NaNo – Day 11 – falling short

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

Well it’s technically Monday and I am still several hundred words short of 25k.  I had a number of distractions today — church, a football game to watch, a Firefly marathon, The Walking Dead (the show, not the real thing), a persistent pigeon that wanted to drive a bus — and I just didn’t get the words in that I hoped to.  I’m still ahead and going strong(ish), so I’m not discouraged, just disappointed.

I plan to stay up and finish the current chapter, but that will still leave me a bit short.  In the long run, I’m more concerned with progressing through chapters than building word count.  The former requires the latter, so they go hand in hand.  My current calculations (via spreadsheet) have me finishing the draft less than a week into December.  These calculations are done my chapter count rather than word count.  Since I expect some of my middle chapters to be shorter (as much to build pace and suspense as anything), I think that calculation may have some accuracy.  Man, it would feel good to get the last word typed in November.  I’m looking to be child-free next weekend, a fact that could be a blessing or a curse to production.  We’ll see.

  • ETA- Perhaps I was wrong.  It is six after one in the morning and I should be asleep, but the chapter is done and I have completed word 25,004.  Now sleep, or tomorrow will really suck.

NaNo – Day 10.98 – Momentum

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

As the last minutes of day 10 tick away, I inch ever closer to the halfway point.  I hereby vow to hit it tomorrow!

I wrote on and off for a lot of hours today, all the time making very little headway.  It was the scene.  I’ll likely cut some of it to smooth things along since it kind of goes an odd direction with one character.  It was slow because I knew it wasn’t working.  Still, I refused to edit.  I powered through and hit the next chapter.  And wow did I pick up speed.  I think I wrote over 1000 words in my last 20 minutes at the local write-in.  It was actually a scene that was slated for an earlier chapter but just didn’t fit there, so I opened that PoV character’s next chapter with it (the one I was writing today) and the whole conversation just slid out like I was pushing the handle on my daughter’s Play-Doh Fun Factory.  I actually expected this character’s scenes to be more tedious due to less action.  I was wrong.

Truth be told, I don’t like writing action sequences.  Sometimes they come quickly, sometimes they don’t, but I get tired of the repetitive writing of who was doing what, who was standing where, whose hand was where when they grabbed for the sword.  Tedious detail that is either important or later cut.  With two-person dialog, character names thin out.  If I close person A’s quotes, the next quote starts person B.  Every few exchanges we need a beat or a tag to remind us we’re on track.  One thing leads to another and bap-bap-bap you’ve revealed a lot of information while developing characters.

Alas, a lot of action comes at the end of this chapter, the kind that is very unusual and cannot be glossed over.  While it’s nothing like it content wise, I always think of The Matrix when I write the kind of action that’s coming up.  The characters do things that are so other-worldly that you need to slow things down to make sure all the details are recognized.

Anyway, it’s day 11.02 now, so I’ll turn in for the night.  Good luck to all you wrimos.

NaNo – Day 10 – Hooray for 20k

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

I hit 20,000 last night.  It’s amazing how fast the words flow when the scene itself has internal momentum.  I was writing a battle scene (three characters versus hundreds of carnivorous deer) and the words kept adding up.

As it turned out, I accidentally deviated from my outline’s PoV choice for that chapter and wrote it in someone else’s.  I realized this halfway through the chapter when my outline started going into the intended character’s thoughts. I was happy with the other character’s perspective and had to decide what to do.  As luck would have it, the chapter was already running way long, so I just cut the chapter there and started the new one in the intended PoV.

That puts the (planned) chapter count at 37 and a coda.  (S0 37.2)  That’s a lot of chapters, a lot of words.  Editing may well fix that; it’s not a concern on the front end.  And if the novel needs 37 chapters or 40 chapters, by gosh it’ll get them.  Remember (he told himself), I’m typically a sparse writer; there’s not a whole lot of extraneous words hitting the page here.  Cutting words would mean cutting scenes.  The scenes really need to exist before they’re cut.

I’m yet to get started today (save for a few words I typed after midnight and recorded to today’s count on the site), but I’m angling for a big score.  Halfway by the end of today would rock.  Definitely by tomorrow.  25k, here I come.

NaNo – Day 8 – early to bed

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

It’s not early, but this is the earliest I’ve abandoned my manuscript.  Only about 1000 words today.  I labored on the most recent stretch, not quite happy with anything I was writing.  I should have just powered through and accepted the suckiness, but I knew it wasn’t happening the way it should and I needed the peg to fit the hole.  I think it did.

Tomorrow is Friday and it’ll be easier to get back on the horse.  I’m turning in for the night.  I’m still a couple days ahead on wordcount, so I’m not stressing…yet.  A few low yield days are to be expected.

Nano – Day 5 – a quarter of the way there

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

I have officially passed the 25% mark for my NaNo wordcount.  In doing so, I am still only starting chapter 8.  And I’m pretty far from my 2k word goal for today, though I did hit my finish-on-time minimum.  Worse, I’m looking at a lot of work-related distraction tomorrow.  Plus I have to vote; who knows how long that will take.

I’m fairly pleased with the chapter I just finished.  I think the suspense builds nicely and I paint my viewpoint character as the codependent shell of a person she is supposed to start out as, and I paint one of my bad guys as the dissociative nutjob he is supposed to be.  (I do not mean to suggest all codependents are shells or that all dissociatives are nutjobs; these things combine to encompass my characters.)  Now I am preparing to introduce my fifth and final viewpoint character as well as the true villain of the novel (different characters).  It comes a little late, but we’re talking maybe 15% of the way into the novel, not 25%.  The timing is important so that all the characters will get their respective calls to action at about the same time, with the possible exception of my first viewpoint character who may already have received his…it’s a little tricky.  Anyway, I’m eager t get these two characters introduced since things seem to roll along better once I know my characters.

So tomorrow may be a disappointment — and today wasn’t great — but I’m not losing steam, just losing freedom.  I’m still aiming for the 50% mark (of the 50k) by the end of this weekend.  Fingers crossed…no wait, that makes it really hard to type…

Nano – Day…what is this, 4? Really?

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

According to my NaNoWriMo profile, last year’s novel hit the wall on day 6 at 7281 words.  Today is day 4 and I am past the 10,000-word mark.  And I’m not losing steam…yet.  I’m pretty convinced that I’m gonna make the 50k mark ahead of schedule.  And I’m pretty convinced that this will be a sellable novel, though it will surely take some serious revision after thewords “the end”.  I’m comfortable with that.  It’s just nice to see the story — and moreover, the characters — taking shape on the page.

I’m planning to maintain a minimum target of 2000 words a day.  I missed it yesterday, but that was because midnight hit in the middle of a writing session.  Here’s hoping that life behaves itself and stays the heck out of my way for a while.

Nano – Day 2

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

I managed to steal some time at work (read: not eating lunch) to get some writing done.  I am so much happier with the quality of the writing I’m producing today.  I suspect it’s because I have the characters established well enough that I can just move the story forward.  There will definitely be some rewriting going on in my first chapter and a half, but not until December at the earliest.
I’m ahead of schedule for the month and almost at my desired 2k for the day already.  I plan to get some good time in tonight and maybe hit the evening write-in on Saturday.  As long as I don’t get complacent and fall behind, I’m in good shape.

ETA: I’ve crested 6600 as of 11:20.  I’m loving what I’ve been writing recently.  Some good character interaction going on, exactly what needs to be fixed in the first chapter.  (Not yet, Scott.  Not yet.)

I’m also focusing on writing more rather than less.  You see, short stories are all about accomplishing as much as possible in as few words as possible.  The plot must be perpetually propelled.  In a novel, sometimes you can develop character just to develop character.  Or setting, foreshadowing, backstory.  Novels are about the richness of the story more than the efficiency of it.  As I wrote chapter 1, I kept finding myself fretting over wordcount, thinking “I’m spending too many words on B and I need to get to E withing 2000 words, so I better get moving or I’ll have to cut C and D way short.”  Yeah, I was worried about the wrong problem.  Chapter 1 wound up about 1000 words short of my intention.  At least it helped me relax on the wordcount issue and now the story is flowing.

I wanted to hit 7k before bed, but I don’t see it happening.  I got sucked into the horror movie my wife was watching, Cabin in the Woods.  normally not my speed and I thought I could just write while I ignored it, but then I saw Joss Whedon’s name in the credits.  …  Let’s just say that Joss is one twisted individual with a sense of humor a little too close to mine for him to qualify as “stable”.  I don’t think I could call it a good movie, but I was entertained.  But please, someone increase the man’s effects budget.  Well, increase Drew Goddard’s effects budget; he was the director.
But I digress.

In short: NaNo going well.  Cabin in the Woods, twisted and fun in a splattery kind of way.

NaNo Morale Modifier: 9 (out of 10)

NaNo – Day 1

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

Word count came in under 4k for the first day of NaNoWriMo.  I was hoping for 5k, but I got distracted by all the great people at the local write-ins (both the midnight and 6pm varieties).  I’m planning to hit some of the weekend write-ins, but we’ll see.  I need to find a good place to pound out my wordcount and my living room doesn’t seem a likely candidate.  We’ll see.

Not thrilled with the quality of the stuff I’m typing, but I’m deliberately powering on.  Revision will take care of all that.  I suspect I’ll be shuffling some of the early chapters.  It’s slow trying to start 3 PoV characters in the first 3 chapters.  I’ll get back to the first when I hit chapter 4, then move on to a fourth and eventually a fifth.  Having never written more than one PoV in the same story (successfully), I’m a bit nervous about the whole thing.  But mostly I’m sleepy.  G’night.

Very Tiny Countdown

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

It’s a NaNo countdown…very tiny…? Ah, what do you know from funny?

The outline is officially fully-formed, character intro to denouement, even a 2-page coda at the end.  While chapters are really glorified scenes, each scene is fully structured in its own little outline.  It’s a masterpiece of outlining if I do say so myself.  And, in the spirit of giving credit where it is due, I want to give the credit for this to my word processor, Scrivener.

The layout of Scrivener is very much designed for the outliner.  At first I was turned off by this because, contrary to my recent blog history, I am not an outliner.  I’m a pantser (but not the kind that sneaks up behind you and pulls down your gym shorts).  However, as I learned during last year’s NaNo, writing a novel is not really a pantser’s game.  Some degree of planning and structure is a necessity, though how much and what form varies author to author.  The only novel I ever finished writing was the very first thing I wrote, for which I had an outline (complete with Roman numerals and indents).  Scrivener’s index card system gave me tools with which to brainstorm and organize my thoughts; quite a feat, as anyone who has ever seen my desk can attest.  Moreover, the outlining system gives me the framework to start writing scenes and keep those scenes linked to the respective portion of the outline.  And I can’t wait to get to it.

I have only used Scrivener for one other project before, a very segmented short story entitled “The Scrapper and the Saint Bernard” for the collection Galactic Creatures.  In that story, each index card was a scene in which the main character spoke into his space suit’s recording device. It was 100% dialog, though 95% of the story was him talking to himself or to a mostly inanimate satellite.  (Confused?  Think Cast Away in space.)  Anyway, the story was very experimental in format and I wanted to have a feel for the structure before I tried to write the story; it needed a descent into delirium I had never attempted, and without stage directions.  I embraced the structure and was incredibly happy with the result.  There may well be something to this whole outlining thing.

Still, we’re talking about a sentence or two to structure each thousand words.  A pretty thorough substructure, no doubt, but I still have a whole lot of gaps to fill during the writing process.  And the outline went through some growing pains as each chapter notecard grew into 3-6 notecards.  Chapters split, merged, reorganized, new chapters spawned.  I’d be a fool to think the same won’t happen in the writing process.  And again when I finally reach the editing phase.  This is by far the largest project I’ve ever undertaken and I have done ten times the prep that I’ve put into any other project.  I have no excuse to fail.  So I guess I’d better not.

My goals for the next two days include reacquainting myself with the first few chapters of the outline and condensing my novel into an elevator pitch so I can tell people what the heck I’m writing without robbing them of a half hour.  That may be the biggest challenge of the bunch.

It’s almost here; good luck, WriMos!

Finished my novel…outline

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

I’ve had 70% of a working outline for my NaNo project for a few weeks, but I just finished sculpting the last few chapters, at least in broad strokes.  The map is drawn, my compass has a heading.  Insert your own cliched metaphor here.  And I’m kind of happy with it.

I’ve known for a while where I was going in a very broad, hand-waving sense.  Now I have a very concrete, hand-waving sense of it.  Next step is to give each of those chapters a point-by-point skeleton.  It’s the most over-wrought outline I’ve ever made, yet I still get to fill in a lot with the writing.

Let’s do a little math here. I currently have 35 chapters planned and most of those should come in around 2-3k words, a few I suspect scraping as much as 5k, so let’s set the average to 3000.  3000 x 35 = 105,000 words.  Ahem.  Yeah, that won’t be finished by the end of November.  And that will be a tough first-novel sale, though it doesn’t seem impossible.  However, I’m (somewhat of a) realist; not all those words will survive the editing apocalypse.  I’m anticipating 95k when the red ink settles, though don’t tie me to that.  I’m giving myself as much permission as possible to expound, be verbose, describe, and generally write like a novelist and not a short story writer.  At the same time, the story is being told through five PoV characters, so each is getting his/her own novella, only diced up and spread through the book chronologically along with the others.  And once characters come together, the story lines bleed into one another.  It is an ambitious project, but I am an ambitious guy I’d like to be an ambitious guy.

There is almost no doubt that the outline will change as I write.  I am comfortable with that and I look forward to it.  And as for the character that I created for a specific purpose but never quite put into the outline…well, she may make a brief appearance and a bloody exit if I truly need her for what I designed her to do.  I’m hoping to just write her out.  There will be enough unpleasant character death as the outline stands, though not quite GRRM standards.

I’m setting myself a moderately soft deadline of Jan. 31 to finish the entirety of the draft.  I really wanted to draw the line at Jan. 1, but there’s way too much happening in December (state tests, end of semester, bitty birthday, X-mas, etc.) to believe in that.  Though I confess, it would be great to have the whole thing submission-ready before ChattaCon (Jan. 25-27).  But finished draft is not submission ready.  But perhaps that makes a better draft deadline…

Anyway, I’m looking at about 72 hours and counting before I can start tapping out prose.  NaNoWriMo, here I come.

Oh yeah, I have three days of work first.  :-/