nanowrimo: in soviet russia
Word count: 100043




With that, on to Nano and my love life.











Spoiler alert: Not a single word got written.


And then he kissed me.





Yes, yes it is.

nanowrimo: sushimustwrite





Yep, pretty much my reaction right there.




And by the way, here's the poem.
What It's Like To Be A Food poem

By Jimmy Lo
I see you eying
the fresh peel of my package.
In the language of modern consumption
I'm consumed with the possibilities
of the many ways to snap into a Slim Jim
Or break me off a piece of that
Kit Kat bar--or
the melt in yr mouth not in yr hand variety
of sexual innuendo that fills
my mind with the vaguest wish
to die inside the stomach of a whale
like some martyrannical version
of slowly wasting away,...

Oct. 31st, 2011

NaNo starts in twenty-four hours.

The madness is nigh.

Now to finish things before I sleep.

That is all.

An idea for next year's NaNo? Already?

nanowrimo: since 2002


NaNoWriMo vs. my family

nanowrimo: sleeping is for december
The new NaNoWriMo website launches in a week. I'm running around like a headless chicken thanks to MLing, having a social life, trying to get other work done, and oh, being away last weekend and this upcoming weekend. This thing called a social life is really getting to me, but at least I'm getting it out of my system before Nano season officially begins for the masses.

What many people don't realize is that Nano season begins much sooner for me. My brother contacted me about the family coming down to visit me this weekend for my dad's birthday. The fact that my dad and I aren't very close at all (the least close of all my family members) aside, I have an airtight excuse in being away this weekend. But it also happens to be Nano season, and as we all know, Nano eats my soul even more than usual during October and November. Not that it doesn't during the rest of the year, of course, with many of my social interactions being with Wrimos, but the soul-eating definitely goes into overdrive and obsession during Nano season. You would think my family is aware of this since I did Nano as a high school student while living with them, but no, every single year they still ask what Nano is. At least my brother, who is like me in that he is Internet-savvy and geeky, has figured out what Nano is after all these years and even commented on it last year when Nano trended on Twitter. He still thinks I'm nuts for doing it, which is expected. My parents primarily care about my writing to get published and therefore rich. It doesn't work like that, but that's a separate subject altogether.

So how do I explain to my family just how important Nano is to me? They sort of know what Nano is but don't really value writing unless it's going to make me rich. You know, because all writers are rich, right?

Night of Writing Dangerously: It's on

sea kitten






Does NaNoWriMo foster bad writing habits?

nanowrimo: sleeping is for december
There's a discussion in the NaNoWriMo forums about a non-writer friend of a Wrimo who believes that NaNoWriMo fosters bad writing habits. Does it, though? The non-Wrimo friend believes that NaNo encourages writers to pad and worry about deadlines and word count instead of writing on one's own and page count. Let's take a look.

I rarely if ever pad, which you might not believe. In fact, I anti-pad. My writing is so skeletal in the first draft stage and lacking in description that I often have to go back and add these things. Of course, not every Wrimo writes like me. Padding can be part of the NaNoing experience, but only if that Wrimo chooses to make it so. The idea behind padding isn't necessarily to make one's word count or to intentionally write crap that will definitely be cut out later but to write something down. You can't edit a blank page, and writing anything down lets you keep going. In that way, NaNoWriMo fosters the best writing habit of all if you want to write well: writing.

Word count, not page count, is what the publishing world usually goes by. Anyone who has written a paper for a class knows that you can fudge page count by changing the font or margins to squeeze in that last half page. Word count can't be fudged as easily, but you get a good idea of how many pages, say, 50,000 words take up in pages. (Somewhere around 175 book pages, if you didn't already know.) Awareness of your word count isn't an entirely bad thing in the long run; it makes sure what you intended to be a novel doesn't end at ten thousand words or stretches on to 300,000. Some genres have understood guidelines on word counts, so knowing those limits going into a book's writing is a good thing so you don't overstep them too much. Well, unless you're absolutely convinced that your novel is really really good.

If you're a writer outside of NaNo, there's a very good chance you're going to work under a deadline at some point. NaNo teaches you how to do that. Writing under a deadline makes you better at it over time, and you'll learn how to write smoother prose that is easier to edit, even if it doesn't look easier at first. Take this from my own experience; my first NaNo novel is never getting touched again, while two of my books from the past two years definitely have potential.

If there is a bad habit that a Wrimo may fall into, it's the idea that one writes only in November with a bunch of other writers. Writing doesn't have to be a solitary activity, but it's not always an activity with thousands of writers cheering you on, either. Not everyone does NaNo with its breakneck writing speed and community support, and as much as I love NaNo, that's okay. November is for writing, but if you want to be a serious writer, the rest of the year can't be off-limits.
nanowrimo: sushimustwrite
As I mentioned in my list of goals for 2011, I want to go to the Night of Writing Dangerously, a write-a-thon fundraiser in November by the NaNoWriMo staff. I've been planning my fundraising page and bribes for months in preparation for the day the event fundraising page went up and I could simply make a few small changes and practice my copying and pasting skills to get started immediately.

My Night of Writing Dangerously page text has been ready for quite awhile, so I let it sit until the fundraising page sneaked its way onto the Internet today. A few tweaks later, my fundraising page made its way to the Web.

Then another idea for bribes came in, courtesy of OLL's Sarah. My Twitter icon is rather iconic, and she joked that she might not recognize me if I didn't come in looking like that. She suggested that I add one element of the outfit for every hundred dollars I raise.

I could go to the Night of Writing Dangerously looking like this.

Well, that would mean I'd be outfitted up for right around a thousand dollars. Why not reward people for raising more? For every hundred dollars over the minimum $250, I will wear one element of the icon's outfit. This means that if you raise $1450 on my page I will go to the write-a-thon looking as much like that sea kitten as humanly possible.

But there are individual prizes too. Everyone who donates receives a thank you email from me. Donating five dollars gets you a Twitter shoutout. Ten dollars gets something or someone in my novel named after you. Twenty gets a character of yours in my novel (or a character of your choice created in my novel for the non-Wrimos). The custom pep talk comes at forty.

If you are the top donor, you will get to choose the idea for one of my novels this year. I'm not kidding. It'll probably be my 50k weekend novel. This is the big one, folks.

My fundraising goal for this year is $500, twice the minimum for admission to the event. Take a look at my fundraising page for the full deal. Thank you so much, and you rock no matter your support level, from donation to spreading the word to wishing me many words in November.

May. 26th, 2011

I haven't been here in so long for a few reasons. In the beginning I wasn't here because absolutely nothing of interest was going on, so what on earth would I write?

Then I started writing what was going to be exactly 1667 words a day for May. I fell very behind, but now it's not such a huge deal since David and I are cowriting a work of awesome and still working on it. Aw yeah.

I did some work at a lawyer's office last week. It wasn't that difficult, mostly answering phones and general office stuff. This could turn into more intermittent work in the future, which means money for me. Huzzah? Huzzah.

Camp NaNoWriMo approacheth!

I'm still a bum. This is a surprise to no one.

And I'm going to sleep.

All my NaNoWriMo word counts to date

nanowrimo: word count badger song
Note to self: the 2002, 2004, 2008, and 2009 aren't officially official (read: from my old NaNo profile). 2002 and 2004 are from old blog posts, 2008 is from memory and the novel itself, and 2009 is from memory because for some reason I still remember that word count. I collected these to figure out my 2011 NaNo goal with a theoretical job. That word count is now set. More on that in a minute. Now, the word counts.

2002: 50037
2003: 51992
2004: 52286
2005: 53726
2006: 50170
2007: 54823
2008: 61335
2009: 131014
2010: 300787

Gee, I wonder what year I graduated. And no, that's not a typo for 2006. I finished the story that year, and it's one of my better ones. That doesn't explain why it's still unedited.

If you mentally added up those word counts like I did when I started thinking about it, you might notice that I'm near 800k cumulative words for the first nine NaNos. A million isn't too far away now that I know how much I can really write in a month. In fact, it's 193820 words away. That's my goal for November 2011. Whether I have a job or not, I'm writing at least that many words and will likely aim for 200k. Of course, if I don't have a job, I'm writing 500k. Next year will be my tenth NaNo. It needs to be the best one yet.


Things that have happened

* Jennifer and Autumn showed up for Thanksgiving, family members we haven't seen in nearly a year and a half. Given everything that had happened surrounding Jennifer, I'm glad that everyone acted cordially.

* NaNo ended, but you know that. I'm still going through withdrawal.

* I'm still a bum, but you could have guessed that too.

* I had my last tutoring session with one of my tutees yesterday. The other tutee's last session will be next week.

* I'm working on my writing schedule for next year. It'll be interesting with two books to edit (the first 2009 novel and this year's first novel). I'm hoping to make significant progress on both of them next year, but the timeline on the first one (the one about the haunted pumpkins) has been driving me nuts, probably because I want to change the timeline again and the one I want to change it to (over the course of one night and the day after) simply isn't doable. No, really, I can't think of a single way to keep the reader's attention or make it not confusing. There needs to be something more to the story, but I can't figure out what. That's what I'll be spending the rest of the year thinking of because I'd really like to have a third draft finished before NaNoEdMo in March, when I'll start working on the first 2010 novel again.

* Slightly related, I'm working on a list of goals for next year. Or to be more specific, a list of things to do before I turn 25, which is *gulp* in early 2012. Seven days into 2012, actually, so I may as well make the goal list for next year. First up: Income flow. This usually comes with a job. Second up: At least one more draft of both aforementioned novels with a plan for editing the chick lit novel from 2006. Fun fact: the love interest from said chick lit novel showed up in this year's third novel. It makes perfect sense, believe it or not. Both books take place in New York City, and the love interest is an artist. He painted a painting that is very important to one of the storylines. A couple of his paintings from the 2006 novel are even mentioned in this one, though not the important one. That's because the important one got stolen.

Even more ideally, I'd have a plan for the mathverse as well by the end of 2011. This is where being a pantser comes and kicks me in the butt. You'd think NaNo would have taught me to write the damn thing instead of waiting for it to come fully formed in my head, but apparently not. Time to brush up on my math for the mathverse planning, then.

* I think that's everything of interest. Carry on.

NaNo is over.

nanowrimo: sleeping is for december
Final word count: 300787 spread out over three novels of lengths 78787, 50036, and 171964. A full NaNo review will be here soon, but for now I'm sleeping.

#50kweekend: The End

nanowrimo: sleeping is for december

Some observations about the weekend:





*And finally, a little paragraph on my female lead.



#50kweekend: Day Two

nanowrimo: sushimustwrite
Two important things happened today: I hit my new 250,000 word goal for the month, which was exciting in itself. I also reached 50,000 words in #50kweekend around 11:15pm with a cumulative total of 260,307 words and a daily total of 22238 words.

This was the shocking part for me. My previous record for 50,000 words was sixty-four hours, which I reached during the Three-Day Novel weekend. This time I reached it in just over forty-seven hours. That's over 1600 words per waking hour, and I definitely wasn't typing for all those waking hours. Once meals (yes, I ate three of them both days), showers, travel to and from a write-in, and Internet tomfoolery are accounted for, the number of writing hours goes down a bit.

This means that 50k in twenty-four hours is theoretically possible. I write a thousand words in fifteen minutes regularly, so I can theoretically top 4k in an hour. This would mean 12.5 hours of typing at that speed, which amounts to constant typing all day or staying up all night and doing it. I'm tempted to try this one day. Really tempted. I'm not going to try it anytime soon, though.

This book still shows no signs of ending, though the ninjas I introduced ten thousand words in are finally showing some significance. They're actually showing a lot of significance. I still haven't figured out where the rest of the plot lines are going, but that's okay. I'll figure it out later.

#50kweekend, day one

nanowrimo: sleeping is for december
So how was the first third of 50k weekend? In a word: awesome.

I started with 210,302 words. I stopped writing at 11:45pm with 238,069 words. For those playing along at home, that's 27,767 words. For those who don't care about the numbers, that's a lot. Given that my previous record was just over 20,000 and I mean that by not even 100 words, I just shattered my single day writing record and stomped the pieces into the floor.

Observations of the day:

*Pain level: Rare and only when I've been sitting for too long. I expect this to go up tomorrow, just as it did during the three-day novel contest.

*Plot: I swear, this book is never going to end. Just in case it does, I have a fourth idea ready thanks to the crazies in the #nanolanta chat room.

*Competition: I had the best first day of the #50kweekend crazies I've been talking with today. I plan to cut back on the words a little tomorrow, perhaps to 20k. I'm also approaching the top of page three on the NaNo word count list, though. I probably won't hit page two before the end of the month, but it'd be nifty if I did.

*Fun: It's still a lot of fun so far. Writing may be a little less fun tomorrow, but that's the nature of the beast. Word wars and talking to my fellow crazies will keep it more fun.

*I pulled off 10k in four hours (okay, three hours and 45 minutes) after hitting 15,000 words and taking a break for food and a shower. This was the big accomplishment of the day. 10k in four hours is a push for me, but it's a doable push. It requires me to concentrate on writing for almost that entire period (unless, of course, I'm doing word wars, in which case I get a little more distraction time but still have to be dedicated to setting up those wars).

*This is ridiculous amounts of fun. It should be a NaNo tradition.