NaNoWriMo Up to Today

Okay somehow Blogger's spam filter is kaput. Great, just great. Don't take it personally if I invoke Captcha for a while, although I hope there's a workaround.

Ummm let's see. I've had a busy non-writing week, and an okay writing week too. I'm about to hit a couple of kaboom moments that I've been waiting to unleash for a while, so that's exciting. My main character isn't going to see what's coming. As it turns out he's a wee bit smug, so I think I'll enjoy smashing him in the face with the plot equivalent of a wet fish.

In the meantime, I've been reading super short novels and ultra short stories. If you haven't read them, I heartily recommend Daisuki by Hildred Billings and The New Death and Others by James Hutchings, for totally different reasons.

Hildred's book is naughty lesbian erotica (or maybe porny romance?). Hildred manages to deftly balance fun sex scenes with an exploration of what it's like to be a gay woman in Japan and a central romance in which, despite conflict, we aren't asked to choose sides but rather understand both characters' points of view. It's lovely.

James Hutchings's short story collection sits somewhere between a modern, snarky Aesop's Fables and a perverse version of the Grimm Brothers' Fairy Tales, with a smidge of Cthulhu thrown in just for fun. There's some shorter poetry in the mix, also, which is everything short poetry should be, which is to say clever. James, I trust you wouldn't mind my sharing a bit from the poem that convinced me I was going to have a great time reading the collection, "If My Life Was Filmed:"

If my life was filmed, it would
go straight to DVD
and someone who was famous once
would have the role of me
and if five stars meant 'excellent'
you'd give it two or three
and most of those who rented it
would watch ironically.

Seriously, The New Death and Others is worth your time if you like smart ideas played out in the time it would take to crack a whip. It's worth the investment to get to read the second half of "If My Life Was Filmed."

(37060 words)

NaNoWriMo 2012: The Lost Week (Days, uh, Five Through Ten?)

By Andreas Praefcke, via Wikimedia Commons

So, I've been writing. And there was that little blip in the middle of last week when I participated in Mina's Resurrection Blogfest, which was great. I am still making the rounds of people's entries, so if I haven't visited but you're on the linky list, I will see you sometime soon.

This year's NaNo isn't the frenzy that last year's was, but it is going well. Every time I write a novel length manuscript (and I've done five or six, I guess?) I feel like I'm getting closer to a real book. Last year's was an amazing bit of chaos, for which I still feel that I have to do some research to supplement what I wrote. (Seriously. I don't want to be irresponsible about stuff.) This year, my plan to go way more character-focused has paid off, not necessarily in terms of sky high word count, but most definitely in terms of feeling like I know what my next step will be, and writing with that in mind. 

I'm at the point now where my main character has to make the decision that will determine his fate for the rest of the story - or at least set the parameters for the rest of the story. Oh, and there's a nasty fellow whose eyes are sewn shut. Yup, we're still in the dark here. It's a good place to be.

Word Count: 25126

NaNoWriMo 2012: The Adoption Society (Day Two)

This month I'm using a gorgeous NaNo-based wallpaper for my computer background by Kiriska. I've used her designs in the past. They are wonderful because she does deeply aesthetically pleasing calendars for any number of screen resolutions, and offers daily word counts for both the usual NaNoWriMo goal of 50k, and the doubly ambitious 100k.

The other great thing about Kiriska's stuff is that she includes little challenges and suggestions on each day of the calendar. Today's suggestion was "adopt a something from the adoption forum." So I did.

I didn't adopt Markus, but he is currently available at the Hamilton SPCA if you want him.
Look at that face!

The Adoption Society forum at the NaNo main site is a place where writers go to post their superfluous yet brilliant ideas for others to use. After combing through some of the threads (Adopt an Illness! Adopt an Insult! Adopt a Pet Name!), I chose to adopt an obstacle. I chose it from a list of simple yet devious problems that virtually any character might plausibly face in the course of a story. The one I chose is good and juicy: it will massively complicate the lives of two of my characters. It's going to be a while before I'll be writing the scene in which I'll use the obstacle, but I can't wait.

Even if you're not officially NaNo-ing, I highly recommend a browse through the forum to get you thinking about ways to make your current project that much more fun.

Word Count: 5440 

NaNoWriMo 2012: The Writening Day One

So tired. Thursdays and Sundays are my days off, so I was fortuitously able to spend much of today writing and plot figure-outing.

One thing I'm doing is trying to pre-think my characters a bit better, rather than have them be all haphazard (and therefore flat). I've got some scant plot points sketched out, but more importantly, I'm drawing some handy schematics for my characters that are helping me remember what their typical responses should be in a given situation.

So far, I've drawn up some dodgy looking notes on tiny slips of blue paper. This is the one I did for Walter Esterson, a secondary antagonist:

Yup, it's messy. Sorry about that: these are raw notes. In case you can't read my writing, these two triangles represent a summary of Walter's character. The top triangle maps his strengths (things he's good at), weaknesses (things he isn't good at), and vulnerabilities (what he cares about / what can hurt him). The lower triangle maps his goal, what motivates him to reach that goal, and who he conflicts with. Both of these schematics I've adopted thanks to listening to the Storywonk podcast. Alastair and Lani go into both of these ideas in detail over the course of numerous episodes, so if you find the schematic confusing or want to know more, that's where you should go.

I've been thinking about keeping my characters "cleaner" - i.e., doing more to get to know them and make them more self-consistent - ever since reading Game of Thrones earlier this summer. One of the many things that George R. R. Martin is amazing at is making a character's traits grow directly out of his or her place in society and other circumstances.

In making myself think through this simple schematic, I found that I had to push a minor character like Walter Esterson to a more nuanced place. I needed someone who could and would function like a bully. The world I'm writing allows for a particularly dark version of magic. Walter basically feeds on conflict: the more he can draw someone into a fight with him, the more power he has. Without conflict, though, his magic doesn't work. That idea gave me strengths and weaknesses for Walter, but I had to think a while to give him something that he really cared about. We can be hurt in those areas where we open ourselves up.

I decided to give Walter a love interest: Sparrow Lao, a member of his gang of ne'er-do-wells. The way I'd been picturing Walter, he was basically a flat villain type, eager to make mincemeat of my main character. Giving him something to really care about not only softens Walter a bit, it also changes his responses in the scenes where he and Sparrow are together. He's just as interested in offering Sparrow support as he is fighting. I'm really liking the way these schematics serve as a reference for me to review all of a character's concerns, before I insert him or her into a scene. It makes tracking them through an interaction much more fun. Because I'm working on a story where the conflicts are multi-directional, I'm hoping this will help me grow my plot fairly organically.

I plan to draw schematics like this one for each character I introduce, major and minor. It only takes a moment or two, but it forces me to answer questions I might not have thought through.

Day One Word Count: 3291