Just...Can't...Write That Much...

As the end of October nears, inevitably National Novel Writing Month draws closer. I hear its siren call!

But alas, given that I can't even keep a blog updated these days, I fear I'm going to have to sit this one out. I just don't have the time or energy to spare for 50,000 words this year.

There are too many people clinging to me and demanding that I feed them or change them or rock them to sleep. OK, there's one person doing that, but that turns out to be too many for me to get much else done.

Have no doubt about it, another terrible novel will be written by me in the month of November--but not this year.

However, I encourage everyone else to do it. It's good clean fun, unless your computer is really filthy and/or your novel is porn (neither one of which should stand in your way), and there's a nice "Winner" web logo in it for you if you finish.

Old-School Writing

I found this post on Swan Tower, about the struggle to master a 19th-century handwriting style, oddly fascinating.

Possibly because my handwriting actually kind of looks like that? (Or did, when I wrote neatly, back in my careful youth. It has degenerated to a scribble over the years, which I blame on higher education--taking notes in college ruined my cursive with the prioritization of speed over neatness.)

But other than the elaborate capitals, that's basically the form I learned to write. Or, I may have learned the elaborate capitals, but I don't recall them. I gave up on writing cursive capitals soon after I started writing in cursive, and just used print ones instead.

One might wonder why I bothered to write everything in cursive except capital letters, and I'll tell you what I think: because connected letters in general are faster to write than to print*, but big loopy capitals are slower.

I was an efficient young person.


*For me, anyway. I know some people hate cursive and find they can print faster than they can write, but when I try to print quickly it always starts to run together in proto-cursive anyway, so if I don't expect someone else to have to read it, I just write.

If I'm making notes for other people, I do pretty much always print, though...my handwriting is just not legible enough anymore for me to subject others to it.

Bah and Hooray

Bah, I say, because this is still a really poor novel full of people talking about things that might happen, but nothing actually happening.

But hooray, because according to the NaNoWriMo word counting software, I have completed 50,140 words, and that is done. I have ended the long, boring tale with the appropriate words "it could have been worse."

There's done well, and then there's just done, which sometimes is also OK.

Please note my official winner icon, and tremble with admiration.

Now to really put my full attention into Assassin's Creed. I haven't managed to complete more than maybe half of it so far, but that changes now!

I Blame the Software

I've discovered that Word 2010 on the PC counts differently than Word 2004 on the Mac.

When I word-count my terrible novel on my PC at work (on my lunch break, obviously!), it's almost 500 words more than when I word-count exactly the same document on my Mac at home (after working hours, obviously!).

I suspect it's largely to do with hyphens, since Word 2004 (at least for Mac) appears to count hyphenated terms as a single word, while Word 2010 (on a PC, at any rate) counts them individually.

I must have used a lot of hyphens. Somewhere around 500 of them, perhaps, just taking a wild guess here.

But that's only one reason this novel is so bad.

Some time ago I had put a hold on a book at the library called How NOT to Write a Novel, and it would perhaps have been helpful if it had gotten to me before today. Because I'm telling you, I'm pretty sure I did most of the things this book advises against.

Well, maybe not the frequent, confusing changes in POV. But all the stuff they say to just cut out because it's boring to read? That's pretty much all the stuff I have.

The problem is, I had no story idea I cared about. Right from the beginning, I was just throwing words around to fill pages, not to convey anything about any particular idea or character. And then I got bogged down, trying to keep going along the same general path, thinking sooner or later something interesting would have to happen...but no. I should have tried shaking things up or striking off in some radically different direction (I should have actually introduced the packs of wild dogs!), but I got attached to continuity.

Continuity of dullness.

So you gotta have a story. That's what I have learned from NaNoWriMo this year.

Oh, I'm going to get to 50,000 words and technically finish the marathon. I haven't clawed my way to 42,000 just to quit now. I'll have 50,000 words of almost utter boredom, and perhaps it will somehow be a learning experience  for next time.

The lesson will be "don't even start unless you care at least a little bit about something that is going to happen in that darn story."

Also, "something interesting does not have to happen. Sometimes it's just boring all the way down."

Anyway, back to the Word counting issue, my obvious concern now is, which method does NaNoWriMo use? Because I could be done about 500 words sooner if it's counting like Word 2010, and at this point, that sounds pretty good to me.

Flavor Text

I was staring at my 1942 encyclopedic dictionary this morning, for no real reason except it was in front of me while I was staring into space, and I remembered the most awesome bit of editorial opinion slipping into a factual piece ever.

Now you have to understand that this is a perfectly normal dictionary, 'encyclopedic' because it has a little section with brief biographies of famous people (including, because it was 1942, Adolf Hitler as the Chancellor of Germany) and a tiny atlas showing the borders of countries during World War II, and some lovely illustrated pages showing different kinds of birds, and fish, and reptiles, and mammals, in gorgeous color.

This last is really why I bought the book, years ago; the exact same picture pages had been in another book I remember looking at when I was a tiny kid, and seeing them brought back all these memories and I had to have it at once.

Anyway, a very normal dictionary, with normal dry factual entries such as one expects in a dictionary. Objective, unemotional statements and all that.

And then there's a section with brief entries on various animals, and the entry on the jackal concludes with this dry, factual line:

"Jackals travel in packs, and make the night hideous with their discordant yelps."

It would seem that someone working on that dictionary was not fond of jackals.

He or she had kind of a poetic turn of phrase, though. "Make the night hideous." That sounds serious.

I still consider this a prime example of slipping some personal opinion into dry facts. If I'm ever working on a dictionary, I will be seriously tempted to insert that bit of information about jackals. Hey, I still remember it even though I haven't opened that book in about 10 years. It must be true.

Everything Seems So Tainted Now...

It's funny how quickly one project can make you start seeing other things in a new light.

For example, I'm chugging away on this novel writing project, trying to get to 50,000 words by November 30 (about 18,600 so far), and today while writing an email, I had to remind myself that more words was not necessarily crucial in that context.

Because when you're aiming for a word count, all your normal habits of trying to be concise and find just the one right word for something go right out the window. Maybe normally I would say "unlikely," which is nice and to the point, but for NaNoWriMo, "not very likely" is much better. Three times as good, in fact!

So I was basically looking for the long way to say something to someone in a business email, which is not normally the recommended approach. My work emails tend to be probably longer than strictly necessary or desirable anyway, because I always want to explain everything in great detail, the better to avoid having to send another email later.

Fend off follow-up questions by smothering the person with information the first time, that's what I say.

It may not always be perfect for work, but it's an advantage in unreadable-novel-writing.

Move Along, Now

If you're contemplating NaNoWriMo this year, you may want to check out the blog SF Novelists, where James Alan Gardner has an occasional series underway called The Skill List Project.

See today's post on plot flow for helpful tips to keep your story moving.

It suggests, broadly, that every scene should either be a result of, or stand in contradiction to, a scene immediately previous. Either Scene A happens and causes Scene B, or Scene A happens and then Scene B threatens to throw a wrench in the gears of whatever A has suggested is going on.

There are obviously other things you can do for artistic effect, but that seems like a good, straightforward way to keep basic forward momentum going.

Good times!

Not Feeling Fictional

November is coming up, and t'will be National Novel Writing Month once again, and I'm sitting around not having any inklings of ideas.

You can't start writing until November 1, so it's obviously OK not to have really fleshed anything out in mid-October, but in the past I at least had some loosely connected notions I'd been mulling over, and a kind of "here's where things will start" plan.

Now, I've really got nothing. Just not feelin' the inspiration. I'm feeling as if I may not get around to doing it this year, although I'll only be busier next year, so I kind of might as well go for it now.

I'm also concerned because the next Assassin's Creed comes out in November, and that will be very distracting. Veeeeeeeery distracting. Just thinking about it is distracting. Ah, to be climbing tall buildings right now!

Plus, there's all of this knitting to be done. It turns out I got way more yarn than I needed, but I wanted the free shipping that came with a $50 purchase!

Also, I'm a terrible judge of these things. It's like the time I needed to order an ethernet cable, and after considering the available lengths, decided 50 feet sounded about right.

Indeed. About right for when I need to take my computer out of the apartment and around the corner of the building. Which, you never know.

Be prepared by overestimating your need for everything, that's my motto.

This is why I really feel I should have about 8 or 10 novel ideas in mind if I'm going to tackle NaNoWriMo.

Eight or 10 ideas, 50 feet of cable, 20 balls of yarn, and a video game. That's preparation.

No Thought. No Pants. No Caring.

I am pleased to announce that a colleague and I, merely in the course of our daily business, have hit upon a can't-miss formula for fabulous productivity as a writer.

Now it all started when my colleague mentioned how he read that the guy who wrote hundreds of pulp novels about The Shadow (probably Walter B. Gibson, but I couldn't be bothered with details), was rumored to sometimes write as many as 10,000 words a day.

That's a lot of words. Now we figured that if you're writing that much, you're pretty much doing nothing else, and you're certainly not pausing for long thoughtful stretches while you ponder your next plot twist. No thought! Thinking is for weaklings! Just type! Type, damn you! Type as you've never typed before!

Then my colleague, who is a font of useful information, recalled that he has also heard that Victor Hugo, when he had trouble getting motivated to write, would have his servants lock him in a cold bare room, with nothing in it but pen and paper, and they'd have orders not to even give him pants to put on or a cup of tea to drink until he'd written a certain number of pages. (I have no idea if this is true, and I'm not even going to do a web search, because that would involve thinking, which has already been forbidden.)

So we concluded that one problem with today's lazy, unmotivated writers, like ourselves, is that we've grown decadent and soft. Always wearing clothes, and having food. Bah.

If you really want to get something done, have your servants (or, if you have no servants, your family, friends, or someone else who would like to see you suffer just a bit) lock you naked in a chilly room with nothing but a computer, on which is installed only a word processing program. You'll get something done.

Finally, it's kind of obvious that in order to make this work, you need to not care about subtle plot points, or carefully developed characters, or what people are saying about your tendency to go around without pants. You must be uninterested in--indeed, oblivious to--the opinions of others.

Therefore, no thought, no pants, no caring, just typing as if your life depended on it, throwing onto the page/screen whatever demented and half-baked ideas flit through your mind, and I'm pretty sure you'll produce, at minimum, some acceptable pulp novels.

I say "you," because I suggest that you try it first, and let me know how it goes.

Also, if your first thought was that "No Thought. No Pants. No Caring." was the tagline for another horrible 'friends with benefits' movie, shame on you, and you should probably just write that up and pitch it if you know anyone in the movie business, because it could be your big break.

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Reading and Writing

My favorite post of the day is Aunt B at Tiny Cat Pants musing about possibly mythical Viking torture techniques and fiction writing.

Also of interest is this Sociological Images post compiling a series of posters warning soldiers to stay away from women lest they catch a disease.

I was struck by the number of terms for these women: 'easy' girl-friends, pick-ups (with a hyphen), procurable women, "V-Gals" or victory girls, pickups (one word now, and I wonder if that was just a coexisting variant, or if one form of the term was earlier or later?), loose women...

I don't really have any interesting point to make, just that that's a lot of ways to talk about someone, or some group of people. A lot of words for something the targets of the posters talked about a lot, maybe?

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Write it Down, Everyone

In case you were worried about cursive writing, Slate has an article arguing that it will never die, so don't fret.

The piece basically says that people naturally want to write faster, so even if they aren't formally taught cursive, they make up their own versions of connected letters. The problem with this is that personally made up styles tend to be very difficult for other people to read. Therefore, we should just go ahead and keep teaching it so that we're all working from the same basic concept of what a cursive letter 'b' should look like and so on.

The piece also mentions bias against poor handwriting, which is unfair but probably real. If you see something that looks as if it were written by a 10-year-old, are you really going to give it same the respect you would if it were a nice, elegant script? Even if the words are actually the same?

My own handwriting has deteriorated over the years, and I honestly think I type as fast as I write these days, but there are still plenty of occasions when you do have to write things by hand (the article mentions essay questions in school). Having writing that other people can read is probably a good thing.

I still try to write legibly, using the general idea of the letters taught to me long ago by my mama. And my mama's friend who was around at the time.

One thing I don't do, though, is cursive capital letters. I gave up on those freakish things when I was about 15. I just put a printed capital letter and then take up with the cursive after that.

Also, I just like to say 'cursive.' Because it sounds like 'cursing.' And who doesn't like cursing?

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Retro Machinery

There's an interesting reflection on SF Novelists about how hard it used to be to rewrite your novels when you had to type the whole thing multiple times on an actual typewriter.

Word processing programs are certainly a gift to the writer who likes to rewrite.

I have no excuse for not re-doing my NaNoWriMo pieces. It would be a lot easier to do than if I had to retype everything, but not easy enough that I actually get around to it.

However, I can certainly speak to the fact that word processing makes working in an office a lot different. Imagine typing up all the documents I work with with every day on a typewriter. Memos, letters (multiple copies, of course), lists of tasks. Spreadsheets?

Yes, typing used to be a much more specialized skill.

Also, people used to be more tolerant of errors and imperfect corrections. I've seen documents in old files where typographical errors are crossed out and the word retyped, or simply corrected in pen, and they just left it that way, because obviously you don't want to retype an entire page to correct one error.

Nowadays, you expect to see pretty much perfect typing in any sort of official document, because it's easy to fix and reprint if you catch a mistake.

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Speaking of Writing...

Here's a nifty post by Marie Brennan on the SF Novelists blog about writing fight scenes.

Fight scenes, like dramatic action scenes of other sorts, would be handy to be good at, since people tend to like books where things happen, and in a large number of your novels these days the things that happen tend to be dramatic and fight-y, so, yeah, a useful skill.

I'll get right on that.

Pow! Zap! Biff!

Pretty good, right?

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Late Night Ramblings

I would just like to say that parents are junkies, according to this article that theorizes that people choose, often repeatedly, to become parents (even though research suggests children don't actually make people happy) because children do make people happy, but in an intense, yet rare and unpredictable way that keeps a parent chasing that child-love high despite stress, ill health and personal expense.

I would also like to note that dialogue is a word-goal-having writer's best friend. I have said this before, but I really cannot stress it enough--just have some characters talk about stuff and the words will pour onto the page! And yeah, they may have boring and obnoxious conversations that, if you overheard them on the train, would make you want to punch yourself in the ear to avoid listening to them, but that is irrelevant when the goal is wordiness.

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Just Do Stuff Already

I love the enthusiasm in this post on What About Our Daughters, about going back to school after ten years to pursue a passion. I especially like the reminder of why now is often a good time to do this kind of thing:

Maybe you INTEND to do something when conditions are perfect... Well that ain't ever gonna happen. You can't INTEND to live life. You are either living the life of your dreams or you're not. Period. In the same way, intentions are relatively worthless without action.

It's a good reminder that putting things off until some future time when you'll totally get them done because you'll have all this time and energy that you just don't right now...will often just mean you never actually do those things.

For me (as for many), this is a sharp reminder of how I'm totally always planning to someday write some fiction again, and then I just never actually get around to doing it.

Reminder National Novel Writing Month? Yeah, I did that. Then I closed the document and moved on to...basically no other writing projects.

So the advice is, if you have a dream of writing poetry or going back to school or something, maybe you should just do it now. Because now is probably not exactly the right time, but later probably never will be either.

There's no good time. There's just now. So if you want to do it, just do it.

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You Should Write Something

I see LISNews is having a Librarian Essay Contest. It calls for "an original essay about issues that impact librarianship," to be submitted sometime during the month of August.

You should totally submit a piece. Even if you're not a librarian.

I'm going to be busy sweating and streaming Netflix movies, or I'd do it myself, but I bet you can come up with something really excellent.

For example, you could write about Netflix and how that impacts librarianship (do Netflix subscribers with streaming-video capability make less use of the library?).

Another thing you could write about would be sweat (how can librarians maintain a cool and professional appearance when they're dripping wet and disheveled by the time they get to the office? Seriously, I'd be interested to know this).

That's just to take two ideas chosen completely at random. If you need more, let me know.

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Write it Up

In case you decide to participate in National Novel Writing Month this year (plan ahead: November will be here before you know it!), this Mashable post, How To: Write a Novel Using the Web, may be of interest.

It lists a variety of useful online tools for organizing, researching, planning and even self-publishing your brilliant work.

It could happen for you!

Me, I'm not sure. I haven't opened the possibly brilliant thing I wrote last November since I finished it, and I never even claimed and posted my 'badge of completion,' so my follow-through is plainly lacking.

But you should do it. I'm rooting for you. So, I bet, is iLibrarian, who suggested this handy resource.

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I Need This Answer!

I have often had the very problem expressed in this xkcd post. 

How do you properly manage emoticons within parentheses? As one who appreciates proper use of punctuation, the question haunts me. 

Gasp...Pant...Writing...

I am pleased to announce that I have crossed the 50,000 word mark, and therefore am officially eligible for the fame and glory that comes with NaNoWriMo completion. 

I can't actually submit it for verification and claim my fabulous prize (the right to say I finished NaNoWriMo...plus the aforementioned fame and glory, of course) until the 25th, though, so I may as well go back and make a few edits. Maybe add a little gratuitous nudity and some cursing.

Sample dialogue:

"Consarn it, Ebenezer Yakbane, put some dadburned clothes on!"

I will now attempt to get caught up with my blog subscriptions. 

Goals and Aspirations

Although I'm pressing ahead with National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), I'm apparently failing at National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo), which I did not officially sign up for but which from reading other peoples' blogs I've gathered is a quest to publish a blog post every day in November.

Well, see, the thing about that is...yeah, I haven't done it. 

I get absorbed in my other project, and then I look up and it's past midnight, so no post that day. I could set the clock back on my Blogger account or something, but the day I resort to cheating to reach an arbitrary and fairly pointless goal is the day I...shake my head sadly at how pathetic I've gotten, I guess.

Or else it's the day I'm getting paid for it. But then, that removes the "fairly pointless" aspect from that description, since getting paid can give anything a nice, sharp point. 

Many's the time I've injured myself badly on that point! 

Anyway, I'm not posting every day (which is no doubt a source of great sadness and lamentation among my legions of loyal followers), and I still haven't caught up with everything in my feed reader (which is no doubt a source of great sadness and lamentation among the legions of blog authors who depend on my eyeballs for their self-esteem), but I am trucking along quite well with the novel, thank you.

Just crossed 49,000 words, and some quick arithmetical calculations will tell you that this is very close to the 50,000 words required for successful completion of the NaNoWriMo challenge. 

None too soon, either, because I'm pretty much out of plot. 

So that works out nicely, don't you think? 

I concur. Let's have some wine.