28K Words Later

Note: Thanks to Andy for the title.

Ridiculously, I left myself in a position this year in NaNoWriMo where I needed to write 17,000 words on the final day.

Fortunately for me, I've got a few extra vacation days I have to burn before the year ends, and today was the perfect day because there was no way I was going to be able to write that much if I went into work.

With one hour to spare, I reached 50,093 words.

The problem came about fifteen minutes before that though when I reached about 49,700 words.

I had actually finished the entire story, and I was 300 words short.

It was my first crack at a children's/young adult novel, so I knew it would be shorter than past attempts, but I cursed my ill luck at falling just under the mark. I had to pad it somehow with at least 300 words of filler to reach the finish line.

The obvious solution to this, of course, was a zombie attack.

Please enjoy the last few hundred words of my novel. They will not be included in any draft after tonight. Please keep in mind that I have been writing for awhile and I'm frankly stunned I am not weeping blood from staring at this screen all day.

Some context - the story is about an immigrant family from Germany. One of the characters is named Franz, and he lives on a horseradish farm. That should really be all you need. None of this is about to make any sense anyway.

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Franz walked over the crest of a hill. The world was his to explore now, and he had been traveling for many days.

Never could he have anticipated what he would see on his first trip off the farm to another town.

“Hello there,” he shouted. It looked a nice town and the people approaching seemed like normal, good-hearted folk.

Until Franz realized that one of them was gnawing on a human arm.

“S&*%,” Franz muttered. “I knew it would come to this sooner or later.”

Zombies.

Franz pulled out his 12 gauge. With a click-clack he cocked it.

“Time to do some horseradish farming, m%th$rf&#@ers. And by ‘horseradish farming’, I mean zombie killing.”

Franz charged down the hill, the battle cry of “JIBBLY JIBBLY” spewing from his lips.

Zombies, of course, know no fear. But if they did, they would have feared the sight of Franz and his 12 gauge tumbling down the hill.

Franz gave both barrels of business to the zombie gnawing on the arm. The zombie head exploded in a spray of blood and brains.

“I’m f%&#ing Jackson Pollock,” Franz said, “and I’m here to make some abstract art.”

Three zombies rushed him from the right. He turned and shot the first one clean through the neck, the head landing on the ground and spinning like a dreidel. “Happy Hanukkah,” he cried. He then did a full flip over the head of the second zombie in the group, shooting straight down as he did into the top of the skull of zombie #2. “That’s my Gallagher impression, b%&#h,” he shouted as the head popped like a ripe watermelon.

Franz realized as he landed that he was out of ammo. “Why the hell did I only pack six shells?” he wondered allowed. Then the zombie ate him.

Unfortunately for the zombies, they didn’t know that an elite force of ninja warriors was already on the way.

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I smell a Newbury Award.

The Novelling Continues

This is not going quite as well as last year.

In 2006 I wrote pretty consistently every day. The goal is 50k words in November is easily attainable if you just hunker down and spend an hour or so every day plugging away. In the big scheme of things 1,667 words per day isn't that much.

However, you can make it very challenging on yourself if you only write 9 days out of 27.

As you can see from that report the days that I have actually sat down to write I've cranked out some pretty good totals. However I've now put myself in a position with 4 days to go where I need to average 5,500 words the rest of the way.

It's doable. I'm going to give it a shot.

I could make excuses: wedding planning, holiday travel, blah blah blah. But that's all they would be: excuses. The bottom line is that there are definitely a few days in there where I could have gotten writing done and haven't done it.

That changes today, and I'm going to do my best to hit the target. I even took Friday off for a last minute push. It's like school all over again!

NaNoWriMo II - The Noveling

In two days it will be National Novel Writing Month again and I encourage readers to participate if possible.

Last year was my first year in NaNoWriMo and I crossed the finish line with a couple of days to spare. Problem was that after 50,000 words, the novel I was working on wasn't close to finished. I had resolved to finish before moving on to other things, but the truth is I wrote myself into a corner and I can't figure out how to get the characters out. It is said that Tolkien took years of time away from writing Lord of the Rings while thinking of ways to get the Fellowship out of Moria, but in the time in between he invented like half a dozen languages. I don't think battling pixellated zombies is quite on the same level.

This year I have a new plan. I came up with a new idea for a children's/young adult type novel that shouldn't end up being nearly as long as last year's project. Although I was satisfied to finish NaNoWriMo last year, I must admit to serious disappointment in not finishing the novel. This time 50k words should put me a lot closer to finishing a full first draft of the entire book, what with the scope being much smaller.

This year I've got a couple more writing buddies as well, including my mom. Writing buddies are great because you end up pushing each other to actually reach the goal of 50k words as you see each other's word counts increasing. As World of Warcraft and other games have taught us, there is no greater motivation than an incrementally increasing progress bar.

This will be extremely fun because my mom and I actually worked together writing a children's story when I was much younger. It was called Frankie the Fabulous Fighting Ferret. My mom had the idea for this tale after watching ferrets wrestling in a pet store, and imagined a professional wrestling league consisting entirely of ferrets. The tale followed sort of a Rocky arc, with Frankie being an unknown and fighting his way up through the ranks. I'm not sure I contributed much more than "technical" names for various pro wrestling maneuvers (yes, I was actually really into pro wrestling when I was a kid), but it was a lot of fun.

There's still a couple of days for stragglers to sign up and I encourage you to do so. Even if you get in a couple of days late, you can still catch up with one solid weekend of writing. It's going to be tougher this year with wedding planning, an extended visit from Julie's mom, and of course the ever present Thanksgiving travel, but that's sort of the point of NaNoWriMo... it's always busy and the trouble with writing is people (myself included) always talk about doing it at some distant point in the future "when we have time."

If anybody does decide to sign up and needs writing buddies, feel free to buddy up with me at robustyoungsoul.

50,000 Words Later

Although I already outlined a lot of my thoughts about this process in a previous post, I figured I'd add a couple more things now that I've reached the finish line of NaNoWriMo.

I've experienced a few distinct phases since uploading my work and receiving my winner's certificate.

Phase One was elation. I mean seriously, I have never written so much fiction in so little time at any other point in my life. That includes school. For some of the veterans of this event, 50k is nothing. They go into the hundred thousands on their word counts. But for a schlub like me, there were definitely times I didn't think I'd make it. If you look at my progress during the course of the month, you can see that I came tearing out of the gate with 10k in five days, but things really took a nosedive in the middle of the month. Initially, when I had lots of outline, I looked forward to coming home and fleshing out those ideas. But it didn't take long for the outline to run out (I'd guess around the 8th of November: note the four day gap), and that was when things really got interesting. I knew where I wanted the story to go, but without the safety net of the outline, it became harder to know just what I should write on a given day.

Phase Two was relief. Now I can finally relax, I thought to myself. Now when I come home I can sit down and fire up a game or the TV without any guilt whatsoever! And speaking of games, my moratorium on video games can finally come to an end!

Phase Three was realization. Even at 50k, my novel isn't done. In fact, realistically I'll probably need another 20-25k words to finish a full first draft of the thing. The ending isn't written yet, and damn it, I want to know what happens.

Finally, Phase Four: resolve. The moratorium must stand. December must be treated just like November. If I don't get this thing done now, I'll never get it done. I've proven to myself I can write 50,000 words in a month.

Now I need to prove to myself I can finish.

So Final Fantasy XII will have to wait.

And you know what? I'm okay with that.

I Did It

I'll write something more informative here tomorrow, but right now I'm just going to go to sleep and enjoy it.

The Halfway Point

Last night I reached 25k words in my attempt to reach the finish line of NaNoWriMo. The entire experience has been eye opening on a number of levels, and I've learned (or relearned) a couple of things.

The first and most obvious lesson is something I knew already, but had forgotten over the past couple of years: writing is hard. Back in college, I used to wait until a couple of hours before any given deadline and crank out the requisite number of pages at that time. This resulted in pretty good grades (when I actually handed the paper in), and deadlines tended to spice up what was otherwise a pretty dull activity. I can distinctly remember one time writing the first word of a 20 page final paper 4 hours before the deadline, and getting it done with a half hour to spare.

For some reason, that kind of "academic" (the quotes are extremely intentional) writing came pretty easily to me. Most times I didn't take it seriously because, quite frankly, I didn't find it that difficult to throw up a smokescreen analysis wrapped up in pretty language for the purposes of getting a decent grade.

However, I once took a poetry writing class and the experience was entirely different. It was a lot more difficult to BS my way through things. This might sound strange, because poetry is such a subjective thing... surely I could've just spit out some free verse and handed it in and passed. But for some reason I took it a lot more seriously. When writing in "academic" tones, I was just arguing for argument's sake. When writing poetry, it was a lot more personal. What I wrote said something about me.

So it is with fiction, I suppose. When I started this I didn't think 1667 words per night would be that difficult. It is. I've had to let go of making things perfect, and just write. I always knew that writing was difficult: whether or not I like John Grisham or Tom Clancy, I've always respected that they have the discipline necessary to sit down and engage in the act of writing.

The second lesson I've learned applies to a broader scope than just writing. When someone hears I'm writing a novel during the month of November, the thing I most often hear is: "I wish I had time to do that."

Now, some of those people are definitely busy. I have no clue how people with kids and a full time job are capable of doing NaNoWriMo (although there are plenty that are if you read the forums). But there are just as many people that easily have the time. They've just chosen not to prioritize it.

I think this applies to things like working out, reading books, or just about anything. People love to say "I'd go to the gym, but I don't have time."

Bunk. You've got time, you just haven't prioritized going to the gym above other things. I'm guilty of this myself. I haven't been to the gym consistently since high school. But it's not because I "don't have time." It's because I'm lazy. It's about that simple.

I can understand prioritizing things like family and stuff ahead of writing a novel, going to the gym, or learning to ride a unicycle. But any time you sit down to watch TV or play a video game, you've got time to do something else.

This is not an indictment of playing video games or watching TV. Those things are relaxing, and relaxation is important to a healthy and balanced lifestyle. But I will say this: since November 1st, I have had to force myself to watch less TV and play fewer video games because I've prioritized this over those other things.

Third and final, I'll share something from one of the NaNoWriMo FAQS:

If you don't do it now, you probably never will. Novel writing is mostly a "one day" event. As in "One day, I'd like to write a novel." Here's the truth: 99% of us, if left to our own devices, would never make the time to write a novel. It's just so far outside our normal lives that it constantly slips down to the bottom of our to-do lists.

This goes back to point two about "making time", but we all know that not all novelists are great "artists" whose work will stand the test of time. They're just people who had the discipline to sit down and get done what almost everybody says they'll do "one day".

Perhaps the reason some people who style themselves artists don't have that much respect for "popular" authors is because they seem to believe that they could do what they do "if they had time".

To them, I say this: make time.

Football, Baseball, and Novels

Keeping the thread of personal responsibility alive for at least one more post but switching the lens from gaming to sports, I'm going to talk for a moment about Shawne Merriman.

Those of you who know me know that I love baseball. For the past couple years that has meant trying to sort out the steroid issue and how it factors in to the "purity" or "history" of the game. The conclusion I eventually came to is that there really isn't such a thing as "pure" professional sports anyway, because when that much money is involved, some folks are going to do what they can to get an extra edge. If injecting yourself with steroids means you might be able to squeeze one or two more home runs out of a year or one or two more innings out of your arm, that difference can mean millions of dollars on your paycheck.

Call it what you will, but it is a tempting proposition.

Baseball has been the face of the steroids in sports discussion for the past few years now. Somehow, football has completely flown under the radar.

Those of you who know me know that I'm not a big NFL fan. So I'm clearly biased in this. But Shawn Merriman's positive steroid test and his subsequent excuses smack of good old fashioned BS to me.

Maybe it's not. It's possible he's telling the truth and he really is the "victim" of an overly harsh drug testing policy.

But if he is a "victim" for taking something on the banned list of substances: isn't it pretty clear that he or his trainer just flat out screwed up?

Bored at Life has a nice writeup on just this.

Now, getting back to the important stuff for a moment (namely me). As I mentioned previously (but before the World of Warcraft firestorm), this year I'm participating in National Novel Writing Month. Like many others I'm sure, I've talked about "someday" writing a novel many times, but never actually done it. The goal of this event is to crank out 50,000 words in the month of November.

Just before November 1, I almost threw a giant Molotov cocktail into that plan. Final Fantasy XII was released.

I admit, I almost bagged the entire thing to go out and buy this game. I knew if I did it, I would never, ever, reach the goal of 50,000 words because I'd be playing the damn game every day for at least a month.

So I held off, and promised myself I'd get it on December 1.

Pathetic? Yeah, probably. After all the talk of "addictive behavior" and the "wasted time" flying around here, it would've been pretty funny if I had bagged an attempt at writing a novel for a video game.

Then again, an argument was made in some of the comments that there is no intrinsic difference between spending time writing a novel and playing a video game. Maybe they're right.

I just know that for me personally, buying the video game would've been the easy way out.

5000 words and counting.