Victory! Glorious victory!

I have come through the month of November with a single crazy goal. to write fifty thousand words in thirty days. And, in the last minutes of the month, I did it! Fifty thousand words! Yeah!

I need to finish up the chapter to have a complete story. And in the editing I want to add two extra subplots (which I mentioned in a previous blog). But I finished the 50k challenge and I am quite happy.

My writing friend also won, and I'm happy for her, too. She's getting me some chocolate as a reward, so now I'm trying to think of a suitable reward to get her in return. I'll have to ask some friends what they think.

Well, that's about it for tonight (this morning, whatever). Goodnight everyone!

750 words, among other things

I mentioned my horrendous workload a couple of blogs ago, and now I'm mentioned that I got it all done and turned in on time. I'm not as happy as I could be with the quality of the paper, but then I've felt that way before about papers and still ended up with a 'B', so we'll see how that goes.

In other news, my writing friend recommended to me that I try out 750words.com. The point of the site is to write 750 words every day. It doesn't matter which words, or if they make any sense at all, just as long as there's seven hundred fifty of them all in a row. Even after only two days, there have been a number of benefits, as well as some perceived future benefits.

For one, it whets my appetite for writing. After spewing out the first 750 words that come to mind, I want to  keep writing. This prompts me to open up my NaNo and start typing. Hopefully I'll put better quality words into the NaNo, and so far I have been. But 750 words is an effective way to get me moving.

I've also discovered that, when I focus on the task at hand, I can write 750 words in fifteen minutes. Not the most impressive speed (that's only fifty words a minute), but it's almost three times the speed I previously thought was my upper limit. In the past I've found that I tend to write about one thousand words in an hour. I've shown myself that a lot of that slowdown is because of distractions and procrastination eating into my writing time. If I could focus on it for an entire hour, I could easily get about three thousand words. I'm going to start setting my general writing speed goal at two thousand words an hour, and see how that goes.

There's also the hope that this will get me into daily writing, a goal I've mentioned before. The end of NaNo is coming up soon, and it will be time to begin taking action towards my daily writing goal. If I get myself to writing two thousand words in an hour, and if I write for an hour each day, I could easily turn out a rough draft every two months. Not sure how I'll incorporate the editing phase, but I'll figure it out.

That's all for now. Going to see about getting a ride to go grab some food, then try to work on my NaNo some more.

A new direction for NaNo

My story for NaNo has decided on a new direction for itself... mere (metaphorical) inches from its end.

So far, the story has focused on a single group of characters. All humans, hailing from the sole remaining empire in the world. There are good story reasons why no elves or dwarves are featured in this party. The elves were banished from the empire because they all went completely insane, and the dwarves are too busy fighting an endless war underneath the mountains to pop out for an afternoon tea. Unfortunately, without any elves or dwarves in the story, the reader is almost unaware of either race's existence, at least until the humans run into some of the elves.

But, as I said, the story has decided to take a new turn. Although I have four or five viewpoint characters right now, almost everything that has happened so far could be seen through the eyes of only two of them, who are turning into the main viewpoint characters anyway. Thus, the story can be easily refactored to have only two of the current characters be viewpoint characters.

This opens up room for more viewpoint characters. Elves (who, while pretty crazy, aren't nearly as insane as the empire thinks), and dwarves. This will also help solve the problem of the main baddies and the main threats not being revealed until three-fourths of the plot has already happened. The humans have no way of knowing about these threats. But the dwarves have been locked in war with the main baddies for a couple of centuries, and the elves live right next to the main threat. Characters from these places will vastly help reveal plot elements when they need to be revealed, rather than when this group of humans learns about them.

So, major story overhaul, right there. But, and there has to be a but, this overhaul won't be coming along until after NaNoWriMo ends. I'm going to keep writing the story as planned (although limiting myself to the aforementioned two viewpoint characters). This plotline will end up at right around fifty thousand words, not much over a third of the length of an average-sized fantasy novel. Giving me ample room to slip in chapters from the other characters, interspersing them along the length of the story so that three threads of plot run throughout the novel and meet up at the end. This will be helped by the fact that the three plotlines won't share very much until the very end. The elves live outside the empire, which the humans only leave briefly, and the dwarves don't leave their caves.

I think it'll work out. And if it doesn't, eh, it's just a NaNo. If everything works out the way I'm thinking it now, though, the end result might be something halfway readable. Wish me luck!

Minor victory

I totally won the word war I mentioned in my previous blog. I'm eagerly awaiting my prize of unspecified chocolate, which may have to wait until after Thanksgiving Break, because she's really busy.

In other news, I probably won't be writing any more until Thanksgiving Break. Lots of assignments have come up, and although I've knocked a fair bit out of the way today, there's still a lot to do.

I did a homework assignment and a quiz for my Information Security class. Although not very difficult, those were time consuming and involved looking up a lot of facts. They made my brain tired. I texted my writing friend to complain, but she just told me to get to work and quit moping. It was good advice.

Then I started reading A Stone of Hope, which I have to read and write a paper on by Tuesday. I'm not worried too much, I started the last book the day before and still got done. Using online summaries, I wrote up a basic outline with some simple ideas for the paper. I'll flesh that out as I read, which will help because I can skim through a lot of the material.

I also learned Python today. And by that I mean I've never looked at the language before, and I am now nearly as competent in it as I am in C++. I picked it up in about six hours. I'm not some crazy fast learner, or anything, Python is just that awesome. It brings me back to my high school days, when I was first beginning to program, learning QBASIC and enjoying every minute of it. After a few hours of stressing out over all the work I need to do, it was an excellent way to relax.

The pressure is still on, but looking back at all I've done today, I feel confident that I'll be able to get everything done. Go me.

Thirty-three Thousand

I like that alliteration. It's cool.

Ok, so it took me a day longer than I had planned. But I broke past thirty thousand. Then I pressed on for another three thousand words after that. I'm caught up with NaNo! Well... I'm three words behind, technically, but screw you, I'm caught up!

One of my writing friends challenged me to a word war last night. We're racing to see who can get ten thousand new words first. She got five thousand before she went to bed. I've just written seven thousand. She'll probably write the rest of hers before I even wake up tomorrow, but maybe, just maybe, I can win this thing.

The winner gets chocolate, so I'm super-motivated. I'm half tempted to press on and get the last three thousand right now, but I'm far too tired and my story has reach a sort of boring point where it just feels natural to stop and take a break. We'll see what happens tomorrow.

Twenty... erm... two thousand words

Ok, I'll admit it, I've been slacking off quite a bit on NaNo. Yesterday I had an excuse (had to write a paper for class), but the weekend I had mostly open, and all last week I did a lot of sitting around doing nothing. Yeah, I was kind of down, but I shouldn't have let that slow down my writing, especially since writing is fun and would have made me feel better.

But whatever, that was then, and this is now. I've only got about twenty-two thousand words, which means I'm behind. But I'm not too far behind. And given the pace I've shown I'm capable of in the first week, I can still totally do this. So tomorrow, when I get out of class, I'm going to sit down, open up my computer... and check Facebook. But after that, after the Facebook, then I'll eat lunch. At some point I'll do some writing. My goal is to hit thirty thousand words by Thursday night. That's an average of four thousand words a day in the next two days.

I've got some cool action scenes coming up in the plot, and action scenes write easy, so as long as I sit myself down and make myself write for a few hours a day I shouldn't have too much trouble. I'm going to try to do extra tomorrow, because my Thursdays are usually pretty full. I just have to remember to take some time out to study for an exam next week.

I think I'm going to try to push myself to keep writing daily after NaNo ends. Even just an hour a day, without worrying about wordcount, just to keep me moving throughout the year. I'm not sure how I'll convince myself to do this, but they say that it takes only twenty-one days to get yourself into a new habit. I think I'll spend December pushing myself to write for an hour a day (trying for the same hour every day, maybe 10pm when I'm usually not doing anything). If I can keep it up through December, then in theory it should be easy to keep it up indefinitely.

I'd start the habit-forming now, but for two things. One, starting at the beginning of a calender month gives more of a feeling of structure to the attempt. And two, I foresee a hectic, inconsistent pace of writing through the rest of NaNo for me, which would detract from the attempt to make writing regularly a habit.

I've got two stories competing for my attention after NaNo. One is about a really cool pair of characters that I was eager to write a month ago. The other is a newer idea, much darker with dozens of characters and a much more epic plotline. I'm not sure which I'll start on, but I think it'll be the pair of characters I've already done some planning on. The epic story will have to wait, but in the meantime I'll probably do some idle planning for it. Hopefully I won't lose interest, as I've done with similar stories before.

Twenty Thousand Words

It's the end of the first week of NaNoWriMo, and I've made it to twenty thousand words. Quite an accomplishment, and I've still got hours left to write tonight.

My goal for the evening is twenty-five thousand words, but I'll be content if I fall a couple of thousand words short of that goal. I was hoping to push for thirty thousand, but I've already lost the race to thirty thousand against my writing friend so I'm not really motivated enough to push myself that hard. Twenty-five thousand would be a fantastic finish to the first week, halfway to the ultimate goal in a quarter of the time.

Week two is the dreaded "why am I doing this" week, where productivity drops and motivation plummets. I think I'll be bothering several friends to do write-ins with me over the week, to keep me going.

Onward, to victory!

So...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if someone consistently does not talk to me, should I not make the assumption that the person in question simply does not want to talk to me?

It's been bothering me a lot, lately. There are several people who act like they like me, but then they never actually talk to me. If we run into each other on campus or if I say something to them through Facebook they'll be friendly, but they'll never initiate conversation. And that's really annoying. If someone rarely hangs out with me, never initiates conversation, and seems distant and unresponsive whenever I do talk to them, then I think it's fair to assume that this person just doesn't really like me.

I may have to do some editing on my Facebook friend's list soon.

NaNo Update

NaNo was going well, but now... not so much. I'm not behind on my wordcount yet, but only because I got so far ahead in the first two days. Yesterday I didn't write at all. I was going to, but then the friend I had hoped to write with was too busy, and another friend came over and distracted me, and... I dunno, no writing got done.

Now I've lost all my momentum, and building it back up won't be easy. I'm going to try to write tonight, but I'm not really sure I'll be able to motivate myself. If I do manage to get going, I'm hoping to hit ten thousand words before bed.

Wish me luck.

NaNoWriMo has begun!

The first day of NaNoWriMo has come and gone. I thought I'd celebrate by finally making the blogging switch over to my actual Google account instead of the temporary one I've been posting from.

The day went well. I procrastinated through most of the early afternoon. And most of the late afternoon. But by about seven-thirty in the evening I kicked my butt into gear and started writing. Got in a good thousand words in an hour.

What really boosted my wordcount, though, was the small writing party I had at the library with a couple of other NaNoers. We gathered around a table at nine o'clock, and for two hours we sat typing furiously at our keyboard. Each of us added about two thousand words to our wordcounts during that couple of hours. Also, my story now randomly contains a Grue, thanks to a conversation near the beginning of our gathering.

So I typed a total of three thousand words into my favorite text editor today. Nearly twice the actual goal of one thousand, six hundred sixty-seven words-per-day. And that with several hours of procrastination! If I can get my butt in gear more often on the days my schedule is empty, I might just push this story well past fifty thousand words and into the range of eighty thousand.

Hanging out with fellow writers was great fun, too. They sound like they have interesting stories going on, I can't wait to read them after all is said and done.