nano post-mort
Dec. 3rd, 2010 09:54 am( So, Nano. )
And 4,800 of that was today. I rule.
Full post-mort to come in a day or three. (On my opt-in writing filter; let me know if you're interested in reading my word count updates and blatherings about writing. Contrariwise, of course, if you're on said filter and would rather be off it, let me know; I'm not offended in the slightest.)
... crud, I have to get up and go to work and be functional tomorrow.
Full post-mort to come in a day or three. (On my opt-in writing filter; let me know if you're interested in reading my word count updates and blatherings about writing. Contrariwise, of course, if you're on said filter and would rather be off it, let me know; I'm not offended in the slightest.)
... crud, I have to get up and go to work and be functional tomorrow.
final final slog
Nov. 30th, 2010 08:57 amFifteen hours. 4,649 words. Yesterday was around 4100 words, and that was with a four-hour break in the middle, so I'm upgrading my estimate of my chances to slightly better than 50%.
Also, wow, I can watch the plot elements being left behind in the dust as I write this. It's kind of impressive, really. Who was that one guy? Why did I introduce that thing in the first scene? What' that character's motivation? Who knows?
oog.
ETA: encouraging comments welcome and, well, encouraged.
Also, wow, I can watch the plot elements being left behind in the dust as I write this. It's kind of impressive, really. Who was that one guy? Why did I introduce that thing in the first scene? What' that character's motivation? Who knows?
oog.
ETA: encouraging comments welcome and, well, encouraged.
nano: last slog
Nov. 28th, 2010 11:52 amEleven thousand words in sixty hours. Good thing I took Monday and Tuesday off work.
Chance of finishing: roughly one in three. (My best day so far has been around 3500 words. I'll need two 4000-word-plus days in a row to have any chance of knocking this out.)
Slightly worried about running out of story before I get to the end of the wordcount, but only slightly.
I will sally forth until I have this book by the balls and by the throat.
I am the Commander of these words.
I am the King of this story.
I am the God of this place.
I am a writer, and I will finish the shit that I started.
Chance of finishing: roughly one in three. (My best day so far has been around 3500 words. I'll need two 4000-word-plus days in a row to have any chance of knocking this out.)
Slightly worried about running out of story before I get to the end of the wordcount, but only slightly.
I will sally forth until I have this book by the balls and by the throat.
I am the Commander of these words.
I am the King of this story.
I am the God of this place.
I am a writer, and I will finish the shit that I started.
nano update
Nov. 20th, 2010 11:58 pmWords: 22,300
Expected words: around 33,300
AHAHAHAHA. At the 2/3 mark and not even halfway there. I'm torn between "this is utterly hopeless" and "this is totally doable." Because if I write 3,000 words a day for the next ten days, then I'm there. But I can't do that, because I have to go to work for three of those days, and to Thanksgiving dinner with my family on a fourth. Post-T'giving I'll have four or five days to do nothing but write, and that will help, but I honestly don't know if it will be enough to get me there.
And I don't know if I care, either. I mean, obviously I care about finishing something I said I'd do, and proving that I can do it, and all that. But the writing is crap, enough so that it's making me twitchy about how bad it is. My characters are either flat or contradictory, my worldbuilding is an incoherent mess (even though it's drawing on someone else's world, the reader will see it as an incoherent mess, because I've not given nearly enough pacing and small hints and all that), and the plot is... serviceable, I think, that part I can do pretty well. I suspect that I shall finish this and lock it away in a Drafts folder and never touch it again.
I'm not sure whether Just Write The Damned Thing is doing me any good or not. It might in smaller doses. I /do/ think that a thousand words a day is a sustainable pace now, which is an improvement. I can understand how people can just sit down and knock out a story in a night, when it used to be a struggle for me to get four hundred words at a stretch. So that much has been good.
We shall see.
Expected words: around 33,300
AHAHAHAHA. At the 2/3 mark and not even halfway there. I'm torn between "this is utterly hopeless" and "this is totally doable." Because if I write 3,000 words a day for the next ten days, then I'm there. But I can't do that, because I have to go to work for three of those days, and to Thanksgiving dinner with my family on a fourth. Post-T'giving I'll have four or five days to do nothing but write, and that will help, but I honestly don't know if it will be enough to get me there.
And I don't know if I care, either. I mean, obviously I care about finishing something I said I'd do, and proving that I can do it, and all that. But the writing is crap, enough so that it's making me twitchy about how bad it is. My characters are either flat or contradictory, my worldbuilding is an incoherent mess (even though it's drawing on someone else's world, the reader will see it as an incoherent mess, because I've not given nearly enough pacing and small hints and all that), and the plot is... serviceable, I think, that part I can do pretty well. I suspect that I shall finish this and lock it away in a Drafts folder and never touch it again.
I'm not sure whether Just Write The Damned Thing is doing me any good or not. It might in smaller doses. I /do/ think that a thousand words a day is a sustainable pace now, which is an improvement. I can understand how people can just sit down and knock out a story in a night, when it used to be a struggle for me to get four hundred words at a stretch. So that much has been good.
We shall see.
nano day 10
Nov. 10th, 2010 03:05 pmWord count: 8500, give or take.
Expected word count: 15000
Yeah, that looks about right. By the end of Day 1 I was slightly over my required word count ("required" average words per day to hit 50K by the end of the month), and it's been all downhill since then. I spent the evening of Day 2 engaged in conversation that was ultimately more important than noveling, and other days have involved Being Sociable and such in the evenings, and and and.
Oh well. This is exactly why I took tomorrow and Friday off, so I could sit down and just plain write for hours at a time. Or at least stare at Scrivener and push things around.
The real problem is that when I went to bed last night I was pretty much done with the setup for the plot, and now I have to figure out what to do with the actual plot itself. Which requires time spent composing but not actually writing. argh.
The process fascinates me. I'm writing crap. I know I'm writing crap. It takes conscious effort to keep writing forward, to not go back and fix the crap I'm writing. (I can't help myself in some cases, particularly where the structure's so bad that it's making the rest of the story unstable.) Of course, not letting myself worry about the sentence-level flaws just means I can see all the massive structural flaws. There may be something salvageable in this mess but I can't see it from here.
And I can't tell from here if it's being at all helpful. There are certainly days when I don't want to get up and go to work, I want to stay home and work on the novel. Which is a nice feeling. But in terms of encouraging me to finish writing things... I really don't know.
I guess I'll see in another twenty days.
Expected word count: 15000
Yeah, that looks about right. By the end of Day 1 I was slightly over my required word count ("required" average words per day to hit 50K by the end of the month), and it's been all downhill since then. I spent the evening of Day 2 engaged in conversation that was ultimately more important than noveling, and other days have involved Being Sociable and such in the evenings, and and and.
Oh well. This is exactly why I took tomorrow and Friday off, so I could sit down and just plain write for hours at a time. Or at least stare at Scrivener and push things around.
The real problem is that when I went to bed last night I was pretty much done with the setup for the plot, and now I have to figure out what to do with the actual plot itself. Which requires time spent composing but not actually writing. argh.
The process fascinates me. I'm writing crap. I know I'm writing crap. It takes conscious effort to keep writing forward, to not go back and fix the crap I'm writing. (I can't help myself in some cases, particularly where the structure's so bad that it's making the rest of the story unstable.) Of course, not letting myself worry about the sentence-level flaws just means I can see all the massive structural flaws. There may be something salvageable in this mess but I can't see it from here.
And I can't tell from here if it's being at all helpful. There are certainly days when I don't want to get up and go to work, I want to stay home and work on the novel. Which is a nice feeling. But in terms of encouraging me to finish writing things... I really don't know.
I guess I'll see in another twenty days.
Because I am a) a crazy person who b) wants to become more acquainted with his new computer in a trial by fire and is c) in desperate need of something to distract his brain, I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year for the first time.
This is madness for any number of reasons, but mostly because the only time I've ever written more than 1,667 words of fiction in a day, it wiped me out for several hours. 50,000 words is an order of magnitude longer than anything I've ever written. It may be more words than all the fiction I've written so far put together. Honestly, the only reason I think this is even possible is that I had several thousand-plus wordcount days in a row the last time I was writing anything, back in July.
(Also, I figure that if I get something else written, that'll give me the distance I need to go back and revise the space story.)
I've taken a couple days off from work in the middle of the month, and a couple more at the end, so in theory I'll have a chance to catch up when (not if) I fall behind on word count.
I have no intention of posting daily word counts here, no worries. I'll probably gripe about it here once a week or so, and give the same vague story info you've come to know and love from other things I've been working on. If you're actually interested I'll be keeping a running wordcount at the NaNo website. I'm jazzfish over there as well.
I fully expect to crash and burn with this but it'll be interesting to see how far I get at least. And yes, I do have a personal bribe waiting for me at the end of it, beyond just bragging rights.
(I'm using the special NaNo edition of Scrivener to write this thing, plus of course Neo for writing on my lunch break etc.)
This is madness for any number of reasons, but mostly because the only time I've ever written more than 1,667 words of fiction in a day, it wiped me out for several hours. 50,000 words is an order of magnitude longer than anything I've ever written. It may be more words than all the fiction I've written so far put together. Honestly, the only reason I think this is even possible is that I had several thousand-plus wordcount days in a row the last time I was writing anything, back in July.
(Also, I figure that if I get something else written, that'll give me the distance I need to go back and revise the space story.)
I've taken a couple days off from work in the middle of the month, and a couple more at the end, so in theory I'll have a chance to catch up when (not if) I fall behind on word count.
I have no intention of posting daily word counts here, no worries. I'll probably gripe about it here once a week or so, and give the same vague story info you've come to know and love from other things I've been working on. If you're actually interested I'll be keeping a running wordcount at the NaNo website. I'm jazzfish over there as well.
I fully expect to crash and burn with this but it'll be interesting to see how far I get at least. And yes, I do have a personal bribe waiting for me at the end of it, beyond just bragging rights.
(I'm using the special NaNo edition of Scrivener to write this thing, plus of course Neo for writing on my lunch break etc.)
