Week Three: The Horror

Day 15. Half-way! Binge on crafts during the day, and hit 25,440 words in the evening. Boyfriend is coughing. This may spell trouble.

Day 16. Now I’m coughing. Spend day sprawled in front of daytime TV. Binge on Star Trek gives me no useful ideas. Hack out a guiltily small 745 words.

Day 17. Feel terrible. Star Trek completely destroys my grip on the past, though I do manage a fabulous dye job on some laceweight. Apparently managed more words than I thought, as I’m less than a day behind on 27,189.

Day 18. Gain a bonus evening due to postponement of a trip darn sarf and drag out 2,637 words from somewhere. I’ll have plenty of time over the next couple of days to get back on target.

Days 19 & 20. BLARGH. Write nothing. Spend much time shivering through 6 layers of clothing, and proclaiming everything in the Tate Modern to be bollocks.

Day 21. Aha! It’s alive! Largely recovered from illness and spew my highest daily wordcount yet (3525 words) in my attempt to catch back up. Most of it is tat. My characters happily set fire to something which bears a striking resemblance to something seen in the Tate Modern. 33,351 words leaves me a day behind schedule.

In sum. Not an enjoyable week. Came close to ditching the whole thing once, during a particularly grumpy (and paranoid) moment on Friday. Suppressed for now, but the longer I stay behind, the more words I need to pull out each day to catch up. Yikes.

Week the Second.

Day 8. 14671 words. Longer than my dissertation. An amusingly ham-fisted attempt at creating some sexual tension. I fear that the inevitable descent into smut is beginning rather earlier than I would have liked, but successfully distract the naughtiness with some bloody slaughter.

Day 9. Ooouuuch. Mondays kill writing. I know there is a Bigger Story here but I cannot find it. I feel like I am painstakingly removing the day’s 1694 words from my brain with a mustard spoon. One at a time. Through my eyeballs.

Day 10. EUREKA! Said Bigger Story comes to me in a flash of ghosts and skeletons. Lose the evening to Muse at the NIA (which was, as usual, epic on a stick) but knock out a few words at lunchtime and just squeeze past the target in the last thirteen minutes of the day. 16728.

Day 11. Halp. Today brings the opposite problem to Monday. So many threads and themes and words wanting out that I can’t decide where to start. Have an easy time getting to 18455 and pause for some light fibre artistry.

Day 12. I break 20 thou. :-O woah. That’s a lot of words. My story becomes unintentionally comic as I bring the gods into it and they start acting the fool. I can tone down the campness later, right?

Day 13. I use the phrase ‘his/her body was wracked with heaving sobs’ at least twice today. Might change one of them but I suppose I can edit them further away from each other. Also I seem to have used up all my new plot already. Oops.

Day 14. Don’t feel like writing at all, until DG starts playing Gears of War 2. I decide to take my prompts from that. I end up with an epic scene involving mutant birds, skeletal warriors and rivers of flame. Nice. 23,793 words and it’s flowing beautifully.

In sum. You know, I think I might manage this. Half way through both time and words, and feeling good. Hurrah!

12,000 words. One week.

It’s like writing my dissertation all over again. Only the dissertation was completely re-written and edited in the same time period. This ain’t so hard, in comparison.

Here’s a little run-down of my writing week.

Day 0. I realise the main premise of my plot is untenable. I scrap it, but the loss of that brings the opportunity of an interesting relationship between two of my main characters. I sleep.

Day 1. I have gotten off to a flying start. 3318 words in four sessions of about an hour each. The inspiration that has been building flies out of me. Goats feature heavily. I dislike quite a lot of what I have written, but am virtuous and do not delete.

Day 2. Realise I have already shot my goat load, as it were. Force words out one at a time. Not pretty. Eke myself to 4935 words, which is enough to take me into the next day.

Day 3. Unexpected pub trip delays start of writing. After our return, one of my characters sits down and refuses to do any more until I acknowledge that he is ginger. I shrug, and amend his description a few lines above. Suddenly, I am on 6376 words, and my previous male lead is sulking.

Day 4. Words spill out of me, both before work, and when I return. Mr I-wanna-be-a-ginge is so rude and blasphemous he is an absolute pleasure to write. 8425 words.

Day 5. Fireworks (and wine) obliterate the evening’s writing potential. However, got a few hundred in at lunchtime so end the day on 8791.

Day 6. Snatched a few words before another outing distracts me. 9587, some way short of the projected word count. While out, am struck by inspiration for a singularly morbid short story and briefly flirt with including it in my wordcount. I am accused of cheating on my novel, and shamed into removing it. I am keeping those 1,500 words close at hand in case I am desperate at the end of the month. It’s in the rules, I don’t care what you say *shakes fist*.

Day 7. An epic day, despite the wine literary efforts of the night before leaving me drained and unable to rise before noon. Am sure I’m doing a grave disservice to the geography of eastern Europe but if I check it on the internets I will be distracted by shiny. I end the day on 12488 words, 25% of the way through, and well on track for a win.

In sum. I am still having fun. Not having any idea where my plot is going seems quite valuable in terms of the freedom it gives me to just vomit out words into a random scene. Also, the whole thing seems to be getting more violent and bloody by the minute. This is absolutely fine by me. I’ll take black blood and oozing wounds over character pieces any day.

NaNoWriMo, here we go!

And so, in the words of Fable II, our story begins.

It’s nice that the first day of my first NaNoWriMo has fallen on a weekend. A full day of preparation, then a full day for writing, and a chance to get ahead of schedule in the first flush of inspiration.

I was considering throwing down a few words at the stroke of midnight, but instead, hit by a sudden waft of perfume from my Muse, revised my plot in a fairly dramatic way and immediately went to bed. I didn’t dream of my book. I wonder if I will. I would rather like to. It seems like it would be an interesting way to develop the story if I lack inspiration one day.

Anyway, I have begun. 3318 words so far, roughly four hours work and about 6% of my total. I even allowed myself a reasonable amount of editing, so I don’t hate everything I’ve done so far. But I’m not allowed to read it now I’ve had a glass of wine. My self-critic is a harsh bitch when I’m tipsy.

If you want to keep an eye on my progress, you can do so here. Once they turn the widgets on (or just fix them) I will lodge one over there on the right hand side of the page. I am accountable to everyone. If I am lagging, do not let me get away with it.

I know I said I’d never do it, but…

… it’s for a good cause.

I knit. I crochet. Sometimes I dye yarn. But spinning always seemed to be going just that bit too far. There are perfectly good machines to do that, I said, which are far more efficient and reliable than some bint with a bit of wood.

I still believe this.

But my NaNo is set in the ancient Mediterranean. It’s pretty hard to image a female character – in fact any character, without knowing what they would have been making or wearing. I was researching such matters when I came across this:

Lekythos by the Amasis Painter

And that was it. I decided to give it a bash. So I bought a bottom-whorl drop spindle and a lump o’ roving, and spun some yarn:

It’s pretty cool to think that I’m doing something that women have been doing for thousands of years. I like to think that all of them swore as much as I did on their first try as well. And I am so going to adopt the fleece-on-a-stick-like-candyfloss method once I’ve got my technique down.

Blogtoberfest < NaNoWriMo

Bad planning on their part, really. They should have put at least a month in between the two for respective recovery and preparation. It’s hard to pull a blog post out of your arse when you’re too busy researching the harvesting season of chickpeas.

Yes, I’ve decided I am doing NaNoWriMo (thanks for the encouragement!). I have a vague plot, some characters, and a setting. I’ve spent the last few days doing some ‘research’, mostly from wikipedia (it’s a novel, it doesn’t have to be that accurate, right?). I’ve made vast lists of questions that I need to answer before I can write, or while writing. I have trawled the internet for pictures related to my topic (my desktop now cycles through them to be a constant source of inspiration). I feel – almost – prepared.

However I am a teensy bit terrified. In a perfect November, I would aim for 1667 words a day. I’m already losing at least five evenings to already-planned events, so that brings it up to 2000 words immediately. Factor in my notorious inability to stick to *anything* for that long and I’m going to have to write 10,000 words a day for the five days I manage to do any writing at all. While probably being completely dissatisfied and disheartened by the entire thing because I am not allowed to edit.

However, fear not – I’m not disheartened yet. How can I be disheartened with all these pictures of goats on my desktop?