Writer's Blog - 50,000 words in 30 days

A great big group hug

Official thank-yous for all the people who cheered me on this month. I was pleasantly surprised how many of my friends and family and new acquaintances took the time to wish me well and remind me how amazing I am for even trying to make it.

Special thanks to the other Guelph participants - and for the record, a bunch of them finished.

Laura Rainbow Dragon
Beth Faulkner
Julie Scott
Ruth Cooke
Terry McLean

And nine others (I don't know any more than their online handles)

These folks rock my world. I have some excuses - some legitimate, others (But "House" was on....) less so. But some of the above-named folks had equally or more-pressing issues during November and still turned it out. Good for them. Next year. If I got to above 40,000 words, I'm sure I can do it next time. I'm not going to try in January, though, like some people intend to do.

It's over! The madness is over!

It's now past midnight, making it officially Dec. 1 and therefore, the end of NaNoWriMo. Huzzah! Let's dance a jig! It's finished!

Of course, there's the small detail I haven't yet mentioned ...

...

...

...

I um, didn't make it to 50K.

But I'm embracing the knowledge that this mad month is no more and have been surprisingly upbeat about my failure to become a real, live author. Let's face it, I've written more than half of a novel that, just 30 days ago, was nothing more than a few tiny ideas floating around in my head from a conversation over a few too many cocktails.

Thanks to all my supporters, and I am a little sad, but I'm also very proud of what I have accomplished.

I'm going to keep posting for another few days before the blog dwindles off into the land of unread ramblings. And don't forget to check out the Here section of this coming Saturday's Mercury for my update on the month that was.

Not the month ...

My word count is still abysmal and for the first time I'm wondering if I'll finish. There's still some time and I have done a good job - win or lose, I'm proud of how much I've accomplished and I've enjoyed getting back into creative writing.

One of my all-time favourite movies is "Airplane" — the joke about Striker's "drinking problem" (if you haven't seen it, he can't drink a glass of water because he misses his mouth) makes me laugh out loud every time.
One of its other great running gags is the Lloyd Bridges character, who is a senior airport official. Near the start of the movie he lights a cigarette and says, "Guess I picked the wrong day to quit smoking." The gag continues as he says he picked the wrong day to quit drinking, popping methamphetamines and finally, glue. I have to say, if I'd planned to quit smoking during November, it would have been the wrong month. Between the stress of word counts and the perfect five-minute break provided by a butt, my intake may have crept up a little (sorry, mum and dad).

Next month.

 

Update X2

From Terry McLean:

Since my last update things when from good to not so good and back to good.  I hit a little bit of a rough spot around the middle of the month. I didn't write for three days which put me at risk of not being at the 25,000 mark at the mid-point.  Since then I've written every day and have been able to add substantial number of work in the past three days.

Getting words down have not been my only issue since my last update.  By the end of last week and as I walked into the NaNo meeting Saturday I had exhausted my plan.  Granted my plan did not bring me to the end of my story but it brought me to the end of where I knew the story was headed in the short term.  When I took my son to swimming last Wednesday I had foreseen this issue and managed to plan an additional chapter.  I came through that additional chapter back into an unknown place. Since then I have written a completely unplanned chapter and started another.  However I'm sitting at a NaNo Official 45,000 words and I'm about at the end, I just have to hope that I have enough plot left to take me over the 50,000 word mark.  If not I may just have to dig a little deeper.

I'm confident that I will reach my 50,000 words by the end of the month. I am happy for Laura who is already a winner and look forward to join her, many others and hopefully you at the finish line.

More Guelph WriMo updates

More from Ruth Cooke (this is her fifth year, but she has never completed the challenge):

I finally heeded Chris Baty's advice and put my current work in progress (WIP) away in a drawer for November, and began on the first with a shiny new idea. For the last four NaNos (in fact, for the last twenty years) I'd been working on the same book, hoping to get it into a final form that I could send out to agents and publishers. And it just wasn't working, and I didn't know why.

So I decided that this year, instead of being all serious and working on my 'real' novel, I was going to do one just for fun. One that would never be published, or seen in its totality by anyone not related to me by blood or marriage.

The freak trombone accident became "Death by Trumpet," mainly because I sit right in front of the trumpet section in the usual seating arrangement of the Cambridge Community Orchestra, and the conductor who fainted isn't the usual conductor of this fictional orchestra, but the mayor of the city in which the orchestra plays, mainly as homage to the mayors of both Cambridge and Waterloo, who were brave enough to conduct the 85 player orchestra that resulted from the collaboration of the Cambridge Community Orchestra and the Kitchener-Waterloo Community Orchestra this past Saturday and Sunday.

What happens after, though, is pure fiction (fortunately for me, since the whole viola section is struck dead by a trumpet blast at the beginning of the novel), and a whole lot of fun.

What a tangled Web we weave

I've been thinking a lot about how NaNoWriMo is connected to the internet. It's so completely an online project from start to finish, which makes it a very unique project in a lot of ways.

It's also a great example of an organization that completely understands - "gets" what the Internet is, and how it can be used to create new opportunities that would have been unavailable to people even 10 years ago. Here are some observations about that:

• The NaNoWriMo website itself is able to connect people who live far away from each other, but also makes it easy to find people living nearby - and to foster connections that can then be made "real," by facilitating write-ins at local cafés or other meeting spaces.
• Community is key to the process - success rates are much higher for people who write in groups, whether in person or through the web. Widgets and buttons for the blogs of participants (and a ton of folks have MySpace pages or other places where they share their work or, like me, talk about the writing process) are available to show live word-count updates, and NaNo participants can challenge each other to "word wars" where they are facing off with other writers.
• The online community is invited to create programs designed to help. The Write or Die application I discussed earlier this week is a perfect example of using the web to increase productivity, rather than create a distraction.
• Local WriMo Ruth Cooke sent me an email with an update about her process. In her words, "NaNo is not a solitary pursuit, but I treated it as one for the first four years of my participation ... and it just didn't work for me." This time, she's been using the web to share encouragement with other WriMos on a writers' forum message board, as well as keeping updated with Guelphites via the local blog.
• Ruth also said she's been enjoying herself by trying to embrace some of the "dares," challenged posted by other participants at the NaNoWriMo site. She successfully included:
  • Have the first line of your novel be "Where the hell are my pants?"
  • Have someone die in a freak trombone accident.
  • Include a conductor who gets so into the music being performed that he holds his breath until he passes out. (She got 5 times the bonus points for it happening (a) during a performance, (b) the orchestra kept playing, (c) someone from the strings section tries to resuscitate the conductor during a long rest, (d) that person failing to resuscitate the conductor but returning to the seat to keep playing and (e) their idea of resuscitation included poking the conductor with a bow.
• That just kicks butt. The key to finishing this competition seems to be joining in with other people, and using the web to do so is one of the best ways to encourage, challenge and entertain the 100,000 participants.

Winner's circle now open

As of  right now, Guelph has one official "winner" of NaNoWriMo 2008: Laura Rainbow Dragon's word count has officially been verified at more than 50,000 so she gets a pat on the back and the official title of novelist.

Other local WriMos are getting close. The local blog has at least 6 folks over the 40,000 mark and several more in my 30,000 + "There's still a slim chance we could finish" camp.

More flashbacks

I've been experiencing a real sense of deja vu throughout this whole process. It's interesting that it's been a number of years since I was procrastinating while trying to write essays, but my own tendencies to distract myself really haven't changed.

Today I'm having flashbacks from another wonderful feeling from my student days: being so tired I'm not sure if I'm sleepwalking or actually awake. I can remember sitting in lectures, desperately trying to pay attention and keep taking notes as my handwriting got more and more illegible because I couldn't stop my eyes from closing, even though I was trying my hardest to get through the day.

Last night I worked on my novel until I reached the point where my eyes were closing for those lovely 10-second "blinks" that happen just before the sandman cometh. It still took hours more before my brain shut down enough to let me sleep. Getting anything done if I feel like this all day will be interesting, to say the least. Hopefully the caffeine will kick in any second.

Fun times

One of my favourite parts about the whole novelling process has been the conversations I've had with friends, family and new acquaintances about the storyline.

One of my coworkers came up with a brilliant plot twist I think it may be too late to introduce: the bitchy character, named Scarlet (of course) is after Brooke's job at the paper. I'm already planning that Brooke gets her dream job in Toronto but isn't sure whether to move away from her new/perfect boyfriend, Gavin. So Scarlett is after Brooke's job and wants Brooke to take the Toronto job, thus tries to break Gavin and Brooke up by using her feminine wiles. I kind of love it.

Tonight/last night, depending how you look at it, I talked to my friend Andrew in Toronto. We had a lot of laughs when I detailed the romantic plot twists and turns, while I revealed that I know a little bit too much about romance novels in general. I explained than any time I'm at a huge loss for a plot twist or don't know how to add to my word count, I just start Brooke and Gavin kissing and suddenly have 3,000 words. Talk about embarassing. But we definitely had some very humorous moments talking about it.

Semi-legitimate word padding

I've realized how great conversations between my characters can be for increasing word count. On the one hand, word counts accumulate more slowly when it isn't a descriptive passage. On the other hand, it helps speed along the plot (a key part of novel writing, I understand).

Because I'm used to newspaper-style writing, I've been adding a lot more "he said" or "Brooke asked" type statements at the end of sentences than a seasoned author might. But I haven't been doing it (thus far) to pad the word count, it just seems to be the way I naturally write.

Journalists are taught early that the word "that" can, 9 times out of 10, be completely removed from a sentence without making a difference to its meaning. "She figured that she'd be home by 10 p.m.," for example, could easily do without the extra word. In news copy, I excise the word as often as possible. When it comes to my novel, I have to say I'm embracing it. Ooops.