Tuesday, November 29, 2011

That's a LOT of words.



50,000, 50K, fifty-thousand.  No matter how you write it, it's a big number, well, as long as you're not talking sports salaries anyway.  I crossed the finish line of NaNoWriMo this evening at 10:43PM EST.

This being my first ever NaNoWriMo, I didn't have a clue what to expect. When I started out, I didn't even know if I'd finish, and crossing that line tonight, I didn't know what I'd feel when it happened.  You know what I feel?  Elated, satisfied, exhausted, surprised, and most of all, confident that I can do this if I really stick with it.  You see, even though 50,000 words is a lot of words, and it really is, it's ~200 pages in a standard print paperback, I still have a LOT of work ahead of me.

I'm about half-way through my outline, which has had some major revisions as I went along, and I don't want to cop out on the ending either, so I can't just make one up and tack it on.  I built this story backwards from the ending so all the pieces would fit, and I can't, in good conscience cheat myself of that effort.  Not at this stage where I'm still working on the process of how I'm going to do things.

Once I have the story completed, I have to start making it readable by other people.  There's a few pieces here and there that turned out ok in what's done of the first draft, but a lot of it needs some heavy revision, and back-filling of details and descriptions.  Something tells me "They Fight" isn't going to get anyone's heart racing.  Oh, and some of my dialog is dreadful!

So I mentioned that this was my first year doing NaNoWriMo, well, it certainly won't be the last if I have anything to say about it.  I've learned SO MUCH from this endeavor that I can't imagine not doing it again next year to learn some more.

Working with the deadline of 50,000 words in 30 days means you have to get ~1,667 words written per day.  That means you have to either find a few really great days for writing, or do what I did and set aside an hour or two each evening to work on it.  That process, that dedication of time and forming the habit of pushing forward was the biggest step forward for me.

My biggest problem before this event was the endless revisions I would do on the first 2-3 chapters of the book, all the while expanding and expanding on the world building and outlining.  While self revision is a great thing, nothing I ever write would be anything but eye-bleedingly bad without it, if I had kept allowing myself to do it, I would never have come close to 50,000 words.  It was the first hurdle I had to cross, and it took me nearly a week to get past it and get my butt in gear on the rest of the story.

I'll try to do more blog posts as I go about this process, to let you know what I'm learning along the way.  As for this blog post being a bit of a train wreck.  Tonight I'm ok with that, I can always come back and revise it later ;)

Friday, November 25, 2011

The Home Stretch!

As much as I hate the use of a Baseball metaphor, I'm past third and heading home.  Of course, that's just to finish NaNoWriMo, the book is only about halfway done, maybe nearing 2/3 if you don't count the back-fill and detailing work I'm going to have to do, or the billions of revisions to make it actually readable.

That's right, even when this thing is "done" it's not "done" yet.  I intend to go through the whole process with this book, even if it never gets published, the learning experience will be worth every second of work.

I'm enjoying the pace of NaNoWriMo and the consistent schedule it keeps me on.  I worry a bit about maintaining schedule when I don't have bar graphs to goad me on, but I'll figure something out.

Truth be told, I'm so excited about having even this much of the novel process done, that I doubt I'll slow down any time soon.

Time for sleep

- Grimm

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Achievement Unlocked: Wordasaurus!


It was either Wordasaurus, or Velociwriter, I think I made the right choice.

Here I am on the 15th of November, A.K.A. NaNoWriMo Half-way day, and I've actually completed 25K words! It feels fantastic!

I fell behind early on and had to play catch-up by bumping my daily word count quota from 1667 to 2000, and 2000 is such a comfortable number for me that I think I'll keep it there for the rest of NaNoWriMo. This structured writing thing is definitely working.

I've only used about 1/3 of my outline for BookB, and still have lots of story to tell. I've read over some of it and it's certainly got a few rough patches, but I'm very quickly getting it drilled into my head that this IS the first draft, not the final work. I'll be revising it until I hate it, so any time I feel the need to do a major re-write on a chapter or something I simply make detailed notes of what I need to change in a secondary document (the outline actually).

I do still make minor re-writes as I go, but that seems to be less detrimental to my pace than constantly re-writing the same chapters over and over again. I'm having a blast, and hope to be able to share something with my thousands of dedicated followers either by the end of the year, or early next year.

-Grimm

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

A Good Start

So, the target for NaNoWriMo is 1,667 words per day. Today I hit 2614. That's a good start. Of course, it's basically a new rewrite of Book B, changing a number of the characters around and following some of the revised outline I've worked up, so I had a pretty good handle on where bits were going.

NaNoWriMo

No, that's not some obscure code in the title. It's (Inter)National Novel Writing Month which is run via a website with a LOT of wonderful Author support. I haven't decided whether I'll do a full rewrite or whip up something new for NaNoWriMo but I intend to put some serious work into it. I've registered, I'm going to find some local groups (hopefully find a good writing group for outside of November as well), and see what this thing shakes out to be.

I've been pretty stalled lately, the paying job has eaten up a LOT of time and energy lately, but some major milestones have been reached and a fair bit of the pressure is off. I'm going to spend this evening going over my old outlines and notes, and attempting to keep the grimaces and flat out disgust at what I've written to a minimum. It is an incomplete first draft after all. Let's see where this train takes us.