Last night we got the biggest Halloween crowd we've had in years. Which isn't saying much, since it was only around a dozen kids, but I think there were a couple of big groups that collided, because about 6 or 7 of them showed up at the same time. alenxa redid her Sylar Victim makeup, and scared some of the kids. (One actually asked, "Does that hurt?") After that first round, she stayed in the back room and I handed out the candy.

Since I was up late anyway last night (making sure everything on the laptop worked after upgrading to Leopard), decided to get an early start on Nanowrimo after midnight rolled around. Only jotted down 135 words (including the title & byline), but it's a start. Then I spent too much time looking around the site for counting tools and such. Should've gone to bed as soon as I stopped writing. I'll probably be blogging progress reports over at K2R this year, instead of here. Haven't decided for sure yet. Here's my profile.

Pushing Daisies continues to be fun. Anyone else here watching it?

About 15 minutes before Veronica Mars, I finished a scene and checked my word count. It was 50,145. A few days ago, when I checked the offset between OpenOffice's word counter and NaNoWriMo's word counter, I calculated that it would be about 144 words off at 50K. I figured, what the heck. I saved it to a text file, scrambled the letters as directed, and uploaded it.

50,000 exactly. I have officially completed National Novel Writing Month.

I have no illusions as to the quality of those 50,000 words. But it's only a first draft. I've never written a first draft of a novel before, so that's pretty cool!

The main things I've learned are:

1. I actually can sit down with no idea of what I'm going to write and come up with characters and a story.
2. Discussing writing issues with another writer (i.e. alenxa), even in vague terms, can help solve problems and crystallize ideas.
3. When I really get going, I can write about 800 words an hour (at least on the computer)
4. I can actually sustain a story over ~110 pages.
5. I need to do a lot more research on medieval Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and snow.
6. Writing follows a bell curve: it's hard to come up with ideas when you're starting out, gets easier in the middle as you start running with things, and when you get near the end, it's hard to pull everything together and wrap it up. (added)

Next step: sleep. After that, start revising, and figure out how soon I'm willing to let beta readers see it.

Me: Oh, that's too many syllables for this character!
Katie: What are you trying to replace?
Me: Sanctimonious.

By writing like a madman over the Thanksgiving weekend, I've managed to get ahead of the goal, and complete a 47,000-word novel. Unfortunately I need a 50,000-word novel, so I'm going back and looking for things that I glossed over the first time through. There are a couple of spots where I knew I needed more scenes to show character changes, so that's where I'm going to be focusing.

Still, I've got three evenings to write 3,000 words and be done by the 28th, with Thursday as a safety valve. But given the occasional outages at the Nanowrimo website this weekend, I don't want to take any chances.

Word Count: 47037

Last week my goal for Nanowrimo was to stay right on track. Hit 20K on the 12th, 25K on the 15th, 30K on the 18th. But I realized that the last few days of the month aren't going to give me much time to write. alenxa and I are going to a concert on the 29th, leaving me only the evening of the 30th to finish the last ~3000 words. Add to that the fact that Nano's official word counter seems to run a little shorter than OpenOffice's, and I really need to be aiming for something like 50,500 words.

So my new goal is to finish by the 28th.

For now, that means aiming for 2,000 words a day instead of just 1,700. In some ways it's easier, since I've gotten used to it. But it's getting a lot harder to sit down and start. I'll spend all day wanting to get home and start writing, and then I'll sit down, check my email, read some webcomics, read a couple of blogs... And once I do start writing, I'm letting myself get distracted by web surfing that starts as, say, research on medieval surgery and veers off on a tangent that sucks up an hour reading about the overseas territories of the U.S. (Sometimes, hypertext is not your friend.)

The next few days are going to be tough. Tuesday evening's out, and I've got a project at work due Wednesday that may have me staying late if I can't figure out the solution earlier. And of course, Thursday afternoon and evening are taken.

I made 32K tonight, though. For the first time, Nano expects me to finish on deadline.

Word Count: 32,101

I didn't get much written yesterday, but I made up for it today, and passed the 25,000 word mark right on schedule. I am now just over the half-way mark.

A subplot jumped out at me on Monday, and while it's slowing the A plot down, it seems to be working into things that need to happen for both the A and B plots.



Word Count: 25,032

Just made 20K with 10 minutes to spare. Actually made a bit more than that, as I was sitting at 19,900 at 11:00 and wrote a 400-word scene.

Switching to another progress gauge and going to bed.



Word Count: 20367

Mostly random stuff this morning. Read some comics. Finished Callahan's Cross-Time Saloon. Errands in the afternoon. Late lunch at Ruby's, which always lends itself to not needing dinner that night. Weather went from warm and sunny to gloomy and cool during lunch.

Picked up writing early evening. My goal is to hit 20,000 words by the end of the weekend, which should put me on track (20K/50K = 12d/30d = 40%). Looks like I can make it.

Concluded that the progress gauge I've been using here is either using something other than time to determine the goal, or just plain b0rked. It went from 13,105 yesterday to 12,896 today. Maybe it's based on average words/day or something.

It's odd to be writing with the only goal being word count. But it's also oddly liberating. That's kind of gone down now, since I've been establishing a world and characters, and at the very least I have to keep things more or less consistent. I guess it's the freedom to mess up. It doesn't matter if what I write is crap. As long as I finish it, I can revise it as much as I want later.

I had a bit of conflict insert itself into the story today. Completely unintended, but the character was acting grumpy, and started explaining why. In such a way that's going to make things complicated for a while.

One of the big problems I've been having since I started to see the overall shape is that the stuff I have the best handle on comes near the end of the story. I'm enough out of practice to not have a sense of how long it'll take to get there, but I want to get a sense of where the characters are before I start writing too far ahead.



Word Count: 17415

Managed ~1600 words and passed the 25% mark in Nano. Which is probably silly to play up, since it's so close to the 20% mark that I hit yesterday. Still, from 1/5 to 1/4. Next milestone at 1/3. Unfortunately to be on track I ought to hit it by the end of the day tomorrow, and I've got ~3500 to go. On the plus side, I've got a no-plans weekend to do some catching up. (Oddly enough, the progress gauge seems to think I'm ahead 17 words. I'm not sure how it came up with a goal of 13,105 words based on 9 or 10 days, when the ultimate goal is 50,000 in 30.)

Somehow I was convinced all day today that it was, well, yesterday. This showed up in a number of things, such as forgetting that I needed to update a website for work, and thinking that 1/4 would be on schedule for today. Grumble. Watching Lost on Thursday and Veronica Mars on Wednesday can't have helped matters.



Word Count: 13,122

Writing 1666 words a day is hard. Writing 1800-2500 or more because you've fallen behind is harder. Throw in work, traffic, voting, food, and other plans, and it gets really hard.

The last time I got a good night's sleep was Saturday. I missed my chance to write Sunday morning, and a trip to see a movie turned into an all-day event, so I didn't get started until evening. I think I was up until 1:30. Monday evening was a marathon session, and I think I finished around midnight. Tuesday I didn't get a chance to start until 11pm, and I was determined to get at least a few paragraphs down, which turned into a couple of pages. 12:30? 1:00?

It's taking its toll.

Today I skipped my weekly trip to the comic store during lunch hour, because I knew I wouldn't have time to read anything tonight. alenxa and I were contemplating grabbing coffee on the way home, but eventually decided to skip the Flashback Feature showing of Dr. Strangelove and just put it on Netflix. Even though we were home, we still taped Lost as both of us went into writing mode.

I broke 10,000 words today, the 20% mark. And I added some more characters, which will help me figure out what's actually going on in the middle of the story. I figured out where it's going Sunday night, but how it gets there is still pretty nebulous. I managed to do some good character bits today that actually set up a scene I'd already written better than what I had before.

I'm not quite on track, but I'm getting there. I think I'll take a cue from Girl Genius and describe it as Doom Level: Middling. Goal identified, but still determining course. Almost caught up with word count. Major sleep debt, but finally getting to bed before midnight.

Crap, I need to figure out what's going on with the villain. So far I don't know any more than the main characters do, and they don't know much.



Word Count: 11471

Friday night: mad dash through Nanowrimo. Still nebulous, not much in the way of direction. Still behind a day.

Saturday morning: laundry. (Yay fun.)

Saturday afternoon/evening: Went to katyakoshka and David's wedding. Got to talk with the bride, got to finally meet the groom, got to hang out with sekl and non_seqvitvr. I heartily approve of a wedding where the bride marches down the aisle to the Masterpiece Theatre theme.

Sunday morning: Was going to work on Nano (now two days behind) but ended up reading Callahan's Cross-Time Saloon instead.

Sunday afternoon: Went to see The Prestige. v. good. As we walked in, we saw that they were running The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3-D. After the first movie, figured what the heck? Got tickets for later showing. Dropped by Jamba Juice, then Barnes & Noble (finally picked up our own copy of the Temeraire series), then a couple of clothing stores (alenxa found a dress). Re: movie: I was very impressed at how seamlessly they managed to match the look of the film. I couldn't remember which eye got the original film, and which eye got the shifted CGI copy... and I couldn't tell. Of course, after the first few minutes, I wasn't looking! Afterward went to Cheesecake Factory for the first time in... well, years, come to think of it (unless you count take-out cheesecake). Dinner conversation was mostly about our respective stories, mostly in veiled references, though it actually helped me crystallize a number of things about my story... including where it was going!

Sunday night: Mad writing until way too late in the morning... and forgot to update my word count until after midnight, so it looks like I skipped two days. Grrr.

Work today, then most of the evening madly typing, with a break for Heroes. As of when I started this entry, I'm officially 126 words ahead of goal. Of course by the time I finish, it'll be after midnight, so I'll be 1500 words behind...



Edit: Realized that the numbers didn't add up, and the progress gauge above doesn't measure what I thought it did. I thought it measured your word count against the count you should reach by the end of the day to be on track to 50,000 at the end of the month. It actually measures the count you should have reached by the beginning of the day. So I hadn't actually caught up, and I'm still ~1200 words behind. And I don't think I'll have time to write ~2900 words today.

Word count: 8922

I've decided to break nearly a decade of writer's block by joining NaNoWriMo. Technically I've written quite a bit -- 250 posts here on LiveJournal, 1000+ posts at K-Squared Ramblings, hundreds of articles about Flash comics, the Alternate Browser Alliance website, etc. But aside from some Literary Guild projects back in college, I can only think of two works of fiction that I've finished since 1996: one short story and one short-short story.

Part of the problem is just getting started. I'll have an idea but decide it's not worth writing about, or I won't have any ideas at all. I started a couple of fanfics, but they petered out when I realized I had a setting, but no plot.

I still didn't have any ideas for Nanowrimo. I figured I'd just start writing and see what happened. Maybe it'll be total crap, maybe it'll be 50,000 words that I can chop down to a decent 10,000-word story. I started a day late, but managed to get 1150 words last night. I'm still trying to nail down the genre, when/where it's set, the main character's background. I have no idea where it's going. But it's two pages, and I made myself write description and narration instead of just dialogue. (That's always been my Achilles heel with writing -- I tend to fall back on dialogue and end up with something that looks like a script in prose format.)



Word count: 1150