NaNoMongering 20: Exhausted Elementary Epiphany

I wondered whether to include boring stock photography that was vaguely relevant... (TBC)

Yesterday I mused that I might be better off focusing on writing my novel, instead of obsessively aiming for 30 blog posts in November. No point in blogging for blogging's sake, when I have nothing better to add except to repost other people's content and to angst about my word count. The fact is, I have achieved my original aim, which was simple blog necromancy.

Behold the resurrection. Having established a habit of regularly scheduled quantity, the next step is quality. Now I need to post only when I have a good reason.

Having said that, a "good reason" can range anywhere from existential triumph to angsty epiphany to how having only 19 NaNoMongering posts is bothering me and my OCD compels me to round it off to 20. #iregretnothing

I have learned that having a set schedule for tedious activities breeds productivity. Now I choose to subvert my original plan with a better, more sustainable one: blog once a week. I will still have the schedule to kick my butt, but hopefully this means I will actually edit my posts now, instead of word vomiting all over the place. This is actually meant to be a semi-serious (because since when have I ever been able to take myself entirely seriously?) writing blog, to function as a tool for me to help me write more good. How else could I find that, having written 2k of explanation about my WIP, that I still don't know what it's about? All the heaps of inane off-topic drivel, rabid fangirling, angst, fudge posts, etc. may provide fun content, but they defeat this purpose. There's a reason Tumblr exists.

That's not to say I'll cut out all the fun. I can't guarantee that the occasional picture of David Tennant won't slip in. :-)

(cont'd) Or a cheerful picture of fruit that had absolutely nothing to do with anything. There. You get both.

It's still November, though, which means insanity is necessary. (Though with me, this excuse is like a hat on a snowman. Looks good, but hardly required.)

This is a little tune called Smells Like the Write Spirit.

Load up on puns
Bring your pens it's fun to lose and also win
I'm never bored, a sugar hoard
 Write extra late to pad the words

Nano nano nano nano nano
Nano nano nano nano nano
Nano nano nano nano nano
Nano nano nano nano nano

This is NaNo. Time to party!
Mr. Ian Woon is tardy!
I'm a pantser! Time to fly now!
Fifty thousand! NaNoWriMo!


Fearless fighter!
Puny writer!
From a zero!
To a hero!

Yeah!

The count won't come, I must rest,
For wars of words our will shall test,
Our little group will always grin,
And type a tale until The End 

Nano nano nano nano nano (X3)

This is NaNo. It's my story!
Plot a novel. That is scary!
I'm a pantser! How should I know?
Fifty thousand! NaNoWriMo!

Fearless fighter!
Puny writer!
From a zero!
To a hero!

Yeah!

And I forget just why I write,
Oh yeah I guess I'm just insane,
Our angst and doubt, make it hard to win,
We cheer and share the pain.

With the lights out, Midnight oil
Burns as we slave, sweat and toil!
This is stupid! This is pointless!
Aching fingers need some ointment!

Fearless fighter!
Puny writer!
From a zero!
To a hero!

Yeah!

NaNoWriMo! (X9)

Tune stolen borrowed from Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Camp NaNoWriMo, Day 3

This will again be a very short entry.

I am pretty sure that the stiffness in my thumbs is due to tendonitis. The symptoms fit. Well, the only thing to do now is to just relax the affected areas, and wait until it goes away.

In other news, life happened, which is why I have, so far, written nothing today. By tomorrow, I will be 5000 words behind. I'm going to have to produce them somehow. Previously, in these situations, I would just have an all day typing marathon, and I would rely on Write or Die to push me along. Currently, neither of these is a feasible option.

It looks like I am going to have to spend a long time talking to myself…

And, possibly, go for the Bronze Fingertips badge…

Camp NaNoWriMo, Day 2

It is getting late. My hands still hurt too much to type, so I am hunched over my phone, whispering into it like a prisoner in a story, trying to write down his memoirs in the dead of night, when the guards are not listening.

This will be a pretty short entry.

Nothing much has happened. I have so far crossed 1700 words, which is on track…for day one. :-) I'm going to have to do some catching up tomorrow.

Plot-wise, I still have no semblance of one. Dark Arcana is an entire trilogy, and I have no idea where one book begins and the other ends. That is not a problem. That is what Camp is for. Therefore, what I have so far is basically a bunch of scenes. The pattern for me is that I keep writing, and I keep writing, and gradually, a plot arc images. That is not to say that I write in any sequential order. I do not. It is almost guaranteed that almost everything I write this month will be thrown out. However, hopefully, at the end, I will have some sort of skeleton for the story.

Badges Earned

Goed Begonnen

I had meant to color these in, so that I would have pretty pictures to post here, but that ended up not working out. I will be posting pictures, as I earn badges. So far, I have earned one badge, for starting.

Camp NaNoWriMo, Day 1

It is Day 1 of Camp NaNoWriMo, and I am already feeling too lazy to write.

This is my list of excuses: I have been writing JavaScript instead of fiction, I need coffee, I can't decide what to write, my hands hurt too much to type, I'm hungry, and I haven't yet built a tent.

All in all, a rather crappy start to the month.

However, since the time I wrote down that sentence and now, at least one of those excuses is no longer applicable. As for what I am going to write, it has come down to two stories:

• Dark Arcana: This is a trilogy idea. I know it is fantasy, specifically, steampunk. However, other than the fact that my hero is a guy named Oscar, who has multiple personalities, and that my Dylan is a half android half human creature called Khronos (basically, a steampunk Darth Vader), I do not know much else about the story.
• The Fires of Ozan: Dark Of The Sun: It started off as fanfiction based on Avatar: The Last Airbender, but I found that I liked the direction in which it was going. Also, I found that I was using far less of the original material than I had thought I would. Basically, the only thing which I "borrowed" was the idea of bending, and the names of the Four Nations.  Given that, I decided to just write it as original fiction. However, the result of that is that I know even less about this story than I do about Dark Arcana. Now that I can no longer use bending, and now that I have to remove all references specific to the world of Avatar, it leaves several big huge gaping plot hole- in my story.

… And it seems, based on that, that my decision has already been made for me. Might as well write the story that I know more about, right? Good. So something productive came of this blog post after all. :-)

Of course, knowing myself, it will bother me that I have to Come account, but that I am working when only one story (for one account). I may be working on Dark Arcana in the beginning, but it is almost guaranteed that somewhere along the way, I will be taking a shot at the other one also. :-)

Alright. No more excuses. Time to write!

… Right after I painstakingly create new Scrivener projects, customize them exactly the way I want, eat dinner, clean up the kitchen, find some scarves to build a tent with, finish designing the Winter skin for my plotting forum, do the laundry, put together a playlist for Dark Arcana, and design a new scoring system for determining plotting progress for my plotting forum.

This is a picture that I made in Photoshop a few years ago. I was procrastinating by searching for inspiration came across it today, and realized that it looks almost exactly like Erebus, the planet ruled by Khronos – the steampunk Death Star, as it were!

Total Word Count: <100 (Invoking Luddite Clause–had to hand write because I'm still going easy on the typing–haven't yet made final count).

Meta? Never Met 'Er.

I know. It's been so long. I have been wanting to write a new entry for the past few days. However, so much has happened since January, since I last posted, that I don't even know where to begin. Therefore, for now, I shall simply make a list of the terrors delights in store, and write more later.

• New 2012 Plan!
• New Plot Bunnies!
• More crappy drawings!

The gist of the forthcoming revelations is that I have decided that 2012 will be the year in which I finally finish something; I shall be blogging about those challenges. More anon. Yeah. Just a little Shakespearean there. =)

A Voyage Into the Unknown

Off we go, into the wild--

...achromatic howling void that is the spaceless timeless void of hyperspace.

Here I go, shouting into the ether. A voyage into the unknown. How grand that sounds, doesn't it? I can prose on all I want about the awesome adventures I am starting inside my own head, but it means nothing since I am not exactly being great about writing them down. I must now write about 1400 words per day to make my monthly quota, which is not good, because that's about twice my original daily goal of 667. From the difference between these numbers it may be inferred that I have been doing a considerable amount of skipping days. But I'm fine when I actually start, so basically the problem would be solved if only I could whip myself into doing this every day, and not every other day. Basically the issue is that my productivity does not live up to my ambition.

But enough about that. My progress/plot bunnies so far:

The Amber Node: Signed up for FebNo, which begins in 6 days, during which I will do 20k, as I mentioned before. This month, I am...plugging along, kinda. Still 4k behind, because of course as soon as I write, the clock flips over to the next day, and the next day's quota is added to the whole total count. On the up side, I wrote exactly 1000 words yesterday, which is bodacious, considering that I started at 10:30 at night. I could catch up if only I could start earlier and if I didn't have assignments clogging the way.

The Spirit Turning Into A Human Thing: I don't know what it's gonna be called yet, but this is what I'm going to do for Script Frenzy in April. It's the one about the spirit who turns human to be with the woman he loves, except she cheats on him. Now he's stuck as a human, heartbroken and alone, and has to find a reason to live. This idea is still at the germ of a plot bunny stage. I better get my act together if I want to have this whole thing outlined by April.

Harry Potter Fanfiction: There, I Fixed It!: Started planning this out today. Basic plot, of course, is a given, since he has to defeat Voldemort. I am starting it off in the summer before sixth year, because a lot of the stuff that annoys me about HP happens in the 6th and 7th books. It's gonna be AU (um, Alternate Universe :-D) because I'm gonna change things. Ginny's gonna kick some more a** and Dudley and the Dursleys will get a chance not to be a wimp.

Paranormal Romance: I got the idea for this from this awesome website, which should appeal to anyone who loathes the hamster cage liner that is Twilight, or even those who secretly like it but admit that it could...use some work. I don't know if AnTwiNoWriMo is going to happen again this year, and I couldn't do it anyway because I'm doing FebNo (and the min is 50k anyway, which is too much too soon for me!). But I have said I could do better all along, and I thought, why not? I won't finish (or probably, even for that matter, start) in February, but it would be fun to try something which I would never in a million years do normally. And here's the kicker: I can't stand romance, because I hate the mush! I don't read any romance except Georgette Heyer, who only has very slight mush at the end.

So I'm gonna make it easier on myself by setting it in a fake Regency period, and have lots of action or something with enough mush to classify it as romance. At least...I hope it comes out as romance. Ugh. :-) Regency + Vampires...could be awesome. (I know, we don't have to use vampires...but I like vampires.)

So yeah, this is my mind splurge. Apologies to all of the two people who read this (probably. right? right? ...guys?) LOL!!! :-D /ditz

Man, I've written practically 700 words with this one post alone in only like an hour, and that's with frequent interruptions. I wish fiction was as easy.

/procrastination? I wish.