Unrelated - What I'm Doing Now

I guess it would help to make clear to myself & others that right now, I'm devoting most of my writing time to my TechSurvivor blog.

I'll be getting back to the novel soon enough. In the meantime, I hope you'll enjoy reading about why knitting might actually help make the most depressing day of the year (today) better...

Process - When Failure Is Success

I did not make the 50,000 mark. Much as I would love to say that the absence of blogging during the latter part of the month was due to writing furiously, that is only partly true.

Fortunately, I have not abandoned the novel. I figure this blog will help me stay on that path. I like where the novel is going. I like that I have written somehwere in the neighborhood of 22,000 words and that the less-than-50k output is the result of shifting priorities (November is a tough month for me all the way around - maybe I'll turn March into my own personal NaNo month) more than it is a matter of sluggish writing pace. It turns out, I can actually write quite a lot of material that (to my biased eye anyway) is reasonably readable, even in raw form. Imagine what I could do with an editor!

Anyway, some of the good news is that it is starting to seem like I finally have an entry point into this story, making it far more likely you'll start seeing some posts that start with "Novel - " instead of "Process - ". I still need to do some more organization and background work but that has progressed rather smoothly in parallel with the writing so far, so I see no reason I shouldn't continue in that vein.

Stay tuned; there will be more...

Process - The Promise of Week 3

I find myself hoping that week three really does deliver on its promise. I don't believe I am seriously behind and yet I know I am still behind at least a bit. I was able to crank out something like 1200 words during the mini-write-in last Friday but then Saturday was mostly a lost day, what with haircuts and shopping for dinner guests & having them over. Sunday was spent helping small person put the finishing touches on a presentation about acid rain.

The good news is that though I had only about three hours sleep last night I was able to get 600 words down before sleepiness and writer's block converged and put me out. I napped off and on with the laptop in my lap and the cats next to me. Finally, I woke up and was ready to keep going and now the word count is up above 1500. I forgot, though, to add up the totals. I promise I'll at least do that much later and perhaps that will give me incentive to write another 1000+ words to work on getting myself back out of my hole.

Daily Total - 1,529
Running Total - ~16,292
Average WPD - WAG is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000

Process - Write-In

I'm off now to the local library to meet up with another NaNo to write for a while. Hopefully that will help catch me up a bit more on my wordcount again. Taking time off yesterday to look after a miserable small person who had to have a bunch of teeth extracted resulted in a bit of a hit...

Process - Take It In Context

I finished up what I hope will be the last explicit scene in this novel. I had not ever really intended there to be any such thing at all but when it came right down to telling the story, it seemed more effective to go ahead with it.

The last one was the toughest because it sets the protagonist up for a serious fall and I wanted it to be at least somewhat plausible. It's okay for her to look a little stupid (she ends up feeling that way herself) but anything more than that erodes at any sympathy we might have for her as readers. Finding that balance took a fair amount of effort which will require additional effort later if I ever try to do anything with what I've written besides put it on a shelf somewhere. And therein may be the silver lining for writing something that's probably so bad it'll never be seen anywhere else.

In any case, so now I have a fair amount of writing that looks like I'm trying to be a romance novelist/soft port queen at this point and I'm finding myself somewhat embarrassed about that and a bit uncertain about what to do about it. The conclusion that I've come to is that perhaps the best thing to do is to wait to show any of those parts until I have more of the rest of it done so that they can be viewed in context with the overall story. It does mean more of a delay before I post any of what I've written (I did locate the diskette drive so have a reliable method of file transfer available to me now) but I think that's fair under the circumstances.


Daily Total - ~ 1,500
Running Total - ~ 12,963
Average WPD - 1,440