Although I did not participate in NaNoWriMo, I did start a new novel and write two and a half chapters this month. I’m pretty pleased with my stats, where I wrote every day, averaged more than an hour a day, and wrote at a pace that suggests I could write a novel a year.
WORDS WRITTEN: 8489
HOURS SPENT WRITING: 33.1
WORDS/HOUR: 256.5
As Murphy would have it, we’ve had heavy clouds and rain this week, so we weren’t able to look for Comet ISON. The clouds finally blew away this morning, so we braved the cold morning to see if we could spot the comet through the colors of the sunrise. We didn’t spot the comet, but we did see Saturn hovering above Mercury. It was quite striking, don’t you think?
To all those participating in National Novel Writing Month: good luck!
In spite of having a novel-length project ready to start, I will not be participating this year. This year is the first year I’ve tracked both words and hours, so I know that writing the 1700 words a day required for NaNo would be a full time job for me, and I already have a full time job [1]. Further, I know that I have never written that many words in a day, even when I was deeply involved in a project. So reaching the goal would require a radical change in my writing process, and it’s not a change that I either need or desire to make.
However, since it is National Novel Writing Month, I will be working on the novel-length project, plodding along at my 250 word/hour pace. I won’t be crossing the finish line with all the NaNo hares, but I hope to cross it eventually, turtle-style.
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[1] And I am very relieved that the government reopened so I could keep my job. If the government had stayed closed, I was planning on making NaNo my full time job and seeing how that worked out. I’m glad to not be doing that experiment.
I finished the first draft of the story I started last month and started editing it. I had hoped to be finished editing it by now; hopefully that will be done today.
WORDS WRITTEN: 2860
HOURS SPENT WRITING: 11.7
WORDS/HOUR: 244.4
I am very pleased that Goldfish Grimm’s Spicy Fiction Sushi has published a story of mine called “Have You Looked in a Mirror Lately?”. You can find it here:
http://www.goldfishgrimm.com/back-issues/issue-11-secrets-connections/looked-mirror-lately/
“Goldfish Grimm’s Spicy Fiction Sushi” is an awesome name for a magazine, don’t you think?
I hate it when this happens: My inner editor escaped from its box and started editing my current short work in progress … before my inner writer finished writing the darn thing.
Does this happen to anyone else?
I started a new short story, and the stats show it.
WORDS WRITTEN: 3735
HOURS SPENT WRITING: 13.3
WORDS/HOUR: 280.8
I recently realized in my “real job” that I need to write something up in detail before I write a summary of it. Even though in the recent case in point I knew all I was going to eventually need was the summary, I needed to go through the exercise of thinking through the whole thing.
To some extent, I have always done some version of that. For example, in five paragraph essays for school (back in the day), I liked to write the three body paragraphs to figure out what I was doing and *then* write the introduction/conclusion. I’ve done that for technical papers at work as well.
So it shouldn’t have surprised me when I realized I needed to do that in my stories, too. Having drunk from the “show don’t tell” Kool-Aid, I tend to try to describe step-by-step action to try to capture the visuals that I am seeing in my head. Unfortunately, this can generate some really, well, *boring* prose. Yes, seeing an acrobatic troupe build a human pyramid is cool, but describing each jump and flip to make it? Not so much.
So in the current short project, 173 visually awesome but boring-as-showing words have now been summarized in 23 action-packed narrative summary words. Much better.
I hate it when this happens: I was thinking about my current short project in the shower this morning, and I figured out how I was going to handle a particular issue. Now I can’t remember what that solution was.
Does this happen to anyone else?
I spent August working through the snowflake method to plan a novel. I am now somewhere between steps 5 and 6, which is to say that I’ve written a character synopsis for my main character the length of the plot synopsis in part 6 and several but not all of my one-page character summaries for the other characters. As such, I have written lots of words, but none that I can count towards word count. My plan, BTW, is to finish the character summaries, call steps 5 and 6 done, skip step 7, and go straight to step 8, listing the scenes in the novel. Then I will be ready to start writing it.
However, I had a short story idea come to me, so that may get written first.
Either way, I expect to generate some actual word count this month.
WORDS WRITTEN: 0
HOURS SPENT WRITING: 12.5
WORDS/HOUR: 0
Space&Aliens 