That’s probably a description that you will want to not have on the back cover of the book.
I’m so glad I found this thread.
I’m currently stuck in a lame part of my novel, and I’ve run out of procrastination time. Apparently I can’t write good (or even functional) dialogue to save my life, but a description of a fishing lure can easily take up a whole page. There’s not enough :rolleyes: in the whole world…
Can’t I just skip to the good part where the evil people come in? Whadda ya mean I have to develop my characters?
On a positive note, I’ve invented my own method for preparing incredibly stong and sweet coffee slushies. If all else fails I plan on slurping down a large bucket of them and writing incoherant stream of consciousness prattle about the pretty colors. Desperate times require desperate measures…
You think you two got it bad? I can’t write dialogue OR descriptions! I’m stuck with 15,717 words of blog-like first person rantings! (Of course, it helps that the novel is in the form of a journal, so it’s more okay, but still…)
I’m stuck at 14,233. At this rate I’ll have to chain myself to my computer over Thanksgiving break if I want to finish…
Please share. Pretty please???
Well, the computer issue has been resolved. Yay!
And then I spent last night in the ER. Boo.
But I’m up to 17,202 words. Yay!
But that’s about 6,000 less than I need to be on track. Boo.
And everyone survived the ER visit. Yay! YAY!
When making coffee I make it double strength, then pour it into ice cube trays and freeze it. I also have ice cube trays with a frozen soymilk and brown sugar mixture. When I start to feel my inspiration running out I take about 8 coffee cubes and 6 soymilk cubes and put them in a plastic baggie. Pound the crap out of them then throw that icy goodness into a blender with a splash of more soymilk. Blend on high for a couple of mintes, and viola! An instant lowbrow version of diabetes and hallucinations in a glass. They taste kind of like chocolate coffee slurpees. I know you can buy a better version of this at Starbucks and elsewhere, but I’m cheap and lazy.
I decided to do some writing on my laptop while going to sleep last night. I got alot of editing done (the bad lines… they taunt me,) but I fell asleep and woke up with a weird grid pattern on my cheek and 2 paragraphs of gibberish. Something about a shower cap with yellow rubber duckies on it and Circuit City. I actually kind of like it.
I just signed up! Help!
May I tell you what has been working wonders for me? Okay, thanks! I will! I find myself with the idealized picture of a scene or exposition via dialog that I know I’ll never be able to do properly, so I say “fuck it” and change it so that I’m not doing the perfect bit that’s in my head. What comes out is not only actual words on paper, but also tends to be much better than I had ever thought I could do. (Which is not saying much.) Nevertheless, not doing what I want to do has saved me a lot of stress and suffering.
I’m getting close to 15,000 words. I just had to do a lot of infodumping wrt sci-fi crap which flew by pretty fast. I’m also skipping a lot of tedious description; I can churn through dialogue super-fast. Also, dialogue takes up more space than blocks of description, which makes it look like I’m accomplishing more. Yay!
Ooh, this is a brave one. ggurl, you have the bravery of a thousand, well, really foolhardy people. Good luck! 
Great suggestion! I’ve been trying that for the last 30 minutes or so and got a whole page and a half done. I’ll have those 50,000 words or so in no time if I can keep it up. I just have one question. Do your characters tend to get a little unruly when you write this way? My plot is still pretty flexible and changing right now, but I find that they tend to wander all over the place when I focus less on the ideal outcome and more on just getting something down.
ggurl, you must be completely out of your mind. I admire that in a writer! If those overacheivers from lel’s link can make 50,000 (and even 80,000!) in 10 days then you can certainly do it in 16.
Hey, thanks for the encouragement jsgoddess and Hoshiko! My word count is up to 5643 now! And it’s really not a bad story so far, the main character is basically writiing himself. Oh well, back to writing! 
:smack: 
;j
I’m impressed. Keep up the good work.
Though if you pass me, keep it to yourself!
21000 words on the nose, and I am bailing for the night. Are we all allowed to be pretty impressed with ourselves yet?
Not really. The path the story is following is different from what I had imagined before Nov. 1[sup]st[/sup] came 'round; however, it is going where I want it to go. In my most grandiose fantasies, for example, I had envisioned a sort-of Anti-LOTR where the notions of racial superiority and genetic hatreds could be pretty soundly trampled, and now that I’ve abandoned the idea of doing the perfect vision in my head—that was nebulous and inchoate, and most likely unworkable—I am well on my way to that in what is probably a better telling of it.
What is happening is that it is continually expanding at each step because not doing what I have pictured as ideal is forcing me to improvise much more creatively. It has allowed me to put in more conversation in a way that seems more natural. And I’ve come up with new ideas that I think are much better.
It’s been making the characters a little more real, I think, too. The little saint who helped the main character is allowed to be seen a light that may suggest he’s more Machiavellian that we would want to believe; the main character is allowed to have a mini-breakdown, which she’s doing right now, because she is under the protection of a character who was originally inserted as so much filler, and who may turn out to be a major hero; and I’ll be able to turn the evil goblin-like race into a sympathetic people because I needed a new perspective to move the plot along because I knew I wouldn’t live up to my irrational standards doing it with the main character—so I introduced someone akin to a stoic, sane col. Kurtz who has turned into a doorway to the reality of his people.
Of course, in reality it probably sucks in spades. But I’m giving myself this little bit of fantasy for a little while because it’s fun. NaNoWriMo really is a great idea because there is no expectation that what I’m going to produce will be in any way readable. I can’t imagine writing a novel for fun other any other circumstances.
js_africanus, do you mind if I cut and paste that post into my novel?
I haven’t been saying much, since due to circumstances I didn’t start until the tenth and I was ashamed of my puny word count. 
HOWEVER, I typed like a madwoman over the weekend and now I am at 15,790! Woo hoo! Go me! FIVE DIGITS worth of words!
My little questing heroine will save the world yet.
I’m over 30K! miniature 60% victory dance
And I managed to get there without incorporating my extreme talent for … ahem … erotic passages.
11k. 22%, and I’ve only introduced one zombie (except for the backstory, which has millions of zombies, but that was exposition) which was killed off quickly.
I’ve brought up the Haitain voodoo zombie cult, I’ve got a mysterious zombie attack in London, I’ve got some main characters, and aaaah. Zombies on the brain.
I suppose it’s better than zombies eating your brain.
I’m sorry, I just couldn’t resist that. You can’t use the words “zombies” and “brain” in the same sentence and not expect it.