Just made 20K with 10 minutes to spare. Actually made a bit more than that, as I was sitting at 19,900 at 11:00 and wrote a 400-word scene.
Switching to another progress gauge and going to bed.
Word Count: 20367
Tag: See Also: LiveJournal
Writing Weekend
Mostly random stuff this morning. Read some comics. Finished Callahan’s Cross-Time Saloon. Errands in the afternoon. Late lunch at Ruby’s, which always lends itself to not needing dinner that night. Weather went from warm and sunny to gloomy and cool during lunch.
Picked up writing early evening. My goal is to hit 20,000 words by the end of the weekend, which should put me on track (20K/50K = 12d/30d = 40%). Looks like I can make it.
Concluded that the progress gauge I’ve been using here is either using something other than time to determine the goal, or just plain b0rked. It went from 13,105 yesterday to 12,896 today. Maybe it’s based on average words/day or something.
It’s odd to be writing with the only goal being word count. But it’s also oddly liberating. That’s kind of gone down now, since I’ve been establishing a world and characters, and at the very least I have to keep things more or less consistent. I guess it’s the freedom to mess up. It doesn’t matter if what I write is crap. As long as I finish it, I can revise it as much as I want later.
I had a bit of conflict insert itself into the story today. Completely unintended, but the character was acting grumpy, and started explaining why. In such a way that’s going to make things complicated for a while.
One of the big problems I’ve been having since I started to see the overall shape is that the stuff I have the best handle on comes near the end of the story. I’m enough out of practice to not have a sense of how long it’ll take to get there, but I want to get a sense of where the characters are before I start writing too far ahead.
Word Count: 17415
Full quarter
Managed ~1600 words and passed the 25% mark in Nano. Which is probably silly to play up, since it’s so close to the 20% mark that I hit yesterday. Still, from 1/5 to 1/4. Next milestone at 1/3. Unfortunately to be on track I ought to hit it by the end of the day tomorrow, and I’ve got ~3500 to go. On the plus side, I’ve got a no-plans weekend to do some catching up. (Oddly enough, the progress gauge seems to think I’m ahead 17 words. I’m not sure how it came up with a goal of 13,105 words based on 9 or 10 days, when the ultimate goal is 50,000 in 30.)
Word Count: 13,122
NaNO Sleep
Writing 1666 words a day is hard. Writing 1800-2500 or more because you’ve fallen behind is harder. Throw in work, traffic, voting, food, and other plans, and it gets really hard.
The last time I got a good night’s sleep was Saturday. I missed my chance to write Sunday morning, and a trip to see a movie turned into an all-day event, so I didn’t get started until evening. I think I was up until 1:30. Monday evening was a marathon session, and I think I finished around midnight. Tuesday I didn’t get a chance to start until 11pm, and I was determined to get at least a few paragraphs down, which turned into a couple of pages. 12:30? 1:00?
It’s taking its toll.
Today I skipped my weekly trip to the comic store during lunch hour, because I knew I wouldn’t have time to read anything tonight. We were contemplating grabbing coffee on the way home, but eventually decided to skip the Flashback Feature showing of Dr. Strangelove and just put it on Netflix. Even though we were home, we still taped Lost as both of us went into writing mode.
I broke 10,000 words today, the 20% mark. And I added some more characters, which will help me figure out what’s actually going on in the middle of the story. I figured out where it’s going Sunday night, but how it gets there is still pretty nebulous. I managed to do some good character bits today that actually set up a scene I’d already written better than what I had before.
I’m not quite on track, but I’m getting there. I think I’ll take a cue from Girl Genius and describe it as Doom Level: Middling. Goal identified, but still determining course. Almost caught up with word count. Major sleep debt, but finally getting to bed before midnight.
Crap, I need to figure out what’s going on with the villain. So far I don’t know any more than the main characters do, and they don’t know much.
Word Count: 11471
How Crowded Could It Be?
Note to self: Stick with morning voting next time.
“Oh, it’s only a midterm election! How crowded could it be?” (Yes, that was me.)
Feh.
Katie and I arrived at the polling place at 6:30 PM. The people who got in line behind us decided to leave, have dinner, and come back. Of the two of us, she voted first. I walked out of the voting booth at 7:58 PM.
It wasn’t as bad as the last time we voted in the evening, which was either the 2003 recall election or the 2004 presidential election. That time we were still in line at 8:00, and they made the cut-off anyone who was in line by 8 PM. IIRC the local Starbucks had actually sent over free coffee for people waiting in line.
But it was a far cry from last November, when we arrived and only one person was in line ahead of us.
Nano
I’ve decided to break nearly a decade of writer’s block by joining NaNoWriMo. Technically I’ve written quite a bit — 250 posts on LiveJournal, 1000+ posts at K-Squared Ramblings, hundreds of articles about Flash comics, the Alternate Browser Alliance website, etc. But aside from some Literary Guild projects back in college, I can only think of two works of fiction that I’ve finished since 1996: one short story and one short-short story.
Part of the problem is just getting started. I’ll have an idea but decide it’s not worth writing about, or I won’t have any ideas at all. I started a couple of fanfics, but they petered out when I realized I had a setting, but no plot.
I still didn’t have any ideas for Nanowrimo. I figured I’d just start writing and see what happened. Maybe it’ll be total crap, maybe it’ll be 50,000 words that I can chop down to a decent 10,000-word story. I started a day late, but managed to get 1150 words last night. I’m still trying to nail down the genre, when/where it’s set, the main character’s background. I have no idea where it’s going. But it’s two pages, and I made myself write description and narration instead of just dialogue. (That’s always been my Achilles heel with writing — I tend to fall back on dialogue and end up with something that looks like a script in prose format.)
Word count: 1150
Maybe not as good a predictor as they think
Last week NPR ran a story on “Applebee’s America”, a book on the way politicians brand and sell themselves to the voting public. One thing they brought up was “microtargeting” or “lifetargeting.” The idea is that you can take a person’s lifestyle and determine which way they’re more likely to vote, then send targeted advertising to people who are most likely to be persuaded.
There’s a link to a quiz on the website. It decided I was solidly Republican. (Hey, I might vote for a Republican someday if they ever run a less reprehensible candidate for something. [Update 2024: they’ve gotten so much worse.]) It took flipping four of the twelve answers before it decided I might be a swing voter.
Either the scoring system is reversed, or they need a new quiz.