Accountability Wednesdays: Week 45

Ladies and gentlement, we are a week and a half into National Novel Writing Month, and I am exhibiting signs of writing insanity and breakdown! I am getting constant comments from coworkers on how I can possibly write so much by hand and not be in horrible pain. And then, on “Double Up” day (when you are encouraged to double your word count for the day), I wrote so much that I genuinely was in a great deal of pain (luckily it felt better by the next morning). Today my pen started to act up, and upon examination I had run it completely dry…the same pen that I had pulled fresh from the pack less than five days prior! And now I’m getting into the giddy multiple-personality stage of the game, wherein one voice is screaming at me about how horrible the story is, and the other is screaming that editing is for December. My GOD, do I love NaNoWriMo!

But I digress. Let’s get this accountability nonsense out of the way, shall we?

Goal #1. Lose ten pounds and become healthier overall.

Let’s not mince words here, people. This goal means nothing to me at the moment. How can I think about weight loss when I’m trying to HANDwrite almost 2000 words per day (whilst simultaneously working 12 hours a day)? I can’t, that’s how! Then again, all this writing has been distracting me from eating maybe there’s something to be had there…

Anyway, the real important thing is that the meds my doctor gave me seem to be helping quite a bit. There’s still an anxiousness factor that I can’t seem to get past, but hopefully as time goes on and I have fewer issues, the anxiousness will abate. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Goal #2: Be more active on social media, and work harder on my author platform.

Man, I have been ALL over Twitter this week. I’m just sayin’. Mostly that’s been because I’ve been hanging out and chatting with the #NaNoWriMo crowd, but that’s all good. It’s been keeping me (somewhat) sane through all the writing sprints.

In future news, I have my first ever Influenster Vox Box waiting for me when I get home next week, and I should also have my second ever BzzAgent campaign box waiting for me by then as well, so look forward to some fun! The Vox Box has a game for my daughter to play, so that should be tons of fun!

Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.

Nope, still not tired of reporting the completion of this goal. Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

On an unrelated note, buy my book! 😀

Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.

Obviously I’ve gone a little wacky this week, and it’s mostly the symptom of this goal, exaccerbated by NaNoWriMo. I have been writing like the wind, killing my wrist, and putting together a manuscript that I really hope I will be able to make something off in the months following NaNoWriMo. If I were able to write by laptop (since I’m out at work I am severely limited in what I can accomplish) I would probably have twice the word count, but I am happy to report that as of your reading this I have already written 18,598 words for NaNoWriMo so far. Now, not all of those words were this week, but if you tack on the words I wrote for recent blog posts it makes this week’s total 16,723. And remember, the overwhelming majority of that was BY HAND. I’m going to be crippled by the time I get home to my laptop, but I’ll have one hell of a notebook to bring with me.

And with that all said, I need to lay my head down for a moment and “rest my eyes”. If you hear snoring, don’t worry, it’s just, um…the gears in my head turning. Yeah, let’s go with that.

Camping while there’s still snow on the ground…yikes!

This special weekend edition post of No Page Left Blank is brought to you by Camp NaNoWriMo, in which I will be participating for the first time this year.

I’ve mentioned National Novel Writing Month before; for those who have never heard, it’s a challenge to all writers across the globe to write a 50,000 word novel entirely within the month of November. The challenge is run by a group of wonderful peoplel at the Office of Light and Letters, and participating (which is free!) grants you access to a community full of writers of all ages, enthnicities, religious groups, skill levels, and whatever other group designations you can think of. It’s a wonderful challenge that has really helped thousands upon thousands of people to finally get that novel out of their head and down on paper (or computer screen). The community aspect is so supportive and helpful, and there are lots of fun little distractions on the website as well. There are even in-real-life meetings organized by Municiple Liasons (or whoever takes up the task) where writers can meet each other and have write-in events. All in all, it’s just a great and fun event that I’ve participated in several years in a row now.

Camp NaNoWriMo is a similar event that is also hosted by the Office of Letters and Light twice a year. It’s like NaNoWriMo, but a little less structured, a little more freebase, and a little more casual. This year they’ve pleased many people by making the word count goal variable. If you want to participate but don’t think you have a chance of hitting a goal of 50,000, you can tailor your goal to suit yourself. If you think you’re a superstar and you can double, triple, or quadruple that goal, then that’s what you can do!

I’ve chosen to participate in Camp NaNoWriMo this year because of the motivational advantage. NaNoWriMo always revs me up to write as much as I possibly can because I love the challenge of it, and that’s something I sorely need these days. While I have been writing quite a lot since my Wildly Improbable Goals post, my enthusiasm has been waning. I’ve been unmotivated to the max, and have been finding myself struggling to get through each sentence. I hope to banish these lethargic feelings by taking up the challenge that starts tomorrow on April 1st.

I don’t think I have it in me to get through 50,000 words, considering my work schedule and how active my daughter is getting, but I don’t think it will be pushing it to give myself a word count goal of 30,000 for April. That’s slightly less than 1000 words a day, which I did with some amount of success back when I first started this blog. Can I do it again for one month? I think so. I hope so. We’ll see!

If anyone is brave enough to take up the challenge with me, visit the website ASAP! The challenge starts tomorrow, people! Seize the day!!

Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

70. Writing an ugly draft vs editing as you write.

The people behind National Novel Writing Month would have a field day with this one.

There are a lot of arguments for both sides of this conflict, but mostly it comes down to personal preference. Most writers I know tend to edit as they write because silencing your internal editor can be a herculean feat that hardly feels worth it. Then again, there are plenty of writers out there who subscribe to the NaNoWriMo method, which is basically “worry about quantity now, quality later”. I’ve also been told by fellow writers that there’s a specific way you should go about writing a novel: planning, ugly first draft, revised second draft, any number of further revised drafts until your story plays out exactly as you want it to, and final editing. I don’t know about you, but just looking at that system makes me want to gather up everything I’ve ever written and sacrifice it to the god of bonfires.

Like I said, it mostly comes down to preference. Some people can follow steps like the ones above and be perfectly happy and content. Other people completely lose the ability to move on with the story if their internal editor is screaming at them to go back and change things. Additionally, some people can revise their work a hundred times and still find stuff they want/need to change, while others manage to hit the bulls-eye with the first shot and just have to worry about editing. It all really depends on what kind of writer you are.

As for myself? I’m still working on exactly what kind of writer I am. When I was younger I could never finish anything I wrote because I would regularly find major issues with my plot or decide that I wanted to make a significant change, and instead of dealing with it as I continued to write, I would start the damn thing over from scratch. In fact, my current work in progress is a story that I’ve completely rewritten from scratch no fewer than six times over the years. I’ve never reached the end. In fact, until about a month ago I’d never even reached the middle. My internal editor is just that powerful…she is a cruel witch who should be burned for her crimes.

Where was I?

Oh yeah. So as I was saying, my default setting seems to be edit-as-you-go, but as I’ve just described that’s not always a good thing for me. What really showed me the error of my ways was when I participated in my first National Novel Writing Month. I really wanted to reach that 50,000 word goal, and I knew that my current habits would not allow for that, so for one month I let myself just write. No matter how many mistakes I made or how awful some sentences sounded, I just forced myself to keep writing. Guess what happened? No, I didn’t finish my story. But I wrote 50,000+ words toward it, which was way better than I’d ever done before.

So clearly adopting the “ugly first draft” method was good for me, but even after several more NaNoWriMo’s I determined that it wasn’t something I could strictly adhere to. These blog posts are a great example. I edit these posts as I go, and it works just fine for me. Maybe the wording isn’t always as good, my thought process as organized as it might be if I were to draft my post first and then revise it, but I’m happy with what I produce. Alternatively, I continue to force myself to (mostly) ignore my internal editor (as she screams at me from her burning stake) while I’m writing fiction because NaNoWriMo has taught me that its more important to get the full story written than to make that one chapter absolutely perfect the first time around.

So I guess the short answer is that I do ugly first drafts and I edit as I go. In this, as with many things, I am a rebel. Sexy, huh? Yeah…you know it.

Who Needs Sleep?

Didn’t I promise an update after my all-day traveling-across-the-country write-a-thon. I think I did. What happened to that?

What happened to that is that my days have become so jam-packed with work and writing that I haven’t been able to find the flippin’ time! Oh NaNo, how I love/loathe you.

So here’s the update:

– During my write-a-thon on Tuesday I wrote 1162 words while waiting in the Halifax Airport, 828 words during the flight from Halifax to Toronto, 3728 words on the flight from Toronto to Calgary, and 2111 words while riding in the bus on the way to camp, for a grand total of 7829 words in one day. Woo! That would have felt twice as good had I not been more than 7000 words behind at the time, thus all that effort was just to break even. o.O

– I am currently just managing to reach my word count goal every day. Reasonable, though I was really hoping to get ahead at some point so I can relax a little. Either way, the NaNo goal for the 9th of November is 15000 words and I just hit 15065.

And now, because I’m so nice, here’s a quick excerpt from what I’ve written so far. It’s unrefined, of course, because editing is for December, dammit. 🙂

“What is your name?” Tori asked. Her voice was wavering, but if the other noticed he didn’t acknowledge.

“Jacob,” he replied quickly. “Jacob Ravendale.”

“Jacob,” Tori echoed as she pulled herself to her feet. “I have a very important question for you, Jacob, and I need you to answer honestly and quickly, okay?” She set Jacob with a look that accepted no argument. He nodded. Tori raised her arm, and with one finger outstretched she pointed directly at the rising sun peaking up over the trees. With her voice continuing to betray her emotions with every word, she asked her question: “Which direction is that?”

Jacob looked confused and unsure at first, but when he saw the look on her face he sputtered out his answer quickly. “That’s West…your majesty.”

“West,” Tori whispered, her arm dropping. “The sun rises in the West.”

Jacob blinked several times. “O-of course?”

That was when Tori burst into laughter. It was not a laughter full of humor or amusement. It was a laughter filled with madness. Jacob stared nervously and took a step back as she cried out to the sky, looking for all the world like someone who had just lost the last bit of their mind.

Need for Speed

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

27. How to speed up your writing process

First of all, I would suggest that you go check out the National Novel Writing Month website. NaNoWriMo, as it is more commonly known, officially happens in November, but they have other events throughout the year now that are similar and can be very helpful. The original, happens-in-November event is a challenge to write 50,000 words in one month. Thousands of people participate, so there is a lot of support, and the overwhelming motivation of it all can be just what a person needs to really sit down and write.

Aside from that, I think a good rule of thumb to speed up your writing is to choose a personal goal number and write that much every day, no matter what, even if what you end up writing is utter crap. Writing, like many other things, is something you just have to do. The more you write, the more you will write, and the better your writing will become. And even if everything you write isn’t absolutely perfect on the first run, getting words to paper is the most important step…you can fix it all up and make it sound pretty later! This is how I finally got Nowhere to Hide, my zombie apocalypse novel, written…I dedicated myself to writing 1000 words no matter what, and I found myself determined not to break the streak once I had it going. Some people might not have the time to squeeze that much writing into every day, but writing anything is better than writing nothing, and eventually all those anythings add up into something. 🙂

Hey! When did that happen?

Those who have been paying attention know that I’ve been pre-writing posts and scheduling them to pop up on the days while I’m working out West, to ensure that posts are made even if the camp internet is so awful that I can’t even load Google (i.e. always). This system is great for a number of reasons, but there’s one tiny little thing I’ve noticed…just an eetsy little thing that niggles at me. See, when writing an entry and posting it immediately, a little WordPress sidebar pops up with a progress bar on it that shows how many posts you’ve made. It’s nothing special, but it sorta urges you on by saying things like, “You’ve written 50 posts! Your next goal is 55!” or something like that. When scheduling posts in advance, you don’t get to see that little progress bar. Your post is written beforehand and pops up automatically at the time you’ve set it for, so you don’t get to see whether or not you’ve hit a goal.

Why does this matter to me at all? Well, basically, it matters to me because without it I’ve completely lost track of how many posts I’ve made. And it turns out that sometime during my work rotation, about halfway through my first batch of 101 Blog Ideas posts, I hit 100 posts. I missed it completely, and now I’m actually at 108.

Okay, so it’s not the end of the world or anything, but I am a little pouty that I missed it. Milestones are fun and motivational to me. It’s why I enjoy writing drabbles, trying to squeeze that little story into exactly 100 words. It’s why I keep going back to NaNoWriMo to see if I can pluck out another 50000 words in a month. And it’s part of what keeps me writing blog entries…so that I can say “Ooh! I’ve hit a milestone! Let’s see if I can hit another!” And really, come on…100 posts is kinda a big deal, right? Right?

So I guess what I’m trying to get at here is, someone warn me the next time I’m getting close to an important milestone!! lol