Monday, November 29, 2010

day Twenty-NIne


I won.

I'm crying.

So happy.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Day Twenty-eight, 1135 more

According to my counter, I've now hit 50k.

Story's not done yet--luckily, because the official NaNoWriMo counter says I"m at...

[drum roll please!]

49,014

So as long as I wrap up the story using my usual number of words, I'll win tomorrow.

Yay!

Day Twenty-eight, 3482 words

Two sessions so far:
60 1688
60 1794

One more, and I will hit 50k on open office. Then I can input it to NaNo and see how much I have to write tomorrow.

So close to done!!

Saturday, November 27, 2010

Day Twenty-Seven, 764 more

764 more words. I've hit 45k. And I'm caught up.

Two more days to go (since I can't do the 30th).
5k words.

Let's see what I hit tomorrow.

Day Twenty-Seven, 3001

Three sessions:
10m 519
30m 907
60m 1575

If I can do one more session today with at least 1500 words, I may get my goal of 50k words in open office by Sunday. I'll know then how many I lose when I submit them to the NaNo word counter.

Then complete the last scene on Monday, to make up for the eaten words.

Friday, November 26, 2010

Day Twenty-Six, 3640 so far

two hourlong sessions: 1765 and 1875.

So here's what I learned:

I cannot cannot cannot outline. I outlined the last nine steps of the book and then couldn't write them, because they were wrong. I just worried that continuing to write without a plan would make the book a bit like the never-ending plays I'd make my family endure when I was eight.

So I sat down today with a couple of questions and just jumped in where I'd left off, and tried to see where it'd take me.

I am liking where it is taking me--and I also think it'll give me a far more satisfactory path to the ending.

Now, let's just see if I can do another 1700 words this afternoon.

Day Twenty-Five, 79 words

That's just sad.

And funny.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Day Twenty-Four, 1773 words

So I made the mistake of doing the word counter last night after I was done. It ate almost a thousand words. So it looks like I really have my work cut out for me--Can't do anything Tuesday, so that's over 10K words by Sunday.

Made an outline of the remaining scenes today. If I write through those, I should hit it--except I'm missing two of them.

Good times. It'll get there. Let's see what tomorrow and Friday bring.

Day Twenty-Three, 1672

Barely squeaked in my words due to time constraints, but man was that fun to write!

It appears that week four is kicking in finally. I really hope so. Still 2150 words down. Closer, but not quite caught up yet.

Monday, November 22, 2010

Day Twenty-Two, 1881 words

Well, ostensibly week two is the hardest but I've been having the most trouble with week three. Partly because I've just been busy (and other RL things) but in part i've had trouble with the writing--i keep thinking i need to do research, etc--and although I have a sense of the ending I can't quite figure out how to get there from here.

Still I've had a lot of interesting and surprising (to me!) developments in the story, and if I'm not making up large amounts of lost time, I've stopped losing ground and I'm adding a little bit every day....

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Day Seventeen, 1764

I think is the third or fourth time I've written 1764 words in a day.

Weird.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Day Sixteen, 1689 words

Barely squeaked in my words today.

But I did.

Monday, November 15, 2010

day 15, 2134 words

My first day off, yesterday. But today flowed well. Could have kept writing even if I had more time, but I want to save the setup for tomorrow.

Set pieces seem to flow. It's good. I'd had a vague idea of where i wanted the story to go around 5k words, but i had no idea how it'd make it, but the connections are still happening.

This week is crazy busy; let's hope I can make my daily counts. If I can come close, I should be able to get ahead slightly this weekend.

Still a bit rocky, but it's going....

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Day Thirteen, 1764 words

This is... actually happening. I have a story! I have a story!

True, I'm realizing the order and pacing is a mess but hey! it's a rough rough draft anyway.

I have a story! I have a story!!

Friday, November 12, 2010

Day Twelve, 1804

Last night was another short night -- Ruth's birthday.

I'm not sure if I"m really 40% through my story but we shall see!

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Pep Talk

From John Green's NaNoWriMo peptalk:

"Go spit in the face of our inevitable obsolescence and finish your @#$&ng novel."

Pretty much some good advice in general.

Days Nine and Ten,

It's the bad part of NaNo--or so they say.

Personally I have not yet noticed much in the way of additional misery. It's the same amount of awful as it was before.

I find that the first four hundred words are the worst; then 500-1200 go by very very fast; then 12-1800 normalize.

The ninth was my sister's birthday so I was distracted.

Day Nine: 542 words;
Day Ten: 1739 (which surprised me).

Monday, November 8, 2010

Day Eight, 1825 words

And this was supposed to be a bad day. I even left myself on a cliffhanger, because I knew i couldn't write the next scene as well today.

Yesterday was far more of a drag.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Day Seven, 2305 words

14518 words--30% complete sounds... kinda awesome.

Tonight ended up going easier than I had expected, but earlier was a total wash. I get the impression it's easier for me to write at night, and to edit in the morning. Interesting.

Now I'm going to read and go to bed. What on earth did I do with my Chandler, anyway?

Read this week that it'll be 70 years since Fitzgerald's death in December. For some reasons I find this very depressing.

Day Six, 1724 words

squeaked in tonight. I'd like to have another 3k day tomorrow because next week looks to be really busy, AND it's week two, the week of drudgery.

Already now I can feel the week two doubts coming in: my characters are inconsistent, my dialogue leaden....

but somehow i'm feeling excited about the story.

Friday, November 5, 2010

Day Five, 1960 words

Took a couple hours to get this far, but then again, I wasn't doing sprints.

More sprints:
- Character Study: Tomy;
- Scene Study: Umut's on Radio Row.

I think it's about time to do these. Hoping I get a couple of new things to explore in the next few days of writing the main story--they really help expand things and increase my word count. Also, I worry less about them.

I think in the future I may just start doing them within the body text of the story. Not sure--one of the reasons they may be easier to create is that I'm not doing them as part of the main narrative, but as tangential.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Day Four, Part Three - 1102 words, 20 minutes

Last sprint of the day. Working through my questions about the man in the glen plaid suit.

Day Four, Part Two - 1137 words, 20 minutes

Sprint two, about the office, done.

I'm not sure if I need 20 minutes on item 3; and I'm not sure if I'm enough into the store for four and five.

May do ten minutes on the police station and save the other two for later on in the weekend.

Right now I'm over my daily word count without even touching the narrative part--and I definitely want to spend an hour at least on that.

Day 4 - part one, 1010 words, 20 minutes

Did a sprint about what the protagonist's apartment looks like. Hit over a thousand words in twenty minutes. Didn't worry about tone, or voice, or anything, just talked it through in writing.

Helped a lot. There's definitely usable stuff there for the main body of the story. I'm going to try to do one or two more 20 minute sprints today and then write for an hour on the main story line. That should boost my word count as well.

next possible sprint topics:
- description of office
- description of police station
- description of Umut's in Radio Row
- character study of the man in the glen plaid suit.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Day Three, 5280

Yeah I know, I should be at 10% after three days.

Still feels kinda cool though, to see ten percent done, woo-hoo!

notes: usually things start going faster around 1100 words.

today was an hour; yesterday was two hours; monday was an hour and a half.

I'm really trying to focus right now on not editing, striking out changes rather than editing them, and letting things, well, suck.

edited to say: just edited my 2007 posts to also be tagged with the day number (day 1, day 2, etc.)

Day Two, 3523

Yep. I decide to blog about NaNoWriMo again--because when I did it was the furthest I'd ever gotten.

Last night I started with no idea. Nothing. Managed to hit 1759 words.

The Chris Baty book really helped.

These posts will be short because... well, I'm hoping to write 1750 words each day this week.