Inspiration

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 11 (11/11)

Chris Leave a comment

Well, yesterday was a bit more productive than the last few days have been. I was super wiped by the time midnight rolled around so I didn’t stay up much, but I still got plenty done. I’m only scratching the surface of making up for the days I’ve barely written anything, but I’ll take any progress I can get right now. I need to get the ball rolling again and last night went a long ways towards that. Hopefully, but the time this posts, I’ll have gotten some more writing done, but who knows. I am dozing off as I write this, so it’s entirely possible that I wound up sleeping in super late to make sure I get a full eight hours of sleep. I need it pretty badly at this point, thanks to spending the day helping my friend move and my neighbor playing really loud music again until well past midnight.

I did most of my writing in my National Novel Writing Month project, “What You Know You Need,” instead of in the romance novel. I need a good deal more clarity to figure out how I want to restart that but being half-asleep makes it a littler easier to keep the worlds rolling on a project that’s better established, like “WYKYN.” As long as I don’t actually fall asleep, being half-asleep means getting more words written because the aware parts of my brain shut down a bit. My fingers know my keyboard well enough that I can maintain my typing pace easily enough, even with my eyes closed and my mind approaching dreamland. I can’t always understand exactly what I meant when I review whatever it was that I wrote, but it usually sounds pretty interesting. Take, for instance, the original end of this paragraph that I wrote while falling asleep last night. “but I can be surprisingly coherent most of the time, when it comes to killing stuff and staying alive.”

Classic sleepy Chris writing. If I was writing anything other than a blog post for tomorrow, that would be great. I’m pretty sure I was thinking about the video game I spent most of yesterday’s free time playing. That’s all I’ve played lately when it comes to killing stuff and staying alive, so that would make sense. Well, as much sense as any of this makes.

When it comes down to it, all I’m really trying to do every day is get more words written. I try to avoid staying up so late that I start to feel loopy and in danger of falling asleep at my desk, but sometimes I’ve just got a lot of momentum going and I want to get just a few more words in. I was making such good progress on “What You Know You Need” and I’ve finally gotten through a difficult scene so I just kept writing until I’d eventually done two thousand five hundred words for the night. That’s a good number to end on for a day of getting back into the swing of things, you know. I’d also dozed off in my chair three times, but I still got my words written and they seem to make sense so far. I then wrote this post and dozed off another handful of times, but I still got it done in what I hope is a sensible pattern.

Anyway, I hope day eleven of National Novel Writing Month is going well for you. I hope you’re getting enough sleep and taking care of yourself. I hope you’re making progress on your goals, at least, if you wound up deciding to forego sleep for more writing like I did tonight. Whatever you’re doing, good luck!

 

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Daily Prompt

The idea that you need to appeal to the five senses is just as much bullshit as every other writing rule (they’re more suggestions that rules since none of them apply absolutely), plus a little bit all its own. There are way more than five senses and you can really add to the reader’s suspension of disbelief (the way readers voluntarily choose to believe the story you’re creating) if you appeal to them. Sense of balance is a good one. The sense of where your hands are when your eyes are closed that lets you touch your nose on the first try. Sense of temperature, sense of the passage of time, sense of thirst or hunger, even! Throw in as many senses as you can! But not all at the same time, or else you’re going to be slowing down the story a lot.

 

Sharing Inspiration

As someone who tends toward negativity in my internal narrative, I often turn toward upbeat music to help shake me out of it or get me working on stuff when I don’t feel like doing anything. My favorite musician for that is Kyle Andrews. His music is reliably upbeat and even the slower stuff still has a cheerful vibe to it. Even when you start listening to the lyrics and realizing the cheerful Christmas song is about breaking up with your girlfriend and burning everything she ever gave you to fight off the chill you feel as a result of her treatment of you. It’s great! They’re clever and actually thoughtful songs, on top of all that. They very much adopt the attitude of “this is bad, but that isn’t the end of the world” and I need that sometimes. There’s even a song literally about that. Check him out if you need that. Or just want some good electronic pop/rock.

 

Helpful Tips

There are a lot of things that get in the way of writing every day. Some of them are the unfortunate requirements of life. Things like your day job, paying bills, doctor’s appointments, and grocery shopping all need to happen no matter how much writing you have to do still. Identifying these things and building time into your schedule for them can go a long way to mitigating how interruptive they can be. The biggest problem involved is actually figuring out all of the things that interrupt you or take time away from writing. The best way to find these things is to journal your days. If you keep a careful record of what you do and how it impacts your schedule over the course of a few weeks, a pattern will eventually emerge that could give you some interesting insight into how your mind or days work. For instance, my neighbor playing loud music late at night has the most impact on my schedule since it essentially renders me useless for the entire day after he does it. On the other hand, trying to play Pokemon Go actually makes me more productive because it’s something distracting that gets me out of the house for some exercise every day. Thanks to three months of journaling, which has used up half a notebook, I’m finding a lot of interesting patterns in my life. I hope you find some as well if you take the time to journal.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 10 (11/10)

Chris Leave a comment

Expectations are heavy things. One or two are alright, if you’re up for them. Once you start to collect a lot of them, though, the weight can crush you. The thing is, not all of them are yours. Sure, your expectations can be problematic when you’re looking for something you probably won’t get, but other people’s are usually heavier in my experience. I can simply put my own down. If I drop someone else’s, I feel like I’m letting them down or disappointing them. They can come in the form of wonderful compliments, but that doesn’t change the fact that someone has their eyes on you. I love that I’ve inspired people, but I feel like now there’s pressure to continue inspiring people.

That’s sort of why I do this blog, though, if I’m going to set aside the main goals of “public accountability when it comes to my writing goals” and “having a place to put the stuff I write.” The reason I write the things I do and unabashedly post about my mental health and personal life is that I want to create a place where other people who are struggling can find some comfort, rest, or understanding. I know my audience isn’t huge, but I’ve got my own little corner of the internet and I’m doing my best to shout so anyone who wanders by can hear something that is supportive and hopefully helpful. If I’m inspiring people to write, that’s great! I’m so happy to be able to have a positive effect on the world (and that’s my real life goal right there). If people think of me when they hear about someone who works really hard, then I guess that’s pretty apt because I work my ass off most of the time. They might feel like expectations sometimes, but that’s my own problem to deal with. I’m the person who is taking them that way.

When I want to give up on writing, when nothing else is helping and the little voice in my head that constantly fills my thoughts with “nothing you do will ever be enough” and “there’s no point in trying because you and everything you do is worthless” is winning, I take the time to sit down and write out a list of reasons why I write. There are a lot of consistent things on the list that hearken back to my reasons for beings. Things like “to help make the world a better place” and “to give other people what my favorite books gave to me: a place escape and hide away from a world that sometimes felt like it was out to get me” are usually first. Then there are things like “because storytelling fulfills me in ways that nothing else ever has” and “I need something meaningful in my life and telling stories is more full of meaning that anything else I’ve ever considered” that come and go as the way I view my life shifts. The last things are the ones that change from one year to the next, or even one month to the next, like “because I’m going for two years of consecutive days without missing a blog post” or “I want to wrap up this project by a certain time.”

The list helps because it’s all about me and why I write. It has nothing to do with whoever reads my stuff, with people involved in my life, or what might be going on the world. It is focused entirely on the intrinsic value of writing and that little voice in my head has nothing to say about whether or not those things are true or worthwhile. Plus, it tends to lead to some really productive introspection that helps me center myself. Between yesterday and today, I think  I’ve gotten my feet underneath myself again. Hopefully this next week of November will be more productive that the last.

I’m still not ready to talk about what’s going on in my life, but now it’s because I kind of want to focus on writing for a bit. There’s a time and a place for everything and sad stories that are going to require me to spend some time on emotional recovery should not be a part of trying to right the writing ship of this particular National Novel Writing Month. I’ve done almost not work on this weekend’s goals, so I’m going to forego sob stories and instead focus on trying to get a daily allotment of words written. Which is my new goal. Get words done every day. I need to dial it back while I’m getting back up to speed again. Otherwise, I’m just going to burn myself out getting nowhere. I’ll hopefully be able to write about my real progress for Monday’s blog post, but we’ll see.

I hope your weekend is off to a good start and that you’ve managed to continue making progress on your National Novel Writing Month project! I also hope your weekend continues to be good or improves and that you can make the time and energy to get some writing done. Good luck!

 

Daily Prompt

Action sequences can be really fun! Maybe there’s a fight brewing and your protagonist finally gets to show off their moves or maybe they drop a jar and, through a lucky combination of juggles, grabs, and kicks manages to keep it from hitting the floor. Whatever the reason there’s action, show it to us today! Write about the way the characters involved move through space, the way people respond to their movement, and make sure we know where everyone is so we can make sure that the person walking down the stairs who manages to securely catch the jar at the end actually had a clear line of effect from the person who gave it a last desperate kick to hopefully land it on the couch in the other room.

 

Sharing Inspiration

One of the most complex (in a good way), detailed stories I’ve ever read and enjoyed (sorry, Silmarillion) is Erfworld. It has been going on for ages and the amount of foreshadowing in every chapter is staggering. The attention to detail, the way every single thing in a page is important, and the fact that you’re usually right if you see something and wonder “is this important?” is mind-boggling. And the best part is that most of the twists are STILL unexpected. Or, if they’re expected, they’re still deeply satisfying. The characters are amazing and I’ve never been more hooked on a story and the characters taking part in it for as long as I can remember.

 

Helpful Tips

Like I mentioned above, creating a list of the reasons I write is super helpful for me when I’m having a difficult time staying focused over a long period of time or when I’m feeling particularly down. You should spend some time to do the same. It can be incredibly helpful as a mental exercise because it will hopefully help you figure out why you’ve decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month. Once you have the answer to that question, pushing through some of the bigger slumps or more difficult days will be easier because your reasons will be clear. If your reasons for writing are “to become inundated in attractive people I am sexually interested in” or “so I can make tons of money and build a bed out of hundred dollar bill” like some kind of nest-based Scrooge McDuck, then you should probably reexamine your choice since neither of those things happen to most writers. I suspect Neil Gaiman could do the former and that J.K. Rowling could do the latter, but both of them write because they love stories. The desire for money or a cadre of beautiful people isn’t really a motive that’ll help you push through a difficult day.

That being said, I’m not gonna judge you if those are your motivations since they might actually help you write. I’d just recommend setting some more reasonable expectations for the results of this month of writing.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 9 (11/09)

Chris Leave a comment

I bit off more than I could chew yesterday. I got home and tried to focus and write for four hours and got nowhere. I wish I’d just called it after the first hour because I’d have at least done something relaxing with my time. But I just wanted to get it all done like I’d planned. Which is the downside to goals, I guess. Especially big ones like the ones I was throwing around yesterday. It’s important to know the difference between “possible” and “likely.” I leaned too hard on the possible part and paid no attention to how unlikely it was that I’d have the energy and focus to do that much writing after a full day of work and stuff. I probably need more sleep, a bit of actual relaxation, and then I’ll be good to write.

I think the goals are good, I’m just still recovering. So I’m going to dial them back a bit and aim for that. The blog post counts are pretty much going to stay the same since nothing is going to stop me from updating my blog every day, but I probably won’t pre-write all the Tips for the rest of the month. It’s a bit of a pain to try to come up with them at the end of a night of writing, but it’ll still be easier to do that once a day over this weekend than to try to jam out nineteen extra at some point in the next few days.  I’ll aim for reaching fifteen thousand words in my National Novel Writing Month project, which is pretty much what I should be writing every day according to the NaNoWriMo thing, and I’ll drop my word count for the romance novel down to six thousand. Sure, I’ll have most of tomorrow afternoon and evening to write since I’m up a few hours at work, but I’ll be busy most of Saturday so I’ve really only got two days to spend on writing. Saturday, like yesterday, will be just about getting as many words done as possible before or after helping my friend move to her new house and then doing the requisite amount of hanging out before I bounce. As much as I’d love to spend some time with my friends, I would also like to get some writing done and rest up for next week. Next week is when I’m going to try to get back to it, hardcore mode.

I say “hardcore” mode like I’m going to step up my game to some new insane level, but that’s kind of the theme of the entire month. I’ve had three good days out of the last eight and I wrote twenty-three thousand words in that time. If I kept up that pace every day and wrote just my NaNoWriMo project, I’d have the whole thing done in a week.

Maybe that’s what I should do. Set aside the romance novel and just do the next forty-two thousand words of my novel over the next seven days (leaving a little room for blog writing), and then swap to my romance novel to do the same. That could work. Except for the fact that I know it won’t since seven-thousand words a day is an unsustainable pace during a work week and I still also want to do my Coldheart and Iron weekly posts, so that’s an extra two or three thousand words. Plus, as I said above, there’s a big difference between “possible” and “likely.”

So let’s just stick to my tame goals and then, when I’m rested, I’ll figure out how to fix up my plans so I can still accomplish all my goals for the month. I know I can still do it. I’ve been off to worse starts than this, percentage-wise. I doubt I’ve ever been this far off on word-counts, though. I should be at about thirty-two thousand words for the month as of the end of yesterday, but I’m only at twenty-seven thousand five hundred. Which isn’t a bad place to be, it’s just behind on all my metrics because I’ve only been consistent about blog posts and I can’t ride that minimum daily count for any longer before it starts to put me way behind. I mean, I’m only five thousand words behind schedule and that’s about five hours of work if I can focus. So who knows, maybe I’ll catch up. I feel pretty far behind, though, so I’m not sure the “projected total” and “actual total” are actually giving me the information a quick analysis says they do.

Okay, I crunched the numbers and everything’s further off. I should be at eight thousand words for my romance novel (at a minimum) and I’m only at two thousand and all those are getting tossed out because I need to fix how I’m writing it. I’m at eight thousand five hundred words in my National Novel Writing Month project and I should be at thirteenth and a third thousand words. So I’m essentially thirteen thousand words behind my word count totals. Which is about what I’d make up if I’d actually gone with the goals I stated yesterday.

I think that I’m going to keep my more reasonable goals for this weekend and just see where I am when I get there. Maybe I can push for some extra words every day to make up for being behind. An extra thousand every day would catch me up in no time. Four thousand words a day plus blog posts. Doesn’t seem like much when I say it like that, looking at my daily totals from past days, but it’s going to be difficult.

I’m going to take my advice from a few days ago and just focus on non-numeric goals. No time, no word count, just moving down the page and marking off story beats. It’s good advice. I should listen to myself more often. Anyway, I hope your day goes well, that you make good progress today, and that you can find the time to step away long enough to breathe and prepare yourself for the next dive. Good luck!

 

Daily Prompt

Unless you’re trying to write period literature based on stories from over one thousand years ago (if you are, I wish you the best of luck and I hope you let me know because I live stories from back then), your characters are probably going to grow and change. Maybe the entire story is about your protagonist growing and changing. Whatever part of the story it is, growth is important to show. For today, write a scene showing your protagonist growing. You could show them reflecting on a time when they would have made a difference choice or you could even show them growing by having them change the way they’re responding to whatever situation is causing their growth. It can be as little or as big as you want, but show it to us, don’t just tell us about it.

 

Sharing Inspiration

Sometimes, you just need to have an uncomplicated fun time. Most people don’t really think of Twitter when they think of places they can go for a fun time, especially considering how many nazis infest the platform these days. But me? I go check out #BadBookIdeas. Two of my Twitter friends are responsible for the resurging popularity of the hashtag and they occasionally have duels that always result in a spike of people Tweeting. It’s a great place to go for ideas. You shouldn’t use the ideas other people are posting because that’s kind of rude, but they have pun titles usually and they do a great job of getting you thinking about quick little stories. Participating is also great practice for coming up with stories ideas for your own use, so check it out and try it out!

 

Helpful Tips

Take some time away from your screen, typewriter, or notebook. Walks are great, but sometimes you just need to center yourself. Your mind needs to be tidied up every so often, just like the place you live, and the best way to do that is some kind of non-specific writing or expression. Maybe have an open-ended philosophical discussion with your friends. Maybe draw something or make some non-word based art. Maybe write a poem. Maybe do a little writing in your journal. Maybe meditate. You’ve got a lot of options and I’m sure you know which will work best for you. Don’t continue to push yourself when the words won’t come. Take a break, tidy up, and get your mind in order. This doesn’t mean play video games, read, or watch TV. You need to take the time to intentionally order your mind. Get things out of it.  Put some of it away. All of that. It’s not always easy and it’s not always possible, but there’s usually benefit to it. I’m planning to do a bunch of it after I leave work today since I’ve been putting it off all week. I’m going to make a phone call, have a good cry about this week, and then clean up my mind. Maybe then I’ll actually be able to write what happened in my life.

Anyway, this is a bit beside the point. Take the time to reflect on what’s in your head because that’s where the stories come from. You need to clean it up and care for it if you want to keep producing. Sometimes that means not accomplishing the goals you set for yourself, but that’s okay. Your mind is your best tool and it’ll work better once you’ve put some work into caring for it.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 8 (11/08)

Chris Leave a comment

What a fucking morning. Jesus Christ. Wake up and find out that not just all of the terrible stuff I mentioned in yesterday’s post is gonna be in the news all day, but there was also another mass shooting and Ruth Bader Ginsberg is in the hospital? I mean, is the world going for a new record number in their recent “Bad News Combo?” I feel like we’re approaching a point where everything that can go wrong will go wrong. It’s horrifying and incredibly draining. I just wanted to have a month where I could put everything else aside and shoot for some crazy-pants writing goals instead of trying to set up a sustainable writing habit like I did last November. I was so excited for those goals and now there’s so much going on in my life and my government that I can’t just tune it all out. There are so many things competing for my time and attention–I want to give my full time and attention to–that I wind up feeling pulled apart and unable to focus on anything.

I played a lot of video games last night, but that would up being less relaxing that I’d hoped. The game I’ve been playing, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, is a lot of fun and the story is great (I’m planning to review it next month, once I’ve gotten further into it), but it is nigh-impossible to get through this game with my character being a sorcerer! Spell-casting is powerful at later levels in the tabletop version of Pathfinder, but it isn’t super weak at earlier levels. It is limited, sure, but I shouldn’t be struggling this much. The real problem is how difficult it is to recover spells. Camping supplies are heavy enough that I can barely carry any since I’ve got a couple of low-strength characters in my group and they’re required for resting unless I want to let a bunch of hours fly past while someone in my party tries to hunt for food. Which doesn’t make any since because there’s also a “meal prep” section of the camping interface and you can make actual recipes if you have the raw ingredients in your inventory so I don’t know what is even going on here. Maybe they’re hunting for firewood? But there’s no fucking way that takes six hours. Honestly, I think the whole system needs to be reworked if they want to make casters a viable option. Otherwise you’re restricted to only buff casting and that gets super boring. Honestly, I might just restart my game and make a ranger or dexterity based fighter. Martial classes benefit the most from this system because very few of them have powers that get used up and health potions and such are cheap enough to buy in bulk. I mean, I have about three dozen at any given time since my cleric’s healing sucks constantly (his “rolls” for hitpoint restoration are so bad that he could use Cure Moderate Wounds and heal less than the bard casting Cure Light Wounds and has literally every time he’s done it) and the fucker keeps getting knocked unconscious because SOMEHOW, despite having a barbarian with double the movement speed who stands RIGHT NEXT TO HIM, he is ALWAYS the first person to reach melee combat so all the enemies latch onto him. I mean, fuck.

Anyway, this is what happens when you try to play a tabletop game like you play a video game. I would have loved this game if it was a turn-based game where everything moves in order like you do in the tabletop version of Pathfinder. I don’t care about grids or any of that stuff, but just being able to more easily line people up since I wouldn’t need to manage everyone at once would be nice.

I’m going back to writing tonight, once I leave work. I want to start catching up on the writing I haven’t been doing and, if I can get through today without anything horrible happening, I might be able to get some done. At the VERY LEAST, I’d like to avoid falling further behind in my goals. Sure, I’ve written a total of twenty-five thousand words this month, but I should be higher by now. That’s only twenty to twenty-five percent of what I want to do this month and I’m already past that point in the month. I know I can still recover from this. I’ve done almost thirty thousand words in a single weekend, friday night to Sunday night, before and I can do it again if that’s what it’s going to take. I just need to get my feet under me after this past week so I can start working again. If I can have a single calm day, just one, I can find a way to catch up this weekend.

Ultimately, I can’t count on that. I’d like it, but there’s too much going on right now to expect a calm day. I mean, I’m probably going to a protest at five this afternoon as a part of the public’s response to the recent shit Trump is trying to pull, and protests are generally not a part of a calm day. So I’m going to set myself some goals for the next four days, I’m going to mentally gather my power, and I’m going to do everything. I had my day of exhaustion and moping, so now it is time to work.

These are my goals to be hit by the time I go to bed on Sunday. I’m going to get my National Novel Writing Month project up to twenty thousand words. I can do fifteen hundred to two thousand words in an hour if I focus a bit and swap between projects to give myself a break. If I do that twice a day between now and Sunday, I can reach that goal without a problem. I’m going to re-write my romance novel with the tone I should have been using since the beginning and I’m going to get that up to twelve thousand words, which will also be about two hours of focused work a day between now and then. I’m going to continue updating my blog every day because nothing has made me miss a day in three hundred seventy-eight days and this isn’t going to stop me either. I’m also going to pre-write all of the “tips” for my blog posts so I don’t have to spend time figuring them out every day. Since they’re only one hundred fifty or two hundred words each, they’d make great breaks from working on my two book projects. Which means I’m going to find a way to write thirty-one thousand words in the next four days (or only thirty thousand if you exclude today’s post). That’s more than I’ve done so far this month, thanks to spending half my days trying to recover from everything going on. And it’s totally possible since I ALREADY did twenty-three thousand words in just the four days I actually worked this month.

I’m going to do this and I’ll keep you all updated on my progress as I go. I hope you can find your centers today and use it to push yourself forward as you work on your goals today, whatever they are. Good luck!

 

Daily Prompt

How do your protagonist’s friends view them? How does the world of your story view your protagonist? Your protagonist may have a very solid identity and you may know exactly who they are, but the world often sees people differently than they see themselves. The same is true of friends. Today, focus on the difference between the way your protagonist sees themself and the way their friends see them, along with the conflicts that can cause when a friend makes an assumption about the way the protagonist would react that clashes with the way the protagonist views themselves. These moments can be incredibly moments for growth, so don’t hold back!

 

Sharing Inspiration

My favorite video game, Breath of the Wild also tells one of my favorite stories using a wonderful and different method than most. Instead of telling most of the story through a strict narrative unlocked through steady progression through the game (like almost every video game I’ve ever played), Breath of the Wild hits the major plot points using a mission progression, but actually tells most of the story passively, as you wander through the game and learn the names of the various places on your map. Destroyed villages and overgrown ruins paint a picture of destruction generations old that most of the world is still unable to properly recover from. The people wandering through the world have kept their spirits up, but they’re constantly being attacked by monsters and, for most of them, their only recourse is to run away from the beings that destroyed their world one hundred years ago.

 

Helpful Tips

The act of setting goals, as evidenced above, can help you move from spinning your wheels to making progress. It’s the same idea as putting some research or part of an outline in the blank page of a new project. Once you have something, anything, to focus on, it makes it a lot easier to get started. Blank pages are terrifying, even after several years of writing I still hate coming face-to-face with them, and trying to make progress on a giant project without small steps to work on is the mental equivalent of a blank page. Break it down into steps, give yourself a time to get each of them done, and adjust your schedule and goals as time goes on and your progress requires. They’re supposed to help you motivate yourself, to change the giant task of “write a novel” into simple things like “write a full page” or “finish the chapter” that can be accomplished in a couple of hours of work. You want measurable progress and a list of goals is the best thing I’ve ever found for that.

Bonus-tip: If you need help getting fired up today like I have, listen to the first half of the Hamilton soundtrack while you’re working out your goals. Specifically, only the first half. Trust me on that.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 7 (11/07)

Chris Leave a comment

As you can see from the lateness of today’s post, I’ve encountered a hiccup. As a result of work, the things going on in my life, and my writing, I have over-extended myself. I spent yesterday evening trying to enjoy playing video games instead of writing in an effort to relax, but any recovery was offset by the stress and anxiety that resulted from yesterday being election day. I would normally be able to ignore that, but already being mentally and emotionally exhausted meant I was unable to do more than take it out of the forefront of my mind by playing video games. Because of how active my mind was, I was unable to sleep until the results were in and the anxieties about the day had been resolved. So I was up until two in the morning and I woke up four hours later. And then went in to work were I had to manage the second half of a meeting that was the culmination of over a year of work on my part. The first part, a major contributing factor to how tired and exhausted I was last night, was yesterday. Thankfully, all that is done now. Election results are mostly in. Sure, there’s still a ton of bullshit tied to most election results because my state (among others) is gerrymandered to the point of being completely fucking undemocratic and there’s tons of instances of blatant corruption and voter suppression, but the elections are over now and trying to change things with voting isn’t an option for another two years.  Plus, apparently democracy doesn’t matter anymore, the rule of law means nothing to a huge number of voters in this country given their support of a political group that has unabashedly allowed the most corrupt federal government in living memory to do whatever the fuck it wants, and apparently we’re no longer even pretending that the shit-show we’re living through right now is any kind of “normal.”

So I’m trying again tonight. Emphasis on “try” seeing as it’s doing to be difficult to relax while I’m waiting for the country to fall apart. Still, you gotta keep trying to live, right? So I’m gonna post this and then play video games until I get tired enough to sleep (which, in this case, means staying up until 10pm so I actually sleep through the night as going to sleep now means waking up at 9pm and being unable to sleep until 3 or 4 unless I just dose myself with NyQuil). Progress and forward movement are important, so I’m going to get at least a few hundred words in today between this post and doing some work on my National Novel Writing Month project. Maybe aim for one thousand words total, if I can. Or just focus on finishing the thoughts behind this post and doing enough to make it worth updating my word count on the National Novel Writing Month website. Whatever I can do without pushing myself too hard.

I hope day seven of National Novel Writing Month is going well for you and that you’re making progress on your goals. Even if it feels so small as to be entirely pointless, it is still progress. Write only one word, if you can’t muster more than that, and be proud of the fact that you managed to accomplish something today.

 

Daily Prompt

Humans are often very emotional beings. A lot of us let a few emotions have a lot of say in our lives because we tend to respond habitually unless we are consciously trying to change our behavior or taking the time to sort through our emotions before reacting. I tend toward anxiety and worry. One of my roommates tends toward exasperation and concern. One of my friends tends toward intense interest and nonchalance. What are the emotional habits of your protagonist? Are they aware they have a tendency to respond in certain ways or would it come as a surprise to them if someone pointed it out?

 

Sharing Inspiration

If you want to have a good time and don’t mind a certain degree of meta humor, and a really long-running gag, you should check out One-Punch Man. The story itself isn’t anything particularly amazing, though it’s still pretty clever, but the main reason I read it is for the way it makes fun of superhero comics and shonen manga. The comic is full of crazy villains yelling out their backstories as they commit stupid, petty crimes and heroes who do the same thing while busting said villains. It features a man who never fights seriously and still wins every fight in pretty much one punch (actual number may vary, but it’s only ever one vaguely serious attack per fight). It is full of great little jokes, a decent amount of well-conceived parody, and it still manages to stress the importance of heroism in ways that don’t get old even as it makes fun of most heroes.

 

Helpful Tips

There are these things called “sprints.” They’re essentially the same thing for writing as they are for running: quick bursts of speed and focus in order to get as far as you can in a predetermined amount of time.  Most people do fifteen minute writing sprints, since anything longer tends to stray away from something people can expect themselves to easily stick to. Personally, I prefer five-minute sprints. That’s about the amount of time it takes for my brain to get so far ahead of my fingers that it actively starts to impede my ability to write words. After a five-minute sprint, I update word counts, do a little math for whatever form I’m building to calculate the over-complicated formulas I produced to track my writing progress this month, and then do another one. Five minutes of writing, one minute off. I repeat that until I need to use the restroom or I’ve done five sprints. After the fifth sprint, I take a five-minute break and then get back to it again.

Ideally, you’ll figure out what period of time works best for you. If you’ve already done sprints before or you have some knowledge of how to cater to your natural attention span, you should be good to go. Otherwise, just try different lengths of time until it clicks. It’ll be obvious when it does because you’ll notice your word count start to climb quickly. Just make sure your breaks don’t involve anything distracting or else your sprints with turn into strolls.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 6 (11/06)

Chris Leave a comment

Well, day five was pretty much typical of how I expected a standard National Novel Writing Month day to go, despite staying at work a couple extra hours to prepare for a meeting I’m supposed to run today (and am running as this blog post goes up. Yay technology!) I’ve gotten over three thousand words written before working on this blog post and it should put me over four thousand. After this goes up, if I still have some energy, I’m going to do a little romance novel work or write another two hundred and fifty works in “What You Know You Need” so I’ll only be about three hundred thirty-three words behind, which is about the average amount of “extra” words I write in a standard day.

That being said, I’m still super wiped out from not sleeping enough over the weekend and still pretty emotionally distraught about what’s going on in my life. I may have had a busy enough day to avoid thinking about anything too deeply, but it’s still there, just beneath the surface, waiting for the right moment to rise up and make me want to cry again. I usually manage to keep my face pretty much neutral, which is important at work. It’s hard to run a meeting about the process you’re trying to implement as a part of your software coup if you look like you’re about to cry.

My German coworkers are in town (which is why we’re doing all this stuff now instead of waiting a bit longer) and it’s frustrating to need to be putting on a social face when all I really want to do is keep my head down and work alone. Coincidentally, they were also in town the week after I broke up with my ex and I had to do the same thing then. If I were a more superstitious man, I’d find it entirely plausible that their visits to the US are harbingers of pain and sadness in my life. I’ll have to watch out for it in future just, you know, to make sure. Honestly, I’d kind of like a bit of quiet in my life, next year, so I’m hoping that this year was the only year were we have my German coworkers are harbingers of doom. I need to work with those guys. I can’t do that if my every interaction with them brings doom and loss upon my life. I’m got pretty good emotional fortitude, but even I don’t think I could manage that amount of tribulation.

Anyway, writing is going well. I’m making good progress despite my emotional state. I’ve passed the twenty thousand word mark and I’m rapidly approaching the twenty-five thousand word mark. I still suck at writing romance novels, but I think I’m figuring it out. I’ve already read two of them this month, so I’ll figure it out eventually, I’m sure. I even managed to wrap up a draft of a Coldheart and Iron post for tomorrow! I’m still waiting on review, but it should be up at some point! Two updates in ONE DAY! That’s a first. The only other thing of note going on is the ongoing war with my computer chair. It refuses to stay at its maximum height so I need to continuously adjust it and it also makes this incredibly creepy, animalistic squeak if I lean on the left arm just right. Which I do. Constantly. Because I forget it’s there. And then my heart-rate skyrockets and my lifespan decreases.

I’m rambling. I’m going to go sleepy-write some words for my other projects until I actually fall asleep at my computer. I hope day six goes well for you and I hope you’re making progress on your goals. Good luck!

 

Daily Prompt

Despite the fact that Humans are incredibly complex individuals, our first reactions to surprises or big news tend to fall into a bit of a pattern. I tend to give placebo responses immediately and then either give a genuine response after catching myself being non-specific or give a genuine response after taking the time to examine my feelings about it. One of my roommates tends to respond logically first, entirely devoid of emotion, which he adds later on as needed. My other roommate tends to respond emotionally first but then fills in reason and shows you the logic behind his responses upon request. How does your protagonist respond to something unexpected or portentous?

 

Sharing Inspiration

Sometimes, I really just want some good music to stick in the background with an upbeat tempo, a fun sound, and a great rhythm. On those days, I always turn to Matt and Kim. Their music, which I’m pretty sure is “electric pop,” focuses on a delightful mix of keyboard synth and drums for some great dance music to listen to in your own home. Their early albums have a great deal of similarity to their songs, but that words really well for when I want to shut down the busy parts of my mind so I can focus on my writing. Their more recent stuff has a greater variety to it and it’s really good for jamming along to and signing when I don’t need to focus as intensely.

 

Helpful Tips

If you’re struggling to come up with what to write and taking a fifteen minute break isn’t helping, I suggest going for a walk. The soothing back-and-forth motion of a steady walking pace coupled with the movement of both sides of your body stimulates both sides of your brain. While you’re walking, try to think about stuff other than the story you’re working on or the frustration you’re feeling at not being able to figure out what comes next. Focus on the trees or houses around you. Do you best to be present in the moment and watch the world spin its way through the universe by observing it all around you. You may not find the answer to how to continue your story, but it’s a lot like unclogging the drain in your mind. Once things start to flow again, eventually the right idea will show up. Stagnation is the enemy and the best counter to it is a simple walk around the neighborhood. Seems too good to be true, right? That is where you’d be wrong. There’s actual science behind this that supports the reasons why the therapy I use for my OCD and PTSD is effective. Stimulation of alternating sides of the brain is linked to processing thoughts and feelings and emotions that feel stuck in your head. Clear whatever’s stuck on your mind up and you should be good to write again.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 5 (11/05)

Chris Leave a comment

Well, yesterday was an entirely normal day. I got everything done I was supposed to do for that day. There’s still more I could have done, but given how my weekend went prior to yesterday, “normal” is a damn good accomplishment. Middling productive, only marginally stressful, and entirely too long. Seriously. Daylight Saving Time always screws with my ability to perceive the passage of time so I feel like it is several hours later than the clock tells me. It was worse yesterday because of how terribly I’ve been sleeping lately, and I went to bed a good deal earlier than I normally would.

Today’s going to be a busy day, too. It’s my first day back at work after my break and I’m concerned about how I’m going to write my four thousand or more words in just the time I have after work since I might need to stay late at work on account of the projects I’m trying to wrap up. I also generally have D&D on Monday nights, but I’ve cancelled my participation in it on account of the stuff that happened over the weekend. I’m not going to have fun, nor will I be any fun, so it was best to just stay away for a week while I try to focus on getting my stuff worked out. Plus, it’s going to be difficult to maintain my nightly pace of four thousand words on nights when I have anything else to do. Ideally, I could do all that in about four hours, but the ideal is rarely the case. Planning on six hours is much more likely. And I still want to write the Coldheart and Iron post that’s supposed to go up tomorrow and that’s another two to three and a half thousand words worth of writing that almost always takes a little over an hour per thousand to write since I need to look up stuff and reference past chapters. I tried to get some of it done last night, but I just hit a wall.

I’m still really worn out, despite the sleep. This emotional stuff is taking quite a toll on me. I’m worried I’m entering the loop I took all of last week off to avoid. I’m still technically behind from Saturday’s day of rest, thought I’ve already taken steps toward catching up in almost everything. I’ve gotta confront the reality of whether or not I can actually write three stories at once (What You Know You Need, Spicing Things Up, and Coldheart and Iron) because wanting to do it isn’t going to get me through the nights of lessened sleep it’ll probably require. I’ve already got enough of an extra challenge between National Novel Writing Month blog updates and the romance novel. I don’t need to keep doing weekly updates for a Science Fiction story almost no one reads. Tuesdays are my worst days for views because almost no one cares about the story I’m writing. I know a few people who all say they’ll read it once it’s complete, but those are the people I talk to who are the closest to reading it. I could skip a month of updates, leave the last four chapters for January instead of trying to wrap it up on Christmas thereby saving myself some time and sanity… It’s certainly an appealing thought. It’s not like I don’t have enough other crap to do.

The question just remains to figure out what I really want. More rest and downtown, or to have the story finished on Christmas Day. My initial reaction says the latter, but my common sense says the former. It’s hard to argue with either side since they both have good arguments. Not writing it would be limiting myself. Writing it would be pushing myself toward a vicious cycle of doing nothing but writing and sacrificing sleep on the altar of potential productivity. To make it all worse, I’m still super tired and probably not in the right frame of mind to make a decision since my tired impulse always says “do it anyway” but also “just go to bed and sleep for a long time.”

I mean, I’ve already written over eighteen thousand words. It’s not like I’ve gotten nothing done or I’m not already doing enough. I’m doing plenty. I probably should dial it down a bit. But having time and energy for a little more is easier to allocate when I’ve got projects to switch between with smaller goals rather than “spend the extra time doing an open-ended extra amount of typing in your NaNoWriMo project!” I do most of my extra writing by rounding out word totals to interesting numbers, finishing scenes, or letting the writing carry me along when I find bits that are easy to add. Concrete extra projects and definable goals are my thing.

Anyway, I hope you’re making progress on your goals, whatever they are, and I hope the fifth day of National Novel Writing Month goes well for you! Good luck and know that you’re doing a great job! Keep it up!

 

Daily Prompt

Before your protagonist became a protagonist, they had some kind of life. Maybe they were a sad orphan with no home and nothing but verbal abuse and child labor to fill their formative years, or maybe they lived in the lap of luxury with a silver spoon in their life. Maybe their life was entirely unremarkable before this point aside from a few key traits that set them up for the circumstances of the story. Whatever the reason, it’s important to know who your protagonist was so you can figure out how to turn them into the person they’re supposed to be by the end of the story. Today, write about your protagonist’s past and how it’s relevant to the story you’re telling today.

 

Sharing Inspiration

One of my favorite books that has an amazing character building experience throughout it, is Wake of Vultures by Lila Bowen (Aka, Delilah Dawson). There’s a plot involving the protagonist trying to avenge a murder and bring down some kind of terrible monster in the Old-Time Fantasy Wild West, but most of the book involves the protagonist exploring and developing a sense of self that they find comfortable. Even as the story draws to a close, the protagonist is learning more and more about themselves and their past, which in turn informs the person they’re becoming as they are pushed to the absolute limits of what they are willing to put up with or what they can learn to live with. If you want to read some masterful character development, you really need to check this book out.

 

Helpful Tips

If you’re struggling to focus because you’re tired or you can’t seem to get your brain away from whatever thought it’s been picking at all day, try taking a nap or meditating! A short nap, about fifteen to thirty minutes, should be plenty to get you feeling awake and alert again, unless you’re like me and don’t actually sleep so much as crash as a result of your sleep debt every time you lay down your head. If you’re someone like that, you should probably skip the naps and head straight to the meditation. That’s what I do. A simple guided meditation (plenty of which you can find on YouTube) can go a long way to clearing your head or making you feel more mentally focused and physically relaxed. Naps are good, but meditation is usually better if you’re any good at it.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 4 (11/04)

Chris Leave a comment

Well, I’ve been pretty derailed. Yesterday was not the day I had hoped it would be. A combination of only getting four hours of sleep, from seven to eleven in the morning, set me up for a bad day. My nieghbor’s music was loud and non-stop until four in the morning and then I was too upset and frustrated to go to sleep for three hours. Also, four hours isn’t enough sleep when that’s more or less the amount I’d gotten for each of the two previous nights as well. After that… well, I got the precursor to some bad news right when I woke up, got the bad news half and hour later, and then, around two in the afternoon, finally got the context for the bad news so I could properly appreciate how bad it was.

And that was pretty much it for the day. I was just waking up enough to be able to write at that point and then I got the context for the bad news and I pretty much gave up. I still tried to write, but I packed it in around six and just played video games until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore. The only reason I’m in any kind of shape to write is momentum built up by starting with easy stuff like showering, breakfast, and laundry, along with the eight hours of sleep I got thanks to the start of Daylight Saving Time. I still feel like absolutely crap, but I’ve worked through worse. Maybe. I don’t really know. It’s not like there’s a translation table for “effort required to keep doing stuff” between the various kinds of awful stuff that can happen to people. I’ve felt worse from my own depression and kept writing, but I’ve also been dealing with my depression for over a decade. This… This is new. I’ve experience similar things before, but not this.

I’m not going to go into the specifics of what it was, but I will say that my health and life are just fine. The biggest impact this will have is the negative impact on my mood. And my focus. Right now, I very much do not want to be in my own head and it is incredibly difficult to avoid being in your head while writing. My current strategy revolves around partitioning things and trying to be a little more forgiving when I need to go do something that pulls me out of my head quickly. I’m also leaning heavily on one of my YouTube playlists. It’s full of music that has a calming effect on me and that’s super helpful because it is basically shrinking the size of the stuff I’m trying to avoid in my head which gives me more room for trying to write stuff.

Which I’m still going to do. I cancelled D&D because my heart just isn’t in… well, anything. It isn’t in anything right now and I don’t want to run a game I’m not going to enjoy because I’ve learned that’s a really good way to run a game no one will enjoy. Hell, I won’t even really be able to get into it. I played games all evening yesterday and I kept getting pulled out of it by what’s going on in my head. But I’m still going to try to write today. I owe it to myself to do the best I can to continue working on my goals because those goals haven’t changed, my plans haven’t changed, and my life still needs to continue. I can’t let this stress and emotional turmoil just bring it to a halt. So I’m going to try again today and I’ll hopefully be able to get more done today than I did yesterday. I’ve got all day, still. Twelve hours until Monday. Ten until I should go to bed (since I need more than one night of decent sleep if I’m going to survive the upcoming week). That should be enough to scrap out one thousand six hundred sixty-seven words of main National Novel Writing Month project, one thousand words of romance novel, two blog entries (since I am supposed to write the next day’s post during the last hour of the prior evening and I didn’t do that yesterday), and a bunch of reading. Ideally, I’d also get a draft of Coldheart and Iron: Part 36 done since I still plan to post that on Tuesday, but I’ll take progress on it instead of the whole thing. I’m not picky.

In fact, I’m trying to be realistic. It’s entirely possible I’ll do none of those things at all. Maybe I’ll just do a few hundred words and pack it in for the day because trying to force myself to write right now was too tortuous. Anyway, I hope your National Novel Writing Month is going well and that you had a chance to make some good progress this weekend!

Daily Prompt

Unless you’re Andy Weir, your protagonist needs someone to interact with. A friend to go to for advice, a student to mentor, a foil to highlight their strengths and weaknesses, a rival to compete against, or so on. There’s someone (or multiple someones if you want an “all-of-the-above” situation) in the world of your story who will be the main focus for the protagonist. Maybe they’re part of the reason the protagonist is driving the plot or maybe they’re helping drive the plot so the protagonist can figure out how to solve it. Whyever they’re there, your protagonist needs them to shake up your descriptions with some dialogue. Today, introduce the protagonist’s main source of interaction and give a scene that establishes their relationship with the protagonist.

 

Sharing Inspiration

One of the best stories I’ve experience this year, though it’s not as good as “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing,” was the anime, My Hero Academia. What I thought was going to be just another “people with powers in high school fighting stuff” show turned out to be one the most complex and well-written anime I have ever seen. The only one that compares is Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and that only came together that well because the fans demanded a faithful adaptation of the manga after it was finished. I love the way it tells complex stories using an anime genre that is notorious for simple stories about gaining more power to beat the bad guys. There’s still plenty of that in this anime, but that’s not all there is to it. It constantly defies my expectations and I love any story that can surprise me in a good way.

 

Helpful Tips

Don’t be afraid to take a break if you need one. You can always make up for it in the future or you have probably over-written on a few previous days so you’re not even really missing a full day of progress. The most important thing you can do this month is maintain your mental and physical health. Writing is great, and finishing a story feels great, but none of that matters if you make yourself incredibly sick as a result of pushing yourself too hard. So take breaks, take a day off when you need it, or, at the very least, don’t hold yourself to a word goal for a day. Try to write a little bit and be content with getting anything out instead of being disappointed that you fell short of your goal. Take it from me, building a daily writing habit is more important than writing the same amount every day and keeping yourself from getting sick or over-stressed is more important than both. Figure out what your hierarchy of needs is and make sure to stick to it as well as you can.

 

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 3 (11/03)

Chris Leave a comment

In the grand scheme of things, Yesterday was a decent day. I got plenty done despite staying up super late the night before and forgetting I had a therapy appointment first thing int he morning until it was too late to get more than five hours of sleep. I then caffeinated myself to compensate and pretty much ruined any ability to focus I might have ever possessed so I only got another six thousand words written. Which, you know, it still a crap-ton of words. It’s just also not as many as I wanted to get done. Eight thousand would have been good for today. It’d have gotten me back on track. That being said, if I can do another six thousand tomorrow, I’ll be all caught up since all of the support writing stuff is done except my daily reflections and tips for these posts. It’s hard to write a reflection on a day that hasn’t happened yet, but it’s fine. This is about one thousand words of stuff and I can jam that out in thirty to forty-five minutes these days. The only question is how good my focus is when I write this and, seeing as I’m writing this after midnight again, I can confidently say my focus is crap.

I should probably stop complaining. I wrote six thousand words today and that’s only if I actually go to bed after this is done. If I decide to stay up a little later to get some more work done on the romance novel that’s been sitting at the bottom of my priority list, then that could easily go up. Once I’ve got the opening worked out, stories usually tend to go pretty quickly at first. Thanks to the outlining I did on the first, I’ve already got that part worked out so it should be pretty easy to do one thousand words before I decide to pack it in for the night. Or maybe I’ll just got to bed and get some freaking sleep for once in my freaking life. It’s like I’m allergic to a good night’s rest.

To be fair, the loud music that is coming from my neighbor’s side of the duplex, like it does every goddamn Friday from ten in the evening until two or three in the morning, discourages sleep. It’s a been a bit quieter than usual, lately, mostly after midnight, though. I wonder if one of my roommates complained. I doubt it. They could sleep through a tornado. Maybe the neighbor on the other side complained. There’s an air gap and the exterior walls are thicker than the one separate the two halves of the duplex, so it seems unlikely. Maybe he just decided to stop being an asshole before I lost my temper and called the cops on him. Originally, we were going to ignore it because we can be loud at times and it’s usually best to try to stay on good terms with your neighbors, but this is every Friday like clockwork and we maybe noise late at night once every few months.

Night like tonight are a bit easier. I can turn my fan to the max setting, set up some quiet music I can sleep through (from long practice. This has been my sleep music playlist since I was 13 and had my own room for the first time), and turn on the Rainy Mood app. The calming sound of rain and thunder always helps cover up the shitty bass pounding through the walls. Some days I’m pretty sure it only feels worse. Today, it’s pretty quiet, but I can’t unhear it tonight, no matter what I do, so it’s incredibly grating. I might need to meditate myself to sleep tonight to forcibly get my mind off the frustrating bland club-style music he listens to.

Anyway, that’s probably a good summary of my day. Unfocused, frustrated by petty shit I refuse to address in a constructive manner, and so focused on trying to get more writing done that I’ve ruined any real chance I had at productivity by continuing to try to focus instead of letting myself take a break. Honestly, if I’d just gone and played video games for a few hours this afternoon instead of mindlessly procrastinating on writing Inspiration segments, I’d probably have gotten eight thousand words written and been asleep for an hour by now. Lesson learned. I’ll try again in the morning, once I’ve gotten more than 5 hours of sleep at night. That’ll be a nice feeling.

Good luck today! I hope you’re hitting your targets and making solid progress on your goals!

 

Daily Prompt

Most stories have a star. The Protagonist. In some stories, there are several protagonists. Whoever they are, however many there are, they are the people who the story happens to. They have agency and they use it to push the story forward. No protagonist chooses to lay down and die when it’s that or fight back somehow. If they do, they’re not the protagonist. They might sacrifice themselves, but that’s still their choice. Behind all this, though, they have something that drives them. This is their reason for making decisions, for choosing to act, for resisting whatever is happening. Today, write about what drives your protagonist(s) toward the end of your story. You could work it into their introduction or figure out how or when you want to reveal it later, but it’s important to establish why they do what they do.

 

Sharing Inspiration

In the last year or so of the comic, Order of the Stick, we have seen some amazing developments that have been years in the making. We have seen the resolution of stories that began when I first started reading this comic back during the Azure city sage and we have seen stuff I thought was a throw-away gag come to fruition. Stories that were foreshadowed have come to pass and events long prophesied have finally made their dramatic entrance. Low, have I wondered about the various colors of the gods and now we finally have our answers. This gets me excited about the potential for long-term storytelling available in forms like comics and dungeons and dragons that generally require a big chunk of time to come to an end.

 

Helpful Tips

While National Novel Writing Month prioritizes a word-count goal, you probably shouldn’t focus on that yourself. If you’re constantly checking how many words you’ve written, you’re just going to continuously break your concentration. Instead, try pages. A little bit under three pages using standard fonts and pages in most word processors should be your goal, if you’re writing single-spaced. You can get about get about six hundred words on a page, as long as you’re not constantly breaking onto new lines for a bunch of short lines of back-and-forth dialogue. If it’s double-spaced, you’re at about three hundred fifty words a page and you should aim for five and a half pages.

Really, though, the goal of this thinking is to stop you from focusing on getting enough words written to stop and keep you focused on telling the story. If you focus on sitting down to write every day, you’ll get your words in eventually. Don’t worry about the count, worry about who is going to move the scene along. Stop when you run out of writing time, start to doze off, or otherwise reach a logical end point for the day. If you write more than your daily amount, that’s not a bad thing. I guarantee there will be at least one day where stuff keeps coming up and you barely get anything written. Then you’ll be glad for that extra few hundred words a day you’ve been producing. So don’t mind the word count (and disable it if it’s easily visible anywhere in your word processor), and just focused on the act of spitting out more words for your story.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 2 (11/02)

Chris Leave a comment

Well, Day 1 went pretty well. I got my daily word count in for my NaNoWriMo project and did about three thousand other words of writing. By the time I’m done with this post and whatever else I do before bed, I’ll probably have done about six thousand words today. Which isn’t as much as I’d have liked since that’s a whole day of writing and only 50% more writing than I need to do during my average day if I wind up closer to my maximum word count than my minimum one. Which is going to be my daily goal because I’d hate to get to the end of the month at ninety-five thousand words only to have fallen short of actually finishing the romance novel or updating my blog every day. Plus, it’s usually better to front-load so long as you’re not pushing yourself past the point of sustainability.

To be entirely fair to myself, I didn’t start writing right away. My whole morning was off because I had to deal with the maintenance guy coming to fix the broken garage door motor, feeling loopy and slightly disassociated from tiredness because I slept like crap and stayed up until past three in the morning, and I then had to leave to meet my friend for lunch right away so I didn’t get ANYTHING written until after 4pm. Because I also had to spend some time playing video games with a friend (oh no, poor me) since I’d promised to join him and, honestly, I need to not spend all of my time working on stuff. I did that for a month and a half just recently. I was so burned out that I needed three full days of rest and gaming to recover at all. So I got a lot done yesterday, all things considered. Even if I didn’t make it to bed right when I wanted to last night, I still did better than I expected in total words and in boxes filled-in on my to-do list.

I did outlines for both projects, but I had to do them by story beats rather than chapters because I’m not as firm on my National Novel Writing Month story or the romance novel story as I was on Coldheart and Iron (the story I did my first chapter-by-chapter outline for). I wish I was, but Coldheart and Iron started as a dream and I rarely get to see an entire story unfold like that before I write it down. Even with all that, it changed significantly as I went, with half again as many chapters added in as I went and a lot of shifts to the events of the story to make it fit with how I was writing it. “What You Know You Need,” which is what I’m calling my NaNoWriMo project, is still evolving and solidifying. I know most of the major points of the story and have some ideas about what I’d like to be in there, but nothing is certain yet. I have never written a romance story, so “Spicing Things Up” is still a giant mess of nothing but story beats as well. I mean, I barely even read romance novels so I fully expect this to be a travesty that changes as I write it and read actual romance novels for reference. Neither one of my stories can afford to be pinned down right now.

Finishing up the outlines (well, turning them into outlines instead of plot summaries) was one of my big tasks for yesterday, along with writing as many of the Inspiration posts ahead of time as I could. I’ve got two weeks of them finished and all of the writing prompts already done, so now I’m trying to get the rest finished and start in on daily progress on my novel projects. I also need to think about this month’s four Coldheart and Iron posts since I want to keep those up as well so I can finish it by Christmas Day. Which means I still have plenty to do with my weekends and days off. Today is my last planned day off, so I’m going to do my best to make the most of it. Maybe I can knock out my daily novel projects early and then pump out two big Coldheart and Iron posts. That’d be nearly ten thousand words for the day right there. I’d at least like to get one done. Hopefully two since I’m going to be incredibly busy next weekend. I’ve still got this weekend free, so who knows what all I can get done. Maybe I’ll get all four Coldheart and Iron posts done, get the Tips pre-written as well, and even get a few days ahead in my novel projects.

It’s nice to imagine. I’ll be happy just getting my daily allotment in so long as I can also get some work down on the Coldheart and Iron post. I’m going to be really busy most evenings for the next month.

 

Daily Prompt

Today, think about where your story is happening. Develop a setting. Set a scene. Write a little about the world it takes place in–how it differs or is similar to our world. Maybe just set the stage rather than set a scene. You can always add more detail later or change how “present” the world is, but you the writer need to know a lot about the world that will inform the characters’ actions. These thoughts, this knowledge, doesn’t need to be anything other than notes to yourself that you’ll pull out when you edit it so you can focus on what’s important to your story, but it’ll make your job a lot easier if you write this stuff down somewhere so it doesn’t need to constantly tumble around in your head. Free up some space and just jot it down in the margins.

 

Sharing Inspiration

One of the best books I’ve read this year, if not the best, is “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing” by Hank Green. If you have not read it, you should read it. It appealed to me on a lot of levels and it was one of the first good books I’ve read of what I believe is an emerging genre (which I am also trying to write in for my project this month) of 20-something literature. I see it like a sort of second coming-of-age that is more focused on learning to live in the world we have rather than the world we were promised instead of simply accepting responsibility for oneself or being “an adult.” Beyond that, it also made me feel like a part of something larger than myself as someone who uses the internet. It had a positive effect in that it has reminded me that we can do good and that Human connection is still a goal for the internet.

 

Helpful Tips

Yesterday, you started writing. Or maybe you’re playing catch up today since you were too busy yesterday. Whatever you’re doing, however much you’ve done, remember to cut yourself some slack. No one has ever sat down to start a project and magically produced 40,000 actual words of a story in a single day. You could do that if you copy and pasted a bunch of words, but that’s not even close to the same thing. People like me take years to get to the point where we can sit down for forty-five minutes and write our daily allotment of words. I literally practiced writing every day for a year to get to this point, and that’s not counting all of the words I wrote in my life leading up to the start of that challenge. I have spent literally half my lifetime working on this. So, seriously, cut yourself some slack. Don’t measure your accomplishments against other people, especially not people like me. Measure it against the person you want to be and the person you were before you started this challenge. As long as you’re making progress, then you’re doing a great job! Keep it up! I never would have dreamt of doing something like this when I was starting out. Believe in yourself and take things at your own pace. As long as you work on it every day, you will get there. Persistence is key.