Reflection

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 25 (11/25)

Chris Leave a comment

As I sat at my desk with my therapy light going, trying to come up with something to write about for today’s blog post, I remembered a similar feeling from well over a year ago. From most of my life, actually. I’ve always been of the opinion that it is best to say nothing if you don’t have something worthwhile to say. We’ll, that particular thought has always been in my mind. It’s difficult to draw the line between something I’ve come to believe and something I was taught from an early age. They’re often related to each other in ways that aren’t necessarily clear. This one, though, is probably something I was taught early in life and internalized deeply enough that it became a strongly held belief.

Looking back, it’s pretty easy to see where I learned that lesson. As the second oldest of (eventually) five kids, it was difficult to get my parents’ attention. Not for me specifically, but for any of us. There was just so much going on as my parents tried to make not just their lives but the lives of the four little children they had (the youngest showed up a seven or eight years after the second youngest). They taught us a lot of things in order to cope with the sheer number of requests for attention, like waiting silently if someone is on the phone rather than constantly saying “mom” until we got a reaction. Or placing a hand on someone’s arm if we wanted their attention rather than yelling their name. Or going to look for someone to talk quietly rather than shouting across the house. Or trying to solve problems on our own before going to our parents. Or taking the time to decide if something was really important before bringing it to them. All of it points toward consideration for other people’s time and a thoughtful selection of what’s worth vocalizing.

There’s plenty of room to debate on whether or not thing was a good thing. I’m sure it made my parents’ lives easier when it actually worked and it taught me to be deliberate in everything I say which has helped me avoid saying something I’d come to regret when dealing with anger or sadness. The only real problem I see with it is the idea that holding back until you have something important to say lends power and worth to your words isn’t really how the world works. It may be how the world once worked, but I suspect that’s a bit of fiction we collectively tell ourselves to make it seem like the past was a more civilized time. I’m willing to bet the quiet considerate people who spoke only when they felt it was important were just as ignored back then as they are now. For similar reasons, too. I remember my first manager at my previous job telling me that I needed to speak up in meetings more if I wanted to climb the ladder. I told her that I generally didn’t have anything useful or constructive to add and I’ll never forget her response. “That’s not the point. You just need to appear like you’re contributing to the meeting so always say something about anything that comes up in a meeting.”

Needless to say, I refused. I still think this particular attitude toward meetings and competence is part of what’s wrong with corporate culture in every company or institution I’ve ever been a part of or heard about. The idea that someone will get promoted by constantly saying nothing important just so they appear to be involved in everything is probably why there are so many terrible managers in the workforce. Companies are literally promoting people who have done nothing useful except attach themselves to the accomplishments of others. It’s insane and I’d rather never get a promotion that get one because I’m faking competence.

Where this whole idea gets problematic is when it gets applied to my writing. I have had three other blogs before this one, all of them with the goal of updating every day or at least every other day, and none before this one ever survived very long. My common refrain, when talking to friends or writing teachers about it, was that I just couldn’t think of anything worthwhile to say or write about. For a long time, the first year and a half of this blog’s existence, I did the same exact thing. I created this blog because I had something to talk about that I felt was important, and then I self-edited myself into silence by saying it wasn’t worth posting about all the time or by telling myself I should never repeat myself.  Deciding to post every day for a year is what saved this blog from eventually be consigned to the trash heap like all the others. It also taught me that I have a lot that’s worth saying, even if I’ve said it before. A lot of things worth saying are worth saying multiple times and in many different ways. It takes practice to be able to do that, but so does every kind of writing.

I still often feel like I don’t have anything important to say, but I know that I still have a lot that’s worth saying. So even today, when I sat down and felt like there was nothing important on my mind or stirring inside me, I could find something worthwhile to say. It has taken a year of practice and several hundred thousand words worth of blog posts, but I can finally say that I’ve gotten over this particular hump. I may not be constantly keyed into all of the most important issues in the world, but my views and my thoughts are worth writing about. It’s really difficult to be a writer if you don’t believe that on some level or another. It still feels a little conceited sometimes, to be constantly putting my thoughts out there for everyone to find, but at least I’m not running an anti-vax or flat-earth blog. At least what I have to say isn’t really hurting people. Like the description of Earth from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I’m proud to say the worst I am is “mostly harmless.”

Well, I’m sure I’m also a little caught up in my own stuff from time to time and there are probably a lot of people who find my inability to get directly to the point frustrating, but all that kind of fits under the “mostly harmless” descriptor in my opinion. Even if I’m not doing everything I want to be doing, I still feel like I’ve gotten past one of my major hurdles to writing. It’s a good feeling, to be honest, and I think I should add that to my list of personal triumphs to be celebrated.

I hope your holidays are wrapping up nicely and I hope you got a lot of writing done! Or, you know, at least ENOUGH writing done. We’re on our last calendar week of the month and we’ve only got six days of writing left, but that’s still enough time! It might take a lot of work (I’ve got eighteen thousand words left to write), but if we dig deep we can get it done! I believe in you and I am here to support you as best I can! Good luck!

 

Daily Prompt

Humans are endurance hunters. We aren’t really faster than most of the creatures we’ve hunted over the course of history, but we’re certainly more durable than most. Animals often die of shock from a single broken bone and yet humans can live through things that take all their limbs. On a less gruesome scale, we’re also really good at enduring long periods of stress and strain. We can go without sleep for a while and are generally pretty quick to get back into the thick of things once we’ve recovered. How does your protagonist handle this kind of endurance? Are they graceful under long-term stress, or will they crack quickly without proper care? Can they deny hunger or exhaustion when the chips are down and they need to keep moving forward? Write a scene showing us how well your protagonist can endure whatever you’re throwing at them.

 

Sharing Inspiration

If you need a new book series to read or a fantastic series of fantasy books that’ll make you see the potential of Fantasy in a whole new light, you should check out The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. Technically, they’re classified as Urban Fantasy, but they helped solidify the genre as its own independent genre that doesn’t need to rely on vanilla Fantasy for shelf space. It still usually does because most bookstores dislike that level of granular sorting in the books since alphabetizing things is a pain, but I’ve gone a bit further afield than I meant to. The series is creative, the protagonist actually grows from a misogynistic egotistical jackass into a real human being who is CLEARLY out of his league and only surviving due to a mixture of luck, audacity, and lateral thinking. At least at first. More recently, things have changed pretty significantly so there’s been a big shift in the formula for the stories and that’s super exciting. You should check them out and get into a great series whose newest book COULD be coming out soon! Sometime in 2019! Probably!

 

Helpful Tips

If you’re having a difficult time working your way through a scene, trying drawing it out. Not lengthening it, but putting a pen or pencil to paper and representing it with images or something. I like to use bubble charts when I’ve got a busy scene to write and I need to keep track of too many people to juggle while writing. Since I play a lot of Dungeons and Dragons, I’ll do “round graphs.” The idea is that I represent the movements through the scene in six second intervals (skipping ahead a bunch when no one is moving) without attaching dialogue to the rounds because talking is a free action. If there’s a lot of dialogue between a lot of people who are also moving around, I’ll add dialogue trees to the rounds. If I’m trying to get some key element of a scene worked in smoothly instead of tracking a bunch of people or their speech, I’ll write down the core of that element and slowly wrap layers around it until it can fit in the scene. For instance, if I’m trying to show grief in each of the characters, I’ll start with what they’re sad about, how they feel about their grief, how they show their grief, how they think they’re showing their grief, and how other people see their grief. From there, it’s easier to just plop it into the scene where appropriate because I can just go to the correct layer for each character depending on narratorial perspective. The idea can work for pretty much anything, so I recommend experimenting with it until you figure out how to apply it for your own writing.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 24 (11/24)

Chris 2 Comments

Yesterday and today have been weird. Between getting booted off my laptop for a surprise Windows update and trying to arrange a visit with my grandparents, I haven’t had much opportunity to get my writing done. I only got six hundred words in once my computer had finished doing its update as it was almost midnight and I was dead tired from two nights of sleeping in an unfamiliar bed that felt akin to sleeping on a moss-covered boulder. I wanted to do more, but I just didn’t have it in me. I also wound up sleeping really well last night, so I overslept my planned wake-up time and didn’t have the time to write before I needed to get out of bed, pack, and head to my grandparent’s place. So now it’s after seven in the evening, I’m sitting in my friend’s living room because I need to be around My People after a stressful weekend, and I’m trying to jam out enough of a blog post that I can justify hitting that “Publish…” button.

Honestly, I should probably just get this up, write one hundred words so I can continue my update streak on the National Novel Writing Month website, and then stop writing for tonight, but I’ve given up on my daily word count so many times lately. I don’t want to keep doing that. I’ve got a lot to do in order to succeed with my goals this month and I can’t afford to keep making excuses. I don’t want to keep making excuses. I want to get my words done, but that’s a tall order when all I can think about is how thin and frail my grandfather felt when I hugged him on my way out the door. How small he’s gotten. How he was too tired to crack jokes. How he didn’t once refuse any of the assistance we offered him. He used to be as big as I am and it’s startling to see how small he’s gotten. In my car, I have clothes my grandmother bought him that are too big for him that would fit me. These are different from the last ones I got. Those were given to me as my grandparents moved to a smaller house and needed to free up some space. They were extra. These are almost new and just don’t fit him now that he’s lost so much weight.

This is one of those things that alters the course of your mind. I can feel my mental topography change and my thought’s about my grandfather show up in every mental space I have ever built. The mental image of my writing–the internal me slowly climbing a mountain without a clear path or a certain destination–is now done in the shadow of another mountain whose paths are all too clear. The empty darkness that is where my internal self lives, a place of calm emptiness where I go to get peace from the noise of my mental health issues and the noise of live, is no longer entirely dark. The ocean of my depression has a giant wave on the horizon that is moving at a speed I can’t detect, but I know it can crash over me at any moment without warning. There’s no escaping this.

I imagine I’d feel something similar if one of my parents was ill, but it’s hard to know. It’d probably be different and maybe worse in its own special way. My grandfather has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories involve him or stories about him. I remember when my sister was being born, the one who is only a couple of years younger than me. It is only a flash, a moment in time, a picture of a story someone once told me, but it’s still crystal clear. I remember my older brother and I playing some kind of game on the couch in the basement of their old home that involved taking the cushions off the couch. Maybe we were building a fort, maybe we just wanted to bounce on the springs of the couch, but our grandfather was there, watching over us as we played as he put up with our games in a way that let us know he’d rather be here with us than anywhere else. He was a bartender and union electrician until his retirement and he’s always been a tough old man in my eyes who still managed to avoid a lot of the more toxic bits of masculinity in his emotional dealings with us. That might just be the eyes of a child worshiping his favorite relative or the rose-colored glasses of an adult remembering his favorite relative since most of that side of the family has a tendency to engage in passive-aggressive bullshit more often than not, but it’s hard to believe I’ve imagined it entirely.

I want to be able to write about it, but I just don’t know how to fit him into a story. He’s always been a goofy, silly old man to me, and I don’t want to just drop him off somewhere that won’t do justice to the person I’ve seen my entire life. This is all still pretty recent and I’m pretty sure I just need more time to figure it out, but it’s hard to write anything without thinking him. I want to preserve a part of him in the stories I tell, just like I’ve got snapshots of so many people in my stories, but I haven’t spent as much time considering him like that. Even though I’m familiar with loss and the limitations of mortality thanks to the loss of high school classmates and my own traumas, some part of me just refused to accept that this man who always seemed bigger than me–even after I had an inch on him–would one day no longer be. I still don’t want to believe it.

Everything comes to an end eventually. There is a price to be paid for everything, even life. I’ve gotten a lot of life and happiness out of my grandfather, especially considering I know so many people whose parents have already passed on. I just always hoped it would be longer. I mean, out of all my grand-relatives, I always kind of figured he’d be around the longest. I feel kind of crappy saying that, but it’s true. Now I have to face the fact that it isn’t and I’m having a hard time reconciling my feelings and my knowledge. Especially when I’m struggling to figure out how to write about it.

I’m going to eat some kind of alcoholic desert my friend made and rejoin the group for a little bit, but I think I might take the night off from my National Novel Writing Month project and try my hand at writing about a man who is leaving a shadow larger than life. I hope your day was productive and I hope you manage to reach your writing goals today. Good luck.

 

Daily Prompt

One of the big Fantasy series I have been enjoying lately is Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive. Despite being made up of three (of ten, according to what I’ve read) giant Fantasy tomes, his stories are fun, quick, and refreshing. This gigantic, sweeping series features a world that is different from most fantasy worlds I’ve read. The powers are novel, the means of getting powers relies on rules that are slowly being revealed but are incredibly interesting, and everything originally from the world has some kind of carapace because of the regular storms that swing through the area or is otherwise incredibly hardy to account for how insane the weather is compared to ours. Beyond all that, the stories aren’t afraid to confront difficult issues or show how terrible people can become good people. The effects of trauma, the reality of depression, and complexity of doing bad things for good reasons are all addressed (incredibly well) throughout the series.

 

Sharing Inspiration

How does your protagonist respond to interpersonal conflict? Are they a pot-stirrer, or do they hate the idea of being involved in the nitty-gritty of other people’s lives? Some people immensely enjoy setting up conflicts between people and some people would literally rather die than engage in any kind of emotional or verbal conflict, let alone a physical one. How does your protagonist feel about them? Is it something they can handle easily or is it going to be a struggle they’re going to need to muddle through? Write a scene showing them responding to or engaging in some kind of conflict.

 

Helpful Tips

Don’t chain yourself to continuity when you’re writing. If you get hit by a great idea for something that’s pretty far down the line from where you’re currently writing, pursue it. Don’t put it aside and expect to remember it when the time comes. The same goes for entire scenes or chapters. Or plot points. Or books. If an idea comes to you, record it. The idea might change as time passes and it might not fit when you finally get to it, but it’ll still inform how you write the parts around it. Maybe it’ll bring you back to an element of the story you lost between writing that section and reaching it. No matter what, though, it’ll be worth recording because at least it’ll get the idea down somewhere so you can keep your mind focused on moving the story along rather than trying to juggle story pieces that showed up ahead of their moment.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 23 (11/23)

Chris Leave a comment

I know it might make me sound like Scrooge or the Grinch, but I really hate the holidays. You spend a bunch of time trying to participate in something bigger than yourself only to wind up wiping yourself out as you try to make sure everything goes well or that everyone has a good time. Then, once the food is done and everyone has finally settled down to eat, you spend your time trying to make polite conversation and not rip off someone’s head for making an incredibly shitty comment that you don’t appreciate but which really isn’t worth ruining everyone’s good time. Because there are people who enjoy this experience. I’m sure at least one of my siblings had a great time. I think my older relatives also had a great time. It’s not like they’d admit it if they didn’t, though. That’s not polite. An entire day was sacrificed on the altar of family and festivity and all I’ve got to show for it is a new degree of tiredness, a slow smoldering anger at someone for the ignorant shit they said, and a sort of tacky feeling to my mouth that is the result of too many sweet deserts.

I honestly get along with most of my family. I also can get along with almost anyone, so I don’t really know how much that’s saying about my relationship with them. Most of my family skews toward the conservative side of things, in politics and religion, and I’m about as liberal as they get without entire abandoning sensible democracy. I dislike mind games or being passive aggressive and one side of my family plays tons of mind games while the other side engages in constant passive aggressive warfare. It’s exhausting just to be around them, and that’s just on normal days. If there’s something going on or something in the subtext of the gathering that’s less than positive, it gets exhausting to even think about being around them because they’re all in on the games and I just want to be left alone. Which is apparently “a millennial thing” rather than a “properly manage my mental health and be the steward of my own well-being” thing. I’m still quite upset about that remark, to be honest. It was uncalled for and I would have thought it was out of character for the person who said it until I heard them say it. Now it is entirely in character for them and they have been made lesser by their more apparent small-mindedness.

I also left my light therapy lamp at home so I’ve been without its benefits for more than twenty-four hours now and I kind of miss it. Even if I don’t need daily exposure to enjoy its benefits, I really enjoyed having it as a part of my morning routine. In not even two weeks, it has already become an indispensable part of my morning routine. The warm glow of it on my face as it stirs my brain and mind to life while I slowly get myself in order to start the day… It has probably been the most beneficial thing I’ve done for myself outside of creating good writing habits. And deciding to end things with my ex. And playing the Hamilton lottery. Okay, maybe not the most beneficial thing, but it is definitely having a major positive impact on my life and I miss the little bump it gave me every morning.

Honestly, if it weren’t for my plans to visit my grandparents (the ones who are having health problems that resulted in me being entirely derailed for the first full week of the month), I’d have left to drive home yesterday after dinner. Mostly because I was frustrated by my relatives but also because I like sleeping in my own bed. I’m looking forward to getting back to the audio book I listened to on the way down and having some quiet solitude for a few hours. In fact, the only reason I’m not definitely driving home this evening is because of Shitty Music Neighbor and my desire to have a Friday night free of his shitty music. I slept right through it last week, but I don’t know if I’m tired enough to repeat that performance again. I probably would be if I drove home tonight.

I’d also lose out on a few hours of writing time and that’s precious today. I’ve got the usual two and a half thousand words to write, but I’m probably going to be busy all day. I’ve got a friend to visit, grandparents to visit, and both of those things are far away from where my parents live so I’ll probably have about three hours of driving just to get to and form these events. Even if I only spend a couple of hours on each of these visits and it takes half the time I expect to drive around, I’m still only left with the evening and filling that with a drive home would leave me with no time to write since I’ll probably be too tired to do much when I get home, especially if I don’t try to stay up incredibly late to just push the words out. That never actually works out for me.

I’m sure my family would also appreciate it if I stuck around for a while longer. I don’t see them much, on account of living in a different state, and I know my youngest sister wants more of my time than she’s gotten so far. I don’t think she’ll get as much as she wants, even if I stayed until Sunday, but I don’t really want to just leave without giving her at least a little more of my time. I left for college several years ago, when she was just six, and I haven’t been back much since, so I think she kind of misses me without really understanding why, which is why it hits her so hard when I don’t have the time for her that she wants. I also don’t really know her as well as I know my other siblings, so I could be entirely off base. I would guess my absence has something to do with it since I’m the only one of her siblings who hasn’t moved back into our parents house at some point or another. For most of her life, I’ve always just been a little too far away to easily visit. I imagine it’s not a great feeling to have a brother who seems to like the same things you do who is never available for you to get to know better. Any attempt to bond is further complicated by our respective mental health issues that tend to clash if we ever spend more than a few minutes talking to each other.

Family is tough and I dislike the holidays because they’re stressful and often upsetting. For me, anyway. I hope your holidays are nothing like that but actually serve as a chance to rest up for the lat push of the month, this last week of writing before National Novel Writing Month draws to a close. If they don’t offer anything but more frustration and emotional drain, feel free to use National Novel Writing Month as a reason to pull away a bit and get some room to breathe. It may not be easy, but you’re worth it. Good luck with today!

 

Daily Prompt

Humans, as a whole, celebrate birthdays in a large variety of ways, usually dictated by cultural traditions. At the same time, there is a growing movement in modern Humanity to redefine how we all treat birthdays. My boss remembers when people are work would bring in treats for someone else’s birthday, or else the workplace would provide them, and now we’re all expected to bring something in ourselves unless we manage to avoid admitting it’s our birthday by conveniently taking vacation around it. How does your protagonist view their birthday or celebrations in general? Are they something to be avoided, or are they a ready-made good time? Write a scene showing us your protagonist’s inclination toward celebrations in general or birthdays specifically.

 

Sharing Inspiration

Currently, my favorite Science Fiction writer is doing a great job of putting out a book or two a year. He’s had a notable career in that he’s dependably produced books you’ll enjoy if you enjoyed any of his previous ones and, while he’s probably not a writer pushing the bleeding edge of wordsmithing to new heights, he’s probably one of the best Sci-Fi writers producing works right now. I’ll admit my collection is a little dominated by white dudes, so I’m also willing to admit I might be wrong. I think all of the authors he boosts for visibility, using his success to help minority writers succeed, are amazing as well and I can’t wait to keep digging through the writers he’s recommended. You should check out Scalzi’s books if you want some good Sci-Fi on a regular basis since he was the writer who inspired me to try writing my own Science Fiction. He’s got some really cool ideas out there that will hopefully inspire you to come up with your own.

 

Helpful Tips

I don’t know about you, but I have a tendency to get uncomfortable if I’m sitting in one place for too long. My legs get restless, my knees start to feel weird, and my back demands the opportunity to bend and flex. I can counter this somewhat by using a standing desk, which is something I’d getting set up at work as we move from one office to another in the coming weeks, but I much prefer something even more free-form. I like to lounge on the floor, propped up on pillows or beanbag chairs while I work. I can roll around, twist into any comfortable shape, and never get stuck in one position for long enough that my knees start to hurt. I’d suggest you spend some time considering what barriers keep you from your writing desk or area. Are they barriers of comfort? If so, checking out different ways to sit or recline are your best bet. Even springing for a different chair can work wonders. I started using a padded folding chair instead of my computer chair because my computer chair is constantly sinking and I’m actually enjoying the simplicity of the folding chair. Maybe you’ll find out that you feel the same way if you start to explore ways to find comfort.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 22 (11/22)

Chris Leave a comment

Trying to write during the holidays is difficult. There’s a lot of stuff that comes up that doesn’t normally interfere with your day. It’s really tempting to write off (ha-ha) the entire day, if not the days around it as well. There’s travel from one city to another (sometimes multiple cities if you’re trying to make multiple holiday meals), large meals to consume, time in the kitchens preparing food, time to catch up with relatives you might not have seen since the year before, and the time you need to just lounge around the house after eating before you’re ready to do anything. There are very few days in a year that have any of those things, much less all of them at once. If you do wind up taking the day off of writing or even taking a few days away from writing to visit with family or loved ones, I don’t think anyone could really blame you for that unless they’re a miserly, Scrooge-like loner who begrudges people their families and joy. Those people aren’t worth listening to when it comes to making time for family, so just ignore them.

I’m going to try to get some writing done today. I haven’t missed a day this month, and I’m planning to keep that up for the entire thing if it is physically possible for me to do so. I’m also still behind on my National Novel Writing Month project word count, so I am actually hoping to make up for past days with low word counts. This post doesn’t count, unfortunately, because I wrote it before going to bed. I technically didn’t start it until after midnight because I only just got my daily minimum finished before midnight thanks to driving, eating a large meal, spending time with my family, and trying to be social. I don’t really count that as “today,” though, since I hadn’t gone to sleep. It’s only the next day once you go to sleep. Anything I do before then can still be chalked up to the day I last woke up on. Dozing off sorta counts, but not really. There are rules.

I’m probably going to try to work it in during the morning since I know I’m probably going to be completely useless after dinner. My parents are planning some kind of activity to keep us all engaged together instead of letting us all drift apart to do our own things like we’ve done in years past, so even if I hold back on the food a bit I’ll still be rather more occupied than I would prefer. I plan to take my own advice, of course, and work in some writing sprints here and there, as I need a break from social engagement, but I’d still like to get a few uninterrupted hours of work done at some point. Like I said, I’ve got some catching up to do. I’m about six thousand words behind right now and I’d like to close that gap. If I can get myself to forty thousand by the end of the weekend, I’ll be in a good spot for the last five days of National Novel Writing Month. I can do two thousand words a day, no problem. Which means I’ll have four days to do ten thousand words since I’m at almost thirty thousand as of this morning. I can definitely do two thousand five hundred words a day. Aside from the last couple days when I was falling asleep at my computer, I did over three thousand words a day. Maybe I’ll even get in the groove for a binge and just catch myself all the way up in one day.

A distinct lack of writing binges is an unintended side-effect of my daily writing and blog progress. I no longer go long periods without writing like I used to and that’s almost a requirement for a writing binge. It is difficult to do several thousand words in a single day when you don’t feel like you’re full to bursting with things to write about. I was really hoping to be able to work in a good writing binge sometime this month as my previous daily word count record is ten or twelve thousand (I’ve got it written down somewhere) and I’d like to see how far I can pass it now that my writing speed has taken to major steps up (I’m pretty sure it was ten thousand written in twelve hours of work from a time when my peak writing pace was about a thousand words an hour). Despite having a few days at the beginning of the month with absolutely nothing scheduled, I wasn’t able to focus for long enough to do more than five or six thousand words. Since then, I’ve had a lot of stuff going on that has pretty much filled my days with things to do and even my downtime is filled with anxiety about my grandparents’ health or how I’m going to manage the holidays this year.

As much as I’d love to have one just so I can see how many words I can pump out, I think I’m past the point where binging like that is a good idea. Binging was a big part of the worst burnout and recover cycles I’ve ever done and though I’m not as bad as I used to be, I’m still trying to cut down on those cycles. Steady, daily progress is the best way to move toward a goal and since I’ve gotten that skill under my belt the need I felt for binges to make progress has disappeared. I mean, this will be the first National Novel Writing Month I’ve ever done where I didn’t do in excess of five thousand words on more than on day during the month. I’m pretty sure this is also the first National Novel Writing Month where I haven’t done more than eight thousand words in a day. Even though I’m behind and will need to work harder to still finish in time, I’m still way better off than I usually am since I actually made at least SOME progress every day.

I’m not trying to knock binges. If they work for you and that’s the only way you’re going to get the writing done, keep it up. I still can’t help but think of the quote from one of my college professors that I referenced the other day. If you’re doing your best work in binges, you probably haven’t done much writing aside from as part of a binge. I think this idea is why I’ve been spending so much time thinking about (and writing about) trying to break up writing with time spent relaxing or finding ways to do your writing in a large number of smaller groupings.

Anyway, I hope you have an excellent US Thanksgiving if you celebrate that particular holiday. Otherwise, I hope you have a good day filled with progress toward your goals and manage to avoid burning out as we work our way through the last week or so of the month. Good luck!

 

Daily Prompt

Everyone needs help sometimes. I needed a lot of help coming up with thirty separate writing prompts for all of my National Novel Writing Month blog posts. You might need a little help getting the creative juices flowing on your NaNoWriMo project. We both got off easy because we both relied on internet resources so we could avoid asking other people for help. Today, write a scene where your protagonist has to decide between asking for someone for help or looking for it on the internet. Have them work through the process in their head and show us if it’s a struggle to admit they need help or if they’re more motivated by the convenience of looking things up on the internet.

 

Sharing Inspiration

My favorite Disney movie from recent years is Moana. The music is amazing (Lin-Manuel Miranda helped write some of it), the story is beautiful, and they have really stepped up their animation game. I’ve never seen more realistic water and wetness affects or such detailed hair. That’s one of those things you don’t think about, how difficult it is to animate realistic hair. Cartoons have historially resorted to clumbs of hair that move as a unit but Disney, thanks to Pixar’s help, has made it look almost more real than hair in live action movies (since that never seems to get in people’s faces and, as someone with long hair, I can tell you that one of the defining features of hair is it getting in your face constantly if it is unsecure). The movie is great, it has a high-quality feel-good message, and the music is infectious. Check it out during a break from writing!

 

Helpful Tips

The most distracting thing I own is my phone. I have literally thought “I’m just going to check my messages quick” and then spent an hour browsing imgur or surfing the web. My tip to you today is to take your phone and move it as far away from you as you can get it without leaving your house, flushing it down the toilet, or in any way harming it. If you’re in your room, plug it in to charge. If you’re at a coffee shop, don’t even think about taking it out of your bag or pocket. If it’s an option, leave it in your car for a while. Sure, there’s a chance someone will call you about something important its a really low chance and your productivity is more important right now. If you’re concerned about a call that might come, have a friend you trust change your password so you can’t just open it until you’ve finished your writing. Maybe just turn it off for a while and check it every hour. You’ve got a lot of ways to remove it from your immediate physical vicinity and I recommend you try them all until you find one that works. You’d be surprised how much your productivity increases.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 21 (11/21)

Chris Leave a comment

As I was getting ready to write this post (and wondering what I was going to say today), I added in the prompt and inspiration I’d prepared at the beginning of the month. The first line of today’s prompt feels incredibly apropos. “There’s a price to be paid for everything.” Truly a motto to live your live pay. Right now, I’m paying for a week of heedless late nights resulting from the mood boost of my therapy light and the addictive feeling of making progress on my writing projects. I keep falling asleep while writing or being unable to stay awake and alert until midnight despite the caffeine I allow myself. I haven’t gotten much written the last few nights because I’ve been so tired as a result of being short on sleep and, instead of taking time to rest, I’m making Future Chris pay a steeper price by only getting five to six hours of sleep a night. Which is enough for things to not get any worse, but not enough to recover. I’ve got a few nights off in a row coming up, thanks to the holidays, and I’m planning to use them to get a few night of consistent, quality sleep.

This idea has been on my mind a lot lately as I’ve been trying to find a better balance between taking care of myself and relentlessly pursuing my goals. I mean, if you read my blog regularly, you’ve probably seen that as I’ve been circling around this idea all month. But it’s not just on my mind. It’s even something that’s been coming from outside influences as well given that two related topics, how to plan and pick projects in order to avoid burn out and how important it is to take the time to actually celebrate your successes, have been the subject of Vlog Brothers videos in the past week. I tend to engage in a cycle of burnout and recovery rather than avoiding burnout all together, live most people try to do. I don’t even celebrate things. I acknowledge them as they pass and then continue working on whatever project currently has my attention. Neither of these things are healthy habits and they’re things I’m actively trying to work on.

I mean, the fact that I actually chose to not finish my daily minimums the last two days, when I was within a few hundred words of reaching them says a lot about the progress I’ve made. A few weeks ago, I’d have just powered through, gotten even less sleep than I did, and made things worse for myself. I’m trying to concede to my limits and focus on the fact that they’re daily limits, not long-term potential limits. Only getting one thousand one hundred words done last night is not going to have a significant impact on my writing goals for this month. Going to bed at midnight instead of struggling until one or two in the morning helped me recover enough that I’m not worried about driving to Chicago this afternoon. I’m also going to continue to focus on going to sleep at midnight every night, at the latest, and trying to get down to work on my writing sooner after work. It’ll be a lot easier to do since exhaustion from not sleeping is usually why I’m unable to sit down to my writing for a while after work.

Additionally, I’m planning a break for the end of the month, to celebrate another successful National Novel Writing Month and a new personal record for number of words written in a single month (I passed sixty thousand last night and I’m on track to pass ninety thousand by the end of the month). Even if I fail both goals, I’m going to turn it into a break to celebrate my year of writing and for essentially doing one third of my lifetime writing in the past four hundred days. I’ve made tons of personal progress as a writer in the last year and I’ve blown some personal goals completely out of the water. I feel weird saying this, but I deserve some recognition from that, even if it’s from no one but myself. I’m not saying I need people to pat me on the back or tell me how amazing I am (though I’m certainly not going to turn anyone down if they volunteer to do just that), I just want to take some time to celebrate my success with my friends. I have no idea what that celebration is going to entail since I’m not really a “go out and have a party” kind of person, but it’ll be fun. Maybe I’ll just make a nice dinner and invite my friends over to eat it and drink cheap champagne for an evening.

As much as the statement “there’s a price to be paid for everything” implies a lot of negativity, I don’t see it that way. I’ve spent my whole life paying for the wisdom I have now and the experiences that have formed me into who I am. Some of them have been prices I willingly paid, like giving up a lot of other goals and my time in order to write every day for a year. Some of them have been prices that I would have avoided, like the foundation for most of my common sense and wisdom about the way the world works. Some of them I didn’t even have a choice about. Ultimately, though, I feel like I’ve been doing a lot of pre-paying lately and I’ve finally get myself to the point where all my cards are stocked up and ready for the right opportunity to cash in on all the work I’ve been doing. I think I’ve been paying the price for a level of expertise and ability I never considered possible and now I’m finally seeing it pay off in ways I didn’t anticipate.

I’m in a spot where I can now work to minimize the negative aspects of some of my habits, like my penchant for staying up late or sacrificing sleep. I know I can pump out a coherent blog post of over a thousand words in an hour. I know I can do a thousand words in an hour if I’m actually awake and two thousand or more in an hour if I’m focused. I don’t need to plan six hours a day to write three thousand words, I can just plan two or three. I just need to set rules and enforce them. Sleep by midnight. Take a day to celebrate my accomplishments. Take my health seriously. If I actually give everything it’s due priority and stop trying to just cram things in wherever I can find a little space, I might actually start to relax and be even more productive. Which is terrifying and exciting. More productive? What would I even do with myself if I was MORE productive?

Anyway, I hope your writing is super productive today and don’t be afraid to carve out some time for yourself today! Holidays are important, but as are your habits. You might need to make some time concessions when it comes to when you’re doing your writing, but you should be able to still get your daily words in. Even if you don’t get all of them, try for a few. Daily progress adds up! Even a dozen words is better than zero. Good luck!

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Daily Prompt

There’s a price to be paid for everything. For most goods and commodities, it’s the assigned cash value of said goods and commodities. For rash actions or heedless words, it might be a loss of social standing or the destruction of an important relationship. There are a lot of ways to interpret the saying and I’d challenge you to come up with a novel way for your protagonist to “pay the price” for something they’ve done or something they’re knowingly choosing to do. Trials and tribulations are important, but sometimes it’s just a simple trip to the grocery store that winds up being a little more expensive than expected because they were out of generic orange soda so you had to buy the more expensive name-brand stuff. Or maybe they went to the club and, instead of paying a ridiculous amount for a drink, chose to go home alone instead. I’d love to see what you come up with.

 

Sharing Inspiration

In reference to yesterday’s inspiration, today’s inspiration is about the series that got me interested in reading more than picture books. Redwall, a series of stories about anthropomorphic animals featuring a bunch who live at the titular Redwall Abbey, was written by Brian Jacques and generally (but not always) follows the successor to one of two or the major lineages: the spiritual successor of a warrior who helped found Redwall Abbey or the spiritual successor of a different warrior who left the area that would become Redwall Abbey and made his new home in a mountain fortress. They’re both great stories, Jacques is easy to read, and the food descriptions are some of the most detailed and delicious-sounding I have ever read. Even now, decades later, they’re still fun for me to read.

 

Helpful Tips

I’ve previously mentioned writing sprints in the tips section, but I want to revisit them as we approach US Thanksgiving. The idea is to set yourself a short timer, for five to fifteen minutes, and then to spend all that time focused on writing. It’ll take some getting used to at first, but you’ll find your word count climbing steadily higher and it’ll be easier to focus during your writing periods because you’ll have the chance for a break between them. Plus, they’re the perfect size for taking refuge in the bathroom to get a break from your little cousins nagging you about some game they’re playing or your aunt trying to pin you down to talk about college or the fact that you’re still single (all hypothetical scenarios that are not based on my life). They’re also perfect for taking a break in the guest bedroom you’re sleeping in between dinner and dessert when you’re feeling a little overwhelmed by the number of people and amount of noise present at the dinner table (which is a scenario based on my life). Just keep your laptop handy, get a good text editor on your phone, or dictate some notes to yourself using a vocal recording program on your phone. Anything works.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 20 (11/20)

Chris Leave a comment

As I’ve mentioned previously, the first two weeks of my month had me off to a rocky start. Because of how busy work was and the personal issues I was dealing with at the time, I fell behind my target goals rather quickly and am still working on recovering from that period of emotional turmoil. However, for the last week, I’ve managed to hit my daily minimums every day and surpass them more often than not. I’m not quite writing as many words as I did during my initial word binges, but I’m making steady progress that will see me caught up by the end of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, if nothing else. That being said, I’m also finding that writing as a whole is easier than ever before. I never would have imagined that I could sit down and, in about ten minutes, pound out eight hundred words. They were easy words, a character monologuing his way through a story he was telling about a cruddy day at work with only a few interjections from other characters, but it was still an impressive moment to see in the rear-view mirror.

The more I write and the more time I spend on trying to create, the more I see just how much I’ve grown since I started my daily writing journey in November of 2017. There are all the skills I’ve learned from having an amazing editor and the better understanding of the English language that I went over in my one year celebration post, but that’s not all. As a result of the year of writing, I am now comfortable with story formats I used to dislike. I specifically challenged myself to practice shorter pieces like flash fiction and specifically paced stuff like serial fiction because I was not good at trying to tell a story in what felt like very constrained formats. Now, I have a ton of experience with them and am looking forward to another year of exploring what I can do in three hundred words. I’m also the closest I’ve ever come to having an edited draft of a story, thanks to the weekly nature of my serial science fiction story, though I imagine turning it into a non-serial story will take a bit more work than I’d like to imagine. I’m sure there are inconsistencies and things I’d like to add to the beginning that I hadn’t come up with until partway through the story.

In my novel writing for this month, it’s mostly benefited me in regards to allocating time for writing and avoiding procrastination. I’m used to setting aside time every day for writing and I’ve created a habit of writing every day to the point that not writing feels uncomfortable. I know myself and my mental processes so well that I no longer fall for my own tricks when it comes time to sit down and work. I know that it might take a lot of work to get started, but continuing to write is easy. If I can just push myself to start stringing words together, the momentum will easily carry me through my daily minimum. There are exceptions, of course. I can’t push myself to write if I’m sick or struggling with an emotional issue, and now I’m better at recognizing when that’s the case. I’ve got a whole history of finding compromises with my mental health so I can avoid the sting of feeling like I’ve wasted the day without pushing myself so hard that I make myself feel worse.

As someone who has been working on writing for the larger half of my life at this point, these skills and this level of self-management is invaluable. Being able to just sit down and write no matter where I am will serve me well if I ever manage to go into writing as a self-supporting career. Being able to work through stories quickly, to come up with new ones at the drop of a hat, and to be able to rely on my creativity to work with me on demand is amazing. It also took an entire year of working at this to make it happen. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It is easy to look at someone like me and see how simple it can look to write over sixty thousand words in nineteen days, but this has only been made possible by a decade of learning and a solid year of daily practice. You want to get good at writing? Put in the time. Do the work. Practice. There are no shortcuts, though the starting point may vary to some degree, so just take your time, set reasonable goals, and you’ll get there before you know it. Despite being a really difficult year for a lot of non-writing reasons, it feels like it flew past me as I slowly worked my way from an ambitious idea to the self-affirming conclusion.

The point I’m trying to get at is that writing is more than just one month, even if that month is nationally recognized. Even if this is the only time you really work on a novel, there’s still another three hundred thirty-five (or thirty-six) in the year and everything you do during those days is going to contribute to your National Novel Writing Month project. The more you read, the more exposure to different ideas you will have and the better your own ideas will be. The more you write, the easier it will be to get through your National Novel Writing Month goals. If you really want to turn this story idea into something bigger than a one-month project, you should probably start thinking about what comes next. December first is just another day, sure, but I once decided it was going to be the day I turned a one-month goal I’d set for myself into a one-year goal I thought was going to take a few tries to actually manage. Everything starts somewhere, so start thinking where you want to start.

That being said, there are reasons to wait, too. One of my friends is struggling with her family situation, the demands they place on her time, and a significant degree of burnout I can relate to since she’s never really gotten an uninterrupted break since college. That’s a situation where you need to acknowledge your limitations and pick a time to start after you’ve rested. There’s no shame in needing to rest, which is something I should tell myself as often as I tell my friends.

I’m not trying to force you to make a decision or to have an answer. I tend to make decisions quickly, but I spend so much time thinking about hypothetical situations that there aren’t many realistic scenarios I haven’t considered already so it’s easy for me to just make a decision. Just figure out what your pace is, what you want to do, what your needs are, and come up with a plan. Whatever you do, just don’t forget that nothing happens in isolation and gradually working on something will always yield better results than trying to rush through something quickly. Good luck with your writing today!

 

Daily Prompt

An unfortunate fact of the world is that most people define what they support by listing what they’re against. Hate is easier than love and sometimes it can feel so good to finally be able to score a decisive victory against something or someone we hate. Maybe it’s someone in an argument on the internet admitting they were wrong (I’ve seen it happen) or maybe they finally got Bob next door to cut back his hedges by three inches so they’re firmly on his side of the property line. Maybe it’s even a just hatred and someone scored a major point by standing up against worse hatred. However you want to do it, show us what your protagonist hates and the battles they choose to fight against whatever it is they hate. If your protagonist doesn’t hate anything, have one of their companions do it instead.

 

Sharing Inspiration

One of the first stories that ever made me want to tell stories myself was The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. Mostly the Hobbit, because that was one of my bedtime stories growing up, but also Lord of the Rings because it was one of the first stories I read once I finally got over my disinterest in reading. The idea of an entire made up world filled with such interesting characters as you found in Lord of the Rings, the sense of history and weight behind each of the tales told, and the expansive world full of intricate detail that appealed to my much more literal (at the time, anyway) mind. It got me interested in making worlds of my own and trying to explore them beyond the immediate bits you saw when playing pretending or telling a story and that led to my decision to write stories of my own instead of just verbally telling them to my sisters.

 

Helpful Tips

Never underestimate the power of music to influence your writing. The right mix can get your brain thinking along the right track for pretty much any emotional scenario. I’ve got mixes for all of the major emotions, situations, and scenes. I’ve got five different varieties of fight scene music (overwhelming good guy power, overwhelming bad guy power, the hero narrowly prevails, and the death of a hero in both tragic and noble variants), I’ve got music for interpersonal conflict that is not violent (over a dozen playlists, so I’m not going to list them), and all of the emotions with the direction the emotion is heading (for example, sad and getting sadder or sad and getting less sad). I’ve got music for investigations, music for explorations, music for tense moments and near death experiences, and even music for romantic moments, though that tends to vary by the characters involved. I’ve also got playlists for each of the major characters that generally form the auditory backdrop of any moment I’m not focused on a difficult scene.

Music is such a big part of my process that half of my book ideas were born from a song or the mental image from a song. One of my favorites and the one I got the furthest in, “Between Light and Dark,” is inspired by a Vampire Weekend lyric. Their song “Giving Up the Gun” repeats a line: “You sword’s gone old and rusty… …It’s locked up like a trophy forgetting all the things its done.” That one line spawned the tale of an older swordsmen blessed by an elusive god with a talent for swordplay unrivaled in his lifetime who decides he doesn’t want to kill anymore. It explores the erasure of his identity as anything but this ultimate killer and his fumbling attempts to help prevent the protagonist from following him down that particular path, all told in a fantasy setting where the Elves are the evil people. Man, I want to get back to that story. Maybe once I’ve finished “Coldheart and Iron” and “What You Know You Need” I’ll get back to it. Anyway, music is great and you should let it influence you. It won’t disappoint.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 19 (11/19)

Chris Leave a comment

I meant to only do my daily minimum and then go to bed, but I wound up staying awake super late as I wrote an extra fourteen hundred words. I hadn’t done much writing yesterday since my ill-fated trip to a coffee shop ended in disaster. Not a real disaster, mind you, just the “I wasted an hour and a half of my time on this” kind of disaster. The place was super crowded, full of kids, and louder than I thought possible. By the time I’d realized how bad it was–it takes a while for noise and crowd levels to permeate my pre-caffeine brain–I’d already ordered a coffee and a breakfast sandwich, so I couldn’t just leave. I had to sit and wait for them to come up, eat them, and then figure out what I was going to do about the crowds and noise. Which was leave. I wound up leaving after trying to write and complaining to my friends about the noise for a while.

I was then going to go home and write at my desk, but I started playing Pokemon Let’s Go and got caught up in that until it was time to run Dungeons and Dragons. I was going to stop it at eight, but they were making such good progress I extended the session until ten. Then, finally, after six hours of Dungeons and Dragons, I finally got down to writing. Except I got super caught up in trying to get my iPod to fully back up on my external drive and subsequently spent an hour fiddling with its settings and some of the songs on it that stalled the backup process. The hour was spread out over three, from ten until one. I was going to go to bed at that point, but I told myself I’d just round my word count up to the nearest thousand since I was only three hundred words away. The next time I checked my word total, I’d written more than a full-page and was fewer than five hundred words away from three thousand, so I just rounded up again and went to bed.

It was an experience. A good one, mostly. I forgot how tiring Dungeons and Dragons can be since it’s been almost three months since I ran this particular campaign, but it felt good to run it again. I missed playing with those guys and the story we were telling. Pokemon was super fun and very relaxing, since it has a lot of the elements of the game that I enjoy plus some new interesting mechanics behind finding shiny or rare Pokemon. The only problem is that there’s a monetary restriction on how much leveling up you can do since getting XP from wild Pokemon encounters requires catching Pokemon. Poke Balls are cheaper than ever, but they still cost a lot and I’ve already gone through over one hundred of them and I only just got to the first gym. The catch combo mechanic the most fun since it increases the amount of XP you get per subsequent catch of the same Pokemon and because it also increases the chance of encountering shiny Pokemon. It will also make rare Pokemon start to spawn if you get it high enough, like my beloved Cabbage the Bulbasaur from the Viridian Forest. I’ll go into it more once I’ve gotten a chance to play more of the game and have the time for reviews on here again.

Honestly, the only part of this past weekend that rankled was the fact I stayed up until two in the morning last night and the absolutely unproductive nature of my Sunday coffee shop trip. The first was good, if not terribly productive, because I got to spend some time with my friend, but the second just felt like a waste of time since I pushed myself to get up and out the door in the morning for what turned out to be nothing but noise and chaos. I have coffee, breakfast foods, and apple cider I can heat up at home. There was nothing I gained by going out except for being able to say I left my home at least once yesterday. That’s valuable, sure, but there are other places I could have gone, other things I could have done that would have added more value that sitting in an overfull coffee shop in the sunniest table I’ve ever found inside a building.

It’s really quite difficult to try to manage my time without descending into panic and neurotically measuring the time I spend on everything in such a way that I never actually enjoy anything I do. If I’m super litigious about how I spend my time, I get stressed out and wind up getting nothing done as all my time goes to analyzing how I spend my time, recriminating myself for wasting time, and breaks from all that to browse the internet since I’m clearly too stressed out to work. If I’m super lax about it, I don’t do anything until the last-minute and wind up sacrificing sleep. It’s funny, actually, since I’m doing a project at work about increasing efficiency and managing our processes so we never wind up pushing up against our deadlines in such a way that we need to cut things in order to make it. I really should treat my life-like this work process stuff, break it down, and figure out what is keeping me from actually making timely progress on any of my projects. It’s definitely not a result of a lack of planning and preparation on my part.

It’s probably the fact that I tend to be impulsive when it comes to spending my own time and I’m the first to sacrifice my own sleep on the altar of getting something done, even if that something is video games. From there, it devolves further because even a single night of inadequate sleep makes the next day more difficult and time-consuming. It reminds me of something one of my professors in college said. “If you do you best work the night before your paper is due, you don’t do any work at other times.” I heard it enough times that it stuck and discovered, in my senior year, that I was way better at writing papers if I spread them out over the course of a few weeks than if I crammed them into the last couple days before they were due. The same is true of sleep. I’ll probably be a lot better at writing and being productive if I’m well-rested.

That’s kind of the theme of my blog lately, isn’t it? “I need to sleep more! But I’ve got so much to do! I’m not doing a good job of staying focused while I work on all of these projects, I wonder what the reason is for that?” I know the reason, I just don’t like admitting I need rest. I also extremely dislike laying awake at night, unable to sleep, with nothing to contemplate but my life, existence, and the universe. That is one of my least favorite things. I even wrote a whole poem about it. I wouldn’t mind a less complicated relationship with sleep, that’s for sure.

Anyway, I hope your day is going well! I hope you’re making good progress on your writing goals and that you’re staying strong as we approach the end of the middle third of the month. We’ve got twelve days left for writing, so keep it up! You’ve still got plenty of time left. Good luck!

 

Daily Prompt

Do the characters in your world us the bathroom? A lot of stories tend to gloss over things like toiletries and waste disposal, but not all of them do. Maybe their use of a bathroom is a setup for someone catching them unawares because people are often are their most vulnerable when they’re eliminating waste. Maybe no one uses the bathroom in your world because that’s just not how humans work. Maybe it’s not really something you care about and just want to avoid it because it’s often an unimportant detour (I’m looking at you, Wheel of Time series. How many times do people need to brush their teeth or hair while they dissect everything that just happened to them? I mean, I usually turn my brain off and just veg while brushing my teeth or combing my hair after my shower to the point where I sometimes hit places twice because I can’t remember if I’ve gotten that particular spot yet. I know a lot of people probably think, but no one reflects on the minute details of the past two weeks of their lives while poking at their teeth with a friggin soft/green twig. Jesus.). Whatever you decide to do, try to avoid inspiring rants like that one.

 

Sharing Inspiration

Lately, I’ve been revisiting an old favorite TV show during my relaxation/recovery hours. Community, an amazing show recommended by my friend Carolyn (mentioned a few days ago) follows the exploits of an unlikely group of study partners at a local community college. They bond over all the things that make them the same despite being a diverse group of races, political alignments, religions, and mental aptitudes/wellness. They struggle with the same kinds of problems we are struggle with when we’re part of a group that spends all our time together and, despite being characters, feel remarkably human. The show is a comedy, but that doesn’t stop it from telling some really great stories about the human condition and how we all just want to connect with each other. Honestly, the first three seasons are some of the funniest stuff I’ve ever seen and, while the show runner was brought back after a disastrous fourth season, there was no real recovering from it. It took two more seasons after that for it to die.

 

Helpful Tips

Being able to manage your diet and caffeine intake is incredibly important if you have a marathon of high-stress like National Novel Writing Month done in conjunction with pretty much anything else. Knowing what kind of fuel your body handles best can mean the difference between being sleepy after every meal or spending all your time between meals snacking. I need a decent amount of protein every day to stay full and empty carbohydrates like most snack foods and breads don’t keep me feeling full for very long, so I try to avoid snacking on anything that isn’t meat. Preserved meats like jerky and the various “snack sticks” are my go-to. When it comes to caffeine, you really need to do some experimenting yourself. Finding out how much caffeine you need for a reaction varies from person to person. For instance, my roommate drinks a cup of coffee and that’s all he needs. He even has to drink it slow to stay sane. I drink a cup of the same coffee and need another. At the same time, he doesn’t react any differently with a soda but I can’t drink soda for anything but caffeine withdrawal relief because it hits me quick and then leaves. Once you know how much caffeine you need, you should set some rules on it and stick to them so you don’t start wrecking your ability to sleep or making yourself unable to function because you’re constantly flirting with over-caffeination.

 

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 18 (11/18)

Chris Leave a comment

Yesterday went alright. I got exactly three thousand words write for my National Novel Writing Month project, which was a ton of fun to realize. I hadn’t planned it, but when I went to update my word total on their website at midnight, I discovered I’d written exactly three thousand words. That felt like a good place to stop since I’m not under any particular crunch other than the “I want to catch up before the end of the month” crunch that I’m familiar with. I’m only about six thousand words behind at this point, so a dozen days of five hundred extra words will do it. I know I can handle an extra five hundred words a day, no problem, and I’ve still got thirteen days to go so it should be easily handled. I may try to do more today than I did yesterday, but I’m not going to push it. I’d like to do more, but I definitely need to avoid over committing myself to things like I usually do.

Despite how crazy things have been lately, yesterday was actually pretty calm and normal. I needed that. In fact, my only complaint about yesterday is that I spent most of it with an incredibly sore neck as a result of spending most of my night scrunched up against my headboard. I have no idea why, but that happens sometimes and I always wake up with a headache, sore neck, and stiff shoulders. I should probably look into the ways I sleep and actually get a good mattress, but those are both long-term tasks. Neither of them will be simple solutions since it’s difficult to figure out the physical aspects of my sleep since I’m, you know, asleep for their duration. Getting a good mattress requires a lot of research and some time spent investigating at a mattress store so I can figure out if I prefer more firm or less firm. So far, my mattress buying has been entirely driven by prices and convenience. I’d like to get an actually good mattress just to see if it can help me deal with my various sleep issues. I’ve got enough of them that I’m willing to try just about anything for a while, to see if it helps.

I should probably try “go to bed at a reasonable hour” since I haven’t gone to bed before one in the morning since… I honestly don’t know. It’s definitely been more than a week. I think. A lack of adequate sleep is really bad for your short-term memory so there are something things that have faded from my mind a bit…

I joke. I don’t always check the clock before bed and, without an actual hard number to attach to the thought of going to bed, I lose most of my sense of when it was beyond “late” or “reasonable.” I really should work on not pushing myself below a minimum of six hours a night, since I’ve managed to handle it this past week without too much of a problem but I can’t explain why. Unless, of course, therapy lights help deal with sleep deprivation side effects. Or maybe most of my tiredness from not sleeping enough was tied to my depression and, since the light helps lessen that, my exhaustion levels never got quite as high as they usually do.

Truthfully, it shouldn’t matter. I know I need six hours of sleep a night at a minimum. I shouldn’t be starting these posts at midnight, I should be finished with them and in bed by midnight. I shouldn’t put off my daily NaNoWriMo writing until ten at night, I should be doing it right away when I get home from work. Video games can wait and they’re a bit easier to stop doing. Aside from, you know, that Pathfinder Kingmaker game I’ve been playing that kept me up until three and two in the morning on subsequent nights. That was a really poor choice on my part and I will own up to that. Nowadays, I’m sticking to Pokemon games with a focus on the new one, Pokemon: Let’s Go. It’s pretty fun, but I wouldn’t recommend playing it if you want a new experience. If you want to relive the Kanto region, already own a Nintendo Switch, and can have a realistic reaction to something that resembles something else, in that you don’t immediately hate it because it’s different, you should play Pokemon: Let’s Go. If all of those things are not true, then you probably shouldn’t play it. Especially if the last one is true. No one wants to deal with that, so just avoid the game.

I am optimistic about how much I’ll get done today. Yesterday wasn’t amazing, by any means, but it was a solid day. I’m hoping today will be similar. I’ve got Dungeons and Dragons planned for the late afternoon and early evening, so that’ll be fun. It has been a long time since we’ve played, for various reasons. Some of them have been my fault, some of them have been the fault of one or more of the players, but we’re finally ready to play again. We were at a good pausing point since the party returned to their caravan, so  it should be a relatively painless restarted. There will be hiccups because there always are, but I’m really looking forward to it. It’s going to take up a good chunk of my day, about four hours of running the game and at least two of preparation since I’ll need to refamiliarize myself with all the notes I wrote during previous sessions in addition to planning what we’ll do tomorrow. Rough plans are good enough for most sessions, but I need to have a more solid one since this is our first session in a while. The smoother it goes, the more likely it is that we’ll actually get through this chapter of the campaign by New Year’s Day.

Anyway, I hope your day goes well! I hope you’re all caught up on your goals and that you’ve been enjoying this chance to rest and recharge for another week of writing and, for the people of the US, navigating the difficulty that is the holidays. Whatever the problems are, whatever petty bullshit comes up, just remind yourself that you’ve got a story to tell. Plotting and working through scenes makes for a great distraction from the messily unfolding drama that often shows up during the holidays. I hope your day is great and I wish you the best of luck!

 

Daily Prompt

What are your protagonists hobbies? What are they interested in? The things that hold our attention and that we care about influence the way we think. I enjoy video games, so I tend to view most of the stories in my head as a cross between a video game and a movie. I can pause and move the camera around to look everywhere, but the story is happening on it’s own so I can miss it if I look away. It influences the way we talk, the metaphors we use, and how we relate to people. How does your protagonist’s interests influence their interactions with other people? Write a scene showing them bonding with someone over a shared interest or perhaps them struggling to connect with people who are disinterested (or maybe even people who dislike) what they care about.

 

Sharing Inspiration

I’ve been working at this crap for over a year and, let me tell you, believing in yourself will only get you so far. There will be a day when that belief runs out, when you have nothing left to push yourself forward. For those days, I have a few things to remind me that I’m not the only person who believes in me. One is the speech my creative writing professor gave when she awarded me a scholarship for creative writing and fellowship. The other is a birthday card from a good friend filled with heartfelt words. The first I only have in electronic format, but I’ve memorized it so I can recall it at will. The later is pinned above my desk so I all I have to do is look up to be reminded that I’m not working in a vacuum. There are people out there who see how hard I’m working and are excited to see where I’m going to go. Believing in yourself is important and should be your main goal if you’re just getting started. Having someone else who believes in you is super helpful for getting there, though.

 

Helpful Tips

I know you probably have a place you like to write, with a specific ambiance and location, but you can write at pretty much any time. Bring a notebook if you prefer to write by hand, and take whatever time you have during your day to write down some ideas or make a big of quick progress on your National Novel Writing Month project. If you don’t really care how you take notes or work through things, set up a writing application on your phone and just type it out there. I’ve got Google Drive set up on my phone and most of my writing projects are stored as documents in my Google Drive. Two aren’t, but that’s because they’re so big they cause my browser to crash or hang when it tries to do the whole “dynamic saving” thing that google documents likes to do. It apparently doesn’t like anything that passes one hundred thousand words since that’s when it starts to get buggy. But it’s still great for quick edits, taking notes, or having an easily accessible place to do some five-minute bursts of writing throughout my day. I suggest you check it out to see if it will help you.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 17 (11/17)

Chris Leave a comment

Well, last night didn’t go horribly. It didn’t go great in terms of writing, but I had fun with my friends and the whole thing was pretty relaxing. Except, of course, for my neighbor and his music. I can’t hear anything but bass through the walls, so it’s not like it’s very loud, he’s just cranked the bass up to the maximum and decided to completely disregard the fact that he share’s a building with people who aren’t his family. I don’t even know how THEY put up with his music. Fun fact, that was the first thing we learned about the people we moved in next to. Their youngest kid came over while I was unloading the moving van and told me his dad likes to play loud music on Fridays. After that, he wandered away like five or six year-olds will. It wasn’t until relatively recently that it started staying on until early morning. Before that, it wasn’t even this loud. The noise of my fan and a couple of white-noise creators in my room would mask it. Now, it’s so pervasive I can feel the bass when I’m in bed. in the past three weeks, it hasn’t stopped before two am.

I wonder what changed. Maybe he got a new stereo with more bass to it. Maybe he’s stressed about his job and is trying to work through it on Fridays with his music. Maybe he just wants to have a good time and this is his idea of one. Normally, I’ve got nothing against people who just want to have a good time. More power to them for knowing what they enjoy. I’m not one to try to stop someone from having a good time, whatever that may be. However, my idea of a good time after midnight on any night of the week is going to sleep. You can see how these two things might be in conflict.

My roommate has agreed to handle the talking part so long as I bake him something to offer as a sign of peace and good intention. I’m glad he’s willing to do that because I would rather struggle through baking something, which I’m not particularly good at (or bad, for that matter), than have a potentially tense conversation. Plus, it doesn’t help that every single one of my mental simulations of the conversation include a lot of swearing and at least one ultimatum per simulation. That’s a good way to get people to dig in their heels or decide to do something idiotic just to spite you. No one wins when those kinds of games start.

Another part of the problem is that I’m now so frustrated by heavy base that it pulls me out of whatever I’m doing when it starts. I got almost nothing done yesterday, from nine until midnight when I finally gave up, because his music was going. Any period of silence was enough to make me pause my music to listen for the potential end of this headache-inducing vibration. Every time it started back up, a small part of me died and my focus was further broken until I couldn’t stay focused on what I was writing long enough to finish a single sentence. It was incredibly frustrating to try to get anything done last night and even putting it aside to do something else wasn’t much help since the constant rise and fall of my neighbor’s bass prevented me from enjoying that as well. Heck, even the event I went to with my friends was kind of grating because the DJ used an adequate amount of bass but even that makes me uncomfortable and angry.

I mean, I was so tired last night that I was dozing off as I wrote and still, climbing into bed to sleep made it so difficult for me to ignore the bass that even my complete exhaustion couldn’t crash me from awake to asleep. I dislike feeling that tired, but I was hopeful that it’d help me get past the frustration of the bass so I could just go to sleep right away. Alas, it was not meant to be. Not even my old standby of “play Pokemon until I hit myself in the face with my 3DS” worked. Only NyQuil. Which sucks because that meant I was unable to actually rest during sleep until it wore off around six this morning. Which meant I immediately work up, of course, because I can’t just go to sleep or even stay asleep.

The upshot is that I won’t have to deal with this until the end of the month. I’ll be away, visiting family, next Friday, so I won’t have to deal with this jerk and his music. By then, my roommate will have talked to our neighbors and gifted them with banana bread, so hopefully it won’t be a problem anymore.  For now, I’m going to focus on writing and trying to get caught up with my National Novel Writing Month project. Having written forty-nine thousand words doesn’t help much if only twenty thousand of them are in the actual project I’m supposed to be doing this month. Twenty-nine thousand bonus words is nice, but I really need to start making some big progress on the novel project.

I’ve got nothing planned this weekend except coffee shop trips, Dungeons and Dragons on Sunday, and kitchen cleaning. Two days is plenty of time to get all that done plus a bunch of writing, even if I’m still pretty sleep-deprived. At least I’ve managed to go three days in a row where I’ve made my daily minimum for word counts. That’s a good feeling, avoiding falling further behind. I’m catching up a bit, too, but so far only about six hundred words over the past three days. It’s totally doable to still finish in time. Even if all I do is write two thousand words a day instead of one thousand six hundred sixty-six.

Anyway, I hope your weekend is off to a great start and that you’re making progress that feels good on your National Novel Writing Month projects. I wish you the best of luck in getting some writing done today and I hope no one rises to frustrate you at every turn like my neighbor and his music have done to me. No matter what, I believe in you!

 

Daily Prompt

Why is your protagonist’s best friend actually their best friend? There must have been some moment, some shared thing that solidified the friendship, even if it was only the weight of the history they have shared. What created that bond and how have they maintained it? Is it something they both work at, or is the bond held together by only one person? Why is their relationship currently the way it is? For today, write about the relationship between your protagonist and their best friend. Show us how they each value the relationship and how their participation in it affect the other. Is it something that’s going to grow stronger as a part of the character growth in your story, or are they going to grow apart? Maybe nothing will change. Give us a bit of foreshadowing!

 

Sharing Inspiration

Some days, it  is difficult for me to get out of bed in the morning. Depression sucks. You know what doesn’t suck? Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Gmorning and Gnight tweets. Been doing it for so long and they’re so popular that he’s got a whole book of them now. Honestly, there are days where his tweets are the only thing that makes me feel like someone cares about me. He’s a stranger on the internet and they’re so heartfelt and he’s so lovely and positive that there’s no doubt in my mind that he really does care and that he really does mean those words for every one of us. They remind me I’m not alone on what is a typically isolating platform. How many people would call Twitter anything other than a distraction or a reminder of how disconnected we all are despite how much access we have to each other? Lin-Manuel Miranda’s tweets make me feel like we might actually be able to really connect and that the internet might one day actually become a place for community and togetherness like I’d always hoped it would.

 

Helpful Tips

Whether this is your first story or your thousandth, it is always good to remember that you don’t need to get everything perfect the first time. If you’ve got a good idea that you can’t quite capture, just get something down that’ll jog your memory when the time comes to work on it again. There is always time for edits and anyone who tells you otherwise is full of it. There are tons of great authors out there who spend their time making each thought perfect, getting each line into the best possible shape, but that generally means each book takes them almost a full decade to finish. It’s basically ready to go at that point, just like most books, but it took them years to get there. Years that other authors used to create half a dozen or more books. Don’t be like them, at least not yet. Focus on getting into the habit of writing every day and gradually start incorporating common mistakes you notice yourself making or that your readers point out you’re making. It’s good practice.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 16 (11/16)

Chris Leave a comment

Last night was a saga for the ages. I settled down at about seven-thirty to begin writing, making sure all my other chores around the place were finished so I could focus on my writing without other stuff taking up space in my mind. I started making some good progress, though it was a bit of a slower start than I’m used to. Around eight, though, I noticed my iPod was acting strangely. Normally, I plug it into my computer and use iTunes to edit playlists and stuff on it since I don’t have it synchronized with my computer. Manually managed in fine with me, since I like having that level of control anyway. The only downside is that it sometimes won’t register because, back around the time I built my current computer and subsequently lost all the data on my old hard drives (that’s a story for another day and involves personally re-learning that wiping a computer using software doesn’t necessarily clear it of all data), some of the data on the iPod corrupted. This corrupted data made it a gigantic pain in my ass to move my music library from my iPod to my new computer since it would crash windows every time it encountered a corrupted file. Which means I’ve spent the last two and a half years tempting fate with eighty gigabytes of music on my iPod that is backed up nowhere else. \

Well, last night, as I investigated why my iPod was acting so weird, I discovered that my daily schedule backup was happening at the same time. Since there was nothing else going on to explain why my iPod froze and iTunes stopped working, I decided to just unplug it and plug it back in. Which is when I was notified that my daily backup had suddenly failed. Looking into that, I discovered that it was attempting to back up my iPod. Which it had been successfully doing until I went ahead and unplugged my iPod in the middle of it communicating with my external hard drive. Excited, I got my iPod plugged back in and started the backup again. I was giddy at the idea that my external hard drive would be able to just copy the data off my iPod and then all I’d need to do is import the file from my external hard drive to iTunes. I started the backup again and went about my business as it slowly worked its way through the weird hidden files on my iPod.

After I checked on it a couple of times without seeing any real progress past a certain point, I put my writing aside in favor of investigating. Surely, it’d be a quick fix. Probably a result of the fact that I interrupted the last backup. It wasn’t. My external hard drive was encountering the same problem I had when I tried to move the files manually. There were corrupted files that crashed windows explorer (which was a significant upgrade from crashing all of windows and, as I found out, is a result of a fix that Microsoft did last summer). This time, though, I could see which file it was that caused the problem. I reasoned that, even if I kept encountering these files, it would still be easier to go in and delete them off my iPod as the backup went through its process than to try to do it manually.

I was wrong. It was not easier. In addition to reset windows explorer and unplugging my iPod to restart the copying process, which is what I wound up doing when I encountered a corrupted file while manually copying the songs, my external hard drive needed to be restarted as well, along with the software that manages it. The only way to truly do that is to restart my computer. As I was resigning myself to living out the rest of my iPod’s days in fear of its eventual death and the loss of my music library, I decided to take a look at the files I was deleting, to see if there was any common factor that would let me preemptively remove them instead of needing to trip over them. Turns out, there was. Some crappy metal album I’d gotten from a friend when I integrated his music library into mine had corrupted at some point, so none of the songs would play on my iPod and they hung every involved software application when I tried to copy them over or edit them. So I deleted every song by them off my iPod.

Buoyed by my success at finding the common link between the files, I started up the backup process again and went back to writing. Twenty minutes later, I was back to investigating since the backup had hung again. What was supposed to be an hour of poking around and letting the automatic copy process of my external hard drive turned into me manually copying every song off my iPod and cramming in what writing I could during the minute I had during a successful copy and paste. I finished it, though, at about half past one in the morning and I even got my writing minimum done. All-in-all, it was a successful night. I’ve copied the music somewhere it will be safe and my iPod should be ready to back up to the external hard drive now. I’ll be able to finally scan and repair my iPod like Windows constantly wants me to do. I’ll be able to restore it like iTunes wants me to. It is done and I never need to worry about it again since I’ll never be so foolish as to rely on my iPod as my music backup.

Even if I didn’t make the progress I wanted, I still made progress and fell no further behind. It may have been weird, frustrating, and exhausting (on account of only getting 4 hours of sleep last night), but last night was a good night. I don’t know how today will go seeing as I’ve got a thing I’m doing with my friends tonight, but I’m sure it’ll be fine. I’ll have a chance to do my minimum writing before the event and time afterwards to do more if I want. As long as my neighbor doesn’t keep me up with his music again, I’ll be good. I hope today is going well for you! We’re officially in the second half of the month and now’s the time to start hunkering down to work if you’ve been putting it off. If you’re on schedule or a head, that’s great, but don’t get complacent! There are still a lot of days left before the end of the month. Plenty enough to fall behind or catch up still. Good luck!

 

Daily Prompt

Who is your protagonist’s best friend? What part do they play in the narrative unfolding this month? Is it a good part, or are they holding the protagonist back? For today, trying writing about your protagonist’s closest friend and their part in the story you’re telling. Maybe they’re absent and the hole they left in the protagonist’s life is part of what drives them to act. Maybe they’re a voice of restraint and fear when the protagonist wishes to boldly push forward. Maybe they’re a voice of reason and a calm voice to help slow the protagonist down. Maybe they’re wildly emotional and one of the forces pushing the protagonist forward. You have a lot of options and it would be great to see how the protagonist’s closest friend affects the story.

 

Sharing Inspiration

I love art. Good art is like a feast for your eyes, fighting back against brain starvation and defeating the haunting spectre of white (or off-white) interrupted by splats of black in the shape of tiny little symbols that start to lose all meaning when you’ve been staring at them for well over twelve hours a day. No, I’m not going insane from spending all my free time writing and spending all day at my job staring at text because I’m a software tester and there’s way more of that than you’d think. But that’s mostly because I’ve surrounded my home computer with good art and my friend Carolyn’s art features heavily because she has a mastery of color and detail I find refreshing after looking at a text all day. Her stuff also looks amazing on a computer screen, so click that link up there and check it out! Maybe buy some prints to hand around your desk so you can pretend you’re not sitting in the same spot for a couple hundred hours this month.

 

Helpful Tips

If you’ve been working every day this month, then you’ve officially been working on the same project for sixteen days. That’s a long time to be doing any one thing. I know we’ve already gone over taking breaks, going for walks, and getting proper rest, bu it would also be a good idea to take some time to work on a different project for a bit. I can’t speak for everyone, but I know I work better if I take occasional breaks to do something else. That’s why I have two projects for this month. If I swap between projects every hour, it is easier for me to stay focused or work through difficult spots because I’ve got something else to focus on while my mind works it way through whatever problem came up in the previous project. So find something else to do that’s constructive an engaging! Build a Lego set! Plan a dungeon! Reorganize your bookshelves! Draw some art! Write blog updates! Whatever it is, so long as it is constructive, just go do it!