NaNoWriMo 2014

So I'm doing NaNoWriMo again this year, as I have the past 3 years. Last year I finished, as I did the year before that, so I thought I had this thing down pat. Maybe not. I'm falling behind. As in previous years, my process has been to write like mad on the train to and from work and, as with previous years, there have been a few snags here and there. Some days are faster than others. When I have no pauses between words and it just flows easily, I write up to 1500 words each way on the train, which can make for a very productive day. That can happen maybe once per month. Most days I get a bit over half my quota done each way. I've got some time next week that I can use on my own to catch up, but catching up is not the way I want to go. Right now I'm at 24,007 words, and I should be up to 28,333 today. That's getting to be a big hill to climb.

The story itself isn't coming together the way I'd like. My characters lack agency. They're not making the story go, the story is making them go, and I have to keep making the story make them go, which gets boring for me. I have no idea how to get them where they need to go, so perhaps I need to switch gears, develop some character and figure out how they can work the quest instead of being worked over by it. Maybe that will work.

I'm using Scrivener this year, which I bought on discount from a previous year's voucher. It's pretty good, but I could be using it better. I have notes for myself for next year.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't really know if I'll make it this year.
PPS - Maybe I'll learn something from the journey, though.

NaNoWriMo 2013 Week 4

At this point, I'm on schedule to win NaNoWriMo today, and that feels pretty good. I'm probably not finished telling the story yet, but that's okay. The only goal of NaNoWriMo is to finish 50,000 words in 30 days, and I've done that this year.

I think I need NaNoWriMo. I've realised that. It gets me back on track, writing long-form fiction again, and sort of lets me check in with my skill levels. Am I getting better at writing? The answer this year is "yes, slightly and incrementally".

Something else I've learned this year is that writing from an outline doesn't (or didn't) work especially well for me. This might be because of how I did it. I don't know.

Lastly, I think I need to try new things. I don't want to keep rewriting this same book in slightly different forms. I want to be able to say "I've written three novels" next year, and "I've written four" the year after that, rather than "I've written two novels, but they're not really good and I keep rewriting them, but they're not getting better".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It feels pretty good to have gotten this far.
PPS - Last year's win didn't feel as real as this.

UPDATE: I'm done! I finished my 50,000 words on the train this morning.

NaNoWriMo 2013 Week 3

I thought I was ready to rewrite this book. I was wrong.

I mean, that much became obvious from my outline pretty early on, but I'm talking about something deeper now. I'm not 100% sure I was ready to write anything this long and have a good result come out of the other end. Even a usable first draft.

My characters are flat. They have some characteristics, but the whole spaceship colony acts like a big hive mind. They're all tentacle appendages of the communal will. That was not the goal, though it might make an interesting setting if I can figure out a story to tell about it. The point is that, although I know where the story is going and I think I'm going to get there, I'm not happy with the results.

That's normal, I suppose. I mean, you're not supposed to be happy with a first rough draft. It's like the raw clay you smack down in the centre of the pottery wheel. It's not anything much yet. Maybe I'll be happier when I finish.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - As of right now, I'm about 1600 words behind schedule.
PPS - I've been behind this whole time.

NaNoWriMo 2013 Week 2

Last week I vowed to keep writing, even if I was putting down a steaming pile of words that would never amount to anything.

This week, I wondered a little bit why I am even doing this if I don't think it's good. The answer, in part, is to get better, and that led me to my second related thought for the week: I can write better than this. I don't have to just hammer out terrible words, get my daily count in and go home. I can, at the very barest minimum, practice my craft within the terribleness of my plot. So I started doing that. I took more time, I wrote scenes that might not suck. I brought a little more life to what I'm doing.

It felt better. Not great, just better.

In general, I'm still finding it hard to follow my outline, I think because the plain text format turns out to be awful for outlines, at least for me. I'm still behind on my word count, but slowly catching up, managing to write about 2000 words every weekday. If I can keep up over this weekend, I should be ahead next week. I want to win on novel words this year, rather than novel+notes like last year.

I've also been getting physical pain in my right shoulder, and it's been worse on some days than others. At work, I've moved my mouse to my left hand, and that seems to be helping a little.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Probably what I need is to get away from computers for a while.
PPS - Or get a work desk that doesn't contort my body into awful positions.

NaNoWriMo 2013 Week 1

I'm sick of rewriting my book. There, I said it. It's exhausting and it's stupid and it's not coming out any better than the barftastic first version that I wrote two years ago. This is disappointing and a little unexpected. I thought I had matured a lot since then, but I have not sat down like this to write a book in some time. It shows.

I'm behind schedule and I'm not catching up. My outline is hard to follow. It's full of major plot problems that aren't going away, because they're too big. Also, it's physically uncomfortable. I've been writing on the train to and from work, and hunching over in that cramped seat, trying to get the words out is pretty awkward. It wasn't that way when I started doing this. I have an appointment with a physiotherapist (or some equivalent) on Monday to try and help.

I'm going to keep going, though. Might as well. The disappointment has already set in, though. The first draft was far from perfect. This second draft is at least as far from perfect as that, but in different ways. So I guess that's what I'm taking away from NaNoWriMo this year: a second draft that proves there is more than one way for me to suck.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's good that I'm allowed to suck, though.
PPS - How else could I get better?

NaNoWriMo 2013 Day 1

As of this morning, I am embarking on my third National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. I'm going to be attempting a rewrite of the book I finished two years ago, because, when I read it again, it was quite choppy and weird. Unpolished.

I treated the first effort as a first draft, turned it into an outline and edited that. I've changed some characters and some scenes, and I'm quite pleased with the outline as it currently stands. I still don't think it's quite perfect, but now I'm out of time. I'll be writing on the train to and from work, as I have before, because that worked out pretty well for me, but I'll also be getting some work done on the weekends this time around. On a good day, I get down about 800-1000 words each way, so the weekdays are covered. I'm not totally sure how I'll handle the weekends yet, but we'll see.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I do feel like I should be attempting something totally new.
PPS - However, I also want to get this done to a point that I'm really proud of it.

Final NaNoWriMo 2012 Update

I'm writing this on Thursday night, and I'm not done yet. I won't hit 50,000 words until Friday morning, so by the time you read this, that's where I'll be. A Winner.

But I won't be finished yet. My story isn't done, and I don't know when it will be. One thing is certain, though: I'm taking some time off. Now that the daily word count pressure is off, I'll be taking it a bit easy, probably until Christmas. I'll catch up on my reading, leave the laptop at home and enjoy some recharging time, introvert-style.

It's been a tough project, as always, and I'm glad that it's finishing. I think I've grown as a writer because of it. Not into a good writer, as such, just into a slightly-less-incompetent one. It could still be a few years before I have confidence in my writing, and until then, I'll just keep doing it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Practice less imperfect!
PPS - And constant practice makes exhausted. I'm going to bed.

Weekly NaNoWriMo update

This week I have decided I'm not giving up. I mean, I probably wasn't going to give up completely as in stop writing and go have a lie down, but I wasn't going to bother trying too hard to hit my 50,000 word count goal by the 30th of November. I'm still behind, but now I've written over 30,000 words, so it seems silly to stop when I'm past halfway. My characters are talking through my plot problems, which sounds a bit weird and probably needs to be edited down quite a lot, but I'm quite proud of the battle scene I wrote the other day, just because it's so bizarre. It made me laugh while I wrote it, which wasn't exactly the goal, but it's my book and I can do what I want.

Again, I won't be writing much this weekend, but I might be able to write just enough to keep ahead. I'll let you know next week when it's all basically over.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And I'm not sure how long it will take me to finish the editing.
PPS - Some time next year, I'll release it.

NaNoWriMo weekly update

I'm still behind my word count goals, as of today, but I'm catching up, bit by bit. I've started wondering whether NaNoWriMo is the right atmosphere for me to write a book in.

Thinking about it from a project management point of view, is it reasonable? I have a fixed schedule (1st-30th of November), fixed scope (50K words) and fixed resources (me). No flexibility at all means a setup for failure, because everything depends on everything else going exactly right.

The flexible way is this: either I need to consider my work done when the 30th rolls around, no matter the word count, or I need to give myself more time to reach the word count (which, unfortunately, means that I can't get the "Winner" badge from the website). But you know what? I didn't win last year either, and I'm still here. In fact, I still finished my first novel that year, and that turned out pretty well. With this one, I've been much more obsessed with reaching my word count goals, just to get that Winner badge by the 30th, and that is causing me extra stress that I don't need.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For now, I'm going to keep writing.
PPS - But it's costing me a little piece of my sanity and a lot of my energy.

NaNoWriMo update

I've decided that my usual Friday Flash Fiction posts will be on hold for November while I write my second NaNoWriMo novel. As of right now, I've written 11325 words, and I've learned a couple of things. Here they are:

1. Not all novels are created equal. This one is starting much slower than my first one.
2. Writing at lunchtime at the office doesn't work. I get 30 minutes for lunch. By the time I'm done eating and my hands are free to write again, I only get through about 200 words before I have to get back to work. That doesn't help enough, which means...
3. I need to write on weekends. No matter how much I get done on the train to and from work, it's not enough to write 50K words in 30 days, because it's only 22 working days. At 2000 words per working day, I still need an extra 6000 to win.
4. New plot points and realisations do come as I'm writing, so the plot keeps advancing, even as I don't know quite where it's going yet.
5. Even so, an outline would be helpful, and I wish I had worked one up before I'd started.
6. The NaNoWriMo website can be a bit tricky to navigate. When I want to see my own novel stats, there is no obvious way to do that but to update my word count.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My current word count is still below par.
PPS - And this weekend is not looking like a great time for writing.

NaNoWriMo 2: Wri Harder

Today I begin writing my second-ever novel, as part of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. Last year I didn't exactly "win", in that I finished the month about 2000 words short of the 50,000 word goal. That was probably because all of my writing was done on my daily train commutes to and from work, and I did nothing on weekends. This year I'll be trying harder to stay on target, planning to get some work done on weekends and lunchtimes too. I'll keep you updated on how I'm going, probably as I hit my 10,000 word goals.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I plan to expand this very old idea into a full book.
PPS - I'm also quite pleased with the title of this post. Thank you.

NaNoWriMo wrap-up

So, my first NaNoWriMo is at an end. Technically, I did not win. At the close, my novel weighed in at just over 47000 words unfinished, which is nothing to scoff at, but not quite the completed standard required. I intend to finish it by Friday, just two days late. After that, it needs a lot of editing, and probably a lot of rewriting too, and will probably not be over 50000 words when it's ready for preview.

All told, I've had a really good time doing this. Writing on the train has been an interesting experience, but in future years I will need to do more than that if I want to finish within November. Next year I will use my lunch breaks, too. I've learned that, when I'm going strong, I can write as much as 1200 words in 30 minutes, and when it's a hard slog I'm more likely to end up with 800 words, as long as I remain focused.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't know if I said yet, but I used my Friday Flash Fiction piece Planet Scavengers as a starting point.
PPS - I have ideas for next year and the year after, too.

NaNoWriMo

This year I decided to attempt NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. I don't expect what I write to be publishable without some drastic editing and probably a lot of rewrites, but that's not the point. The main point is to get me writing every day and using my ideas instead of sitting on them and imagining maybe possibly one day writing them. So far, from that point of view, it's a success. Assuming I manage 50000 words in one month, then have to edit down to a third of that for quality, I will actually have something more akin to a novellette at the end, rather than a full novel. Still, writing 50000 words in one month would be a decent achievement, and if I also manage to pull out a 16000-word novellette to be proud of, that's just a bonus.

I'm not yet confident that I'll finish properly. My story could easily run out of steam long before the month is up, in which case I may have to switch tracks to a totally different story halfway through. I'd rather not do that, though.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - According to the Nebula awards, it's still a novel even if it's only 40000 words.
PPS - No, you can't see it yet.

NaNoWriMo and motivation

Only about 20% of people who sign up for NaNoWriMo actually complete their 50 000 words. What does that tell you about writing and people? To me, it says that a publicly-declared intention does not ensure follow-through on a goal, and that setting the goal is not the problem. It takes more than "just get started, then keep going" to write a novel, and those 80% of people who fail will attest to that. I think NaNoWriMo needs to look to those 80% of failed participants and ask them what went wrong. Did they run out of steam? Was their idea not sustainable for the length of a novel? Were they derailed by some personal disaster, or could they just not commit to the time it took every day?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Not enough attention is paid to failure stories these days.
PPS - Which is a pity. We could learn so much.