Type, Typo, Typing

Short summary: I’m 3000+ words behind, after a week of illness and a load of work. I had 2 zero days, and one day of 150 words). But I’m feeling confident that I will catch up this week, and every other day that I wrote, I did over 2,000 words. Current count: 8,451.

Things are not flowing as I would like. This may change, this may not. I went with the story idea I wrote about in my last post. However, right now there’s not much conflict, not much plot and even less any interest. I had a discussion with some people throughout the day today – at the write in and over dinner tonight. And I have a few ideas I may throw at my main character, including making some things happen to her (finally!). It may be that the 8k I wrote already will be useless, but I did flesh out a few things about the world, and I definitely found out a lot of huge gaps in my worldbuilding.

On a regional perspective, Leicester is doing really well. We’ve had more people than usual stick around after an initial meeting as newcomers. We’ve had a few people returning from the past years, and of course our lovely core membership. It will be interesting to see what happens next week in terms of numbers. We had a successful if small group of people in the online chatroom, but I know there is a writers group that meets at the same time that some people were attending, and also that there has been a daily write-in at the university library as well. I’m curious if there have been a lot of attendees.

As usual, monkey stickers have proven to be a very valuable tool for motivating the writers. Seems it’s a waste for me to bring stars any more at all! The Seeds box has been filling up, too, but I’m not sure if many people are using it for inspiration. I may do an exercise at the next write-in to encourage people to use it.

At today’s write-in, we only managed two word sprints, but they were pretty productive. In 15 minutes, a couple of people had over 1,000, and the average was about 500, with the three participants who were handwriting doing a couple of hundred each as well. So many words written! A couple of people went over 10k or 20k at the meeting, and more monkeys were stuck on. I happily made over 2,000 at the write-in myself.

Probably the very day after I posted that I had no idea what I was going to write for NaNoWriMo, the muse put an idea in my head. I wanted to do a diary, something akin to Little House on the Prairie. But instead of doing it in the American West, it would be on another planet. My main character would be helping colonise an Earth-like planet in another galaxy, after travelling for 20 years in a cryogenic coma. Beyond that, I have come up with some little bits here and there about my character, but mainly I focused on world-building the planet. I know its daily rotation, a bit about its moon, a bit about the time structure (days are only 20 hours long), and very little about the rest. I have a picture in my head of looking out over a field at night with a bright moon. I’ve been thinking of the story on and off for a couple of weeks, and I’m very excited.
I planned on starting at midnight last night, but I just couldn’t stay awake, despite (because of?) the time change. I wanted to start first thing this morning, but I had to do work, and I haven’t felt well all day. I did cast on a sweater, since I’m also trying to do NaKniSweMo (National Knit a Sweater in a Month) at the same time as NaNo. But it’s a lot easier to mindlessly watch telly and knit than to put words onto an electronic page. Says I, as I type a blog post. Yes, I see the irony.
I’m waiting for some muffins to bake, and then I may go and write a few hundred so I am less behind than I already am.
This is, weirdly, the first year I haven’t started at midnight. Is it a sign that I will be running further and further behind than I usually do? Or will I take it slowly yet steadily and keep up for the month? Only time will tell.

It’s that time of year again, when all my projects, stresses and everything come knocking on my door and remind me that it’s all going to get a bit more stressful. This is going to be my 8th NaNoWriMo, so I should be used to it by now. But I’m just not ready this year.

I have no idea what I’m writing yet. No idea. Not an inkling. And I think this is the first year I haven’t even had a glimmer by now.

At least I’ve met with my co-ML and we started planning for the month. It’s a usual fully packed six-plus weeks of meetings and write-ins. At least with that I feel like we have a handle on what it takes and what we need to do. And I’m sure the writing will follow. It (almost) always does.

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.