National Novel Writing Month, Day 2

When you’re on fire, your skin crackles and peels, your guts boil and explode and…wait, this is a metaphor. Let me start again.

When you’re on fire with your writing, you get that itchy “gotta get back to it” feeling where your mind keeps going back to the story while you do other things and you fairly trip over yourself sitting back down at the computer or, if you’re Harlan Ellison, a 70 year old typewriter, diving back in to see what happens next, to enjoy the thrill of the ride.

Now take everything I said in the above a paragraph and reverse it. That’s how I felt about returning to my novel today. It’s not a bad premise–weird guy who keeps a weird journal and maybe has some kind of supernatural writing ability that causes weird (and bad) things to happen–but it simply isn’t grabbing me. I co-opted the characters from my short story “The Dream of the Buckford County Church” (itself a failed expansion into a novel back in NaNo 2012) as the protagonists and so far haven’t really gotten a handle on them. One is maybe a little a more sarcastic than the other (so more like me) and the opening scene has them cracking wiener jokes around a campfire. It’s not exactly my finest hour of creativity.

So today I am taking a break, mulling over what to do. Start over with the same story? Drop in different characters? Grab some other loose premise or situation and truly start over? Give up and cry into my pillow?

I am as yet undecided, but I know if I don’t have a course set (reset) by tomorrow the endeavor is likely doomed.

The pleasant weather isn’t helping, either. I have in the past written during lunch but with the sun out and the choice of either getting out into the fresh air and power-walking for an hour or staying cooped up inside and writing, I have been opting for the former. The decision to write at lunch is easier when it’s making like a monsoon. I don’t like walking in monsoons. It’s still an excuse, of course. If you want to write, you write. If you’d rather walk, you’re more a walker than a writer, aren’t you? Walking isn’t something you tell people you do. “I heard you were doing that National Novel Writing Month thing. Are you a writer?” “No, I’m a walker.” [blank stare] “But I do write sometimes! When I don’t bore myself with my own words.” [blank stare turns uncomfortable, eyes shift looking for an escape route]. “Come back, I want to tell you about this crazy squirrel I saw out on my walk. Where are you going? We’ll catch up later, okay? Okay!”

If I do end up bailing and my writing continues to atrophy, I’ll invest energy into the best excuses instead, like:

• the switch back to standard time messed me up–who can write when time itself is changing?
• I’m freeing up time (which totally changed, see above) for that acting career I foolishly abandoned
• writing is just a fad, I refuse to be a sheeple
• no matter how much I tried, I could not make the premise of “shit squirrels” work
• writing, shmiting
• it’s not like we’re going to face a book shortage if I stop
• I probably would have eventually turned to writing werewolf sex novels, anyway

National Novel Writing Month, Day 1

After a day of doing everything but writing, I finally sat down around 8 p.m. and managed to crank (think more of a hand-crank here) out 1,745 words, putting me safely if not excessively above the 1,667 word minimum to keep on track.

I’m not terribly enthused by what I’ve written and the story itself is not really exciting me. We’ll see how things evolve. Or devolve. If I can get myself back into the habit of writing fiction on a daily basis, it will be a win regardless of whether or not I end up wanting to bury this particular effort in a shallow grave (which would be ironic as it features a shallow grave).

With a whole two hours before National Novel Writing Month 2015 officially begins here on the west coast, I have finally settled on an idea for my novel. Woo!

I have decided to revive and modify an unfinished play I wrote back in November 1991, Yes, 24 years ago. A note at that top of the document reads “Reformatted to Word for Windows 2.0: June 11, 1993.” I think the original version was written on papyrus scrolls.

I’ve elected to not bring over any of the actual writing and just start from scratch, taking the broad strokes of the plot and going with that. I may also jettison some of the main characters in favor of new ones. I haven’t decided yet but I’ll find out tomorrow as I begin this latest 30 day excursion into writing madness.

Oh, the novel is called Weirdsmith. The blurb on the NaNo site is as follows:

Last year I used WriteMonkey for NaNoWriMo and it worked well enough–I hit 50,000+ words with it and encountered no issues along the way. It’s a text editor with full markdown support, perfect for people who want a writing tool without a lot of distractions.

The one thing it lacked was a tablet version, specifically one for iOS. I do have iAWriter on my iPad, which can read WriteMonkey files (they’re just text, after all) but I’ve never been comfortable with swapping between different programs for a single project. That ultimately led me back to Word, as I can use it on my desktop PC, my Surface and now on my iPad (where it will primarily serve as a place to fix typos and such, not for any serious writing). I can even use a version of Word online if I happen to have Internet access but don’t have my own device handy.

I had briefly considered using Scrivener again. I used it in 2013 and while I suffered a huge data loss with it, it was my own fault for switching which copy of my story would be backed up on the cloud (in this case Dropbox) and which would be my local copy partway through the month. Even without that bit of bungling, I was never entirely comfortable with the way it spreads your project among a variety of files, and the lack of an iOS version hurts (it is in development but not due until 2016). I will miss a few of Scrivener’s features, like the progress/goal indicator and the way it easily lets you move scenes around. I have to admit I’ve never actually moved scenes around, though. I’d probably accidentally delete half of them with my luck. Also, Scrivener is such a massive toolbox I sometimes find myself spending more time tinkering with the various tools instead of just writing. While Word also has a ton of features, very few of them are directly applicable to writing straight-up fiction, so it ends up being less distracting.

None of this is to take away from Scrivener, which is a fine program. I’m just a weird and easily distracted kind of person.

For notes and other miscellany I am using OneNote. My story and notes will live on OneDrive and be backed up on my desktop and Surface, as well as a USB stick.

The only thing I need now is an idea. I have one more day to grab one. Plenty of time!

…I am still in search of an idea, like Leonard Nimoy in search of the Loch Ness monster, except with less traveling to Scotland, prehistoric aquatic dinosaurs and Leonard Nimoy.

I’m not concerned about having something to write because ideas are cheap and plentiful, my worry is that if I just grab whatever in order to start writing, it won’t grab me and my effort will fizzle out. On the other hand, if that happened I could return to last year’s still in-progress novel, which I quite enjoyed working on.

But no! I will find a snazzy idea and I will write one corker of a 50,000 word novel by November 30. Or else!

Or else I won’t. Ahem.

With one week before NaNoWriMo begins and my idea still not quite pinned down I remain cool as a cucumber (which, as has been established, terrify cats for some reason). I’ve been here before and in my six previous attempts I never failed due to lack of idea.

I am starting to see vague outlines of something I might enjoy tackling in November. If nothing further materializes before next Sunday I will probably curl up in a ball, revive an old idea or in complete desperation use some sort of writing prompt, possibly even one of my own.

In the meantime, today I went to my first local NaNo event, a kick-off at Moose’s Pub in downtown Vancouver. After walking past it a thousand times I finally took the stairs down and went inside.

I came away with a snazzy Vancouver NaNo mug, a pin and four new writing buddies (the people sitting at the table with me). We chatted about writing, as one might expect, and it was interesting given the different genres we write in (horror, fantasy, science fiction and combinations thereof) and the age range, which probably spanned a good forty years. One guy, who said he writes non-fiction and who had not yet committed to NaNo–and who left early–may have accidentally stumbled upon the event, for all I know. Maybe he’s a Moose regular. It was slightly weird.

The rest of us enjoyed our food and drink and shared some of the usual frustrations and triumphs–the latter probably best highlighted by one of the participants actually having his 2009 NaNo novel published this year.

In all, it was an enjoyable outing and nice to meet others who share this zany hobby of mine. I plan on going to at least some of the write-ins during the month, too.

Now I just need to commit to that pesky and elusive idea.