NaNoWriMo success!

This afternoon I put the final words together to put my NaNoWriMo over the top. At 50,133 words, it clocks in as a winner! There's still a bit more to write to wrap up the ending and make the draft truly done, but it's nice to be able to mark this one as over the line.

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Gone again

I'm off on a trip to Prague as of this afternoon. Between now and then, I have a ton of things to do, none of which include writing fiction or blogs. Since I'm sitting at 43K for #NaNoWriMo as of this morning, I'll have to abandon my plan of finishing before I leave town. Fortunately, I'll have lots of time in airports and buckled into a seat in coach to keep writing.

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Taking a break

No fiction written yesterday, NaNoWriMo or otherwise. As of right now, I'm still at 38,053. Many things were vying for my attention yesterday; many things vie for my attention today. NaNoWriMo is a deadline, but there are other, more important deadlines snapping at my heels.

Fortunately, since I took a break last night, I was able to lay aside all (or at least most) of my burdens, mental and physical. An evening off, with an early-ish bedtime has eased away a big chunk of my exhaustion. With luck, dedication, and plenty of coffee, I might get done today all the things that need to get done today.

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Help keep the words flowing.

Withdrawal from the world

Coming into Week 3 of NaNoWriMo, I'm at 32,500 words. Progress is steady, which is a pretty good feeling. If I get a solid push, I might be able to finish up this week, which would make my schedule for next week MUCH more pleasant. Alas, my optimism is counterbalanced by the knowledge that the next bit will be harder to write.

All of this writing means that I've not been blogging or hanging out on twitter much. It's not that great of a loss to the communal life of the mind, I know, but it's nonetheless a mental dislocation for me. Can't be helped, but I thought I'd mention it.

In the dark hours of the soul, I question whether the book I'm writing will ever see the light of day, or if it even should. That makes the ROI calculation klunk hard on the "don't bother" side of the ledger. This is all the more true since it's going to need heroic amounts of editing. That's not only to make it a more coherent, compelling narrative, but so that I won't open myself up to slander charges. Too many real people and real events are in it for me to carry it off without substantial camouflage.

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Help keep the words flowing.

Finding time to blog

During NaNoWriMo, my time for blogging is much diminished. However, odd moments like this one can be used for it. In this case, I'm blogging via email.

Most platforms support it. You have to approve a contributor (in this case, myself), then allow that email address to send posts in directly. Such posts have an immediacy that other posts lack; they're more like personal status updates than topical thought pieces or essays.

Do you write blog posts by email? Would you if you could?


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Follow me and find me around the web:
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My books (click the cover for more info):
  


Nothing to report except self-loathing

My NaNoWriMo is at 17,823 words. The big start I had has given me the cushion to withstand a few slow days. I'm still on track to hit 50,000 by the end of the month, but I'm behind the pace I wanted to be setting. I'll be traveling during the last week of November, with uncertain opportunities to write. More importantly, I don't know what my connectivity will be, so I need to get NaNoWriMo finished well before the end of the month.

Here in Week Two, I am, as usual, convinced that this book is the dumbest waste of time and effort I've ever undertaken. My inadequacies as a storyteller are revealed more plainly with every dreary thousand words I fling onto the page. The manifest truth is that I was never meant to be a novelist. The searing, brutal, reality of this is inescapable.

This isn't about me. For the good of society, I should a) stop writing, and b) burn everything I've written up to this point, lest some unsuspecting innocent happen to come across it. I'm committing a crime against humanity, creating a weapon of mass destruction. This book is a bucket of powdered polonium, a mylar balloon filled with uranium hexafluoride, a rack of leaky vials of the Zero Hour Plague. This book I'm writing is the fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, the one God loved the world too much to set free.

And I'm behind schedule on it.

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#NaNoWriMo, Day 6: 10K+

Broke 10K yesterday. This keeps me slightly ahead of the standard pace, which is where I need to be. I'll note that, on re-reading yesterday's last writing, I realized this morning that my MC was "shocked" twice in the same paragraph. Will I fix this repetition?

No I will not! That's not how NaNoWriMo works! If I get wrapped up in editing one paragraph, I'll want to edit the whole damned 10K, and there's no time for that. Believe me, I know - I wrote it.

However, I need a little mental break to cleanse the neurons. As today is Wednesday, I'll give you a little poem, based on today's three words for Three Word Wednesday: amplify, criticize, moan

Writing can amplify fear,
A moan of self-doubt looming near;
But to win NaNo's prize,
I won't criticize.
Forge ahead and put it in gear!

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Blogging during NaNoWriMo

It should be pretty clear by now that my take on blogging during NaNoWriMo is that I won't be, much.

Yesterday's writing took me up to 9400. I'm ahead of the standard pace, but I don't want to allow that lead to be eroded. Since I have another thing I need to throw some words at today, so I'm going to be VERY busy over lunch.

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More testing

I'm semi-consoled by the thought that no one is reading any of these anyway.

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#NaNoWriMo: voice dictation

Day 2. Logged 4122 words in yesterday's opener. I think that's a record for me.

Today, I have a big block of time where I'll be on the sidelines of a soccer practice & game. In the past, I've taken my laptop to type during the slow bits (which make up 95% of any soccer game), but have since been told that this is not acceptable.

Therefore, I'm going to try voice dictation with my phone. Plenty of people talk on phones on the sidelines without being scorned, shunned or suffering social approbation. Granted, not many of them will be doing it with a bluetooth gaming headset complete with boom mic, but I'm willing to look cutting edge. The fidelity of voice recognition drops from "not great" to "lousy" outdoors if you don't use a microphone of some kind - too much wind and ambient sound.

I expect that the quality of prose today will be marginal, but that's OK. Better to log a bunch of strange, semi-coherent words than to log none at all. I know the next five plot points, so I can keep talking as long as I need to.

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Help keep the words flowing.

NaNoWriMo, Day 1

Wrote 240 words before coffee. Power went out in high winds. Have since written another 1200 at another location.

Hoping to do 3000 today.

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Help keep the words flowing.