Ten days.  That was as long as I lasted before reality set in and I surrendered to not finishing NaNoWriMo.  I am a schnitzel.

It’s a matter of pragmatism.  I am currently incapable of reaching the 50,000 word goal by the end of November without fracturing an already delicate priority system.  Here are the bullet points that led me to this conclusion.

• The demands of my day job have increased.  Substantially.  I am behind on everything and this weekend is time to either catch up work or on WriMo.  Not both.
• I am woefully behind already.  My fault?  Definitely.  The story I am working on is not a story.  All I really have is a milieu.  The characters are cardboard, but the kind of cardboard you can stand up.  The plot is thinner than Kate Moss.  I’m not opposed to fighting to salvage a crappy novel on a deadline, but not at the expense of my day job, especially with no monetary prospect at the end.
• I do have a novelette to work on that does have a monetary prospect at the end of the rainbow.  It was a bit asinine of me to take on NaNoWriMo with that project swaying in the breeze.
• I have “stuff going on at home” that’s none of your business.

I’ve done the math.  Not happening.  I have set a new goal of finishing the novelette by November 30th.  With my current workload and the holiday looming, that’s still a significant aspiration, but one that won’t get me fired or alienate my family.  And my novel?  It’s going back in the drawer to await the rest of its skeleton before I heap any more innards into the mess.

I am a slow typist.  I’ve known this for a while.  I should probably learn to type from the home row rather than using my mutli-finger hunt-and-peck method.  But I’m not there yet.  This contributes to me being 2500 words behind on my NaNoWriMo story.  Contributes, but it’s not the cause.

I’m bogging down on my novel.  I do this, it’s part of my process.  My WotF story was flying along great until the end where it kept bogging down and kept bogging down.  It took me months to write the ending.  Why so long?  Because I was trying to write an ending that didn’t fit.  The scene I’m bogging in now fits the novel, but isn’t propelling the story like it should.  I need to cut a lot of the words I’ve written, if I’m being honest.  And I need to write a Chapter zero (can be renumbered later) so that the oddities of the story are more obvious when they arise.  It should come out a bit like the opening scene in The Matrix, only not quite so Matrixy.

I didn’t do my homework on the front (outlining) end so now I’m suffering on the writing end.  This may not have been the right project to try to NaNo.  Temptations to return to my Naked Man novel (you heard right) are growing.  Since this is more about my career than about the challenge, I’m seriously considering it.

If you don’t care what I choose to do, by all means, stop reading now and I’ll vow to be more interesting next time.

Still with me.  Really?  Okay, I guess you can watch me weigh the pros and cons of each project:

Time Travel Novel: Pros

• Good practice to stick with one project through completion.
• Marketable concept.
• Flexibility in plot/characters.

Time Travel Novel: Cons

• Will require a lot of cuts (later) to anything I write right now.
• Lack of project enthusiasm.
• A lot of historical research needed.

Naked Man Novel: Pros

• Theme is integral to the story.
• I know where the story is supposed to be going.
• Unique and original.
• In a subgenre where I’ve had past success.

Naked Man Novel: Cons

• Requires a lot of cultural and language research (mostly Japanese).
• Haven’t worked on it in 6 months.
• Questionable marketability.

I hate the thought that this Time Travel novel may just end up in the also-ran pile of 10-20% finished novels, but it’s dreck.  I started decorating the cake before it was baked, now it’s just a flat, gooey mess.  Upside: I seem to be at a similar wordcount in these two manuscripts, so switching horses in midstream will have no real mathematical or moral dilemma when I report wordcounts to NaNoWriMo.

Wow, November starts tomorrow.  Which means NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow.  Wow.  My novel is still only slightly prepped, pretty much still at the grand-scheme stage.  I’m prepping characters and I’ll start typing chapter one tomorrow like a good NaNite (or whatever NaNoWriMo participants call themselves…I’ll have to find out).  I’ve been a seat-of-the-pants writer for years, but I’ve never finished a novel that way.  The one (bad) novel I did finish was based on a huge outline.

The story I have in my head is pretty complex, getting more so toward the end.  Twisting timelines is always complicated.  On the upside, 50k won’t be the end so I may be able to slow up the pace once I get that far.  But I won’t want to lose momentum, either.

The biggest part of my organizing will be on the back end: making sure I don’t contradict myself anywhere.  Some scenes will be repeated with small changes.  Some historic events will be referenced and/or altered.  Still, I’m not looking for a particularly deep piece so most of the history will be of the Wikipedia variety.  More importantly, I’ll have to keep track of individual’s timelines since people who travel won’t be aware of changes in their personal lives.

Paradoxes will arise, I’m certain.  It’s a time travel story, after all.  I’m thinking time travelers are immune to the effects of paradoxes,  In other words, you can kill your grandfather and still exist, but you’ll return to a world where you never existed and you have no possessions, no one knows you, etc.  Jimmy Stewart time travel.  I can have fun with that.

I need to keep my goal simple since the twists and turns are going to be confusing enough.  Multiple viewpoint characters to hop between.  Small team of time travelers, each with different personal lives that bring their own drama.  One novice PoV character so the reader can learn the ropes with her (yes, I’m thinking female).  Third person.  I’ve got the first scene in my mind.  I’d like a little more time to map things out, but let’s be honest, would I use the time?  Or just play more inFamous on the PS3?

My buddy Steve just finished 90k in 19 days for a contracted story.  He has given me inspiration that I can do this.  And let’s face it, I need to prove to myself that I can write a (decent) novel.  So it’s go time.

But first, Happy Halloween.  :^)

Demands of the world have been making it hard for me to write of late.  I think I’ve mentioned that here.  I have decided to fight back.  How?  I’m doing NaNoWriMo.  (You fool!)  I need to get butt in chair, fingers on keyboard, words on screen.  I’m hoping a month of hammering at a novel project will get my habits back where they belong.  50,000 words in a month.  I can do this.

I found an abandoned story outline that has a lot of potential.  I think I’m going to develop it.  It’s a commercially viable idea and I’m hoping to stretch that into a “high concept” idea.  You know, that “Citizen Kane meets Harry Potter” idea or “Die Hard meets The Hangover”.  We’ll see.  Either way, I think it will be marketable if I can get it done.  We’re talking 80,000+ words done, not just 50,000, but you have to start somewhere.

Why this November for NaNo?  Several reasons.

• I need to restructure my writing schedule
• I have no major projects in the works (just that fairy tale rewrite…but that can wait till December)
• I stumbled upon an old idea that I’m comfortable using
• If not this year, when?

So I’ll give it a shot.  If I don’t finish, I don’t finish.  But I intend to give it the old college try.  If you’re NaNo-ing with me, good luck.

With November upon us and so many writers’ blogs heralding perticipation, I feel compelled to doscuss the reasons this blog will not be boasting a NaNoWriMo banner.   I have nothing against National Novel Writing Month.  If I did, I wouldn’t have linked to it above.  I might participate some time in the future, but not this year.

First and foremost, I can’t write that much in a month.  Not at this point in my life, no.  It doesn’t fit the pace of my creation.  It took me a year to write my first novel, which needs to be rewritten from the basement up before it’s remotely serviceable.  Yes, a year for 113,000 or so words.  I thought it was great then.  For years I thought it was great.  I’m still too attached to it to really redo it.  It was the very first thing I ever wrote and it started my path to where I am today.  The memory of my dedication to that novel reminds me that I cannot do NNWM.  I gave up too many things while I wrote that novel…and there wasn’t all that much going on for me at the time.  I’m already behind with mundane classroom work (grading, making out tests, calling parents, etc.), I want to spend more time with my daughter, and I’m far enough behind in household chores that I’d rather just move.  How can I rationalize that big a jump in my word production when it would leave all these things behind?

Second, novels aren’t where I’m at.  I still plan to invade either San Diego or Seattle this summer for six weeks.  Thus, I need to keep woring on short stories for my Clarion and Clarion West applications.  I sure don’t want to be “that guy” who was wait-listed one year and didn’t make it the next.  I have stories to sub, but not a whole lot written since my last application.  Worse, my Naked Man story will likely be too long to submit for either application.  I guess I need to get through it and on to another one.

Third, I don’t really feel like NNWM offers enough incentive to participate.  Oooh, I get to claim I made my target word count (short of true novel length, even for YA).  What else?  I’ve never been much of a word counter anyway.  Some of my most productive days churn out only a few hundred words, but the quality of the words or where the words bring me are infinitely more valuable.  I could type like Jack in The Shining and get 50,000 words. So I may participate some day to be a joiner and create a production goal for myself, currently even the intrinsic rewards aren’t driving me.

So no, I will not be NaNoWriMo-ing in November.  Good luck to those that are.

-Oso