Category Archives: NaNo

Not the writing day of my dreams

08 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by in Boring, Grace, NaNo

≈ 4 Comments

Yesterday’s writing flailed.

Well, I guess I flailed. The writing, it more sputtered and trickled and crept.

Until about 1 AM, I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. It’s that Noah is getting hit with all sorts of revelations that would be mind-blowing and I need to discover what he’s like when his mind is getting blown. Poor Noah’s been a bit of a volatile character — what’s he like when he doesn’t think he’s going crazy? The fact that I’m not quite sure seriously stalled my writing. Word count made it to 766, I think, but didn’t come anywhere close to the 2K I was hoping for.

I did, however, swim and enjoy the sunshine, so hey, that’s something. I know I keep writing this, but November 7th is definitely the latest I have ever been pleasantly swimming. This is a very weird weather year. Whenever someone comments on it around here, it’s with a wish for winter to get here, but I’m still enjoying summer, so I don’t mind.

In other news… nope, I got nothing. Yesterday was a quiet, frustrating day. I’m expecting today to be equally quiet, hopefully less frustrating. My goal for today is words, of course, but I’m also going to try to be productive around the house — clean sheets, laundry, vacuuming — so at least if I get to the end of the day and my word count is abysmal, I’ll be able to look around and see that I accomplished something. Eliminating dust bunnies is not nearly as satisfying as spawning plot bunnies, but it’s better than nothing!

Zombie dinosaurs and em dashes

07 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by in Boring, NaNo, Randomness

≈ 6 Comments

Blogging every day is made much easier by doing NaNoWriMo because I always have a topic on my mind: word count and whether I made it or not. I didn’t make it yesterday. Drat! But it was a busy day and I was out of the house a lot. I hit 1200 words in the morning, which was great, but when I got back to the house and tried to settle in to writing, I couldn’t kick my brain into gear again. I decided I’d write in the evening, but instead I went to sleep at 9. Nine! I wish that meant I was back on a normal sleep pattern, but instead I was awake at 3. I finally fell back asleep around 4:30.

The most annoying thing about that was that if I’d been awake at 4:30, I could have gone outside to see Venus, Mars and the moon line up, with Jupiter in the same vicinity. I did go out at 3:30 or so, when I remembered, but it was too early. The moon was nowhere to be seen. The night sky was lovely, though, and there was a little bit of fog in the air, which made it feel spooky beautiful.

It was strange being outside so early, though. I’d been woken up by a nightmare, which was some sort of mix of Jurassic Park with the zombie apocalypse — zombie dinosaurs in a kitchen, maybe? — featuring the Vlog Brothers being mildly heroic and rescuing trapped children. I wasn’t young enough to be rescued by them so I was going to have to find my own way off the island. I woke up as I was trying to decide whether to open the walk-in freezer that might or might not have a zombie raptor trapped inside. Not a particularly fun dream, although it sounds a lot more fun in retrospect than it was while I was in it. But I didn’t stay outside in the spooky beautiful night, because hey, zombie dinosaurs. My grill made a noise — probably a mouse living inside it — and I scurried inside and locked the door behind me.

Even though I didn’t hit my word count yesterday, I had a lot of fun writing. For the first time, possibly ever, I really got into the NaNo spirit. No tinkering, no tweaking, no polishing, just one word after the next. Well, all right, that’s not quite true, but minimal polishing. In particular, I let the em dashes fly. I normally try to be careful about how I use em dashes. My instinct is to use them all the time, everywhere, but I pull myself back and try to limit them to one phrase set off in em dashes at most every several hundred words. Yesterday, it was em dashes, em dashes, and more em dashes.

Today is going to be the same, I hope. I’m still in the scene that I thought would be fun to write, and it was, so that’ll be a good starting place for today. I’m in a little bit of the murky middle at the moment, though — I know this scene, but after I finish it, I’m kind of vague on what happens next. It means I’ll probably slow down a bit. Given that I’m slow already, compared to the NaNo pace, that’s probably not good news. But that’s okay. If it weren’t NaNo, I’d be pleased with my daily word count this week, so I’m going to do my best to break my goal of 2K, but otherwise not stress about it.

Last night’s dinner: ham and a baked sweet potato. I bought these white sweet potatoes from Trader Joe’s and I’ve eaten them mashed a couple of times, which was pretty good, but yesterday was the first time I baked one. Much, much better. If it weren’t Saturday, I’d be headed back to TJ’s today to pick up some more, but the parking there is a nightmare on Saturday, so I’ll try to make it sometime next week. But it was so good that I ate every single bit, including the skin, leaving none for poor Bartleby, who adores sweet potato. Fortunately, he whimpered at me which alleviated my guilt, since one of my basic rules of parenting/dog parenting is that whiners should never be rewarded for whining.

The ham was from CostCo, purchased because it looked like an absolute bargain of a protein: I chopped it up and put it into the freezer in packages with enough for maybe three or four meals for me, and I’d guess I will be eating it for months. I’m sure it’ll average out to less than $1/meal. (With no carbs in my diet, I need plenty of protein.) Unfortunately, I realized belatedly, after I got it home and started chopping it up, that it was cured with nitrates which I’m not supposed to eat. At the moment, I can’t possibly tell if I’m reacting to nitrates — way too many other things that I’ve eaten that I’m not supposed to — but I’m hoping that once I get back on track, it doesn’t turn out to be a trigger food. I’d be very sad to have my freezer filled with protein that I shouldn’t eat.

Good luck with words today, fellow writers! I hope we all catch the current.

Time change

06 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by in Bartleby, NaNo, Zelda

≈ 2 Comments

I used to hate the time change when R was little. It took us so long to get back on track, to get our schedules returned to something sensible, for him to not be over-tired at bedtime and awake too early in the morning. Now I’m really appreciating it. All last week I had to keep negotiating with the dog, who somehow has a really phenomenal internal clock.

I would point out the sky to her and say, “Look, it’s too dark to go for a walk now. I cannot see to clean up after you when it’s this dark outside. We have to wait until it’s light or be bad neighbors.”

And she would put her paw on me, and look at me earnestly with her deep brown eyes and try to transmit the thought, “What’s wrong with you, my beloved person? Do you not see that it is 7AM and time for us to be out sniffing other people’s garbage?”

Now it’s light at 6:30 and she’s still comfortably asleep when it’s dark. The fact that I can’t get used to the time change and am waking at up 5-something every day is but a minor burden. Although seriously annoying as I lie in bed telling myself that I should be asleep. There should be some good riddles about sleep, being one of those things that you aren’t aware of when you have but miss desperately when you don’t.

Anyway, yesterday’s word count was a lot higher than the NaNoWriMo site thinks it was, because the way they do word count is really annoying. You can’t easily post your words for the day — it always wants to know your total, as if you’re guaranteed to be working in one big file. I don’t work that way. I keep lots of separate little files. But it makes it seriously inconvenient to try to track my word count on their site if I want to count all the words I write and not just the ones that I keep. I bit the bullet yesterday and changed my total to not include the words I deleted, so it thinks I wrote something like not quite 1300 words, but I am pretty sure I wrote more like 3200. In other words, a really good word count day, even if that’s not obvious to the NaNoWriMo site.

A fairly terrible diet day, however, and oh, I am paying for that today. I don’t know why my brain, appetite, and body can’t work together to make healthier choices for me, but yesterday was not a day of healthy choices and today is a day when everything hurts. Shoulders, elbows, wrists, fingers, and on down. Ha, which I suppose is not everything, but simply every joint. I shall endeavor to be grateful for all the spaces between the joints that don’t hurt. I suspect it won’t be easy, but it’s worth a try.

Lots of plans for today and, happily for me, a pretty clear chapter destination. I feel like the section that I’m working on will be fun, interesting, and take a fair number of words, so yay, words galore. As far as the NaNo site goes, I’m already 4000 words behind so not much chance that I’ll catch up today. I’ve never had a 4K word day in my life and today has too much going on, so it’s not going to be the first time. But I am going to aim for 2K and maybe I’ll make it.

First things first, though — it’s 6:52 and the dog is stirring. A nice brisk walk to get the creative juices flowing… well, no, that’s not usually how it happens. First a slow saunter around the block, watching as B leisurely sniffs every corner of grass and waddles along. Then a nice brisk trudge with Z.

Random side note: “pick and choose” is the weirdest phrase. We’ve apparently been using it since the 1400s but how does it make any sense at all? Once you’ve picked, haven’t you by definition chosen? I wonder if it came from harvesting, like first you pick all the apples, then you choose the ones you want? But it’s redundant in modern English and yes, I wrote it yesterday, then had to waste precious writing minutes pondering it and questioning whether it made any sense at all and why I had it in my head and then looking it up to figure it out. Bad me. But I’m going to try to eliminate it from the default word choice list in my brain, because it makes no sense.

And now, really, truly, time to walk the dogs. Goal for today: words! May all your November writing goal writing flow beautifully today. 🙂

Morning gloom

02 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by in Grace, NaNo, Writing

≈ 5 Comments

My new kitchen cupboards–not so new anymore, it’s been almost a year–are wonderful in many ways, most notably in providing storage galore. But they’re a deep maple color and the longer I live with them, the more I realize that the room feels darker than it used to. On a day like today, when the sky is gray and the air feels heavy with humidity, the kitchen feels like a place to eat gruel and dry toast.

I didn’t, of course. Salad with sadly frozen greens, which I assume provide the same nutritional value, but are decidedly unappealing. I need to remember not to put defrosting food on top of the salad green box — it never turns out well. Anyway, I’m trying to think of ways in which I could brighten my kitchen, without doing anything over-dramatic, like painting the cupboards. Maybe painting the walls? They’re white at the moment, but maybe if they were a sunnier color, maybe a pastel yellow? I could put higher watt bulbs in the light fixtures, I suppose, but I don’t want to add glare, I just want to make the room feel cheerful. I should check Pinterest and see what people have filed under cheerful kitchens.

I won’t be making changes today, though. Yesterday, I counted my word count as 1930 words. That was true, but it ignored the fact that I also deleted a bunch of words from Saturday, so my overall word count was not nearly so high. Still, NaNo started yesterday, so I figured I should treat it as a blank slate. Along the way of my writing yesterday, I started making a list of all the revisions that I’m going to need to make in Grace as a result of words that I’m writing now. It got frighteningly long quite quickly, but that’s okay. Yesterday’s chapter, which was in Dillon’s voice, felt like I was finally hitting that place where the characters start to act on their own initiative and the words start to spill out. It’s worth all the revisions if it helps me find the flow again. Of course, that’s easy to say today because I have no intention of starting these revisions until much, much later, but so it goes.

I don’t think I have, at this point in my writing journey anyway, stock characters the way prolific authors often do, but the character who was stealing the stage yesterday reminded me of Rachel from A Gift of Thought. She’s definitely not Rachel — she is much, much angrier — but I didn’t know this character mattered at all. For a long way in the story, she was just “crying girl” but lately she’s been fighting for space. A bunch of the revisions will belong to her, because it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that she’s important and that she should have been introduced a lot earlier. I like the way that’s unfolding. Inspiration, not just me making stuff up? But I really hope to finish this book someday, so I’d better get back to it!

If you’re doing NaNo, good luck today. More words!

Bacon & Eggs

01 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by in NaNo, Writing

≈ 7 Comments

I ate bacon & eggs for breakfast, followed by all the gluten-free chocolate in the house. That was probably a mistake. My logic was that I ought to get rid of it and I was never going to have the willpower to throw it out, so I might as well just finish it off quickly, but I actually do feel queasy now. For the last four days, though, I’ve been using Halloween as an excuse to eat stuff I shouldn’t eat — rice and potato starch, sugar and eggs, milk and delicious, delicious pumpkin spice lattes. At least being done with the chocolate means I won’t have temptation lurking in my kitchen anymore. I might decide to have one more pumpkin spice latte, later, just because if I’m already in the midst of a food reaction, I might as well enjoy my suffering. That is, of course, the reason I’ll spend the next five days feeling crappy, but done is done.

I felt really sad this morning. I don’t think I’ve ever spent Halloween alone before. It’s not as if its a particularly special holiday but there are times when I notice my solitude more than others and yesterday was definitely a peak solitude day. Not helped by the fact that my words weren’t going well. In the early morning, still half asleep, I finally figured out that I should draft out everything that I need to have take place in the conversation I’m writing and then organize it and then write it, because everything I wrote yesterday was just a chaotic mess. I did that first thing this morning, then started writing again, and if I don’t worry about the fact that I deleted a bunch of yesterday’s words, then I was at 400 words written today before 7AM. Except 7AM was actually 6AM, and it turned out that I was up obsessing at 4:30 instead of 5:30, and I’m not sure why that’s so much worse, but it is.

I am taking NaNoWriMo as permission to write run-on sentences apparently.

Word count for the day, as of this moment, including blog post, organizational materials, and actual story: 1136. I should view this as a great start, but it’s not yet 10AM and all I really want is to go back to bed. Apparently the caffeine from all that chocolate is not enough to keep me awake.

POV struggles

28 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by in Grace, NaNo, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

One of the struggles I’ve had throughout the writing of A Gift of Grace is deciding which character’s point-of-view to be in. A lot of the early chapters were written from the ghosts’ points-of-view (Rose and Dillon) but it was making the love story aspect really difficult. I wound up tossing all those scenes, despite some fun stuff and nice writing in them, because I felt like the book should be Noah and Grace’s story, not Rose and Dillon’s story. Now the book alternates between Grace and Noah, absolutely consistently, and point-of-view is maintained rigidly. There is no head-hopping in my story.

That said, at FWA, I listened to Marie Bostwick speak about character creation and listened to her read excerpts from her work. At the end of her session, one of the questions she was asked was about point-of-view and about the fact that she’d shifted points-of-view in the excerpts she was reading without scene breaks or clear divisions. Her response was that yeah, she ignored the rules about point-of-view switches because her readers didn’t care. She said that if you do it well enough, you can get away with anything.

I also read a blog post from Rachel Aaron recently on one of her Writing Wednesdays about choosing POV, and she said:

When I’m deciding on a POV character, my most important considerations are 1) who’s got the most interesting viewpoint, and 2) information control.

(The link on her name leads to the exact post if you want to read more.)

The scene I’m writing today has a lot going on. It should be fun. But by a lot going on, I mean A LOT. Anyone and everyone’s viewpoint might be the most interesting. I had a great line to end the scene with that only worked from Grace’s viewpoint. Then I had the inspiration* to use Dillon’s viewpoint, which I haven’t used before, but hey, if his perspective is the most interesting, why not? Then I realized that some of the emotional impact is probably best from Noah’s point-of-view. Gah! Decisions, decisions.

*I didn’t change that clause to ‘felt inspired’, although I was tempted as soon as I reread, because it is a perfect example of a hidden verb. A hidden verb is when you turn a perfectly good verb, like inspired, into a noun instead, ie inspiration. Hidden verbs should be pulled out of hiding whenever possible!

I still haven’t decided whose point of view to use, but instead I came up with a plan: I’m going to write all the dialogue first. Not descriptions, because those should change based on POV. Noah’s non-native perspective on kayaking in FL should be different than Dillon’s perspective since he hasn’t been able to go kayaking for years, which should be different than Grace’s perspective as someone who goes kayaking every week, so I can’t write those parts until I know whose voice I’m in. But the dialogue, without in-depth tags, should be the same experience for everyone. And once I have that dialogue written — once I know who says what and how — maybe I’ll have a much clearer idea about whose head would be the most fun to be in.

This is, of course, a very anti-NaNoWriMo way to write. It means writing, revising, writing, revising, which is a stupid way to try to get 50,000 words written in a month. But the good news for me is that it’s still October, so they don’t count as NaNo words anyway. Yay!

So yeah, that’s the writing plan for today. I’m looking forward to seeing how it works!

Day 26

26 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by in NaNo

≈ 1 Comment

So close to the end and nowhere near any of my word count goals!

Yesterday, I managed to shave my left index finger with the vegetable peeler. It was basically the first thing I did in the kitchen as I started to prep for Thanksgiving dinner, done while peeling an apple to include in a cranberry salsa for the appetizers no one truly needs. The salsa is pretty darn tasty, though, and is going to go great on turkey for people who like spicy salsa, so maybe it was worth it. But it hurts to type this morning, which presages bad things for my word count.

Also presaging bad things: R comes home today, today, today. It was my first thought when I woke up this morning — well, after, “why I am awake so darn early?” So my second thought of the morning. But I suspect today will include more getting ready for Thanksgiving (I’ll be making roasted squash for a salad and preparing the mashed potatoes ahead of time, plus setting the table and polishing the silverware if I can find some silver polish, and maybe baking some cookies, plus definitely doing a little cleaning) and a lot of anticipating of R’s arrival. Oh, yeah, and some wrapping of Christmas presents. Anticipated word count: eh. I’ll try to write a few sentences just to make sure that I stay in the goal of a daily word count existing, but I’m not going to worry about it too much.

Probably not a surprise, but I am not going to win NaNoWriMo. Except, I hope, for the blogging every day part and that wasn’t even a goal when I started. And I also hope — and maybe even believe — that the project I started will someday turn out to be something wonderful. But thinking about those things is for the future. Today… R is coming home! Yay, yay, yay!

Day 25

25 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in NaNo, WIP

≈ 2 Comments

Yesterday started out great, but somewhere along the way… yoga, actually… it took a wrong turn. A thousand words of outlining turning into a sentence or two of story by the end of the day.

The outlining was good, though. I have some solid ideas for where the story is headed. I may have made a major tactical mistake in my point-of-view characters, though, which could be a pain later. I had a choice between using Rose’s POV or Dillon’s and I chose to use Rose’s, but as the plot is currently shaking out, that was probably the wrong way to go. I don’t particularly want to change it, but I may have to decide to later. That’s a worry for another day, though. Today — grocery store, kitchen guy, starting prep for Thanksgiving, wrapping some R Christmas presents so he doesn’t see them when he gets home and somewhere along the way, squeezing in a bunch of words.

And staying off the internet. I need to get one of those blockers to keep me from getting derailed by every interesting train of thought that heads off in the wrong direction. Yesterday’s was whether people who acknowledge that they are not nice guys are potentially less “not nice” than people who pretend to be nice. It started from a football conversation about the guy who answered every question at a press conference with one word answers and went off in all sorts of interesting places, but it really wasn’t a good use of my time. I don’t think knowledge and curiosity are ever wasted, exactly, but it’s late November of the year I decided to take the business of writing more seriously and I have not exactly reached my ambitious goals. Ugh. Not going to think about that, because it’s not exactly making me more cheerful. Time to walk the dog and then after that, time for some words.

Day 20

20 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by in NaNo

≈ 2 Comments

Word count yesterday: 0.

That’s not quite, true, though. I actually opened up a fanfic that I’d started a while ago and wrote a couple hundred words on it. Then I reformatted A Lonely Magic with its lovely new cover and I wound up spending the day on that project, including editing the first chapter. I would swear that I edited and re-edited and edited some more that first chapter, but I couldn’t resist making more tweaks when I had the chance. Part of me thinks that’s terrible — move on, write the next thing, don’t get trapped into endless revisions — but the editor part of me was a lot stronger yesterday. No regrets.

Today I’m miserably allergic and having guests over for dinner, so it’s not likely to be the most productive day. Not to mention that most of my brain seems to be endlessly trapped in a loop of what to do about my kitchen. What to do, what to do… ugh. I’m sick of it and it hasn’t even gotten ripped apart yet. But maybe it’ll be like the floors and I’ll really love it when it’s finished.

Goal for today: to do something productive. To write some words. To get back into Cam’s story. It’s a fun story, and if I weren’t feeling so miserable, I’d be a lot happier about being able to play in it, but the tissues are piling up and I’m starting to think chicken soup might be the menu for the evening.

Last night I had a revelation, though — sitting in front of a fire in a friend’s backyard and watching the flames, which is really the best possible way to have a revelation — that perfect is boring. Not only is my perfectionism getting in my way and slowing me down, it also doesn’t make for better writing. I’m not talking about avoiding typos, of course, but about being too obsessed with things like repetitions, grammatical accuracy, and following rules.

For example, one of those “rules” for good writing is to find the verb that avoids the preposition, so instead of “put up with” you should use “tolerate” and instead of “figure out” you should use “deduce.” Straightforward, right? And actually excellent advice for people writing non-fiction. But in fiction, the prepositional phrases feel natural. They flow. Searching for the “better” verbs slows me down, but also doesn’t always improve the language. It can turn the text into thesaurus-verbiage instead of a smooth, unnoticeable voice. Even more important, it doesn’t make the story better. The plot, the characters, the setting — none of them become more alive because I’ve avoided using a preposition.

I won’t jettison that rule entirely. Good verbs–ones like jettison–are great when you can find them. But I’m going to try to relax when it comes to rewording prepositional phrases and try to give myself permission to be less perfect — not with the idea that I’ll fix it later, but with the realization that perfect isn’t the most important quality of a story.

500 words written this morning and not one of them on my book. Oh, I am bad, bad, bad at NaNoWriMo!

Day 13

13 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by in NaNo, WIP

≈ 1 Comment

I just typed Day 30 by accident in the title bar. I wonder if that was wishful thinking?

I decided this morning that I should create a new NaNo goal for myself, just to make sure that the pressure of my impending failure doesn’t make me shut down and freeze (any more than I already am, that is.) 30K words and a blog post every day. That’s an achievable goal and a lot more likely to happen than 50K words, although I do think I could make it to 50K words if I just gave up my need for them to be good words. I could write 50K words of babble, I’m sure. But 50K words of babble would be reasonably useless, while 30K good words plus a blog post every day would not.

At any rate, I decided that, and then promptly forgot to write my blog post for the day until now. Ha. My mind does so like to play tricks on me. But at least it’s not 11PM when I’m remembering that I didn’t write a blog post.

Yesterday was not a huge word day. I intervened in a dog fight–well, first I caused it, but then I intervened in it–and wound up with a bloody, bruised, but fortunately not broken, pinky finger. I wound up taking some painkillers and going back to bed. I did eventually do some writing and some editing (bad me), but I also went to the Orlando Indie Alliance meeting in the evening and watched an extremely wonderful Supernatural episode at my housemate’s prompting after that, so words were never the priority that I had intended them to be. So it goes. (I feel like I should explain the dog fight but it’s a boring story: short version, my terrier is far more protective of me than she needs to be & I used a voice that made her think I needed help when I didn’t. I suppose the even shorter version is that I appear to be incapable of training my dog not to attack C’s dog.)

At any rate, 30K words means that I’m behind by about 5K words instead of 17K, so it’s doable at a pace of 1.3K words per day. I already did some writing today, but that gives me plenty more to do, so time to get back to it. I’m going to be writing a chapter with Rose as the POV character today and I’m hoping it’ll be easier than other chapters have been, since Rose is a familiar character to me and I’m not working out who she is at the same as I write about what she’s doing. I’m also feeling like my scenes are being a little floaty–not enough context embedding to give the reader a sense of place–so I’m hoping to get some more of that in there, too. And off I go to make it be. Happy writing!