Whips and chains may break my bones...

This year, as part of my New Year's Resolutions, which aren't really new because I've been working at them since last year, I have resolved to finish at least one novel. I have handwritten over 340 pages, and now it's time to transcribe them.  All of them. From my delightful chicken scratch.

Because Rebecca Blain is a vile, conniving wench who is entirely too good at manipulation, I have decided to set an actual schedule for this. See, I don't do self-motivation well, but as it turns out, I rather enjoy beta reading her current WIP, and well, she's promised that if I don't meet my goals, I can't read anymore.

I've never done a self-imposed schedule, but I've never done an outline either, and I have one of those, and since I have exactly zero finished drafts on my computer, the way I've done it in the past is not going to work.

So, I'm expected to maintain a pace of 1,000 words per day transcribed, minimum. That would mean that I would have the entire 80,000 or so handwritten words I have by. Weekly, I'll need to write 7,000 words. My goal is 2k total by the end of the night; since I'm at 1700 right now, that won't be an issue.

By January 31, I will have at least 27,000 words.
By February 28 I will have at least 55,000 words.
By March 25, I will reach 80,000 words.

That gives my deadline for complete transcription at March 25th.

If I manage to finish by my youngest child's birthday, March 17th (St Patrick's Day) I will expect an extra reward from my slavedriver. I will leave the choice of reward up to her.

Using Scrivener's project statistics, I have set up my deadlines, and it's autocalculating things. This is part of how I will reach my new self-imposed schedule.

See, this is why I bought this program. Well, one among many things.

So, here we go. 80k or bust!

So what about NaNoWriMo 2012?

This year has kicked my butt in SO many ways. It's the busiest, most successful year that NaNoWriMo has ever had. I didn't lose, unlike last year, but I did spend every waking moment working and/or writing.  Usually both.

I hit a nasty little bout of depression towards the end of the month, and didn't write at all for days, but I pulled a nice little heroic win out of it.

This year was different for me. It's the first year I've been proud of winning in a while. Before, it's been kinda rote; I did it because I've been doing it, and I'm staff, so I'm supposed to do it. But this year felt different somehow. I was more motivated. Though I was participating as a rebel, and adding 50k to Heaven's Bounty (from 2008), it felt like a greater challenge. Writing 50k in a month is easy for me; I've done it half a dozen times, with a record of 10 days one year. So this was harder; it's a step towards completion, and ultimately, publication.

I'm even getting a winner's shirt this year! I'm suffering from a bit of carpal tunnel, so I've been wearing my brace a lot.

So how was the 2012 event for you? Harder? Easier? Your first time?

Flip flop

So I switched stories; I found myself at a bit of a wall on Spirit of the Hunt (the handwritten one) so I switched over to the sequel. It's a bit liberating to be able to just change stories when I get stuck, rather than being wedded to one and forced to keep writing on it.

I think that Spirit is stuck because I was writing past the ending; it was stuff I needed to write, I think, since it was important character development, but I don't know that it will end up being in the final piece.

It's fun to go back to the sequel; I love those characters so much. It has a bit of the feel of a YA novel, and I wonder if that's how I might market it. It might be a better first attempt than Spirit would! Who knows.

Gotta finish one before I can start thinking about what order I want to try and publish them in!

Tracking spreadsheet for #WIP500

Because I'm writing offline, I'm finding it difficult to keep up with my daily totals. I'm writing them down, sorta, in my notebook, but I've been bad about it. I'm marking which day is which, but I don't want to re-count each time.

So I made a simple spreadsheet on Google Docs. See, I love spreadsheets... I'm not GOOD at them, but I love them. Eventually, I hope to have progress charts, reports, all kinds of things to show off how I did month-to-month and such, but for now, it's just the basics. I have it tracking your best day, how many days you've entered a count for, average words per day, totals, and the percentage of the total you've got so far.

I also have it flagging days you wrote under 500 with red, and over 500 with green.

Here's the clean copy so you can download it for your own use if you'd like to. Feel free to redistribute, edit, do whatever to your own copy. :)

My personal progress (which is terribly inaccurate for the first 6 days, because I kinda guessed based on G+ posts and what my totals are on Cara's site) can be found here.

I plan to continue adding to it as I figure out how to make Docs display the data in a useful way. I like charts.

Good progress!

Last night I got into the zone. I hit a good place in the story, full of angst and drama, and blew the #WIP500 goal out of the water. The 4th, I wrote almost nothing. I was so tired I couldn't focus, and only ended up writing about 150 words... but yesterday? 1500. SMOKED the total. That's a good two-day buffer on my 365 day challenge.

This 500 a day goal is proving to be very motivating for me. I'm not limited to a new work. Which is what I think torpedoed my NaNo this year... I didn't want to write something new. I have too may good WIPs to start something new. Being able to write 500 words on anything has been awesome.

So I think I'm going to write some more, and see if I can't write my January 6 totals even higher. :)

Right now, my FMC is angsting over her lot in life, not wanting to be a vampire (boo hoo, existential crisis) and the MMC is about to tell her to grow up. And it's going to be fun.

Stop doing that!

Ready to tackle writerly things for the new year? Stop right there, and read this list. It's 25 things writers should stop doing, right fucking now. And these are things that are all over the NaNo forums, where people worry about this or that, anything to prevent themselves from actually writing.

I started #WIP500 last night. I hit right at 500 words, estimated, and finished before bed. The cool thing is I had a spot of inspiration, and thought of a spiffy plot twist that just might result in me being able to combine the two endings I'm battling in a way that's sensible and pleasing to me.

I wanted to write more today, but I've been so cold that my poor fingers couldn't hold a pen, and barely type. I spent most of the day snuggled under a sherpa throw and two cats, just trying to stay warm.

So what do you think... can I really write 500 words a day, every day?

Can I do it for the whole year?

I can... but will I?

#WIP500

Joining a new challenge for the new year. I seem to do better with concrete goals to aim for (even if I don't actually complete them totally. So in the interest of that, I've joined #WIP500... the goal being to write 500 words a day. Not at all a hard goal... I can church that out in less than 15 minutes if I try. It'll take longer handwriting, of course... but I think I can do this. I've got about four WIPs that I need to work on, so this is the perfect motivation to do that.

I'll also be tweeting about my progress (or lack thereof.)

Let's do this thing.

For personal reference: 126.

Progress and ruminations

I've been working steadily on Hacker Dragon. I'm up to 21,667 words as of this very moment. I feel like that's a truly respectable total, since this time last week, I only had about 13,000 or so. I'm finding it's hard to get back into Drakan's head; I'm not sure what the magic mix was when I first wrote her. She's there, I can *feel* her, but I haven't quite reconnected with her.

I'm pleased with the work. She's mellowed, some. I think it's me that's mellowed, truthfully. I think I was in a very turbulent time in my life then. It's no less turbulent now, but I'm coping better. I'm not in the grips of post-partum depression, though its lingering effects still hang in my mind like the unwanted cobwebs in my bedroom. I know they're there, I know I need to get the broom, but I can't quite bring myself to do it.

Such is the nature of depression, I suppose.

But I'm enjoying what I'm writing. It's not Great Literature or anything, and I'm not sure I will pursue traditional publication with this piece; it's leaning towards romance, although it may pull away into a respectable sci-fi piece by the time I'm done. If it does stay romantic, I may try Ellora's Cave, or maybe just plain self-publishing via ebook.

I have NOT given up traditional publishing for my other works; I just don't know if the world is ready for this one. :) I won't know until I'm finished, of course. I've got roughly a month before the CreateSpace deadline, and I think I'd like to print this one with it.

I don't know. This is a very experimental book, for me. It's outside of my comfort zone, it's different, and I don't think it has mainstream appeal, but I think it may very well find a very loyal audience in a certain niche.

Who knows, though, after I get the original version out, it may end up very different after it goes through editing.

I love writing. I love the mystery of it, the discovery. I'm a very visceral writer, I take a dream and I give it reality, and I enjoy learning where it leads. I've never been much of a planner.

And that, my friends, is my scattered brain dump for the day.

Picking up an old WIP

Mom cancelled on us, so I've got the whole day to myself. I've made two positive steps towards being actually productive.

1) Last night, I read over the piece I'm planning to continue. It doesn't suck, and although I think I need to back up and take the story in a different direction than it did from the last plot twist, I think I've got a good base, and some damn good characters to work with.
2) Just now, I opened Scrivener. I will follow this action by stopping to tweet about the action I just took, then make a blog post about it.
Hey, it's forward motion, right?

I think after that, I will move all of the text from the word doc I've got this saved on into Scrivener.

I've been trying to think of a new title, though. This piece is about a genetically enhanced computer geek who takes over a corporate network (think Shadowrun, but without most of the magical stuff.) just before another hostile organization takes over. This is literal hostility, including guns. She lets them take over, makes an arrangement with the leader of that organization, and is now playing cat-and-mouse with him. Romance ensues.

Quick bit of worldbuilding: Post apocalyptic thing, now humanity has a dual animal nature. Some are naturally more strong than others. Corporations rule the world (nah, I wasn't influenced by anything cyberpunk. I PROMISE.) Most people are regular animals of various sorts, some are myths. MC is a dragon, leader of organization is tiger (smilodon fatalis, to be exact.) It comes off less cheesy than it sounds, I promise.

Anyway, It's a sci-fantasy thing, heavier on the sci than the fantasy.

Current working title REALLY sucks: Hacker Dragon. Not the kind of thing I'd be proud to show off in public. So I have to figure out something different. I'd like this to be my CreateSpace submission, so I need a non-shitty title.

Now to figure one OUT. Any suggestions?

But I think I'll start working on my scrivener file first, so that I'm making more progress towards actually writing, rather than procrastinating with minutiae.

Unemployment means more writing time, right?

So I got laid off from my sweet, awesome job. This sucks for the finances, but you know something? This means LOTS of writing time. I've been carrying my little red notebook around, scribbling, and I've written probably around 20k in the past couple of weeks. I'm rather happy with that. At the very least, I write for an hour or two before bed. Today, I've spent most of the day with the notebook in my lap, writing a paragraph here and there between distractions (It's very hard to write with a toddler and a preschooler around.)

I've really begun honing my writing process. I do better without the distractions of computers and the internet when I'm getting my initial ideas down; so a little leather-bound notebook is the way to go for me. It just... feels right. It's how I learned to write, it's how I've always done it. The only thing that sucks is it makes my arthritis act up. To the universe: I know it seemed like a funny idea to give arthritis to a teenager, but that was WAY uncool. If it hurts this much now that I'm in my thirties, it's gonna suck when I'm all old and stuff.

My mother showed me a book one of her customers had handed her. It made me hurt for the author; it was clearly self published, too. A no-name publishing house, based locally. What makes me sad about these things is they sell themselves short; I scanned through the book, and her writing wasn't that bad. It could have stood a little professional editing, but overall, it seemed readable. She suffered from the terminal "said" disease (you know, the inability to use the word "said" in dialogue.) and there were some rambling bits. I was impressed with the quality.

It's never a good sign, though, when the author is giving away the books in convenience stores.

What bothered me more than anything wasn't the fact that this author published her own book, it's that she created her own "publishing company" that advertises its services to other authors, and that she didn't bother to get a professional to design her website. She didn't even get a separate URL for her publishing company... it's just her own name. "authorname.com", you know.

Here's something I'll tell anyone: If you're not a professional web designer? Don't do it yourself, and don't hire a friend who doesn't do it for a living. As with any business, using a professional makes all of the difference. As a web designer myself, I can promise... no you can't do it on your own. It's not something just anyone can do, and do well. There are elements of design that will show your lack of expertise. Do yourself a favor, and pay someone else. The investment will be worth it!

That reminds me... I REALLY need to start working on mine! After all, I'm officially a degreed web designer now... as of June!

Anyway, now that I've rambled on enough, I'll wrap it up, and I'll keep you updated on my progress. Heck... I think I'll break out the camera and take some pictures of my notebook for you.

Write Every Day

You hear this advice a lot. And up until now, I didn't think I was following it; after all, I went through a six month drought of zero fiction.

The thing is, I have been writing! I write every single day, sometimes thousands of words, just not on what I would consider fiction in any way. I write journal entries in my livejournal, posts on forums, emails in my duties as NaNoWriMo forums moderator... every day, my hands are on the keyboard, tippy-tapping away. I log many, many hours a week at the keyboard, writing.

So I'm already in the habit. Now I just have to turn a fraction of that energy to actually writing creatively!