Here are the stats for Days 2-4 of NaNoWriMo 2016:
Day 2: 1867
Day 3: 1112
Day 4: 1722
As you can see I slacked a bit on Day 3 but the buffers of the other days have kept me slightly ahead of pace. Four days in requires you to be at 6667 words and I’m sitting at 6839. Way to be a tiny bit above average!
I am not very excited by my story so far and in a way I am surprised that I have been able to keep on track and keep writing. I think the difference is this year I am taking a wider view of the effort, seeing beyond the effort of specifically writing a novel in 30 days and instead seeing the restoration of the daily (fiction) writing habit as a worthy goal unto itself, even if the novel ends up being poop.
I’m also now ahead of last year’s effort, so I’ve already achieved a victory of sorts. Hooray for me!
Although I wasn’t entirely sure what I would write–as in, which story idea I would go with–I ended Day 1 of National Novel Writing Month on a successful note, exceeding the minimum of 1667 words by topping out at 2138. This is already close to half the word total of last year’s failed attempt.
The second day is one of the toughest in my experience. It’s fairly easy to blurf out almost anything to get started, but the second day is where you need to start finding a direction for the story if you haven’t already. It was at this point last year that I stalled out and never recovered.
But I am cautiously optimistic this time. Sort of.
It is the eve of National Novel Writing Month and I technically have a story ready to go, though I’m actually not really sure what I’ll be writing tomorrow. I’ll be writing something, though. A story of some sort, all fictional-like.
What I do know is I won’t be writing on a shiny new MacBook because Apple has decided to make all of their laptops insanely great expensive. I’m still a little tempted by the “low end” MacBook Pro or even the old model that they’re still selling for $1549. Sure it’s a little slower and a little heavier but for $350 less I might be able to live with that. We’ll see.
In the meantime, tomorrow begins the great writing adventure once again. I can’t say I have a good feeling about it this year but I may surprise myself. I have made a promise to keep writing even if my NaNoWriMo project fizzles and if I break that promise I will make myself feel bad. That’ll show me.
Today is Halloween, the second favorite holiday for candy purveyors. It is that special time of year when holidays collide. This means you will see Halloween and Christmas candy sharing space on store shelves. There is probably a decent chance that we’ll see some companies try to make their candy packaging work for both holidays. A witch wearing a Santa hat, perhaps.
As is often the case the weather is looking rather soggy and many of the little ghosts and ghouls out tonight will be carrying umbrellas, somewhat diminishing their terrifying aspect.
I will, as always, be at home, hiding away from everything and everyone, and will curse the late night fireworks because I hate fun in all its forms.
Run 470 Average pace: 5:35/km
Location: Burnaby Lake (CW)
Distance: 5:08 km
Time: 28:25
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 12ºC
Wind: light
BPM: 168
Stride: n/a
Weight: 157.2 pounds
Total distance to date: 3740 km
Devices/apps: Apple Watch and iPhone 6
Twenty six days later and I am finally running again. Early in the month I was felled by an especially nasty cold. That wiped out any chance of running for two weeks, then I lost another week because I was still not feeling great and after work runs were no longer possible because of that whole getting-dark thing. I’ll eventually come up with a plan for dealing with that but for now, today arrived and I was finally feeling up to a run.
I kept it to 5K because of the long downtime (and I feel that was the right call) but conditions were otherwise pleasant–a cool but not cold 12ºC, with little wind and clear skies.
The run went about as expected, which is to say I was much slower than usual given the long layoff. I started out not bad at 5:16/km for the first km but then dropped way off. On the plus side, the drop stabilized and stayed consistent and I actually picked up the pace toward the end, even as I began to feel a bit tired. The only negative I felt while running was a pressure headache, a remnant of the still-somewhat-lingering head cold.
The trail around the fields was a bit soggy and was the reason I ended up with some mud splats on my shoes and up my calves. This is to say that I was dry for about 99% of the run. It was literally in the last few meters that I faced unavoidable puddles and mud. Not that I mind, but if I can choose between mud and no mud, I usually go with no mud.
There were plenty of leaves on the trails but pleasantly, the conditions were not slippery.
My legs are starting to feel a little sore tonight but they shouldn’t get too bad.
Now I just need to figure out where to run during the rest of the week.
As I cast about for inspiration for National Novel Writing month–a mere two days away–I realized how selfish I was being. Why spend time thinking of ideas for myself when I could be spending time thinking of ideas for the whole world?
So here they are, a bunch of prompts that will lead any budding* author to a 50,000 word NaNoWriMo success story**!
A mysterious woman is feeding ducks at a pond. When you approach her she turns around and pulls off the shroud she is wearing, revealing the head of a duck. She quacks at you. What happens next?
Lots of people have already written novels and people love sequels. Put the two together and presto, you can write a sequel to another author’s book. No nuanced characters to invent, no pesky worlds to build, just pick up where the author left off! Note: this may not be legal so you might get sued or sent to jail or something. Maybe pick a book that came out two hundred years ago to be safe.
Every time the saddest person in the world cries it starts to rain. Pretty soon the world is in danger of a flood that would make Noah nod his head and say, “It’s ark-buildin’ time!” How do you make the sad person stop crying and save the planet from being a little too fish-friendly?
People love historical novels that tackle serious subjects with care and emotional depth. Since all the good stuff has already been written about, make your novel a sober examination of hoedowns in the frontier towns of early America.
An author struggling to come up with an idea for National Novel Writing Month suddenly finds herself in the middle of her own story–whatever it is! This has never been done before, trust me.
Those two guys on “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” decide to travel back in time to stop Hitler.
Something with vampires.
Part 1 of a 10 part series about, oh, anything. Just throw darts at a board. The important thing is people love series even more than they love sequels.
For inspiration, watch 50 self-made YouTube videos of people talking about how they are preparing for National Novel Writing Month. Upon completion of viewing the last video, you will never want to write again. Maybe don’t do this, actually.
Include the word “girl” in your novel’s title. Then use one of the other nine ideas listed above for the actual story.
* this is not a “BC bud” joke, I swear
** this is, however, an awful play on words
Apple had its “Hello again” event today and much like Microsoft at their event yesterday, Apple used theirs to announce really expensive products.
In all, they revealed new MacBook Pros and new (Canadian) pricing for the MacBook–$100 higher.
The MacBook Pro line-up previously started at $1549 for the 13 inch model. Today Apple showed off two new 13 inch models, a non-fancy one positioned as a sort-of successor to the MacBook Air and a fancy one with better specs and the somewhat controversial OLED touch bar that replaces the row of function keys.
The prices are $1899 and $2299 respectively, or as I like to put it: LOL WUT
These prices make Microsoft’s Surface pricing seem almost reasonable by comparison.
Almost.
It also seems a little weird that Microsoft is arguably being more innovative with its Surface Studio than Apple is with its MacBook Pro. At the very least it feels like Microsoft has done more to earn its premium pricing.
And while the newest Surface Book is too expensive for me, the other models, now with newly-reduced pricing, is something I’m actually considering again. The bang-for-the-buck on the MacBook Pros is way too far out of whack for me to seriously consider them. It’s disappointing but not surprising. Apple seems determined to prop up declining revenue with significantly inflated pricing.
As a series of website updates that present the daily journal of a soldier surviving a zombie apocalypse, Day by Day Armageddon works fairly well. Collected into a novel it feels a little creaky but fans of zombie apocalypse fiction (you may have noticed a few* books of this type have been released over the last few years) will likely enjoy this particular take on what happens when the dead don’t stay dead.
True to its name, the story is told through journal entries, covering the first five months of a zombie outbreak that devastates the world, forcing survivors to navigate hordes of shambling, mindless people. Wait, that’s the mall during Black Friday (ho ho). Supplementing the journal entries are maps, letters and other bits typical of an epistolary novel.
The story doesn’t follow a traditional narrative, given its unique structure, though Bourne does ramp up the action/tension from time to time by placing his protagonist and others in especially perilous situations. And while the story does build toward a showdown of sorts, it ends abruptly, with an author’s note promising there will be more in the form of sequels. Not surprisingly, there are sequels. A reader looking for a strictly self-contained story may be disappointed by the ending.
The prose is workmanlike, as befits journal entries, but at times I wished the protagonist was a struggling writer rather than a soldier. Sure, he wouldn’t know which way to hold an assault rifle (a handy zombie survival skill) but he would not how to wax poetic about the existential dread of facing each morning not knowing if you’d make it through to the end of the day. Plus there’d be comic relief when he tried using an assault rifle.
The ebook edition has a fair number of spelling errors in it, but I’m still not sure if they are actual editorial slips or if Bourne was trying to portray his protagonist as being as fallible as most when it comes to the difference between “to” and “too.” The repeated use of “lightening” over “lightning” grated, though.
The women in the story seem to mainly serve as props, with Bourne referring to them as “the females” and of course they don’t know how to handle guns (not to worry, the protagonist teaches them). At least there is no requisite romance, though the possibility is hinted at (“I am a man, after all,” as the protagonist puts it).
Overall, this was a quick and effortless read. Given the day-by-day approach, Bourne does a good job in keeping things moving along, but the whole presentation feels a bit slight. This isn’t a knock, exactly, because I think Bourne did about what you would expect given the parameters he set out for himself.
See what I did there? Ho ho. I actually hate when people write out things like “Micro$oft” but in this case it almost seems appropriate.
At today’s event Microsoft announced some Surface keyboards and mice but the main hardware on display was a Core i7 version of their Surface Book laptop and a new all-in one device known as the Surface Studio that sports an adjustable 28″ super-thin touchscreen monitor with better than 4K resolution.
The starting prices on these are $2399 and $2999 respectively. Those prices are in US dollars. Converting to Canadian at today’s exchange rate makes them $3194.50 and $3993.46 which is firmly in “lol no” territory for the average, slightly above average and slightly more than above average person.
Both are sexy designs with great specs. But the prices are madness. These are clearly aimed at professionals with money to burn. I am sad that they are priced so far beyond my budget that just thinking about them feels expensive, like I’ll get a $50 invoice from Microsoft for lusting after them.
I’m expecting more sticker shock tomorrow when Apple reveals its updated MacBook Pro. The base 13″ model is currently $1549 and I expect its replacement to be higher-priced. In Apple’s favor, though, I’m not expecting it to be boosted to $2399. How odd that Apple’s pricing may seem reasonable by comparison.
May being the key word here. We’ll find out tomorrow.
Meanwhile, my New Laptop Quest will not include the new Surface Book as a potential choice unless I win some sort of lottery in the next week.
I’m at 1% complete. I should finish prompt #1,000 right around the same time I turn 1,000 years old. Come on, technology, keep me preserved so I may accomplish this tremendous literary feat.
Prompt 10
(from Chapter 1: Time and Place):
It’s been said that the negative events of the past will repeat themselves if we fail to learn from our mistakes. Do you agree with that statement? Why or why not? How might the statement apply in your life?
Answer:
Do I agree that if we don’t learn from our mistakes we will repeat them? Let me give this some serious thought here.
No, let me skip that because what a stupid question. This is a stupid prompt. It’s like asking, “If you stand at the top of a staircase and someone comes up behind you and gives you a hard shove and you tumble down the stairs and break many bones as a result, will you learn that tumbling down a flight of stairs kind of sucks?” Hmm. Maybe!
How might this statement apply to my life? I learned that eating barbecue-flavored sunflower seeds when you secretly have the stomach flu isn’t a good idea because you will barf those barbecue-flavored sunflower seeds all over the dining room floor, which, by some miracle, is the only room in the house that isn’t carpeted. By incorporating this lesson into my life I have never repeated the mistake of eating barbecue-flavored sunflower seeds when I secretly have the stomach flu.
Seriously, though, it did suck, though not as much as being pushed down a flight of stairs (the stairs were carpeted, too). I was ten years old, didn’t feel at all unwell, was happily noshing away on the sunflower seeds, and then suddenly the flu switch flipped to ON and everything in my stomach had to leave RIGHT NOW. And did. I went from no flu to very flu in a second.
It also left me sufficiently traumatized that I didn’t even touch barbecue-flavored sunflower seeds for twenty years. And then only once. (I didn’t throw up the second time.)
[spoiler title=”Explanation of this exercise” icon=”plus-circle”]These are prompts featured in 1,000 Creative Writing Prompts, Volume 2 (Goodreads link). My intent is to write ultra-short stories that are no more than a few paragraphs long, working through the prompts in order. When I am done I will perhaps have a party of some sort.
Sometimes the short stories will be longer and sometimes instead of a story I will answer the questions (most of the prompts are in the form of questions).[/spoiler]
The last time I ran it was getting downright gloomy by the end of the run. I was then felled for two weeks by an especially stubborn cold. Now that I am recovered the days have grown so short that the sun is setting before I can even head out for a run.
This presents a dilemma because I do not have built-in night vision and even if I did I’d probably get chased by vampires out there in the dark, anyway.
My options for running now are:
run around the golf course during lunch. This is a so-so option because I’m not crazy about the route, it cuts into my lunch, I’d have to figure out some way of having a shower afterward (because most days it’s going to be wet) and did I mention I’m not crazy about the route? Because I am not.
run on a treadmill at a place like the Canada Games Pool, which, despite the name, does indeed have treadmills. I’ve done this before and I’m even less enthusiastic about running on a treadmill than I am about running around the gold course. It feels weird and unnatural.
run at a location that has artificial lighting. First I’d have to find one and second it would need to be close enough to be practical. I don’t want to spend half the evening just getting to the place and back. This would also likely mean running at a track, not exactly a thrilling activity but sometimes you gotta takes what you can get.
don’t run. This carries the explicit danger of replacing running with eating, specifically with eating delicious in-season shortbread. I do not want to go from a runner’s physique to a shortbread physique.
some other magical solution that I haven’t thought of yet.
I must ponder. In the meantime I will probably miss runs this week, but should at least head out for a weekend run on Sunday, unless there are bears again.
What is the most important lesson you’ve learned from studying your own past experiences? Would you consider teaching that lesson to others? Why or why not?
Answer:
The most important lesson I’ve learned from my past experiences is that you cannot change the past because it’s over there, in the past. Where you can’t change it. Yesterday will never come back. You can keep waiting like a faithful dog on the porch, wagging your tail, knowing master will be home any moment but he’s not coming back because he is gone, baby. Gone. Because your master is the past.
Unless you have access to a time machine. That changes everything. If you have a time machine then you’ve got the equivalent of a giant erase button on every mistake or ill-considered decision you’ve ever made. Of course you’ll probably screw up history in the process and inadvertently lead to the creation of an army of Hitler clones and you just know that’s not going to end well (unless you’re a Hitler clone).
So the most important lesson I’ve learned from my past experiences is that I can’t learn from my future experiences because they haven’t happened yet. No, that’s not the most important. Actually, it’s probably barely in the top five.
The most important lesson is that you can’t change the past. And if you could, you probably shouldn’t (because Hitler clones).
Would I consider teaching this lesson to others? I just did.
Class dismissed.
[spoiler title=”Explanation of this exercise” icon=”plus-circle”]These are prompts featured in 1,000 Creative Writing Prompts, Volume 2 (Goodreads link). My intent is to write ultra-short stories that are no more than a few paragraphs long, working through the prompts in order. When I am done I will perhaps have a party of some sort.
Sometimes the short stories will be longer and sometimes instead of a story I will answer the questions (most of the prompts are in the form of questions).[/spoiler]
