A Novel Journey: From Start to Finish

As you may notice from the shiny new participation badge at the top of the screen (ignore the word count badge…it’s not working yet), I will be participating in NaNoWriMo 2010 in less than one month.

On the one hand, I’m a moron…not only am I going to be EIGHT FREAKIN’ MONTHS PREGNANT during NaNo this year, but I also am nowhere near finishing my poor zombie novel.

But I look at it this way:
I’ve participated in NaNo two years in a row, and won both years…I don’t want to break my streak if I can help it. Additionally, I’m hoping that the craziness of the month will spark some of that writing spirit. I don’t know how much time I’m going to have for writing once the baby is here, but we’ll just have to see what happens, yes?

I will publish this book, so help me f&$%. :P

As you may have established from the almost two months of radio silence, I did not, in fact, finish the novel and get my free copy. I’m understandably disappointed, but ‘C’est la vie’! I dramatically underestimated both the amount of studying I would be required to do for my apprenticeship training, and also the level of exhaustion that would be enforced on me as my body nourishes the little mini-me growing inside it.

What that basically boils down to is that I didn’t have the time, and when I DID have the time, I was sleeping.

I take my second year of being unable to claim my free print novel as a personal failure, but I will not admit defeat. My apprenticeship training will be over at the end of this week, I’ve been feeling a lot better coming on to the second half of my pregnancy, and I have three whole months until NaNoWriMo ‘10. That’s plenty of time to finish this novel and get it printed, even if I have to pay for my own copy.

Get ready ladies and gents…we’re about to jump to hyper-drive mode.

It has been precisely 100 days since my last text update, and almost three months since my last overall update…you know, the one where I gave proof that I’d been working? Well I have a confession to make…not much has happened since that last update.

Or, I should restate that…plenty has happened, just not on the writing front.

You see, something a little more huge than finishing the novel has occurred…and it has had the result of exhausting me more than I ever thought was possible. It’s understandable, however. After all, my body is growing a whole new tiny little body inside itself.

:) :) :)

So now you know why I’ve disappeared off the face of the interweb. Ladies and gentlemen, the zombie-loving novelist is going to have a babay!!! <3

Other such nonsense as apprenticeship training is also occurring shortly, but thanks to a great sale on a new laptop for my hubby, I’ll be completely wiping and revamping our old laptop into a writing machine and be back on the horse in no time!

I have a whole…eep!…31 days to get my free novel copy! o_o

As has been the experience of many people before me, there are times when I feel as if time can’t move by quickly enough, and then there are times when I look at a calendar and wonder what I’ve been doing for the past three months.

You can probably guess what the case is at this particular moment.

I decided not to begin editing during December because I had amassed much to do over the course of NaNoWriMo. Christmas came and went, and now I find myself wondering where all my time has gone since then.

It is now February 19th. I have a little more than 4 months to mould Nowhere to Hide into something worth printing, before my free proof copy from CreateSpace (a ‘prize’ for finishing NaNo) expires. Think I can do it?

I really, really, REALLY hope so.

NaNoWriMo ‘09 is over for another year! I bagged my second win with just over 50400 words on the 29th, and then took a well-deserved day off on the 30th and watched other people cross the finish line.

I am both glad and sad that NaNo is over for another year. I’m sad because sometimes the stress of a deadline is what really gets you moving; as an example, I’ve been toying with the idea of a zombie novel for over a year now, but it’s only NaNo that got me actually writing it. But I’m glad because I was starting to get that spousal guilt that WriMo’s with husbands/wives tend to get…it starts as an annoyance that your spouse won’t leave you alone so you can write, and ends as a sad realization that you’ve been ignoring your loving other half for the better part of a month. They usually understand, of course, but it still makes you feel like a bit of an ass.

With that said, I breath a sigh of relief that I now have a (mostly) finished manuscript in my hands, ready to be fixed up, edited, proofed, and eventually printed.

It is with a sigh of pain that I realize I still have to fix up, edit, proof, and eventually print my novel. And it’s going to take a LOT of work to turn this pile of half-formed ideas into something worth printing, let me tell you!

So wish me luck! Day 51 and I’m only a fraction of the way to the end of this journey!

We are now past the half-way point of NaNoWriMo. The week of evil has ended, and we are into the point at which many people find their novels suddenly take off into strange and wondrous new directions. It’s all downhill from here! (Supposedly…:P)

My novel has taken some strange turns that have amused me. Characters who I’d had major plans for turned out to be left for dead in the opening chapters, and new characters of whom I’d had no knowledge before I started suddenly became majorly important players. Scenes that I had meticulously planned out never occurred, while new and better scenes seemed to spring out of nowhere.

I won’t lie…the novel is a thing of awfulness. It will require a great amount of work from December on to turn it into a readable piece of literature worth printing. It is, however, amusing me greatly as I press on through the month, thinking of new and interesting tortures to bestow upon my poor, hapless characters.

This is the magic of NaNo…starting with an idea and turning it into something that is completely different from what you had originally intended, but yet still makes you excited for the words yet to come.

Why didn’t I become an author sooner? :P

Week 2 of NaNoWriMo is what a lot of participants refer to as the Week of Misery. It is the week where bad things happen. Some people will have technological failure (back up your document, for the love of puppies!), some people will have the outside world interrupt in cruel ways, and the overwhelming majority of us will contract…

dun dun dun duuuuuuuuuuuuuun….

…the dreaded Writer’s Block.

Week 2 is when the most NaNo participants will drop out, because for psychological reasons that none of us have yet been able to explain, it is at this point that your brain starts to melt. You lose track of your story, you doubt the likability (or hatability, as the case may be) of your characters, you start to truly believe that what you’ve written so far is complete and utter trash, or you just plain find yourself staring at the page wondering what the hell to write next.

Week 1 is an adventure. You’re either trying something new, or returning to an epic journey. You’ve got hundreds of ideas. Nothing is going to keep you down!

By week 3 you’re on cruise control. You’ve got enough written that the rest seems laughably obvious. You’re unstoppable!

In week 4 you realize that you’re definitely stoppable, but you’re too close to the finish to give up now, and so you push yourself into ultra-overdrive, using every trick in the book to make it past the finish line.

Week 2 is the smooth, shiny, 100-foot wall you’ve got to climb right in the middle of the journey.

I’m in week 2 right now. Things are looking grim. Much of what I had thought I had so perfectly planned out is not going according to my vision. The words tumbling out of me are ridiculously less than works of art. My brain is screaming at me that this is an incredibly waste of flash drive space. And yet I must persevere. All first drafts start out as something that the author thought was a waste of time and space. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be polished into an enjoyable journey. And that’s what it’s all about.

So I’m home from my trip, and rather a bit behind. I did not, as intended, get my word count up to where it should be for today before I left. I now find myself approximately 2 days worth of word count in the red, and into the first ‘catch-up’ mode of the month.

I’ve added a word-count calendar to the top of the page so you can follow my pain. Dark green days mean you well exceeded your word count. Dark red days mean you failed miserably on that day. The top, of course, shows my current word count. Watch, and pray that it goes up significantly by the end of the day. D:

EDIT: Changed the word count calendar to a plain word count widget for now because the calendar is reporting the wrong numbers for some reason. :P

If there’s one thing that all NaNo participants will tell you, it’s, “If shit is gonna happen, it’s gonna happen in November.”

(They might say it in a nicer way and with better grammar, but you get my meaning.)

During NaNoWriMo, it seems like everything is out to get you. Computers that have never had a single problem start glitching and erasing files at will; coffee cups mysteriously dump themselves all over your notebooks; children and pets are suddenly imbued with the will to hit/walk on your keyboard, causing massive erasure of your precious words. And barring technical difficulties, your boss suddenly decides that he really needs you to put in 60 hours this week, and friends and relatives you haven’t so much as spoken to for the last year suddenly decide they want to grace you with their presence for a day or two or ten.

It’s the Murphy’s Law of the Author’s world. The second you dedicate yourself to a deadline, you find a million and one reasons why you can’t write, or else a million and one pieces of proof that the world doesn’t want you to write.

I am about to experience one such issue. Starting tomorrow at 4 pm, until sometime late Sunday, I will be effectively unable to write. That’s three and a half days of 0 word count. The reason behind this is partially my problem (god damn why do we always schedule things so that they screw everything up!) but that somehow just makes it that much more frustrating.

So weep with me, while I spend the next 30 or so hours trying to get my word count to where it should be for Sunday, so that I don’t get too far behind.

WEEP.

Want to know one of the major mistakes that writer-wannabe’s make, particularly during an event like NaNoWriMo? It’s not what you might think:

You do not have to write your book in sequence.

It may not sound like a particularly ‘major’ thing, but the assumption that a book has to be written sequentially from ‘Once Upon a Time’ to ‘Happily Ever After’ has been the ruin of many a novelist. The fact of the matter is that there are going to be parts of your book that bore the hell out of you, or are particularly difficult to write, or are so shrouded in mystery that you aren’t even entirely sure what’s happening there.

These are things you should skip.

Writing these boring/difficult/non-understandable parts of your book can depress you, turn you against your book, and lead you to eventually giving up all together. You don’t want that!

The best thing to do, in my opinion (and the opinions of many, many other NaNo novelists) is to write the scenes that interest you, the ones you’ve been dreaming about, or the ones that you desperately want to see put down in print. Writing these ‘fun’ parts of your novel keeps you going, keeps you interested, and keeps the word count spinning. If you use this trick you’ll find that, by the time you find yourself necessarily returning to the boring or difficult bits, you’re ready and willing to tackle them because, well, you’re almost done! You’re not going to give up with just a few scenes left to write, are you?

No. No you are not.

:3