A few days ago the big dogs were having an energetic game of bitey-face in the office, and one of them slammed the computer tower to the floor, pulling the plug out.
Stupidly, I had not yet started backing up my nano on google docs and when I got the computer re-started, Open Office didn’t run the auto-recovery document thingie. I looked high and low, but the first 4,600 words on my nano are irretrievably gone, I fear.
That put me in a funk and I didn’t write on Friday, but then I managed to go into hyper-free-writing mode over the weekend and I’m up to 13000 words, woo hoo. I knew what my word count was because I’d just saved it to the nano site, so I substituted the 4600-odd words with nonsense rather than re-write them.
So far most of what I’ve written is utter dreck, and I can’t seem to pull together a plot so I have basically a series of short stories in a theme so far. Tonight I’ll have a couple of the characters meet each other and see what happens.
That sucks. Will you be able to recreate it later?
I should back mine up… I have it on a thumb drive I’ve never had problems with and I’ve printed everything out (although most of those pages are in the trash after having typed up the additions), but just in case.
I calculated last night that 55% of my words are actually from the porn story. But the scripts are scripts and have less words on more pages! It’s not that I’m a pervert… although there’s that too.
Anyway, wrote a couple hundred more words or so before I got up. Not porn.
I’m up to 17,500 which is good, because I start a new job tomorrow, and between both jobs will be out of the house between 7:30 a.m. and 10:30 p.m. and I will continue this on way Wednesday and Thursday as well, so today is probably the last time I’ll write until Thursday night. If I manage 1,000 words between T-TH, I’ll be impressed with myself.
I’m at around 16,000 right now, and I’m stuck in a boring section. I need to liven things up a bit, and I’m impatient to get to the point where I introduce my favorite character–but I need to be patient. Every time I feel like things are going too slowly, I read over it later and the pacing seems fine. But right now it’s a bit of a slog.
I can remember enough for continuity’s sake…not that it really matters I suppose! This is really an exercise for me, not a serious attempt at writing a novel.
**
StusBlues**, When I last did this five years ago, I went to several of the local writing meetups…seemed then that the demographic skewed female and young then as well. Or maybe those are the sorts more likely to add people as writing buddies?
I’ve mostly stayed off the forums this time around; I’m not getting into the social aspect of it this time around. No time, mainly.
Cleared 12,000 today, so I’m a bit ahead of schedule. I’m taking the entire week of Thanksgiving off too, so if I fall behind I should have some time to catch up.
I don’t know how you people do it. I still need to type up what I did yesterday, but I think I’m still behind. Of course the whole script format isn’t real conducive to high word counts…
I’m up to about 12,700 words last night, so yay me. It’s still way too repetitive and I just know scenes I’m slapping down are gonna need to be either drastically edited or removed altogether. Still, I’ll worry about that later.
Honestly I’m rather surprised I’ve been able to stick to it so far. I haven’t really written in a year so I thought those muscles were permanently paralyzed. Of course yesterday I wasted way too much time trying to find the correct Latin phrase for a prophecy, when I could just as easily (and far more wisely) just stuck in placeholder Lorem Ipsum crap and continued onward. Finally I gave up and put the SDMB GQ thinktank to work for me.
chiroptera, my condolences! That’s gotta sting. But glad you found a way to get your wordcount up. The rules don’t say they have to make sense.
(Your experience is a bitter one but definitely will be a useful reminder to us all. I’m gonna stop now and FTP my manuscript to my website!)
I can add you as a buddy – that’ll boost the average up a bit (depending on exactly how many of these 20-year-olds we’re talking about). Same gender, twenty-five years older.
You’re doing really well so far, even with the section being boring! If the slog turns into a block, maybe skip ahead a bit and head for a more easy-to-write section? Nothing says you need to be chronologically correct during NaNo.
Damn straight it’s not! Have you thought of doing ScriptFrenzy? I know it’s not till April, and I’m definitely not suggesting you stop participating in NaNo, but it’s just a possible alternative next time you’re writing a screenplay.
Comic scripts actually. I get to add a lot of Page #, Panel # in. I added about 200 words yesterday just by adding descriptions. I’m writing some porn too, but since I promised myself I’d get one thing off my wish list for every issue I finished, and the porn doesn’t count for that (writing porn is its own reward… :D) I don’t want to work on it too much. Although it would be nice to finish writing chapter two.
Good news:
I’ve hit my page count for Issue One. I have at least a few more pages to go (she has to track down the address she has for the murderer, get the real address by breaking into police HQ, catch him, get caught herself and get arrested.
Bad news:
I need to write 2525 words today. I think this calls for porn.
Amusing: Some of my descriptions. I’ve got mental pictures for many of the characters. The main character’s son looks like Joel Hodgman from MST3K. The crooked jewelry seller looks like Danny DeVito. The murdered husband looks like Hohenheim from Full Metal Alchemist. One of the cops looks like Draco Malfoy (that one was unintentional - I made up a picture of him in Poser and when I looked at it again, well…)
I stalled out somehow, though every day from November 2 on I had surprising amounts of stuff to do for whatever reason.
Also, I noticed I can’t seem to write dialogue. Like, when I try, it seems to come off as “hm, I see the author decided there ought to be dialogue here,” like it’s something imposed externally. I don’t know what to do about this.
And I tend to write nothing BUT dialog. Which is good for nano, because it takes a hell of a lot more words to make a scene out of everything, but honestly, so much of it is so boring it’s barely worth a sentence or two of narrative summary to establish the point and then I should move on to something with some inherent interest.
I think I’ll go back and tuck in some sex scenes here and there. People talk less when their mouths are full.
Since I started without a plot, I don’t really have constraints and by doing this, not only do I manage to spew out copious wordage, I get ideas and the stories or characters take off in unexpected directions. Also when I read what I’ve written later, I’m surprised to find some nuggets of good stuff.
Heh. I just read and word-counted the free writing example in the above link. If the author was being truthful, he wrote 555 words in 11 minutes. Theoretically, even with several breaks, it wouldn’t be difficult to hit the nano daily word count in under an hour.
I don’t believe it breaks any nano rules, as long as you’re keeping it fictional and it makes some sort of sense.
“Knight Errant” seems exactly the opposite of what you’ve told us about the character. In-setting, the unusual thing about her is that she’s a knight who isn’t a knight-errant.
This may depend on the number of issues you plan for the arc, but you could name each issue using a knightly virtue that has thematic echoes in the issue. If you are planning eight issues, for instance, you could use the eight beatitudes associated with the points of the cross used by the Order of St. John. From the description of your first issue, it could be titled something like “A Knight in the City: Devotion”. Some of them could be tricky to match themes to, though.
And there was me all chuffed when I got the daily word count in two hours … pity it was a week before nano, for a different project and was supposed to have a 500 word limit.
They seem to have fixed the bug and I’ve added everyone who had added me as a writing buddy - thanks again.
I’m going through writing withdrawl But, having worked 23 hours, plus driving another 6 hours, out of the past 48, I’m lucky to find the time to check my e-mail and read a few posts here (okay, and read a few tweets.). Thank God tomorrow is the end of this insanity…until the next night project at one of my jobs. I have this lofty vision of spitting out a 2-3000 words before I finally go to sleep tomorrow night, but odds are even I’ll crash immediately, and not wake up until a few hours before I work Friday night.
