Tonight, I thought I’d take a gander at my unfinished NaNoWriMo novel The Mean Mind, just read the first few chapters or something.
This isn’t a humblebrag, but upon re-reading the story, it actually pulled me in. There’s no huge backstory, no build-up, no endless “world building.” It quickly establishes weird stuff is happening and starts piling on the mysteries, totally encouraging the reader (me) to keep turning the virtual pages to see what happens next (spoiler: I already know).
The reasons this is trouble is because I’m now excited about the story again and it makes me want to resume working on it. But it’s unfinished for a reason, and I know if I keep reading I will reacquaint myself with that reason. And then I’ll feel sad.
But I’m going to keep reading, anyway. Maybe after having not laid eyes on the story for so long, I’ll think of some new way forward. The notes section on it literally ends mid-word, like I was suddenly distracted by a shiny object and never came back to it.
I’ll update this post once I’m done the read-through.
I came to a final decision regarding National Novel Writing Month 2022: I won’t be taking part.
BUT! I have also decided to go ahead and revive my incomplete NaNoWriMo project, Road Closed. It currently stands at over 70,000 words, many of which will no doubt be excised from the final draft (not to be confused with the software of the same name. Not that it’s not totally confusing to use a common term as the name of your software).
Since I am not reviving this as an actual NaNoWriMo project, I’ll be working on it at my own pace, which is really for the best, anyway. There’s going to be a lot of revision, and NaNoWriMo is definitely not built around revising your work.
I’ve actually written two outlines, the first is based on the outline template mentioned in this post, and I quickly sketched in some ideas about where the story would go, providing it with an actual ending and other crazy things a reader might expect.
The next was an outline of what I’d actually written, 20+ chapters (the number is imprecise because some of the chapters are themselves only outlines and not actually written out). This is right now the more interesting of the two (to me) because it reflects the story as it currently is. The process of putting it all down has laid out how lumpy the story is.
By lumpy, I mean how the story sometimes has scenes that don’t really add much, or seem to build toward something, then peter out. It’s not a smooth ride. The classic three act format is classic because it works, and Road Closed currently does not follow this. There are foundations in place and some of it works pretty decently now. There is, I think, a progression of the deterioration of Christian. The harder he tries to pull things together, the more things unravel, with his drinking accelerating and leading to near-collisions while driving, episodes of vomiting, the DTs and an overnight stay at the hospital. But the concurrent idea (spoiler alert!) of him inevitably leading toward a spectacular car crash that wipes out a bunch of innocent bystanders–which the ghost of Simon obliquely warns him about–is only hinted at very late in the story as written, and I wonder if it even works now as a conclusion.
Also left unaddressed is the entire plot point of revealing Russell Stave as Wendy’s killer, allowing Wendy to find peace, which is a plot point specifically referenced by Christian and Kevin multiple times, so this should really be expanded upon, which means Russell needs more than a few brief cameos.
But now that I have the whole story laid out in front of me I can start yoinking scenes that don’t work and figure out what to fill in, then come up with a convincing third act that pulls it all together in a spellbinding package of spellbindery. Or something.
The next update I’ll report on how this has progressed.
Yes, after months in hibernation, I am finally reviving work on Road Closed, because it is time to get writing or quit trying. These blog posts, while satisfying, will not be cherished by millions.
Neither will Road Closed, but if I self-publish I can probably force more people to read it than look at my blog (current views for today by way of example: 3).
The first thing I am doing is using the plot outline template from Libbie Hawker’s Take Off Your Pants (my favourite way to write), to see how the overall plot holds together. I know there are things that I never quite fleshed out and questions to be answered. Once I have the outline sussed out, it’s back to writing and after finishing the first draft I’ll go back and toss scenes that no longer fit and make other adjustments. In fact, I had already started this before my last not-meant-to-be-a-sabbatical.
But hey, instead of writing my plans out in a big, cumbersome paragraph, let me write out out in list form. Maybe I’ll do the entire book as a list!
Plans for Road Closed in 2019:
Use plot outline template to complete plot, uh, outline
Look for any holes in the plot, fill as necessary
The above may include both adding new scenes and purging ones that no longer fit
When the first draft is complete, get very drunk, in keeping with the theme of the novel. Actually, don’t do this.
Finish the first draft
Read the first draft, take notes
Write the second draft
When the second draft is complete, realize I am so sick of the story that I have lost all objectivity and find a first reader, possibly several first readers
Get the first reader(s) to read the novel and offer detailed feedback. More than just “I loved it!” Or “I’m never speaking to you again!”
Determine if this feedback is sufficient to do a third and final draft
If not, shop around for a professional or semi-professional editor to go over it
Write the third draft
Research and refresh myself on the art and arcane magic of self-publishing
Self-publish the novel
Hope that more than three people buy the book, making it more successful than my blog, while also covering 0.001% of the expenses involved in self-publishing in a crowded, unforgiving market
It will be a grand adventure. Maybe I’ll write a book about it someday.
I love Scrivener, or rather, the platonic ideal that Scrivener can represent.
The actual program inspires something less than love in me. I long ago adapted to its complicated, cumbersome interface and learned to ignore the long list of features I would never use. I write simple stories, I don’t need a lot of sophisticated tools for that.
I came to appreciate the Scrivener features I did use–easily dividing chapters into discrete blocks that could be moved around or removed, being able to set goals and see my progress (especially handy for NaNoWriMo), the corkboard for keeping track of scenes, and being able to set up my editing environment and have it complete separate from the compiling of the document. I realized I did not need the WYSIWYG approach of Microsoft Word and it was nice.
I’ve been thinking of doing a proper outline of Road Closed, then going back and properly finishing the first draft. I’d written the novel using WriteMonkey and earlier this year I took the time to convert it over to Scrivener. This is a somewhat time-consuming process as Scrivener would import the novel’s entire text and place it into a single scene, from which I would then copy and paste the different chapters into their own Scrivener folders.
Now, my first mistake was using the Scrivener for Windows 3.0 beta. In November 2017 Scrivener 3.0 for the Mac was released, and at the same time the first beta of Scrivener 3.0 for Windows was made available. A final release date was never offered beyond “2018” and that, too, ended up not coming to pass, though it seems a release in early 2019 is possible.
All the caveats of using a beta apply, of course. And I already had the novel safely backed up and ready to go in WriteMonkey in the case of disaster striking.
Last night I updated to the latest Scrivener 3.0 beta,. with the intention of loading Road Closed so I could export it to the older Scrivener 1.9 format, allowing me to keep writing in a safer, more stable environment.
Except when I loaded Road Closed, all of the text was gone. The chapter and scene structure was preserved in the binder, but the actual story had vanished. I thought about why this might have happened for a minute or two. It’s quite possible–even likely–I had done something wrong. I considered my options.
And then I did nothing. Because I had a current version of the story intact and ready in WriteMonkey. I am not going to spend any time playing my own personal technical support. I’ll just wait until version 3.0 comes out of beta, then consider then if I want to invest in the upgrade.
This is not the first time Scrivener has gone sideways on me, losing or corrupting data, and if I keep using it, I would fully expect it would eventually happen again. And I emphasize once more, this may be my fault entirely. Maybe I just don’t get it.
But in the end, it doesn’t matter. I can’t trust Scrivener, or perhaps I can’t trust myself to use it, so I won’t. For now, anyway.
This irks me in another way, too, because last year I had what was close to the perfect setup, using Ulysses on my MacBook Pro. There were a few problems, though:
I came to strongly dislike the MacBook Pro’s butterfly keyboard. Some people (tech writers especially, weirdly) love the shallow, clicky keys, but I ultimately did not. I ended up going to the other extreme on laptop keyboards by getting a Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1. This has one of the deepest keyboards you can get on a laptop. I very much like it. This is an issue for Ulysses because the program is Mac-only and Apple’s entire line-up of MacBooks now use the butterfly mechanism in their keyboards (my 2016 MacBook Pro is helpfully still eligible for free keyboard repairs for another two years, a testament to the issues that have plagued the design, even if you do love the keyboard).
The other issue was the decision by the developer to switch to a subscription model, which I have ranted aboutbefore. As much as I like the app, I don’t think it’s worth paying what amounts to the full purchase price every year in perpetuity.
But there is really nothing else like Ulysses out there. There are dozens of markdown and minimalist writing apps available on every platform and I’ve tried a bunch of them, but they all fall short in some way. The biggest issue for me is failing to support indents, something I consider crucial for writing fiction.
FocusWriter is lean and generally nice to use, but it’s almost a little too basic and its organizational structure is pretty bare.
The WriteMonkey 3.0 beta looks promising, but indents are still only a “might include” feature and the beta is moving so slowly I may be 110 by the time it hits official release. It’s a one-man project, so I’m not knocking the dev, just saying.
iA Writer has a wonderful minimalist interface, but it lacks indents and the Windows version lags behind the Mac version of features (even though the Mac version itself is not exactly feature-rich).
And on it goes, with other programs either getting abandoned, lacking features, not working well with cloud-saving (like Atomic Scribbler–though really, how can you develop and launch a writing app in 2018 and not plan for people wanting to save their work to cloud-based storage?) or just somehow not being the right fit.
It’s also possible I may be too fussy. Very possible.
For now I’m sticking to WriteMonkey 2.7. It’s getting old, but it still works and it’s pretty solid. It only saves text files, so the possibly of data corruption is pretty low (insert GIF of Jeff Goldblum saying, “Nature finds a way” here).
Now I just need to get back to the actual writing. One of my resolutions for the new year. Let’s hope it pans out better than my attempts to get my weight down.
December is a strange month. You are forced to listen to Christmas music in every store you go to, the days are short so it feel like it’s dark all the time, everything is directed toward the end of the month and Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve. People take stock, buy presents, make resolutions. It’s a time to reflect, even though you can do that any time you’d like.
It’s also a bad time to lose weight because people are constantly plying you with sugary, fat-filled goodies. The short days, colder temperatures and general sogginess also discourage one from going out and exercising (hence the resolutions). In general, there is a sense of winding down, of biding time until the calendar flips over to the next year.
For me, it has always been a terrible time to write, for most of the things mentioned above. It’s like the spark that makes me write–a fragile thing most of the time–gets snuffed out all but good until the new year. It’s an excuse, really, just like any other. But it’s also very consistent.
This is a roundabout way of saying I have not yet picked up on my unfinished NaNoWriMo 2018 project. I think about it, I nibble at its edges, but I never fully commit to actually working on it again. And I even have an exciting scene next–a car crash! The only thing better would be a car chase. And dragons. But still, I balk.
I’ll work harder to get moving. If I can start even a modest amount of momentum this month, that will help all the more going into the new year. Excelsior, and all that.
This year I decided to dust off my 2009 NaNo Novel The Ferry because I actually finished it and could use this month to polish it into a second draft, then have someone else eyeball it. I set a modest 15,000 word goal, since I wasn’t expecting to greatly expand on it.
Then a few days ago I chucked all that aside. Am I mad?
Maybe.
What happened is I started re-reading the story after a long time away with it, so my eyes were “fresh” and it just didn’t grab me like it should have. There’s a newer prologue scene I added awhile back that I actually quite like, then it goes back to the largely unchanged text of 2009 and it doesn’t really gel, though I can see what I was attempting.
In brief, I was trying to set the mood through a long, slow burn where tensions keep increasing, without anything actually supernatural or weird happening. The ferry is late. It’s really hot. The terminal is crowded. Tempers are short. A stranger insinuates herself to the main characters in a way that is not entirely welcome. But nothing actually happens. And instead of things feeling tense, it starts to feel a little more like, “Is anything going to happen?”
And when it does finally start, I’m not convinced it’s even that interesting. Weird and deadly dog-like creatures appear to have gotten on the ferry and start attacking. There is a fear of panic. The bridge appears to have been attacked and is now empty. But still, I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep reading…and I wrote the thing!
I went back to Road Closed and in a way it has the same problem. There’s a lot of set-up in the early chapters before anything spooky or weird happens. Right now I’m deciding on how best to rework the beginning of the story and how to fit things together at the end (the middle is strangely fine). It’s already stronger than The Ferry, because it has the added bonus of watching a guy slowly self-destruct from drinking even before the ghostly shenanigans start.
Here’s hoping, then, that I can make real progress on Road Closed this year and maybe even self-publish the silly thing.
I’ve decided it makes the most sense to take my 2009 NaNoWriMo novel The Ferry, and attempt to self-publish it this year. I’ve chosen it because it’s actually a complete novel, so it only needs another draft or two to be ready, vs. actually finishing one of my other novels. It’s not my best work, but it’s words on a (virtual) page and has action, romance and horrible monsters from some other dimension. And that’s not a sly reference to some political angle.
Steps in my plan:
Choose a novel to complete – DONE
Prepare the novel in the writing tool of my choice – DONE (I am using Scrivener, the story was originally written in Word)
Read up on self-publishing – IN PROGRESS (I’ve read a few books and will go back to review as the story gets closer to being ready)
Find an artist and pay them to create a decent book cover – TO DO
Find an editor to read over and revise my manuscript – TO DO (when I’m closer to ready)
Spiffy up my “serious” website (stanwjames.com) – In PROGRESS
Decide on pricing strategy, any marketing, etc. – TO DO
We’ll see how it goes, but if I don’t do something this year, I’ve decided I’m going to give up and spend all of my free time playing Diablo 3. ALL MY FREE TIME.
Somehow I missed writing about last week’s writing group. There were only four of us but it was a good group and I was productive again, finishing off the new chapter I have inserted after Chapter 2, cleverly called Chapter 2b for now.
This week I cleaned up some stuff near the end of the chapter to better align my intention for the chapter with the actual words. Having done that I next worked on some organization of the novel in two ways. The first was in Ulysses, where I moved the story into a manuscript folder underneath the main folder, then added a Notes folder also separate from the story. I find this easier than using Ulysses built-in notes function, at least on the MacBook Pro where screen real estate is more limited and you can’t have a bunch of windows open without reducing everything to “must have the eyesight of a 20-year-old.”
Having done this I next worked on hashing out some ideas on how to fix inconsistencies early in the story because even though I know it’s better to just forge ahead now and fix this stuff later, I’m the kind of person who hates the idea of leaving large-ish sections of the story in a state I think of as “wrong” and if I don’t go back to fix them now, they will serve as constant distraction.
Also, there is the possibility that in fixing these I may come up with other zany ideas that might work.
As for the group itself, there were six in total, though only four had confirmed, including several people I hadn’t seen before. I was early as usual but the previous group had cleared out, so I set up in my usual spot and began clacking away almost immediately.
The men’s washroom was out of order so I had to use the women’s. It’s pretty much the same, except it had a shelf holding a dangerous-looking (because it had the word DANGER on it) yellow plastic box labeled “BD Sharps Container.” It had a line on it that said not to fill it past that point. I could tell by the shapes pressed against the translucent casing that these sharp objects were needles. It looked to be nearly full.
One thought was “ew” over how many people apparently shoot up in these washrooms. The second was more about what a weird place to keep a box full of needles. Shouldn’t they be stored in the back out of reach of customers? Maybe customers are expected to safely dispose of their needles in the box, as civilized junkies would do. I don’t judge, I just ask questions.
Anyway, the writing session was a success once again. I am going to try to get more into a regular writing habit during the week but for some reason, it’s been even more difficult than usual this month, as the number of blog posts attests. Between having a billion things to do at work, health concerns, starting up with running again and other stuff, I have a lot on my mind and it’s been tricky to clear out the head space to just sit down and write.
It’s only two months until National Novel Writing Month 2016 rolls around. Will I take part? Most likely. Will I succeed? Odds are trending toward 50/50 (at best). My current plan is I have no plan, but this year I will definitely make a plan and have it in place one full month before this whole thing kicks off on November 1st.
I’ll report back at the end of September on the status of the plan, possibly while weeping in despair.
Yesterday I spent some time looking at various distraction-free writing programs but didn’t find any that really clicked. I still prefer WriteMonkey and am hoping the sexy new version launches soon, though I am doubtful of that. I could use the current version of WriteMonkey and probably should. Or Word. Or a notepad and crayons. Or anything. It already feels like I’m making excuses. I wrote my first (admittedly unfinished) novel by hand–using a pencil! Well, several pencils. I don’t need the newest, shiniest writing software in order to write.
But I want it.
Anyway, the proto-plan still in development is to have both the tool and story idea nailed down a month in advance. If I don’t I will officially give up before I even start.
Here’s to my maybe success in a month and my maybe greater success in three months!
That would be National Novel Writing Month. I’m signed up and ready to pound out my 50,000+ word masterpiece* over the next 30 days, starting Sunday (no day of rest here).
I intend to keep writing here on a daily basis as well. Perhaps my novel will be about a guy struggling to find work who finds himself trapped in his own blog. It could be called The Blog but in big scary wiggly letters and 3D and stuff. You know.
* my definition may differ than yours…or the dictionary’s