And the winner is....

Me.

But you deserve more than that dear reader.

So since I last posted, there's been some ups and downs. Last Thursday I only got about 1,000 words written. Yeah, it was a holiday, but I had intended to go to the Turkeyday dinner, and come back early enough to crunch out another thousand or so words.

That so didn't happen. Not that I'm complaining. There was a lot of wine, a lot of good conversation and a cute 1 year old, so I obviously don't regret it.

Then Friday I managed to get about 2,500 words done. So, that was good.

Writing wise, Saturday was amazing. A friend and I staged our own write in. We put in Game of Thrones and just wrote, occasionally reading small pieces we thought came out well. Yeah, I know I said I wasn't letting anyone read what I was writing until I'd finished and gave it a second pass.... but I only read small snippets, so it doesn't count.

Anyway, that put me within 4k of the finish line. 

Sunday I had wanted to bang out all four thousand word. However, I got into holiday shopping and it just didn't happen. I got about 1,500 words done. Monday I ended up having more holiday shopping issues and so only got about a thousand done.

That left me to finish it today.

Which I did.

That's it for the numbers.....

The fact of the matter is that I sort of ran out of plot last week. As I've mentioned earlier, I had made up an outline for the first chunk of the book, but I wrote to the end of that last week, which just kind of left me spinning my wheels. I wrote a lot of character scenes and just kept going... which means there's a good chance that what I wrote in the last few days will never see the light of day.

The important thing is... I got 50k.

Back from the pseudo-dead

No, I didn't die.

No, get kidnapped.

No I (sadly) didn't get abducted by mercurial aliens from beyond the fifth dimension.

I knew when I started this blog that it was gonna be a challenge to update it every day. It's been a but more of a challenge than I thought. During the first week of so of NaNoWriMo, I'd finish my wordcount by something like 10pm, and be able to pop in and tell you how everything went.

During week two, it pushed later, and the updates became more sparingly spaced. things got harder. The story looked at my outline and said "to hell with you, I'll do what I want".

Week three has been the story rebelling against the author, so to speak. Characters decide to do things I hadn't intended, people who I thought were a dirty shade of white became steel gray. Characters who were initially supposed to dominate the story are now sitting on deaths door step, having been pulled back before they could walk through.

They always say that the second week in the hardest, but I disagree, I think the third week is the hardest. I find myself still plunking the keys during Jon Stewart, which I haven't had to do up unto this point. I'm ahead of my wordcount, but I want to stay there. I want to be able to finish early and take a day off on my birthday (since I'm not doing anything else on it, just taking a day off of NaNo would be nice).

I have that chance this coming week with Thursday and Friday available for me to to do double sessions or sessions and a half. Plunk down a thousand words in the morning, then another thousand and a half at night. Saturday I could do this too... that's a potential 7500 words in 3 days. Dump that on top of my current 33405 (probably closer to 37000 by the time thursday hits) and I'm within 5k of my goal. I dump another one of those on Sunday and I've got almost 47k by the end of the weekend.

My problem is now that I've just ended the big opening sequence. I'm 80 pages in and I've just completed the first sequence and inciting incident. This piece is a god damned monster. Bigger than I intended. I'm not even out of Act I yet. If this were an Indiana Jones movie, Marcus would have just now told him about the Ark of the Covenant.

So much to go, and I just kind of want a day to step back and reassess. I need a game plan because I'm swiftly running out of outline, and what I do have doesn't quite fit anymore.

Current word count: 33,405
Days left: 10

Hemingway had the right idea.

The two week mark!

So, yesterday was the two week mark.

I'm currently on Chapter 3, after finishing Chapter 2 on Monday. Things are currently building to my inciting incidents nicely, but not easily.

Tuesday I didn't get to 1,667, petering out at around 1,500 words. The scene was just spinning in circles, and it hit a couple of points I needed it to, but it just wasn't working. So, I called it a night and decided to let the little bits of extra from preceeding days soak it up.

I was content to let the bad scene alone until, laying in bed, I realized I had missed a major event that needed to happen in that scene. A character who needed to be instructed to do something wasn't even present.

So yesterday I went back and tweeked the scene, adding the missing character and making it work more toward what it needed to do. It gained words instead of losing them, so it's a win in my book.

Then I had a nice scene with one of the protagonists stuck in a car with the antagonist. Ended up being pretty interesting, and hints of crossing backstory reared their head.

Total word count: 24,202
Suggested word count for 14 days: 23,338

Today is the middle of the road. 25k by the end of the night or bust. Realistically, hopefully we can be at 26k.

How about a little intimidation this time:

A Message from Neil Gaiman

Taken from NaNoWriMo.org

Dear NaNoWriMo Author,

By now you’re probably ready to give up. You’re past that first fine furious rapture when every character and idea is new and entertaining. You’re not yet at the momentous downhill slide to the end, when words and images tumble out of your head sometimes faster than you can get them down on paper. You’re in the middle, a little past the half-way point. The glamour has faded, the magic has gone, your back hurts from all the typing, your family, friends and random email acquaintances have gone from being encouraging or at least accepting to now complaining that they never see you any more—and that even when they do you’re preoccupied and no fun. You don’t know why you started your novel, you no longer remember why you imagined that anyone would want to read it, and you’re pretty sure that even if you finish it it won’t have been worth the time or energy and every time you stop long enough to compare it to the thing that you had in your head when you began—a glittering, brilliant, wonderful novel, in which every word spits fire and burns, a book as good or better than the best book you ever read—it falls so painfully short that you’re pretty sure that it would be a mercy simply to delete the whole thing.

Welcome to the club.

That’s how novels get written.

You write. That’s the hard bit that nobody sees. You write on the good days and you write on the lousy days. Like a shark, you have to keep moving forward or you die. Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

A dry-stone wall is a lovely thing when you see it bordering a field in the middle of nowhere but becomes more impressive when you realise that it was built without mortar, that the builder needed to choose each interlocking stone and fit it in. Writing is like building a wall. It’s a continual search for the word that will fit in the text, in your mind, on the page. Plot and character and metaphor and style, all these become secondary to the words. The wall-builder erects her wall one rock at a time until she reaches the far end of the field. If she doesn’t build it it won’t be there. So she looks down at her pile of rocks, picks the one that looks like it will best suit her purpose, and puts it in.

The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.

The last novel I wrote (it was ANANSI BOYS, in case you were wondering) when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book and write something else instead, or perhaps I could abandon the book and take up a new life as a landscape gardener, bank-robber, short-order cook or marine biologist. And instead of sympathising or agreeing with me, or blasting me forward with a wave of enthusiasm—or even arguing with me—she simply said, suspiciously cheerfully, “Oh, you’re at that part of the book, are you?”

I was shocked. “You mean I’ve done this before?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Not really.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “You do this every time you write a novel. But so do all my other clients.”

I didn’t even get to feel unique in my despair.

So I put down the phone and drove down to the coffee house in which I was writing the book, filled my pen and carried on writing.

One word after another.

That’s the only way that novels get written and, short of elves coming in the night and turning your jumbled notes into Chapter Nine, it’s the only way to do it.

So keep on keeping on. Write another word and then another.

Pretty soon you’ll be on the downward slide, and it’s not impossible that soon you’ll be at the end. Good luck…

Neil Gaiman

And thats why Neil Gaiman is awesome.... well, that and Sandman, and Coraline, and Good Omens, and American Gods, and that guest appearance on the Simpsons, and his Doctor Who episode, and...

Twelfth Night

So, yesterday started out rough.

Remember the scene from Friday that I realized was now outlined to come to a head with an event that no longer fit the world? Remember how I just kind of rewrote a few lines and then worked to put a button on the scene?

Yeah, last night I had to work on the scene that followed.

The problem now is that, without the strong motivating force of the original version of the preceding scene, the character no longer had a strong motivation for being in that scene. She just kind of sits at the place she's supposed to be waiting to see something.

Then the scene the way it was intended kind kicks in and everything is okay. Once the actual problem enters the scene, people start functioning properly. In fact, in this scene the two characters who jumped out the window (who meet up with the character from the outlined scene) suddenly become stronger in terms of saying and doing what they should.

There's a bit of fire in them that everyone was lacking in the two prior scenes.

I'm hoping that the fire carries though, and everyone feels urgent. I already know that it's something I need to go back and fix in what I've got so far. In fact, chances are very good that the scenes involving all three of these character up until this scene will need to be completely rewritten.

The stakes for the window pair have technically been high, but I feel like there's been no real danger and tension there. Things have happened, and one of them is on the road to death... but nothing feels like it's got weight.

The other character... yeah she needs a real purpose in the scenes before this one. She needs something that matters to actually do. She's setting up an important group of plot points, but that's not enough. There have to be stakes in her scenes.

Anyway, enough prattling on.

Daily count: 1,710
Total words: 20,848

And remember, the great words of Richard Castle...

Teeth pulling, followed by candy

So, friday was a mess in terms of writing.

Saturday wasn't much better. As I know I've mentioned before, two of my main characters jumped out a seventh story window. This led me to the unavoidable question of "Okay, so how do they not die?" Funny thing that I learned in highschool physics.... people who fall out seventh story windows tend to die. Yeah, there are the weird exceptions that you hear about (a toddler falling 7 floors and only getting a couple scrapes, a window washer falling 50 floors and getting some cracked ribs) but by and large... when you swan dive seven stories, you become the the consistency of chili.

So Saturday morning I was stuck trying to determine how in the name of god these people were going to survive. Guess I should have thought of that earlier. I posted on facebook and got a ton of joke answers, but a couple of people offered some valid suggestions. Theres one I'm genuinely thinking about, but it requires some revisions, which I can't do at this point, because the scene before it needs a different tone or what could be a grim savior might seem like a joke.

Anyway, I spent all morning on it, and still had to come home and crank out 300 words after the rest of my day happened.

Sunday was easier. Thank god.

Sunday was easy because I found myself rewriting a scene I'd written back in like February. I absolutely loved the scene, so it proved exceedingly easy to just kind of look over the original draft of it once and then pound out a new version that hit on most of the same points, but also expanded into some others. I really needed the easiness of yesterday.

Anyway, here's the tally:
Word Count between Saturday and Sunday: 3,447
Total Word Count: 19,138

Thank god that's over...

I'm not much of an outliner.

As I've said before, I prefer to be what Brandon Sanderson, and probably many others, call a discovery writer. I like to sort the story out as I go along. I have a beginning, I have an end, and I have some loose plot points in the middle that I know I want to get through. In the past I've occasionally used things like the Heroes Journey to give myself a bit of structure, but I never felt like I was locked into it. Heck, on the first piece I really tried to use the structure on, I killed a main character off quite a bit earlier than anticipated, just because it felt right in the moment.

For Eastgate, since I've been trying to figure it out for so long, I took to outlining. I figured it would help me work out the knots in the story as NaNoWriMo approached. It seemed like a wonderful idea, especially since I was dealing with so many characters.

Well, tonight I realized a solid reason why I've never felt right outlining before now.

Amber is a critical element to this story. It's a symbol of the old religions before the reign of the Dark Lord, and the people of Eastgate esteem it a great deal because of that.

Now, I had already sort of worked out exactly how things had to play out with amber. Who was obtaining it, why they wanted it, and how they got it.

Tonight I sit down to continue the scene I worked on last night, and I realize that there's a huge plot problem with this scene.

Initially the scene called for one of the Dark Lords orc marshals to enter the scene looking for amber, and already having some with him that a character would attempt to steal. Except, in the restructured way of the world, figured out after I'd outlined this scene, marshals would never been out looking for amber. The Dark Lord still wants it.... but he's not being obvious about it.

So when I sit down at my computer I stare at the blinking cursor for the better part of an hour (well, not really staring at a cursor, more like doing all those things that writers do when they try to put off writing... like facebooking, looking at the news and doing research).

It takes me the better part of an hour and a half to realize that I can salvage what I'm doing by backtracking a handful of lines of dialogue that I wrote last night and eeking the scene in a new direction. It makes for a terribly shaped scene, one that's going to require a buttload of work when I do the first draft (this draft as I've mentioned is Draft Zero), but it's functional and it points the character who needs to be somewhere in that direction. Awkwardly.

Anyway, I don't think that there's any other spots where I will find myself stuck so badly because of the outline. I still face a major hurdle in figuring out how two character can survive a 7 story fall, and then figuring out how those same two character will be able to be healed up and back in the story in some kind of rapid manner.

Regardless...

Todays words: 1,667 (right on target)
Total words: 15,691

Tomorrow is a crowded day, so I need to be back up early to get my words in before my day gets consumed by everything else.

Good night all, and if you're still awake...

Day 8

Got to bring back a character from an earlier attempt that I really liked and was afraid would slip into the void where forgotten characters end up.

Other than that, not much to report on todays writings.

Words today: 1,679
Words total: 14,024

Really going to try to do a real post again this weekend, so bare with me....

Day 6 & 7

Okay, so Chapter 1 is done.

Characters have leapt out a seventh story window and are in free fall. Guess that means i have to figure out how to not kill them.

Moved on to chapter 2, introducing a new character and a couple of new vital plot elements.

Tough writing last night with the election going on, but tonight I barely made my word count by midnight.

Daily count: 1,749
Total count: 1,2345

Guess I just need to try to focus more.
 

Day 5

Well, that was like pulling teeth.

I managed to come to the logical break point of the action scene I was writing yesterday, which brought me back to the "plot set up" scene". That in and of itself should make the scene fairly easy to write; I know where the plot goes, I just push the scene toward that.

The problem comes in the form of me being much more of a discovery writer than an outlining writer, and just watching the scene go where it wants.... which puts the character in a different location than I originally expected. It also has the character sit down.

There's a reason than in theater you never let your scenic designed put a sofa on the stage - it eats the action.

The same thing happened with a building stoop. The character sat down and started going over the things they'd picked up in the prior scene (something that had to do), and the action just sort of petered out like one of those toy cars that you pull back and watch go.

Now, the character was originally going to review these things in the same location that the "plot device" was that propelled them into the next scene. I say plot device, cause it should at first appear like a piece of random chance, but after a couple of other things, the reader should realize that nothing in this story is chance.

Anyway, because the character plopped down in a different spot then I originally thought they would, it created an awkward lull because the "plot device" was nowhere to be seen. It simply couldn't exist where the character sat.

Thankfully a brief chat with a friend opened the door to a couple of possibilities. The resulting prose that got me to the daily word count is awkward, but it gets the job done. More importantly, it can be fixed in rewrites.

Here's the tally boys and girls:

Daily Word Count:1,683
Total Word Count: 8911

Tomorrow, "plot devices" and a seven story fall.

And remember....

Day Four

Words today (so far): 1,931
Words total: 7,112

Wanted to post this now because I'm in the middle of a scene. I tried to walk away from it earlier and it kept playing out in my head.

Characters in peril. Lots of blood. Already a death.

And this is still chapter 1.

Day 2 and Morning 3

As you may have noticed, or... probably hadn't yet...I didn't post my word count last night.

I was distracted as it was last night, and it took me a while to eek out the words I got done, so by the time I got done it was late and I just didn't feel like poking at my keyboard any more.

I didn't hit the 1,667 count last night. I fell short by a couple hundred words. However, the extra that I built up on Thursday kind of made up for it, so I still kept on pace for the larger target.

Got up "early" this morning (read 9:45, which isn't actually early, but since it's 12:15 and Jenna's still asleep, I'll count it as early) and decided to pound out some words while the apartment was quiet. I managed to finish the second scene, one that has given me a lot of problems every time I've tried to write it, and still pounded out more than the daily word requirement.

Word count for the morning: 1,842
Word count total: 5,181

Hoping I can pound out another thousand or so words tonight, but we'll see. If I can't I have an 110% free day tomorrow, so maybe I can do a double session and try to pound out 3-4k.

Until then, May the Coffee be with you!

Art of the infodump

Ever watch a terrible 1950's science fiction film?

Not necessarily Ed Wood bad, but something like "The Thing From Another World" or "Invasion of the Saucer People". Those movies were always shot on the cheap, and made with the sole purpose of giving American teenagers the weekly dose of invading aliens that they demanded. The writers weren't skilled, the actors had never even heard of Stanislavski (not that you can blame them, what with Communism and all) and the special effects crew had to make things happen with a lick and a promise. 

I ask because those movies were almost always guilty of obvious infodumps. They frequently had two scientists talking, and then decided that it was a good place to give the audience a bunch of information. What makes these infodumps so bad it that apparently the two people talking both had the information the audience lacked. Because of this the films almost always began their infodumps with a line that went something like "Well, as you know Bob..."

If you write that line today, William Shakespeare will personally rise from the grave and devote his undeath to making you watch a continuous loop of The Room, Zombies vs Vampires, and Are You Scared 2. There is simply no excuse for that kind of a clunker any more. There wasn't an excuse then, either, but really it could be argued that they didn't know any better. 

Last night I wrote the first 1961 words of Eastgate. Story advanced a little bit, but I'm genuinely afraid that I did way too much infodumping. I didn't just insert paragraphs from the Encyclopedia Britanica article on Eastgate (cause I have a TARDIS, and Grant Morrisons penchant for getting pulled into alternate dimensions... and if you don't get those jokes, you have some reading and watching to do), I dribbled here and there during a chase sequence. But in the end, I can't help but wonder if, when someone gets their hands on this manuscript, the reader will go "I don't care... make with the action."

End of Day One

Okay, so just a quick post for now.

Day one word count is 1,961, which is a little shy of my hard goal of 2,000 and a far cry from the optimistic count of 3,000. I got home a little late, and dinner was late... so, as you can guess I got a little bit of a late start. Also had to do a bit of math that I wasn't counting on, so that put me a little behind.

Over all, I'm happy with the word count, but not ecstatic.

Hopefully I can put more ahead tomorrow, or possibly saturday (or both)... and Sunday is a day where I have nothing to do but writing and laundry.

By the way... does anyone actually know if a skull hitting steel makes a distinctive noise?

It begins

You're probably wondering where I was the last 3 days.

No, I wasn't digging out from the rubble. No, I wasn't without phone, light or motor car (any more than I usually am on the last one anyway). I was safe at home, watching terrible horror movies (some of which I couldn't even bother to finish... even if they did have Tom Savini and Tony Todd). I was prepping for NaNoWriMo.

Now, I wasn't prepping like most other people. I didn't sit down and flesh out my outlines like everyone else. No more character sketches. No more brain storming.

No, I prepped for NaNoWriMo by actually doing a little bit of NaNoing.

No, I didn't cheat and start my story. I started a new story, one with absolutely no direction. One without much more than a general concept, and I just started writing.

I haven't done that since I started brainstorming Eastgate. Every ounce of creative writing I've done has been dedicated attempts toward getting this story down and seeing where it goes. A part of me was wondering if that part of me that had written everything before.... the part that doesn't plan... would be able to get back in line and just crunch out words when the time demanded it.

That's the danger, I think, of forcing yourself to outline things. You risk getting out of practice of just writing by the seat of your pants.

Well, write by the seat of my pants I did. It didn't go too badly, if I do say so. The words came, slowly at first, and I just let them guide me the way I've done on just about every other piece I've done. It was like riding a bike- except without the wheels, or the bell, or the peddles.

In any event they both have a seat.

The results aren't finished, and remain something I'd like to come back to. I've been writing in a little journal, as opposed to at a computer, so that if I have some spare time away from a computer this month, I can always continue working on it without breaking the programming of "MS Word = 2k on Eastgate".

If you're wondering, the story is a fan fic. The first I think I've ever really written, save for an X-Files piece I did in the 6th grade. It's not about pre-established character, just a pre-established place - Silent Hill. The story and characters are completely new, but I think that the concept fits well into the tone of the games and the psychological aspects of it's horror.

Anyway, today is the first day of NaNoWriMo. That means tonight is going to be dedicated to the first 2k words. 3k if I can get myself that far (I always like to have a buffer in case I have a bad day, or have to take a day off for some reason).

I'll update tonight with my first word count.

Wish me luck, without saying the words good luck (old theater habits die hard).