Tag Archives: NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day Thirty: DONE!

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I made it, kids! It was an uneven, weird, at times exhausting month, but I made it. I screeched into home plate, keyboard smoking at about 1:30pm or so this afternoon with a grand total of 53,212 words!

I’m not sure how I managed to wrap the whole thing up today, because last night when I sat down at 7:30 it seemed like I had a LOT left to write. However, by 10:20 a bunch of weird and unexpected things had happened to my characters, and the story seemed on the verge of wrapping itself up! Today I sat down with the intent of just adding some words to the count in preparation for the “real” writing session this evening, and an hour later I sat back and went, “Hey – HEY! I’m…I’M DONE!”

Man, another year of NaNo, and another novel. It’s pretty freaking obvious that I’m capable of actually mechanically assembling enough words to write a novel. I’m kind of worried about what the next real question/challenge is: that of turning those drafts into works that are also so entertaining that not only do people want to read them, they want to PAY to read them. Urgh. How do I do that? When I figure that out, I’ll let y’all know, and likely I’ll be doing jumping jacks at that point.

For now, hah, for now I’m writing 400-word “information articles” on “old metal signs, vintage metal signs, retro metal signs.” It took me about two hours to write 400 words on that somewhat repetitive subject, and I should clear $2.80 for that effort, which covers about half the cost of the coffee drink I bought while I was writing it. Hmmm…writing, good. Finance? Not so good. Oh, and I found out AFTER I got all fixed up on this content site that they only pay you when you’ve amassed enough work for a $25 payment. Somehow they leave that out of all the info up front. You only see that once you’ve written your first article and submitted. Cute, right? How many people do you suppose write four or five articles, get tired of it, and then never write enough to get a first payment? This may be the reason that the company was able to inform me in a recent email that their first-year business effort netted them a status of “in the black” for every day but one out of the first year of operation.

I say all this with cynicism, but a healthy does of humor as well. I don’t hold anything against them for the work I’m given now. It’s still a good way for me to get my chops back, and I can already say to any prospective freelance employers, “Yeah, I’m familiar with SEO writing. I’ve done that.”

Okay, now my word count for this entry is over 400 words, which means I’ve hit the $2.80 mark for content, and I should quit while I’m ahead. Y’all take care, and keep up with whatever creative endeavors you enjoy. I wish you the best in your efforts.

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day Six

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I am officially at 12,600 words, which puts me ahead from the daily average of 10,002 for today. That’s not bad, but I would like to be further ahead than that. I hope to possibly write again a bit this evening before going to bed. If not, there will be much more writing tomorrow.

I worked on sculpture this afternoon, and was pleased with the amount of work I got done. I put in something like three hours on it. It didn’t seem like I got much done until the end, and it still sort of seems that way, but as I often say, “Well, I had to sit there for X hours to do it, so it doesn’t matter if it seems like a lot or not, it was going to take me X hours regardless.”

These are the major elements of the most recent sculpture.

Tomorrow, more sculpting, more writing. So far I believe I’m on track for both, or closely so. Sculpting is a littler harder to guess, but if I break it up into four-week estimates, I guess it looks like I’ve gotten a fair amount done for one week. Similar progress over the next three weeks should (hopefully!) result in a finished product at the end of the month…I think?

Continued good luck to all my WriMo friends! Keep at it! We’re one-fifth of the way through!

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day Four

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Day Three got me zip in the word count, but I was pretty much planning on that. I drew that night with Jem instead of writing, and it paid off, because we actually, finally finished a piece! Not sure what we’re going to do with that, but it’s done now. I’ll get pics up later.

For Day Four I planned to get more writing done, kind of bulk up on some writing, but it didn’t quite work out that way. I wanted to get around 3000 words down. I got almost exactly two thousand, 1,990, actually. Not bad. Good for a day, and a bit past the 1,667-word minimum. I’m up to 9,444 words now, which still has me ahead of the curve. I’m very close to being one fifth of the way done, and that feels good.

This weekend there’s a break in band activity, and I plan on bearing down on both sculpture work and writing. I hope to make my word count literally soar into the realms of the ridiculous and to have some sculpture progress worth showing to you. I hope to have pics. DOn’t hold your breath on that one, though, because I seem to have become terrible at actually posting photos even though I’ve taken thousands over the last few months.

More to report on Day Five later. Write on, WriMos!

NaNoWriMo, Day Two

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Today ends at 7,454 words. That’s well past the necessary 3,334 to keep on pace for a 30-day win, but I’m padding. There are going to be some days where I’m sure I’ll not get to write much. I have a sculpture commission that is due in mid-December, so I have to make sure that I am more than on track with NaNo. Today, in fact, I even started on the sculpture as a “break” from writing. The irony! I didn’t get much done on it, but it is a start, and that’s important. I also managed to squeeze in getting some laundry done and getting some shaving cream picked up at the store. These are the little things that suddenly seem monumental during NaNo. You go, “I’ll just go to the store – wait! That’s…that’s going to take 23 minutes out of my day! I could write 500 words in 23 minutes! I…I don’t know if I can make that sacrifice! Maybe I’ll just shave with bar soap tomorrow…”

Shaving will commence as normal tomorrow. And I’m not even close to feeling like I need to give up time for showering. Not yet, anyway.

Best of luck to all you fellow WriMos out there!

NaNoWriMo, Day 1

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All right, kids, it’s that time of year again. I’m starting it dog-tired, because I was at Steak & Shake last night at midnight kicking off this insanity with about a dozen other writers. This post is short, because I’m really exhausted. I’m about a thousand words into my story. I’m not sure what it’s about yet, except an electric ray figures into it, and so does a boy in his teens. We’ll discover it together, then, eh? Come along and let’s see what we find in the insanity that is National Novel Writing Month. Only 49,000 words to go!

Night Light and NaNo Novel

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This was the only picture I had energy left for after spending about two hours straight talking about my NaNo novel. The discussion was a lot more exciting than this picture, but not so exciting that you’d actually want to hear the details. I just got some feedback and ideas on what I might want to change for the rewrite. Ugh, I just backed up my commitment to the rewrite in that last sentence. Gah. GAH! Rewrite! AHHHH!

I should do this, though. I should rewrite it. I told myself I was going to, and, I don’t know, maybe it’s not such a bad story, you know? Maybe. That might not even matter, the good or lack of good in the whole thing. It might just be important that I go back and write the whole thing, you know? Might just be important to follow through, to get some practice at that, get some idea of what it’s like to do a rewrite, maybe confirm that I actually am into this whole thing. With all this metal stuff lately, it’s been hard to concentrate on other stuff, but that novel is out there now, out there on my hard drive, and I think I should give it some effort. It may not be awesome, but it’s not horrid, either.

Well, we can’t have that

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Ugly

Less ugly

Today’s pic o’ the day brings with it – an extra pic! Woohoo! You’re welcome.

I usually try to limit it to just one picture to force myself to learn to make decisions, but today’s post simply wasn’t going to go over so hot without having a “before” shot. And, um, actually, the “before” shot is really more of a “already started, but still ugly” shot.

Shall I explain? I shall. In the top photo in the foreground you can see what looks like a pretty ugly piece of wire. In the, um, aft-ground a wire that looks kinda shiny. That wasn’t like that minutes before I shot this. All the wires looked blackened and scarred up like the foremost one. I wish I’d thought to take a picture before I started cutting things off. Pity. At any rate, there were two main wires for the track that were haphazardly connected to each other with two U-shaped pieces. They were all horrible welds, and some of the pieces were nearly cut in half rather than being welded together. It was a mess, and I didn’t think it was even going to stick together for long.

With my recent success in welding, I decided I absolutly had to fix that aberration. I picked up the bolt cutters and proceeded to remove all manner of nastiness. Then I fabricated new pieces to go in place of the dead ones. It took a total of ten welds to get everything back together, and I’m happy to say that only two of those were less than decent. Unfortunately, you can actually see one of them here (that black dot on the connecting piece is a hole), but an 80% success rate for me is ridiculously high. In short, it was a good night, a very good night indeed. I hope this streak of goodness continues, then we’ll be able to look at photos of me building stuff instead of pictures of welded spots like these.

Did I mention I wanted a punch press yesterday? I’d like one, thanks. And the vertical mill also, still want that. A lot.

Did I also mention that I was looking up geometry on line and CAD stuff and that I looked up the course requirements for a machinist? Yep, losing my mind here, folks.

Tonight I’m also going to meet with someone from my NaNo group and we’re going to go over the edits and suggestions we had for each other after swappping novels. I do still write, you know, lest that be forgotten amidst this morasse of machinery obsessiveness.

TGIO NaNoWriMo!

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It may not look like a gala event, but spirits were high at the coffee shop where we held our TGIO party following the end of yet another fantastic November for NaNoWriMo. It’s largely a general bag session, although things change from year to year, and apparently sometimes it’s been a bit more formal or dinner-oriented. One thing that is a continuing tradition, regardless of venue, is the reading of Autosummarized Novels.

There’s this function on Microsoft Word called “Autosummary.” What the true purpose for this is I have no idea, but it makes for big fun when combined with a novel of many thousands of words. What you do is, you highlight all your text, then select the function, and you can trim down your 50K-word novel to a summary of most-occurred phrases or sentences of between five hundred lines and ten words. We usually go for about 100 or 200 words. We gather these up and read them out loud, and they all sound rather ridiculous and repetitive and completely nonsensical – which kind of sums up how a lot of us feel while we’re in the middle of writing a novel of 50 thousand words in the time frame of a single month!

The novel has landed!

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I have truly amazed me this year. Last year I wrote 76 thousand words in thirty days during NaNoWriMo. However, while the word count was fairly impressive and I was very pleased with that, the novel itself, the story, was not finished at said 76K. It took me another seven months to write just 16 thousand words and wrap the novel up at 92K. I was happy with the entire effort, and pleased that I was able to both meet the challenge of actually writing an honest-to-goodness novel-length story, not to mention the fact that I FINISHED it(!) (and we all know what a big fan I am of finishing things!!!), but it was a lengthy process, one which sucked up my creative writing energies for pretty much every other project that might have possibly come my way.

This year my goal was to not only write the 50 thousand words in 30 days, but to actually complete an entire novel, from “It was a dark and stormy night” to “and they all lived somewhat happily together ever after except when they had to decide who was going to pay for pizza or whose turn it was to take out the trash” by the end of the month.

I am extremely happy to say that, despite starting with nothing more than the idea of “this guy is looking for a job, and he meets this other guy” I slogged and scraped and sprinted my way through the month of November to wind up with an entire rough draft of a novel from first word to last by 9:22pm Eastern Time this evening. I even have an entire day left! Hah!

I am currently basking in the glow of accomplishment, celebrating by listening to some music and drinking a little water (yeah, I live big)…and wondering about The Next Big Challenge: turning this thing into a polished finished draft. Stay tuned, kids. It could get messy…or neater and more coherent, perhaps!