vive la misère!

Just a bit over 35k! This is my favorite number to reach (apart from the obvious 50k, of course). It feels so much better than 25k; in a truly glass-half-empty way, that milestone tends to make me think, "Ugh, I still have to write the same amount I just wrote? That's too much!" But just 10,000 more words, and it feels like an accomplishment. It feels really close to the end.

If I write 3,000 words a day from now on (which is approximately what I've been doing all week, although I did have one day with 4,000), I think I should finish on Tuesday which should be the earliest I've ever finished. Which would be awesomeness. I would not be adverse to finishing sooner, of course, but we'll just see what happens.

Last night at our meeting we were talking about how being depressed and miserable seems to make it easier to write, and I think that really says a lot about why my second week was so much more productive than my first. Week one was a pretty good week for the most part; week two was misery itself thanks to illness and a panic attack about life stuff and then an utterly crappy work week. Word count at the end of week one: about 8,500. Word count at the end of week two: about 32,000.

halfway there

Characters wangsting about their attraction to other characters makes for good word count.

Got to a little over 25k easy as anything. Writing gets worse and worse, my spirits get better and better.

Huzzah, terrible writing! Huzzah, word count!

crazy writing frenzy

This was a bad week for writing, by which I mean, I didn't do any. I was more than a day ahead on Monday, which turned out to be a crappy day, so I felt all right not getting any words in that day. Alas, then the week got crappier and I got sick, and before I knew it, it was Saturday afternoon and I only had 8500 something words.

As of now, Sunday evening, I have just a little over 22k.

My brain is so close to falling out.

I think this is how I have to do NaNo now. The first couple years it was a challenge enough to get through the month and get my word count. But I know I can do that now. I've done it five times before during November and once again last July. But without a challenge, I'm super unmotivated to finish. But writing a ton of words in one (or two) days? Still a challenge. Still exciting.

Anyway, I should get to the halfway point tomorrow with no problem. I'm more excited to get to 35k though. That always feels so very close to the finish line.

And I really want to be at the finish line really early this year.

My novel continues to get dumber and dumber. I've always gone on in previous years about how the novel o' the year is terrible and no one ever needs to see it, but there are always at least a couple people who end up reading parts (or all) of it. This year's? Seriously never going to be shown to anyone. I haven't even managed to write anything apart from the first three paragraphs of the first chapter that I'm willing to put up as an excerpt on my profile. Last year I was throwing whole chapters up there. This year it's all just too truly terrible. At least I'm having fun with it though. The first week was really hard, what with the starting over and all, and the second week obviously got off to a bad start. But things are looking up.

pirates

Day four of NaNo and I've started over and am almost a day ahead of where I need to be to be on track and I don't hate writing or my novel or the world.

So, a good decision to start over. This year, at least.

Anyway, I'm writing about pirates now. Possibly gay pirates? I'm not sure yet. Also, there's a samurai. It's lame and ridiculous and, therefore, kind of fun.

New title: Captain O'Bollocks Strikes Again!

scratch that, start again?

So, day two of NaNo and I hate my novel and want to start over.

Seriously, it's terrible, and not in an awful-but-still-fun-to-write way. Terrible in an I-want-to-kill-myself-for-producing-this-tripe-oh-it's-painful-to-think-of-writing-more-of-this way.

I seem to remember feeling the same way last year, but I stuck with it and the novel turned out cracktastic and was mostly pretty fun to write. So maybe I should just stick with it again this year and hope for the best?

I really, really hate it though.

I really, really want to quit start over.

almost time

Okay, so NaNo starts (for me, at least) in about thirteen and a half hours.

The more I think about it, the less I know what I'm going to write. I mean, I seem to remember a couple weeks ago the beginnings of a clear idea, and now it's all gone. I have only the vaguest notion now of what I might write, and I wish I could just start; I worry that even that will vanish before tomorrow.

It'll be okay. I didn't know what I was writing last year, and that turned out all right (cracktastic, certainly, but all right). I'll figure it out as I go along.

It's just a bit annoying to know that I had an idea and somehow lost it. And it's not that I really forgot it (although I did a little) so much as it turned from something I would write into something I really wouldn't. Woe and sadness.

preparation

NaNoWriMo preparation for me involves thinking about everything but my novel. Honestly, I've learned from experience that planning things out never works for me (for NaNo at least), and it's better to just start with a character or two (or a few) and perhaps a vague idea (optional).

I've been an ML for the past couple years, so preparing for that takes up some of my time (probably not as much as it should; I always put it off and then feel woefully unprepared when we start meeting).

No, my NaNo preparation mostly involves thinking about music, drinks, and food (not necessarily in that order).

Thinking about drinks involves hunting down new and delicious teas to try, pondering whether I should purchase celebratory reaching-50k champagne now and chance being tempted to use it for writing fuel at around 15k instead of any other alcoholic delights I'll have on hand, and trying to find my favorite chai recipe.

Thinking about music involves making playlists. Lots and lots of playlists that I inevitably end up not even listening to while I'm writing because I get sucked into obsessively listening to just one artist instead. One artist who is inevitably named Nick Cave.

And food is what I have been thinking about this week. I bought a few not-too-unhealthy snacks a couple days ago and will get some more at Uwajimaya and Trader Joe's before noveling commences. What I really need to do is find recipes for things I can make big batches of on the weekends and eat for a week. I've half-heartedly tried to do this in the past and then given up before the month is out which tends to lead to me just not eating while I'm doing NaNo or getting a bunch of take-out. Not ideal! So this year I'm going to stick with it. And I think I'll do better. I've gotten much better at cooking in the past year (perhaps the acquisition of this apron helped, or perhaps I'm just not so lazy). So. Recipes. I must find them.

It's hard to believe we're halfway through October already.

concept, characters, crap

Concept
Last year for NaNo I wrote a completely ridiculous novel about people's dreams changing the world around them. It made absolutely no sense. It constantly referenced Neil Patrick Harris and Robert Goulet. It was, to put it eloquently, utter shit.

Anyway, there was a relatively minor character named Bastian who, I believe, appeared in the novel simply because a friend of mine said something like, "I really like the name Bastian. You should have a hot character named Bastian in your novel." So I did. He seemed fun. At the time I thought that maybe I could use him in something again someday.

And I think I'm going to do so this year. Of course, October isn't even half over, and I'm pretty sure I've never actually written anything for NaNo that I thought of this far before November, so things might change completely. But I like pretending that I know what I'm up to, so for the moment that's what I'll do.

The setting will probably be the same as last year's novel (Bastian lived in Seattle), although it might not be quite the same universe in general and shouldn't really be a sequel to that book. It might have something to do with fairy tales or folklore, stereotypes, and the acceptance of oneself as a character in one's own life instead of an observer of others' lives. I imagine it'll be some sort of adventure/urban fantasy/comedy/romance. A Frankenstory, if you will. At the moment it's titled Bastian Bobertsson and the Terribly Inconvenient Adventure.

Characters
As of now, the only characters I really know are nabbed from last year's novel. There's another who is vaguely showing up in my head, but I don't know enough about him yet to have anything to say.

Bastian is 20-something, conscientious, calculating, distant, and mildly psychic. He likes numbers, green tea, and not getting involved; he also likes feeling helpful which tends to make him get involved anyway. He has an open mind. His world, by both choice and circumstance, is very small.

Bobert is Bastian's father. He has no arms, although whether he was born without or lost them at some point is, as of now, unknown. He seems friendly, but his father insists that he is quite mean. He doesn't talk much.

Shirley is Bobert's father and Bastian's grandfather. He runs an import shop in Pike Place Market that is a front for a sort of supernatural charity.

Evelyn is Shirley's twin brother. He is a librarian and fancies himself a wizard.

Crap
Seriously, this will probably be utter crap.

on having no purpose

I don't care about being published.

There. I said it.

It's a secret I have; I don't like mentioning it to people because doing so always makes me feel odd and like I have something to apologize for. "I'm sorry that I like to write but don't care about being a published author. Yes, of course there must be something wrong with me."

I just like writing for what it is. I liked making up stories when I was six; I liked writing stories using spelling words in fifth grade; I liked writing fanfic when I was sixteen; I liked writing terrible novels for the past five Novembers. But I've never been serious about it. Is it so wrong to write with no goal beyond enjoying myself? Must we always think that things are only worth doing if we get something out of it?

This isn't just about NaNoWriMo or writing, of course. I feel like I take life in general much less seriously than a lot of people around me. Of course, I do like having purpose in my life, but I hate when I'm made to feel guilty that my life isn't filled with meaning 24 hours a day.

I like taking long baths and reading trashy romance novels and spending the evening on the internets and, yes, writing just because it can be rather fun.

So there.

nanowrimo

So this will be where I keep track of NaNoish things this year - not where I actually post any of my novel (that, as always, is a secret location few know about), but where I generally keep track of things and talk about whether the day sucked or not, etc. And maybe I'll post a bit of actual writing now and then.

Just thought it would be nice to have somewhere more public for this sort of thing this year, just in case anyone out there cares.

a beginning

What's writing?

Words that stay.

(The Dark Crystal)