The Unfocused Life

Breezeway Blows Town, Day 11:

20879 / 25000 words. 84% done!

Got a little more than 2500 words done today, which is damn good for a weekday.  I even took a short run this morning, which I desperately needed.  Things are crazy at work, but otherwise, everything’s going pretty well, so of course I’m waiting for a meteor to land on my head.

The Australian writing and publishing podcast The Creative Penn recently ran an interview with Mur Lafferty, with tips for NaNoWriMo, which is well worth a listen.  In the next episode, she interviewedJ.C. Hutchins, author of the Seventh Son podcast trilogy, with the first book just released in print — J.C. mentioned that he started writing the trilogy during NaNo around 2002.

After a couple of days where the writing seemed to bog down a little, I think I worked through a couple of tricky plot points and got my momentum back today and burned through just over 2000 today.  Pretty damn good for a week day, especially during Week Two. NaNoWriMo conventional wisdom is that Week Two is usually a complete disaster; it’s only Tuesday, but so far, so good.

Breezeway Blows Town, Day 10:

18353 / 25000 words. 73% done!

Fellow Wrimos or writers may already be familiar with Write or Die on the web, a sprint timer for writing that plays awful sounds or actually deletes your writing if you pause or go to slowly before the clock runs out.  Now for a nominal fee, you can download the Write or Die Desktop Edition, with all of the functionality of the web version plus the ability to save your text directly from WoD (instead of copying and pasting into a word processor or text editor) and to engage in real-time word wars with other users.  I bought the Desktop Edition the day it came out (no freebies in exchange for promotional blogging, I should note) and have used it several times to boost my daily wordcount.  I haven’t engaged in live word war yet, but I am open to challenges.

Breezeway Blows Town, Day 7:

12725 / 25000 words. 51% done!

Today I wrote 2,626 words (up from 10,099 words yesterday) and passed the halfway point for a half-assed NaNoWriMo goal of 25,000 words, or the one-quarter point for the full NaNo 50K.  It’s starting to look more and more like the full 50,000 words is doable, but you never know.  The big thing that I thought was going to cause all kind of havoc in November turned out to be nothing, which means that it’s just an ordinary month with a major holiday at the end of it.

I’m still in the very early stages of the story; in the last day or two it started to bog down a little, so I finished the early scenes with the Chief Protagonist and moved on scenes introducing to other point-of-view characters for a nice change of pace.

I haven’t gone for a run or gone to the gym since NaNo started, and I feel like a complete slug.  I still don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow morning — I missed last Sunday’s long run, I don’t know about missing two in a row.  Maybe I’ll take a shorter long run as a compromise.  We’ll see.

Here’s an excerpt from today’s output:

As he fired up a five-dollar Rocky Patel, he heard the crackle of a patch of ice breaking behind him.  “Hello, Felicia,” he said without turning around.  “You’re getting clumsy in your old age.”

Try not to get too excited.

If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, you might want to give a listen to I Should Be Writing #135, which is all about NaNo, including interviews with pro authors and serious WriMos Nathan Lowell and David Niall Wilson, and NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty.  Host Mur Lafferty is doing NaNo as well.

I just looked back through the archives and it took me exactly a month to get through the first 25,000 words of Meet the Larssons last year, as noted in this post.  I’ve got to believe I can do better now than I did in the first month I started writing again, right?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, Chadicus looks like he’s trying to catch up to my word count. Can’t have that…

No time for an update, it’s ridiculously late. I’m backdating the time stamp on this post by 10 minutes so it hits for the correct day. Been working on work work all evening, so no NaNo progress since the train home. Big day in other news, but that will have to wait until tomorrow or the weekend.

Breezeway Blows Town, Day 4:

7547 / 25000 words. 30% done!

My half-assed NaNoWriMo project continues apace.  While it looks like I’m on track to do a full NaNoWriMo novel at 50,000 words by November 30, I’m painfully aware that it’s only November 4, and a lot can happen to throw a wannabe novelist of his or her game.  I’m sticking to my 25,000 goal until I get a hell of a lot closer to 25K.

I finished rereading Stephen King’s On Writing this morning.  This is my third time reading it, and I think I got more out of it now that I’ve been writing my own fiction for close to two years.  If you’re writing and you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend it, even if you’re not necessarily a fan of King’s work.

I’m falling asleep at the computer pathetically early, but so it is.  It’s 10:37pm, and, after writing both ways on the train, at the ChiWriMo South Loop Write-In over lunch, and again at home, I’m falling asleep on the keyboard of my MacBook.

Here’s today’s chart for my NaNoWriMo progress:

Breezeway Blows Town, Day 3:

5766 / 25000 words. 23% done!

One resource for fellow Wrimos that I’m enjoying is the encore presentation of The Nanomonkeys over at The Secret Lair. This is an encore feed of a short daily podcast that ran during the 2006 and 2007 NaNoWriMos, but is essentially as useful today as it was then. Highly recommended.