50,000 words. Fifty thousand. In twenty-four days. I'm going to take tomorrow off, I think.
Thursday 25 November 2010
Finished!
50,000 words. Fifty thousand. In twenty-four days. I'm going to take tomorrow off, I think.
Tuesday 23 November 2010
Nearly almost there!
Well I have been slightly quiet about Nanowrimo but tonight I passed a MASSIVE milestone: I wrote more words today than I have left to write before I reach the 50,000.
This does not mean I'm going to get there tomorrow necessarily, but it does leave me a mere (ha!) 2328 words shy of the grand total with seven days to go.
This is an achievement I am happy with. The writing, well not so much. Actually that's inaccurate. I'm very pleased with the writing - it's just the words I have a problem with. The process of thinking, persevering, setting aside time, repeatedly hitting the keys, sitting down when I didn't want to, when I didn't care, when I had no idea what to say, making myself do it and make words appear, make people say things, do things, just to fill a relentlessly endless page - that has been totally awesome and has transformed writing for me from something abstract into a real physical activity. I am delighted with the writing.
But yeah, a LOT of the words, sentences, whole chapters are awful. Utterly, indescribably bad. I know you'll think I am not a fair judge of my own work, but I can be really very objective when I want to and a good 20,000 words of what I have written is unremittingly foul. That's okay. It meant that when I wrote something good (or well) then I really noticed and that was also delightful.
I started off trying to novelise a dream I had had. You might not be surprised to learn that I now think that was a dumb idea. It went well to begin with but it was unsustainable without some serious planning. At about fifteen thousand words I began to worry that I was running out of story. But I persevered. I extrapolated. I lensed in, exploring relationships between characters. I added twists. Moved locations. At all costs, I swore, I would not give up! I banged my head on kitchen tables. I drank coffee. I drank bourbon. I drank tea. I drank beer. I wrote in the garden. I wrote at my desk. I wrote in Starbucks. I wrote on the plane, hunched over a laptop that was so squashed it was nearly folded shut.
It was horrible. Painful. Dispiriting. I still kept going. It got a bit better. I had already written up the dream, in incredible detail, much of it twice and then much more. But I was breathing stale air into a dead story.
At 28179 words and 17 days I stopped writing that story. I switched. I dusted off a plan for a novel I had made several years ago, and written only a few hundred words of. I scratched those and I started again. I wrote 5000 words the first day and I've almost hit 20,000 a week later. Having a plan makes an enormous difference. But so does writing something that is supposed to be a story, rather than a dream.
I'm not abandoning the dream story. It's no more than a distended metaphor, but I think there's a very long short story/ very short novella there. It's not uninteresting, just unformed. I'll go back later and polish and cut and so forth and at some point during that process I'll nail the focal length of the thing and it will be fine. And in the meantime I will continue with my new work in progress until I hit 50,000 total for the month and then I'll submit.
No, it's not an ideal first Nanowrimo, but in a way, it has been perfect. They talk of there being two kinds of writers for this thing: planners and pantsers, the latter being those who just wing it by the seat of their pants. Well, at my first attempt I've tried both approaches and learned an awful lot more as a result.
This does not mean I'm going to get there tomorrow necessarily, but it does leave me a mere (ha!) 2328 words shy of the grand total with seven days to go.
This is an achievement I am happy with. The writing, well not so much. Actually that's inaccurate. I'm very pleased with the writing - it's just the words I have a problem with. The process of thinking, persevering, setting aside time, repeatedly hitting the keys, sitting down when I didn't want to, when I didn't care, when I had no idea what to say, making myself do it and make words appear, make people say things, do things, just to fill a relentlessly endless page - that has been totally awesome and has transformed writing for me from something abstract into a real physical activity. I am delighted with the writing.
But yeah, a LOT of the words, sentences, whole chapters are awful. Utterly, indescribably bad. I know you'll think I am not a fair judge of my own work, but I can be really very objective when I want to and a good 20,000 words of what I have written is unremittingly foul. That's okay. It meant that when I wrote something good (or well) then I really noticed and that was also delightful.
I started off trying to novelise a dream I had had. You might not be surprised to learn that I now think that was a dumb idea. It went well to begin with but it was unsustainable without some serious planning. At about fifteen thousand words I began to worry that I was running out of story. But I persevered. I extrapolated. I lensed in, exploring relationships between characters. I added twists. Moved locations. At all costs, I swore, I would not give up! I banged my head on kitchen tables. I drank coffee. I drank bourbon. I drank tea. I drank beer. I wrote in the garden. I wrote at my desk. I wrote in Starbucks. I wrote on the plane, hunched over a laptop that was so squashed it was nearly folded shut.
It was horrible. Painful. Dispiriting. I still kept going. It got a bit better. I had already written up the dream, in incredible detail, much of it twice and then much more. But I was breathing stale air into a dead story.
At 28179 words and 17 days I stopped writing that story. I switched. I dusted off a plan for a novel I had made several years ago, and written only a few hundred words of. I scratched those and I started again. I wrote 5000 words the first day and I've almost hit 20,000 a week later. Having a plan makes an enormous difference. But so does writing something that is supposed to be a story, rather than a dream.
I'm not abandoning the dream story. It's no more than a distended metaphor, but I think there's a very long short story/ very short novella there. It's not uninteresting, just unformed. I'll go back later and polish and cut and so forth and at some point during that process I'll nail the focal length of the thing and it will be fine. And in the meantime I will continue with my new work in progress until I hit 50,000 total for the month and then I'll submit.
No, it's not an ideal first Nanowrimo, but in a way, it has been perfect. They talk of there being two kinds of writers for this thing: planners and pantsers, the latter being those who just wing it by the seat of their pants. Well, at my first attempt I've tried both approaches and learned an awful lot more as a result.
Don't kiss that baby, we're all going to die!
I don't even know where to start with this so randomly I shall just go ahead and say that I don't really get ill. Maybe one day or a half day a year I will feel tired or crap or I might have to put up with a mungy cold for a few days and, of course, if you are within earshot I will moan about it but let's say I don't tend to succumb to whatever it is that is 'doing the rounds'. Similarly my children are very infrequently ill. I think W has had one half day off school in two and a half years, possibly longer. Perhaps we are lucky, or just plain old healthy, I don't know; it's something I'm grateful for, to be sure, and just watch now as I develop symptoms of Syldavian Lungworm over Thanksgiving.
But the community I live in seems to be utterly terrified, not only of casual illnesses but of any kind of concession to the idea that we all might be ephemeral mortal flesh.
So there are legitimate and sensible reasons to protect your, of course - especially in a country where you pay for your own healthcare. And so, to begin with, I found it merely amusing that there were sanitising wipes at the supermarket for you to wipe the handle of your trolley before you, ugh, have to touch it. Or sanitiser dispensers in the walls of the hallways at school, so you don't have worry about, ugh, infecting the poor children. But when someone didn't shake my hand on the grounds of hygiene, I stopped being amused.
Children here do not get 'sore throats', they get 'strep throat' because, you know, this is an infection caused by something invisible that can be cleaned, for goodness sake. And the kids get antibiotics of course and flu shots - well, actually, everybody gets flu shots because catching it would simply be intolerable, wouldn't it.
Okay, still not completely beyond the pail, but it gets weirder. The word 'kiss' is a banned word at my kids' elementary school, let alone the action itself. Because kissing is disgusting, you see, because it spreads germs. Presumably the word 'fuck' is taboo for similar reasons. One parent told me, horrified and apologetic, how her child and mine shared food from their lunch boxes at school one day. I thought she must be worried about life-threatening allergies and was prepared to be sympathetic. But then she explained just how disgusting and unhealthy it was. Funny that her children get sick so much more often than mine...
I have this pet theory that we're healthier because my house is dirtier than theirs. There's no evidence for it, but I like to think that living in a dust-ridden cesspit inures us to bacteria and grime and gives our immune systems a rigorous regimen. That's my excuse anyway.
So I find this either amusing or disturbing depending on day of the week, but just this afternoon the dentist was telling us about a new product. They're called Spiffies and they are antibacterial wipes for babies' mouths. Here's a choice quote:
Hooray, something else to clean! I'm sure this offers some help with regard to protecting milk teeth from possible cavities but I was happy when it was just the outside of the babies we were supposed to keep clean. It's as if we're hell bent on breeding out any resistance to infection whatsoever. Anyway, the reason the dentist got onto the subject of Spiffies, is that the key (I think he used the word 'miracle') ingredient is Xylitol, the stuff they put into sugar-free gum. He has a gynaecologist friend who as started prescribing Xylitol to his mothers-of-newborns. You know, because they can't help but, ugh, kiss their babies and their mouths are, ugh, full of germs.
This blew me away. Is it really germs or bacteria that is the concern? Or is it the dreadful inevitability or our own mortality that they are worried about being passed on to the beautiful brand new baby? I can't say for sure but I have my theory.
Whilst we're on the subject of Americans and hygiene and disgust I have to share this article from the New York Times last month.
In a nutshell, it discusses how political views and disgust are related. The killer quote:
Absolutely fascinating. Especially living in a conservative state where there are (as discussed) hand sanitizers everywhere! There's no real way to tell how precisely these concepts are inter-related but there is, apparently, a connection. Beneath all this behaviour and these attitudes, whether against people who are different, or in favour of our own precious bodily fluids, there is an unshakeable fear, an anxiety that cannot be assuaged.
In fact, I find it kind of scary. I hope it's not contagious.
But the community I live in seems to be utterly terrified, not only of casual illnesses but of any kind of concession to the idea that we all might be ephemeral mortal flesh.
So there are legitimate and sensible reasons to protect your, of course - especially in a country where you pay for your own healthcare. And so, to begin with, I found it merely amusing that there were sanitising wipes at the supermarket for you to wipe the handle of your trolley before you, ugh, have to touch it. Or sanitiser dispensers in the walls of the hallways at school, so you don't have worry about, ugh, infecting the poor children. But when someone didn't shake my hand on the grounds of hygiene, I stopped being amused.
Children here do not get 'sore throats', they get 'strep throat' because, you know, this is an infection caused by something invisible that can be cleaned, for goodness sake. And the kids get antibiotics of course and flu shots - well, actually, everybody gets flu shots because catching it would simply be intolerable, wouldn't it.
Okay, still not completely beyond the pail, but it gets weirder. The word 'kiss' is a banned word at my kids' elementary school, let alone the action itself. Because kissing is disgusting, you see, because it spreads germs. Presumably the word 'fuck' is taboo for similar reasons. One parent told me, horrified and apologetic, how her child and mine shared food from their lunch boxes at school one day. I thought she must be worried about life-threatening allergies and was prepared to be sympathetic. But then she explained just how disgusting and unhealthy it was. Funny that her children get sick so much more often than mine...
I have this pet theory that we're healthier because my house is dirtier than theirs. There's no evidence for it, but I like to think that living in a dust-ridden cesspit inures us to bacteria and grime and gives our immune systems a rigorous regimen. That's my excuse anyway.
So I find this either amusing or disturbing depending on day of the week, but just this afternoon the dentist was telling us about a new product. They're called Spiffies and they are antibacterial wipes for babies' mouths. Here's a choice quote:
What is it about wiping and babies? We wipe their bottoms (a lot!) and their hands and dirty faces. Of course if you watch a baby, you’ll notice everything goes into their mouth including yucky bacteria...
Hooray, something else to clean! I'm sure this offers some help with regard to protecting milk teeth from possible cavities but I was happy when it was just the outside of the babies we were supposed to keep clean. It's as if we're hell bent on breeding out any resistance to infection whatsoever. Anyway, the reason the dentist got onto the subject of Spiffies, is that the key (I think he used the word 'miracle') ingredient is Xylitol, the stuff they put into sugar-free gum. He has a gynaecologist friend who as started prescribing Xylitol to his mothers-of-newborns. You know, because they can't help but, ugh, kiss their babies and their mouths are, ugh, full of germs.
This blew me away. Is it really germs or bacteria that is the concern? Or is it the dreadful inevitability or our own mortality that they are worried about being passed on to the beautiful brand new baby? I can't say for sure but I have my theory.
Whilst we're on the subject of Americans and hygiene and disgust I have to share this article from the New York Times last month.
In a nutshell, it discusses how political views and disgust are related. The killer quote:
Consider recent experiments by the psychologist Simone Schnall and her colleagues: people who were sitting in a foul-smelling room or at a desk cluttered with dirty food containers judged acts like lying on a résumé or keeping a wallet found on the street as more immoral than individuals who were asked to make the same judgments in a clean environment. This general finding has been replicated by other psychologists using a variety of disgust elicitors and moral behaviors.
Subtle cues about disgust and cleanliness can affect social and political judgments as well. In an experiment conducted recently by Erik Helzer, a Cornell Ph.D. student, and one of us (David Pizarro), merely standing near a hand-sanitizing dispenser led people to report more conservative political beliefs. Participants who were randomly positioned in front of a hand sanitizer gave more conservative responses to a survey about their moral, social and fiscal attitudes than those individuals assigned to complete the questionnaire at the other end of the hallway.
In another experiment one of us (Dr. Pizarro) was involved in, a foul ambient smell — emitted, unbeknownst to test subjects, by a novelty spray — caused people answering a questionnaire to report more negative attitudes toward gay men than did people who responded in the absence of the stench. Apparently, the slightest signal that germs might be present is enough to shift political attitudes toward the right.
Absolutely fascinating. Especially living in a conservative state where there are (as discussed) hand sanitizers everywhere! There's no real way to tell how precisely these concepts are inter-related but there is, apparently, a connection. Beneath all this behaviour and these attitudes, whether against people who are different, or in favour of our own precious bodily fluids, there is an unshakeable fear, an anxiety that cannot be assuaged.
In fact, I find it kind of scary. I hope it's not contagious.
Tuesday 16 November 2010
San Francisco
Wow, different again.
San Francisco, with its peculiar topography, bridges, bays, parks, architecture and myriad forms of municipal transport, looks and feels more like something from Sim City than any other place in America. It is beautiful and odd and foreign and familiar all at the same time.
Thanks to some hefty frequent flyer miles L's acquired, I got to tag along for this leg of her November audition tour. Whilst she was stuck inside working, I got a day to myself to zip about. Impossible, of course, in such time to get a proper insight or understanding of a whole city, but it is possible to form some first impressions.
So, firstly, density. How wonderful and thrilling to be somewhere squashed up, where every square foot of ground counts. Houston is so lazily spread out that the very air is thin, but San Francisco is piled high and squeezed in, from the bay to the ocean and therefore immediately has the air of a properly exciting city.
Secondly, the hills are spectacular and stupefying, just as they seem to be in Vertigo, or Bullit, or the Dirty Harry films, or even Crazy Like A Fox (don't tell me you don't remember that, I know you do). In fact watching the streets bend up and up, the impossible angles rendered by sedate lines of traffic, it's hard not to feel part of a vast optical illusion.
San Francisco feels like a city that's happy to play up to its reputation. The cable cars and trams are all carefully preserved from classic eras whilst the buses proudly proclaim their zero emission status, the overhead cables clicking and singing with juice. The architecture varies enormously with white-cubed casas in the hills near the airport, grand and ornate Victorian town houses in the heights, immaculate classical civic buildings around (and including) City Hall and everything else, scruffy and smart in between. Every single billboard I saw was an advert for iPad, but at the same time there is a faded resort charm to the place, rather like Brighton I suppose.
It's a very diverse city, a broad mix of white, black, hispanic and asian Americans; the kids are very cool and there's plenty of delicious individuality on display from all walks of life. But, in some senses, San Francisco is very much the end of the line. There are certainly more homeless people there than anywhere else in America from what I've seen. And, perhaps not coincidentally, plenty of people who look like they are headed in the same direction: young men with wild beards and ragged clothes, ranting at nothing. I wonder if there is a current in this country that pulls or pushes people out west to California. Maybe people end up here simply because they keep going until they hit the ocean and then there is nowhere else to go.
We made our way back into the city and took a cable car up into Chinatown. Getting off the cab and suddenly being surrounded by Chinese script, lanterns, restaurants, shops and people was a reminder that there really was something across that ocean after all.
Thursday 11 November 2010
Bang. Crash.
This is the somewhat predictable "I've hit a wall and can't write any more" post. Suffice it to say that I have no idea how to keep going from here.
I managed to write 20,000 words in 8 days which is wonderful. I am delighted with the fact that I can do that. I have managed about 1500 words in the last three days however and this is not good.
I have written the story in to a ditch. The characters, who've been stuck in more or less the same place for the entirety of proceedings, are bemused and exhausted to the point that they can't express themselves any more.
I can relate to that.
Another problem is that I have nearly exhausted my plot ideas. I did expect this to happen, but I thought I might get another 10,000 words done first at least. Perhaps it is in anticipation of this that I have slowed up.
I want to reverse out of the hole, work backwards until I find the problem and fix it. I think that won't work. This is sausage-factory fiction. I guess I just have to plough on and start really making stuff up. The important thing is the word count and the deadline. I have to keep going, no matter how turgid my prose becomes, and just, argh, you know.
I managed to write 20,000 words in 8 days which is wonderful. I am delighted with the fact that I can do that. I have managed about 1500 words in the last three days however and this is not good.
I have written the story in to a ditch. The characters, who've been stuck in more or less the same place for the entirety of proceedings, are bemused and exhausted to the point that they can't express themselves any more.
I can relate to that.
Another problem is that I have nearly exhausted my plot ideas. I did expect this to happen, but I thought I might get another 10,000 words done first at least. Perhaps it is in anticipation of this that I have slowed up.
I want to reverse out of the hole, work backwards until I find the problem and fix it. I think that won't work. This is sausage-factory fiction. I guess I just have to plough on and start really making stuff up. The important thing is the word count and the deadline. I have to keep going, no matter how turgid my prose becomes, and just, argh, you know.
Thursday 4 November 2010
Intense
I've finished writing for the day feeling very smug to have hit 10,000 words. Twenty percent of the way there!
Writing this much this fast is strange. I'm working in the mornings and chipping away at targets: 300 words until I've hit the 1667 or 450 until I've managed 2000 for the day and so forth. This seems very effective in keeping me typing, but the resulting prose is very rough - certainly lots of polishing needed to get it up even to a first draft quality.
But that can all happen later. Right now I'm enjoying the intensity of a writing marathon comprised of lots of little sprints whilst also desperately trying to keep hold of my story by my fingernails.
Writing this much this fast is strange. I'm working in the mornings and chipping away at targets: 300 words until I've hit the 1667 or 450 until I've managed 2000 for the day and so forth. This seems very effective in keeping me typing, but the resulting prose is very rough - certainly lots of polishing needed to get it up even to a first draft quality.
But that can all happen later. Right now I'm enjoying the intensity of a writing marathon comprised of lots of little sprints whilst also desperately trying to keep hold of my story by my fingernails.
Monday 1 November 2010
Day 1: 1667 words gets me a Jaffa Cake.
I'm not going to post EVERY DAY about how well or badly I am doing at this NaNoWriMo thing, but I'm going to do a Day 1 blog because my enthusiam levels are still relatively high!
So far, I have written 1742 words - just over the given daily target of 1667 - so I'm going to stop for a bit and interact with the children, cook dinner and so forth. This is a good progress I think and I'm surprised that it has come as easily as it has, especially considering the hangover I started with this morning. I certainly haven't been sat here crying against a blank Word doc, which is what I was afraid of.
I've been writing in bursts, trying to get between 250 and 500 words done at a time. This is great for fitting in the writing between chores and dovetails very nicely with an online app called Write or Die which lets you input a time limit and a target number of words before gently nagging at you when you stop. Surprisingly effective. Obviously, not having a day job puts me in a rather luxurious position for this sort of thing. If I were to actually write all day, like it was a job or something that I was good at, then 1667 would be a feeble effort. But it isn't just about smacking your fingers against the keyboard. The words still have to come from somewhere. Again I've been pleasently surprised.
The two short scenes I've written today were both entirely new to me and they have allowed the rather cardboard characters from my vague plot outline to begin to push back a bit against my expectations. This has got to be how it works - whilst I do have a plan, I can't have everything exhaustively mapped out. If I knew absolutely what is going to happen then I wouldn't need to write it.
Hopefully I haven't stopped for the day either. Any word surplus I can build up this week has got to be a good thing, especially with some of the upcoming November fun I have to look forward too.
Above all it is a relief to be writing and it feels wonderful to have the time officially ring-fenced for writing in. And Jaffa Cakes are great motivators.
So far, I have written 1742 words - just over the given daily target of 1667 - so I'm going to stop for a bit and interact with the children, cook dinner and so forth. This is a good progress I think and I'm surprised that it has come as easily as it has, especially considering the hangover I started with this morning. I certainly haven't been sat here crying against a blank Word doc, which is what I was afraid of.
I've been writing in bursts, trying to get between 250 and 500 words done at a time. This is great for fitting in the writing between chores and dovetails very nicely with an online app called Write or Die which lets you input a time limit and a target number of words before gently nagging at you when you stop. Surprisingly effective. Obviously, not having a day job puts me in a rather luxurious position for this sort of thing. If I were to actually write all day, like it was a job or something that I was good at, then 1667 would be a feeble effort. But it isn't just about smacking your fingers against the keyboard. The words still have to come from somewhere. Again I've been pleasently surprised.
The two short scenes I've written today were both entirely new to me and they have allowed the rather cardboard characters from my vague plot outline to begin to push back a bit against my expectations. This has got to be how it works - whilst I do have a plan, I can't have everything exhaustively mapped out. If I knew absolutely what is going to happen then I wouldn't need to write it.
Hopefully I haven't stopped for the day either. Any word surplus I can build up this week has got to be a good thing, especially with some of the upcoming November fun I have to look forward too.
Above all it is a relief to be writing and it feels wonderful to have the time officially ring-fenced for writing in. And Jaffa Cakes are great motivators.
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