Rough month -- need your support

Considering all the hardships you're facing, I think you're doing rather well. In my opinion it's better for you to focus on the good things; focusing on the problems only disheartens you, and being disheartened won't lead you to wanting to write.

Additionally, your story sounds like a fun read, and the excerpt left me wanting more, just as an excerpt should.

if all else fails, take pride in the fact even with all your difficulties you are doing better than a girl who had plenty of time and yet has very little done (namely, me.).

Good luck~!

And my heart said "let there be love" And there was. <3

Hey Blue,

Went and read your excerpt. It looks very, very good, really. If you can keep up that level of prose throughout, I'd read it just for the words. If an outside opinion helps any, I think your first draft is phenomenally good. It's well written and readable. The edits I'd suggest range between picayune stylistic stuff and pacing and flow. In other words, perfective rather than corrective stuff. No, I'm not going to tell you; editing is for December. Like sleep and my birthday.

Anywho, it looks good. I'd love to read more. Keep hammering, and spend those five free days wisely.

Ta,

KC

I think you've got a higher word count than I would if I had to deal with such a busy schedule on top of being sick at this point, so for that alone you are to be commended!

Your excerpt looks good - it raises a lot of questions about the world and characters which made me want to keep learning about them, which is exactly what good writing should do. What happened to the NaNo spirit of babbling insanity that's supposed to pervade everything we write this month? ;-)

Hey - one of my long-term, pie-in-the-sky goals is to have a publisher make the comment about my first drafts that Jim Baen did about David Drakes. The pertinent line was 'clean enough to eat off of'.

Just because I'm throwing words on the page as fast as I can doesn't mean they have to be misspellet, or have! poor, almost; Shatnerian: punctuation, or be IN ALLCAPS. Seriously. For me this month is as much about welding good writing habits in place as it is welding good time-management habits in place.

Remember, though. Editing is for December. Rewriting is for December. Sleep is for December. My birthday is for December. Bookstore gift certs are always appropriate gifts :-)

OK, I'm showing signs of not enough sleep. Off to give more exams.

Oh, I tend to make things as coherent as possible without getting caught up in editing or revision, so I was kind of joking about the babbling drafts.

You've got a December birthday too? Mine's two days after Christmas, which isn't exactly the most convenient time to have it... as a matter of fact, my parents still owe me a cake from last year. Maybe I can talk them into making it an end-of-NaNo cake....

As opposed to reading it just for the punctuation? ^_^

Thank you, I feel a little warm glow now that I will try to parlay into 1,000 words before I have to go to work. Novelist power, activate!

Seriously? That's so weird - my son's birthday is the 27th (mine's the 6th). My wife and I always make sure he has his own thing; growing up with a December birthday I got used to and fed up with 'combined' parties, presents, etc.

Form of; a bucket of water!

Wait, that's not right.

I was trying to think of a way to differentiate the prose from the characterization, or plot, or setting. There are authors who are good at all of it, and authors who are a master of one or two, but honestly the books I like reading the most are the ones with good prose.

You can do it blue!!!

Every once in awhile I remember that lil cheer that you made up a few years ago and debuted at the after-party.

EN-AY-EN-OH-dubbleyouareeye-MO!

I am way behind myself. I've been awake for four hours and number 2 thing to do on my list was write 1500 words. Have I done it yet? No.

I have total faith in yeh, blue. You've never failed to surprise me by finishing strong. No doubt you will!

In other news, Mudjumper is going to host a write-in at a bar on November 30 so we can write until midnight!! yeah!!!! So if worst comes to worst you can join us (at least virtually, if not in person)

Sorry this was an extremely procrastination-inspired post. i'll read your excerpt after I get my 1500 out of the way!

time for another misadventure

I'm reviving this thread because I still need a cheering section. After scrabbling my way to 20,000 words tonight, I will still have 30,000 left to get in seven days. That's 4,200 words and change PER DAY to bang out if I want to be able to hold my head high come Dec. 1. That works out to four and a half hours of solid writing per day, since I average 1,000 words per hour when the creative juices are flowing. And I can't afford to let the juices run dry for one single day.

My play is over! I have my health back! But I have some of the same problems dogging me and a few new ones to chew on. So I'm asking for more than praise this time. I need some stories of problems this month you thought you couldn't overcome but managed to vanquish anyway, whether due to chance or sheer determination. If I know you got through worse and kept on writing, the guilt of chickening out should pressure me into typing like crazy. So go ahead and brag a bit about triumphing over life's speed bumps or just your own procrastination, even if it's a small triumph. I need to borrow some fighting spirit.

I can understand your limp towards the finish line. On one occasion I sat in my college parking crying because the paper I had written sucked and I coudn't make myself turn it in. I ended up failing out of college that semester which would have been my last. I failed because I couldn't be perfect. Seems logical doesn't it? I did finally pull it together and finish my degree. My gracious professor gave me an incomplete when I never showed up again and when I finally turned in my papers she ended up giving me an "A" .

Don't be afraid to fail. Do the best you can, turn in what you have, and be proud of yourself. There are no grades here and you can't fail.

LOL if anyone can write 30K in a week, it's you blue! although I wouldn't put it past Gypsy either :)

Don't know if this is exactly inspirational, but I thought of this today so it might be somewhat relevant.

As I was going over some of those questions that potential employers "might" ask, one of them was "what have you been doing in your unemployment?" Since August, I have:

Started a non-profit organization; scrapbooked, journaled and digitally backed up photos from a trip I took to Honduras in 2004; reduced six years of clutter from three storage sheds to one 10x12 room; almost finished my Christmas cards; hosted six volunteer events with six different organizations that involved a total of 62 volunteers and impacted hundreds; taken two online "professional development" classes; put together four camping trips for the winter; taught a knitting class; and started applying to grad school.

AND, to that, i'm going to add "wrote a novel." I have realized that all these years, It's WORK that's keeping me from LIFE. Must ponder.

Keep going!!! I've got at least three more pages to write before bed. Fortunately (or unfortunately, as tomorrow morning may find me) I had two cups of coffee this evening. #wideawake!

time for another misadventure

I wrote over 10,000 words last week. I'm fairly certain I had walking pneumonia. Still all coughy.

You can do it! Go go go go go go!

There is a secret. Bring up your MS. Look at it. Write a word. Write another. Rinse and repeat until you hit 50K.

KK, taking my not-thinking-right self to bed now.

Ta,

KC

I just crossed the halfway mark tonight. 25,000+ words are in the bank! Thanks for sharing those messages of encouragement. The next five days are going to be a real test of will, so keep them coming if you can! (Especially you people who are already past 40k. You obviously have some wisdom to share.)

You can do it - just force yourself to keep going! Try sprints or word wars if you find yourself getting distracted. Or decide what the next close milestone that you're going to go for is, and offer yourself some kind of reward for it (a piece of chocolate, adding another x amount of money to a budget for something fun, allowing yourself a bit of time to do something you enjoy - just not too much time right now... I know I tend to get distracted easily if I don't set some kind of limits for certain activities).

You're past halfway - you can do this! And you need to add another silver circle in the pretty pattern you've got going on your profile! You can do this!

Sigh... I was really hoping to get the plot flowing after the halfway mark. The 30k mark is supposed to be where it all gets easier, right??

I have my reward chocolates lined up beside me, my tiara sitting on a table where I can see it clearly, and a bottle of wine I've promised myself I can crack open if I hit 35k tonight. And I'm still gagging on purple prose and meaningless minutiae even as I tell myself to write ANYTHING.

Seriously, there is something wrong with me when I try to write an action-packed scene with guns and knives and a brawl in a medical research facility and I end up maundering on about light filtering through a window in the background AAAGHHH.

Actually, it's 35K where everything is supposed to get easier, at least according to our illustrious founder...

Words are words. Keep pumping them out, even if they are embarrassing shades of violet; you can always cut them right back out when editing time comes around.

Your issue with going from an action-packed brawl to maundering on about light filtering through a window in the background made me chuckle, probably because I kind of have something of that issue myself. For one, action and fight scenes aren't exactly my forte (so I often end up cheating with them by using some sort of gaming system, which at least helps me get the basic idea of some sort of fight scene), and then when I'm not really sure what I want to happen next or how to get to the next thing I'll sometimes find ways to divert along side paths and delay going there, or to slow myself down so I don't get there so quickly. Sometimes I've found that if I go a little bit ahead and write part of a scene or two later, I can then go back and fill in and things fall into place much more easily than they were doing before. I suppose it's a bit like driving at night, which has always been a challenge for me. If I think of the whole journey at once, or just the part immediately in front of me, then I tend to get stressed out, whereas if I'm going along a familiar route and can break it down into "Okay, the next landmark is the really good bakery, and I'm almost there," then that helps me feel more comfortable, for whatever reason.

Maybe you even want to go and very vaguely sketch out a few scenes ahead, decide on the important things that are going to happen next, and then just go scene by scene. I find, for myself, it works well for me to have a general idea of where things are going, with a bit of room for me to be surprised by what happens next. Of course, I'm also someone who happens to be writing my novel as the journal of a character who will happily maunder on about this and that, but at least it's a good excuse for the maundering when it happens.

So yeah, I'm not sure if any of my rambling made much sense - but I'm sure you can do this, if you keep trying! You know you want that bottle of wine... and you know you want to wear that tiara!

Yeah, that's part of my challenge right now ... the plot is so foreign to me at this point that it's only the plot holes keeping the thing together. I'm giving my characters free rein and watching to see what they do. I just spent the last 500 words watching two of them work together to make a fire in a decayed old building in the middle of the night. I'm impressed at their resourcefulness, considering their lack of matches or much dry tinder. Did you know you can start a fire by prying apart a bullet casing and sparking the powder inside? Field & Stream says you can, and I'm willing to believe it.

I really thought I'd get my wordcount going by having them argue over different points of view, but they're too cold to argue. So I had to find a way to get them warmed up. Of course now they're too tired and hungry to talk. I imagine they'll fall asleep soon -- at least I can throw in some entertaining dreams now.

The only reason I haven't dredged up long descriptions for this scene is that it's taking place in near darkness and I can only think of so many ways to portray that without repeating myself. It's a good way to get those other senses going, though. I get a bit irritated at authors who never draw upon smells and touch to engage the reader's imagination.

That's my prompt for anyone who needs one, by the way: Write a sentence describing the smell in your present scene. Give everything the sniff test, no matter how strange or unpleasant it is! Bonus points if one of your characters then has a physical reaction to the smell, either positive or negative. Triple points if the smell dredges up a long, involved childhood memory...

Hey, you're only 2k behind me! How'd that happen?? I've been slacking!

Let's race! :) I'm working toward 6 or 7k today. I can't write much tomorrow, although I'll try to sneak in 1000 in the morning...Then I'll be putting in another 6 or 7K monday...all day... would love to be finished at the treehouse Monday night, but I have a feeling I'll be taking it home with me to push through midnight...!

time for another misadventure

The magic number for me was 33k. As soon as I hit it everything became smoother and so much easier. If not for the fact that I am probably the world's worst typist, I would have hit 50 by now.

I'm past 33k -- barely -- but today is not looking good for reaching 40k. I have to leave the house and don't know when I'll be back tonight. Maybe I can work out some plot points in my mind and slam them all out when I can get to my laptop again. Carry on without me, brave novelists! I shall return!

Actually, that's how I do most of my writing - plot points, key scenes, even particularly sharp bits of dialogue put themselves together when I'm at work, driving, what have you. By the time I'm home, I'm just typing them up, or putting in connective scenes.

Yesterday was a wash, since I drove out of town to spend the day with a friend who really needed me. But I just noticed that Chris Baty wrote slightly over 7,000 words on the 26th. Wow. It can be done.

Thus far today I've gotten 3,500 words written. I'm going to take a short break and then dive back in for 3,500 more. That will bring me past the 40k mark, and depending on how stoked I am at that point, I may be able to surge forward a bit more before midnight. Let's see if this works!!!

Just so you're aware - it IS possible to do a 10K word day. I did so in 2006 (my first win). Twice.

Of course, I NEEDED to, and got no sleep, and was sommat delusional by the end. Oddly enough, of all the sections of the book, that's the one that no one said needed editing.

For large last minute word counts, I recommend 5-hour energy shots to keep you from sleeping :D Except now my sleep schedule is screwed up >>;

It can be done! Go go go!

So here's how it is. I have 10k left to write and only 6.5 hours left in the month. I'm literally crying right now with stress and fatigue and depression. I'm going to do stream-of-consciousness and out-of-place dialogue and lists of things my characters have in their pockets and anything else I can think of. I hit my figurative wall last night and gave up on the whole thing twice. Even chocolate didn't help. But I picked it back up three times. I'm really going to try.

I'll be checking the South Jersey threads and my private message inbox every time I get another 1,000 words out, as my reward. Thank you guys for being my cheering section and believing in me. I know I would have given up already without your posts and messages.

I've been there, believe me, and it sucks! I've given up several times this month, to the point that I actually took down my NaNo wall paper on my desktop. But then I got back into it each time! So you can do it too!! The important thing to remember is IT DOES GET BETTER! (and that by tomorrow you don't have to do it anymore!) Your plan sounds good, keep with it! Just add all the little random things about your characters, or blog about them, or make a blog through them. Someone recommended writing your story to-do list, and then all your character's to-do lists. Pretend your room (or something else you can easily see) is one of your character's rooms and describe it IN DEEETAIL.

Also, may be considered cheating but it helped me get into writing faster: you could try listening to a song and writing the lyrics as you hear them. You'll get more words in no time because it's almost like a word war, except that you're typing a song, so you can be rather brain dead to do so. Though it does sound rather cheatish, so many pick songs your character might randomly burst out singing? *shrug* But it helped me!

Something else you could do, similar to stream of consciousness, would be pick a subject you can rant on hours about (for example, I can talk loads about my horse and all the fun and terrible times I've had training him) and rant about it through your characters in a setting in your story. Maybe your character really hates banana muffins; let her go on a giant rant, completely irrelevant to the story, about how the muffin industry should be taken down, burnt to the ground, flooded, then blown up for creating such diabolical things as banana muffins! (except I love banana-nut...)

Or, you could RP with a friend right now on MSN or something, you being one character and your friend being another, and then just have a long long long long chat, then copy and paste it. (time thingies included!)

That's all I got at the moment. YOU CAN DO IT!!! :D Remember that you've already dealt with giving up before, and you got yourself out of it each time! GO YOU! YOU ARE AWESOME! Keep going Blue! I'm not going to even wish you good luck, because you're so awesome you won't need it ;D

You can do it! Just write. Lots of short words, and have your characters repeat themselves a lot. Write little titles describing what happens in each section. Rename a character you use often so that he or she had a couple names and titles, and use "Find -> Replace" - you can do this! You're so close to winning! And I'm so impressed with your determination in how you've kept going even with the month you've had - you can do this!

I did it, but it wasn't pretty. I had to take out all the apostrophes and replace "and" with "as well as." Gulp.

EDIT: I had slightly over 50k, but I trimmed it down because it's a tradition for me that I stop on the finish line and refuse to budge ... lol. Seriously, though, those extra 200-some-odd words were ridiculous search-and-replace padding anyway.

BUT YOU DID IT! That's the important thing. As well as replacing all those "ands" with as well as will make for interesting reading if as well as when you decide to go back as well as look at/edit your manuscript.... :-)