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[inEQUALITY]

2047 words today. I'm up to 14284 in total. Hanging in there and whatnot, trying to keep my average words per day above 2k. I'm over a day and a half ahead of the curve, so I guess that's something.

Still, it's nothing compared to the insanely high word counts some people have of hundreds of thousands and thereabouts. I won't say they're cheating or writing extraordinary rubbish or anything like that - that's apparently against the rules of NaNo - so I'll just say that I wonder what sort of "arcane magicks" they've discovered that I don't know about.

Anyway, I introduced a third perspective character, injecting a new chapter between the first and second. I'll finish that up tomorrow, as I ended today mid-sentence most of the way through this new chapter. Not sure if next I'll interject yet another chapter or two with her as the perspective character between existing chapters, or continue where I left off in what's now the fifth chapter. I think it's the fifth chapter now. It'll end up changing eventually anyway, I'm sure.

[Digital Hellhound]

Been sick and powerless, unable to write. Makes me so pissed off - there goes my beautiful lead in wordcount. I want November to be extended, damnit.

[Sappho]

Took a nap for half an hour, until the cat woke me up demanding his dinner. It seems to have been enough, because I just pounded out my minimum word count and then some. I think it's getting easier to write, now that I'm getting to the good part. I will definitely have to go back to the start and seriously reduce all the details when the first draft is finished. There's way more information there than necessary, and most of it probably won't be very interesting to anyone other than American expats who have moved to Prague.

So this is the first day in a week that I'm done writing well before bedtime. I can enjoy my beer and watch a movie without feeling like I should be either writing or sleeping!

[sjm9876]

46 words. Still can't bring myself to do much else but stare at the screen. Saturday I think I'll just sit in front of the computer until words appear. Possibly drunk, if that's what it takes.

[Flying Dice]

Man, what bloody awful timing. Just as I developed a great chewy subtext core to fit into my crunchy fantasy shell, I get sick and can barely stand sitting upright, much less thinking. Feeling better now, though I'm so far behind that I won't expect to reach the goal line.

[Willfor]

Still, it's nothing compared to the insanely high word counts some people have of hundreds of thousands and thereabouts. I won't say they're cheating or writing extraordinary rubbish or anything like that - that's apparently against the rules of NaNo - so I'll just say that I wonder what sort of "arcane magicks" they've discovered that I don't know about.

There are people who can stream-of-conscious a writing session, and just type whatever comes into their head for hours on end. If you are one of these strange people, and you can type about 70 words a minute, you can write about 4,200 words an hour. If you can write for five hours a day at that speed, you can write 21,000 words a day. These people exist, and they write during NaNo. Many of them aren't writing anything they want to publish, they're just writing for fun. The key thing to understand is that these people are the exception to the rule, but they still exist within our sightlines, tempting us to feel bad about ourselves, and bad in general. It's tempting, but ultimately problematic because you're not racing against them. You're racing against 50,000. You win if you cross the line, and you don't get any title other than "winner" no matter how many extra words you cross that line by.

Myself, I know that if I force it I can hit 5,000 words a day. It leaves me burned out, hateful, unable to continue very easily. I can comfortably write about 2,000 words a day before mental fatigue really becomes a concern, so that challenge for NaNo for me is mostly trying to keep myself consistent and to write every day.

Got home from work not to long ago, so I'm taking a break. Starting off from 11.3k today. The clock is catching up to me.

[inEQUALITY]

There are people who can stream-of-conscious a writing session, and just type whatever comes into their head for hours on end. If you are one of these strange people, and you can type about 70 words a minute, you can write about 4,200 words an hour. If you can write for five hours a day at that speed, you can write 21,000 words a day. These people exist, and they write during NaNo. Many of them aren't writing anything they want to publish, they're just writing for fun. The key thing to understand is that these people are the exception to the rule, but they still exist within our sightlines, tempting us to feel bad about ourselves, and bad in general. It's tempting, but ultimately problematic because you're not racing against them. You're racing against 50,000. You win if you cross the line, and you don't get any title other than "winner" no matter how many extra words you cross that line by.

I still find it silly. 150000 in 30 days? You know, that's fine I guess, if you can devote 8 hours a day. Not quality work, but fine if you feel like suffering through it. But there are people shooting for a quarter of a million. People with 125000 on day 3. People doing 50k in one day at the last minute. It feels like some kind of pointless joke.

They don't make me feel bad, though. Maybe a little irate. But if anything, really, they make me feel good. Good in that I know that when NaNo finishes up, I might just be able to say "Yeah, maybe I can do this. Maybe I can actually achieve my dreams of being a writer." And I know some of them - most, probably - won't be able to say that at the end of the month. That makes me feel alright, if a little frustrated. It's National Novel Writing Month. I just wish people would stay true to the spirit of the challenge, and not game it like they do.

I guess I just let it get too personal for me. I want to be a writer. Have since I was a kid, writing my first ever short stories. I fell in love with the art. I forsook it for a while, but I came back. This is my chance to prove I can be a writer. Some of us are keeping up a dogged determination to make our way through this. Breaking new ground for ourselves. To get somewhere with it. The proper way. And these people are making a silly game out of it. It's almost insulting.

At the end of the day though, so to speak, their 'fun' ends with November; as for me, nothing stops November 30th. I'm going to keep writing. And then when I've moved on to other things, and written more, I'll come back and rewrite. And I'll do it again for everything else. I'll become a writer. And that's reward enough for me.

Whew, I feel a little better now. Getting that off my chest was nice.

[Willfor]

Right now my struggle is that I can't keep my internal marketing department happy. I know that I can't sell this novel in its current state, and my internal editor is like "Alright, you've already pissed off your entire audience by comprising the first 1/10th of your novel with exposition you've tried (and failed) at disguising as dialogue. I know your writing style is 'Set up a train wreck and force people to watch,' but right now your novel is a train wreck."

And my internal writer is like, "No, no, you don't understand, I need to setup like 40 different characters and they're all important to the plot, and I need three viewpoint characters, and I'm doing so well giving them unique voices, and if I can just finish this first draft I can go back and maybe take out all that exposition maybe??? But then I can't setup 40 characters because that's a lot of things I need to setup and FUCK"

"See??? Do you SEE what I'm dealing with here??? No amount of editing is going to make your first four chapters readable without someone throwing your book across the room! Why can't you just for once give me a story with less than 20 characters? Why can't you for once, just fucking once, give me a story with something like, 10 characters? You get 10,000 words per character to explain 10 characters. Is that so fucking hard?"

"But then I can't setup a train wreck! A forty car pileup on a highway where everyone's going 200 km/h, and there's a 40-way intersection about 3/4ths through the book, and there's this massive confluence of plot that makes everyone who reads it just sort of sit there, watching as all these cars I've setup slowly plow towards the most fucking terrible event they can imagine, and I make them love all these characters, and so they're sitting there going 'no, no he wouldn't. he wouldn't actually make them all hit this intersection at the same time. no. no. no turn around. please no, turn around. TURN AROUND. TURN AROUND YOU FUCKERS CAN'T YOU SEE THE INTERSECTION? NOOOOOOOOO'."

"Okay. But they've already thrown your book away at the 1/10th point. So. They aren't actually doing that. Look at them tossing your book in the trash. no. no don't do it. no don't throw it away. nooooooooooo"

"You don't have to mock me. Remember that you're still me, right? Just the really bad part of me?"

"You mean the one that has to put up with all your shit? Yeah. Good luck making anything worthwhile without me. Just. Ugh. Finish this book, okay? Just stop fucking expositing everywhere. It's disgusting."

":("

--

That was actually kinda therapeutic, so I'm going to leave it there . . .

[Aqizzar]

There are people who can stream-of-conscious a writing session, and just type whatever comes into their head for hours on end. If you are one of these strange people, and you can type about 70 words a minute, you can write about 4,200 words an hour. If you can write for five hours a day at that speed, you can write 21,000 words a day. These people exist, and they write during NaNo. Many of them aren't writing anything they want to publish, they're just writing for fun. The key thing to understand is that these people are the exception to the rule, but they still exist within our sightlines, tempting us to feel bad about ourselves, and bad in general. It's tempting, but ultimately problematic because you're not racing against them. You're racing against 50,000. You win if you cross the line, and you don't get any title other than "winner" no matter how many extra words you cross that line by.

I still find it silly. 150000 in 30 days? You know, that's fine I guess, if you can devote 8 hours a day. Not quality work, but fine if you feel like suffering through it. But there are people shooting for a quarter of a million. People with 125000 on day 3. People doing 50k in one day at the last minute. It feels like some kind of pointless joke.

I look at them the same as those people who have three doctorates by age 20.  I choose to ignore them, because the universe is a happier place if I don't know they exist.

Finished my outline last night, came out to 23 chapters with 112 segments altogether.  I've done this plenty of times before, for both academic and creative writing.  Just list down all the concepts I want to get across to the reader, then plug in any prose or scenes that come to mind.  Basically, I pick all the low-hanging fruit jumping around the outline, then think about how to walk the narrative from one block to another when I run out of spontaneous stuff.  I've done this so many times before it's silly.

I wrote 600 words on my lunch break at work.  I open up my text at home and just stare at the keyboard.  I can't work on anything creative unless it's a distraction from a chore.  At work, writing is the distraction.  At home, writing is the chore.  What the crap.

[Sappho]

Hooray for Fridays! I don't have my usual job, just a sort of babysitting thing in the afternoon that doesn't require any preparation. I got up, took a shower, ate a nice breakfast, then sat down to write. Without the stress of worrying about work and the knowledge that I didn't have to go anywhere until 11.30, I was able to get out my entire word count before 10.30. Now I don't have to worry about it all day! Also, my book is starting to find its shape. I'm getting to the good part. I'm getting past the boring background and setup and getting to the actual plot, the actual fantasy. These parts are coming easy. Later, when I'm done (and that will certainly take a lot more than 50,000 words), I will go back to these beginning parts and condense them. Take each paragraph and turn it into a sentence, or reduce 3 paragraphs to 1. I don't want to have the kind of book where people say "it starts off really slow."

I have also just gotten a copy of Scrivener. I might transfer my writing to that program after today. They have a built-in feature for tracking your word count, overall and per day/session, like the NaNoWriMo site does. That way I can continue motivating myself in the same way even after November ends: make that bar turn GREEN!!!!

[Darkmere]

I'd like to know what you think of scrivener after the month is up. Lots of people seem to use it and I think winners get a big discount on it, so I'm intrigued.

[Caz]

I look at them the same as those people who have three doctorates by age 20.  I choose to ignore them, because the universe is a happier place if I don't know they exist.

There's something to be said for that philosophy. I think I will adopt it.


Edit: #nano on irc.darkmyst.net was the channel we used before. I'll hang out there if anyone wants to word war or needs a writing cheerleader etc.

[inEQUALITY]

2533 words today, as far as the word count is concerned; a little under 400 of that was typed last night in a moment of inspiration. Either way, that puts me at 16817 words total. With Day 8 coming to a close, I've already surpassed Day 10's daily minimum word count. Which is great, because I won't be home tomorrow. AT ALL. From 6:30 AM to, very likely, past midnight. I just really hope it doesn't hurt my attempt to establish a daily routine through the week by skipping one day, and then having a weird day on Sunday.

Spent a lot of the day doing some research into publishing. Man, it really dashes my hopes. It seems to me that getting into the short story market is 1000x times easier and more likely than the novel fiction markets. There's all of like two or three decent science fiction publishers I found that accept unsolicited manuscripts, and their required word counts are something to the tune of 90000 - 100000 words minimum.

Between that, the likelihood of it taking a year and a half for you to so much as get a rejection slip, the likelihood of receiving said rejection slip, and... well it just feels all for naught to try.

Self-publishing hardly seems any better, being a high inundated market with absolute crap payout even when you toss money at it for professional editing and such, which I can't afford to do anyway.

I'm going to finish this novel, but it's going to have to sit in my hard drive for a while, I think. Once it's done, I'm getting down with short stories. I know I'll have better luck with that, considering just how much more open the field is and how much faster I could produce finished product. I'm not really giving up on my dream of being a semi-successful published author one day, but I'll be lying if I said I had any delusions about it being anything remotely resembling easy or probable.

[Willfor]

Over the past few years, publishing companies have started shifting their submissions to agents. Basically, agents have taken on the job of reading through the slush piles that publishers used to, and then they work with the writer to get it closer to something worth sending in. Then the agent uses their contacts to get the right editors to read it and start bidding on it -- hopefully getting them into a bidding war to get you a better negotiation position for an advance. But possibly not. Then if all goes very well, you'll be picked up by an editor who will go over your manuscript with you again to refine it to a state in which it is publishable.

Unsolicited submissions have become a very hard way to get picked up. Though, getting an agent is not a whole lot easier. On the plus side, their entire job is to make sure that you don't get completely screwed over. So. Kind of worth it, really.

[EnigmaticHat]

For some reason I haven't been following this thread.  So.  PTW.

Unlike last year's computer disaster that ended my attempt within the first hour, this year is going pretty well.  I mean I'm behind, but I'm feeling pretty optimistic.