Tue 29 Nov 2011
NaNoWriMo
Archived Posts from this Category
Mon 21 Nov 2011
I’ve had a really productive weekend and tonight I’ve been cranking out the word count like nobody’s business so that my NaNo is just shy of 43,500. Who knew sticking my two favorite characters in a room and making one spill his secrets would be fun to write, eh? Sheesh. Sometimes I wonder why I make this so hard for myself, why I spend so much time spinning my wheels on the story, but whatever. Now is not the time to question myself; now is the time to be grateful for my success.
I’ve added a couple of chapters and I’ve also added a Chapter Zero at the beginning in which Our Hero closes an earlier case as a way to observe what it is he does in his school. It’s an idea stolen from James Bond novels and films and I’m sure Sir Ian Fleming stole it from someone else. I want to say it happens at the beginning of The Maltese Falcon but now I honestly can’t remember. Chandler starts all the Marlowe novels at the commencement of a fresh case but I can’t do that and Chandler was a genius anyway. I mean, seriously, people say they’re trying to write the Great American Novel but guess what: Chandler already did it and saved us all the trouble. The Long Goodbye is simply the best novel written in America in the 20th century as far as I’m concerned. No, I have not read all novels written in America in the 20th century, or even very many of them, but it’s hard as hell for me to imagine one that does a better job.
Sun 13 Nov 2011
I update the PDF linked in the post below every day, as that’s one of my backup locations for total oh-shit-just-in-case scenarios, but I’ve been told that there are persons who do not realize that the link below does not point to a stale, 10K-word version of my NaNo for this year so here’s another link just in case: Tricks Up My Sleeve at 27,000 words and counting.
By the normal math I should be at 21,671 words, so I’m ahead of the game. I’ve also managed to stay on top of my homework and the gym and my walking/running schedule, more or less. Things I have not stayed on top of include anything else in the universe, but such is life in November. I’m mostly impressed with myself for having more or less managed this whole school-work-life-writing balance thing and only burning five days of leave to do it. So far.
Sun 6 Nov 2011
My goal for today was to cross the 10K word mark, which I did with relative aplomb. My story so far has already undergone a number of changes. I was going for a slightly campy “gay boy Nancy Drew meets Brick” thing and instead it’s turned out to be slightly more hard-boiled than I had thought it would be but that does not mean it’s actually hard-boiled; that means that my main character’s campy qualities are more unconscious. He likes to think of himself as a hard-boiled adventure hero and that is, itself, campy. I’ve also added some elements – the love interest is a second-string quarterback playing the role of well-muscled femme fatale – and deleted some. Originally he was going to have these minor magic powers and I still kinda sorta want those? Maybe? But I’ve decided that if he’s going to have them then he doesn’t know he has them yet. I’m leaving the door open to them manifesting halfway through if I need them but overall I’m actually enjoying writing something more “realistic” than usual for all that it’s at all realistic, which is to say that it isn’t at all realistic in the least.
I’m having a lot of fun this year, already. I’m having as much fun as I had last year and about ten million times as much fun as I had the year before that, the only year I refuse to link or to show to anyone because it was such an unrelentingly awful pain to write much less to read.
Sat 13 Nov 2010
This year I’m writing a novel called Deal With the Devil, about a vampire and a vigilante hero and a self-styled super villain in Durham, NC. It’s sort of a sequel to Tooth and Nail, in that it stars Withrow. He shows up in lots of things I write, though, so really I guess it’s just part of the overall continuum of that fictional world.
Today I hit the 25,000 word mark. I was going to walk to the coffee shop to do my writing but I lazed around and didn’t have time and felt guilty about it because I haven’t worked out for jack in the last two weeks as the weather has turned and NaNo has eaten into my free time. Hitting the halfway point on a six thousand word writing spree, though, is worth it.
Fri 16 Jul 2010
I am a sucker for Internet narcissism and thus I went through “I Write Like” with the first pages of all my NaNo’s:
My brain-destroyingly terrible sci-fi entry from 2009:
My trashy gay noir 2008 NaNoWriMo, Particular People:
2007′s redneck vampire-centric Tooth and Nail:
In the Fuck Yes department, 2006′s horror fantasy noir The Palanquin Cat:
2005′s sci-fi sequel Root Shell:
2004′s sci-fi adventure Shell Access:
I write like
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
2003′s poli-sci-fi Life, Liberty And…:
Given that one’s about a Libertarian governor who completely fucks things up, that’s pretty satisfying.
Sat 28 Nov 2009
51,600 words and finished in a hurry. I hated it. I’m not linking it. Maybe in a year or two. Bascha or Josh can ask me for a copy via email but dear gods, no one wants to read this. No one good should ever want to read this. Still, digital schwag:
Mon 23 Nov 2009
Weekend travels and an overwhelming hate of the book so far have slowed me down. I am determined to finish before Thursday, though, which may have me up half the night on Wednesday but it will be worth it. The Boyf has been insanely patient with my short fuse as I have slogged this far. Things are going to be so nice come Thursday.
Interesting to me is the fact that when I switched perspective characters at 35,000 words, for what I thought would just be a scene, I was instantly more engaged. I can’t make him the perspective character the whole time, but I am going to try to make him the perspective character for as much as I can of what remains. The words, like spice, must flow.
Sun 15 Nov 2009
Just over 25,000 words as of today and almost entirely unrelentingly awful. Seriously, fantasy? Never. Again.
Sun 1 Nov 2009
I started last night just after midnight. I went to D&D today, so that was a big chunk of non-writing time, but I still made it past the 3,000 word mark. Here’s a PDF link for Bascha.
Sun 27 Sep 2009
I face a quandary: write my NaNo using the Dyson Sphere setting invented by my gaming group and friends of ours a few years ago or write another Withrow story?
Pros/Cons of the Dyson Sphere world:
- new setting (pro)
- new setting (con)
- characters that aren’t yet fully defined and the ones that are don’t yet wholly interest me (con)
- a whole world of societies and cultures to create, or at least several different societies/cultures to create (con)
- opportunity to design whole societies & cultures (pro)
- a setting that I find really engaging and interesting after having had it in the back of my mind for years (pro)
- what I consider, on first examination, to be a pretty clever use of the undead in a story (pro)
- a genuinely creepy thing about how the undead work in that world (pro)
- possibly way too much story for 50K (pro & con)
- no idea where the story ends or what it’s about beyond some very vague one-line thematic descriptions, such as “fulfillment is living to see the realization of a goal, not dying in its service” and “to run away from one situation is usually to run towards another” (con)
- five weeks before NaNo starts (con).
Pros/cons of the new Withrow story:
- characters that are pretty much fully-formed and interesting to me (pro)
- it’s a semi-sequel to a NaNo I’ve already written and my one experience with a sequel was terrible (con)
- set in the town where I live, so super-easy to research with many possibilities for field trips (pro)
- too much opportunity for distraction in the name of “research” (con)
- possibly not enough story for 50K words without padding like hell (con)
- a character I already know I love to write (pro)
- a character I’ve already possibly written too much (con)
I’m at a loss. In the meantime I’m trying to do character sketches for the Dyson Sphere world. I didn’t have a name for it until five minutes ago, which was itself almost enough to get me to abandon it. I guess my real quandary is, do I do NaNo to challenge myself (Dyson Sphere world) or to enjoy myself (Withrow story)? No one reads them and I have no delusion of turning them into a great literary career so they really are for my enjoyment alone but I also really do like to approach it as an exercise, not just an entertainment.
Bleah.
Mon 31 Aug 2009
Dark Stores from the site Not If But When.
Particular People (PDF link), my NaNoWriMo last year, was set in the very real 100 Oaks Mall – a wonderfully ironic name that made me wonder if that’s how many trees they cut down to build the place or if they instead had installed 100 saplings in containers inside the mall. 100 Oaks was a Nashville, TN, shopping mall that opened and closed repeatedly over the course of its life. It’s now been bought by Vanderbilt and is being redeveloped as medical offices or something. When I asked KJ to get me pictures of it last year she couldn’t because it had been closed off in preparation for that work.
On a practical level, of course, it’s always preferable to see existing spaces redeveloped instead of new projects take up new spaces but were I king tomorrow I would decree that a certain percentage of dead retail and development spaces had to be kept around, unmaintained, as silent monuments to… something. Hubris? Ecology? I don’t even know what lesson is to be learned there, just that there is a lesson there of some sort. That the CitySearch page for 100 Oaks is still up is both amusing and insufficient.
Fri 6 Feb 2009
So, I am definitely doing Script Frenzy in April. (Crud, April? That’s really, really soon.) I’m going to be writing a comic book script because that’s a medium I love so, you know, since I don’t know a damned thing about writing a script I might as well enjoy myself while I screw up. I’m currently kicking the following around in conversations:
What could possibly fuel a really serious beef against a university? Assume a full-fledged university with an attached hospital and medical school, the works. Mr. Pink Eyes very keenly suggested someone who might have had, you know, surgery performed on them using instruments soaked by accident in hydraulic fluid rather than antiseptic, such as happened at an august local institution. I like that. I like that a lot. Unfortunately, it’s too close to fact. Variants? Other ideas? Someone cut from a sports team? Someone whose entire sport/academic department/major/sorority/library gets shut down in the shite economy?
Any suggestions are most welcome.
Also, NEVERMORE‘s lineup is out and wow. Classic horror films (IN 3-D!) next to a hilarious shorts collection next to a bunch of new horror and NC premieres? Hells yes. I am ordering a 10-pass if any of the usual suspects see something they’d like to see and I’ve got an extra ticket for it. I’m particularly interested in Blackspot, The Disappeared and Reel Zombies.
Tangential: isn’t it about time NEVERMORE started giving out prizes? Maybe it’s a huge pain in the ass, maybe it requires a whole ado of certification or dues in the League of Award-Granting Film Festivals, I honestly have no idea, but I would have paid extra to get to vote for American Astronaut for best feature the year they showed it; the same goes for The Host and… damn. Now I’ve forgotten the name of that amazing movie I watched last year, the super-cold 1950′s gangster movie. Damn. Anyway, that.
Fri 2 Jan 2009
After having read this story when it was linked from Unfogged earlier this week I have been unable to stop talking about the idea of real-life superheroes. Back in the day, Aaron used to run a group story project thing and in it were a few “normal guy superheroes.” Eventually, if I recall correctly, those of us who wrote some of them threw in the concept of there being a sort of combination farm league and trade union made up of all the Normal Guy Superheroes – Flash Gordon, for instance, or Ash from the Evil Dead movies.
At any rate, the more I talk about this idea that real people decide to put on a costume and go bust crackhouses or whatever – becoming, as I said to The Boyf, the middle ground between the saying “be the change you want to see in the world” and Katmandu’s fabulous “be the trouble you want to see in the world” t-shirt – the more obsessed I become with what Durham’s local superhero would be like if we had one.
The way I figure, she or he would pretty much have to go by the monicker “The Bull’s-Eye.” Given our architecture and the general Faded Glory/Urban Decay prom theme we have going downtown, she or he would need to be one of the trench-coated, goggled, fedora-wearing types. The calling card would be the obvious emblem of a bull’s-eye. They would need to be more a criminologist than a ruffian. Durham would happily play home to a Batman or a Golden Age Sandman but not so much a Superman or The Flash. They would be the detective type, collecting evidence and leaving bundled baddies on the steps of the police station.
Now that I think about it, that actually happens in The Dark Knight, doesn’t it? See, that’s what I’m talking about.
Such trains of thought naturally lead me to wonder what would result if this were to happen in the World of Darkness version of the Triangle inhabited by more than one of my group’s tabletop games over the years. Were Withrow to encounter the Bull’s-Eye running around Durham he would be so horribly miffed. What the hell does some crazy mortal mean, claiming to be a superhero? Withrow is supposed to be the brooding superhero, don’t they know that? It would be amusing.
Thus, I may have found the topic for next – I mean, this – year’s NaNoWriMo or, even better, this year’s Script Frenzy.
