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Got together with some of my WriMo friends today for a write-in. We had a good group. I think all told we had about a dozen people show up throughout the afternoon. Many words written at those tables that day!
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Doesn’t take much to make me happy. A few free hours with the laptop, a latte, and some kind of bran/granola/fabola/roll-a.
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This was right before I sat down at the local coffee shop to get to work for the evening. Notice I have all the necessities: laptop, coffee, biscotti, and a really big harmonica.
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It’s that time of year again, folks! My life is officially being swallowed by the worldwide phenomena known as National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo to those of us who talk about it so much we have to shorten it. The challenge is to write a novel of not less than fifty thousand words in thirty days. I did it last year, got 76K of a 92K novel written in thirty days. I hope to be a lot closer to finishing my novel this year at the end of the month rather than dragging it out for an additional seven months afterward as I did last year.
It is very likely that my life will devolve into me spending most of my time at my laptop writing for the next thirty days. It is highly likely that posts here will become erratic and that you may not see the picture posts put up in a very timely manner. Rest assured, I’m not dead or sequestered on jury duty. I’m just writing a novel. A whole novel. In a month.
Ever wanted to be a zombie? Thought so. Me too, but until now, I never dared believe that such a dream could be mine. It’s not in the bag yet, though, so maybe I just better back up and explain what I know at this point.
A few weeks back I was goofing around on Facebook (yep, I do that, and I do it very well, thank you!) when I saw that one of my friends had added a group to her favorites. The group was called “8 Wheels of Death,” and it had this kicky little graphic with two skate wheels making up the number eight. Combining wheels with anything gets me interested, so I clicked on it. Lo and behold, what should I find but a group for “the upcoming top-secret Roller Derby Zombie short movie to be filmed during the summer of 2009” in my old college town. “What the heck,” says I, clicking on the “Join this Group” button. “I’ll keep tabs on it. Sounds like fun.”
A week later an announcement went up: “A round of auditions will be held Saturday, June 27, from 4-7pm in 9th St Park.” “Huh,” says I, “this might be interesting.” I didn’t take any action, though. I mean, me, get involved in a movie? They’d probalby need for me to be places and do things and – well, that could all get very busy and uncomfortable! I just noted it and went back to my usual Facebook sending of flair and putting up announcements of finishing writing my novel (BOOM! Didn’t see that coming, did you?!).
A couple of days after that a note goes out to everyone in the group: “We need a cool old car for a scene, so if you know of anyone who has one…” *Tom smiles wickedly and rubs his hands together over the keyboard, then begins pecking* “Dear Mr. Director, I may have something you’d be interested in…”
A day later the ’67 Chevelle has been conscripted as the “cool car” for a pivotal scene in the movie. “Hmm,” thinks myself, “maybe I should go ahead and goof off with this audition thing. I always wanted to be one of the living dead.”
I send the director an email: “Glad the car will fit your needs. I don’t think there’s any abuse it can’t take, and it’s kind of beat up anyway, which sounds like that’s what you want. I’ll be heading down for auditions this weekend, too. I’m not dying for a part or anything, but I just thought it would be a fun experience.” At this point it’s prudent to mention that I’ve never done any acting in my life, unless you count grade school spring pageants, and I don’t.
Days later I’m gassing up at a station as I’m about to head out of town for the audition. My brother calls from the drag strip to give me an update on the car’s performance, the same car that will be in the movie. All is good. In fact, he’s doing rather well with it. I congratulate him and say, “I gotta go. I have to gas up. I’m going down to Bloomington to audition for a zombie movie, and get this: they want the Chevelle to be in the movie!”
“Really?” says my brother. “That’s kickass!”
“I KNOW!” I say, grinning like an idiot. I’m getting more excited now that my brother is on board with the idea as well. I gas up and hit the road.
Ninety minutes later and I’m down at the park. I basically just wander over to the one shelter they have there where a few people seem to be headed. I guess that’s how these things come together.
I get up to the group, who are laying out papers and positioning something that looks exactly like a video camera. My powers of perception tell me that I have, in fact, picked the right group to wander toward (this assisted by the fact that there were no other groups in the area at the time).
I introduce myself, and everyone seems pretty happy to be there and happy that I’ve come out as well. They’re a little surprised that I drove 90 minutes for the audition, but I didn’t get the opportunity to tell them that there were no zombie movies auditioning in my town that weekend. (I let them think it’s because I love theatre so much.)
Since I am cool and think of you, my Awesome Readers so much, I had the foresight to bring my trusty Nikon. Behold the gallery o’ fun that makes up the first round of auditions for “8 Wheels of Death!”
I had a blast, and the Chris, the director, was very awesome in granting my request to read first, as I had to leave only about twenty minutes later so that I could drive back up north and play a gig. It was a full day, but one hell of a good time overall. Before I left, Chris told me that it looked like I would probably have a good chance of getting a speaking part in the movie. I read for the part of “Chester” the EMT, who’s pretty much a straight guy, but I also read for “Buck” who is a “smarmy redneck” who comes to a bad end. I’m a little hoping I get to be Buck, because he’s kind of a jackass, and I could SO have fun with that, because I’m so NOT that guy. (It would be the perfect excuse to wear a T-shirt that says “Chicks Dig Me” or “#1 Lover” or something equally tasteless.)
I will certainly keep you all updated on this one. Shooting takes place in July and August with plans to have it done and ready to show to the public by Halloween of this year, which is a pretty short turnaround on a movie, in my mind. It’s a zero-budget thing, and very campy, but I hope it comes out fun and wacky and entertaining all the same. From the folks I met it looks like it’s going to be a good time!
Oh, yeah, and that part about the novel? For those of you who have just tuned in, I started my first ever novel attempt on November 1, 2008 during the wonderful caffeine-infused frenzy that is NaNoWriMo. I got 76K words written within 30 days, which was more than enough to hit the challenge goal of 50K, but not enough to finish the story. My goal in entering NaNo was to completely write the rough draft of a novel, beginning to end. Since it wasn’t finished, I plodded along, and sometimes it seemed like I was never going to finish the damn thing, but the day finally arrived. The day after my zombie audition, June 28, I sat at a table in a funky little cafe near my home, typed the final sentence, sat back, took a sip of my latte, and clicked “Save” once and for all. 92,165 words, and they are all done and all mine.
Stay creative, kids.
Yesterday I posted a horrendously long, rambling, and only vaguely coherent comment on someone else’s blog. I’m not telling you whose, because it was that bad, or at least it seems that bad. Really, the length is what’s embarrassingly astounding about it, and it just looks heinous. As a too-kind soul who reads that blog as well as mine immediately pointed out, I had not even put an entry up on my own blog in quite some time. In an effort to drain myself of whatever wordery may be mucking up manky sponge that is my brain, I present to you what will likely be a long, rambling, and only vaguely coherent blog post. Enjoy?
NaNoWriMo has come and gone in its 30-day fourish of literary madness and caffeine. I enjoyed it thoroughly, except for the part where I didn’t reach the end of my novel. Oh, I hit the word count all right. I nailed that fifty thousand word minimum with a big ten-penny spike on the 18th of the month, so winning the challenge was not really a problem. Of course, in my head I figured that I’d battle out my novel with myself until somewhere around 50K, and I’d reach the finish line, exhausted but exalted at the end of the month.
No.
At 10K I wondered if I’d be able to make it to fifty.
At 20K I realized I had finally actually started writing the real story (plot).
At 35K I started to get jazzed that I was really going to make it to 50K!
40K…starting to get concerned that a major character still hasn’t shown up yet.
45K – realizing there’s no way on God’s green earth I’m ever going to wrap this up in five thousand words.
50K – pretty elated, for maybe thirty minutes. Keep writing.
60K – realize that another ten thousand wasn’t going to do it either. When will this end?! Attempt to get through major plot points and scenes as quickly as possible.
70K – Nope, that’s not gonna be enough either. Start furiously writing extremely shortened scenes in attempt to finish all major points by November 30th.
74K – Having written 2K in two hours, have a major revelation about the plot and several characters while brushing my teeth. Immediately rinse mouth, return to laptop, and spend 30 minutes typing up the story I should have been writing 74K ago. Feel elated. Fall asleep.
76,884 – Written on November 29th whereby REALLY finishing it wasn’t seeming so dire or possible anymore. Start forming plan to complete novel anyway following existing plot so I can say “I did finish a novel,” and then immediately start rewriting entire book all over again with the “real, good” idea that came at 74K.
I learned a lot, kids. A ton. A literary Spruce Goose full of information was handed to me via many mornings, afternoons, evenings, nights, and full weekend days of writing. For one, writing takes up lots of your time! (This is a newsflash you’ll surely pass on to anyone you meet in the next thirteen seconds.) For B, a lot of the hard work of “crafting” a novel isn’t sitting there in front of the screen/paper trying to find the perfectly exact awesome way of describing the trees in Bloomington, Indiana on a fall day, or thinking up the perfect synonym for the “red” of a girl’s hair. It’s actually going, “What? They just met that dude, and now they figured out this thing, and it would be perfect if they met this other dude tomorrow, but they can’t run into other dude until Tuesday, and it’s Saturday. What the hell do I have them do for three days?” It’s also about sitting there going, “Uh, why did he just do that? He wasn’t supposed to do that! I didn’t even know he was going to do that. Now all this other stuff has to happen, and I have to write about all this other stuff, and I really, really, really just want to GET. ON. WITH. THE. STORY!
Ah, the wisdom of the “been there, done that” scenario. Now I have said wisdom. What other lovely wisdom awaits me? Rewrite wisdom? Finishing the novel wisdom? Writing the climax wisdom? Figuring out how to tie up all the loose ends at the denoument wisdom?
Stupid wisdom.
What else has happened? Let’s see, I finished the Artist’s Way. Big yay. I mean it. I’m not overly overjoyed right now, but yay. I wrote a lot. A ton. I hand wrote 270 pages worth of journaling. This does not include writing that was required for the Weekly Tasks, or the Affirmations and Blurts stuff. I used up an entire full-sized, college-ruled notebook and started on a second one before I was done. Now I’m not done. You are challenged to do at least the Morning Pages and Artist Dates for the next ninety days – three more months. I’m on Day Four. We’ll see how this goes. The Artist’s Way got me a repainted kitchen door, a finished rolling ball sculpture, a trip to Bloomington, a trip to the Indianapolis Children’s Museum, some self-decorated pottery, a look at art work from the Ming Dynasty, a bunch of colored name signs for friends and family, a (nearly) finished novel…how long can this list get? I’ll stop there. I got a lot out of it, more of which I plan to blog about, since I already spent tons of time taking the pictures of it. It’ll be out of sequence, but I hope you enjoy them just the same.
I hope that cures me of some of my apparent need to talk about everything and nothing all at the same time on other people’s blogs. I hope.
Okay, so two thousand words per hour is me on a really good day, but I have done it. The hitting the wall thing has really happened. I’m still hard at work on my novel fro NaNoWriMo. I started to get stuck last night, and this morning I’ve no idea how to move forward with my story. I wrote out a bunch of thoughts, and they all seem to dead end into really stupid things. I’m not sure what to do at this point. I was going to write all day today, but I don’t know what to write.
On a happier note, on Monday, 11/24 I am going to be published on Jamie Grove’s blog How Not to Write: The Art of Writing Without Writing. Given that I wrote it on Thursday last week, it should sound much more positive than I feel at this moment.
Here’s hoping that I figure out what to do at some point in the next few hours, at least enough to get another scene written.
Thanks to Olivia and Genevieve for your recent blog comments. It’s nice to hear from other writers working through the process.
A bit stumped today, kids. I reached the official NaNoWriMo “win” goal of fifty thousand words yesterday. That’s great. That’s awesome. That’s actually incredibly in line with my goal to have 50K written before Thanksgiving so that I’d be pretty much done with the novel and wouldn’t stress about it over the holiday.
Except I’m not pretty much done. I don’t even know if I’m half done.
I do know that what I said in the last post is true: it seems like my story started taking off around 40K or something like that, maybe it peeked in around 30K. I don’t know, but there’s a good bit of story going on now, and I actually have all these little plot points that have to be written, events that have to happen, major s*** to go down, if you know what I mean.
Looks like my plans for a carefree holiday are not what they were, although I don’t have to choose to worry and obsess about it. I’m going to do my best to just take it as it comes, accepting that I can only do what I can do every day, and that somehow I will finish it, like I finished the sculpture and raced at Bonneville. I can do this stuff. Somehow, I can do this.
I’ve been graciously asked to do a guest blog post over at Jamie Grove’s How Not to Write blog. There will be a much more well thought out blog on this subject up there in a few days. I’ll post the link here when it happens. I’m rather excited about it. It’s a cool opportunity.
Holy cow, dudes! I hit forty-five thousand words for NaNoWriMo today! Gadzooks! Call the papers! Alert the military, or at least a comely lass with a penchant for reading horrid first drafts. I’m deep into the home stretch on this bad boy, and it feels mighty good! (For evidence of the feelings of mighty-good-ness, see the multiple exclamation-pointed sentences afore.)
During the past week’s period of time I’ve largely been doing writing in my free time and very little else, although I did find time to fit in a little fashion consulting to an elderly black gentleman at the thrift store yesterday. I still think he should have taken home the Big Johnson Speed Shop T-shirt, but he opted for the Golf with a Weiner one. Hey, I can only make suggestions. I can’t help it if people don’t listen.
Yesterday was a sonic buzz of activity at Mo’Joe’s coffee house where I (kinda) buckled down with a bunch of other writers and (talked) wrote. The last of my word smith comrades departed the land of caffeine and more caffeine at about 7pm, whereupon I took it upon myself to move to another table, pop in the ear buds, and write without stopping (much) until 11pm. That last push got me another three thousand words added to the day’s total, bringing me to a grand total of 4K for the day, and an overall total of 38 thousand and some. I’d wanted 40K by the end of the day, but that was plenty good to sleep on.
Today I was up early enough to get all my early morning journaling out of the way and be done with church and laundry and guitar practice by 12:45pm. Without pausing to see if there was anything else that could possible allow me to procrastinate further, I threw my laptop in the bag, grabbed the Hohner 64 Chromatic, and headed for Monon Coffee Company with thoughts of getting absolutely as close to 50K as I possibly could.
Fifteen minutes later I sat before my laptop with an excellent hot green tea chai latte and fretted about where the hell to go next. I fretted a bit more. I sipped tea. I fretted a bit more.
“If you type something, you’ll be writing,” I thought. “You can figure out if it really makes sense later, but if you don’t friggin’ start writing, you’re not going to be writing.”
Faced with this rock-solid and irrefutable logic, I began.
Six hours and a cafe latte later I came up for air: 45 thousand and some couple hundred words.
In the past two days I’ve written over eleven thousand words. My brain feels kinda squishy right now, but I’m okay. I’m pretty happy. If I wanted to take my time and finish on the 30th, I’d only need to do about 311 words a day for the remainder of the month.
The joke of this is, I’ve almost hit 50K and the story is just finally starting to take off. It’s looking like it may take 100K (or more?) to help these kids figure out just what they’re doing in my story. I…hope…I survive the experience.
Better go. I’ve got some writing to do before bed.
I’ve been busy, kids, very busy, and this is just a quick post to try and keep mildly updated here. National Novel Writing Month is upon us. The challenge: write a 50K-word novel between the dates of 11/1 and 11/30. That’s 1,667 words per day. This evening I hit 23,502, that’s *so* friggin’ close to where I’d like to be. Ideally, I wanted to hit 25K by day 10, so that I’d be on track to hit 50K by day 20, which I’m trying to do, because I know Thanksgiving will be busy around here for me.
I’ve been doing my Artist Dates, still doing all the other The Artist’s Way stuff, and, yes, it is REALLY keeping me busy!
Tomorrow I have the day off work, so I’m going down to Bloomington, Indiana to soak up the college vibe and do a little general poking about and visiting as some background work for my novel-in-progress. Should be good times. Then, in the evening it’s back up to Indy for another write-in with fellow WriMos at a coffee shop, and then, kids, THEN we shall see TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND WORDS BAHAHAHAHAHAH!
Oh, sorry, got a little carried away there. (25K! Halfway!)
Ahem. Good evening.