Decisions, Decisions!

Less than a day to go until Nanowrimo starts.  Wow that went fast, perhaps too fast!  The question is do I stay awake until midnight and start writing, or wait until I get home from work tomorrow.  Last year I have to admit I did a fair amount of writing at work to get my word count up.  This year I will try and do less on paid time.  I hope to make better use of dead time, the odd five to ten minutes waiting in cars for example.  If I can get a couple of hundred words down in these little windows it will greatly help to reach my goal without too much rushing, and panicking.  I am still debating which story to write, so in an attempt to help me I shall try and use writing them down here as a mechanism for helping me decide.

Story 1:
Working title: Banshee
Plot: Early teen boy, bullied by peers, a little odd, possible with something like aspergers syndrome, meets and forms a relationship with an unusual old woman who may be into witchcraft.  Humorous adventures ensue, etc., etc.
Positives: lots of scope for toilet humour, and fun unrealistic capers
Negatives: 50k words might be too long for a children's book should I decide to foist it upon the unsuspecting public.

Story 2:
Working title: Bye Bi Christmas
Plot: A womanising, commitment averse photographer is cursed, and he is falling in love with a cross dresser.  Can he overcome his prejudices? Has he really found love? Can the curse be lifted? And why does his best friend look so good in a miniskirt?
Positives: Lots of scope for funny scrapes, male bashing etc.
Negatives: Back-story very similar to film "Ghosts of girlfriends past"

Story 3:
Working title: Warrior
Plot: Fantasy adventure in a jungle environment.  A teen girls world is turned upside down when she helps save her best friends life during a coming of age ceremony.  Outcast, betrayed and alone, she is the only one who can save her people from disaster, but will be killed if she ever returns.
Positives: Lots of adventure and excitement.  Positive female roll model protagonist.
Negatives: Keeping the pace going whilst maintaining good description, and characterising.

So there you have it.  As midnight approaches I will have to make up my mind out of these, unless of course another idea pops up!

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Sometimes it seems like an impossible climb!

 

This is kind of how I feel when I started my first Nanowrimo last year.  Fifty thousand words to write in a month, crikey.  However much you break it down into the sixteen hundred or so words a day it still seemed like an insurmountable task.  With little more than a silly title to go on I had little idea of how I was going to proceed into the story.  I took the easy way out.  I wrote as a timeline diary of events.  Each day of November became a day in my story, each daily entry preceded with a location and time.  It wasn’t a great plot device, but it helped me through the month.  I also fell into the trap of trying to hit the daily target.  There’s no problem with this, and indeed is a great motivational tool for the first timer.  This year I am going to try and ignore the daily target.  There is a school of thought that your average Wrimo novel chapter is around sixteen hundred words long for a reason, and this could stifle the authors creativity.  So this time I am going to try and fly without the safety net, and see how I get on!  The other lesson I learnt is to not tell people too much about what is going on in the story.  I got inundated with ideas for my story last year.  It got kind of tricky to let people down lightly; not including their ideas.  This was my silly story, and I wanted all the ideas to come from my twisted mind, not anyone else's.

As the month went on, sometimes the top of the climb didn’t seem to far away, other times it seemed to stretch further into the distance.  At these times you just have to reach for the next branch and grab hold.  Sure enough you will get to the top.  At the end there are a mixed bag of emotions.  Relief that it’s all over, emptiness that there is no more writing to do, curiosity over how others have done.  You have a manuscript of sorts. Sure it’s full of typo’s,, sentences that don’t make sense, mangled grammar, but a manuscript all the same.  If you are brave enough you can read through it, and cringe at all your mistakes.  If you are braver, and thick skinned, you can encourage others to read it, and smile as they pick out all the errors.  Then all too soon, it’s time to let go.  Leave the story alone for a little while.  Get back to real life.  Have a rest.  Give yourself a little distance between this mad, crazy word dash, and your normal existence.  Then you will feel serene for a while!

 

That is until you decide to do a rewrite of course….

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Let me at it

I know its less than two weeks away, but I am eager to get started on my Nanowrimo jaunt this year.  It’s weird because those that can write can pretty much do it any time of the year.  We can even set ourselves the same challenge of writing a set minimum target in a specified time, so why am I finding this event so exciting.  Let me digress a little, there is sort of a point.  My wife, Jane, has entered got a place in the London Marathon next year.  This race is very important for her.  Now she could run any marathon she wanted to.  There are far more challenging ones, there are many that are easier to an entry for, as I’m sure the thousands of unlucky applicants for the London Marathon would attest to.  She could even just run the distance on her own, not as part of a race.  The twenty six point two miles is the same challenge, possibly harder as you need more self-discipline to run alone. However this is not the main point of taking part!  Jane has her personal reasons for wanting to run this race in this particular year.  All the runners have their own reasons for wanting to run this particular race.  The reason this race is so important is that it is iconic; a thing to be a part of; a massive social gathering.  As a species we are social animals.  We want to be a part of things with other humans all trying to achive the same goal.  We want to compete, to show off, to collude, to empathise, and to support.

In the same way all the people entering Nanowrimo are doing the same.  There are the atheletes, who write all the time, possible making a living at writing.  There are the first timers, who have perhaps not written anything creative since leaving school, but fancy having a go.  There are those like me who have done it sucessfully once, and want to see if it was a fluke or not.  What Nano provides is a framework.  A start and finish line.  It gives those of us with busy lives and families permission to set time aside to write.  It gives us something to love and hate, to get frustrated with, to cherise, and nurture.  At the end we can, if we like, sigh with relief and thank goodness it’s all over; or it can spur us on to write more, to learn how to proof and edit, and self publish.  For the atheletes, new or already established, those with real talent, it might mean the possibility of a best seller.  The important thing, whatever your reasons and motives for writing in this event is that we’re all in it together.  This is why Nanowrimo has grabbed my imagination.  I’m never going to write any great works, no bestsellers, but I am going to enjoy the journey, the ending, and the support and attention of my family, family, and of all those other Wrimo’s who give each other a friendly nudge in the forum, mail, and twitter feeds when we reach out for help.

Sunday mornings are good for rambling blogs.  Later I will look back at this and cringe.  I will be tempted to delete it, but won’t.  Happy writing!

 

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Fading Fast

Not having to earn my living at writing, or having an adoring audience to please means that writers block isn’t something I’ve encountered. I have no illusions as to how good my work will be, so if my story lines hit the skids I just switch hit it off into another tangent, however ridiculous the new storyline might be.  Those words are my little creations and I care about them just as much.  No my block is language block, and I am sure it’s to do with aging, and this content delivered age we live in.  The age thing manifests itself when I am on a roll.  I can be rocketing towards the end of a fantastic sentence, with the perfect turn of phrase to end it, when poof! It’s gone!  And can I remember what I was going to write.  I imagine that little wordy snippet, dancing just out of reach, cocking a snoot at my struggling brain.  It happened this morning.  I was sitting in the car waiting for one of my kid’s school to open, tapping away.  Desperate to capture the words before the doors opened when it happened.  I was at a loss.  Should I put in some inferior phrase, and go back to it hoping, probably in vain that my gem would revel itself.  No, not this time.  I metaphorically stamped my feet, stated that “I’m not playing any more, it’s my ball and I’m going home”, and stomped off.  That’ll show me!

The other theory is that we’ve all bought into this multi-dimensional would whizzing through the airwaves, down wires, through screens and speakers.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the internet, and all that it brings, but socially we have embraced it too wholeheartedly, almost unconsciously, and made it an indispensible part of our daily routines. This is all well and good if we did it in a balanced way, but we have rushed at it, lapping it up as I imagine indigenous peoples lapped up refined food, and alcohol from the various invading explorers over history.  We devour social networks, bathing in a dozen communication method, paring down out language to shoehorn our messages into 140 character blocks.  We check our smart phones and tablets by the minute, getting nervous if we are away from the social cloud for too long.  As I alluded to rich language is fast becoming  a victim of our need to relay and receive messages as fast as possible.  Tv programs, web pages, news, movies, all written in a rapid development style, to be the forefront of today's attention.  I am one of the worst offenders.  I used to read a lot, at least two novels on the go at once.  Now I barely open a printed book at all.  I have a kindle, pc, tablet, even my phone where I could devour fantastic pieces of literature, but I don’t because there is always something more instant that can fill my mind and time, preventing me from thinking for myself.  When you stop thinking, it is very difficult to start again.

 

So here's my plan.  I am going to pick up a book and read it.  Not just a page or two at a sitting, but really read it. I will drink in the prose, mull and digest it.  I will let my mind flow over, in around and through the words, words that some other human being has strung together in a meaningful way to get a message, a story across that can’t be told in a short sharp snippet.  I am going to find words that are unfamiliar to me, and find out what they mean, when they are used. 

Hopefully, there’s a chance, however small, that doing this will enrich my vocabulary, exercise my brain, and bring a little more colour to my writing.

And if this all sounds pompous and pretentious then so be it.  Maybe the would needs a little more pomposity, and now and again, what's the harm in pretending!

 

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Getting in a little practice with a little indulgence

With Nanowrimo looming large I have started getting into practice.  How? Well starting to write a novel of course.  I have bought a small tablet device which I am using as a notepad in those little in between moments, such waiting to pick up or drop the kids off at school, of snatched moments at home, etc.  The screen is sensitive enough to type reasonable quickly, and bright enough to read out doors, i.e. in the car.  I have ordered an adaptor cable so I can plug in a proper keyboard for those moments when I get half and hour or more to do some serious writing.  For £120, it’s far cheaper than an iPad with a keyboard, and I still have the dubious pleasure of being able to play Angry Birds, possible the dullest, but very compelling game I’ve played since Farmville.

So why write a novel now.  The main reason is to get back into practice before November.  I have half a story that needs to be written.  Unfortunately it’s the first and last quarter of the story.  The middle bit will need to compost a bit more.  I have launched into the first chapter, and am longing to do rewrites already. I plan to keep this one going until Nano starts then shelve it until December.  I will then pick it up and finish the first draft, by which time I will be sufficiently distant from the Nanowrimo novel to give that a rewrite, proof etc.  When that is done, I will be able to do the same to this one.  I am hoping that that is a going to prove a productive workflow.  If it does work, I have a couple of other stories I want to get into.

The current novel is an adventure story.  It is inspired by the stories of Edgar Rice-Burroughs.  It will be suitable for older teens and adults, but there is some graphic violence in it, and possible some mild sexual scenes, so I might have to put one of those warning stickers on the cover!  It’s set in the jungle, but not on our planet, or time frame.  So there is a fantasy fiction element to the overall theme.  So as I write this, chapter one is underway!  Starting has been the hardest part as I had no compelling reason to start.  With the Nanowrimo event, there is a definite start date, which is very useful, but with writing just for the sake of it I have to be self-disciplined, and that is not something I am good at.  With that initial barrier aside, the blank sheet of electronic manuscript paper written on, my only obstacles of the multitude of diversion activities drifting my way.

 

Onwards and upwards.  There are words to abuse, grammar to mangle, and the lives of fictional characters to mess with.

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I'd rather be watching tele!

With November rapidly approaching it's time to think about cranking up the brain cells to attempt another assault on the English language.  Yes November is Nanowrimo month, or Write a Novel in a Month month, or to misquote it, write 50,000 or more words of complete drivel, and bore family and friends stupid with your faux author like antics.  I hasten to add this is purely self deprecation, and many of the thousands of participants are very accomplished writers, I speak only for myself. 

Last year was my first attempt at this challenge.  Man Eating Pies was born.  I hit the target with about 157 words to spare (I think).  There was an incentive to all those who completed the challenge; to get a proper printed proof copy of your novel.  In my excitement, I am 43 and things like this get me excited, I rushed odd my manuscript as soon as could, not even considering the possibility that my small tome might be full of numerous spelling mistakes, dubious grammar, and even sentences that made no sense whatsoever.  I had even forgotten to end one of my small, but possibly important plot devices.  This would not really have mattered, however I did  encourage a couple of people to read some of my creation.  I was soon crestfallen as my well meaning readers reeled off error after error.  Not too down hearted, I went through the whole thing with a gappy toothed comb.  Not exactly a rewrite, more of a patching up.  Consequently, the book, small cough, is in its second print edition.  It has been sold in three countries in printed form, and two in digital form.  One day the sales might reach double figures.  I do discourage people from trying to buy my book, as they need the money more than I do, and honestly, apart from a few cheap gags, some tenuous reference to inter species sex, and a lot of violence, it's really not very good.

So, on to this years effort.  At the time of writing there are just over seventeen days until this years challenge.  I have several ideas for a story, one silly, one a kids book, one an adventure aimed at teens, one an adult book that will require serious thinking.  As with last year I think I will be going for quantity not quality, so I'm guessing the silly one will out!

I will publish updates here, but probably not the story itself.  Write you soon.