Well. I'll keep going....

   There is next to no chance I will make my goal this November.  I'm not surprised.  November is a lousy month for me to try and set goals.  I get so stupid.  I have no idea how the 3 Day contest is a thing I can do, but to do less than half again as many words over 10 times the number of days continues to defeat me.
 
   It's served its purpose, anyhow.  I've been trying to keep super busy, and I'm certainly doing that.

   I was head down yesterday for six hours, and I wrote scarcely 1000 words.  I've been editing the book as I go, and that has turned out to be MUCH more time consuming than I thought.

  I don't mean to blow my own horn here, but my plotting, at least for the first two-thirds of the 3 Day book has turned out to be a lot tighter than I thought.  it's not easy to wedge new scenes in. 

  This has been a weird book for me.  During the 3-Day, one of the characters did something unexpected that caused me to pitch the whole outline.  This weekend I'd just gotten to the place I intended to add about 10,000 words of new material   I did add one scene, and as a result of what happened in that one scene, My protagonist felt too guilty to keep playing undercover, and decided to fuck off back to Los Angeles almost as quickly as he did originally.

 I'm now a bit unsure how I'll expand this book to a useful length, though I know some of the rushed shit is coming up, and I can expand that.  I don't think I'll be adding 50,000 word to the total anymore.  I just hope I can get it to a publishable length.

In addition to revising the 3 Day, I've been writing a comic novella based on the presidency of David Hasselhoff.  I don't know why, but it writes itself, and I think it's strong.

So I'm gonna keep writing, but I'm under no delusions that I'll finish my 50k.

There's no shame in it.  I should have known better than to revise rather than just do something new.

The truth is, though, I've got no shortage of first drafts that need polishing right now.  It's probably for the best I work on some of those for a while.

And the rest of you?

Day 10

   Well.  This isn't going at all well.

Day 7

Okay, so I wrote a whole new scene.  The first of two that are coming on in short order.  That went quickly, and well.

Now I have some revision of existing material to wrestle with.  I'm going to try and keep at it for an hour or so longer.

Tomorrow is game night so I expect I'll be going into the long weekend with a deficit of about 3000 words.

I am confident I can catch up.  A lot of what's to come now is new scenes rather than revision, and those go quickly.

One thing is that I've discovered I am actually adding more words to the overall manuscript than I thought I had.  As I go, I expand things, but I've also cut pieces of the manuscript, and I was worried I was cutting enough that I was impeding progress.

The 3 day version of the book was 30,942 words. I've added 8, 226 words to the overall length of the manuscript.  That's better than I'd hoped.  Another excision is coming up pretty quick though.

I expect that I will, if I stay on pace, turn it into a real full length book, though.  here's hoping.

Day 6

   Mood of the day:  frustrated.

    This is infuriating.  I am finally at the place in the book where I will be writing essentially new material.  It has taken me SO long to get here, and I've moved at a snail's pace.  I'm pissed off at myself for not working the first three days.

   I'm still confident that I'll catch up this weekend, now that I'm in the new material stage.

   Here's hoping.  Right now I'm just frustrated and pissed off at how hard this expansion shit is.

   I'd have been better off with a new story.. but in the long run, I know this was best.

Day 5

Okay, so, I'm nearly at the part of the novel that broke me during the 3 Day Novel Contest.  I'm not looking forward to "living" through it again.

It's been a very unsatisfying day of work.  I've been making minor changes and expansions to the existing text, rather than doing any major new pieces.  The changes are, I think, for the better, and I'm not BORED exactly, but my brain is whining at me.  "I wrote this book already, give me a new toy," it keeps saying.

I just need to be patient.  I'm two longish chapters away from writing a whole huge piece of the novel that plain didn't exist before.  It's a section I'm looking forward to.  I think it will make Will's anger feel a little more earned.

I'm still behind schedule, but I think I can catch up on the long weekend coming up.

Even with my slight lag in word count, I'm still doing better on NaNoWriMo than I ever have.  That's not saying much, of course.

Late evening

  My challenge right now is figuring out a fair word count.  I am now past new material, and to the place where I'm expanding and revising existing stuff.

Because I've written a new beginning, a lot of expository stuff could be removed from the chapter I'm working on, and that's mad it a little tricky.  As I go on, I'll simply be able to compare the old version of a chapter to the new version, and see how many words I've added, and that'll be close to fair as an idea of my new word count.

That doesn't work here, because I had to cut SO much stuff from this chapter that it would still wind up being a net loss even with the stuff I added.  So, I've been pasting new sections into a document to count the words.  All I can do to be fair.

I think I'm probably at a point now where I've got a net increase in words for the full manuscript, even after cutting the entire first chapter wholesale.  After I've worked my way through the rest of this chapter, I'll do a compile and see how it's going on that front.

By the end of this week, I expect I'll be at a place with this book where I'll be doing about 10-15,000 words of brand new material in a row, at minimum.

Expanding a novel is a lot harder than cutting it back.  I knew this to be true going in, of course.

I don't even know HOW I verify my word count with nanowrimo.org.  But I guess, even if I don't I will know what I'm doing.

Okay.  I'm gonna do one more piece here.  Theoretically, I could get caught up completely if I did another 1558 words before bed.  I think, instead, I'll spread that out over a couple of nights.

It's been a fruitful day, though.  Absolutely.

   Addendum from about a half an hour later:  I did the compile after going through the rest of this chapter and not wanting to change much of anything.  I have discovered that I wrote 5109 words today, with a net gain to my manuscript of 3704 words.

I can sleep on that okay.

ceNoWriMo

Since I did some media interviews about how awesome NaNoWriMo is, I figured I should probably give it another whirl. So I'm whirling. A little. Please send liquor.

Taking a break now

  I've done 3,827 words this afternoon, and I'm getting a bit hungry.  I'm thinking I'll have some supper, and maybe watch a move or something before I get back to it.  I'd love to do another 1500 or so today, but I have some thinking to do now about my next steps.  It might be better for me to let it sit for awhile.

  I think it's a far stronger beginning now.  I worry that it lacks the urgency of the 3-day, though.

  The thing about the 3-Day novel, see, is that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it IS a page turner.

  I'd like to keep that page turner feeling.  It's easy to achieve during the three day, because you have NO choice but a breakneck pace.

  I'd like to think Will comes off rather as rather more likeable in this draft so far.  I guess I'll see.

  If there are any non Canadians out there, do you know who Bruno Gerussi is?

  I think the first line of the book is great if you do, and maybe doesn't work if you don't.

Finally working

I'm using new writing software these days.  It's called Scrivener, and you should look it up.  It's a really interesting approach for a word processor.  It's designed for project compilation.  Once you've finished a draft, you export to Word or whatever you use for the final gussy up.

It's ideal for a project like mine.  I can keep all the old chapters attached to the project, in multiple revisions, and add and insert the new ones.  Each chapter or section is kept as kind of it's own document until you choose to compile it. 

I've just finished extensively re-writing my opening, based on the last attempt I had to get this going.

Now I'm going to lay new ground with a much expanded version of the second chapter from the 3-day manuscript.

It's going to be a weird process of expanding existing material to flesh it out, and adding entirely new chapters, so tracking my word count is going to be an interesting proposition.  I guess, though, that the whole point of this exercise is to just be productive, and I reckon I'll be doing that.

I've had zero desire to work this last few days, and too many shiny distractions.

Now it's time to buckle down and catch up.

If I write 1,772 words a day from here on out, I'm golden.

That's attainable.

How are the rest of you doing?

Busy weekend ahead

   I skived off for the evening, having had a more than moderately stressful work day today, and as I have to get up and go in for a training session tomorrow.

   I lounged on a couch and dozed with three dogs.

   Honestly, I have no complaints.

   Sunday, I'll make a push to catch up.  I have faith in my ability to do so.

  More later

Happy Fun Times!

When I consider the 2500 words that I have written so far, I am filled with rage and self-loathing.  I hate my solo fiction writing.  In collaborative writing, I know the established setting: I can see it in my mind, and I know that whoever I’m writing with can see it too.  I know who my audience is.  Most of all, I can feed off of their passion, and their ideas.

Writing alone feels a lot like eating alone, except that I don’t have to do it to live, and it isn’t delicious.

I do not intend to reread any of what I have written until I finish my first draft or give up on this project entirely.  I don’t need the discouragement.

Which brings me to something else I’m not enjoying about this process: it feels like being back in school.  Not the blowing off class to get drunk in the Uni bar and yell at my compatriots about matters of import part, or the passionate class discussions part, or the bouncing ideas off of enthusiastic professors part.  No, it feels like the part of school where you’re enslaved by it, where your every waking moment is consumed with the guilt of not working, where your time belongs to a project and not to you.

Interestingly, however, as much as I’m despising this process, I know that I’m going to be drawn back to it.  Last night, I kept being reminded of how much I disliked what I was writing and, yet, by the time a couple of hours had gone by it became increasingly difficult to put my laptop down.  I kept wanting to write just a few more sentences, finish the paragraph, finish the scene.  I’m not sure where this addiction to trash production comes from, but I guess I’d better use it while it’s there.

Update: At least I can post on this blog in red font and it looks AWESOME.

Rilla!

   Rilla has joined us here, and will, one hopes, post on her progress as the month goes on.

   I'm hoping to seduce yet more people to this dingy corner of the web.

Catching up

   I decided to have fun with friends yesterday, so I'll be catching up later today on the actual work of writing.  I get to write a new opening to my book.  This pleases me, as the current one is weak and stupid.

   It also means, probably no net GAIN in words for the first two days, but new words that DO count for the event purposes, so that's good.

   Sacha has a different challenge.  He's starting from scratch, and hopefully he'll let us know how it's going for him.