Posts tagged ‘NaNoWriMo’

Well, I kinda fell down on the job for NaBloPoMo, but I’m rockin’ n rollin’ with my annual noveling efforts for NaNoWriMo during the month of November.

After an agonizing month of worrying about the fact that I wasn’t excited about it this year, and that despite NaNo founding father’s advice to “not worry if you don’t have an idea; just write”, I was devastated by the wasteland of my personal creative landscape. It appeared barren beyond any desert and as far as the eye could see. The closer November first came, the more worried I got. My thoughts continually returned to last year’s NaNo Novel… 51K words of a projected 150K word novel that I hadn’t touched all year. Every character, scenario, story line or idea I had seemed to circle back and be a part of the unfinished ‘08 Novel.

I came to a decision. Despite the suggestion to start and complete a 50K novel with a complete story arc for NaNoWriMo, this is my time to write! This month and the daily word count goals and the permission I give myself to be self absorbed and totally immersed in writing seem to be the only way for me to maintain the self discipline to actually pound out a story.
Imagine my surprise when I dropped in to the NaNoWriMo site forums to discover that I was in good company with other rule breakers. I am an official Nano Rebel, (as attetested to by the badge). Hee hee!

When I wrote last year I was only about 20k in when I realized that it would be impossible to complete my story arc in 50k words at the rate I was going. My story was going to need a lot more words than that. So I began summarizing the story here and there, and writing scenes as they sort of needed to be written. I’d find myself slipping from summary to dialogue and prose and then back to summary. Writing this way got me to 51K, a NaNoWriMo “winner” by Nov. 31. I had a complete story arc, albeit one with a lot of HUGE holes!
This year it’s all about filling in those holes to the tune of the monthly goal of 50 thousand words, which breaks down to 1667 words per day. I started writing a bit late, between my cleavered typing finger (a story for another day- and no; you don’t want pictures!!) and the necessity of going through the manuscript and identifying the holes. I went to sleep this morning sometime after 3 AM having knocked out 3,048 brand new words, which is about 5k short of being on schedule, but I’m back to it today and tonight, and hoping to catch up in the next couple of days.

If any of you lovely bloggy peeps write novels or screenplays, you absolutely must get Scrivener, by Literature and Latte. It is the most phenominal writing program I have ever used, and it’s making it soooo simple for me to keep a word count of this year’s writing separate from the entire manuscript form last year. It has super cool meta data, you can make notes and links and stick index cards on a corkboard on a spilt screen, color coded labels and, and, and… it just rawks! Check it out!!

Okay. I gotta go. I’ve just spent over 500 words, and I don’t know if there exists a finite amount of them in me each day or not. Lawl! Wooo hooo!

Peace, out!

* Peggy, please email me again. I lost your addy in comp switching and many of my passwords aren’t set yet, either so I can’t comment at Utah Savage

Oh. My. Gods.
Look over there to the right. The sidebar. Does it show yet? My eyes are so blurry I can hardly see to type.
According to Scrivener, my novel writing program (it rocks! you should check it out!), I reached 50,038 words on my 2008 NaNoWriMo novel about a half an hour ago. Holey shit. My muse was on fire today. I wrote over 6K words. Sheesh, I am such a deadline junky.
Tomorrow (later this morning) after a bit of a sleep, I’ll write a couple hundred words before exporting to Word to scramble and paste my document in the official NaNo validator.
Holy shit, I’m wiped.
Eda, my love. Thank you. You have been absolutely invaluable to me and this novel. Well, you are always invaluable to me, but what I’m trying to say is that I could never have done this without you, my love.
Big thanks to all my NaNo buddies who swapped encouragement and threats with me when the going got tough.
Yippee!

What do these things have in common? Not a damn thing as far as I can tell. (I just like to list in threes? Hmmmm… )
(Not necessarily in title order)
Last night I wrote just under 4 thousand words for my NaNoWriMo novel. Which is a really awesome thing, since I was about 6K behind. When I reached the halfway point in my month (if not my novel) of 25K I kinda freaked out. I realized that there was no way in hell I was gonna be able to complete my story arc within 25K more words. This might not seem like a big deal, but it really is. Chris Baty, the founder of NaNo, says so and as far as cranking out a novel in 30 days Chris is simply… well… GOD!!! Anyway, Chris says that it’s really important to complete your story arc within the 50K words. Basically because it’s much easier to come bact to fill bits in than it is to have an entire ending hanging over your head once the good (insane) pressure of November is over.
I think he’s right. I know he’s right. He’s God, after all; he must be.
So, gonsidering that 50K words is a really tiny (but doable in 30 days) novel (barely more than a novella, actually), and knowing (fearing?) that this year’s creative writing endeavor shall be about double that, (at least? I’m guessing.) I needed a vehicle to get me to the end of my story arc by November 30 and at somewhere just over 50K words. Since I write without an outline, (I can’t outline, it seems. My characters seem to have minds of their own, and I never really know what they will do until they’re doing it), and I have the vaguest sort of concept for my novel’s end, but no real idea how the story will take me to it, nor what will actually happen, I decided to sort of summarize each chapter and sort of flow in and out of narrative as the scene (or my pushy damned characters) demanded.
This is fucking rocking for me! Seriously!! I’m loving it, when I actually push all the other crap aside and sit down to write, this is working!!! Yay, me! Yay, novel! Yay, NaNoWriMo!!!
Okay, that was a rather long intro to segue into the title matter, but here goes. Last night, about 3/4 way through my 4K evening, listening to background music and occasionally struck by lyrics as always, I stopped a moment to sing along and was struck by a nearly overwhelming urge to stop writing and tattoo some song lyrics on my arm in a typewriter font. It was really weird. I mean, I’m a tattoo artist and all, and it has been awhile since I’ve had any new ink, and I do jones a bit for some occasionally, but usually when I’m inking on someone else. Not just out of the blue, apropos of nothing.
Well, I didn’t do it. I’m under the gun with this noveling and the holiday, especially since we are having two days of dinners; one here with family and one away with extended “family”. Even if I manage to catch up the 3K I’m still behind today, I’ll be behind abgain by friday and that’s fucking SCARY!!!
And for whatever reason, the overwhelming urge to tattoo these particular lyrics on my arm has passed, so I’m probably glad I didn’t ink something so transient on myself permanently. So that was the “strange urge”.

So yeah. I hope you didn’t think the masturbation was the strange urge. I mean, it’s a pretty normal urge in general, I think. But then again, sometimes the urge to break one off does come at the oddest times, doesn’t it? Am I the only one who thinks that an orgasm is better than a sleeping pill? Ever lie around tossing and turning, but not want to take anything and then bingo! You just know if you knock a quick one out you’ll relax and sleep like a baby? So I get to bed at about 4 AM and this urge comes over me. Not strange; perfectly normal. The urge to brak off a quick one. It’s not just a mental urge, either. Again; apropos of nothing my body was suddenly screaming for an orgasm!
Weird. Well, I managed to get to sleep without doing that either, but only because I didn’t feel like getting out of bed and heading to the bathroom or something. My poor girlyboy only had about another hour to sleep and I really didn’t want to wake her up. She’s PMS-ing like a freakin Harpy right now (Let me inform all of you that there is NOTHING, I repeat NOTHING, worse than a butch with PMS!!!), and she needs her beauty sleep to go do her job. She works hard, my girlyboi; so it was out of pure love and consideration (and PMS avoidance) that I resisted the urge to break one off.
*sigh
I did wake up this morning at about 8, handle the situation and go back to sleep for a couple hours. But I digress. The thing is, do these two seemingly unrelated urges have anything in common? Are they some sort of result of creativity overload or something? Am I coming out of my depression? WTF?
Only my muse knows.