a coherent order, and this pleases me.

I passed the 40K (FOR THE EMPEROR!) mark this morning as well, now I think it's time to write the climactic scene and epilogue, and then fill in the rest that I marked with stuff like "Insert scene here with Charlie Parker killing a demon".

I'm at 46,533 and approaching the halfway point. I've got one more confrontation on the basketball court, then the run up to the climax, and then a big race riot caused by two ten year-olds fighting over a fake knife.

Then the second half starts six years later, and our now teenaged hero finds out that his friend died that night and has to figure out whodunnit.

So it's a weird mystery story in that the entire first half is just more like a billdungrosman (if I may), then the second half is the mystery. I'm at a loss on how to write a synopsis for that without spoiling the big twist, but I'm coming to terms with the fact that since it's the basic building block of the story, you're going to have to spoil it to get anyone to read the book. Then again, you'll be reading the first half with the idea, "I know one of these kids dies" in the back of your mind and that will color everything. I think I'm okay with that.

Edit: Hey wait, I just saw that you have to validate your word count! Okay, so I'm going to call my first half my NaNoWriMo novel, mostly because I don't think their validator does anything but count words, so looking for some sort of plot close or "And they lived happily ever after" is beyond the scope of NaNoWriMo.

Previous winners, how does this work?

Yes, its just a word counter. Just copy and paste it into the window.

What makes me laugh/cringe is that they warn you not to cut and paste it into the window, as nothing is saved. Which would imply that somebody somewhere wrote 50K words, never backed up, cut and pasted it into the site, and watched their month of writing disappear forever. Not sure that every happened, but the warning is there.

We're in the home stretch.

Doom!

I skipped writing yesterday for various reasons but I have today to myself so it's time to write until I hallucinate, as promised.

I will report back with the results this evening.

Excelsior!

Okay people, here's some inspiration:



From this amalgamation of writers' routines.

Now go finish that novel.

With a saxophone, right? It has to be with a saxophone!

Boss Pendergast and his Russian hermetic mage are trying to turn the West Bottoms into an arcane machine to siphon the souls of the working class, one small bit at a time. Opposing them are the forces of jazz magic, led by Count Basie and young Charlie Parker. Parker winds up losing too much of himself to the music, which eventually will doom him to a life of addiction and an early death.

And that's the B-plot.

I think you just wrote the next big Shinichiro Watanabe vehicle.

I just hit 51,010, so, uhm, I guess I won.

Still have to finish the novel.

I'm still a little over one day ahead of schedule but as I've mentioned before my novel is an organizational disaster. It's not a first draft so much as a proof of concept -- a series of often disconnected scenes that could possibly be re-arranged to eventually form a coherent narrative. I've really enjoyed writing parts of it but have had to force myself to write on some days, like a kid eating all his vegetables.

I'm much more excited about going back to working on the second draft of my first successful NaNo effort. The passion has been rekindled, even if this particular story kind of stinks.

EDIT: And for some reason my neck hurts so I don't think I'm going to be able to write for any length of time tonight. That kind of sucks but I should still beat the deadline.

Yesterday was really rough. Knowing that I'd won, I started feeling like I didn't have to get another 2k out. I only got 800 words in the afternoon and started thinking, "Hey, you've beaten it. 800 words is good enough for today."

But the story still isn't finished, so if I stall out here, I'll still just have a long novel fragment, so what was the point anyway?

I dug out the laptop at 9:30 and put Rachel Maddow on and wrote my basketball fight while MSNBC talking heads complained about Republicans. I got just over 2k and shut it down, but man, I was checking my word count a whole lot more than usual. I blame Republicans.

Yeah, even if I only have sketches for some scenes, I at least want to reach the end of the story before NaNoWriMo wraps up. The incentive to go back and work on a second draft will be a lot stronger than it will if I leave the story unfinished.

I also introduced an actual man with a gun, too.

I would like to play videogames again. This year was weird because Thanksgiving has traditionally been accompanied by a lot of game playing, but the only games I've played this month were handhelds while traveling.

My goal is to get the whole novel done before the next semester starts, which is mid-January. I think I'll give myself weekends off. Then again I keep coming across the "write every day, no matter what" meme from all the author stuff I've been procrastinating inspiring myself with. Maybe only 500 words on the weekends?

I realized about 15,000 words into this story that it wasn't going to be anything that would be fully fleshed out or continued past November 30th. Not that it isn't an interesting story, but it'd need a complete rewrite from the ground up. Once I finish it, it's likely to go into the metaphorical drawer of "come back to this later, maybe, even if just to cannibalize scenes and dialogue for something else". I was going over bits yesterday and realized that, among other things, the manuscript fails the Bechdel Test miserably.

I'm precisely where you are in word count and perspective, except I have 5K to squeeze out in the next three days. Last night I stayed up so late writing that I was literally dozing off at the keyboard and finally forced myself to stop. Tonight, not as bad, but still its been a struggle the last few days. I can't wait until Friday to take a breather from this.

I don't understand though why the stats page says there are four days left, as if November has 31 days? This is what it looks like after I updated tonight:

I should have posted this earlier but it's kind of neat. Warren Ellis uses this on this blog, calling it the "Death Bar".

It got to be 11:55 and I only had a little over 1800 words, so I called it a night so I wouldn't update after midnight.

First time I wrote and didn't hit at least 2000. Damn you, Storage Wars!

As of last night I am at 45,496 words. That puts me very slightly ahead of pace so I will probably wrap this up on Friday, the last day. Looking over my spreadsheet thus far:

19 days when I wrote over the 1,667 minimum (most was 4,545)
2 days when I wrote under the 1,667 minimum (1,013 words and 12 words, respectively)
5 days when I wrote 0 words
1 day where I mucked up and forgot to add an entry but was probably around 1,800 words

That I can skip six days (typing out 12 words does not consume a great deal of time) and still stay on track kind of surprises me.

I'll be glad when it's done, though. When I finished successfully in 2009 I was unemployed, single and writing a story that was dead simple. This year I started a new job five days into NaNoWriMo, am un-single and writing a story that is far too complex to be shoehorned into a 30 day frenzy of writing. But I'll still finish, so there's that.

I'd just like to point out that BillD has ninja'd his way up to 41k without yenta-ing about it like the rest of us. He's in a good position to win, given his bursts of hypergraphia.*

*Yes, I looked that word up.

Aw thanks Dean. We shall see! It helps that I just about have the ending worked out and I've started the final leg of the whole thing with a pretty clear vision of the plot.

Also I took the afternoon off today as I have a new TV coming (woot) so I will just be writin'.

I'm currently at 40,000 words and I've just barely finished writing the inciting incident and introducing all the main characters. Okay, so it's a branching story which means most of that is faffing about on alternate opening scenes, but still. I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to cram the rest of the narrative into the last 10,000 words. AAAAGH.

I think you get the "A Tolkien Of Our Esteem" custom title for that.

5 thousand words to go. Only 5 thousand words. Wait--I wrote 450 words this morning on a very crowded train. So, only 4,550 words.

Where's that damn dancin' banana smiley?

EDIT: Just cranked out two thousand words. My best day of the entire month, it turns out.

I made it also. I did about 2500 words yesterday and nearly 3K today just so I could cross the finish line a day early.




I'm putting away the writing for a few days. I need a break. Phew.

Validated at 50,001! Success!