Lie On Floor

I’ve been meaning to do a blog about NaNoWriMo since December 1^st, but life keeps doing this hilarious thing were it carries on and then smacks me about with boughts of ‘can’t be bothered’ which I fill mainly with sleeping these days.

Anyway, I’ll summarize—I didn’t get to 50,000 words. I did finish the book, but it just didn’t want to be proper-sized, no matter how I tried to embellish or add scenes/characters to keep it going, it’s just not a novel-length story as yet, so although I’ve got a rough draft, it’s pathetically short. I tried to make up the rest of the word count, working on other projects, but it felt like cheating and I didn’t end up even logging my final word-count into the website (or even figuring it out) so… maybe next year will be better! If I won, I don’t know, and I kind of don’t want to know at this point, because either way, I don’t feel like I did my best.

I’m starting to notice a somewhat disturbing pattern. I don’t think it will constitute a real pattern unless it happens again next year—but last year, I had a bit of a disaster I lost about 8,000 words from my NaNo novel, which I was eventually forced to just rewrite, which was lame, since I’m still convinced that the first draft of that section was better than what I ended up with.

That’s didn’t derail me though, I still finished at well over 50,000 words and had a rough draft of a novel on my hands that I actually still don’t hate a year later. NaNoWriMo 2011 - Nailed it.

This year, my computer broke.

Seriously.

It’s still not fixed (anybody have a soldering iron?) and I eventually managed to rescue the files and start writing on a borrowed laptop, but I was struggling with this project to begin with, so that was kind of a slug to the gut.

So, NaNoWriMo 2012 – Fail.

Now, I’m getting paranoid though. I feel like I can anticipate a similar disaster for NaNoWriMo 2013.  Hopefully I’ll handle it more like 2011 than 2012.

In any case, I’m glad that I did it and now I’ve got another rough draft to work with.

I kind of hate it.

It’s a mess. Trying to write a novel based on someone else’s vision was very difficult for me. I think it was good practice though. I ought to be able to do good ‘working-writer’ type things like that. I used to be (understandably) ashamed that when I first started writing, all my stuff was exclusively fanfiction, but now that I’ve had plenty of time to consider all my options as a writer, there’s something to be said for trying to represent someone else’s stories/characters/themes in such a way that you can please another creator, or an established fan-base.  

Overall, writing this book was definitely a positive experience, even though I legit hate it right now. I think there’s a lot to work with, and maybe in a few years, when I’m not so resentful of it, I can come back to this story and rework it.

Now, I’m going back to the projects I abandoned in October.

The Knight of Redboat City– Which I predict will take longer than anticipated if only because I stopped dead at about 3/4ths of the way through and decided to completely change the tense/perspective. Twice. Also, I’ve rewritten the beginning five times and I still think it’s weak.

Untitled Space Opera – Every name I come up with for this one doesn’t manage to look any better on paper than “Untitled Space Opera”. It’s so close to being finished. I hate it when I finish a book and still don’t know what it’s called.

Salvages (2nd Draft) – Also close to completion. I’m hoping to come in below 150,000 words this time.

Boney Fae Ly – The sequel to Rosenrot. It’s about 2/3rds finished. I’m reluctant to work on it while I’m still reworking parts of the first book, but that’s probably a tiny bit of a lie since it’s what I’ve worked on the most lately.

Yay, writing!

Distractions (A list of everything that will prevent me from completing these projects in a timely manner)

Reading

Eating all the food

Work & Church (Barista-ing and teaching my classes, preparing for my classes)

Christmas (This includes parties, shopping for/making and wrapping presents, the traffic associated with Christmas that always seems to eat up more of my day than it should, Decorating & Baking, Preparing to sing in church, going to other wards to watch people sing in Church/Concerts, A General Feeling of Christmas Nostalgia that leaves one staring wistfully out the window for far longer than intended)

Weddings!

The Sundance Film Festival (which could conceivably fall under work)

“Oh look, a bird!”

Sleeping

My cat wants a cuddle

Pinterest

Movies

“I should probably do some yoga/body-rock/Kung Fu before I’m so tired I can’t see.”

Minecraft

“How long have I been lying on the floor ignoring my responsibilities?! Wasn’t I going to write today?”

So, there you have it. If I can just overcome all these distractions I predict I can have four newly completed books in just a few weeks.

…Don’t hold your breath or anything.

NaNoWriMo! Yup, it's that time of year.

While getting ready to take on NaNoWriMo again I decided to do something totally counterproductive.  I took a little while to look back on all my unfinished projects that I could be working on, instead of starting up an entirely new novel.

Ah, nostalgia. It’s so powerful and sort of hurty and now I really just want to go back to them and dust them off and work through the rough bits. But no, I’m going to set them aside and try to do something totally different.

This year, my project is a perfect example of three things I never write.

1.      It’s just straight fiction. There’s no speculative/fantasy/scifi/steampunk/magical realism tag attached to that ‘fiction’ label, it’s just ‘fiction’. The plot and characters never existed that I know of, but conceivably could according to the laws of nature with which I am acquainted in the real world. They’re just people, doing realistic people-y things.

2.      Its ‘literary’ which in this sense means that it works with the more modern model of a novel. Instead of building the conflict to its peak and then resolving everything/offering closure etc., it builds the conflict to its peak and then end the story in such a way that it really just leaves the reader to think about it and draw their own conclusion. I’ve always found this to be crap, but apparently it’s what really smart writers are supposed to do now. Whatever. Pretentious goons. We’ll see how that part of it goes. I may decide to give it a classic ending after all, but I’ll try for this, unless I choke on my own affectation.

3.      It’s not my idea. This is a big weird deal for me. Other people have offered up suggestions to me before, usually the conversation starts about like this, “Oh you write? That’s so cool, I wish I could write. I’ve got all these ideas, but I just don’t have the time. Say, have you ever thought about writing a book about (insertbrilliance). I know! You should write my book for me.”

Most of the time the idea they’ve got strikes me as pretty dull. Sorry, that’s the truth. I typically reply in a toneless voice with, “Sorry, I’ve got too many of my own projects to work on. You’re going to have to write that one yourself.”

In fact that’s my automatic response whenever anyone tries to tell me what to write a book about, even if it’s a mildly interesting idea, and that’s exactly what I said when the idea for this book was first given to me.

But I couldn’t forget about it. And the person kept bringing it up again, so they wouldn’t let me forget about it. I do actually like it, I began to realize.

I’ll go ahead and make it my NaNoWriMo project, even though its obviously not my usual thing… In all honesty, that’s one of the reasons why I set it aside for NaNoWriMo. Because it’s so different from what I usually do, I kind of can’t see myself sticking with it for long. I’m either going to have to knock it out all at once, or forget about it.

I’m not saying it’ll be brilliant, I’m just hoping that I’ll go ahead and finish the 50,000 words as planned and then I can set the rough, rough draft aside and get back to my other projects for a bit, let this poor, weird neglected child marinate for a few months/years and then when I’ve pretty much forgotten what I wrote, I’ll come back to it and see if it’s really any good.