Type, Typo, Typing

I asked for and got Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks for Christmas. It sounds fascinating, looking at how Christie drafted her novels, the notes she kept about them, and even two previously unpublished Poirot stories.

But when I looked over what Christie books I’ve read recently, I found that it was only one in the last two and a half years I’ve been keeping track on Goodreads. I’ve read some before that, but I couldn’t tell you which ones. All I could remember is that I liked Poirot and didn’t like Marple.

So I was eager to dig into this volume, since it sounds so much like it could be an insight into the mind of the very prolific writer. A writer that keeps the reader guessing and works in more twists than a pretzel factory. Alas, when I came to first read the book, what did I discover but that the book would be revealing and discussing some of the solutions to the novels. It makes sense, because how can you discuss how the books came to be if not to also discuss the full idea of the book.

At least the author gives a list at the beginning of each chapter of which books he’ll talk about and you can be prepared. I looked over the list of books in the first chapter. Eight novel solutions revealed. And, as far as I can remember, I’ve only read one or two of them. I looked ahead and saw that I had a lot of books to read just to get through the first few chapters. And I would hate to spoil her novels by knowing ahead who murdered whom.

So I made a list and put in a lot of reservations through the library. (I love the free reservation service!) I also went directly to the central library in town to pick some up so I could start right away. I had a fun afternoon digging through to find some of the more obscure, including the play version of Witness for the Prosecution. I decided on a couple that I remembered well enough not to bother reading again now, including One, Two, Buckle My Shoe.

I had a large pile of Agatha Christie books to read, but it would allow me to get through the first three chapters of the Notebooks. As discussed, I read nine in January and this month I have read a lot so far. I’m at the point where I have only two more to read to finish that list, and they are in the volume called Poirot in the Orient, which I just started this morning. It’s got three novels in it, and I don’t remember which I need to read for Chapter 1 and Chapter 3. So I will finish the volume before going back to the Notebooks. I might even be able to read the first three chapters by next week.

But then… I’ll have another list to find, another pile to read. First, I’ll see how the first three chapters go, and decide if it’s really all that big a deal to read the books first.

After all, the few I’ve picked up the last month and a half and I remembered at the beginning that I’ve already read them, I really couldn’t remember the endings, and having already read the books didn’t spoil the enjoyment. I’ll see how it goes!

I started off the year with a full arsenal of reading. A baker’s dozen finished in the month, with Agatha Christie filling a whopping nine of those slots.

The meta highlight of the month was finally finishing a book I started last July - Little House in the Big Woods, which I was reading out loud with Tom. We enjoy reading together, but finding time to do it is difficult. I really enjoyed the book, too, but not sure if we should read out the rest of the series, since it took so long to get through this (comparatively) short volume.

Two other books this month were recs by someone at work, and books I wouldn’t otherwise have read. The Road was poetic but ultimately disappointing, and Let the Right One In was better than I first anticipated, considering it was a vampire book. Yet somehow I don’t have a desire to see either of those two portrayed in their fairly recent film iterations.

Rounding out the month was a craft nonfic about my newly acquired knitting hobby. I discuss this more on my craft blog.

After a slow start due to illness, I seemed to voraciously read this month, knocking out books like they were targets in a shooting gallery. Most took only two days, sometimes completing a reading in one day. I guess I made more time this month to read, and it shows in the number of books read. I don’t think I can keep up this pace all year, nor would I want to. Next month I anticipate getting a little bored of Christie and moving on to the pile of chick lit books I’ve got waiting. And now that I’m a knitting fool, I will probably spend a bit more time with the needles rather than the books.

One thing I have noticed is that because I have to take the bus to town one day a week, I am reading both more on the bus and when I am eating lunch out.

Possible trend to come: audio books while knitting? I did listen to one of the Christie books audio while doing a different kind of project, though I feel you don’t get the same experience as when you read, so I don’t seriously think this will surpass book reading for me.

After thinking about my next steps for novel writing this year, I finally pulled out my most recent file for my Xmas novel. It was last modified on 3 Nov 2005. Yikes, that’s over four years ago. Guess that burning desire to make it into something hasn’t been burning very warmly at all.

I opened the file, and started poking around, reading here and there, noticing that the plot hole I remembered is actually more of a plot cliff. I am sure I knew vaguely where a lot of the many subplots were heading and why, but I have literally ‘lost the plot’ since then. I had started a notes file where I marked down some of the bigger issues to resolve, but it raises almost more questions than my haphazard reading did. It also highlights that I had some weird names going on in that novel. Bbazo and Asmoday for two quick examples.

As if that isn’t all discouraging enough, I actually fell asleep in the middle of the afternoon sitting up at the computer reading my own story.

Not sure now when I’ll make time for it. I think really I need to sit down and read it with a big cup o’ caffeine and see if it’s worth salvaging. It is at nearly 90,000 words, which I find quite fascinating. A large, slippery beast of a novel, with a good 10-25,000 more words possibly needed to get the grand canyon of plot filled in. I’m kind of giddy thinking about the challenge of it all. And strangely sleepy at the same time, perhaps.

Last year, I read over 100 books. Some people might say that’s a lot, and some people might not. In 2008, I read 90 books. Previous years? I have no idea… I only started keeping track of my reading mid-2007 on Goodreads.com.

I love the ability to see what I’ve read, and I have made a resolution this year to always include a review when I update a book’s status to ‘read’. Previously I’ve added the books as and when, fully intending to go back and fill in the review when I’ve had time to decide how I felt about a book. But then I’d let it go for a while, and sometimes I can barely remember the book, let alone what I thought about it.

My reading last year was fairly varied, though I can see that I go in spurts of reading. Here’s my breakdown per month.

January ‎(5): chick lit, kids, mystery, non-fic thriller, classic
February ‎(9): a few cookbooks (I was clearing them out), chick lit, kids, mystery, writing guide
March ‎(5): chick lits, parody, bio, non-fic
April ‎(3): chick lits, comedy memoir
May ‎(2): memoir, kids
I have no idea why I hardly read in spring, though I finished a few large books in June that I had been working on over the last few months, I guess.
June ‎(20): a majority were kids (clearing them out from bookshelves), memoir, parody memoir, several chick lits,couple classics, couple non-fic
July ‎(12): a real mix; classic, kids, cookbook, mysteries, modern fic, short stories, memoir, chick lit
August ‎(13): mysteries, chick lit, romance (M&B), modern fic, memoir anthology, kids, non-fic
September ‎(18): mysteries, non-fic (quilting), modern fic
October ‎(4): 2 memoirs, 2 mysteries
November ‎(4): 2 mysteries, non-fic, memoir
December ‎(6): cookbooks, kids, modern fic, mystery

So, what trends do I see? I mainly like mysteries, memoirs and kids lit, with a smattering of non-fic and cookbooks. I know in previous years my trend has probably been on more chick lit or bio. I got back into mysteries in a big way the end of 2008, and that has continued last year and this one so far.

I see that in 2009, most of my reading was in the summer time. I did make an effort to sit out in the garden with a book and a cold drink, which helped me enjoy the fact that it was summer. The end of the year was NaNoWriMo and I was ill (yes, so ill I diidn’t even read!!). I’m not sure why I didn’t read so much at the beginning of the year.

I’d like to increase my classics reading. I know I read a few more in 2008 than 2009, and it was great to discover some books that are well-known and that I had missed previously.

2010 will be a different reading year, with new books to explore. I’m starting with a slew of Agatha Christies, which I’ll discuss in another post, and my goal is to read at least 100 again, if not more. Maybe I’ll see where I’m at halfway through the year and set a challenge based on the numbers then.

NaNoWriMo is dead. Long live NaNoWriMo!

Yes, I managed to do my 50,000 words, for the sixth time. Yes, I even managed to finish the plot (for only the second time). And yes, I wrote to a loose outline and stuck to it through the month, for the very first time. So: a win.

However, as I whined in a previous post, I did not do well in terms of maintaining a steady pace. I procrastinated. I had 8 zero days when I didn’t write at all. Five of those was in a row during the first week. I had some freelance work that had to get done to a deadline. I should have done more of it the previous week before NaNo started, but I didn’t.

I had another 7 days throughout the month when the highest I wrote was 580 (lowest was 287). That’s pretty much two weeks when I was not writing a minimum day of 1,667. Of course, another way to look at it is that in those seven very low writing days, I accumulated 3,224 words. If I hadn’t written at all those days, it would have been at least another full day of writing to finish the word goal. On other years, those probably would have been zero days, so maybe I should give myself a bit of a break.

For the most part, the writing itself went well. I felt that the outline, as bare as it was, helped an enormous amount, and next time I will try to work harder on fleshing out the plot before the month/writing even starts. Maybe my mental writerscape needs better maps, while other writers may need the freedom.

On the other hand, now that the story is finished, I’m not sure at all that I want to go back and work on it anymore. I think that an important next step in my learning, as both a writer and an editor, is to do a second draft of a complete novel. But I’m really not that keen on it being this novel. I may change my mind given a longer break from it - maybe six-ish weeks isn’t long enough to be impartial about the story. My immediate thought is that I’d prefer to go back to the Christmas novel from several years ago, finish the writing that needs to be done and then work it into a second draft. Or maybe I should assume the writing is done as is and go forward to a second draft with the fairly large plot hole toward the end. We’ll see. I am currently on my annual writing hiatus and I tend to do other things this time of year, post-NaNo. Like lots of reading, crafts, and general hibernating.

Final word count: 50,020. Story is done, though there are massive plot holes that will need cementing if I ever decide to do a next draft.

Will try to sum up the experience in a near-future post. But for now, sweet slumber and the knowledge of a month’s writing behind me.

I’m sitting here with less than 10K left to go on this year’s NaNovel, but  I am feeling no inspiration. Yesterday I managed to write over 4,000 words but it was like pulling teeth. Very frustrating.

Today, I’ve got 500 words so far. A far cry from the 5,000 I want to write so I can do the same tomorrow and be done by tomorrow night. I don’t want to have to rush on Monday night after work to finish up the novel and make sure to validate before midnight. The servers are notoriously wonky on the last day, and I really don’t want to risk not getting my novel validated properly.

And I’m starting to wonder if I should maybe not do NaNo next year. I know I said in my last post that I was going along better this year, but when you look at the years in a pattern, the pattern is still being repeated this year. I’ve added two or three more zero days to the month and I’m still crunching to finish at the end. I could have written more this past week. I could have written more yesterday and today already. I could have… but I didn’t.

So next year’s event may not be right for me (don’t worry I will somehow justify it all to myself next year, like I have every year but one since I started). I’m not sure. I know that the pressure of getting the novel finished in a set period of time is really what drives me to finish, but I don’t know if it’s worth it in the end.

If I don’t have the impetus to write, why am I forcing myself to do it? If I don’t want to be more than a casual writer, why bother at all? Interesting questions, best left for another time, since I really need to get some more thousands of words done tonight, or I will regret it tomorrow.

I find the patterns amazingly familiar from year to year, no matter that the novels themselves are all astonishingly different. I write quickly at the beginning, I falter for a long while, I pick myself back up. Some years I pick myself back up early enough to have another slump before the final insane push to make the deadline, beat the clock.

This year, I had hoped it would be different.

But so far, it has been so similar that I am just going to laugh at it. I had an early rush with a first day post of over 3,000. Then I did a bit but needed to let real life take control while I got on with a freelance project that couldn’t wait. And then I eked out enough words not to get so discouraged I quit, but never caught up in any real way. Then this past weekend, I pushed it hard. Wrote about 3500 three days running. And then have had two 500 days in a row.

The interesting thing is that this year, I am (1) closer to being on track than previous years by this point in the month, (2) have less 0 days this year than previous years, and (3) have given myself permission to have a life, rather than shut off any social engagement or interesting thing I want to go to. I’m super busy, but I’m still working on the novel.

The number of 0 days can still change, of course, but I feel better about the fact that it probably won’t happen. Hm, well, let’s say it’s more a hope than a fact of probability.

Why do I do this to myself every year? It’s like a form of self sabotage, like forcing myself into a really uncomfortable corner and pushing harder until I have to spring forward and fight back. It’s annoying that this is the only way I can make myself write. I was kind of wondering if I couldn’t avoid the silly drama of procrastination this year. The outline was supposed to help. I think it has a bit. Maybe those days of 360; 580; 498; 287; 549; 525… would have been 0 if not for the outline. Perhaps not.

The outline has helped me definitely get over the initial ‘blergh’ of the start of the novel. It has made me aware that there is a destination we are heading in. What the outline hasn’t saved me from yet is the paralysis of feeling unimaginative when faced with dilemmas for my characters. I have to still come up with the clever traits, the dialogue, the interesting first-person observations, the gritty detail of the lives I’ve created. And I just don’t know if I have that in me. Not all the time, that’s a definite. Maybe not at all. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel I could ever do this for a living, or even more seriously than I do it now.

If not for Nano, perhaps I wouldn’t have a corner to back myself into.

Today’s count: 3,004 Tomorrow’s goal: 4,000 (since I’m not sure when I’ll have time to write between commitments

On our group writing blog, I’ve just posted about my planning for this book. I won’t repeat it all here, but the result is that I started out with a fairly clear, yet not detailed, plan of the novel. I had the three acts set out, the main character’s conflicts in each of these, and some of the reasons for that. It’s not an outline, not what I was originally envisioned when I thought I was going to have an outline for this year’s attempt. However, it seems to be helping so far, in that my first three thousand words were written in a space of 3 hours writing time. My speed is up, I feel good about where the novel is heading, and I am not panicking about what to write next or how I’m going to manage to complete the challenge.

In other words, it’s going well (fingers crossed), and the plan seems to be a very good part of that.

The other part, the one where I actually open the file and write instead of playing computer games… that one I’m going to need to work on.

I wrote about half of today’s word count at the Leicester write-in. It was well attended, with 16 Wrimos, and was much quieter than write-ins in the past have been. This year, all but one person had laptops, another big change from previous years.

Not sure if I’ll have much time for writing tomorrow, but I feel like I want to. It’s weird, with the mini-map of a novel I’ve got plotted, that I feel excited about the writing to come rather than anxious. It will be interesting to see if that lasts for longer than this first honeymoon phase of Nano.

I mistakenly said at the Leicester Meet and Greet that this is my 8th attempt. Alas, it is but a mere 7th attempt. (I started in 2001, but skipped a year once, the year following the only year I didn’t reach 50,000. Coincidence?)

So, that should mean I have six novels neatly stacked away somewhere. HA! One year, I cheated and tried to finish a previous attempt (the Christmas novel). One year I tried to rewrite a previous novel to turn it from dreary literary garbage into romance. Last year, I started three different novels in the month and ended up combining two of them.

And once two years ago, I actually finished a whole novel (about pirates). To the point of writing ‘The End’. Once.

And even that novel isn’t ‘done’, as I want to edit it - in fact have started editing it several times - and maybe post it on my website or just print a copy to show people. It’s not anything for publication. It’s more of a love letter to a game I play and enjoy too much.*

The other day my mom said she was discussing my ‘novel thing’ with someone, and they asked what I did with what I’d done. I laughed, because basically I go on with life as if the creations didn’t exist. Because to me, they are not complete. They are other.

But…

when I do read back, and I usually end up reading ‘accidentally’ when I’m busy looking for other files and come across them haphazardly, I am always slightly surprised, slightly pleased, and often caught off guard with how separate from myself they seem. These are really creations that have a life of their own now. Albeit a bit stunted and unloved. Last year’s crazy three-novel mishmash has some interesting ideas in it. My Christmas novel, I still have dreams of finishing, since I really enjoyed working on it and would love to show it off to people. The pirate novel is still suggesting a sequel in my imagination.

And I am more than impressed by what else I find when I read back. I find that I have improved as a writer. I have matured in my thinking. I have captured some funny moments, I have envisioned some interesting characters and scenes, I have been creative and that creativity has grown over the years.

It hasn’t been for nothing. And that’s probably why I just keep doing it year after year.

*Puzzles Pirates, I love you beyond Reason!