NaNoWriMo: Day 3

Today ended up pointing the nose of this plane into  a steeper dive. Luckily, in the next few days, I should have more time to work on the novel.

Arose at 7 am, we prepared for church and took our 45 minute trip there. Arrived back home around 2 pm. Not too much time had passed before diving into my afternoon nap. Woke up at 6:30 pm. After getting the sleep out of my eyes, helping wife get the shopping list together, and going out to eat, we filled a cart at our local grocery store. Returned home, took out the trash, helped put away groceries, and had a mini-meeting between wife and son #1.

By the time I returned to my computer, the clock read around 12:30 am. Made some deposits, and pulled up a blog post I'd written earlier for my new gig. Oh, did I mention it? I am going to be doing those weekly blog post I mentioned earlier. I'd say where, but not sure I should yet. You'll find out soon enough as my first post is scheduled to go live Tuesday morning.

Took a break editing and adding the blog post to the site to put my wife to bed a little after 2 am. She was up late. Continued to work on getting the blog post the way I wanted it as well as trying to make sure I did things the way they wanted. That took me up until 4 am.

I looked at the time and decided working on the novel isn't going to happen tonight. Sundays just don't have much extra time in them. But as stated, this coming week looks a little freer to focus on the novel. So we'll see if I can redeem the last few days over the coming week. Riveting, huh?

Reality Game totals:

Day 1: 961 words in 2.5 hours, for an average of 384 words/hour.
Day 2: 807 words in 1.5 hours, for an average of 538 words/hour.
Day 3: 0 words in 0 hours, for an average of 0 words/hour.

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Total: 1768 words in 4 hours for an average of 442 words/hour.

NaNoWriMo: Day 2

Up from bed today by 11 am. Being I went to bed at 2:30 am, a good amount of catch up sleep. A little more of a relaxed day, though my weekends tend to be fuller. Spent time with wife, ate breakfast, checked email and blogs. Did a little support group writing, but kept it to one thread.

Then started getting ready for the evening church service. Put together my binder, cleaned up, and wife and I headed out the door by 5 pm.  We returned to the city and stopped to eat at a local Mexican restaurant. Returned home shortly after 9:30 pm. Checked more email, responded to another support group thread, and a blog comment, then put my wife to bed around midnight.

Read a new blog post I follow that reminded me this ended Daylight savings time (Okay, how many of you arrived at church an hour early?). That caused me to try and change the time on my watch an hour back. It is an old digital watch I bought in 1982, a few months before my wife and I were married. The buttons on the side are hard to get to work. After a lot of struggling, I finally got the time changed. So I sat down at my computer at 1:30 to write, after getting some water.

I knew I wouldn't get much done, as I needed to get to bed early since I get up early for church. But I wanted to record something. So I dove in. Considering that I spent some time researching on Google Maps, and my Parkinson's doesn't allow me to type as fast as I used to, I did pretty good. When I stopped at 3 am, I'd written 807 more words in 1.5 hours. Then off to write this blog post and get to bed Should be snoozing before 4 am hits, and I'll get at least 3 hours of sleep. Don't worry, I have a planned afternoon nap to catch up. Standard Sunday  routine.

Reality Game totals:

Day 1: 961 words in 2.5 hours, for an average of 384 words/hour.
Day 2: 807 words in 1.5 hours, for an average of 538 words/hour.

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Total: 1768 words in 4 hours for an average of 442 words/hour.

NaNoWriMo: Day 1

Woke up around 7:45 am, giving me just under 2 hours of sleep. Ate breakfast while checking email and FB. Prepared, and I was underway with wife and son #1 to Austin around 9:45. Arriving at 11, we all three start packing and loading up our Ford Focus. Son #2 is supposed to meet us at 12:30, but he overslept and missed his morning classes. So he arrives more at 1 pm. We load the rest of son #1's material goods into second car, a PT Cruiser.  Wife gets hungry, so after dropping the key off at the school, we go get a bite to eat.

We leave with a little drama over how son #2 is going to pay for his new car. Finally they say they are okay with a personal check. But now we're pressed for time, because the DMV closes at 4:30. So we drive back from Austin and get to the DMV at 4:00 pm. They do the transaction and transfer the title over to son #2, who is now the proud owner of a 2002 Ford Taurus.

We head home, unload the two vehicles. Mom and son #2 go to pick up his car. Meanwhile, I get in some quick FB time before cooking dinner, shrimp stir fry. Sit down to eat sometime after 7 pm. I'm feeling the affects of running on minimal sleep, so I don't feel like doing much. So I end up watching YouTube videos until almost 11 pm. Wife is tired too, so I put her to bed.

11:30, I sit down at my computer to write, even though I'm not feeling much into it. But I want to at least get started on this novel. So I get "rolling" on it and type away, getting in 961 words by 2 am. I'm struggling, so decide it will be better to call it a night, get some sleep, and hope to get more time tomorrow.

Reality Game totals:

Day 1: 961 words in 2.5 hours, for an average of 384 words/hour.

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Total: 961 words in 2.5 hours for an average of 384 words/hour.

NaNoWriMO: Day 0.5

I've decided, both to help me be accountable, and to give folks a glimpse into what I do for NaNo, to do a daily log of my progress much like I did for my attempt at a 10 day novel challenge a few weeks ago.

For those not familiar, NaNoWriMo, or simply NaNo, is short for "National Novel Writing Month." During the month of November, millions of people from all over the world sign into a central website to track their attempt to write at least 50,000 words of a novel, and compare/compete with friends and regions. While there are several versions of this concept around, this one has by far become the most popular and widely participated event of its kind.

I've done NaNo since 2006. This will make my eighth one. Only one year, 2011, did I write less than 50K words. Most of my novels have been written during November each year.

This year has some unique challenges. One, while my "work" schedule isn't as heavy as has been the case in years past, it seems I have several projects that I'll need to work on this month that will take time away from writing.

One, I'm working on finishing edits and getting ready to send to the printer my third novel in The Virtual Chronicles series, Virtual Game. I had hoped to have that done by this point, but I'm still working on edits. I'll have to juggle both tasks until I get that novel sent to the printer and ebooks uploaded. You'll be getting my progress on that here as well, and of course an announcement when it is available for Christmas orders.

Two, I'm president of our local writer's club, and early this month we'll be celebrating our 20th anniversary. So for the first few days, I'll be devoting some time and energy toward that.

Three, around Thanksgiving, my family and I are going on a trip from Texas to Mississippi to visit my daughter, son-in-law, his relatives, and of course, our two grandkids. One is a step, the other will be our biological granddaughter not even 1 year old yet. That will not likely be much writing time, and it is right at the end of the month this year. So the goal is to have this novel finished before we leave on this trip, as the month will be pretty much over by the time we get back.

Four, I have a regular weekly blog post I do at http://blog.healinginfidelity.com that I want to keep up with. So I'll need to devote time to preparing those, a task I've not had in years past. News flash, it is possible I'll be adding yet another weekly blog post to that schedule. I should know on that in a few days.

Five, as of this point, I'm getting the slowest start I've ever had for NaNo. I've been so busy with helping my wife clean houses (pretty much my job now, part time), dealing with our children's issues, while trying to get projects done, including chores around the house, and adequate time with my wife, that I've come to midnight, the start of NaNo, not having given a second thought to what I'm going to write. As a matter of fact, at midnight, I was still trying to help my son get insurance for a car he is buying tomorrow...or later today as it stands. So, that is a good lead into logging my day.

Got up from bed around noon (yes, I have a late schedule). Took care of some deposits, calling about my son Nathan's broken lease obligations (he dropped out of culinary school and is back home now...empty nest now officially over for the time being), checked email and blogs while eating oatmeal and drinking coffee. Then responded to a request at a support group I'm on. Spent some time responding to that. My wife is home before 3:00 pm, unusual for her, but the last client of the day cancelled at the last minute. We didn't complain too much as we've both felt worn out working over the last three days.

So we put signs on our car for the business, and when son at home was getting too frustrated with the mower, I had to take over and mow the front lawn so trick-o-treaters wouldn't have to be greeted by long grass. Meanwhile, wife starts working on cooking the pizza, but discovers we never bought any pizza sauce, nor do we have anything to make it with. Nathan and his friend have pizza and a movie, so wife and I decide we'll go out and stay out until most of the kids have gone through (our street is congested with people between 7 and 9. So around 6:45, wife  and I get in the car, work our way out of the neighborhood through an already growing bevy of kids with parents in tow, and go eat pizza, visit WalMart and the new Specs (they sell roasted coffee from around the world!) We return home a little after 9 pm.

Well, you'd think now I could start preparing for my NaNo novel. Nope. My son, Jeremy, at UT, is meeting us at Nathan's old apartment to help us move him fully back home, then while here, buy a car and get the title changed before heading back to Austin. Since he's never had his own personal insurance, that means we needed to get him some, at the last minute, of course. So after going through three company quotes, we select one, get him processed, and by 1 am, he has insurance on his new car. Meanwhile, I know people all over the world are busy typing away on their novels.

Then I had to focus on getting wife to sleep. By the time I sat down with some hot blueberry tea and a bowl of prunes and cashews, it was well after 2 am. So now I for the first time start thinking about what I'm going to write about, what story I'm going to do. After thinking about it, since I'm editing the third book in the series and I'll need the fourth for next year, out of my options I decided to work on the next novel in that series, which I've tentatively titled Reality Game. So I opened up my writing database, copied over the list of characters from Virtual Game, modified them accordingly, then started thinking what the story should be about.

This was a little more difficult than it may seem. Without giving away any spoilers, the dynamic of things changes for the heroes at the end of Virtual Game. So the biggest issue I needed to deal with was what the bad guys are going to do now, based upon how events ended previously. After 1.5 hours of thinking and writing some preliminary plot thoughts down, I finally have enough rough draft plot outline, at least the start of it, to have an idea where to take things. Don't know how it will end, but I know how it will start and what the primary conflict is going to be about. Enough to start writing the story.

However, by the time I figured that much out, it was getting close to 4 am. Due to going to Austin to help move son #1 back home, I'm getting up at 7. So I figured I'd better write this blog post and get to bed. This will make the first NaNo I go to bed on day one without any word count in place. That puts me behind starting out at the gate.

Another obsticle is also doing these blog posts. They will not all be this long. To not take too much time away from writing, most of these will be bare bones "here's what happened". But this being an introductory post required a bit more work. Now that it is 5 am, and I'll get just under 2 hours of sleep, I'll sign out and give a full report on how day 1 went.

Stay tuned virtual fans. Same virtual blog. Same virtual URL.

Reality Game Progress: 0 words, but 1358 for this blog post. Does that count? Hum. I didn't think so.

NaNoWriMo - Pros and Cons

I finished my fifth NaNo (short for "National Novel Writing Month," where people from all over the world sign up to accept the challenge to write fifty thousand words on a novel during the month of November). Out of the five years I've done this, this is the first time that I've barely stretched across the finish line on the last day, crossing the 50K mark around 9:30 pm yesterday. I ended up with 51,553 words by midnight and the marathon ended. Every previous year, I hit that before or around Thanksgiving.

So after five years of doing this, what do I see as the pros and cons to it? The day after is a good time to reflect on this.

First, let me dispel what some claim are cons, but are not. So we can get those out of the way.

Fake Con 1: All these people writing crap will flood the market with it, thinking it is some kind of masterpiece.

Some will put them out on the market, when they are not ready. And it can add to the noise of publishing. But when you factor in how much noise is already out there, percentage wise it will not add significantly to it. And the fact is, cream will rise to the top. Even if everyone who participated in NaNo self-published their work, it wouldn't prevent readers from finding what they like. There is a natural weeding out process that takes place through reviews and such. It has always been hard to get noticed as a new writer. This will not make it much harder, if any.

Keep in mind that the biggest majority of NaNo participants will simply file away their manuscript, and it will never see the light of day again. Their goal wasn't to publish a novel, but to either prove to themselves that they could write a novel in one month, or they are simply working on their craft. They know they are not good enough yet but this is concentrated practice time. Only a small percentage of NaNoers will ever send that to an editor/agent, or throw it on the market via self-publishing. And an even smaller percentage of those will actually be something that readers want to read, and will start buying.

Fake Con 2: Anything written in one month has to be crap. It takes months, if not years, to write a truly great novel.

Experience says the opposite. While you will find some literary masterpieces that took years to write, like the "Lord of the Rings" Trilogy, there are others that were written in weeks, and became best sellers and/or classics. Dean Wesley Smith speaks to this much better than I could on his blog post titled "Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Speed." The fact is many classics and best sellers have been written within a month or less.

I've seen those two thrown out as to why NaNo is bad, but they are baseless. Myths that some writers believe, but Myths all the same. But onto the pros and cons. First we'll attack the cons.

Con 1: Not getting to the 50K goal can make one feel like a failure as a writer.

This happens when a writer or a region totally misses the point of NaNo. They see the 50K as the line that says, "I'm a good writer," so if you don't make it, you think, "I'm a horrible writer." No, the 50K goal is simply a challenge, a motivation to do one thing: stop worrying about editing and write, freeing the creative mind. Having that goal, that deadline, allows one to push themselves and see what they can do. And many are often surprised.

But there is nothing magical about being able to write 50K words in one month that makes one a good or bad writer. The majority of people who crossed the 50K line last month won't publish what they have, because it is crap. And they know it. Those who don't know it will find out soon enough, probably the hard way. But there is a lot of crap people have spent years pouring over as well.

The problem results when in the heat of the month, the regional leadership, or the writer, sees that 50K mark as a validation of their writing skills and ability. Let me say this: speed has nothing to do with the quality of your work, whether it took two weeks to write it, or ten years. So anyone going into it with this mentality will set yourself up for failure, because you had that nagging feeling in the back of your head that says you're not a good writer, and this proves it. Hogwash.

It proves one of several potential things. You're method and style of writing isn't fit for working in a month time frame. You tried it, didn't work, move on. Or too many real life events kept you away from the computer. Some unavoidable, some not, but stuff happens. Bottom line, you didn't have the approximately two to three hours a day (depending on typing/writing speed) to invest in getting to the mark. Or you ate too much on Thanksgiving, sending you into a state of shock, which you just pulled out of on November 30th.

Con 2: Seeing the 50K as THE goal, and nothing else matters.

The message at times can seem to be just that. Getting to 50K is the end all and be all of what NaNo is about. Do it anyway you can. Some may even "cheat" by copy/pasting, or just typing eileis.  s eiels is els e seis se eis as fast as they can. If you "cheat," you're only harming yourself. It means you've gained nothing from the month long effort, for which the 50K goal is designed to spur the writer to achieve. NaNo would be a total waste of your time.

What that also means is if you don't make it to 50K, say you reached 30K, though you didn't reach the group goal, you still have 30K of a novel written! You still enjoyed the benefit of pushing yourself, despite time limitations. You still got in at a minimum 30K more words of practice, if nothing else. Your time wasn't wasted because you didn't reach the 50K. Yes, you're name won't be on the list. You won't have the "winner" plastered on your progress bar. But you know what? All of that is designed to get you to do one thing: write. You did write, and so you have won where it really counts. The point isn't to reach 50K, that is a goal to spur you to write. If you didn't write something, then you're a loser no matter what the progress bar says, and if you did, you're a winner.

Those are the main two valid cons, and why people might decide NaNo is not worth it for them. The really big logical fallacy happens when that person, taking their limited experience, decides that NaNo must be bad for everyone else too.  Let's say this person is simply not a "fast" writer, in that they have trouble spending more than an hour a day on their work, and stare at the screen the majority of the time. So they think everyone else who writes must write the same way, if they produce decent work. This is because they've bought into the "fast equals low quality" myth.

But every writer is different. Every writer will approach writing in different ways. So it is impossible for one writer to say that they way they write, the speed they write at, and claim it is the only or even best way for all other writers, or even a majority of writers, to follow if they want to produce "quality" stories.

So, what are the pros I've experienced or seen?

Pro 1: It encourages you to write.

When approached in the correct way, the main thing NaNo does is help people who might be future writers, to actually sit down and write something. The first novel I wrote, I did in a month without ever knowing anything about NaNo. It just happened. I'd never done anything like that before in my life, back in October of 2005, but when I finished that rough draft, I knew then that this is what I wanted to do. And I've been working on it ever since.

With motivation to reach a goal and the support of other writers, people will be stretched to do more than they ever have before, and potentially discover that this is what they want to do. Even if they don't make it to 50K, they may have never written anything as big as 20K previously, and find they love it.

Pro 2: It gives a writer motivation to practice their art.

And the one true fact that applies to all but some prodigy kids, is writers have to do one thing if they are to be writers: write. And write a lot. The general figure is that most authors won't reach professional levels of writing until they've written one million words. Because that's how much practice it tends to take for most people. Some may take fewer words or some may take more. But the more you practice, the better you get if you are seeking to learn from your mistakes and take guidance. And that is true even if you're a professional writer with three million words under your belt.

Pro 3: Many discover their creative side is able to produce some really good stuff.

While all writers are different in how they approach things, there is one area that is limited to our physiology. We have a creative and critical side of our brain. And the fact is, for a majority of writers, the critical side will get in the way of the creative side.

There are writers who work best editing as they go. Through whatever training, life experiences, or just the way they are put together, they can switch to the critical thinking mode without disrupting the creative mode's flow and rhythm. But based on what I've read, these folk are not the majority. From several different authors and how they worked, from several editing books I've read, they are practically in 100% agreement that these two modes should be separated if we want to free the creative mind to do its best work.

Problem is, either because it seems right, or because they've been told it is "the right way," many people assume that they should write a scene, then go back and edit it, rewrite it, polish it, before moving onto the next. But not realizing this, they stay stuck in that process, taking years to write it, and maybe even give up on it and toss it in the drawer, never to be pulled out again other than to show relatives what you did.

NaNo can help those folks discover whether they really are edit as you go types, and have not bought into it without critical thinking. For what you'll discover is that when the goal is to attempt to write 50K in a month, and you've never written that much in a year, is that you can't afford the time to let the editor in the door to review what you've written. You're onto the next scene, the next chapter. Then you get to the end of it and look back and say, "Wow, that's actually pretty good. A bit rough, needs some editing, but the plot is so much better than anything I've written to date."

Someone in that state finds out that their better mode of writing is to let the creative side of the brain free reign for a month, free of the editor sticking his nose into everything, with the promise the editor can dig into it uninterrupted by the creative side later on. Or it may be total frustration, and the writer is feeling horrible because they are leaving crap back on page 21 and it is bugging them to no end, that they can't write page 25. Then those people discover either they are locked into a belief system that says it has to be done that way, or have done it that way for so long they find it hard to change, and/or the way they write best is through edit as you go, and this NaNo proves that for them.

In either case, NaNo can be a big help in either showing a writer that they can be much more productive and write better stuff by leaving the editor out of it while writing the first draft, or that they need that editor and can't do without him/her.

Those are my main pros, cons, and even the fake cons thrown in for good measure. I probably haven't covered them all, these are the main ones I see. What are pros and cons you've seen or experienced?