FACT 175 - SWEET SWEET VICTORY!
man, if you thought i was high beFORE, dude. dood! DOOD! (^___^)a 3x wide smiley does not BEGIN to cover it. i am so awesome. i am! this? this right here? this is more awesome than one word can cover. i am so awesome, i have crossed the line into ossum! i'm so awesome, the internet had a to invent a word to cover how awesome i am.
...
yeah, okay, that's enough. seriously, i'm getting lightheaded.
man. it is pretty awesome, though. --oh, sorry, "ossum." i know i say this every year, but this year? THIS YEAR i was sure for a minute there that i wasn't going to make it. it was like, 35k words, and i was like, man, i actually /care/ about this story, and nothing was making sense. i had loose threads ALL over the place, and then my choir's extra long practice day was right in the middle of week two, and then my priest's last day was right in the middle of week three, and then my upstairs neighbor came home and played his music all loud, and i flew into my customary righteous indignation mode, etc etc et-novelus-interruptus-cetera.
but then i realized that if i didn't win, it would be my first fail in SEVEN years of doing NaNo. that's right, my record would be Win Win Win Win Win Win FAIL. and then i also realized that i really did care about this story. nevermind losing, if i didn't write the story, it wouldn't get written. my poor characters would be stuck there, forever mired in the craptastic middle i had left them with. it was time to outsmart myself, as my old workshop professor would say, and get my characters down from the tree.
luckily, their descent took just under twenty thousand words. somehow or other, most of the things i thought were pointless loose ends got tied up as i discovered more and more things about my characters and their horrible horrible pasts. i had a lot of fun killing three or four people one night, and so i resolved to get my main characters shot.
incidentally, my one main character seems un-shoot-at-able. my other main character, god bless him, gets shot at all the time, and actually got hit two or three times in that final scene, but the other chap just refuses to get shot at. he does shoot a dude right in the face though, and manages to violate his own code of ethics in protection of his best friend, so maybe he didn't escape unscathed after all. (^_^)
what i'm really proud of this month, though, is that the story's finished. i have a bad habit of ending NaNo without a completed story. my NaNo from a couple years ago, that i've been editing off and on all year, has no ending scene. i know exactly what it looks like, which may be the problem, but i just haven't sat down and written the damn thing yet. in this story, i knew the ending even before i knew the beginning, and i was worried that i would get bored and just not write it, when it came down to it. but i did write it, and i have to say,
I FEEL DAMN GOOD ABOUT THAT.
in fact, i feel so good, that i feel like writing something else. that's right, i wrote 3300+ words in the past three hours and i'm like, MOAR WORDS PLZ~
we'll see if that lasts.
~meredeth.
victorious.
/me takes a Don't Stop Believin' break
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FACT 174 - the "high" life
when the bloody title contains scare quotes, you know you're in trouble.(^___^)
I HAVE RISEN LIKE THE PHOENIX! FROM A 3000 WORD DEFICIT, I HAVE COME BACK! LIKE AN UNHAPPY VAMPIRE REAWAKENED FROM THE GRAVE! ONLY, HAPPY!
oh my god i am so high right now. not the illegal kind, the adrenaline kind. the other day, there was a question on the Office of Letters/Light blog (at least, i think that's where it was, my neural pathways are a bit scattered at the moment) about why you write. some people said things like, i have to write or i get angry about all the stupid shit in my life. some people said things like, i want to experience things that would/could never happen in real life. some people even said the thing that i always tell people, which is, the thrill of writing is the thrill of reading, you get to find out what happens next. but the deeper truth is this: i get high, from writing. a totally legal, occasionally money-making, often admired past-time, and when i'm done, i'm totally, gigglingly, singing-loud-ly, divuldging-far-too-much-information-when-asked-only-innocuous-questions (using-too-many-hyphens) HIGH. like drunk, but on words. (^_^) (incidentally, this kind of high is also what happens to me when i read something good, hence my tendancy to read at home, alone. but that's a discussion for another post~)
and then of course, there's the killing people.
no, seriously. half the reason i'm so high right now is because no less than four people have died horrible horrible deaths in the past 2000 words. i set them on fire, while revealing some scary plot stuff about my main character. he behaved poorly, and it scared his naive friend. now they're stuck in a creepy Moria-esque (only much smaller, and without short bearded people) hidey-hole (isn't that like the second time i've used that phrase this november? what is WRONG with me? ... oh. yeah.), so main character is going to have to explain himself to naive friend, or at least deal with the fallout from his poor behavior, which is far more likely, since he has not thus far displayed a habit of explaining himself to people. but slowly, we are finding out why. and the whole setting-people-on-fire thing started when the bad guys killed one of main character's friends, and shafting your main character is one of those pleasures of writing that keeps an author at the keyboard when it seems there is no other reason to be there. nothing gets me reinvested in a story more quickly than making something horrible happen to my beloved characters.
also helping me at this point is that i have a vague idea of where i'm going with this. i've had an ending in mind all along, and it seems i might actually make it there (find something wooden, dude, because i need to knock), and so i'm eager to find out exactly how the new things that are happening right now (for example, i thought the chick who just died was going to be an escaped rebel leader, but it turns out she's the escaped government employee i had originally planned the naive friend to be) are going to play into the super awesome bombing run i've got planned for the end.
the fun of writing is the fun of reading: you get to find out what happens next.
that, and the killing. (^_^)-b
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FACT 173 - on deficits
the word count kind, not the 99% kind. (^_^) as of this evening, i'm just over 3000 words behind, and that's including the 2300+ words i flew through (in two and a half hours, yeah, "flew") at tonight's write-in (which was held at the Thurber Center downtown, and was awesome. things i am learning this NaNo: a typewriter makes a great impression at write-ins!). it sounds like a lot, but honestly, this isn't the craziest deficit i've come back from. actually, i've only missed writing on a handful of days this month. i've made it a point not to even think about my story on fridays, and actually that's helped the non-fridays be more productive. i've also found that, outside of miracle situations like write-ins, i really can't write for more than an hour or so before i start making up excuses to get away. this produces Really Crappy Scenes and An Unhappy Writer. so i am now admitting my limitation. one hour, a break, and then another hour. please do not attempt them one right after the other, self, we'll both regret it in the morning.thus, being all written out for tonight, i am Planning. i'm in the middle on the planner/pantser debate ("and i didn't know which way to turn, which was unusual for me.") but i'm definitely confirming for myself this year that total pantsing is not for me. when i don't have something set down for me to write for a particular session, Bad Things happen. or, more usually, Nothing happens. i started with a general sort of overview, a few scenes i knew i wanted, and a general-to-middling idea of what i needed in between. i've been working out a couple of new scenes every day at work, and then coming home and writing those scenes at night. well, last thursday, i ran out of Scene. of course, friday is No Writing Day, so that wasn't a problem, but then saturday came along, and instead of being Make Up For Friday Day it turned out to be Run All of the Errands Day. and since i didn't have any scenes sketched out for me to fill in at an imagined saturday night writing session, the session poofed right out of existence. sadface.
so i'm taking this evening to plan more studiously. as i mentioned previously, i really am not good at middles, so any plot planning i do is this:
write beginning.
write end.
work towards middle.
i also tend to be rather rigid about structure. for instance, my running out of Scene this past thursday took place right at the Point of No Return point, that is, the Event which causes my main character (who FINALLY has a name, THANK YOU JESUS) to really be boned to the point where he'd not going to be able to return to his normal life. this happened 13 scenes in. so, between the Point of No Return and The Final Scene, i figure there should be 13 more scenes. could i break this rule? i probably will. do i have enough to fill out 13 more scenes? i sure as hell don't. but it is a helpful device. i've already written the first two of these 13 Mysterious Scenes at tonight's write-in, and i've got five or six scenes that need to happen in order for the final bombing run to happen, just as Bombing Run Prep/physics satisfaction (i.e., you can't blow up a building without explosives, so you'd better go collect those), so that right there is 7/13 scenes. i'm more than halfway there, and feeling better already. and it's given me a sort of half idea for the subplot i'm (desperate for) going to need if i hope to make the second half of this book relevant to (even half as long as) the first.
not that any of this crap will make it past the first draft. i've already half-filled a notebook with notes for revisions.
~meredeth.
3030 words behind, and Not Worried.
(i am not worried. i am not worried. i am not...)