Nanowrimo day 23 - (insert witty title here. I just don't have it in me.)

23 days in.  I figured I should try and fit in one more update before the end of my 2014 nano journey.  I’ve actually been plugging along at a pretty good rate.  With one week left to go, I am well past the 40,000 word mark (hovering just over 43,000 this morning) which allows me to kind of coast through to the end.  I tried to push myself to go above and beyond on some of the days that were going well so that I could get to a point where I could get away with a lower daily minimum towards the end.  My daughter only has one day of school next week and we’ve invited family up for Thanksgiving, so I knew ahead of time that the end of the month was going to be rough for writing time.  (I wonder why they chose November in the first place.  Seems like a tough month to write a novel in, but perhaps that is the point.)  Rather than try and run a marathon at the end, I thought I would try a few sprints to get a bit ahead of the game if at all possible. 

It’s funny.  A week ago, I was having a hard time even imagining the endgame, but I had a couple of days there when the words just came at a pretty good clip and I didn’t allow myself to stop when I hit the bare minimum.  My record for a day last week was somewhere just over the four thousand word mark…  (I thought it was pretty darned good, at least.)  My word count jumped up quite nicely, leaving me where I am at now.

Which, for the last two days, has been a curious place.  I’m not sure if I burned myself out a bit (or more than a bit) making that harder push, but the words have been slow going.  You’d think only having to hit an average of 800 words a day versus the regular 1,670 would take the edge off of the stress a little bit, let the words flow more easily.  Apparently, though, I work pretty well under deadlines and more stressful situations.  (Maybe if I fall behind, the stress will kick me into high gear again.  Ha.)  At any rate, I am – at least for the moment – ahead of the game.  And even if I am struggling a bit right now, it is a good feeling to have, considering how worried I was that I wasn’t going to make it.  Who knows…  Maybe I’ll even plow on straight past that fifty thousand word mark.  I’m not going to automatically stop at that point if there are days left, even if I’m a little burnt out.

     In non – nano news, I received a poetry acceptance this week from Arsenic Lobster.  It was a breath of fresh air since I was running with quite a few straight form rejections and it is a place that published my work back in the small press days (he says as if he is some kind of mainstream breakthrough artist these days…) – always nice to see a publication from that time in my life that is still around and thriving.  It’s amazing how a string of rejections can impact the actual writing… 

 

I’m keeping to my promise, though (to myself) to not deal with the submission side of the game while in the middle of writing for nano.  Which is much more difficult than I thought that it would be.  But for this month at least, it’s all writing and no dealing with the other side of the “business.”  I have a feeling I’m going to need a couple of days off come the first of December.  I could use some hobby time that is a little more mindless right about now.  Then I'll dive right back into sending out my words, waiting for them to come back to me.

 

Nano day 16: Oh, we're halfway there...

     If you started singing a Bon Jovi tune after that title, then you’re my kind of person.

 

     I’m surviving nanowrimo this year.  Yesterday marked the halfway point of the month and I hit the halfway point for word count (25,000) two days ago, so that puts me ever so slightly ahead of the game in terms of shooting for the bare minimum.  More importantly, it puts me a whole lot of words ahead of where I failed out last time, so it’s already a win in my book in a lot of ways.

     I say that I’m surviving, but it really depends on the day.  The last two have been particularly tough to even struggle towards that minimum goal, tough to even get started if truth be told.  There have been days along the way that have veritably flown by, hitting the minimum some time in the morning (and often continuing on from there).  Days when I felt like I might actually have something to say (that people would actually want to read).  Days when I can call myself a writer and not feel like a complete and total fraud for saying that.

     I would say there have been at least five or six of those days along the way.  (And I think for most writers that would be a pretty good percentage.)  And then there are the days like yesterday and today.  The days when I’m walking uphill, when I feel like I am moving through quicksand, when every. single. word. feels like a struggle.  The worst part about those days for me is when I finally do get to a respectable word count and I look back to find that I have written absolutely nothing that I will keep – that every word I have typed out in my monumental struggle will be ceremoniously deleted come December first when the number of words no longer matters and I have to actually think about quality rather than quantity.

     It is days like those that make me come close to throwing in the towel.  When several of them come in a row without any real breakthroughs or moments of awe from the muse is when it starts to get really tough to continue.  That’s when I start to wonder if this grand experiment is worth it at all.  And honestly, on those days it probably isn’t.  Most of the time, I hit my minimums without anything that I will keep.

     But in the grander scheme of the month, I can come back to the positive side of looking at it.  I will probably end this month with more revisable work than I have written in a good long while.  It’s no novel, but I have several possibly nearly complete stories, some poems, even a couple of short non-fiction pieces that seem like they could grow into something more.  (I have never submitted any non-fiction pieces before.  At least none that I have actually called non-fiction.) 

     I really don’t want to see what the final word number is once I start deleting come the first of December.  But I think that I have some decent writing mixed in among the crap.  And that’s really the point of this exercise.  As I said, so far I see it as a win.  There are just days (like today) when it certainly does not feel like one.

     In non-nanowrimo news, I have signed two publishing agreements in the last week – both for short stories.  It is amazing to me how much legalese I have to wade through for magazines that don’t pay.  (Well, I’ll get my customary contributor’s copy, but….)  And strangely, the contracts stress me out.  I know that none of my stories are plagiarized and that names have been changed to protect the innocent, etc.  But I somehow feel like I’ve been caught with my hand in the cookie jar.  Weird, isn’t it?  I suppose it’s the same concept as why I get nervous every time a police car drives by me, regardless of what I’m doing, why I panic when I have to go through security at airports…  I suppose I have more than a healthy level of paranoia.  At any rate; yay, new publishing agreements! 

     I have read very little this last week, so I don’t have much to say on that front.  Right now it is all about writing and the push for ever more words. 

     I’m past the halfway point.  Less than 25,000 words to go.  Hopefully some of them will end up brilliant.  Or at least passably useful.

     Wish me luck.

Day ten, continuing on...

A short note today.  I’m in the middle of another string of rejections and the push for ever more words in my nanowrimo document.  (Currently racing – ever so slowly – towards 17,000.)

 

It’s a good sort of melancholy here this morning.  Quiet and empty.  Beautiful snow slowly spiraling out the window.  I’m sitting here typing with hot coffee close by, hoping for inspiration while battling the ever encroaching thoughts of the giant to do list that floats over my head.  So I push for the word count while watching the world whiten out the window. 

 

Narratives I’m enjoying this week:

 

-James Richardson’s collected poems and aphorisms – a really excellent collection (and I’m not one to typically take a shine to collected volumes for one reason or another).

-The Walking Dead season 1 and 2 by TellTale Games – Some fantastic character narration in this point and click title.  While there are issues (both technically and narratively), I feel this is one of those games that show where writing in video games is headed, at least I hope so.   Kirkman’s Walking Dead is sort of a cultural juggernaut right now, but I think there are some moments in these games that are the best written moments across all media.  (Make sure to avoid the action game based on the tv show – video game mediocrity at its finest.  And if anyone reading this has an interest in the narrative art of the video game, please seek out Tom Bissell’s fantastic book Extra Lives:  Why Video Games Matter if you have not read it.  It’s an excellent starting point to a serious look at the medium.

-Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life With Words by Susan Goldsmith Woolridge.  Helping me to get the creative juices flowing on those mornings when it is hard to make the words flow.  Also internet searches for writing prompts has brought some entertaining things my way over the last week.

-Just starting a new graphic novel – American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. 

 

Back to the word-count race.  And hopefully today brings something inspired – or at least workable.

 

To today, then.

some words on day seven

Nanowrimo, day seven.

 

The brilliant sheen of a clean page.  The crushing weight of it.

 

It is day number seven.  I load up nanowrimo.org and see the not so delicious curves of the zero – that starting point for each day – just staring back at me.  Today’s a tougher one for some reason.  My motivation seems to also be residing somewhere near a zero level of its own.

 

That said, I’ve done ok.  I’m nearing 11,000 words (and this blog post should take me past that point easily – yes, I’m cheating and writing my blog post in my nano document.  Like I said, no motivation.  I had to start somewhere to get those words flowing, right?).  That puts me at an average words per day somewhere right around where it needs to be for me to hit my goal.  I’m not one hundred percent positive, but I think that I may already be past the word count I hit in my tragically failed 2012 nano attempt.  That in and of itself is a big win for me.

 

The first four days were smooth, easy even.  I was absolutely shocked how well the words started flowing once I got over that first morning.  It’s why I love nanowrimo.  Somehow, it just *works* for me – worrying more about quantity than quality, trying not to allow myself to revise as I go, just push push push for that word count.  It makes me feel like a writer when most days I feel like all that I am is a “reviser.”  (And yes, I know how important revision is to the life of a writer.  Doesn’t mean that I have to love it unconditionally.)

 

My document is a barely contained entropic mess.  When I get stuck with one story, I move on to something else – to a completely different narrative, to a memory, to some poetry…  Yesterday morning, I started an exercise writing traditional 5-7-5 haiku and got a little out of control – now there’s a page and a half of haiku in the middle.  It’s the nice thing about “cheating” at nano – when I get tired of characters or get stuck into some crazy plot corner, I can move on to something else.  (I honestly have no idea how I did it in 2011 without cheating.  Even if the novel sucks, I’m secretly proud of myself for making it through that.)  I put three asterisks on the left margin of anything I would like to return to – first lines, mired plots, answers waiting for their questions…  Scrolling through the pages quickly this morning, there are at least ten spots in the left margin where I see asterisks.  It’s a good “problem” to have.  Anyone who reads this blog has a pretty good idea of how absolutely scattered I am.  Working this way seems to really work for me.

 

That said, I don’t think I have anything actually finished yet.  (as in first draft finished…)  The majority of my document so far is one story – maybe four thousand words?  It’s a story about friends in college at its most basic level.  But it quickly became about a lot more for me.  Loyalty and secrets…  It was just working and kept going.  I was ecstatic.  But when it stalled was when the motivation became harder.  I really want to push this story somewhere.  It was walking along with me so smoothly…   I feel a little betrayed by these characters right now.  Silly but true.

 

I have the beginnings to five or six stories, maybe more.  Some of them are only a sentence or two.  I have some really long stretches of prose in broken lines that may someday be poetry.  Some swatches of prose poetry.  A couple non-fictional recollections and musings…  In short, I have a whole lot of little bursts of somethings that I am hoping, hoping will become cohesive in the long term.  In the short term, I let them be whatever they are.  This month, all they have to be are numbers.

 

NaNoWriMo - Let's go!

 

     For the uninitiated among you, November is National Novel Writing Month – nanowrimo for short.  The challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel in the space of 30 days.  I always thought of that as a crazy, impossible task, particularly for someone who was more known for flash and micro fiction than for any narrative of any length.

     Then in 2011, amidst a long long dry spell, I decided to try it.  And you know what?  It was liberating in a way that other writing projects hadn’t been in a very long time.  I shot for the word count, not caring so much about the direction of the plot, not caring about quality.  Just pushing for that 1600 or so words a day.  And I did it.  I ended with a novel just short of 60,000 words.  Now, it’s not a novel that I will probably ever try to revise (though I make no promises – there were a few scenes, even complete chapters that I really liked.  There’s some promise despite its issues…).  It’s not a very good narrative.  I changed main characters midway through.  It took thousands of words before it really found any kind of direction whatsoever.  And when I was done, I felt more burned out than I had felt for a very very long time.  But I had done it.  Me – whose longest story prior to 2011 was probably 800 words.  *I* had written a novel.  I had proven that I had it in me.  I had proven that I could still write.  And I learned that I apparently work better under a deadline – a lesson that I need to keep reminding myself of, honestly.

     Unfortunately, I didn’t follow through in the following years.  In 2012, I tried but fell far short of the necessary word count.  I was scattered and just couldn’t make anything come together.  (Truth be told, I was in a pretty bad place mentally and emotionally and I think that had far more to do with it than I was willing to admit at the time…)  Last year, I didn’t even try.  You know, I can’t remember why I decided to pass on it.  Maybe because of my crushing defeat in 2012.  The same reason that I considered passing this year as well.  But I decided that I was going to go for it again this year.  Sort of.  I’m cheating.  And I’m ok with that.

     Luckily, I have had quite a few of my short (flash and micro, still, despite finishing that novel…) stories accepted this year in various places.  The problem is that I am running out of polished, finished stories to submit.  It’s definitely a nice problem to have, don’t get me wrong.  But I have written very little fiction in quite some time.  And so I am cheating at nanowrimo this year – I am not going to try for a novel.  Instead, I am going to try and write 50,000 words worth of short stories (and poetry, if I become inspired along those lines…).  Hopefully, it will give me some pieces worth revising and finishing up, but I am going to try my hardest not to worry about that as I go along. 

     The first day hasn’t gone so well.  Yesterday, I came down with some crazy stomach bug that my wife brought home from somewhere (she was sick last week) and spent the night huddled on the bathroom floor.  Today, I’m dizzy.  My head feels like every single sound is a fireworks display.  Pushing the words from my head down through my fingers into the keyboard seems like a monumental task.  But I know what happens when you fall behind with your word count, so I am persevering.  So far, it is all junk.  But I’m exercising.  And if I can hit the daily word count feeling like this, I think it can only get easier from here on out…  Right?

 

     Regardless, if you’re a writer and have never tried nanowrimo, I definitely recommend it to you. It’s one of the hardest things you can try, but it is really exciting at points, too.  The days the words just flow out are brilliant…  You’re reminded (if you’ve lost the feeling like I have) of what it feels like to simply overflow.  It’s an odd thing:  The word count can become your muse.  Today is the first day, so you have plenty of time to catch up (in 2011, when I completed my novel, I actually started a week late…).  Join in.  And if you do, let me know your progress.  I’ll be updating mine throughout the month.  (Today, so far, I’m at roughly 1200 words.)  You may not end up with a novel, but if you fail, you still wrote – probably more than you would have in that same timeframe.  And maybe you’ll end up with something truly great out of it.

 

     And if anyone has any particularly helpful writing exercises or prompts, I’d love to hear them.  I’m going to need help to get through this – at least with stories that are worth going back to…