Schedule

NaNoWriMo Day 28 (11/28)

Chris Leave a comment

I’m a little ahead of schedule so far. I had to write 2500 words last night in order to finish on time, but I wrote 3200. That isn’t very far ahead of schedule, but doing it twice more means I only need to write 400 words on Thursday to finish. Which means I’d be able to start my recovery period and early nights on Thursday instead of Friday. I’m all for that, so we’ll see how it goes. Maybe I can do even more writing tonight so that I can just take Thursday entirely off. Nothing wrong with Finishing early, you know?

I also noticed that the “schedule your post” functionality of WordPress isn’t very precise. I had yesterday’s post all set to go up at 9 am, since I was going to be at work, and it didn’t actually post until I’d pulled up my website and logged in (of course it posted immediately when I logged in). I’m thinking I might be able to schedule the post, but I’ll need to actually still check every day if only make sure WordPress is doing what I told it to. It feels rather silly to have a schedule function that doesn’t really work, though. Maybe I should write up a bug report and submit it to the WordPress team. I do it for Google and video games all the time now, since I’ve become a professional software tester and all.

I haven’t gotten any comments on my post asking for suggestions of what to do with my blog after this month has ended, but I’m think it’ll probably be something a little more focused on creativity since my last blog before this one had focused on that and did much better in terms of views and followers even after I’d stopped updating it. The exact schedule it yet to be determined, but I’m pretty sure my first days of recovery are going to be spent creating a buffer of scheduled posts for me to fall back on while the actual recovery is happening this coming weekend.

A year of daily posts seems like a tall-order, but I’d have said the same thing before I decided to update this blog daily, so I suspect it’ll be a bit more achievable than I think it is right now. I might need to get an editor, though, since I’m clearly not that great at editing all of my posts before they go up. I’ve re-read some of the earlier ones and been horrified by the things I’ve missed.

I actually spent some time tonight playing one of my current favorite video games, Overwatch. I tend to prefer playing Tanks and Supports since I prefer the more strategic style of playing the game and playing a good tank is all about timing, situational awareness, and knowing where the tipping points are. Feeling the pressure building means you can anticipate when to drop your defense and attack with your DPS, while feeling it fall means you can be ready to cover the retreat of your supports and DPS when you need to get to a more defensible position or risk being torn apart. Those are my particular skills. I’m not great at soloing or flanking, but I am one of the best tanks I’ve played with at seeing the tipping points and being ready to take advantage of them. My main problem is that most of the people I play with online don’t even know that these tipping points happen, much less how to actually group around a tank. Tonight, though, I got to play with my friends and I cleaned house. It was wonderful. I’ll look into uploading some of the videos in the future, since I feel like they’re classic examples of the tipping points I’m talking about.

Hey! Talking about video games like that would make an excellent weekly feature! This content practically writes itself.

 

Daily Prompt

For those of us who spend a lot of time working on projects or doing things we’re not particularly good at, failure becomes a familiar face. One of the most important aspects of learning to create or improve is to accept that failure is going to be much more common than success, no matter how long you’ve been doing it or how good you get. If you aren’t risking failure, then you likely don’t have much to gain from what you’re doing. For today’s prompt, write a scene in which your character comes face to face with repeated failure as they try to learn something new or create something.  Show how your character responds to this failure and what happens as a result of them recognizing it.

 

Sharing Inspiration

Sometimes, you stumble across something that can only be a labor of love. Someone, at some point, wanted something and then took an incredibly long stretch of time to create something that perfectly fulfilled it before putting it up on the internet for everyone to see. One of my favorite examples is this list of 1000 totally random magical effects. I found it when working with a D&D player on a character concept that revolved around them causing random magical effects whenever they were frightened. I found a way to simulate rolling a d1000 and then would take whatever magical effect I got on the table. Examples include her character and the source of her fright had to pay 20% of their character’s total worth in the form of taxes. Another one was that the nearest tree (or, in this case, the mast of their airship) turned into a fully decorate Christmas tree complete with presents for everyone around underneath it. She also grew wings once. That was fun. This sort of dedication to an idea is something that always inspires me to keep working on my own crazy ideas and stories because someday, someone I don’t expect at all will find them and appreciate them.

 

Helpful Tips

Like I wrote in the prompt, failure is something you’re going to encounter a lot if you take any risks and trying to create something without taking any risks is not really worth doing. One of the books I’ve been reading for work, as my boss tries to encourage a creative and adventurous atmosphere in our R&D department, suggests that failing early and failing often is the best way to approach any task. If you spend all of your time planning, you’re still going to come up with one or more failures later in the process but you’ll have less time to correct those failures than if you’d just dived right in and started failing immediately.

Writing and NaNoWriMo are hard. I’ve failed NaNoWriMo twice. The first time, I failed so hard I didn’t even sign up to participate. I tried to pretend I didn’t need the accountability and that I’d be able to succeed on my own because I wanted to be able to hide any failure. Last year, I failed because I wasn’t willing to put the energy I had into writing every day or writing enough on my weekends to make up for not writing every day. Sure, I had my reasons, but there will always be reasons to not do something. Better to try and fail rather than not try and fail anyway. You always get something out of it when you try, even if you still wind up having failed just as much as if you hadn’t done anything.

Even if you know you won’t finish in time, don’t give up. Keep trying. Make your failure the best failure you can because the lessons you take out of this, the writing you’ve done when it is over, that will all still be there whether you succeed or fail. Every attempt is a learning experience and the ones that teach us the most are almost always the failures.

NaNoWriMo Day 9 (11/09)

Chris Leave a comment

 

So, last night didn’t go exactly as planned. I wound up working from home after an appointment and then, instead of going right into dinner preparation or laundry folding or even bill paying, I loaded up Destiny 2 and started playing that. Whoops. I still managed to get some stuff done, though, by applying willpower and making a commitment to not play for so long that I lost all opportunity to spend my time on anything else. I got my bills paid, ate dinner, and wrote a bit. Laundry is going to have to wait until tonight (and I am not allowed to play video games at all tonight).

I did still get some writing and review (just reading, not editing) done, which was good. Writing my NaNoWriMo project is important to me, even if I never look at it again once it’s done. Primarily because I’ve been away from consistent writing for long enough that I wasn’t entirely sure I could still manage a challenge like this. Heck, nine days into it and I’m still not sure I can handle it… Secondarily because I’m using this writing project to work through some stuff I’ve been dealing with this year. I have no idea where the story is going or how I’m going to wrap it up because everything the protagonist is going through is a metaphor for something I’m going through. I’m hoping that, if I just keep writing, I’ll figure it out for both my story AND for me..

I want to say that I’m confident I’ll accomplish both of those things, but today I am unsure. I wouldn’t exactly say I’m lost because I know exactly where I am, but I am not sure I even suspect where I’m supposed to be going. “Directionless” would be an apt descriptor. I really want to just sit tight and figure out where I should be going, but I’ve been doing that for most of this year and gotten no where. I really need to just start moving and figure out if I went the right way once I get somewhere. Better to fail early and quickly than to spend a lot of time planning and fail too late to fix anything.

 

Daily Prompt

Having a character act in a void can be fun because it makes you focus on what they’re doing and who they are, but it also can make it harder for the reader to feel immersed. By the same token, adding too much description and sensation to the story can distract from the action taking place with the characters. However, if you set the scene beforehand, using narration, you can get the world established enough to immerse the readers but without distracting from the action that takes place later. For today, focus on creating scene settings. Just set up a few important locations for your character until you hit your word count for the day and then wrap up that one.

 

Sharing Inspiration

Today, my inspiration is good friends. It’s a hard thing to share because it takes so much time to build, but having friends and other creators you can talk to can really get you fired up about your project. I couldn’t count the number of times I was able to work through a challenging bit of a story because I had a friend and fellow creator to talk to. The number of times my friends have given me the support I needed to keep going when I wondered if I should just give up is a (sometimes) frighteningly high number. Talk to your friends, find the people around you who love to create, and embrace this aspect of you, them, and your relationship as a whole. The joy and excitement that builds between you will provide you with all the motivation and willpower you need to get to work.

 

Helpful Tips

While the idea of filling every spare moment with writing is not only appealing but also something I’ve advocated here, that strategy might not work well for you. If you’re struggling to actually get something accomplished during your hectic flurries of writing scattered around your day, try making time for writing using a schedule. Specifically, MAKE the time. Scheduled writing time is not something you will ever find because there are so many other things that feel far more urgent. It is something you will need to set aside and wrap in iron so that it cannot be used for anything else. Set up a period of time you can make clear and use it for writing. It doesn’t need to be the same time every day, but actually schedule it into your day, ahead of time. Take the time on every Saturday to figure out what the next week’s writing times will be. A schedule adds a degree of accountability (if only to yourself), and can help eliminate distractions if you actually dedicate the time to writing.