Category Archives: NaNo

Cici and the Curator

10 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by in NaNo, Personal, Self-publishing, Writing, Zelda

≈ 22 Comments

I’m not totally satisfied with the ending, but then, when am I ever?

But I am done and ready to move on to something else, specifically Fen. I haven’t decided what I’m doing with Cici yet. Probably publishing her, mostly because she makes me laugh. She is very much my sense of humor. I haven’t really edited or revised her at all, though, apart from a quick run through where I deleted a bunch of extra words: probably, actually, really, just, truly, simply, seriously, manage, and some.

However, I am willing to share! If you want to read a first draft, let me know in the blog comments and make sure to include your email address in the appropriate field (unless you’re positive I already know it). Also, if you want it in a format other than a Kindle file, tell me that, too.

In other than book news, there’s been lots of Christmas in my life this week. I went to the Candlelight Processional at Epcot with a friend last Wednesday, which was lovely. Neil Patrick Harris was the narrator, and the music was beautiful. On Friday, I went to another Christmas musical event at a huge Baptist church in Orlando. Very loud, very majestic. When they burst into “Joy to the World,” it was glorious. On Sunday, I saw my third Christmas musical at the Methodist church in Mount Dora. I should be thoroughly in the Christmas mood by now.

I’m not really, though. Partly, I’ve been obsessed with Cici. And partly, Zelda is reminding me on a daily basis that we’re running out of time. Grown-up Me knows that means I need to be sure to appreciate every day: Kid Me would really prefer to stop time right now. I know I claimed to have a ZLSP (Zelda Loss Survival Plan) in development, but… well, I think the ZLSP starts with a broken heart, no matter how good it is.

But today is what it is, and what it is, is the 7th anniversary of the publication of A Gift of Ghosts! Hmm, that almost tempts me to just put Cici up on Amazon. I was so much more relaxed seven years ago. My plan back then was to write a million words and then consider whether really I wanted to be a writer. By now, I’m supposed to be hard at work as a therapist. Ha.

I have no idea how close I am to my million words, although Grace was probably half a million all by herself. Those wouldn’t count, though, because it had to be a million words I was willing to share. But the short stories up in the Scribbles section would count. I should add them up and see how close I am.

I’m not actually sure I need to, though. Post-Grace, I could definitely see giving up on being a writer. Post-Cici, I know that I am a writer, whether I’m earning my living at it or no. It might be a terrible job, but it’s not a hobby I ever want to give up, because when it’s fun, it’s really, really fun. Regardless of whether Cici ever earns a dollar (and obviously, she will, because my dad would always be willing to buy her!), she was a delight to write.

Best of November 2018/NaNo Win

30 Friday Nov 2018

Posted by in Best of, NaNo, Writing

≈ 8 Comments

NaNo-2018-Winner-Badge

I bought myself the t-shirt. No, really! There’s a winner’s t-shirt that falls squarely into the category of “Things I Don’t Buy,” because why spend $20 on a t-shirt when any Goodwill store is filled with dozens that would cost $3? But I did buy it, because when I copied the text into the validator and got my little winner’s badge, I felt pretty proud of myself. A t-shirt felt like the least I deserved.

Also, as t-shirts go, I thought that this one might open me up to interesting conversations. One of the things that I’ve discovered in my travels is that certain t-shirts simply invite interactions with strangers. Fair warning: do not ever wear an Ohio State Buckeyes t-shirt unless you really want to chat with people about football. Ohio State fans are serious! Possibly the same would be true of any football shirt, but the only one I’ve ever worn is from Ohio, so I can only attest to the Ohio fans.

Moving on: the good news is that I wrote 50K words in a month, about which I have Thoughts. It got hard. It got really hard. It started feeling filled with things I had to do (like find an ending); mistakes I had made (a whole pointless middle section that is complicated and contradictory); and duplications of things I had already said. The urge to edit was, at times, irresistible. And I did not entirely succeed in resisting it.

I had some particularly bad days right around Thanksgiving, including one where I did nothing but play solitaire from early morning until the middle of the night. It was like binge-eating, where you know you ought to stop, you know you’re not making healthy choices, and yet you just keep going. I kept looking at the file for 30 seconds and then opening solitaire again. Again and again and again. It was not a good day.

But I definitely had more fun writing, more joy in the (ridiculous, absurd) story, than I’ve had in years. And while it’s true that writing is work and all jobs have hard parts (as Patricia Wrede says, “The only thing one can do about it is slog through the sloggy bits“), it was a lot more fun to write without caring if anyone would ever read my words. Which doesn’t mean that I’m not going to share — honestly, Cici is a riot, she makes me laugh and she absolutely fulfills my once-stated writing goal of simply letting other people share my daydreams — but I do think I should get myself a real job so that I don’t have to care when Cici only earns $50/month. (That’s how much A Lonely Magic has averaged over its lifetime. Not exactly a number that supports a food-eating habit, much less a roof-using, shower-taking, aging-dog-caretaking habit!)

That real job, however, is not going to happen until I do a few more things I have planned, like head to California and spend some time with my friend S, visit my friend P in Seattle for her birthday next May, spend one more summer eating blueberries at my brother’s house, and write the sequel to A Lonely Magic. Eventually, though, real job. On my list.

Meanwhile, though, the best of November. Honestly, what happened to this month? It zoomed by at the speed of light, or perhaps of an interstellar space craft complete with wine bar. Thanksgiving was super nice: I cooked, so I got to have gluten-free pumpkin pie and it was delicious. I got to see several friends, stayed in four different driveways and one state park, plus spent the past week house-sitting. In a real house. With a bathtub. I haven’t taken nearly as much advantage of the kitchen as I thought I would (apart from cooking Thanksgiving dinner in it) but when C gets her water bill next month, I expect it will reflect the absolutely delightful number of baths I’ve taken.

But I have to say that the best of this month didn’t take place in reality, but in the world of my imagination. The best place I visited was the Guanyasar Exhibit on Tirquilk, “one of those in-between sorts of planets.” And now — despite having reached my 50K words — I’m going to go back there, because the story is not finished, even though the month is almost gone, which means I have more words to write!

Mid-November update

20 Tuesday Nov 2018

Posted by in Boring, NaNo, Personal, Self-publishing, WIP, Writing

≈ 8 Comments

My dad called me this morning to point out that I haven’t posted to my blog in a while. (Hi, Dad!) It’s only literally been a week since my last post, but maybe it was a long week.

In my life, the week included a lot of writing, some good time with a writing friend in Merritt Island, and an unfortunate gluten-reaction. I’m assuming now that it was a gluten-reaction, because yesterday I was pretty sure I would never feel healthy again and today I feel pretty okay. The fast recovery, for me, is one of the hallmarks of a gluten response. There’s no long, lingering malaise, just a reasonably swift move from “I’m clearly seriously ill” to “hmm, I think I’m okay.”

I’m glad I got back to “I think I’m okay” today, because I decided last night that I might have to reschedule Thanksgiving, which I could obviously do — none of my guests would be heartbroken to eat their turkey on Saturday or Sunday instead of Thursday and no one is traveling long distances to join us — but still, there’s something nicer about celebrating holidays on the day when everyone else is celebrating, too.

The combination of being sick and hitting the murky middle of Cici was not particularly good (nor tremendously bad) for my writing goals. Cici is currently floundering around in a spaceship, contemplating her life and ethical choices. I suspect that if I ever decide to let some beta readers have at her, the honest responses will range from “it drags a bit in the middle” to “it gets really boring at about 35K words.” Fortunately, it’s NaNo and I don’t need to care about that — all I need to do is keep pouring words out onto the page and hit that end-of-the-month writing goal.

After that, I can think about what comes next for Cici, whether she gets shared with a few friends or revised mercilessly or stuck in a random folder on my computer, to languish unseen. Or, possibly, sent off as-is (more or less) to drift unnoticed on the sea of casually self-published books available on Amazon. She’s not in a genre likely to sell much, so it doesn’t make any practical sense to spend months polishing. Plus, I’ve got other impractical promises to keep regarding my time, notably for poor Fen who has been waiting years for her turn on the screen. But Cici has some very entertaining moments, at least to me. It’s been lovely to be flat-out amusing myself with my words and not worrying about anything else.

Another snippet:

She screwed up her face, wrinkling her nose. Her mouth felt weird. Her lips, in particular. She tapped them with her fingers.

Yep, weird.

She tapped her cheek. Also weird.

“Was that drink poisonous?” she asked.

Huh, those words had popped right out, too.

“The algaro? No.” Seven returned to his chair and frowned at her. The other two were doing something with the trough and the dogs were doing something, too — eating, probably. Cici hoped they weren’t eating the people. But she couldn’t hear any screaming, so they were probably fine. Her eyes didn’t want to focus and it was taking all her concentration to keep Sevyn in sight.

“Feels like poison,” she said. She didn’t feel particularly emotional about it. She would have thought that being poisoned would be upsetting, but she didn’t feel upset. She felt quite tranquil, really. But maybe that was a side effect of the poison.

“It is not poison.”

“Alcohol is poison, though.” Cici tapped her other cheek. Did they feel different, her two cheeks? Was one more numb than the other? She tried the first one again. No, they were about the same. Both feeling very weird.

“Algaro is fermented blood. The level of alcohol in it is very minor.”

Cici stopped tapping her cheeks and replayed his words in her head. Fermented blood. Fermented…

“Ew!” She jumped to her feet in protest and nearly fell over. Her feet were numb, too. “Fermented blood? Why would you feed me that? That’s disgusting!”

“It is an honor offered only to Players.” Sevyn put his hand out as if to steady her, but Cici batted it away.

Blood-drinkers.

They were blood-drinkers.

There ought to be a name for that. A disgusting name. A name that implied horrible things.
A name that revealed them for the monsters that they were.

“Mosquitoes,” she spat out. “You people are mosquitoes.”

Yep, I make myself laugh. 🙂

Cici and the Curator

13 Tuesday Nov 2018

Posted by in NaNo, WIP, Writing

≈ 12 Comments

I meant to write a blog post yesterday, being as it was Monday and all, but I didn’t. (Obviously.)

I did, however, write 2468 words on my NaNo project. Per my usual daily word counts, it would have been an absolutely spectacular day — I consider myself doing okay anytime I break a thousand, doing well when I break 1500. However, on Sunday I wrote almost 2600, so yesterday wasn’t even the best day of the week. On November 4th, I wrote 3457, possibly making it my best day of all-time. (Not a sure thing, since I don’t generally track word count like this, but definitely close.)

In other words, my NaNo project is going well. I’m learning some interesting things along the way. Some of them feel like things I knew when I was writing fanfiction but forgot when I started writing for publication, namely 1) the person to amuse is me, and if someone else reads it someday and is also amused, that’s just icing on the cake and 2) get the story down, fix the words later, and if later never comes, so what?

But some of them are absolutely new to me. The most important of those is that choosing to go along with the story is so, so, so much more fun than demanding the story stick to the script. I had intentions for this story and multiple times now I’ve done something that three paragraphs or two pages later, I’ve had to say, “Oh, no, X won’t work, I screwed up.” In past projects, I would have gone back and fixed the problem or I would have deleted pages. Frequently, in past projects, I’ve gotten stuck for days at a time, finally decided that I was headed in the wrong direction, and deleted chapters or more. In this project, I keep saying, “I guess I’m headed someplace else,” and letting the story take me where it will. Obviously, I have no idea whether this project will ever even be readable by someone else, but I’m having enormously more fun writing it than I’ve had while writing in… well, years.

And yes, that does mean I’m questioning my life choices again. Writing is more fun when it’s for me than when I have to care about the people who are going to leave me one-star reviews and let me know they’re disappointed that I didn’t write a better book and tell me all the things I did wrong and suggest that I should have spent more time editing. Ha. I have to admit that specific review kind of made me laugh. Seriously. Seriously! I’m glad I believe in karma.

I haven’t gotten very far with said questioning, though. At best, it’s realizing that I’d rather not have money thoughts mixed up with story thoughts, but then realizing that I seriously don’t have time to worry about that this month. This month, I have 50,000 words to write. This month, I have an entire novel to finish. This month, I get to have fun with the words.

And so, a random snippet, because while the words are imperfect and flawed and a rough draft (blah-blah-blah, excuses), they’re mine and I love them.

(The story begins here.)

Cici and the Curator snippet:

“One?” Cici asked brightly. Human generic but something about his attire looked familiar, as if it were a uniform she ought to recognize.

“No, thank you.” He pronounced the words carefully.

Not a native speaker, then.

“I search for my captain,” the man said. “It is that I believe that she came here a few days ago.”

Cici’s heart stopped beating.

Not literally, of course. If it had literally stopped beating, she would have been dead. But it felt like it stopped beating, like every drop of blood in her veins froze in place.

“Oh?” she asked, keeping her voice as casual as possible. “We don’t allow guests to stay in the exhibit overnight.”

“No, of coss not.”

Not unexpectedly, it was the same slithery accent as the blue woman had. But this man looked nothing like the blue woman.

Cici felt almost indignant about that. If he’d been blue, if he’d had orange eyes, she might have had some warning. She would have known what to expect. She would have been prepared for trouble.

But this guy just looked like a guy. Well, maybe his skin was slightly purple-tinted and his eyes perhaps were more to the yellow than those of the average human being. Still, she wouldn’t have recognized him as related to the blue woman.

The man held up a picture. It was the blue woman.

“Can you tell me if she was here?”

To lie or not to lie, that was the question.

Cici licked her lips. “She was, yes.” She hoped she didn’t look anywhere near as nervous as she felt, but her skin was prickling like mad, and a dangerous heat was rising in her chest. “With two big dogs. Very big.”

“Yes!” The man flashed white teeth at her, looking delighted. “That is good news, very good news.”

“I didn’t let her in,” Cici said.

He deflated. “But no?”

She lifted a shoulder, looking apologetic. “The dogs, you see. We don’t allow pets in the galleries.”

“I see.” He frowned. “My captain, she is very…” He paused, seeming to search for the word. “Persistent.”

“She was, yes.” Cici didn’t say anything more. She let the silence stretch. Partially it was because she was trying very hard to channel her mother — no one in ten systems would dream of trying to interrogate her mother, she’d wither anyone who dared with a single look — but mostly it was because she couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
Not one.

Her brain was totally blank, except for thoughts of the dogs sleeping in the lunchbox practically under her feet.

Please let them keep sleeping. Please let them have had enough lunch. Please let them not hear a familiar voice and come out to investigate. Cici had no idea who she was begging for help, but every thought she was capable of having was running along the same lines: Please let the dogs be good.

Good? A sleepy voice said in her head. Guard? Work?

With each word, the voice got a little more alert.

No guard, Cici said, trying to keep her mental voice calm and soothing. Sleep.

Sleep. Cici could practically hear the dog’s mental yawn.

Sleep, Cici repeated.

Meanwhile, with her actual voice, she was completely silent.

The man in front of her was moving his lips, soundlessly, and then he said, “Tell me what happened.”

Cici could almost see the waft of purple magic that flowed from him like air. It reached her and hesitated, flowing up and over her.

She didn’t change her expression, but her panic hardened into annoyance.

Magic? On her? How rude!

It was probably a truth-telling spell, or maybe a total-recall spell with a nudge of persuasion to force her to talk, but what kind of person used mind magic on a total stranger without permission?

She was tempted to turn him into a toad. Very tempted.

But that would just be doubling her problems.

In related news, in my spare time I’ve been having fun with cover designs. 🙂

So far, so good

05 Monday Nov 2018

Posted by in NaNo, Photography

≈ 9 Comments

I’m currently staying in my friend C’s driveway: it’s a comfortable and familiar driveway, so I’m not exactly taking a lot of pictures. I decided to start this post, therefore with a throwback photo from some other November 4th. The only photo I’ve ever taken on November 4th (at least in the era from which I have photos stored on my computer) was of the tree that I had two photos of in my last post.

another autum color photo

The same old tree

I thought that was really interesting and kind of cool, and then I realized… today’s not November 4th, it’s the 5th. Oh, well, it’s still a pretty picture of a tree. And in answer to a previous question, I have no idea what kind of tree it is. I hope it manages to survive Pennsylvania’s lanternfly invasion, though. Those bugs were absolutely everywhere when I left PA.

So far, NaNoWriMo is going well for me. My story may make no sense when I’m done, but it’s quite fun and I’m enjoying the serendipity of discovery writing. I resolved when I started that I would never backtrack, no revisions along the way. No such thing as a bad direction (with the exception of my “delete the last three paragraphs” die roll.) Twice already — in the first five days! — I’ve discovered that I’m headed down a path that wasn’t where I meant to go. Instead of “fixing” it, I’ve played along. Honestly, that is so much more fun than revising. A thing to remember for the future, perhaps.

I was going to give you a snippet, because I am amusing myself, but one of my other new NaNo principles is no rereading what I’ve written and it’s hard to find a snippet without reading. Also, a lot of the parts that are most amusing to me are either spoilers or require context. So I will spare you a snippet. But now I will get back to writing, because I’m still aiming to write at least another 1000 words today — along with laundry and dishwashing and cooking prep and a shower and dinner with a friend. My clock is ticking fast!

My NaNoWriMo Game

30 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by in NaNo, Writing

≈ 10 Comments

I would find it hard to believe that I have a reader who hasn’t heard of NaNoWriMo, but just in case, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Every November, a few hundred thousand people set out to write a 50,000 word novel. There are meet-ups and pep talks and social events, word count trackers and message boards, and rumor has it that at least 9 New York Times best-sellers got their start as a NaNo project, The Night Circus, Water for Elephants, and Fangirl among them.

Every November when I set out to join the NaNo crowd, I… freeze. I immediately lose all ability to write a coherent sentence and all inclination to sit at my keyboard. I did manage to write 50,000 words one year, but mostly it was journal-style writing about my inability to write. It was definitely not fiction. The last couple years I haven’t even bothered to try, because I had better things to do than sit around hating myself. Feeling like a failure is not my favorite life experience.

But this year, I’m going to try again. Not because I like sitting around hating myself, but because I need to break through my self-editing obsession. I’ve been working on Fen, but I haven’t even made it out of the first chapter yet. It’s not how I want to write.

I wrote A Lonely Magic in a mad gush of writing joy — I’d been thinking about it for a while, but I wrote the first draft in six weeks, constantly lunging to my keyboard for just a few more lines. I remember getting up in the middle of dinner with promises to be right back, because I just had to get the perfect sentence down before I forgot it. It was completely fun. I want that again. And I’m thinking that NaNo might be a way to find it although obviously, not the way I’ve done it in the past, because that didn’t work.

So here’s the new plan: I’m going to start with a project that has lots of scope for imaginative craziness. Right now the three options are 1) an inter-galactic adventure about a museum of mysterious artifacts, with a magic heroine; 2) a post-apocalyptic magical world with a reluctant adventurer heroine; 3) Fen without worrying about continuity, logic, world-building or characterization, just writing as fast and as fun as I can. Today, I’m leaning toward the first of those options, but I’ll make the decision on Thursday.

Meanwhile, here’s the game. Every time I get stuck, I’m going to set a timer. If I hit ten minutes on the timer without managing to make any progress, I’m going to roll a 20-sided die. (Unless an actual die comes my way in the next few days, I’ll use a online dice-roll generator.) I will then write according to the below instructions.

    1) Switch the point-of-view to another character
    2) Write an unexpected sound and the characters’ reactions to it. How does it change the scene?
    3) How can the POV character say “yes, and…”? Write that.
    4) Immediately make the challenge facing the POV character more difficult. (The challenge can either be the overall story challenge or something in the current scene.)
    5) Write an Aha! moment for any character, a moment of discovery or inspiration, within the current scene.
    6) Some detail of a character’s past is important in how they’re perceiving the current situation: fill in the details.
    7) What does the POV character believe a non-POV character thinks/feels/believes in this moment, and how are they reading it/perceiving it? (Body language, voice, actions?). Write it.
    8) Give the POV character a reason to laugh. (What might make the POV character laugh in the current moment?)
    9) The POV character smells something: what is it and what does it mean to her?
    10) An object in the setting matters: what is it, what does it look like, how did it get there, why is it important?
    11) Reveal a clue to someone’s secret without giving the secret away. Might require giving your characters some secrets.
    12) An animal enters the scene. Plot bunny!
    13) Add a physical detail (or two or three) to make the setting more vivid.
    14) A character has a question: what is it?
    15) Delete the last three paragraphs and take the story in a different direction.
    16) Write one line to end the scene, add a break, start again in a new setting/time.
    17) Give the character a physical want or need — hunger, sore feet, thirst, need to pee, aches and pains, oncoming cold, allergies, tired, etc. — and help them resolve it.
    18) Go to chaoticshiny.com and use a random generator to create something story-appropriate and add it to the story. (A monster, an artifact, a character, a setting… whatever would help with the stuck-ness.)
    19) Ninjas hop out of the closet — probably not literal ones. But write something that forces your characters to move. Bonus point if the movement includes a fight.
    20) Go eat some chocolate. If necessary, go to the store and buy the chocolate first. Then give your POV character an equivalent treat, whatever would make her as happy as that chocolate is going to make you.

Yes, I had fun inventing these yesterday. I also read a lot of blog posts about writer’s block, most of which were annoying. It’s astonishing to me how many people think you can cure writer’s block by taking a walk or reading a book or doing something other than writing. Personally, that doesn’t work for me at all. The only way I know to cure writer’s block is to write. But I’m hoping that this game gives me a way to focus the words I’m trying to write when I’m having trouble coming up with them. I’m also hoping that I roll a lot of 20s and not so many 15s. Or 3s, for that matter, which feels like a hard one. But I will, of course, keep you posted!

And if you’re participating in NaNo yourself and want to be my writing buddy — although I just discovered that I’ve had messages in my NaNo mail since 2015, oops — I’m Wyndes on the NaNo boards. Looking forward to a playful and fun writing month!

Jigsaw puzzles

02 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by in Grace, NaNo, Writing

≈ 3 Comments

Re-reading all the words I wrote in November to pick out the good bits and sadly, there are so many ideas, and — less sadly — so many good bits, but they do not fit together at all, at all. I think I called it a jigsaw puzzle once — it is more like one of those three-dimensional puzzles where all the pieces have the exact same shape. I say “one of” — I don’t actually know that such a puzzle exists, but if it did, this conglomeration of words would resemble it.

Conglomeration is maybe not the word I want. But it’s not collection and it’s not cacophony and whatever it is, it starts with a C.

I don’t want Grace to be a story that gets stuck in a drawer, I really don’t. But yesterday I just bailed. I read the Parasol Protectorate all day long, finishing Book 5 this morning at about 11. So yeah, five books in 24 hours, not exactly the most productive use of my time. She deserved a better editor, in my opinion, although she did some fine retro-fitting to plug up her world-building inconsistencies. But I bet she got some letters of complaint before she did. Is that my problem, I wonder? Am I worried about people complaining? I don’t feel like it should be — so far, with a few rare exceptions, I’m my own harshest critic.

But really, I suspect it’s the jigsaw puzzle problem. When I started, I was writing three stories at once: a romance between Grace and Noah; a mystery about stock options, anonymous threats, and bodyguards; and the story of the ghosts. When I started over again from the beginning, back in the summer, I jettisoned everything except the romance, but now I’m back to trying to write the romance and the ghost story and feeling like the mystery was the glue that tied the two together. So, option one: keep writing, even though I’m lost and spinning in circles. Option two: back to the beginning and start revising, see where I can go if I fix all the things that are already bothering me. Option three: write something else for a while.

Option four: go back to bed and wallow in depressed, gray, miserable gloominess.

I’m thinking option one. I may not be getting anywhere, but as I learned from my re-reading of all my not-getting-anywhere-of-November, there were at least some good ideas. And I did discover — especially in the last few days of November — that when I simply force myself to write, whether I know where I’m going, whether the words are any good or not, things start churning around. I wrote a lot of words in two days. I didn’t much enjoy them. But I don’t think they’re bad words. I’m probably not going to use a lot of them, maybe not any, but pushing to create them was… well, it felt like exercise. Not necessarily fun, but healthier at the end, healthier when I was in the middle of it, and even if it’s not forward movement, at least it was movement.

Three o’clock and I haven’t had lunch, so I think I shall go hunt down some food. But after lunch, it’s time to start writing again. Today will be Day 1 of a fresh writing chain which is, someday, I am really quite hopeful — or maybe just thinking positive — going to end with a book.

Taxiing

30 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by in Grace, NaNo

≈ 3 Comments

Why, oh, why, do we use the word “taxi” to describe an airplane’s free motion along the ground? Apparently they’re traveling on land known as a “taxiway,” but why should that be called that? Maybe to differentiate it from the runway? But who chose taxi?

Also, double i is a really intrinsically weird letter construction in the English language. I wonder how many words there are that use a double i? I’m guessing not many because offhand, I can’t think of another. Ah, but Hawaii and skiing, of course, and all of skiing’s forms. Plus Shanghaiing and shiitake and alibiing. But not a lot of others. (Technically 50-some others, if you include all the ones on the word game cheat list that I just looked at, but a bunch of them are pretty dubious — Hawaiian plant names and words with no definition online, etc.)

If I had discovered the answer to the question about taxi, I’d stuff this blog post with keywords so that other people could find the answer more easily, because I’ve wasted a scary amount of time trying to discover the etymology of that phrase, but alas, I didn’t find the answer, so there’s no point.

But today is the last day of NaNo.

Achievement One: Write a blog post every day. Unlocked as soon as I hit Publish on this one.
Achievement Two: Write a 50,000 word novel entirely within the month of November. Nope. Achievement not unlocked. Maybe next year.
Achievement Three: Write 50,000 words within the month of November. I have ten hours and approximately 4500 words to go.

That’s an average of 450 words per hour. Phrased that way, it still seems possible. And since these words count, I may as well continue babbling here for a little bit longer. Overdrive — in the interests of making it impossible for me to success with Achievement #3 — very kindly auto-checked out the complete Parasol Protectorate by Gail Carriger to my iPad this morning. I’ve had to hide the iPad in the other room to discourage myself from distractions but I did read at breakfast and lunch. I read another series by her — The Finishing School series — last week, also mostly courtesy of Overdrive. It’s encouraging in some weird way to see that she has become a better writer as she’s written more books. I don’t know why exactly, except that sometimes I think I’ve gotten a lot worse, but maybe it’s just hard to see your own growth in progress? And maybe it’s just a satisfying affirmation that yes, authors grow and learn and develop, and if I’m not as good as I want to be today, that doesn’t mean I won’t be later.

Also, although perhaps less optimistically, it reminds me that I’m a good editor and I’m a good editor on my own books, too. The reason I’m saying this is that there are clunky sections in the first book of the Parasol Protectorate series — repetitions, infodumps — stuff that pretty minor edits could have fixed and it’s satisfying to me to know that I would have caught them and fixed them. It reminds me that even if this first draft that I’m working on is the worst thing ever, ever, ever, I am entirely capable of fixing it in rewrites. I wish I could remember that a little more easily. I should be more confident when I’m writing about my own skills as an editor, because that would probably let me relax a little more while I’m writing. Hmm, another useful insight.

So as I hit the end of my blogging every day month, what have I learned? I have learned that I’m probably not going to blog every day. I never check my traffic, but I bet my traffic has gone lower and lower this month as I’ve bored more people with blog posts that say nothing. I’m not even sure that I’d bother to read my own blog if it weren’t, you know, my own. But I’ve also found it really useful to blog every day as a way of beginning my writing process and also forcing myself to relax about what I write. My normal process, even with a blog post, includes a lot of revision and tweaking, but this month, there’s just no time for that. I bet it’s not even that noticeable to anyone who’s managed to keep reading. But it’s relaxing for me.

And I just drifted off to google analytics — a terrible way to spend my now less than ten hours — and yep, I’m dramatically right. The little blue line plummets at the beginning of November. That’s okay, though — it’s a nice reminder that I should blog for what I get out of it myself and not to take up other people’s time. If I worried too much about my audience I would probably stop blogging entirely, because time is a precious resource for all of us and not one that should be wasted. But I can waste my own time, because I’m getting self-analysis, writing discoveries, encouragement and experience out of it. Words, words, and more words! They count for something for me, even when they’re not useful for anyone else. (Technically, of course, all reading is good because spending your time interpreting symbols is good for our brains and keeps us mentally agile, but there are a lot of worthwhile things to read in the world — my blog does not aspire to be one of them. Not that a blog could aspire, but you know what I mean.)

Almost 1000 words on this blog post, which puts me at under 4K left to go in my nine hours and forty-five minutes. Do I have anything else to say about my blogging discoveries in the month of November? I don’t think I posted any recipes, which might just mean I wasn’t a very creative cook this month. But book reviews were obviously my fallback position — when I have nothing else to write about, there are always books. I wish that worked in real life, but it so seldom does. Never once have I survived a stilted conversation with a stranger by discovering that we both liked to read the same things. But maybe I should try more often, since I don’t think I often try the “Read anything good lately?” line. (I don’t actually wander around talking to strangers all that often, anyway.) Writing, reading, cooking, dogs — if I ever try to do the blogging every day for a month thing again, I will have to make sure to take an interesting vacation during the month!

Anyway, I’m going to get back to my attempt to produce words that will eventually go into A Gift of Grace. Tomorrow I’m going to have the fun organizational job of reading everything I’ve written in the past ten days and pulling out all the coherent bits to see how they fit together or how they can be fit together. But today I’m just going to try to write some more of those coherent bits. With any luck, Noah can get on with his confrontation with Lucas and I can get through this section and into a more fun section with Akira. More fun because Akira is always fun to write, I think, and it’s been a while since I’ve been with her.

Tomorrow — if I manage to get all the words done today — I am going to reward myself with a box of these chocolates from CostCo. I shouldn’t, because I seriously don’t need the sugar — it makes all my joints go wonky — but they are oh-so-good and I need the motivation. Yay, chocolate.

Desire and determination

29 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by in Boring, NaNo

≈ 4 Comments

From Judy in the comments: “Motivation is shit when you think about it. It’s fleeting, inconsistent, and unreliable. Commitment. That’s what it takes. Make the decision to better yourself every single day. Don’t rely on motivation, rely on your desire and determination to not stay where you are.” Runningmandz

Yesterday was a 3000 word count day. All the words were terrible. Some of them were a rant about how much I was hating writing and how much I was hating the book I was working on. Some of them were a feeble attempt to write a different book, which, it turned out, I Hated just as much as the real one. (I have no idea why my fingers randomly capitalized hated in that previous sentence, but I’m leaving it even though it’s wrong because it amuses me. Yes, my hate yesterday was worth of capital letters.) But I really tried to keep my fingers moving. As of today, I need to write 11,500 words in the next two days. I am willing to accept absolutely any words as an element of this goal, no matter how bad they are, despite the fact that realistically, that’s kind of stupid.

What’s the point in writing a lot of bad words? Except the point is something to do with motivation, with setting a goal and achieving it. Even if all the words are terrible words, if I’ve written fifty thousand of them in a month, I will have accomplished something. Admittedly, not the something that it would have been good to accomplish, namely finishing the first draft of A Gift of Grace. Even if it was 20,000 words, it would be better to have a solid first draft at the end of the month then a ton of unusable words. But persistence, commitment, desire and determination — as long as I keep opening up that damn file every day, I will get there in the end. Seriously, yesterday was close to giving up again, though. I have thousands of words that are basically just trying to find the next scene and no understanding of why it’s being so difficult. I feel like it should be straightforward — Noah’s got a job and is working until Akira gets back, what’s complicated about that? — but it feels super murky middle.

I suspect my real issue is that I want a lot of time to pass in the book, months ideally, and that is never my strong suit. The best I’ve ever done with that — oh, ha, the ONLY time I’ve ever done that — is “six weeks later” as the starting of the seduction scene in A Gift of Ghosts. That is literally the only time I’ve ever made significant time pass in a story. Well. Huh. Perhaps I’ve just realized why I’m spinning my wheels. That’s a useful accomplishment, go, blog post writing. But all my other books take place in literally days. In fact, I think I can go back to a blog post I was writing in the midst of Ghosts where I discuss my exact inability to make time pass. It has a name, narrative something-or-other, and apparently I still haven’t mastered the skill.

Moving on, at dinner last night, I took a break and read — well, skimmed, really — a classic Josephine Tey novel, Brat Farrar. What I wanted to read was a Ngaio Marsh mystery, having recently been reminded of those books. But unfortunately, the ebook versions that exist of Ngaio Marsh are ridiculously expensive. I hope her heirs are at least the people making the profits of those books, but I suspect it’s just a publisher. There’s a whole ocean of books that would be nice to have as ebooks — Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie, old Dick Francis, Elswyth Thane, Elsie Lee… — but the publisher wouldn’t have the ebook rights in the contract, since the books predate computers, giving them no motivation to make electronic editions without new contracts.

And as a business opportunity for an outsider, it’s probably risky. You’d need a good lawyer, the original contracts, clear owners of the copyrights, all for sales that might wind up being trivial. When I think about that way, it’s more obvious why Ngaio Marsh’s ebooks should be $9 each. But still, I wasn’t willing to pay. Instead, I found the Project Gutenberg library and Josephine Tey and read Brat Farrar for free. It was very soothing. The world in the book is peaceful — well, despite having a psycho murderer in it — but serene and friendly and warm. Darkness is there, all around, with tragic deaths and past wars and death duty taxes, but the sun still shines golden on the hills and riding a horse can be a sublime experience. It didn’t make me less discouraged with my own book, but it did remind me that I can relax and take my time and have some scenes that are just there to be pleasant. I don’t know what kind of crazy standard I’m trying to write to, but I think for today being reminded to take my time is a good thing.

And these words are feeling very incoherent, not to mention rambling, but that’s okay. Given that I need to write 6000 words today — a number that makes me roll my eyes — a few rambling words to begin with are probably good for me. The real issue with that ridiculous word count goal is that I’m bringing R back to his ride to school. For me, it’s a great deal. Instead of a five hour drive to bring him all the way to Sarasota, it’s a two hour drive. Hours of time saved, excellent. But on a day when I aspire to write thousands upon thousands of words, and even more hope that at least a few of them will be good and usable words, chopping out a couple hours in the middle of the day is sort of unfortunate. Of course, that’s the whole deal with NaNo in November, anyway. Losing a couple days to cooking a big dinner is not so efficient, although if I wasn’t the cook, having the holidays would probably be really nice to increase my word count. I bet a lot of writers with full-time jobs pack their Black Fridays with words, words, and more words.

Anyway, the real issue with losing time to the drive is not so much the drive, but the coming home to an empty house. It’s so nice to have R here. I still wind up spending a lot of my time cloistered away at my computer, but when I wander out to the kitchen, I enjoy the company and the conversation. I suspect that when I return to the empty house, I will have to go through a period of being sad before I can settle my head back into Tassamara.

However, that gives me a new goal — to finish Grace before he comes home again for Christmas. It would be so extraordinarily nice to have a final draft of this book completed. At this point, having spent over a year working on it, it’s almost impossible to imagine. It’s the book from hell. It will never end, it will never make sense, I will always have dozens of paragraphs (good paragraphs) that simply don’t fit in anywhere at all… how’s that for pessimistic? Yesterday, when I was trying to get the new version of ALM finalized, I wound up organizing some files and I found some great scenes from Grace that I wrote a while ago. Truly, great scenes. Unfortunately, completely USELESS because I went in a different direction when I wrote and they no longer make sense, but they were very well-written. *sigh*

Okay, time to stop whining. There are two more days left in November and I have the desire and the determination to use them wisely. Waiting for meaning to spring full-blown into my imagination hasn’t been working, so instead I’ll be pouring out the words as fast as my fingers can move and hoping that eventually all my babble will start cohering into something meaningful. Or fun, anyway.

I believe this post gets the Boring tag. Someday soon I will be updating Goodreads with all the books that I’ve read in November — a list that includes the entire Finishing School series by Gail Carriger, the entire Paladin’s Legacy series by Elizabeth Moon, and alas, some other library books that I already don’t remember. Drat. Yeah, Overdrive was both a good and a bad discovery for me. But if I don’t reach 50,000 words (not that I’m giving up — I’ve got 38 hours left!), I sure will have read a lot of books — at least 15 in November, not counting the ones that I didn’t write down, so probably closer to 20. Maybe I should have called it National Novel Reading Month instead of Writing Month? That would have worked better for me.

Gah, I should not have wasted the past twenty minutes on Goodreads. No time for reviewing books! On to writing. And still thinking positive — I can do this, really I can! Desire and determination, that’s all we need, right?

Edited to add: I went looking for the narrative something-or-other post and it’s called narrative summary. My post was nothing special, except for the link to Patricia Wrede’s site where she usefully explains different aspects of the technique. It’s worth a read.

Three more days

28 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by in NaNo

≈ 4 Comments

Approximately 15,000 more words.

Likelihood of success: low.

But not zero! I’ve had three very low word count days in a row, so maybe they can be followed by three very high word count days. It’s a goal, anyway. Yesterday I really intended to write, but I spent the morning working on formatting A Lonely Magic for print and in the afternoon, I was seriously tired. Not because formatting is so difficult, although it is a job for a perfectionist, but because Thanksgiving really does take a lot. It’s not the cooking that’s the problem, although my gravy took an awful lot of stirring, but when you’re feeding eleven people in a house where usually a big meal involves three people, there are a host of other chores. Like moving furniture around, setting up tables, dragging chairs in from the garage, getting the step stool out about a hundred dozen times to retrieve the good china from the top shelves, and then the serving dishes, and then the trivets, and then the search for the serving platters… I even ironed the tablecloths because they really, really needed it. When I think, oh, it’s just cooking a turkey, sure, that’s no big deal, but in fact, there’s a lot of movement and carrying involved with setting up a big meal.

So yesterday I was tired and today, to be honest, I’m still tired. I would happily have another day of zoning, maybe even some television watching. But instead I am going to write, because I think I could still finish NaNo. Not the real thing, of course, but the 50,000 words of one form or another.

In other blog post news… nope, got nothing. I posted the new cover of ALM yesterday and couldn’t figure out a way to ask if people saw Fen’s face without, you know, actually asking and making it obvious, so I am left to wonder how many people missed it. But I feel like ALM and everything around it needs to become for me a thing that I can love so much that no one else’s reaction matters.

That’s an aspirational position, of course — I’m a hard-core people pleaser, so I want other people to love the things I love — but it’s good for me. It’s… hmm, I can feel myself wandering into one of those deep psychological self-analysis moments, tied to middle school and moving a lot, managing friendships, and so on, but I’m going to resist the temptation because it’s not getting the writing done that I want to get done. If I’m not writing Grace, I should be setting up Christmas lights while a super-tall person is available to help me with them. Well, a super-tall person and also a handy spotter for roof-climbing purposes. I don’t mind going on the roof, but I like to know that someone’s there to call 911 should I fall and break my neck. Or really any bones. Doesn’t have to be the neck.

Right, back to Grace. Many words to be written today, so off I go to write them. If you’re a fellow NaNo’er, also not finished, good luck today. Write lots!