I have gone green…

….and no, that’s not an eco-resolution, nor is it a cause for concern.
In Nanowrimo parlance it means I’ve crossed the 50k line. If you click on the Nanowrimo 2009 tab just above, you should see evidence of my word-count on the little calendar tracker. I cam home from work yesterday determined to finish, and logged a count-check of 49,383 around 11pm last night, then kept going til 1.25 am where I checked again and discovered I had 53k. It’s nice when that happens. Despite the fact that it’s too early to “validate and win” (that starts tomorrow) I’ve been copying and pasting into the validator anyway – so I get no nasty surprises from it having a different word-count to google docs or open office.

I then spent a few minutes on nanomail before sloping off to bed and sleeping for a full twelve hours. That much sleep is almost unheard of for me. I think writing at that rate must take a heck of a toll on your system.

What I did realise last night was that not being able to write when I expect to makes me very grumpy indeed. I had been due to start in work at 2pm (after having lunch with my lovely aunt Annette), and so had intended to have a bit of a lie-in, get a few hours writing done and cut into the final 45k+ stretch. Instead, I was called into work early (and insufficiently caffeinated) and was out of sorts all day. It came as a bit of a shock when I realised where the grumpishness was coming from.

Well, actually, more than a bit of a shock.

I would hate to think I was in danger of developing any sort of “speshul snowflake” traits, so here and in the public setting of the interwebz, I do hereby apologise to my workmates (and former workmates who called in to say hi) yesterday, for being a grump. I may have explained why I was grumptastic above, but it’s still no justification. I’m sorry folks.

Thankfully, I was together enough to be perktastic, rather than grumpilicious with customers, as is required. BUt the contrast must have been pretty big for workpals to keep asking me if I was okay. I cringe in retrospect.

(And please, if I ever utter the phrase “bevelling my sentences” with a straight face, someone push me off the balcony, or brain me with that big Phaidon Architecture book in the glowy-green carry-case, I assure you, I will (eventually) be grateful for it.)

Today I plan to spend a while back-filling in plot threads and then I’ll set to writing the ending. Because I may have broken 50k but the darn thing still isn’t finished. Pressure is off now though, I have words enough for my winners badge, and this (and a mammoth amount of snoozage) gives me a happy.

So, fellow work-bods, I hereby give you license to poke fun at me for having been grumpy all day tomorrow. I earned it.

Off to replenish my caffeinated beverage now and get some more words down.

Nano…

is seriously interfering with my blogging time.

So before I start this evening’s tranche of wordsmithery, here’s a post. So you know I’m “still alive, thanks God” (and thank you to the wonderful Mohammed for the phrase that will never die, at least among Irish archaelogy-types).
I’m typing this with a kitten wedged between my back and the chair (don’t ask me why, he likes to lie there), and another moggy eyeing my mouse like it’s the real flesh and blood type, and not a piece of computer hardware (geeky aside, when did microsoft start calling them “human interface devices”? It sounds like something out of a Cronenberg flick).
Ah, kitten has just climbed over my shoulder and is now attempting to eat my fingers while I type. This does not bode well for an evening’s nanoing.

To business. Those following my confusion in an earlier post re: the new Alex Barclay book, here’s some of the answer – the book will be out in March 2010 and the title is not as yet finalised. Okey dokey? When the title is finalised I’ll post it, if I remember.

Appearances to the contrary, I have been reading.

I just finished (and I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to it) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, and I absolutely loved it. It’s hip, smart, laugh out loud funny and genuinely affecting. It also makes geekery seem kinda cool. The prose is a mix of geeky slang, sci-fi/fantasy/RPG references and Dominican Spanish slang. Somehow it all comes together in a voice (or, well, voices) that is utterly compelling and wholly originial. It’s not often I use the phrase “original” so you should know I mean it. Because I am a nerd, I wanted to be sure I wasn’t missing anything in the Spanish slang that I couldn’t figure out, so I found the following link invaluable (also helps with Dominican history, “nerdy” references (*blush* I needed no help with those) and some other things that may cause “huh?” moments while reading. If you plan to read the book, bookmark this and it’ll see you right. It’s not for nothing that people win the Pulitzer for fiction, and this book is a prime example of a deserving win.

The story is about three generations of a family that become part of the Dominican diaspora to the U.S. as a result of the reign of Trujillo (“the dictatingest dictator”) and never manages to feel like a family saga, despite being one. In terms of magical realism (there’s an argument to be used for this book kind of fitting that category) it knocks Allende’s early stuff (which I loved at the time: Eva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna especially), into a cocked hat. The titular Oscar (the Wao is a corruption of “Wilde” his college roomates inflict on him) and his sister Lola represent one generation, their mother Belicia another, and her parents (a doctor and a nurse) the earliest. The narration of the book is shared between Yunior (a friend of sorts to Oscar, and Lola) and Lola herself. Their voices manage to be completely different while sharing a common inflection – thanks to Oscar. The whole book is a feat of story-telling verve and narrative nun-chuckery. I defy anyone not to enjoy it. If you don’t, you lose 8 charisma points in my book. And if you don’t understand what that means, read the book to find out.

I’m currently reading Betrayals, the second in Lili St. Crow’s (otherwise known as Lilith Saintcrow) Strange Angels series. I’m enjoying this as much as I did the first one, and will write more on it when I’ve finished it. I will note that it doesn’t hurt to read the book while listening to the Kristin Hersh album Strange Angels, not sure if that’s where the series title came from, but it’s an association I like.

Okay, that’s your lot as far as book-nerdage for today goes, I will away now and write some new words.

Phew!

Sleeping on it worked, I’m on course to break 30k today.
POV has flipped back to third person (slightly snarkily) omniscient. Words flowing again.
I has a happy.

In other, unrelated news, I seem to have misplaced my Bejeweled Blitz mojo, which is a VERY GOOD THING since it means I won’t be tempted to install it on my iPhone no matter how many big blaring ads they throw at me on facebook.
I SHALL RESIST oh you wonderful PopCap games app designers.

And yes, thank you all for noticing, I do need to get out more.

Just after November and Nano are finished.

Besides, it’s raining out there!

: )

Halfway there…

And boy are things messy. I didn’t like the experimental pov I’d set up – telling the story of Faith through notebooks read and research done by her daughter Joy, so I flipped into the first-person and am not liking that any better.

One thing that can be said for Nanowrimo is that it allows you to experiment, flip things around and keep on going, knowing that you can fix it some other time if you care enough about what you end up with to do so. Another thing is that you begin to recognise pitfalls in your own style. In this story there’s been way too much preamble to a bank heist that is only the start of my main character’s solo crime career. I know I can go back and cut it all, but I’ve wasted time on it, and while it has generated plenty of words, it’s irksome.

Right now I’m so ticked off with myself that I’ve decided to close google docs for the time being and see if sleeping on it will help any. Grrr.

I will start afresh tomorrow with the warning to myself that THOU SHALT NOT HAVE TOO MUCH EXPOSITION. IT GIVETH THEE WORDS APLENTY BUT IT DETRACTETH FROM THE PACING MOST ABOMINABLY (Or: shut up and have someone shoot someone or something).The biblical all-caps warning is the one that I shall post-it to my monitor. If I can find a post-it. It’s been that kind of day.

To cheer myself up with the promise of something good to read in the future I checked Nielsen for a release date for the next Alex Barclay novel, only to find that it’s listed as August 2010. Ah boo says I, but elsewhere on the interwebz it say 26th of November 2009 and that is soon. Imminent, even. I am confuzzled. Also, weirdly, the book title has always been listed as Black Run but the cover art on Amazon has a big bold Tainted on the cover. Curiouser and curiouser. Anyway, whenever and whatever it’s called I want it. And all the better if I’ve finished my nanoing by then as it would be a pretty good reward-read. We shall see.

Damn I’m such a nerd. Oh, and by the way, killing off a bipolar character’s shrink (the plot I’ve seen mentioned) is not only ultra evil (mwhahahahaha etc.), but an excellent premise. Should be fun.

Day one….

…went better than I expected. Having conked out last night, long before midnight. I got up at 7 am and cranked out an impressive 2,100 words before leaving for work.

Since coming home this evening I’ve racked that up to 5,126 – and because I’ve done over the 5k, I am hereby rewarding myself with the rest of the evening off, in the company of Season 2 of House. (Yeah, I know, I got into it late…and even then only because my friend Mark made me watch it at his place. I thank him for it.).

I finished The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest last night. Capsule review: any misgivings I had about anything in the book were laid to rest by the sheer brilliance of the court scenes. For those alone it’s worth reading the entire trilogy, with it’s odd compulsion to list everything a character eats, wears or thinks (Did these by any chance start out as nano novels? I keep picturing Steig Larsson, on a cold Swedish November night eking out an extra 200 words by listing cupboard contents, then breathing a sigh of relief, uploading his wordcount to the Nanowrimo site and closing his iBook for the night). I had quibbles about a few things, but I’ll detail them some other time. For now, it deserves to be outselling everything else (especially Dan Brown) by four to one.

The Nanowrimo2009 tab above should be working, complete with a bit of what I wrote today. The wordcount widget server has gone into its ritual November meltdown, so there’s no widget there yet. I’ll fix that when it starts working again.

As a side note, and this made me smile, my boss came over to me yesterday and told me that she knew she should be rooting for me, but is it bad if she hopes I fail to meet the terms of my onerosity coupon?

Nope, it’s not bad, but I swear, if I hit 30k words by the 21st, I’m not re-alphabetising the kids picture books until at least December. And the same goes for the God-books if I have 20k written by the 14th, a coupon I gave another colleague. I’m not sure how much good declaring myself exempt from those two tasks will do me, but a girl’s gotta try!

Todat at work was made head-wrecking by the fact that people have already started their Christmas shopping, for which we were not wholly prepared (or staffed). Most common thing to happen today was a customer wandering over with one of our Christmas catalogues and demanding we fetch them “this, this, this and that”. Inevitably, at least one of the books has not been published yet. They then glare at us suspiciously and say “But it’s in the catalogue!”.

Yeah, I know, it’s in the catalogue, but that’s because all the big books with pub dates from September to  early December are in the catalogue. Yesterday was Saturday, the last day of October. Many, many books in the catalogue won’t be out til mid-November. I think there’s even a disclaimer to that effect in the catalogue. Then they say “But there’s a picture of the book, you must have one somewhere.” to which one can only reply, “A jacket cover photo doesn’t mean anything other than that the cover has been designed. The book is not out yet, I’m sorry. I can look up the publication date for you, and keep a copy aside for you when it comes in if you like?”. They never, ever believe me. And it’s not just me, they don’t believe any of us. One woman went through the same rigmarole today with me and another member of staff. She probably still thinks we were both lying to her….

We weren’t though.

 

 

 

 

So, it’s nearly November….

…and so it’s nearly Nanowrimo time again.

This means two things:

One: apart from going to work and suchlike obligations, I turn into a bit of a hermit for the month. A word-count obsessed, plot finagling, 200 more words before bed-time, feverishly scribbling word-nerd of titanic proportions (I see I’ve already gotten a head-start on hyperbole. Yay me!). I surface occasionally (as work permits) at the Nano meet-ups in Dublin, and then might wander round to say hi to friends in the vicinity, but apart from that, I score a big fat zero on the sociability scale. In fact for the whole month I’m generally absent even while present. For this I apologise, in advance.

Two: The last few days of October see me furiously trying to come up with an idea, ANY idea for a story, while rooting around in dusty piles of books to find my Nanowrimo stuff (viz. Chris Baty’s No plot, no Problem! and the novel-writing kit I bought last year to go with it. There is also the ceremonial dusting off of my trusty won-every-year-since-I-started-using-it notebook, and the adding on of the current year to the cover in Sharpie. Then there is the sourcing of a plot notebook, and the assemblage of a stockpile of functioning pens for when I’m not at a computer….all of which serve as ample procrastinatory tools to distract me from the fact that I’m still without a plot and the clock starts ticking very very soon.

I was planning to write another story about my post-apocalyptic posse, but given that I’ve spent the last week playing a MMO set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where people ride around on ATVs and struggle to survive (the game is Fallen Earth, by the way, (website here) and it is rather good. I started playing because I’d read about it on the web and there was so much about it that was like my nano-novels I couldn’t resist trying it out. I like it so much I’m quitting Aion for it. I made a character called Camille and pretty soon she’ll have her own ATV just like Cam in my stories does. Lawdy but I’m a nerd!)) I’m starting to have qualms about the world I created, the kind of “Damn, there’s not a lot I’ve got that’s really new in my stories” qualms that make you second-guess everything. I was also toying with the idea of trying a crime book, for the heck of it. Then I realised that I could do that by filling in the back-story of the fun-to-write criminal mastermind Joy from the previous two – and use her story as a way to explain how the world came to be the world it is in a way that I never could do in the other stories without being all expositionally clunky and telling rather than showing (a big no-no that!).

So far so good, except now I have to actually figure out the nuts’n'bolts of how the world became a wasteland, and that thought alone is giving me a worse headache than accidentally head-butting a table while foraging under it for a notebook (yes, I did do that…I know, I’m a clod). Still, it is something that had to be figured out eventually, so better now than never.

So, I still have no plot. But I have some nuggets that could grow into one. Which is better than nothing.

Tonight I’ll be doing my best to finish The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, so the only thing I have hanging over me to read will be a refresher skim of Rebecca for a book group on Thursday. The only thing I’ll say about Millennium III for now is that the translation is rather clunky, I wonder whether it wasn’t a bit of a rush job? I’ll fit in a post on it somewhere when I’ve finished it.

On November 1st, I’ll be creating a Nanowrimo 2009 page here (there’ll be a tab under the header on the front page, beside the other nano ones) where there will be bits from the novel-in-progress available for reading, giggling and/or eye-rolling at, and also the all-important word-count widgets so that anyone who is so inclined can keep track of how I’m doing.

(Kindly note Ms. E. and Ms. K that word-count targets on my onerosity coupons must be reasonable, as I’m not handing you both a free pass to cackling wildly over the sight of me handling Veritas books for hours on end without Hazmat gear….)

There will also be semi-frequent posts from me on the main page, these are usually hyper-caffeinated rants about my own idiocy in attempting this madness yet again, but there may be some lucidity there too.

Possibly.

I can’t promise anything.

For now I’m off to find out what happens to Lisbeth Salander, and then to get some sleep.

(p.s. If anyone knows of an iPhone app that I could use to write with that’d save me having to transcribe hand-written stuff, please let me know. I’ve considered emailing stuff to myself and/or using the iPhone WordPress app to create a hidden page for writing, but they both seem a bit unnecessarily clunky as ideas. A word-processing type thingy would be perfect. Is there such a thing?)

Winning FTW!

I’ve been over the 50k mark for nanowrimo for some time already – and have had the magic green bar of goodness to boot, but today was the first day where it was possible to validate and win.

I left that process (stubbornly) until the early afternoon when I had finally written the last word of this year’s novel (which was “end” but not as in “The End”) and so had an extra couple of thousand words to go on top of my already robust 77k. While pasting in the final version, I took a few minutes to mess around with making a cover (lame compared to last year’s one) and update the synopsis (which I had just plain forgotten to do). I then sat back and the the nano word-counting robots do their thing and was whisked away to the You Won! page where I got to download my lovely winners certificate and choose from an array of web-badges to adorn this blog with.

My favourite one is below, and I’ll slap one of the standard ones on the Nanowrimo 2008 page.

Despite having broken the 50k barrier some time back, there is still an amazing sense of achievement when your word-count bar goes purple and you get brought to the winners’ page, it makes it seem all that much more real. Last year I hadn’t taken a word-count before validating when I passed the 50k (it was a bit later in the month) and got the fright of my life when everything slowed down before the winners’ page popped. This year I was more than prepared for it, but it still gave me a hefty adrenaline burst, and I sat grinning at my monitor like a fool for a few minutes.

Now I still don’t like this year’s tale all that much, but this is the first year where I managed to both win nanowrimo and complete the first draft in the alotted time-scale, so I’m rather chuffed about it. I may, as I already said, end up scrapping most, if not all of “City on a Hill” as it now exists, but the fact of its existence is pretty nice all the same.

I may squeeze a few more words out by working out the end of last year’s story (past the outline I have) and adding it in, since I’m assured that all the words written this month will count, as long as there is one self-contained story that is over 50k. That may have to wait though, as the lurgy has morphed into an honest-to-goodness flu which meant that after validating today I sloped back to bed with Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods” under my arm and read and slept my way through the rest of the day.

So, in short, w00t! I am a winner! Yay, me! (Not something I get to say every day).

ooopsy!

I think I borked google docs…. wrote a shedload last night and this morning, only to be told my nano-novel file is “too big” for google docs to save. Apparently they only give you 512k per doc, which is a little small for my 71k+ of words needs at the moment. Now they may be 71k+ words of utter craposity, but they are mine and I don’t want to lose them. So I copied and pasted the whole thing into Open Office, and then set about breaking it into two parts for google docs, so I can still access it anywhere. The too-big issue seems to have made all of google docs act funny since it refused to save a truncated version of the file due to a “network error”.

All of this happening while the bug of last week has morphed into a flu-type thing is a bit discombobulating. It took me 20 minutes to figure out that I could break the doc up and wouldn’t have to work soley from my own hard drive (which makes me a bit nervous for some unspecifiable reason).

The most amusing part is that, wordy as it is (which is great for nanowrimo, expecially since I’m being nagged to write even more to help Dublin in the Word Wars (a fact I find somewhat hard to take, and therefore will not be entering any Word Wars next year – nano for me is primarily a challenge to myself, 50k in 30 days and a first draft, not a competition against others – the word wars here this year have taken on a nasty edge, with people being urged to drop out if their word-count isn’t where it should be, something which I find extremely unpalatable – we should be encouraging people not telling them to drop out. This time last year I had far fewer words, and I made it past the finish line with a few short hours to spare. If someone had told me in week 3 to drop out of the wars, I would have, and never nit the 50k. Nagging people with high and low word-counts goes completely against the spirit of the thing, and shouldn’t be happening.)) I will probably end up wiping the whole thing come Nov 30th. I just don’t like it. And if I don’t like it then there’s no point in keeping it. I think I am happy with about 8k words out of the total, and so I might hold on to them. A lot of this years prodigious count has come from me trying to find a way to recapture the momentum of last year’s effort. That’s momentum as in speed of plot unfolding, not speed of typing, no trouble there! I keep sitting down, determined to make it “fun” and instead going round in circles. What I did get out of all of that writing is a plot. It’s a good plot, I like it, and I could work with it sometime in the future, and that’s good enough for me. What needs fixing however, is everything else, and it may be best to do that from the standpoint of a blank page.

Luckily enough, I’m only writing these post-apocalyptic adventure yarns for myself, so I have no pressure from anywhere about finishing them. Last year’s effort has had an audience of two apart from me, and it isn’t even finished yet, I have to write the ending, and am not doing that now while I seem to be lacking in the ability to bring fun to the table.

Ramble over….it’s lemsip time!

Not writing tonight…

…coz I’m tired and I had a crappy day at work (see below).

Instead I am curling up on the couch to watch “The Apartment” and will pick up the nano-ing again tomorrow, as I have the day off .

Word-count is around the 23k mark, so I now officially do not have to reorganise the “woo” section in work as I have met the obligation in my onerosity coupon (I had to do 16k by November 14th to escape that sorry fate, I was actually terrified I’d have to do it).

While relaxing tonight I aim to come up with some more nasty tasks to keep myself ahead of where I need to be word-count wise. If anyone has any ideas, feel free to post ‘em in the comments. It must be something I would really really hate to have to do, so bear that in mind…

Nano-differences from year to year

Bit of a mouthful, that.

This is just a short and blah whatever-y post about something that struck me just now while reading over this year’s pile-o-crap (well, as much as there is of it…) in comparison to last year’s.

I knew there was a different feel to this one, and a reason why I don’t feel so enthused about it, and it boils down to this: this year everyone seems to be very thinky whereas last year they were all very talky. I have no idea where this thinky-ness came from, and I wish they’d all stop musing on things and actually talk to one another more. I’m tempted to scrap what I’ve done so far, but given that I’m almost halfway to the 50k that would not be very wise. I love writing dialogue, always have, and I know it’s the best way to draw characters in true “show vs tell” fashion. Dialogue made last years pile o’crap pacy and fun, and I’m starting to wonder whether I’m not hampered by knowing these characters a bit too well and being overly concerned with what they’re thinking instead of just letting them loose on the world, and the plot, like I did before.

So from here on out, nobody is going to have any sort of internal dialogue unless it is completely necessary for plot purposes, in the hope that I can recover what made me enjoy writing last year so much.

Oh, and I did find a task for Joy to send them all on (obviously, given the word-count surge), it involves stealing tech (hardware) from the city government since non-government types are not allowed any sort of computer equipment (oh noes! what about teh interwebz?!!one!1! they are all belong to the churchy types in charge, that is soooo the wrongness!) and this requires some smarts, some planning and  quite a bit of danger, which is all good). Even more on the plus side is the fact that Joy is a very sarky, very fun character to write (a sixty year old black marketeer and hacker who dresses like a child and rips off anyone she doesn’t like in the best possible ways).

So now that I’ve identified the problem (bloody thinky people, only one whom is actually “cerebral” and even he I dislike because he made me type that word all po-faced, and earnest-like…plus he’s on the wrong side) and have a possible solution, I hope I’ll get more fun out of the rest of this month’s writing.