Nanowrimo Day 21: A New Goal

Categorize this under "Excuses, Excuses, Whatever."

I made a few changes this year which hurt my output:

1. Going to Disney World in the middle of November. Not only did this throw off my writing during the trip, but it also threw off my children's schedules, which made them more needy after the trip, and my husband's work schedule, which made him less available to help me all month. It's critical to Nano-ing that he take the children away out of the house for hours at a time during the weekend, and while this happened multiple times last year, it did not happen at all this year.

2. I did not ask for help. Last year and the year before, Ahno took the children during the week at least one afternoon per week so I could be alone in the house and pound out some words. I didn't ask her to do that this year.

3. I decided to write literary fiction instead of a children's book or genre piece. I knew it would be harder to get volume on a piece of writing that I actually care about and want to be perfect. I should have known I was in trouble when I threw out so much of the first chapter and started over. This was in week 1, before Disney World, before whatever else happened.

For these reasons, and more importantly my belligerent unwillingness to just overcome everything and write anyway, I am not going to reach 50K this year. I am, however, going to set myself a new goal of 25K and see if I can do that. I have already written the hardest part of the book, and I have also edited as I go along so that I'm very happy with what I have. If I can end the month with 25K that I'm proud of, I will call that a personal victory.

Nanowrimo Day 19: The Sentence that Could Not Be Written

Yesterday I did it.

Maybe it was Marta's comment that pushed me over the block. She said, and I paraphrase, that if there seems to be a chapter that cannot be written, then maybe there is really just a sentence that cannot be written, and if I could identify that sentence that could not be written, then I could get over myself and just write it. After all, *identifying* the sentence is practically writing it. I would have to write it in my head in order to identify it.

So I thought of the sentence that could not be written, and by thinking of it, I wrote it. And then I wrote the whole rest of the chapter. It was nightmarish to write. At one point I leaned over to Dan and said, "I can't write any more of this chapter. It's too awful. You have to help" And Dan's response was, "Would you like to hear some dead baby jokes?"

I did punch him. But I also put it in the novel. Hehehe. I have now accomplished what I really needed to accomplish with Nanowrimo, which was to force myself to write that chapter/scene/sentence, which has been hovering over me for years. I feel better.

Thank you, Marta! For your inspired comment, you will receive one Bookbeast. You may choose which one you like, and tell me, and I will mail it to you, with my effusive thanks.

Nanowrimo Day 10: Nano on the Road

Look, I wrote something!



In the laptop, in the car, with the laptop plugged into the little converted thingy, and the headphones firmly on.

I managed to generate two new chapters, and for those of you keeping track, these were two chapters of completely separate material, not connected at all to the Scene That Must Not Be Written. So, the Scene That Must Not Be Written has to be written NEXT. There is no other detour to be taken. It's just next and that's it.

I'm going to try and hit 10,000 by the end of tonight, after we go see this rocket launch that NASA has cooked up solely for our family entertainment. Nice of them. I am not goign to write that scene tonight though. I'm going to go back and beef up what I wrote today. Because, obviously, that scene must not be written so how can I write it?

Nanowrimo Day 8: An Important List

1. NBC's Thursday night comedy treatment of the green theme has been very, very satisfying. Self-referential, flippant, morbid, and delightful. Applause. It is also totally funny that the PSAs are paid for by Walmart.

2. Tonight I am going to write the next chapter of my novel.

3. Tomorrow I am packing my gay little bag with ten lucky books to accompany me and my family to Disney World. There's still time to get yours in the bag! Well, really no. Not really. I will announce lucky travellers tomorrow.

4. I have a very strong feeling that I am going to get to 10,000 words tonight. You heard me. Tonight.

5. There are really lots of things to do tomorrow. Apparently I need to pack more things than just books I plan to photograph in surprising locations. Like ears, different shoes for my children, my phone charger, and peanuts.

6. This is the time to write that difficult chapter. Right before a big long trip. Because after I write that difficult chapter, I'm going go bangass on the laptop in the car on Saturday.

7. Last year on the way to Disney World I knit a whole sweater. It was an ill-fitting sweater for a two-year-old who hates sweaters, and while it looked white-and-blue on the skein it actually looked urine-and-blue on the garment. But.

8. I am going to give away my first Bookbeast soon. Scroll down for Bookbeasts.

9. And yet, my children are not yet asleep. It is after 10:00. What can they possibly be doing.

10. I appreciate NBC trying to change my mind, but I am happy to report that I'm able to resist it. And drive a minivan a zillion miles to prove it.

Nanowrimo Day 7: Let's Work on a Completely Unrelated Novel!

Today my writing group met and discussed my Nanonovel from 2005. It has been revised somewhat, and it now has an ending, but mostly it's the same as it was when I banged through it two Novembers ago. The meeting was helpful. I got a lot of feedback as to what needed beefing up, what was unclear, what scenes were working as I had hoped.



I had a massive plot hole, just a giant gaping chasm of a plot hole, which they did identify, and I was able to work out what to do, to fix it, right there in the meeting. Someone made a suggestion, someone else added a thought, and I had an idea, and then the problem was solved. This was amazing. I'm so relieved.

Am I supposed to be writing some sort of other novel, right now? Or something?

Nanowrimo Day 6: I Did Not Vote for Steve Heretick

This bus was driving around Norfolk when I took the kids to dance class this afternoon. It was empty. There were STEVE HERETICK! signs taped all over it. And after all of this bus marketing, he lost the election anyway. I'm glad I didn't vote for Steve Heretick today. It's not that I begrudge him that vote, or revel in the possibility that my one small vote could have been the one vote to put Steve Heretick into the state senate (or whatever). It's just this: voting for a man named Steve Heretick and then having him lose the pissant little invisible election anyway would just too deeply epitomize my general feelings of despair and absurdity today. At least I can say I did not vote for Steve Heretick. There is always that one brittle rod to which my failing fingers can cling.

Nanowrimo Day 5: New Glasses Will Definitely Help

I got new glasses today. I'm going to not write until I get them tomorrow. I am pretty sure that all of my difficulties are located in these old glasses:

I tried on some new glasses with my seven-year-old son helping me:

At the moment that picture was taken, he was helping me by quietly playing Crash Bandicoot on his Nintendo DS. I decided I am over the black plastic. Like totally done. So, bronze or silver?

When I put the silver on, Benny said, "Mother! You look like an angel! Well, you look like you just got done being an angel and you still have your glasses on!"

I got the bronze. As soon as I pick them up from the glasses store, I will recommence writing the novel. I don't think an angel who forgot to take off her glasses could possibly grapple with my ugly crank of a novel. So. Tomorrow I totally promise to bring you more self-indulgent pictures to go along with my self-indulgent skylarking on my novel. All self-portraits! All the time! The new Harpoonist is sensitive to her own angles.

Nanowrimo Day 4: Who's a Hateful Cynic? Who? Who?

I took my children to the park yesterday so they could, as my blind great grandmother used to say, "Blow the stink off," and also so I could get away from the computer for a while and think. I took my gay little notebook with me so I could write down all my gay little thoughts. Yes, it's possible to stop two children from dying on the monkeybars while having a completely unrelated idea playing out in your own head. I have learned this by necessity. Main character, take a hint.

There was a couple there with a two-year-old girl, and the man was clearly not her father. Among other clues, she and her mother were calling him "Jim." Jim was carrying on like nobody's business -- climbing trees, playing hide-and-seek, in general being that awesome guy that really cares about the child that's not his, really tries to be a good simulation of an actual father, cavorts and gambols and capers to please that cute little girl. The mother was a tall drink of water in a tight hippie cardigan and skinny jeans. Buckle boots. You know what I mean. Not entirely sleazy but standing right across the street from it.

So, I am there thinking about my miserable train wreck nightmare horrorshow of a novel, and these people are tittering and clapping and distracting me, and the only thought in my head is that that disingenuous asstard is making so nice with that kid just because he wants to get into the pants of that grinning mother. And then I think, "WHAT KIND OF MONSTER AM I?" Maybe he's just trying hard, maybe he really likes the kid, maybe he is perfectly excellent person with not a plotting thought in his virtuous mind.

I realized I am still a hateful cynic. In spite of all the ways I have tried to revise my view of the world to reflect the fact that I've brought two children here to live in it and it better not be as bad as I think it is, I still think it is bad. As much as I try to locate all of my negative thoughts about people in Dan's brain, thereby making him the misanthrope and me the good person, it is still me assuming the worst and judging, judging, judging.

In the spirit of this new/old cynicism, I will now predict that I will not finish Nanowrimo this year. Last year I finished, the year before I finished, but this year I will not finish. I am already chokingly behind. What's to be done? I'm at 5000 words. I may as well give up now and just play Civilization IV like I want to. Because you know that guy was just trying to land himself a date. You know he was.

Nanowrimo Day 3: AHA!

Today I had my first big AHA moment. AHA moments are so juicy, so ecstatic, so indescribably satisfying -- they may be the only reason writing is at all pleasurable for some of us. Today a neighbor character, who was to be just a generic manly-man, appearing in only one scene to act bemused and shocked and then go away forever, turned out to be a local newscaster with a very interesting backstory, including the fact that he sleeps upside down.

Last year, Dan and I put a bid in on a house that we thought we'd like to renovate, owned by a local newscaster. What Susannah and I saw when we walked through the house was so shocking, so paralytically fictional, that we just knew that it had to be used in a novel. And now it will be. Because when Carl the neighbor turned up at the scene of the accident, it was actually Carl the anchorman. That was a big deal, today, especially when the words are coming so slowly, and I keep having to rip out paragraph after paragraph because it just doesn't work.

Good for me.

Nanowrimo Day 2: Violating Nanowrimo Rule #1

I edited. I threw out about 1500 words from last night, boiled my first three paragraphs down to one, and redid what I had of chapter 1. I know it's wrong, and I hate myself for it (not really) but there was no way I could continue my adorable novel with that steaming pile of excrement sitting at the beginning of it. If I end up on November 30 with 48,500 words, I'll feel a pang or two. Or maybe I'll just dump those 1500 words back in, I wrote them in November after all, and celebrate with everyone else.

I don't know what it is about writing female main characters. Last year's novel had a female MC that I just loved so much I could have eaten her in a flauta. She failed to translate that on the page. Nobody liked her but me. I thought she was resolute, fragile, militant, tense, knock-kneed, and great. Apparently I wrote something that made her seem like a grey robot. There may be some kind of personal lack, here, with my inability to inhabit female characters. Let's see, would that be self-loathing? Stifling self-awareness? Or... not enough self-awareness to determine what my problem could be.

Dan is putting the children to bed so I can word-war my way back up to par. It's my sincere hope that I can avoid any more dumps of that nature, but it's a possibility. It may wreck my Nano, but because of the subject matter and what I've chosen to get myself into, I can't just power through this one. Great choices, me!

Nanowrimo Day 1

There's a book I've been trying to write for a long time. It's a lunatic book to write because it has a lot of elements that are close to my insanity. I've been trying to write this book, in various forms, since I got pregnant with my son, let's see, that was in 1999. What a wild, untrammeled success this book has been so far! Inspiring.

The first time I finished Nanowrimo, I chose a plot/idea/genre I thought I could handle easily in a month, that I could plan meticulously and then mechanically execute. I succeeded at the 50K, so that was maybe me figuring out that I could do it. Last year for Nanowrimo, I wrote a hard, huge story I'd been tossing around for a long time, and in writing it, I extirpated it, and now it's gone. I mean, it's still here, but it's no longer in my skull. Then, for Script Frenzy, I did that very same thing. And now that thing is out of my skull. So, Nanowrimo and Script Frenzy have proven to be valuable in getting rid of those stories that keep clunking around in my brain, wanting to be written.

Why not apply this magical benefit to the mother of all clunkers, which has been known through the years as "the cul de sac story" and "the sister story" and "baldy goes to burma" and "the mother story." If I can get this one out of my system, I might just achieve enlightenment. I might just solve all the world's problems, or at least my own problems, which as so few and so unobtrusive that I have to fictionalize them to make them viable enough to affect me.

So, that's what I started writing at midnight last night. For better or for worse, I have cannonballed into the deep end of the pool, where the ghouls keep drowning, and now I have to fight my way up. I guess I'm only 500 words in, so I can't say yet that my head has gone underwater. Maybe later today though! Wee!

What would I be wearing, in this extended metaphor? I think I would be wearing a little girl one-piece, with a frill in rows along the butt.

How Script Frenzy Saved My Novel

I will confess to you now that I am not entirely of sound mind, when it comes to writing my own fiction. There was a point, and I only tell you this because we are very close friends, where I was almost paralyzed in my fiction by weird little habits and the writing ticks that I had developed.

I was very concerned about the way things looked on the page. I needed the paragraphs to appear in a certain way, very rectangular, all approximately the same size, and I didn't want words hanging down, no strange line breaks. I felt compelled to write my novel in small sections, not really chapters, but three page sections, and each of the three page sections had to be exactly three pages. Exactly. So, when I took out a sentence here, I had to add one there. When I added a sentence there, and it started hanging onto another page, I had to take out that sentence and add a different one.

It was like math, kind of. It was very engrossing. I told myself that the form was being dictated by the very structured mind of the character, by the nature of the book, that I could always go back and change it later. Except, as the book progressed, I was not going back to change anything, and it was increasingly becoming this awful, hard little nut of overworked prose. With no dialogue. Did I mention that? We can't have dialogue spreading out all over the place and messing up our lovely juicy paragraphs, can we precious? No, precious, we can't. You get the idea. What started out with a mild compulsion turned into a book-crushing mania. I have known some famous and clever postmodernists who do this kind of thing with grace and dignity. I, however, was doing it with teeth-gnashing and forehead-clasping. Not the same.

Then I decided to do Script Frenzy. Script Frenzy is a month-long nightmare similar to Nanowrimo except that in Script Frenzy you write a screenplay in a month, whereas in Nanowrimo you write a novel in a month. Script Frenzy is in June while Nanowrimo is in November. I had never written a screenplay before, but I thought, hey, why not. It's not like my novel is clipping along at such an alarming rate that I can't take a few weeks off to do something else. I wrote my script. I used CeltX which is a free, downloadable script-writing software. It forces you do format everything correctly. Watching my script pour out of my frantic fingers, it did not occur to me to count lines in a paragraph of scene description, it did not occur to me to be offended by the dialogue straggling down the page, and by the end of the experience, the screenplay format looked very normal and familiar and right. And I finished 20K words and got to the end, which means I won, as you can see by my sparkling icon at the left.

When I returned to work on my novel, two astonishing things had happened.

1. I can now comfortably write dialogue. This shocks me, because all of my life as a writer I have avoided dialogue whenever possible. I would write "He told her go to home." six times before I would write ""Go home," he said." When I picked up Script Frenzy, I felt certain I would go mad because of all the dialogue I would have to write. Somehow, I bullied myself through it, and on the other side of that experience, dialogue is no longer my enemy.

2. I have a much better understanding of how to describe a scene in terms of the physical surroundings. I used to really struggle with this, and found myself skipping over it a lot, or doing it in some sort of truculent, obvious way, because I could never feel relaxed about taking time out of the scene to look around the room and say, "The walls were green. The ceiling was high. On the floor, there was a carpet. On the chair, there was a dog." Writing scene descriptions in the screenplay was different. You're forced to create a very succinct paragraph to describe the setting, and the purpose of it is not to be lovely, but to be functional. So you find the three objects in the room that give it its character, or you find the scope of the exterior landscape you're describing, or the hat the character is wearing, or the empty diet Coke can under the radiator, and you hang the scene on that. Very useful. The skill translates perfectly into novel-writing. It's okay to drape a whole scene over the cut of glass on the chandelier. It all evolves from that. I get that now.

As I was writing my screenplay, I felt very strange writing a document that was not meant to be read. That is, it wasn't the final product. These words, in this screenplay, are not the art. They're instructions for creating the art. So, while the words are still important, obviously, the way they look on the page has no meaning. They're crammed into a standard format, and there's no deviating from it -- it's out of your hands. Working in this form really made me think about the story, the characters, the dialogue... and stop concentrating on the form.

Writing a screenplay made me a better novelist, for sure. When I returned to fiction, it was as if the hobbles had been taken off my horse. I'm glad I made the effort and took the chance on a new format, even though the screenplay itself may never see the light. At this rate, the book possibly will.

Nanowrimo Research Trip to Historic Virginia

Dan very kindly took me on a trip around Yorktown, Williamsburg, and Smithfield VA today, to take pictures of possible settings for my novel in progress. Here are some of the photos that I took: