Passing the time on a long flight ...
I finally dug out my Catspaw manuscript and started doing some editing.
Argh.
There is nothing as wonderful as reading something you forgot you wrote, and saying, "Wow, I really like that."
There are few things as discouraging as reading something you forgot you wrote, and saying, "Oh my God, that's really ... amateurish."
To be fair, I started again at the very beginning, which was the first stuff I wrote (this was a NaNoWriMo project mind you), so I'd expect it to be the clumsiest.
Still.
Glad I started work on it again. And, yes, I need to trim it substantially.
this post enabled by airblogging.com.
The muse is sitting on my shoulder, nearly invisible, whisper quiet.
"Nice blog," she says. "Good work."
And, "So you can note projects you're working on."
And, "Tsk. So many unfinished bits and pieces."
And, "So ... when you going to get back to work on Catspaw?"
I've managed to get the "Writing & Language" category from my main blog over here, and the broken out to the various categories (further revised). Done a fair amount of clean-up. Tweaked some templates and the stylesheet. Sadly observed the bit rot of the past four and a half years.
Felt noodged by the Muse to get the frelling lead out and finish Catspaw.
Things left to do:
After a several month bout of laziness hiatus, I'm back to revising Catspaw. Like all things, it needs to become a habit before I'll do it consistently.
I really do have a novel in mid-cleanup. No, really. Just because I haven't touched it in a month or two, and have several lengthy comments from a fellow writer to read through, and stuff like that, doesn't mean I'm not working on it ...right?
Finished v1.5 of Catspaw, the "Go through the whole thing and resolve the majority of the internal conflicts and sand down some of the bits that were too, too, too awkward" version.
I have enough further suggestions and things to do (not least of which is cutting out several thousands of words) for a dozen more revisions, but it's kind of nice to have finished yet another pass on it.
(And, no, it's not online for public consumption. Wait a few more revisions, or until I decide whether to actually submit the damned thing or not.)
Finally wrapped up Catspaw with a 5,500 word finale. Thanks to all my loyal readers (and wannabewhenyoufinish readers) for your support, Margie in particular. It's been a long 14 months, I know.
The final tally, including pre-NaNoWriMo 2002 words, was just over 86k. Yikes.
Now, of course, comes a massive editing job. Writing a story in sequence, with no back-editing as I realize things need to be changed, makes for a lot of story lines that stumble clumsily along and/or vanish mysteriously mid-novel. A lot of words need to be taken out, probably, and a lot of others need to be put in --some better character development for one thing, since there's a difference between many strung-together scenes that stand well on their own, and a single narrative that can stand on its own.
Or something like that.
So, fair warning, if you decide to read the dagblasted thing (and it's available on the main page by chapter or as a single download page), it's anything but polished, though it is, at last, more or less complete.
And in time for January, when Doyce, De and I are doing a mutual editing thang. I fear mine will be the light entertainment of the trio, but I have no illusions as to my own literary aspirations.
It's good to be done. Now for the hard work.
I've been busy as all get-out today, and last week as well, which has impacted the blogging today (and last week as well).
It's also impacted my writing. That's particularly irking me because I know what comes next (though I just had a keen idea that will take a few days to unfold, too, so I suppose that delay was a good one).
Maybe tomorrow ...
But best of luck and encouragement for all those who are actually participating this year.
And, with luck, I'll actually have finished my novel from last year (around 74k words and still climbing) by the end of the month.
No NaNoWriMo for me this year. Too much else to do (and, before Amanda mentions it, I still have to finish my long-enough-but-not-yet-finiished 2002 novel).
Yes, the internal judge's decision is final.
But chops and props and kudos and claps to all those out there who are considering it.
I've actually been getting some writing done recently. Not a lot -- not all that I'd like -- but at least some.
I do the daily Oneword (as you've all suffered through). That's an interesting exercise to keep the juices flowing.
I've been trying to keep up with Catspaw, too, with the not-so-subtle flogging encouragement of certain friends. I've not been doing as much as I could, but I'm trying to keep up via a modified Zelazny Method:
I try to write every day. I used to try to write four times a day, minimum of three sentences each time. It doesn't sound like much but it's kinda like the hare and the tortoise. If you try that several times a day you're going to do more than three sentences, one of them is going to catch on. You're going to say "Oh boy!" and then you just write. You fill up the page and the next page But you have a certain minimum so that at the end of the day, you can say "Hey I wrote four times today, three sentences, a dozen sentences. Each sentence is maybe twenty word long. That's 240 words which is a page of copy, so at least I didn't goof off completely today. I got a page for my efforts and tomorrow it might be easier because I've moved as far as I have.
I have an alarm set twice a day during weekdays (9 and 2, to be exact) to write something in Catspaw. If it rings, and I say, "I'm too busy," then I try to respond, "What, to write three whole sentences?" If I say, "I'm too uninspired," then I try to respond, "What, to write three whole sentences?"
If I hit the snooze on the alarms, though, I'm doomed. You can monitor my successes by watching the Catspaw button on the blogroll bob up (or not) each day.
Through that method, at least, Catspaw has been progressing by a few hundred words or so a day. Which feels nowhere near as exciting as it should be, but there you go.
The last writing I've been doing to any length have been Sian's game journals for Doyce's Nobilis try-out short game campaign, Chrysalis. It's not great literature (as if anything else I do is), but it's been entertaining and even a bit fulfilling (in an exploring-the-character way) to me. The most recent effort went up last night.
I suppose, as long as I keep banging on the keyboard for something other than memos and e-mail, I should be satisfied ...
After one hell of a hiatus, I'm finally back to further writing on my NaNoWriMo novel, Catspaw. I broke the 50k barrier in November, then life overwhelmed my Muse for a bit. She's back, though, hard at work, poking me with her little pitchfork twice a day.
If you want to wait for the finished product, I'll mention it here when it's done. If you want to read the work in progress ...
... The site I'm writing it at is here.
... The story starts here.
... The whole megillah on one page can be found here.
I have the story in my blogroll, to the right, so you can see when the most recent update was done.
Consider this your obligatory warning about this being a first draft, etc. I've just had enough folks who were reading it back in November give me grief over not having worked on it since then that I wanted to give them the high sign that I was back in business. The rest of you can ignore this and get back to reading what I scribble here.
Nothing profound here, just an update on How Things are Going.
It's been snowing on and off here in Denver for most of the week. The streets clear out to dryness just in time to get dusted again. That's all to the good -- we so badly need the moisture, but we don't need it all in one day.
It makes driving in more interesting, of course. I've gotten so gun-shy at the Saturn on snow that even a light coat of muddy slush is enough to get me white-knuckling my way to work. I take the I-25/I-70 route, not because it's faster, or because I enjoy maneuvering through T-Rex, but because it's highly traveled, and thus snow will be more likely to be melted away or plowed or sprayed or pushed aside.
I'm not driving myself to Bear Trap Ranch this afternoon for the retreat, thank heavens. Margie needs to have the van here for Kitten Transport, and the road is not the best for the Saturn under summer circumstances; if it's wintry, I'd as soon not. So I'll be riding down with someone else, who has a Jeep with 4WD. I dislike riding with strangers (being my father's son and all), but it'll be worth it.
Things have been busy. I think we've kind of gotten back up onto the wavefront after our time away, balancing and maneuvernig frantically down the pipeline of commitments. The big focus of our weeks is the Monday night Alpha -- Margie's especially, doing the cooking for 100, but I've got my own time sunk into it, as well as the peripheral Margie support -- going to the store, helping watch after Kitten, etc.
Gaming has only started getting moving again -- the advantage of dragging your GM off on vacation with you. D&D at the house tonight, since Margie will be single-parenting with Katherine while I'm away. Keep her in your thoughts ...
We're still not caught up with everything, though. There's still a Christmas tree in the living room (artificial, of course, and de-decorated), and stacks of mail that need sifting (though I made sure the water bill was paid before I left), and other such overhead tasks.
And, of course, my Muse has been prodding me about getting Catspaw finished. And, in fact, she gave me an idea for advancing the plot that I need to follow up on ...
... as soon as I get make some time ...
After taking grief from Doyce and a few other bored souls, I've finally gotten back to working on Catspaw, my (incomplete) NaNoWriMo 2002 novel. Visits from family, visits from bosses, and trips to Orlando made working on it for a few weeks less than easy, but now I have two daily reminders to write something, and further words will, I hope, continue to flow, even during the holiday season.
Hit the NaNoWriMo threshold of 50,000 words this afternoon. Hoody-frickin-hoo!
The story's still going strong, but at least I don't have to sweat during the High Businessness of my boss, in-laws, and various Thanksgiving visitors hitting town next week.
Many thanks to my pals over in the Writing in the Dark support group. More importantly and profoundly, thanks-beyond-measure to my wife, who supported me in doing something writingish prior to the month, continued to support me even when I turned my "short story" into a NaNoWriMo commitment mid-month without discussing it with her first, and whose first words when I mentioned I was breaking through the barrier this afternoon were, "We have champagne in the fridge."
I'm now officially NaNoWriMoing.
This has been made possible by two things:
1. My current job assignment is in flux, I'm reporting to a new boss, and he has been extremely uncommunicative about what I should be doing for him. This is extraordinarily stressful, but it also means I've had a number of free hours during the day to get a lot of writing done. And if the stress and uncertainty about What's Going On translates itself into the writing itself, well, hey, that's a good thing, right?
2. Margie has been fighting some sort of bug, or been working too hard, or Kitten's been waking her up too early in the morning, or something, so she's been hitting the sack no later than 8:30 or 9. That's given me some quiet time to bang out a few hundred more words.
The bottom line (literally) is that my word count (new) on the short story I was noodling around with is up to 12,442. So I really don't feel like I can't NaNoWriMo this year, because, damn, I am. (I am damn. Damn I am.)
What this doesn't mean:
UPDATE: I kid you not, but as soon as I'd posted this, I got an e-mail from my new boss, asking if we could set up a phone call this afternoon to talk about my assignment.
As mentioned (too many times) before, I'm not participating in National Novel Writing Month, largely because last year was a ball-buster, and I don't want to go through it again.
That having been said, I am actually writing something, which might or might not qualify as a short story.
Well, now that I look at it, it does, or more. According to one estimate provided here (and here), the length breakdown for various types of stories is about as follows:
<100 words = micro-fiction 100+ = flash fiction 1,000+ = short story 7,500+ = novelette 20,000+ = novella 50,000+ = novel 100,000 = epic, or split into multiple parts.
So, given that, what I've already written qualifies as a novellette, since I've done over 8,300 words new. (The total so far is 14,400, but I wrote some of it back in 1998).
Doing some quick looking, I've also seen a short story/novel break point given at 10,000 (or at a more subjective measure, such as something that can be read in one sitting -- which, for us avid readers, could push the number up a lot higher). Another breakdown, given here, is:
<5,000 = short-short 5,000+ = short story 15,000+ = novella/novelette 40,000+ = novel
Or perhaps it's:
<10,000 = short story 10,000+ = novella 30,000+ = novelette, trending into novels (mostly 70,000+)
Or perhaps it is this:
<500 = Vignette (1-2) 500+ = Short-Short (2-9) 2,500+ = Short Story (11-22) 5,000+ = Novelette (22-61) 15,000+ = Novella (66-175) 40,000+ = Novel (175+)
(where numbers in parentheses are approximate pages double-spaced 12-point Courier).
Various magazines have their own submission length guidelines, tending toward shorter than this. As you can see, YMMV.
I must confess, given the numbers, I'm almost tempted to be a late sign-up for NaNoWriMo. I'm just concerned that might turn it into an obsession, rather than a dedication, and that as the month gets busier (my parents visiting this weekend, Margie's folks coming out at Thanksgiving), problems might ensue. I'll see how it goes. If I get through the weekend feeling positive about my input, I might consider going "official."
Regardless, I might see if Margie wants to buy me a NaNoWriMo t-shirt for Christmas.
Anyway, if you have any interest, the work in progress can be found here, or you can follow the "Catspaw" link button in the sidebar (which, via Blogrolling, will highlight any updates I've done).
It's Halloween, which these days means it's the now rather-sinister, dark, foreboding, frightful, scary evening before ...
Not doing it this year, but I know folks who are, and who have my admiration, awe, and pity. As do their spouses and SOs.
(I have my own creative writing irons in the fire, and am trusting in Margie to keep me honest about keeping at them.)
To all of you who are participating, though, let me raise up my goblet, watch as your Muses take light and flee into the outer darkness, and wish you all a hearty Good Hunting!
Not doing NaNoWriMo this year. Nope.
But I do have a short-storyish idea I thought of last night, going to sleep. My muse was placated enough by the promise that she didn't prod me with her pitchfork right then and there until I got up and wrote it, which is her usual MO.
(It's all Doyce's fault.)