Another NaNo Conquered!

Last night, while it was still November 22 in my time zone, I hit my 50K words, thereby crossing the finish line of my fourth NaNoWriMo. (pause for cheers)

This year I'd interrupted an active WIP to do NaNo. Okay, maybe "interrupted" isn't fair. Work on Under the Bus had stalled. Partly because the fiction-writing section of my brain was struggling to let go of The Upsilon Knot sufficiently to focus on a less colorful contemporary story. Enter good old NaNo! Nothing like a deadline to force concentration. That was the good news. Bad news was the project I'd decided to work on. I have a self-sabotaging habit of playing by the rules, and NaNo rules say to start a brand new project. I certainly couldn't dare work on another Upsilon project (last year's solution), not while I was having such a time separating from that world. The most likely candidate waiting in the wings had its own world and a handful of characters whose stories I wanted to tell. Problem was, it had no plot; without a sense of direction, it's hard to write at this pace. Even worse, the project I call PDQ is set in a thoroughly depressing dystopic future. Enough said.

Somehow, astonishingly, I kept on and even found my way to a...well, more a framework than a plot. Last night I made my 50K. And NaNo continues 'til the end of the month; I could keep writing until the bitter end, as I have every other year.

I've always been proud of breaking 60 K. However, NaNo did the trick; I can't wait to leave the world of PDQ and leap back into Under the Bus. As they don't even start to verify wins until the 25th, I've made the following decision -- which I'm posting here to make sure that I stick to it. I'll keep working on PDQ 'til the 25th; I still have some left from the list of scenes I'd identified. Then one more day, to jot down all my mental notes regarding the order of scenes; should I return to this project some day, I'll want to have all of this on hand. The day after Thanksgiving, I'm back, 100% fiction-writing energies, on Under the Bus.

(pause to let out giant sigh of relief!)

See you in December

It's the most wonderful time of the writing year! By which I mean NaNo. I've got a nice clean notebook for unplugged productivity (like when I'm on the subway or waiting to go into a a movie). A new Scrivener project has been named and stocked with ideas. And my counter widget is up on this site, the critical tool that forces me to sit down and write whether or not I feel like it!

You might think it counter-productive to put a 1-month hold on a work in progress to start on something new, but consider that both the current WIP and "The Upsilon Knot" began as NaNo projects. NaNo forces me to plunge into the thick of a story, with no time for hesitation or puttering around. The work pours out; a lot of it is even usable. The charge I get from this is well, well worth the exhaustion.

This November, I'll be diving into a future world that revealed itself while I was watching the lunchtime foot traffic near the Flatiron building. Hey, inspiration can find you anywhere -- even on the Shake Shack line!

Things to do when your brain won't settle down

I want to be making deep inroads into the new WIP, I really do. But my concentration is still playing post-project pinball from launching The Upsilon Knot.

Instead of settling down to the task at hand, like a good little writer, here are some of the things I find myself doing:

• Basking in the end of summer sunshine in Washington Square Park while indulging in a caramel custard (with yummy figgy topping) from 5 Oz. Factory, and watching tentative trios of film students embark on their maiden forays into University-level filmmaking.
• Watching reruns of Castle episodes that I've already seen six or seven times and trying to determine which fluctuates more: Nathan Fillion's weight or Stana Katic's hair.
• Actually following all the links in all of those Facebook posts that I "like." Special thumbs up to Jason Gurley's interview with the wonderful Hugh Howey and David Harrington's piece on the new Yoko Ono album.
• Engaging in long off-hour text chats with friends who are either more gainfully employed during "normal" hours or live in very distant time zones from mine.
• Wandering aimlessly through Central Park, somehow inevitably being drawn to the Mall where the benches give me a feeling of stepping back in time. 
• Escaping into Ben Aaronovich's magical London via the Broken Homes, the latest adventures of Constable Peter Grant.
• Writing this post!

Voices in My Head

Right now I'm empathizing with one of the characters in my new book, who reflected:

"That was an inadequate phrase if ever there were one: 'of two minds.'... two minds was a comfortable minimum."

It's a writer thing, to walk around with multiple realities jostling in your skull. There are the things you think about to get through every day: whatever has to be done in the office, making dinner, the lives of family and friends, bills due for paying, world news...Then there are the things you note in passing or that come to you at the borders of sleep, things that tell you they ought to be filed for future mulling/writing. And, always, there's the project you're working on.

I can't speak for all writers, but there's a dedicated room in my brain that runs a continuous feed of whatever I'm currently writing. While I'm going through the rest of my day, and also when I'm asleep, it keeps up a subliminal churn back there. This is why I find myself walking to the subway and suddenly feel the pop of an issue resolving itself, because a piece of my mind has never stopped working on it. When my writing time arrives, I flip the toggle and this back room becomes my main dwelling space for the next hour or three.

This usually works pretty well. Not that I have much choice in the matter; it's the natural way my brain works. The only time I run into trouble is when I've got two different projects jostling for the writing room. Like now, for example, when I'm simultaneously diving into the notes and fragments of one book and handling the publication activity for another.

It's crazy hard to set aside thoughts of the completed story and buckle down to work on the next. Although the outgoing book is set in a fanciful alternative 19th century, I've been living there for the last few years; that world seems absolutely as real to me as the almost-here-and-now of the story I'm about to write. At this moment, those fully-realized characters are much more vivid (not to mention beloved!) than the stick figures that I first have to flesh out. Yesterday, I spent about ten hours fully immersed in notes for the new book. Last night, I woke up twice with ideas about further adventures for my Upsilon Knot characters—and twice more with pre-launch jitters, wondering how the world will receive them.

I know my brain will eventually sort things out. Over the next few weeks, the first flush of publication excitement (and associated internet obsession) will subside, while the "new" world will become more and more engaging. But for the next few weeks, I'll need just that much more discipline to focus on the writing and, 24/7, my brain is going to feel a little bit overcrowded!

NaNo 2012: Winning - ish

'Tis the night after Thanksgiving, and I've "won" NaNo.  That means I've managed to cough up 50K words of a new piece of work. More specifically, with seven days still to go, I've managed 51,507 words.  In NaNo terms, that makes me a winner.

I feel a minor tingle of accomplishment and a big wash of relief. NaNo has been especially hard this year, flying without a net. I wasn't all that confident that I had enough in this new project to write about. I'm glad to have been proven wrong. I've made it and with time to spare.


But I seem to be accomplishing less each year, and that's disappointing. Yes, I've got seven days left, but only a few of them hold good blocks of writing time. I know I won't be finishing NaNo with anywhere near a personal best (that remains at the bar I set on Year One), but I'm not even sure I'll pass the 60K mark as I did in both previous years.

Relief is a nice feeling, but it's a passive kind of nice. It would have been nicer to earn some fireworks.

Status Update: NaNo Week 1

So endedth the seventh day of NaNoWriMo. And I am totally shocked to report that I'm ending the day with a word count of 20,121.

No two of my NaNoes have been alike.

Year One was the Adventure. I was a little terrified at the challenge. The story I chose was in a genre I'd never tackled before, and many times more plot-heavy than my usual tales (probably while I'm still mopping up after it!).  I did a lot of detailed preparation: timelines; family trees; and I hadn't done so much research and organization since my college days in the History department. Most important: I had a wonderful cheering section of friends and coworkers, many of whom I saw five days a week.  I made it through the month and made it beyond the 50K goal. It was exhilarating and exhausting.  And absolutely inspiring.

Year Two was the Purge.  I had a story I knew I reallyreally wanted to get started telling. My prep was a set of character sketches and a long list of bullet points for things I wanted to make sure to fit somewhere into the story somewhere. And I had a very loose timeline that I clarified for myself with a set of doodles that represented character relationships as of the milestone markers. I'd changed jobs, so my cheering section was remote. When my energies flagged, I'd think about the year before and tell myself I'd already proven I could do this.  December 1st found me quietly excited. I had fewer pages, but I'd still gone beyond 50K again and this time I had a number of pages that I felt truly proud of having written.

This year is the Improvisation.  As of October 15, all I knew was that I absolutely had to do NaNo again. The other two NaNo projects were dangling over me, yearning to get finished, but I'd been so distracted this year by publishing (a non-NaNo book) that I hadn't done much writing.  I knew that NaNo would be just the kick in the pants I needed. So I decided to start a sequel to unfinished book #1, on the theory that I'd have familiar characters to work with and that, along the way, I might come up with a few things to iron out some of the wrinkles in book #1.  I did some quick mind-mapping and thought I could see enough shape there to get me started on November 1st.  I'm mostly cheering myself on this year, though I do check in with a circle of NaNo participants who found me from a public G+ post.  It all seems so loose that I can't believe it's enough to get me through to the end. But I'm doing it. And this year, that was the entire point!

Baby Steps

Having finally made the decision to publish my own books, I found myself overwhelmed by the options to the point where I wondered if this was such a good idea after all.  It became clear to me that I could spend the next year trying to figure out "the best."  Which would be another year that The Breast of Everything wouldn't see print (which I mean literally; I'm determined to have a print on demand paper version as well as epub and mobi digital books).  And if at the end I somehow did pick "the best" and learn all the new skills I'd need to get there, would it matter?  In this particular case, the old "vanity press" label is pretty accurate; I honestly don't expect BoE to sell more than a couple of dozen copies.  So I took a deep breath and made another decision.  I was going to get The Breast of Everything out the easiest way I could and I was going to do it NOW.  

Today was day one on the road.  I've already made some progress.  I chose a full-service publishing/distribution provider and I created an account on Bowker to purchase the ISBN.  Most important, I did a single small thing that made it all seem real: I used my chosen provider's online app to make a mock-up of the cover.  Now that I know what it's going to look like, surely it's going to happen.  Right?

NaNo Update: At the Halfway Point -- and loving it

I know, it's not November 15 yet.  But last night I reached the magic 25K half-way point to the NaNo finish line.  So I'm halfway there before I'm halfway through.  This is a very good feeling, even though finishing NaNoWriMo won't in the least mean I've finished this book.  

The beauty of the NaNo experience for me is that I stop worrying over every bitty word and just write.  And when you just write -- anytime, anywhere (yes, the morning subway ride is still my very best production burst of the day) -- you can make huge gains toward telling any story you really want to tell.  

Last year, I started out with all sorts of outlines and timelines and flow charts.  This year, all I had was an odd "to do" list of things I wanted to be sure to say.  Every day that I'm not picking up where I left off the day before, I choose something from that list that hasn't been checked off, and then I write everything I can think of on that topic.  I have no idea how long this book is going to be.  I'm only now now first starting to see a shape emerge.  It was one hell of a relief, let me tell you, to finally get a sense of that after almost two weeks of writing.  Turns out (whew!) I wasn't downloading random thoughts after all, but there is truly a big picture to which all the scraps belonged.  This is a good baton to pick up at the halfway point.  Now all I have to do is run with it to the finish line!

Next Up: NaNoWriMo!

You’ve probably gathered by this time (3/4’s through October!) that I’d decided not to do another historic tweet.  Yes, as I’ve written elsewhere, this project turned out to be oddly satisfying.  With this project, I was able to create three minimalist novels.  When I read through each one (as you can, too, if you navigate down the page), I find believable characters who tell real stories that I can follow and enjoy.  I marvel at the feat -- all of this was written in bursts of 140 characters or less.  And I’m the one who wrote them! 

I don’t usually blow my own horn, but this time I have to; I set myself a ridiculous challenge and I pulled it off.  Now I feel a great sense of freedom. Readers of this blog know that I’ve been searching to find ways to reconcile my vocation (writing uncategorizable novels) with contemporary, primarily digital, reality.  As far as I’m concerned, I’ve done it.  I have proven to my own satisfaction that I can make this medium do what I want it to do.  It doesn’t matter whether or not I had readers or made a dime.  I did it.  And that’s what makes artists happy (in that strange, often grim, artist-like way).

Crazy though Twitter novels (and the whole Extreme Writing challenge it was part of) may have seemed, I’m now moving on to a crazier challenge.  I’ve decided to write a steampunk novel….No, that’s not the crazy part!  In many ways, I’m well-suited to writing steampunk.  I’ve spent a lot of years in the 19^th century and it turns out that much of what I enjoy reading and watching is at least tangentially allied with the genre (according to current buzz).  For a number of reasons, I’ve been searching for a genre I could write in for even longer than I’ve been on the “blovel” hunt, and when “steampunk!” recently went off like a cartoon lightbulb above my head, I didn’t want to waste a minute getting started.  Here’s where the big crazy comes it:  the story idea presented itself just as Scrivener (a great app for fiction writers) emailed a reminder that National Novel Writing Month was coming soon.

During NaNoWriMo, insane writers sign on to try and spew out a novel.  Starting from scratch (new stories only!), 50K words in one month. The logic behind it is that writers need deadlines.  You also get a built-in support group of others trying to do the same thing; if nothing else, it means there are people who will understand your screams!  Including commuting time, my job-that-pays-the-bills-while-I’m-wishing-I-could-get-paid-to-write-fiction eats up 11 hours of each weekday.  That doesn’t leave a lot of writing time, and surely not enough to push out 50K words.  Even if it did, this story is bigger that that.  But NaNoWriMo is a brilliant opportunity to jump start a new project, so I signed on.  Gulp!

Til then, I'm organizing my ideas -- characters, alternative history divergence points, ripping yarn components -- but starting November 1, I'm a steampunk fiction writing machine (hmmmmmmm.......)

Good Night, Sweet Prints

So, once again, I haven’t been writing. I got bored with the “twitter novel” (I'm just not the 140 character type) There’s been no happy news about ‘The Breast of Everything’. And in my actual paycheck job, I’ve learned some new and incredibly discouraging things about Search Engine Optimization and have spent most of the last two work weeks churning out what amounts to spam (in aid of a corporate initiative tied to the aforementioned SEO). This is a pretty soul-killing task. I could rattle off a chain of comparisons, but as imagination isn’t much in vogue and as I don’t know who might read this post and therefore can’t guess which would hit the requisite “just like me!” note, I won’t bother.

All in all, it’s difficult to dredge up the energy to forge ahead with ‘Chasing Fireflies’, a book I very much want to write but which I assume (also very much) will be unlikely to ever find a publishing home. Then today I opened up the NY Times Book Review section.

Dear Reader, if you are a reader-reader, you’re now waiting for me to say that this issue completely changed my perspective and that I am now full to the brim with boundless enthusiasm and will be plunging into Fireflies with a hearty will to complete it by New Year’s Eve. That’s the literary conceit behind the way in which the last two paragraphs were set up, isn’t it?

Well, I’m tossing the conceit on its ear, which is the only sensible thing to do considering that there very soon won’t be any readers who would expect or understand such conceits. No, it’s not me being the voice of doom (for a change). It’s the June 5, 2010 NY Times Book Review.

Jonathan Franzen’s article ‘A Strindberg Family Robinson: Rereading ‘The Man Who Loved Children’‘ opens with the following gambit. “…haven’t we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers, and are going the way of newspapers, only faster? ...novels are a curious moral case, in that we feel guilty about not reading more of them but also guilty about doing something as frivolous as reading them; and wouldn’t we all be better off with one less frivolous thing in the world to feel guilty about?”

He goes on to make everyone want to read the book, but by way of making it an exception. Franzen, who was quoted earlier this year in The Guardian as believing “It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction” apparently has extended that to apply to reading good fiction. An interesting stance for a man who has a new novel coming out this fall. And a grim prognosis for those of us who, unlike Franzen, can’t guarantee a publisher an audience cultivated over 20+ years to buy this now marginal form of writing from him.

Danielle Trussoni’s review of ‘The Same River Twice’, by Ted Mooney considers that “… readers must often choose between ‘literary fiction,’ understood to be works of well-written but meandering prose about the ‘real world’ of human relationships, and ‘commercial fiction,’ fast-paced novels in which plot is everything. The literary is assumed to be cerebral and artistic, the commercial mindless and entertaining. One suspects that nobody is completely happy with this divide. So it is a joy to discover, every once and a while, a writer whose prose and plotting take something from both camps.”

Trussoni goes on to give a joyfully positive review of this book, bolstering the possibility that a book can fall outside the market divisions and succeed (I wish she’d given a big thumbs up to Knopf for daring to publish such a shocking hybrid). This should have made me cheer. The inability to be easily categorized has long stood in the way of my own work (I’m not ‘commercial’ and, to quote at least one editor, I’m “not poetic enough” to be considered ‘literary’). For multiple generations, our citizens have been carefully trained to accept only that which can be understood of one of an easily identifiable group. A nation built on the myth of individualism now absolutely requires typing and labeling in every avenue of life. In positing that this might not be the happiest state of affairs in the neighborhood of fiction, Trussoni is waving a brave little handkerchief from behind the barricades. But her comments speak to the scope of issue. What she doesn’t note is that even when one of these slippery creations succeeds in the market the publishers, producers, etc. don’t take it as a sign to open the doors to more idiosyncratic products. Instead, they turn all their energies into finding copies of the first, because profit isn’t profit unless it’s a blockbuster (thank you, stock market). A “maverick” may have once meant an unbranded range animal, but now it’s one of the most Identifiable brands on the market.

For those outdated enough to care, this is the point where a well-written article is supposed to have a conclusion. This isn’t a well-written essay, it’s a rant. I know I share my frustration with thousands who love fiction, readers and writers alike. If the only new fiction being published comes in a can, readers at least can turn to 200 years of unique minds and voices, but what’s a writer to do except stop.