ABNA 2011

Thanks to a forum post on the NaNoWriMo websites, I was made aware of the Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel Award.  The deadline I believe is February 6 2011 so if you just completed your novel yesterday, you have some time to finish editing it.  Or maybe you have a novel already completed, and you want to try your luck on the opportunity to get a publishing contract with friggin Penguin which includes a $15,000 advance.

I think, since my plan was to have the novel edited and complete by the end of December (is that still possible?  I think so), I might have a go at submitting it.  I won't worry about doing the whole "cut it to a short story" thing until after I know whether or not I have enough to turn out a proper novel.  I think I do, it just needs work.

This is sort of a "why the heck not" kind of deal - I fully expect that my novel - or short story collection, however it ends up - will be available via the self publishing route.  Hopefully though, somebody sees this blog post and goes "Holy shit I should submit my novel to this contest and friggin WIN that bitch"

*ahem* carry on.

I won!

I did it - I made it to 50,000 grueling words.  I promised that I would post the first chapter after I was done - and I wll do that next week after I've spent a little bit of time away from my opus work in progress.  Just wanted to share with everyone that I am DONE.

I will be celebrating tonight by recording a podcast - look for that later tonight!

45,659

I haven't posted on here since last Tuesday, mainly because I've been busy writing / doing other things.  I did mention that typing the novel gave me a lot more free time, right?  Anyway, now I'm at 45k.

I must admit, I finished the actual NaNoWriMo story I started writing on November 1st before I got to 45k.  I think it was around 44k.  What I'm writing now is a short story about the main character's grandfather when he was in grade nine.  I think I'm going to go the route I thought of in one of my last posts - turn the story I wrote into a short story, and write a few other stories about the time travelin' pocket watch.

Either way, I have less than 5,000 words until I hit 50k.  I'm so close to that benchmark, but the words are starting to get harder to churn out.  I thought that if I started a different story it might be easier to hit the 50k mark, but so far it hasn't.  I will find a way, though.

Just thought I'd update people on how things are going.  I hope to have it all finished soon, because I want to do a podcast Tuesday night instead of trying to finish the novel in the last minute (so to speak).;

I Give Up...

...handwriting, that is.  I was able to hand write 28,774 words of my novel.  That's about 58%, over half.  Unfortunately, I just couldn't keep up.  The only reason I'm so far behind is not because I'm struggling to find the story; rather it's because my hand can't keep up.

As an example, just now I typed out 1200 words in under 20 minutes.  To write 1200 words by hand, I would have spent almost an hour, if not longer.  Thanks to doing a quick 20-minute "sprint", I got to my 30k word goal that I wanted to hit yesterday.  In other words, if I don't do any more writing tonight, I'll still be satisfied.  Of course I plan on doing more, but I have a few other things to take care of first.

And that's the freeing part of all this.  I know that I can bang out a large amount of words in a short period of time, which leaves me more time to do other things (for instance tonight I want to take my dog on a walk, clean up the kitchen, and later will be seeing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt 1).  When I was handwriting, I felt slightly discouraged when I didn't hit a word goal simply because it took me too long to write the words.

The one thing I will miss about handwriting is the creative feeling that came with it.  I honestly feel a slight disconnect between my brain and my typing, while the connection was stronger when I wrote by hand.  I'm still going to carry around my binder, because I may find myself in situations where it's easier to hand write, so not all is lost.

I'm excited - I know that I will reach 50k for sure now, and I won't completely wreck my hand doing it anymore.

Finding Time to Write

As I type this blog entry, I sit at just over 27k for my NaNoWriMo word count.  I'm almost 10k behind where my NaNo stats tell me I should be.  I'm not really down about that at all, don't get me wrong - I have plenty of story left to tell and a lot of time coming up at the end of the week to do it.

But that's part of the issue, is finding time to write.  I want to get up to 30k by the end of today, but where am I going to fit that in?  I write at lunch while I'm at work, but I can only usually get just under 1000 words done.  I write after I get home from work, if I can fit some time in between grocery shopping.  Sometimes I just can't fit it in.

That's where my struggle is going to be for the next 8 days; I'm going to need to make a better effort to get this thing written and finished.  While I have a half day of work on Thursday and a day off on Friday, and will take full advantage of that free time to get some work done, that doesn't mean I have a free pass to slack off before that.

It's going to take a lot of balancing, and maybe some late / early hours, but I have to do my best to reach 50k because if I don't at least try, then it's not really worth it.

As a side note: I had small ideas prickling in my head that maybe this story I'm working on would be best condensed to a short story as part of a compilation of various stories about a time travelling pocket watch.  While I'm going to finish the story at hand, I will assess that possibility when I read over my story as a whole during the editing process.

EDIT: My side note also means that if I run out of story before 50k I will just start a new story and I feel that would not count as "cheating".

41%

November 12th is the day where NaNoWriMo writers should be at 20,004 words (if they are following the general 1,667 words per day guideline).  Today however is November 15th, the half-way point.  My novel sits at 20,325 words, or roughly 41% complete.  What does this mean?  Superficially, that there are only 30,000 words left to write.  But I thought I would look back at my first 20,000 words so far.

The most obvious observation is that my writing style and narrative voice has adapted over 20,000 pages.  If you were to compare the first page I wrote with the most recent page I wrote, you would probably think two different writers wrote each one.  I've definitely noticed a growth in skill as I've continued to write, though I think I'd say that the skill was already there - I just haven't used it in a long time, so it took a few hundred thousand words to come back.  Oh also I changed from 3rd person to 1st person.  Go me!

I wish I could easily scan over the document and pick out all instances of alliteration, because I apparently love to use it.  Some day, if this book ever becomes anything remotely close to popular, I'll make the first draft available for people to read and have a chuckle.  There's even a direct reference to the parting of the Red Sea in there, but it's the most basic, obvious reference in the world and so therefore will not be staying in the final draft.

And that's another thing - I'm writing this story with a (very) basic outline.  I know that I want my character to go from Point A to B, and have vague ideas of how to get to Point B, but it's all going by the seat of my pants.  Unfortunately that means that there's a lot of meandering along and not always a lot of plot advancement, but it's giving me something to work with when I go back and edit later.  This is not the biggest problem though, as my main issues are keeping facts / different plot points straight.  This may lead to hair-pulling editing later.

I feel like a broken record though, in regards to editing.  I'm making a conscious choice not to edit as I go, or else I wouldn't be making very much progress.  As a result, I am very aware of areas in the book that need work (and let's not joke around, the whole thing needs work).  It honestly makes me dread the notion of editing this thing, and not want to do it.

But that is ultimately the difference between a writer who sells his/her books and the writer who doesn't: the writer that sells is the writer that puts the work into it.  And make no mistake, all of this?  This is work.  It's also a challenge, and one that I don't intend to give up on until November 30th.  I have to say, there have been points where I've thought about giving up and finishing on my own time; but that's why this is a competition against myself to win.  By giving up, I lose; I know for a fact if I don't finish it this month, the chances are low of me taking the initiative to go back and finish it.

One last thing: writing this has brought out my creative energy again.  Before October, when I decided to commit myself to this month-long haul, I had many misgivings about my own writing.  I was still proud of things I wrote, but that pride melted away like a snowman in October (oh yes, that was a terrible simile on purpose).  I had no confidence in what I was doing, and no motivating drive to do anything new.  I feel that after I finish the novel, that drive will stick and I'll have new creative output other than just this beast in the weeks/months to come.

Fundamental Changes

I went for a walk with my dog Hank last night, and as it was a fairly quiet and clear night, it was the perfect time to do some thinking about my novel.  I had just gotten past the recommended goal of 16,670 words (I believe I'm at 16,775?  Sounds about right) and it was time for a well-earned break.

The thing I realized while I was walking was that my novel needs a fundamental change, one that will require a major rewrite when it's done.  While that sounds like a big job - and it is - it's not actually that much of a big deal.  The change I'm talking about is switching from limited 3rd person to writing the novel in 1st person, from the perspective of the main character.

If you recall, I posted at the end of October of my dilemma - what point of view should I write from?  I ended up choosing 3rd person limited, because it gave me more freedom of vocabulary to describe things.  Unfortunately, that has also led to some pretty flat characters that really aren't all that interesting.  It's fortunate that I've realized this during the writing process only a third into the novel rather than after I've written the whole thing and am in the middle of trying to edit the beast.

This is something I should have realized after I wrote my opening chapter; I felt it was weakly written, but I chalked it up to lack of practice (and it's true, my prose has improved immensely since then).  I won't deny that it is a pale shadow of the opening chapter I had in mind - one that was designed to be written from the first person and the main character's perspective.

While I'm going to re-write the opening chapter during my next writing session, I'm not going back and doing any other rewriting until after November 30th.  And, I'm going to keep writing the story from the third person point of view; the reason for this is because I've decided that this draft will also serve as a comprehensive outline.  That's going to make rewriting a heck of a lot easier and less daunting, especially since I will have a clear direction for the novel rather than writing on the fly.

I think given this revelation, I should at some point post an excerpt from the original first chapter and what I come up with in my rewrite.  I think it would be interesting to see the drastic difference.