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NaNoWriMo 2012: Smile, Sigh, Collapse

November 30, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

On the last day, I managed to careen face-first in a half run, half fall across the finish line. My MS Word doc proudly displays “50,001” in the bottom left corner, which means, somehow, I did it. Oddly, the NaNoWriMo site validated it as 50,069, so I guess I got 68 words for free.

It’s a mess of notes and fragments and ill formed nonsense in a lot of places, but that doesn’t matter. It’s done. And I don’t have to look at it again for a long time. I will come back to edit eventually, as I love the premise and the heart of the stories I’ve written, but for now, to the depth of my Google Drive it goes.

I’m glad I tried it this year, despite my other priorities. It wasn’t nearly as smooth as last year, and the final product is a much hotter, stinkier mess, but I still feel like I learned a lot about myself and how I write. I’m probably going to try NaBloPoMo next year instead, so this victory might have to last me until November 2014 (Side note: Who put those two events in the same month?).

I’ll be back to beer-blogging soon. I’ve got all kinds of ideas lined up for December.

But no more write now. Brain need break. Drink beer. Play video game. Sleep maybe.

But no more write. Soon, but not now.

Yay.

NaNoWriMo 2012: 28 Days Later

November 28, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

Phew. I was just writing, and this is crazy, but if I write ~3500 words by Friday, I might hit 50,000 maybe.

I can’t believe I just did that. I’m so sorry, everyone everywhere.

I’d prefer to have this thing all nicely packaged and bundled into 50,000 words of finished product, but time and responsibility have a tendency to gang up on my good intentions and leave them broken and bloody in some dirty alley. Looks like I’ll be writing all the way up to and across the finish line this year.

Lessons learned this week:

1. Transcribe, transpose: I found a hidden cache of words that I had been hoarding in my little brown notebook, almost subconsciously. I had been scribbling notes, scenes, dialogue, ideas, and other literary detritus whenever I was away from my computer, and when I sat down to type it all up, I found I had nearly 4800 words in there! Sure, they were an incoherent mess of the very rawest of my brain oozlings, but they were words. Words in pursuit of the novel. And those count.

The double plus mega awesome advantage of transcribing notes from one medium to another is that you get a chance to do quick edits and fill out points you missed in your hasty penning. I even came up with a whole new idea for another story, just from some random thing I had drawn (it was like a mushroom-tiger-dragon-monstrosity-thing)!

2. Get up, get out: No joke, 16 of my 20 original short story ideas came to me while I was out wandering the world, experiencing the electromagnetic spectrum, interacting with other beings, living and inanimate. One came from noticing how a meeting presenter kept walking in front of the projector and the text from the PowerPoint slide looked like a tattoo on his forehead. Another came from watching some obscenely large rats run from cover to cover scavenging for food at the fountain in Dupont Circle. One even came from a late-night session of Borderlands 2 (who said video games never taught us anything).

It can be hard to come up with vivid, living ideas in the vacuum of your writing cave, so don’t make it any harder on yourself. Get out there. Check shit out. Ask questions. Drive across that bridge. Take note when something or someone or some concept bothers you. Take a picture of that weird flower or bush that totally looks like the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But don’t sit around in your pajamas trying to force the creativity to spontaneously explode inside your skull. Go get stimulated by some stimuli.

3. The word count doesn’t really matter, the ideas do: One of the reasons I’ve managed to keep up this month is because I’m masochistic and uber-competitive (even with myself). If I commit to something, the idea of failing to do that thing is worse than any other situation I can imagine, thus I tend to get it done, somehow someway. It’s either totally awesome and effective or terrible and unhealthy.

But really, it doesn’t matter if I or you or anyone makes the word count. It’s not like someone busts into our homes on December 1 and confiscates all of our computers and notebooks and pens and tiny scraps of pencil lead that could possibly be used to write. The ideas, thoughts, introspection, and other mine-able literary gold is what makes this month so great. It’s an opportunity for you to expand your brain, learn about some stuff you’d never even heard of, and hopefully learn about yourself as a result. It’s a chance to commit to something bigger than the right now, and work towards a real, tangible goal. It’s a chance to break the monotony of the perfunctory and think about exciting worlds where anything can happen, and heroes are real. It’s a chance to wring some satisfaction out of life, and remind yourself that you are creative and hardworking and really freakin’ love words.

So if you didn’t make 50,000, no big deal. If you came up with some great ideas, or even one pretty good idea, I’d say that’s a NaNoWriMo well spent. You’ve got plenty of time to write it all down, unless you are currently on fire or being chased by an ornery velociraptor. Take what you’ve learned this month about how and when and what and why you write, and store that in your database under “stuff that will make me a better writer.”

Writing drink of choice this week: Magic Hat Heart of Darkness Stout

This is a weird but compelling beer. It almost looks purple in the glass, just on the edges where light pierces the blackness of the body. It tastes choclately and heavy, sort of what you’d expect people from a SteamPunk novel would drink out of gas-powered beer steins or something. It lingers on your tongue for a while, making it a great “I’m in a pensive mood tonight” beer.

Is that weather vane a dragon or a fish or a fishdragon?

NaNoWriMo 2012 – Blackjack

November 21, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

21 days down, 35124 words down. 9 days left, 14876 words left.

I’ve finally brought my count back above par via a steady, wordy weekend and a few extremely productive “waiting for your wife after work” sessions. I’ve finished (and I use the term very, very loosely) 14 of my planned 20 stories, but also came up with ideas for 6 more stories while I was writing the others. Brains are weird sprawling idea farms, just waiting for the thresher of your imagination to come through and harvest all that nutritious mind-wheat.

Lessons learned this week:

1. Sometimes, distractions are good: I’ve been overloaded with school work and work work, to the point where I was finding it difficult to mentally upshift to my creative gears quickly enough to get any NaNoing done. So instead of smashing my head against my laminate desk, I decided to try and use the mindset I was already in to write something. The end result was one story that is highly technical with lots of science and numbers due to dominant left brain thinking (brought on by my day job), and another that is almost a long form prose poem completely made of right brain ramblings (from working on a school assignment).

I have no idea if these will stay in the collection – or if they are any good for that matter – but it taught me that state of mind doesn’t always need to be optimal to make word count.

2. Keyboard, or I’m bored: This is something I discovered last year, that has proven true again this year. The right keyboard makes ALL the difference for me. I can’t seem to get comfortable on certain makes and models, especially those that don’t have a satisfying thwack and clack when I’m writing feverishly. I can make do on my laptop, but I prefer a standalone, wired keyboard, with a scarce few bells and whistles (volume and media controls are allowed). I also for whatever reason, cannot write productively on a completely flush mounted keyboard, and don’t even try to write on a touchpad keyboard. Those things creep me out, especially with the fake tactile response.

I know, I’m weird. Whatever, I’ll just be that guy who demands a keyboard-n-mouse 20 years from now, long after the technology has been sunset, just like that weird old guy with the giant beard in your office who demands he use a typewriter for all this documents.

3. Quitting is for people who aren’t good at not quitting: I had a few times this month where I just had so many deadlines and due dates and other crap going on that I could have said, “Oliver, you gave it a good old fashioned college try, but maybe it’s just not yours this year.” But I didn’t. Because the only thing I hate more than being completely overwhelmed, is feeling like I gave up on myself. And squids. Seriously, fuck squids. Giant creepy tentacled jerks.

Giving up is easy. It’s the get-out-of-jail free card for your psyche; the “don’t worry about it champ, there’s always the next game” mentality. But it’s also lazy, and counter-productive. NaNoWriMo is the perfect time to build your confidence. You’re allowed to write whatever you want, however you want, with no real pressure or ramifications, and no one telling you what is good and what is bad. No editors sending you emails asking for drafts, no boss not-so-subtly reminding you that it is due by COB Friday.

This is your chance to prove that you can finish a project, and the conditions will never be more appropriate or forgiving. This is a chance for you to prove to yourself that you’re as awesome as you always think you are. Quitting is for people who are not-awesome. Are you not awesome? No. You are awesome. Go be awesome. Don’t quit.

Chuck Wending (of TerribleMinds) wrote a much more hilarious and inspirational post about the same idea. You should check it out.

4. Second winded: It feels great to be back above par. Sometimes the cure for your lack of productivity is to have one or two really productive days. It’s like having more energy after you get back from a really intense workout; it doesn’t really make sense, but it’s a phenomenon you should take full, sweaty advantage of.

Drink of choice: I just realized that I forgot to include my writing drink of choice last week! So here’s double duty for this week:

1. Flying Dog K-9 Winter Ale: Sweet, 7.4% ABV, slowly becoming a new winter favorite for me. Full review coming post-NaNo.
2. Rumbeard’s Rum-cider: So this isn’t exactly an original recipe, but it is something I always served to my gaming friends during the sub-30 degree months, and it’s been a hit for years. One part spiced rum (Sailor Jerry’s or Cap’t Morgans, usually) two parts apple cider, one cinnamon stick to flavor and stir, 90 seconds in the microwave. And for all those wondering, “Rumbeard” is my long standing gamer handle. I’ll tell you the story one day over some grog.

“The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.”

NaNoWriMo 2012 – 7 days (give or take a week)

November 7, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

Week one down. 10,032 words, just slightly under par. But it’s not for a lack of effort.

Lessons learned:

1. Writing begets writing…to a point – I’ve always said that the more you write the more you write, but I’ve discovered the upper limit of that maxim this week. Between NaNoWriMo, 4000+ words of writing for homework, the writing I do during my nine-to-five, and various sundry activities that involve letters and words and sentences, I’ve reach critical mass. My brain has stopped processing; fiction seems fact and I’m editing stuff I’ve already edited because I can’t remember what I edited the first time around. It is a good thing to flex your muscles and stay in shape, but over training just leads to exhaustion.

If anyone you know ever says they want to do NaNo while also working full time and taking two graduate level classes, buy them a cup of coffee.

2. Practice makes perfect, or at least perfunction – I find that NaNo this year, despite new responsibilities and distractions, is actually significantly easier than last year. The writing flows more smoothly, and I have confidence that it’s OK to write some stuff that doesn’t sound perfect because I know I’ll be able to fix it in edits. It could be a side effect of so saturating myself in all things writing, or just that a success last year instilled in me some badassery and boldness, but when I do get my time to sit down and write it comes out with almost no painful forcing of my brain juices.

Once you know you can do something, doing it again becomes more an exercise in repetition than self-confidence.

3. Short Stories are @#$@% awesome – I think if I was writing a traditional novel right now, I’d be much farther behind on word count. Being able to mentally leap from story to story, at different points in time in different places in the world makes getting words down blissfully simple. If I’m not feeling the next chronological section, I’ll just go wherever my creativity flairs. It allows me to writing something despite my mood or level of fatigue and gives me freedom to loosely add to the overall world of my novel. It will probably mean a lot more consistency checking once I’m finished, but it seems a tiny tax in the bigger view of the project.

A novel made up of short stories is basically a normal novel where themes and recurrence replace direct plot.

4. Mobility is king – Given my time constraints, I’ve been finding myself writing in less than optimal places. Cramped metro seats, in 15 minute breaks during meetings, in my car waiting to pick up my wife. I’m normally such a creature of habit that I need to be at my desk to write. But this November has forced me from my comfortable blanket of habits. I’ve been whipping my laptop out at pretty much every opportunity and filled margin to margin of pages in my little notebook with hasty inken scribblings.

Always be ready to get uncomfortable when necessity rears its ugly head.

Writing drink of choice for week one: Swedish Style Glögg (one part IKEA Glögg, one part Barefoot Cabernet Sauvignon, 90 seconds in the microwave. You can thank me later.)

How is everyone else doing? Making word count? Behind? Ahead? Off-track, on-track? I’d love to hear about some other experiences so far!

Simple ingredients.

NaNoWriMo 2012: Be Right Back!

October 30, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

In two days, my life is (voluntarily) going to get a lot busier.

I’ve got a lot of things to figuratively juggle; my job, my house, grad school (and lots of writing-centric homework), eating, sleeping, occasionally bathing, playing with my kittys, snuggling with my wife, drinking beer, and of course, my blog. Something in my long list of labors has to temporarily be put aside. Unfortunately, it’s something that I really enjoy but that also consumes a lot of my creative energy.

So, to all my delightful readers: I apologize if my LitLib posts throughout November are sparse. I will post weekly updates as to how far into NaNoWriMo waters I’ve waded, and some lessons learned from my daily writing sessions. I also have a few posts in the hopper that just might make an appearance in case I find myself in the middle of miraculous void of “nothing to write.”

I appreciate everyone who stops by and reads my work; you’re the ones keeping me engaged and giving me the feedback that validates my whole crazy dream. By December I’ll have a manuscript ready for edit and a lot of new experience to pass along about the creative blur that is NaNoWriMo!

Catch you all on the flip side, and all that.

Coming soon!

Craft and Draft: Thinking versus Knowing

October 16, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

The late-October NaNoWriMo runway is littered with the corpses of tens of thousands of would-be novels. Lots of these stories were cleared to fly, passed all the safety checks, but at the last minute, without warning, exploded into an awesome burst of words and pages. If we could recover the black boxes from this mangled writing-wreckage, it’d would be pretty easy to prove that the pilot (read: author) was responsible for the crash.

In my little online social circles, this time of year is made up of three definitive stances:

1) The battle criers: Those people who are feverishly looking forward to NaNo. Those people who already have their pens laid out in a perfectly perpendicular manner. Those people who can and will take time off work to make word count.

2) The wafflers: Those people who just aren’t sure. Those who think it could be fun, but don’t want to commit. Those who have a good idea that could be a great idea if it was given the chance.

3) The defeatists: Those who can’t imagine being able to write a novel in a month. Those with every excuse you’ve ever heard, and then 10 more. Those who treat writing as a novelty, not as a necessity.

I don’t need to talk to the battle criers; y’all will do your thing regardless. It’s not the defeatists I want to talk to either, most of them won’t even make the attempt, making my cheerleading nothing more than words wasted.

It’s you wafflers. You know who you are. You love to write – and are probably pretty good at it – but you haven’t given your work the time or credit it deserves. You don’t take the time to focus on your craft because you feel like it is a waste of time, in a world where you don’t really have any time to waste.

I know the feeling; you’ve got a lot of other stuff to do. Job. Kids. House. Video games. Expensive drug habit. I get it, I really do.

But if you love to write (and I mean “love” in the dirty, visceral, would-stab-a-dude to get to your keyboard, kind of way) then you are only hurting yourself. The longer you go dismissing your own passions and skill, the weaker that skill will become, until it is a shriveled up domovoi who does nothing more than languish around your psyche like an unwanted, unwashed house guest.

I’d be naive to think one little poorly proofread blog post could magically change your mind, but I still want to pass along the one little thing that helped me turn the corner with my writing and let me embrace it as something that I can and should and will do:

Don’t think that you want to write, know that you want to write. Don’t think you are a good writer, know you are.

Thinking you can do something opens a door in your mind, an hidden back entrance that allows doubt to park his U-Haul and move in permanently. Thinking you can do something sets up parameters in your mind where defeat or failure is an acceptable outcome. Thinking is for philosophers and politicians.

But knowing you can do something? Oh man. When you know what you are capable of, there is no room for doubt. He can knock at your door all he wants, but your confidence just calls the cops and has him arrested for stalking.

The great part about knowing something is that it doesn’t even have to be true at this very moment. You can know that you have the potential to write a novel that will be popular and sell, and it will set you on the course to do just that. It’s an affirmation and a reassurance all rolled up into one cozy feel good blanket of self-imposed awesomeness.

So, don’t make excuses for yourself if you really want to do NaNoWriMo.

Know you can do it, don’t just think so.

[Saying or text appropriate for a motivational poster goes here]

NaNoWriMo 2012: Rules

October 10, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

There is really only one rule for NaNoWriMo: write 50,000 words in 30 days.

The rest is sort of nebulous, like a floating blob of guidelines that only loosely apply on a novel by novel basis. I mean, you’re not supposed to write anything before November 1. You’re not supposed to write anything you’ve had in the hopper for a while, and you’re not supposed finish anything you started a while back, and you’re not supposed to drink beer in the morning.

But these are all just suggestions really. Chris Baty isn’t going to come to your house and beat you over the head with a bag full of gerunds if you break any of the “rules.” It’s your month of writing, so I say: do whatever the hell you feel like doing.

Sure, it’s National Novel Writing Month, but if you want to write nonfiction – go for it! You want to write short stories instead of a novel? You better believe I endorse that idea. You want to finish a novel you started in college? By all means. Hell you can even just write one, 50,000 word long sentence if that’s what does it for you.

NaNo is a catalyst, a reason, a scripted event, that has one ultimate goal for us as writers: get words down on the page.

That’s it. No other secret, subtext, or hidden message for us to decipher. Just a thing that makes us write, and write a lot.

So, if you were being sheepish about NaNo because you thought you’d have to flout the rules and ruin the entire spirit of the thing, don’t sweat it. If you want to write, write. Use NaNo as a booster shot to your literary immune system.

I, for example, have been feverishly planning. If I’m going to spend 30 days writing my hands off, I feel like I should put that energy to good use.

I’ve got a traditional outline, but I also did something I’ve never done before, which turned out to be a shit load of fun.

I made a map of the world of my novel.

This isn’t complete, but it’s getting there.

What are you doing to prepare for NaNo, as per the rules, or not?

Craft and Draft: (October) 4th and Goal

October 4, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

Ermahgerd, thernly verrled NerNerWriMer perst!

Ahem, blech, hrrrruugggg. Cough.

Oh my god! Thinly veiled NaNoWriMo Post!

It’s October and we all know what that means. Pumpkin ale, and raking leaves, and Cinammon Apple Yankee Candles for everyone! Oh, and NaNoWriMo 2012 starts in roughly one month. 27 days to be more accurate, or 26, really, since today halfway over.

Last time, I talked loosely about preparation. What and how and why we’re going to punish our brains throughout November. I even made some new masochistic writing friends! I’ve been spending my off-time (what little there is of it) working on the outlines for my stories and building the structure that I plan to fit them all into. It’s a steaming mess of Word docs right now, but the idea is gestating and hopefully my little bundle of literary joy will be nearly fully formed come December 1.

But today, I’m more concerned about the future. The time beyond NaNo 2012, the cosmic unknown of days and events that have only happened in our dreams. Things like NaNoWriMo are great catalysts for getting shit done, but they beg the much larger questions: why are you writing a novel and what do you plan to do once you’ve written it?

Phil (via Writer’s Codex) got me thinking about why I write, and what that means about the person I am and the person I want to be. I write partly out of catharsis, partly for fun, and partly as a manual “Save As…” function for my brain. I’ve got a lot of potent abstracts bouncing around in there, and writing makes me feel like I’ve got a way to catalog them. A Dewey decimal system for my ideas, emotions, musings, and memories, if you will.

And more importantly, I write because it makes my brain all bubbly with joy, which makes life that little bit sweeter.

The why of writing is a philosophical abstract; it’s the same as asking why some people merely like cookies and some people would commit felonies for a tray of freshly baked chocolate chip wonder. We may never know the answer. You can muse on it all day, but may never find an answer that truly satisfies your self indulgent inquiry.

It’s brain-stretching to think about why I write, but it doesn’t get me very far in terms of my craft. I prefer specifics; concrete ideas with real, undeniable answers. Something with some weight behind it, like a good machete or a loaf of stale french bread.

To that end, I’ve established goals that I constantly remind myself of to keep me on track. They are, as of today:

-Finish my masters by the end of 2013 (slated to write my thesis next fall)
-Publish my first “large work” (this could be a number of things) before I’m 30 (I’m 27 on Oct. 21)
-Update my blog (to keep my writing muscles toned) at least twice a week
-Make writing a priority over other non-mandatory things (as fun as Borderlands 2 is, it isn’t going to satiate that creative thirst)
-Enjoy the act of writing, not just the final product (because, duh)

These have kept me focused and committed, even on the days I just don’t feel like doing the Fingers-Keyboard dance. I’ve found that they work sort of like affirmations; the more I remind myself of these goals, the more I see myself moving towards completing them, and the happier I feel about being a few words closer to achieving a dream.

Our brains are crazy powerful if we let them off the leash.

So to all my fellow NaNo’ers: Beyond why you write, what are your goals for your writing? Do you do it just to keep the legions of brain-demons at a sword’s length, or are you striving for a taste of validation via large-scale publishing? Are you writing to get that mega-huge, sprawling idea into something more tangible, or just for the personal challenge of the whole thing?

Whatever your reasons, setting goals will help. Without a goal, you can never score.

“My goal is to be the first cat to complete a jigsaw puzzle. Or steal all of the pieces and hide them under the bed. Either way.”

NaNoWriMoFreOPreBlo

September 17, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

Or, as I like to call it: “National Novel Writing Month Freak Out Preparatory Blog”

After this week, and the next week, there are only four weeks left until NaNoWriMo! Time to officially start freaking out, if you’re into that kind of thing.

I participated in my first NaNoWriMo last year, and found the experience pretty interesting. I played by all of the traditional rules, writing every day, lusting after that tasty goal of 50,000 words in ~30 days. While I didn’t attend any local writing meet-ups, or really work within any writing community to speak of, I still found the entire event a great catalyst to plain getting shit done.

I’m going to play again this year, despite having even more on my plate than last year. I wrote nearly 80,000 words last year (ok, some of those came post December 1, but it was in the same fit of writing), which is more fiction than I wrote in the other 11 months combined (I don’t keep track of how much nonfiction I write, for whatever reason).

This year, I’m going to break from tradition, and write a collection of short stories. It’s the same idea in principle, words into stories into a book, it’s just a bunch of smaller narratives instead of one big, epic one.

I also hope to be part of a bigger community this year. If anyone wants to get in on some hot, word on word NaNo action, my handle is: OliverGray14 (my profile picture is the same as my twitter acount, me in a sweet bowler hat)

To prepare, I’ve already outlined the basics of the stories, as well as the plot lines and characters for each. I’ve also started mentally getting into “shitload of writing everyday mode” which involves finger stretching exercises and building my caffeine tolerance. I still need to figure out if my stories are all going to tie together, or if they are going to be stand alone.

Is anyone else out there doing NaNo this year? If so, are you preparing yet, or am I just freakishly proactive?

NaNoWriMo is no place for a pony, even one so brave as Bill.