I am trying a new online publishing site. Still working out the wrinkles, as you will see from the formating on the page, but if anyone is interested please check it out here.
Any feedback is appreciated.
Cheers!
With one minute to spare, I won the National Novel Writing Month for the third year running. I crossed the line one minute before the midnight deadline, with a first draft of Special Delivery, with a word count of 50,068.
Several things were different about this year’s novel. It was my shortest by 6,000+ words. This was the first year I started the first year I had a false start. I got 400 words into a novel I had planned on writing for a whole month before the contest, doing a good deal of research and outlining. I got those 400 words down very slowly, like pulling teeth, then realized I would never make it. I cared too much about getting it perfect. So, I bailed and blazed into a story I had been thinking about telling for the last two years. Everything just rolled on great, this story was the first of my efforts where I really feel like I might have a book worthy of a full re-write and filling out. The words flowed out, and the ideas came bursting out of their own accord.
Then, I typed “The End.” That was at 46,000 words. It was too short. I added an epilogue, which was a hoot to write, then a prologue, which was also fun. That brought me to about 48,200. An interview of the team (it’s a super hero story), an interview for the position of base receptionist, and a battle with one of the super villains I had passed over in the first pass finally got me over the line. Just as I typed in the last witty line I looked down at my computer clock, saw the time was 11:58pm and flipped out. I got the file onto the NaNoWriMo website’s validation widget with 60 seconds to spare.
Each year has been a different experience. I had a great time this year, but I hope that next year I remember to not go so last minute. Definitely not good for my stress levels.
One of the things I love about the crew over at NaNoWriMo is the amount of support they give the participants in the month of crazyness. They send out regular pep talks and tips & tricks. Since there is no subscription cost for this amazing benefit I don’t mind sharing them with you.
The latest is from Naomi Novik, and it rocks.
Dear NaNoWriMo Writer,
The single most important technique for making progress is to write ten words. Doesn’t matter if you’re badly stuck, or your day is completely jam-packed, or you’re away from your computer—carry a small paper notebook and write a sentence of description while you’re waiting on line at a coffee shop. I think of this as baiting a hook. Even if you have a few days in a row where nothing comes except those ten words, I find that as long as you have to think about the novel enough to write ten words, the chances are that more will come.
The rest of this advice comes out of my own bag of tricks for getting those ten words and then turning them into many. It may well be that only some of these or none at all will work for you; they may not fit into your life or your own mindset. But if these don’t, try and come up with others that do work for you.
Remove distractions. The internet is a phenomenal research and communit y tool without which you might never have started the novel you’re working on right now. It is an equally phenomenal tool for procrastination and wasting time. Unplug your connection. While you’re at it, put down that book, turn off the TV, shut down the Wii. Make scrambled eggs and salad for dinner. The dishes can wait to be washed. Ideally, get out of your house filled with your stuff that you like and go somewhere where you have nothing better to do than write.
I like writing longhand a lot for clearing jams and rapidly generating new scenes. I don’t generally try and write complete scenes when I am writing longhand, I do more of a pencil-sketch version of a scene, all rough and scribbled, drifting in and out of outline form, full of shorthand and initials and incomplete sentences. This is also a easy way to get some polish in without losing speed—when you transfer the longhand to your computer, you’ll almost without thinking improve the sentences. And it’s fun having a physical artifact to commemorate the work—get one of those nice journals from your local bookstore, and if you are the kind of person who hates to waste money, spend enough on the journal that you will then feel bad if you don’t finish the novel.
If characters aren’t coming clear, play casting director. Instead of trying to invent a character from scratch, mentally cast someone in the role and try to imagine how they would do it—their physical mannerisms, their vocal tics, the way they hold themselves. The nice thing is, as the casting director of a novel, you are free to cast actors who are booked elsewhere, too young or too old for the role, not actually actors (your next-door neighbor will never know), dead, or fictional (a writer of my acquaintance once cast Madame Bovary as a character in his modern-day novel).
If you’re finding a scene boring to write, cut it and skip to the good part. Set something on fire. Have zombies a ttack. Note that boring is not the same as hard. Really great scenes can be very hard to write and take a long time, but if you’re sitting there going “god, when will this be over,” make it be over. You indeed have that power. It’s your novel.
Have fun with it.
Naomi Novik
The thing about “ten words a day” is utterly true. The hardest part in writing, for me, is starting a writing session. The rest is much easier. Keeping to a goal of just writing a sentence, or two every day does not sound like much, but that simple practice almost inevitably leads me into a full session. And, if I can write at least ten words, every day, then I can go to sleep at night knowing that for that day I was actually working toward my dream of being a professional fiction writer. Simple steps are best, and this little gem takes the cake.
NaNoWriMo is just barely around the corner! In just eight small days I will plunge myself back into the highly-kinetic, hyper-active, low-sleep-quotient world of finishing a 50,000+ word first draft of a complete novel. Pray for me!
This will be my third year, and the routine is becoming quite comforting. Mid-September I realized how near November was getting and put in my email address on the NaNo site for a reminder when this years registration was open. Early October I registered for this special form of insanity I so love. I had no idea what I was going to write this year. A week later a seed of an idea got randomly planted. A week after that my idea was losing steam to the raucous pleading of four other ideas I have had percolating in my writer’s notebook (Moleskine, of course!), along with a new comer that refused to sit still. I began to doubt my own sanity, and the very meaning of life. Then, after a gentle prod from my beloved Wife, the original idea sprang back into place complete with outset, outline frame and end point. Whew! I know what I am going to be writing this year. And, one of the fun bits is that scenario has been more, or less, the same for the last two efforts.
In 2005 I crossed the finish line with just over 50k on paper. In 2006 my count was just past 57k. I hope to continue the trend this year and get over 60k. Wish me luck.
One of the things I am discovering about my own writing method is that all I really need to get rolling is a character I find engaging, a vague sketch of an initial situation, and an end scene. The middle bits seem to work themselves out just fine. No matter how many interesting scenes, and pieces of character development I note down in what I call an outline (and most people would call an ungodly messy pile of half articulated scribbles), I get nowhere without an end to write towards. The end might be different once I get there, but I still need a target, no matter how much it moves. That’s what works for me, anyways.
Okay, back to the original point. Google Homepage. Of all the things that Google has produced over the years, their personalized homepages are my favorite, with a close second of Gmail. I have a number of tabs on mine, and on is (you guessed it) dedicated to my NaNo effort. Google Homepages allow you to customize the content with widgets designed inhouse, or through there API engine. I have widgets for research bookmarks, writing prompt, notes, a RSS feed of official NaNoWriMo announcements and a NaNo word count progress meter. The notebook is especially useful as I can jot down items as I peruse the research links and read my source books. Other tabs of my Homepage have been customized with my blog feeds, website projects, financial information, news, general writing, and my ever important online comics. Since a good deal of my life is spent working (and playing) with online content, I have found this resource invaluable. Now, if only there was a way to back it all up. 