retentivewrimo

TGIO Isn't My Exact Emotion Anymore

2008-12-07T20:56:00.000-08:00

One week has passed since the clock magically and cruely ended NaNoWriMo (I was just getting started, really). While I feel much better rested and am not in such a bad mood anymore to real life acquaintances, I really miss it.

Yesterday afternoon was Chicago's TGIO party and being there among the rest of the amazing region I'm a part of, made me really wish I had a working laptop and went to more events. This year was really tight knit.

It did make me feel pretty old as most of the people I started out with are no longer around. There were a couple of the class of 2003 still kicking around (though as I've said on here before, I really consider myself the class of 2004, that was the first year I really tried) but there were so many new, excited faces. I am a little jaded, I admit, though winning for a fifth time did feel as good as the first.

The only letdown was this year's TGIO venue was CRAP! I used my newfound love of Yelp to rip the cold, dark sushi joint that is Aria a new behind! About the only way it could have been worse is if they were blasting bad music over our conversations.

I found out something really weird at the party though. This woman who started at my work last Wednesday was one of the two MLs for Chicago. How I managed to miss that, I don't know (though she did look vaguely familiar right when she started). So if I'm still at this job next November (which I don't think I will be, at least not the entire month since I've vowed to quit on my 10 year anniversary, November 18, regardless) at least I won't get odd looks from 100% of the staff.

Though with how NaNo is growing, perhaps there will be even more NaNoers at work as it starts its second decade.

If I don't end up FiMoing this year and writing about that, I just wish NaNo luck as it starts its second decade. Hopefully I'll still be around to participate.

With 3.5 Hours To Spare, A Small Miracle

2008-11-30T21:58:00.001-08:00

I've never been a fan of people who stop right at 50,000 words. Especially if they're on the Word War team. But that was, hypocritically, me this year.

I did write until the end of the chapter where I reached 50,000 at 8:33 p.m. This was 50,125.

The final writing session was from 4:30 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. so I figured that I deserved a break. And I still hadn't eaten dinner yet. So I stopped.

I kept meaning to pick the novel back up because now I'm really in the meaty part where the plot is just flowing out of my fingers (though I've reached a spot where the final confrontation should happen and I don't know how it should).

And when I sat back down, finally, at 11:15 (after watching the end of the Bears game and writing a review on Yelp of the Mexican place I went to with my parent yesterday), I started typing away. But then I just ran out of time.

Final word count: 50,576.

My lowest word count ever. My latest finish time ever. Well, neither are true if you count 2003 when I gave up. But of the now five years I have won, that's exactly the case.

But with what I went through this Novemeber, some people are congratulating me for finishing at all. Even my old nemesis (and probably best NaNo friend from outside of Chicago) Toronto's ML Deb (greensong).

I'm amazed she finished. And she accomplished something even more unbelievable than me. I wrote a little over 10,000 words the last two days. She wrote 23,500.

All of my NaNo buddies ended up finishing strong this year (except for the few who didn't procrastinate). Kim (rosemilk) wrote 20,000 words today alone.

Now that would have just about killed me.

So I go into 2009 with a fresh lease on my NaNo streak. And next year I'll be more involved again as I'll have a working laptop. Barring any unforseen things. Though I may be in a different region than Chicago. I might be in Washington D.C. or Northern Virginia.

I may do NaNoFiMo to polish off the last few chapters. But I think I've said that every year since that debuted (it's that month's 5th anniversary this year). I'll see how I feel after taking the 1st and 2nd off.

It would be nice just to say, "the end" for once.

This time, however, I do promise one thing. December entries in Retentivewrimo. Or at least one. That's something I've been horrible about.

Hopefully Tomorrow Night Will Not End Up In Regret

2008-11-29T20:44:00.000-08:00

I am now officially stressed out. I hoped to be at about 46,000 when I left the Detroit area to go back to Chicago. I should get home in plenty of time to have almost ten hours available to me but I still feel like I'm pushing the limits.

Still, after this last writing session of the day, I stand at 44,051 words. Now a little under 6,000 words could be easily doable if I thought I had that much left in my story. I'm really pushing my two goals for this year a little too close together.

I think I could finish my novel in just about 3,000 words, but I have at least twice that until I reach the required word count.

I just introduced the last element into the story. It will take the main character back to Washington D.C. to rescue Jenae and it will create conflict with Amy (the physician's assisnt who the main character is now together with - a lot happens when you write 5,000 words in one day).

I know this will all end up with Cal taking another drive to drop Jenae back home in West Virginia with the baby. And, well, he would pass through Columbus (where Amy is from) if he drives back to Chicago.

There is plenty I probably could work in if I had more time but I don't.

Only time will tell (and a little over 24 hours of that) what my warped, tired mind comes up with to try to solve this dilemma. But it will not involve any cheating. No dream sequences, none of that. I pride myself in never having used these.

Though I've never been so close to the edge before.

I would say why I'm so close to the edge, but I feel like I don't have time to. Cliff Notes is that yesterday I went to see "Milk" at the Main Street Art Theater in Royal Oak, Michigan with the girl who almost ruined NaNo 2007. Then today I went downtown to Detroit with my sister before going out with dinner in southwest Detroit with my entire family.

If I didn't think I could pull off 6,000 words tomorrow (my record is over 8,000) I would probably regret going to Detroit today. But as it stands I think I would regret not seeing Detroit this Thanksgiving weekend more.

The Uncomforts Of Home Prevent My Writing

2008-11-27T20:49:00.000-08:00

I've never been a huge fan of the Eastern Time Zone.

Sure I grew up in it and all that but for some reason Central Time seems to be a place where I can write a lot more. Things just end earlier there (and by things, I mean things like football games and television shows, which is about all I have to do in Michigan).

The last two days of writing have been pretty pathetic no matter where I've been.

What I'm thankful for on this Thanksgiving is that I wrote until 2:00 a.m. on Tuesday night getting up to 35,257 words. I thought I would have some time to write before my sister and I drove home to my parent's house but that just didn't happen.

I was out running errands and such until the very moment I had to pick up her dog and retrieve her from work.

Then today I woke up early and spent the entire day on the phone with my dad trying to do tech support for my laptop that keeps shutting itself down. I'm getting recovery disks to get the system back to scratch (since they're pretty sure it's a software problem) the second week in December. That's not going to help for NaNo.

What also doesn't help is that I have to use my mother's computer with a kitchen chair (and I thought the folding chair I used at home before making a laptop like setup on my bed was bad) that is not very conducive to marathoning comfort. My sister's dog requires a very large bed, apparently so my dad's office, where I usually sleep on a foldout couch, is taken.

I'm sleeping in my brother's room as he's in North Carolina. Lucky bastard. It snowed here in Michigan.

Anyway, end result is I now stand at 36,574 (just over 1,000 words after I wrote a tiny amount at work yesterday just to say that I did). This means in the last three days of the month I have to write 13,426 words. Which is possible but it's going to be really rough.

Looks like I might not do a lot in Detroit after all. Though we may go back to Chicago early. If this is the case, Sunday could be a madhouse sprint of sprints from the comfort and inspiration of my own bed.

At least I'm going to sleep pretty early today so I can wake up and buy some dirt cheap memory tomorrow morning. Though I am not sleeping out tonight. Thank goodness for small favors.

Finally Writing In Small Blocks But With No Theme

2008-11-25T21:42:00.000-08:00

Since I'll be in the Detroit metropolitan area tomorrow though Friday, I saw my weekly movie at the Logan Theater today. It was "Role Models." That movie was suprisingly good. It wasn't necessarily the smartest movie out right now but it had a nice ethos. It was centered around music as so many movies are, with Kiss and Wings references holding the film together.

And I realized that's what this year's novel is lacking that I've had in the past. But it's way too late for that now. I'm now 2/3rds of the way to the end point and there's no string like that to be had. Oh well, it's not like NaNos are definitely supposed to be about themes anyway.

I wrote 2,313 words today (313 is actually the area code for the city of Detroit so it's sort of oddly fitting but unintentional) in two writing sessions. One of them was a 30 minute block before I left for the movie. I guess it's a combination of not wanting to fail and actually having something to write about that squeezed me into a small block like that.

It's the kind of thing I've done on a regular basis in past years.

I have just introduced the love interest into the story in the form of a nurse at a clinic in Staunton. So this sets up the conflict.

I have tried to avoid the plot of this movie I once saw where a fake psychologist wraps a town around his finger before it all comes crashing down due to a woman and I'm still trying to avoid that. I have to figure out how to do that.

But I have a long car ride back to Michigan with my sister and her dog to do that tomororow.

Off to write again. I only have about 1,500 words until I finally catch the tail end of the active other members of the word war team. And tomorrow will, hopefully, be peaceful at work so I can stay up a bit late. I don't think I'll get to 35,500 to accomplish this but I'm going to try and get close.

This Fantasy Writing Thing Is Just As Nerve Wracking

2008-11-24T21:48:00.000-08:00

Last year when I was word war captain for Chicago, NaNoWriMo was almost like a second job. I would spend my evenings working through the various issues (I don't want to rehash them since they're all in black and white, or whatever color this blog shows up as, in older entries).

This year I tried to avoid that.

This year I couldn't really afford that since I'm really busy at my real job. There is not even a chance to take a day off at my real job (I'm thankful for Thanksgiving Friday this year for sure). I don't even have time to write on my lunch breaks since those are shorter than usual.

I really wish that I did and I know I'm going to regret squeezing in another writing session tonight, but my first writing session was nothing short of pathetic. I didn't start writing until 10:00 since I work up at 8:00 p.m. Today I wrote a review of Philly's Best on Yelp and so I felt I should eat there again tonight.

The owner had actually read my review and commented on a joke line that I put in about rolling my eyes about a substitution. It actually happened but it was more my fault. I took the line out. While I was eating my wonderful hoagie (I gave the place four stars so he wasn't too upset), I realized "My Own Worst Enemy" was on.

Seeking some inspiration from that well written show, I watched the entire thing.

I thought I had gotten blown out in fantasy football this week since I was 31 points behind with Lance Moore and Greg Jennings to go tonight. I opened up stat tracker early in the third quarter and, holy wow, I saw the two of them together had put up 30 points with a lot of time left.

So I turned on Monday Night Football. And I watched as Greg Jennings put up just enough yardage to give me what could be a five point win. I verified the stats independently on ESPN because I couldn't believe my eyes. I still won't until tomorrow morning. I still expect it to be a glitch and instead of being 9-3-0 and in 2nd place in my league, I'll be 8-4-0 and in 4th.

Now I was writing while all of this was happening but I was, as is understandable to anyone who's ever played fantasy football, a bit distracted.

Really long story now short, I only wrote 1,325 words tonight and stand at 31,669. This almost keeps me at around 3,000 words a day to continue on but I feel like I'm taking too many chances. I don't know how busy Thanksgiving weekend will actually be.

I won't believe, similarly to fantasy football, that I reached 50,000 until I'm at about 52,000. That won't happen tonight, obviously, but I still want to push on to 33,000. I'm at the point now where the main character is trying on his new identity for the first time applying for a job at a video store. So maybe I'll just finish this scene.

I forsee being very tired at work tomorrow though.

A Small Town Brings Big Words

2008-11-23T21:03:00.000-08:00

I missed my end of weekend goal of 33,000 by quite a bit. I mean there were 3s and 0s in my ending weekend word count of 30,334 but not quite in the right places.

Though I am astounded I was able to squeeze out4,173 words today.

Things didn't look good toward getting anywhere near that this morning when I went out to brunch with a high school friend of mine that was in town at this fantastic creperie in Lincoln Park.

I was supposed to go into work immediately after but I came home exhausted and slept instead until about 4:15. I wrote a review on Yelp and then, finally at 5:00 started back into "Drive."

I wrote for 75 minutes getting to around 27,500. This could have been where I had called it quits on past Sundays. But, thankfully "Animation Domination" was cancelled on Fox so I wrote right on through until about 10:30 p.m.

I don't know what the next two days will bring but at least I'm at a place in the story now where I can write.

I'm right at the beginning of the 23rd chapter (that mystical number). I worked through the end of Washington D.C. (it ended badly) and now have the main character in Staunton, Virginia. It's a city I drove through on the road trip that inspired "Drive" (though I was never suicidal, for me it was just a vacation and had every intention of going back to Chicago) that I thought, "I could live in this place if I had to choose any small town in America."

It really is a nice semi-liberal college town right in the middle of Virginia's bible belt. It went slightly for Bush in 2004 (by about 2%) but I can almost guarantee Obama carried it this time around. And it has a thiriving art scene almost like an artist collective in the west.

I had the main character check into a transient hotel there (still a bit short on money) while he looks for a job. The description of the rules there took up quite a few words.

I know tomorrow I'll have something to write about the job search and I know this is where something important happens that makes him make a tough decision, but I don't know what yet. It probably involves a girl. All my novels do. Stupid dude lit.

Anyhow, off to sleep so I try to push for that 33,000 tomorrow that I didn't get tonight.

Oh, one more thing, I caught and passed my 27th place New Zealand counterpart in the Word War tonight. By 300 words. It feels good to at least be able to say that, even if disaster does strike and I don't finish.

Not Quite Up To My Goals For Today Or Awake

2008-11-22T21:30:00.000-08:00

Staying up really late to try to write yesterday didn't work out quite like I wanted to. I wrote 826 words between 1:00 and 2:15 a.m. But I didn't end up getting to sleep until 3:00 a.m.

Today I was so exhausted that it took almost three hours to get to 25,000. Only two of them was I writing but it was still a trudge.

As a reward I went up to this Turkish pizza place a couple of neighborhoods north of me. This was about 3:00 p.m. When I got home I took a nap and woke up at around 6:45. I wrote a little again from 7:30 until 8:45 and haven't written since.

I'm now at 26,171 words which is about 2,000 words behind where I wanted to be but I still got in 3,433 words.

Tomorrow I need to beat that so it's time to go to sleep tonight. Though tomorrow I have to go into work in the morning so who knows what I'll accomplish in the afternoon. Probably nothing.

And I'm almost at the point where I have nothing more to write about. I was hoping to get to the end of Washington D.C. tonight and figure out what happens next. But I have no clue what that is. I think it's probably in small town Virginia but something has to happen there that's the climax.

Who knows what that's going to be. And I'm running out of time to figure it out.

Any Unlucky Number Just Keeps Showing Up

2008-11-21T21:50:00.001-08:00

November is always bad for me for so many reasons it seems. Although this might go down as one of the worst Novembers on record.

Life just constantly gets in the way of maximizing my NaNo potential.

Tonight I stayed in again after what happened last Friday and actually plugged out my story up until the point where the drama really sets in for the Washington D.C. scenes. I wrote almost 2,000 word in just over two hours (I'll call it 2:15) and now stand at 22,738. This didn't quite reach my goal of 23,000 but I was really distracted.

Though also inspired.

A real life friend of mine was selected as Review of the Day today on Yelp Chicago (I'm almost proud as I was the first person to compliment her on this review which has now been called "the funniest of the year") and so I wrote a review of Red Apple that I had been meaning to write for a while. It's the best receieved view I've gotten where there were no other Yelpers present (which always bulks up the score).

Well that's not entirely true. The review I wrote of the hospital last Friday now stands at 13 useful, 8 funny, and 8 cool feedbacks. It's creeping me out a bit that unlucky 13 is how many people found it useful but I guess it's fitting considering the circumstances.

Anyway, this positive feedback on my non-fiction writing led to a surge in my fiction writing confidence. I didn't write any high art today but it was good for a push.

The problem is that Yelp will prove more of a distraction than anything else when I go home to Detroit for Thanksgiving. I know I'm going to want to get out of the house and review places around Detroit (especially since Yelp Detroit is trying to get off the ground and needs all the reviews it can get). Plus I got a call from the girl who partially ruined last November who will also be in Detroit at the time and one of the days, I think we're going to see a Bollywood film at this place in my hometown that we had talked about seeing back when we were better friends.

This is definitely a reason to write like the wind this weekend. But I also want to go to a couple of places that I want to review in Chicago first (a New York style pizza joint is one while it's still relevant to my recent trip). I think I'll go to this place as a reward for reaching 25,000.

Hopefully I can get that done before lunchtime tomorrow.

I will begin to write again after this entry is done since I have one more goal to reach tonight. I'm a little over 500 words behind this girl I know (whose real name I can't remember), atlantistale, on the word war team. I want to pass her before I go to sleep. She hasn't written since the 13th (again that number, yikes) so she's probably busy preparing for a play like last November.

So I think it's only fitting that the scene I'm about to start is Jenae, one of the main character's hosts, preparing for a play.

Tomorrow I hope to catch the first remaining active writer above me, fyshy (who was one of the two people I met at the pre-NaNo trip to the Freedom Museum) who is currently at 27,893. I might be able to do that. If I don't get too distracted.

Too Exhausted To Even Make This Post

2008-11-20T21:28:00.000-08:00

So much for the word vein I hit yesterday.

I started to write today at about 8:45 after skipping out on a set of plans that I had tonight. This was after taking a very long nap. And yet I was too exhausted to even move my fingers over the keyboard.

20,747 is where I now stand after attempting to write from 8:45 until 11:15. I don't even know if I can count that as a writing session.

I should have just called the night lost and stayed at my former word count.

The ironic thing is, is that I know I'm about to start on some very serious conflict in the book and that should contain a lot of words. I think I was almost afraid to get there is the problem. I am feeling so uninspiredly tired that I don't think I'll squeeze all of the words out of the next few scenes that I could if I just start them well rested and ready to write.

And not feeling like I'm going to fall asleep on the keyboard.

At least I've got a head start on where the story will be going this weekend. The goal for tomorrow night is now 24,000 since I'm almost at 21,000 now.

The goal for the end of the weekend is 33,000. It's a lofty goal but if I lock myself in my apartment all day both days, and I think I'm too exhausted to do otherwise, it's attainable.

I Actually Made My Goal By 60 Seconds

2008-11-19T21:56:00.000-08:00

By the skin of my teeth, I made my goal of 20,000 words before midnight.

20,006.

It shouldn't have been quite so close but Google Documents, which I've been using to store everything decided to eat the last 150 or so words I wrote early this morning. And of course the words I typed to replace them tonight didn't seem nearly as good to me.

But I wrote them.

And I could write more tonight but staying up and doing these midnight to 1:00 a.m. writing sessions is making me ill. I went to see the doctor today to make sure I was healing correctly and had no neurological damage from the assault on Friday. He asked if I was feeling dizzy and if I had blurred vision. I told him that I wasn't sure because I wasn't getting any sleep.

Tomorrow might be a day of no writing at all since I have plans after work but at least my word count now exceeds the day of the month for the first time this year.

The goal for Friday is 23,000 if I don't write tomorrow. That would mean a pace of 3,000 words per day to close out the month which is entirely possible given Thanksgiving. It's going to be an awful slog but if I can get 1,500 words out of getting a fake driver's license, I can do this.

I'm actually a bit proud of my scene tonight although I pulled a lot of information out of the air about what kinds of documents need to be forged. But there was no time to go and ask the question on the forums or anything.

And it's not really important since I know this story will never see the light of day. It's more a challenge now. Though I am getting some ideas out of the story so we'll see if I can use them in future years.

That's a lot to thing about right now so I'll leave that for when I'm more awake.

Settling Down Into Words In The Story's Washington D.C.

2008-11-18T21:13:00.000-08:00

So this is a good problem to have, I guess.

For the first time in November, but pretty late in the month considering this is 30,000 word day, I actually find myself wanting to write my novel and not stop to do other things. Well, that's not entirely true but at least I find words appearing on the page at a faster rate so that's a start.

I might just make 20,000 by the 20th. Except I still have plans on the evening of the 20th that might prevent this barring a writing frenzy tomorrow.

Tonight I actually had standing Tuesday plans that I cancelled in order to write. Of course I ended up sleeping until 8:00 p.m. after burning the midnight oil yesterday and only getting to 15,245 in 75 minutes (a whopping 206 words, one of my least productive writing sessions ever as far as WPM went). But once I woke up in a little over 90 minutes tonight, I now stand at 17,440.

Or, you know, back to half of what I should be at.

The way I did it? Well, smut I guess. But not in the word count padding way that some people do it. I didn't write a sex scene or anything (I don't know if I've ever written one per se in my six years of NaNoWriMo) but I think I just created some sexual tension in my story.

Turns out the guy, Cal (an old college friend), who the main character is staying with has a really hot wife. The first night he's staying with him in Arlington, Virginia he catches her, she doesn't know it, walking half naked through the hall to go an feed the baby.

I don't know where this will lead, exactly, though I think it may be why he gets kicked out of the condominium and is forced to go on the road again, but at least there were some words in it and a piece of plot.

Though those pieces are less rare right about now. I know what's going to happen next as far as "Washington D.C." goes (the suburbs at least).

Now I just need to free up more time to actually write it. I've almost caught the tail end of the rest of the word war team (I've passed two people who have seemingly given up).

Alright, back to writing (at least as soon as the clock strikes midnight). I'm going to try to get to 18,500 before I go to sleep tonight. That will make the 20,000 that I aim for tomorrow very doable. Kind of like this character's wife. :)

And There Goes Another Week

2008-11-17T21:44:00.000-08:00

I actually met a goal for once in 2008. It's a small miracle! From midnight to 1:15 a.m., I wrote 1058 words and now stand at 15,039 which places me second to last on the word war team instead of last.

This moving slightly up the list has inspired me to write and to try to catch the tail end of the people who have been actively trying to write all month. Or those that wrote early and then gave up.

Of course while I was raring to write, I got a phone call from my sister today reminding me that Sisters of Mercy were playing tonight at House of Blues and we had tickets. I ended up going home from work and going to sleep until 7:45 when I needed to be there at 8:30.

I didn't even eat dinner except for some fries at the show, let alone write.

This is sort of depressing since tonight was the one night this week I thought I could get some serious writing in. Tomorrow and Thursday I have plans and Wednesday I have to see my weekly movie.

I may not get a chance to seriously write again until Friday which is already past the two-thirds mark of the month. I hoped to be well past 20,000 by then but I'm not sure if that's even feasible.

I'm going to write tonight for a bit and see what happens. I probably won't get in more than a thousand. It's sad since I know exactly where my story is going now for about next few chapters. Or at least the next one.

The main character is going to meet up with an old college friend in Washington D.C. who has known his time on the wrong side of the law. Shenanigans ensue. If I knew what those shenanigans were, it would be great.

The Grinder Was Not Inspirational

2008-11-16T21:46:00.001-08:00

Another somewhat wasted day on the novel front. Instead of being productive and writing all day today like I had planned, instead I watched fantasy football scores and played all day on Yelp.

I did manage to complete the scene where the police interrogate the main character about the mugging (asking why he was in what he didn't even realize was a bad part of town). This scene seemed to eat up a lot of words but in reality it only brought me to 13,981.

So I'm maintaining my streak, I see of being exactly half way to where I need to be. My goal for the day was 15,000 so I didn't end up too far off. In fact, despite how bad this might be for me at work tomorrow, I'm going to push for it in a 45 minute sprint after I finish typing this entry.

I seem to have won at fantasy football (something I worried about when my defense (the New York Jets) only put up 8 points on Thursday so the Monday night game is meaningless to me.

Right now the story is in Philadelphia so I went to the Philadelphia themed restaurant across the street from my apartment for lunch. I got a grinder seeing if that would get me excited to write about Philadelphia.

It didn't, so I'm going to get the main character, now down to the $100 he stashed in his car out of the last ATM transaction he made, out of Pennsylvania a.s.a.p.

I think him getting robbed of all of his credit cards and the like is going to be good for the story. I think losing his "identity" is going to mean doing things like getting a fake driver's license and finding a job with it.

I'm definitely leaving things that I've personally done behind and venturing out into a new world.

Will this new world have enough for the final 35,000 words in two weeks? That I'm not really sure of.

Inspiration Comes From Strange Places

2008-11-15T19:49:00.000-08:00

Inspiration certainly comes from some weird places, that's for sure.

Last night as I was walking down Fullerton like I had a thousand times before toward the liquor store to get some milk, eggs, and butter, a group of kids attacked me. They were trying to mug me (at least the police seem to think so) and one of the kids hit me with a lock inside of a sock a couple of times. I'm not much worse for wear except for a cut above my left eye and a lump on the back of my head that has now shrunk down to normal size.

They weren't able to get my wallet or inflict more damage because I managed to duck into the liquor store in a cold run before they could.

I'm fine today. And I actually wrote it into my novel.

It was a bit difficult to write even though I changed the details. But what I'm really inspired to write about comes next.

Thusfar in the novel, the main character has avoided trouble and it wasn't making for a very exciting story. But trouble will eventually find you, especially if you set yourself up for it like he has by setting himself off on the road and leaving his identity behind. I want to write about the violation that is felt when your safety is suddenly called into question.

And now there's a reason for him to actually struggle.

But only half the month to do it.

I had planned on going to a lot of write-ins the second half of the month but just as quickly as my laptop was fixed, it's broken again. It runs perfectly for some time and then, suddenly, out of the blue 15-20 minutes after it's turned on, it turns itself off.

I definitely need a new laptop at Thanksgiving which is something I was hoping to avoid this time around. So it's back to the desktop.

Though I have changed my bedroom setup around so I'm now almost writing as I would were my desktop a laptop. Though with a detachable mouse.

I still only managed to write a little over a thousand words today and now stand at 12,795. I got to 11,392 in a final word sprint at the Brooklyn write-in and hadn't written since. I was just too busy with my program in NYC and then hanging out with my New York friends afterwards.

But now I'm back in Chicago so it's back to writing again.

At least I hope so since I rejoined the word war team as six openings happened (and I was #32 in the original group of signeees to begin with so with 33 spots I didn't feel too bad). So it's back to not letting other people down again. Which leads to quite a bit of inspiration as well.

A Big Apple's Worth Of Inspiration

2008-11-11T17:23:00.000-08:00

I'm writing this entry from Atlas Cafe in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

There's a New York: New York City regional write-in here tonight and since I'm in New York City for work, I decided to crash the party. Well, not really crash since their ML knew that I was coming. And we're not competing against them this year so we're all on the same "team".

Though none of them seem to be struggling nearly as much as I am.

The irony of my writing with these New York City people is that I've yet to attend a Chicago write-in in 2008. And last year I resolved to do that this year at the end of 2007.

If anyone is reading this (I've done a great job of publicizing Retentivewrimo this year) and has the opportunity, I highly recommend going to a write-in with another region. It's so odd how similar they are to our own.

Even the faces could be the same as those in Chicago.

Though they did make me feel a bit slow. We had a sprint (they don't call them word wars here, damn we're competitive in Chicago, but they do keep score) and I only wrote 498 words in 20 minutes.

Now I've never been the fastest in the world at these things (whatever they're called) but I usually do better than that. This year's story still isn't inspiring me in any way, shape or form.

But I have broken the 10,000 mark finally. 10,715. Still around a 30,000 word pace as opposed to 50,000.

The current scene I'm writing is the MC (who still has no name) nearly getting into a fight with a redneck in front of the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania. I think I'm going to hades for writing this chapter in New York City.

For my next trick, when I'm home in Detroit for Thanksgiving, I'll write about the auto industry collapsing. Though there are no Detroit write-ins while I'm there.

Starting To Drive On "Drive"

2008-11-09T17:30:00.001-08:00

I woke up early this morning before dropping my parents off to take the Megabus back to Michigan (talk about a change of position with growing up) and wrote 1,141 words in about 45 minutes. I didn't end up writing the strip club scene.

Instead I wrote about half of the scene with the main character (who still doesn't have a name) calling home to convince his ex-girlfriend to sell the stuff in his apartment.

What I wrote this morning isn't as important, however, as where I'm writing this evening.

I took both of my laptops into Circuit City today. The older one I have just given up on and am just having them do a data recovery. This will be about $100 but is worth it to get back my photos and, I realize now, Microsoft Word.

The newer laptop turned out not to be incredibly broken or incredibly broken depending on how you look at it. The on key is completely disfunctional (the Geek Squad employee at Best Buy managed to push the computer on but then couldn't turn it off). Thankfully since it's a HP Pavilion built as much for watching movies as it is for anything else, it can be booted from the DVD player functionality.

After rebooting the computer completely to get rid of the blue screen of death that was there when the computer did boot up, I am now back active in the world of laptop users. Without Microsoft Word on the computer and using Google Documents but lying down while writing is the greatest feeling in the world.

I now stand at 8,127 words which ranks me 33rd on the Chicago word war team. But now I can actually write in New York City. And on the airplane. And I actually have a desire to write again. So my morale is definitely up.

Moving On In The Story Finally

2008-11-08T20:01:00.000-08:00

While my story is still wandering pretty aimlessly, due to a marathon writing session from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m., I now stand at 6,986 words.

This is still 6,647 words behind but it feels like a pretty significant number.

This evening I wrote some reflections of the main character on why someone would want to be in small town America after I basically change around the facts a bit in a stop I actually made in Fairmount, Indiana in April on my way to driving to Washington, D.C.

Fairmount is James Dean's hometime and there's a hero worship to him there. I wrote in the mindset of the main character how he's almost envious that one person can have such an impact.

In the Historical Museum in Fairmount is also all the senior class photos from Fairmount's less famous graduates. And he realizes that in a small town, everyone has an impact on everyone else. And he wants to be a part of this.

I then have him drive on to Muncie, Indiana where he's currently sitting in a hotel room after setting some things straight (i.e. quitting his job). He's standing in front of a mirror getting ready to get in touch with his ex-girlfriend to sell all of the things out of the apartment he used to have.

Then I'm going to have him go to a strip club.

Sure it might not fit into the story. But I need to have something to get me interested in writing again and smut might do just that. Or at least pad the word count.

My Story Is Dying Like My Laptop Is Dead

2008-11-07T20:47:00.000-08:00

I now sit with two absolutely dead laptops.

I went to Circuit City this evening to buy a new power chord for the laptop I've been using most recently. I plugged it in and nothing seemed to happen. Eventually I got frustrated and turned the laptop on its side. Amazingly the computer came on. As soon as I would face it back down, however, the battery light would go off and just as suddenly the computer would shut itself off.

Now no matter which was I face the computer, there is nothing.

This is the same thing that's been wrong with my better laptop since June. Two laptops that won't even start to boot up even if they've got working batteries.

On Sunday I'm going to take the better laptop into Best Buy and have them fix it. I guess I have the money since I spent $100 on the power cord either way.

This isn't going to help much since I leave for New York City on Tuesday and I'm sure they won't have the computer done until the weekend following (half way through the month).

Tomorrow I'm going with my parents to the Shedd Aquarium before going to dinner with them.

So it looks like I'm stuck on 4,435 words for now after writing on and off between 9:00 and 10:45. I don't even know how much I wrote during this time since I was fighting with the laptop for most of it. I have how much I was at after a writing session yesterday night after I wrote the entry. But it seems like right around 800 words.

And I still don't have a plot besides a guy driving. Right now I've got him in James Dean's hometown in Indiana. Except he's not a rebel without a cause, he's just stuck in a novel without a plot.

I just feel like once I actually get to write the way I want to, things are going to work out.

But by that point, it might be too late in the month.

Things Are Just Not Working Out

2008-11-06T20:15:00.000-08:00

This is not going well.

On the 3rd, I just couldn't be bothered to write. The 4th I was drinking with people in Ukrainian Village and Wicker Park to celebrate Barack Obama's win.

You'd think this would be inspiring but after living on the adrenaline of watching the Democrats sweep through state after state and staying up until 2:45 a.m. or so, I was exhausted on the 5th. Amazingly I made it into work for a half day. After coming home, I planned to write (and run to Circuit City to get a new battery for my laptop), but ended up sleeping until it was time to meet my parents who were in town.

Today I went to see my weekly movie early and came home to write.

Miraculously I squeezed in about 1000 words to leave me at 2,256. Still far behind where I should be since this is 10,000 day.

Tomorrow I really need to get that laptop battery or I am not going to finish, let alone make the cut for the word war team.

I still haven't come up with anything to write about. I still know the story and today I'm writing sort of random observations about Indiana that I drew from my road trip earlier this year but it is really boring me.

What I really need to do is spend tomorrow figuring out what I want to happen. If I'm not writing in November I don't even know what else I'd do with the month. Maybe sleep or something. We'll have to see.

It All Comes Full Circle Back To 2004

2008-11-02T21:32:00.000-08:00

One thing that I often forget in discussing my ultimate success in 2004 is how much peril was contained in that winning experience.

There were times that I thought I would never finish 50,000 words, let alone the novel (and I did end the month with barely over the minimum - 56,000). There were nights typing away on a hotel television screen computer in New York City. There was a day in an internet cafe off Times Square. There were about seven computers involved in total.

In short, I didn't have a laptop.

Well, today I discovered that I don't have a laptop for this year either. In June, right after I moved into a new apartment, the computer that I got Thanksgiving of 2006 ended up becoming useless. Luckily the one from 2005 was fixed and I've been using that one. But the battery has been acting up just like the first time it was my primary computer.

Yesterday the battery went dead.

I really can't afford a new battery right now. Not even close. So I'm back to typing on the very desk top computer that I used in 2004. This year really has come full circle.

Or I should say that I've been avoiding typing on said computer.

After going into work in the morning to catch up on a few things, I had all day to write like the wind. Especially since my primary distraction of posting photos to flickr wasn't going to work either since all of my photos are on that laptop.

I ended up writing around 1,000 words today starting at 10:45 p.m.

I now stand at 1,631 or just under a day behind. Not a great haul for the first weekend but at least I wrote both days.

Tomorrow I will get on this whole writing thing. Only top 25-35 writers at the end of week one get to be on the word war team. Of course being on the team is going to be a lot tougher sans laptop until the next paycheck.

But, hey, in New York City I'll get to relive one of the most interesting experiences I ever had. Writing in an internet cafe off Times Square.

Starting Off Really Slowly And Relaxed

2008-11-01T21:43:00.000-07:00

Since this is the 10th anniversary of NaNoWriMo, I should be more excited about it than ever before.

But I think the way it's turning out, I'm less involved this year both personally and in the region that I have been since the first year.

I did write 622 words after attending the Yelp Halloween party drunk off my behind at midnight while sitting in the ChiWriMo chat room but since then I haven't written anything at all.

I left off at a point where I want to write more but I just don't have the energy thusfar.

This was the first year in a while that I missed the kickoff party. I spent the morning on Yelp talking about Halloween and then actually got in my car to go to the party before I discovered that Chicago Avenue was closed. So I turned around and went home.

I plan on going to the TGIO Party and going to write ins and such (barring my laptop breaking) but so far this chilling is working out better for me. I'll probably have more energy for the inevitable end push.

This Year It Really Is T.G.I.O.

2007-11-30T23:11:00.000-08:00

Well it's all over but the shouting (otherwise known as the awards) and in the end, Toronto pulled it out by 110,000 words (I'm not going to say anything but there's a certain 110,000 words that might not have been written under certain other circumstances). Chicago put up a valliant fight until the very end and it's a good thing that we did or we might have actually lost out to New York City.

The final standing are as follows:

1. Toronto - 2,980,059
2. Chicago - 2,875,287
3. New York City - 2,859,051

16,000 words. That's how much we ended up beating New York City by and it might not have happened without the dedicated crew that was at the final write-in tonight at Open Books. And special thanks go out to Atlantistale who had the idea to have a mega-word war. It was :30 of war followed by an :05 break followed by :30 more of war.

And I don't even know how much Chicago wrote during this but it was way more than 16,000 words.

---

The most important thing to me personally though was that I wrote 9,581 words today to finish with a total of 70,433 for the month.

That is a record that I don't think will ever be broken.

I think that I should have attended a couple more write-ins. Not that they helped me out much in the way of word count (though I highly doubt I would have written 7,583 words in five hours if it wasn't for being at the write-in) but the people there would start talking about something and I would incorporate it into the novel.

It was responsible for what I think is the funniest passage in my whole novel (though about the least work safe):

“Should we make irishlion29 say he’s hung like a horse?” Andy asked.

“No one is actually hung like a horse, Andy,” Kate said, trying to stifle a laugh, “and don’t you think that screams personal ad? We don’t want this guy to seem too desperate or else Tabitha’s not going to go for him.”

“I’m hung like a horse,” Andy said.

“No Andy, you are hung like a pony,” Kate said.

“Isn’t a pony hung like a horse?” Andy asked.

“According to Wikipedia, a pony is not hung like a horse. And neither are you Andy.”

“Can I at least be hung like some large dog, like a German Shephard.”

“No, Andy, you’re hung like a Canadian.”

“Well if I’m hung like a Canadian, than I’m hung like a proud Newfoundland fisherman named Pierre.”

“No, Andy, you’re hung like a dead fish.”

“Well, if I’m a dead fish, then I never stopped trying to grab the hook.”

“You know what they say, winners never quit and quitter never win. But you’re obviously not a winner and you just won’t stop.”

“Why should I quit, I’m as prolific a speaker as Longfellow.”

“Stop it right now. Quit talking about your anatomy, you’re so not a Longfellow.”

“I’ll quit if you quit,” Andy said.

“Then you’re for sure never going to win.”

“But I like that, let’s say he’s really into obsure Irish authors,” Andy said.

“I think that Longfellow was actually American,” Kate said, “what are you, Donovan?”

“I’m sorry, but everyone knows that Bruce Lee was Chinese except for Donovan. Who actually knows who Longfellow even is?”

“Obviously no woman who ever slept with you.”

“Well, there was that one girl from Nantucket.”

“But she slept with everyone, so fuck it,” Kate said. By this point, I think most of them must have been round because they were both rolling on the floor. They were also both as red as our main competitor’s envelope where it wasn’t out of anger. I almost expected them to go into the room with the bed at that point but they didn’t.

“That’s what she said,” Kate said. I had noticed her starting to slip out of the chair and I knew it was inevitable that she was going to fall on the floor. This was the point that she did.

Somewhere I think in there is that golden moment that everyone will be talking about for years to come. It's my "night trains were the worst" or my "don't worry sweetheart, it's not that small" moment. Funny how two of the three involve dick jokes. I guess they're more universal than anything else except for fart jokes.

The whole thing got really raunchy in the end as I think no one was on much sleep.

But the lack of sleep is something that I intend to correct this weekend, to a point. Though I don't know how much of that there's going to be.

I corrected it a bit this morning by calling in sick to work. I wrote from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. actually but it was probably better for my word count that I slept from 10:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

As of tomorrow, it will be good to stop writing about movies and to actually start watching them again. And I took some photos at the write-in tonight so I'm starting to go back into non-November mode there as well.

December is a new month and while I'll miss November this year, there has never been another T.G.I.O. party where I so agree with the sentiment.

One More Session And Everyday I Wrote The Book

2007-11-29T21:22:00.000-08:00

I think I'm going to type just past midnight today which means that I'm going to write every day in November this year. This is, by far, a first. I don't know if I'll ever do it again even if I participate in NaNo until I'm old.

And I just might since these stories are almost like bookmarks in my life. Each year they end up being a collection of my observations on the world condensed into one handy little (well 200+ pages in most cases) tome. Even though I've only LuLued the 2004 book (because it was the only one I finished), I still have the 2005 and 2006 writings around - though I've never even started to read the 2006 disaster.

I'm not one of those that burns their old manuscripts or anything. Despite how awful they are, they are still a piece of my life that I may one day want to just look at and recall. Even if I hate the prose, there's a little something of my life in each.

One thing that I didn't mention in any of these blog entries was that on October 30 while I was driving home from Taco Bell (food for every NaNoers unhealthy November soul), I heard "Everyday I Write The Book" by Elvis Costello.

It was pretty inspiring to write the book every day.

I just found out a couple of hours ago that I am going to karaoke with not-Kate and her friend (the one from the car ride of narrative proportions) on Saturday. That was actually where I originally met her friend (sang "Punk Rock Girl" that night).

Anyway, not getting my hopes up in any way, shape, or form. But point of the story (which some story this month has to have a point since my novel doesn't) is that I'm going to sing it on Saturday.

And it will never have had more meaning.

---

Tonight I beat my previous high word count for any previous NaNo (which I think is 58,229). Though somewhere in the back on my mind, 62k is saying it's an important number so maybe I'm wrong.

Anyway, even if I did write 62,000 back in 2004 (I know the overall novel ended up 92,000 on December so I must have gotten close), I should shatter that tomorrow.

Yesterday, after wanting to stop drunk writing but not, I wrote 717 words from 12:30 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. I was exhausted today. But I slept a lot and ended up writing a whopping 2,639 words this evening.

The total of 3,356 words for the day was my second highest of the month. So much for not having much left to write. I broke 60k with a total of 60,852.

This means that 65k is totally attainable tomorrow at the write-in. If I don't call in sick to work, I'm going to try to go right after work. Though tonight I discovered that my laptop's power cord only works in some outlets now.

This is not good news.

At least it blew at the end of November this year and not the start and there was no fire involved.

---

Speaking of fire, Team Chicago has almost reached it's goal of an average of 50k per person.

That was the magic mark that I thought no team would be able to beat (2,750,000). Toronto is almost at that goal tonight. It is going to take some real umph to push through and beat them tomorrow so I hope Chicago has it in them. We're nearly 60,000 behind.

But there's no shame in losing to any team that puts up 3,000,000 words and Toronto is going to be really close to that.

It's like losing to a team in fantasy football that puts up 200 points. There was just no way, even if you scowered the waiver wire and played every position perfectly that anyone is going to beat that.

If someone bowls a 300, there's no way to bowl a 301.

Still, I think Chicago may have a few people already at the write-in tonight who may not have updated their word count for the day yet. I don't think we're really down 60,000 at the end of the day and we made up a bigger deficit than that once before.

I am not going to slack for my part this time. The last day of NaNo is 10 minutes away as I type this and I'm going to try to make the most of it.

At least I'll write a little in it and have all 30 days writing the book.

Why I Shouldn't Write Or Talk While Drunk

2007-11-28T21:31:00.000-08:00

So I am drunk right now and I'm still starting to plug away at the novel. I have only written about, well exactly, 790 words tonight. The last 365 were in a word war and I'm not even sure they make any sense.

I know that I suddenly had Kate seduce the first guy that walked through the door when she saw Andy and Tabitha standing there and greeting people (nothing is happening there). This caused Andy to act like Kate and goes into pause mode. I actually made a "Freaky Friday" reference to explain it all but I don't know if that even made sense.

I'm now at 57,496. I put in the forum that I wanted to hit 60,000 tonight but that's not going to happen.

I could but I think work might be very interesting tomorrow regardless.

---

See, I'm pretty drunk right now (though I'm sobering up as I write this).

I went to the Blackhawks/Lightning game tonight and before, me and the motley crew of co-workers and roommates of co-workers went to a bar at Madison and Racine (I believe it was called the Third Rail).

I'm a very slow drinker but I had two there and then two more at the game. And so four drinks in the time I'd usually have two has sapped my sanity.

On the car ride home, I told the girl who doesn't want to be in the story far too much about our mutual friend (not-Kate). I don't even know where it came from but I know that I'll end up hearing about it in the near future (if not tomorrow). Not that it's embarassing but it's still not something I should have spoken out loud as some people don't know how to interpret what I say.

I was still totally logical about the whole thing but I have to say that when I'm drunk, it's not good if I'm around not-Kate.

---

Oh, but what is good is that Chicago seems to have by a miracle (a miracle known a cavafy and ilyq) taken the lead on Toronto again.

It's by about 30k and I'm not sure it will last but I'm pretty happy right now (even if I do have to remind cavafy not to wait 70k until they, I'm not even sure if it's a he or she, updates).

I wanted to write way more tonight than I did but maybe tomorrow I'll actually remember to e-mail myself my NaNo file and write at work.

I'm just happy that while I didn't write, my team knocked me down from the #9 word count to the #13 one.

That and while I was at a hockey game, they turned into Toronto. People who I thought stopped at 50k are now madly going again. I just hope I can get back to doing the same for the final two days.

And that I make an a** of myself no more.

Three Characters In One Novel In A Car

2007-11-27T20:11:00.000-08:00

Another day of life being more interesting than fiction saw me write only 1,239 words today. This leaves me at 56,756. Which I think is only about 1,500 words off my personal record of 58,000 or so (if memory serves 58,229).

I should get that tomorrow night after the hockey game I'm going to. Yes it sounds really Torontoan to go to a hockey game on the third to last night of NaNoWriMo, but I planned this way before I thought about the fact that I might be Word War Captain this month. Then again, I wonder if I were just on the team if 56,756 might be good enough to take a day off.

I'm pushing for 62,500 now I think. I just hope my 2,500 less goal isn't going to cost the team.

I skipped out on the west side writing group (which pretty much means it didn't happen since I haven't seen any complaints on the Chicago boards) tonight and slept. It's going to be a busy day tomorrow and so I hope to resume this sleep thing as soon as I finish this entry.

I have been working through lunch the last couple of days so tomorrow, Thursday, and maybe Friday I'm going to do mad writing at work.

I've been reluctant to do this with not-Kate and not-Tabitha right in the building (not-Tabitha actually sits only a couple of cubes over) but today, an odd thing happened. Truth again became stranger, and a better story than, fiction.

---

I drove to work today in anticipation of going to Atomix after work and was supposed to leave with not-Kate at about 4:20. I got stuck in a last minute phone conversation at work.

In the meantime, not-Kate went over to talk to not-Tabitha.

The phone conversation ended and I walked over to not-Tabitha's desk to retrieve not-Kate. Usually, even though she starts at 8:30 like me, not-Tabitha stays until at least 5:00 (she's our web designer and we're about to roll out a new web site in 30 days). But today she left early and I offered her a ride home as well.

Which I think shocked not-Kate more than it did not-Tabitha.

Despite the fact that I made certain parts of not-Tabitha's personality into the antagonist of my novel, I really don't hate her as such. I just don't remember anymore what I once found so fascinating about her that I got into the unrequited smittenness about her.

So we all had a pretty peaceful car ride as unlike in the novel, there's not constant animosity. There's some guarded words here and there and some cruel inside jokes (mostly from not-Kate and not from not-Tabitha) but no snappy dialog.

After we dropped off not-Tabitha (she lives in East Village, not-Kate and I live in Logan Square), the first thing not-Kate said to me was, "you both act different around each other, but you were pretty normal."

I said, "that's because I'm totally over her."

At first not-Kate didn't believe it but that I explained to her that the Sunday of trouble just sealed it. I'm not sure how not-Kate didn't figure this out (the Sunday of trouble was when I went into work on a Sunday where not-Tabitha was there blabbing in Valley Girl on her cell phone as she didn't know I was there, causing me to reevaluate everything).

We ended up talking about not-Kate's new boy and some other things and just generally having a nice car ride home. There were a few funny lines that will be added to our huge collection of inside jokes (none of which would make sense unless I spent a ton more time than I have explaining them) but nothing story-worthy (besides the fact that she said she hadn't given up hope for me despite the events of eight days ago).

I told her pretty much everything I said in here yesterday (I'm always amazed she's so cool with being the FMC in my story's basis) and she generally agreed. "It freaks me out that all of our car rides have a beginning, a middle, and an end like chapters in a book, but I've just learned to accept it," I said.

Oh, there was one event with not-Tabitha. She finally confirmed that she didn't read the 2004 NaNo novel that I gave her. Which is cool, though I really wish she had. Now, though, I'm not sure she'd entirely appreciate it like she would when I first gave it to her back in June or July.

She did apologize for not reading it though and said, "because I'm an asshole."

Now that is something that a reticent Tabitha would say. So maybe I haven't put the good not-Tabitha (which right now, the character in the book is being) too far off the mark.

When Fiction And Narrative Non-Fiction Collide

2007-11-26T21:34:00.000-08:00

I took a break from writing tonight to live the novel that is my own life.

I mentioned last Monday the awful thing that happened (well, not awful, so much as not what I expected or hoped for) and how it played out like a novel. This is so true with so many events surrounding the woman with me in the car ride. Our whole dynamic has been serialized and chapterized in a way that I couldn't even plan.

Stages in our friendship have actually been marked, though never intentionally, by the sharing of the "Up" series movies. I have to say that I was sort of planned in this at the start. I saw that she had watched "7 Up" on Netflix and I watched it on view it now. I had seen "28 Up" and "35 Up" back in a sociology class in college so I was already a fan of the series (and actually saw "42 Up" in the theater with the woman who would become the basis for Tabitha in this year's novel a ton of years ago).

We've taken turns renting the movies since then. And we've reached the end now.

Tonight I watched "49 Up" which is the latest film in the series ("56 Up" is in the planning stages right now). I don't think it will mark a huge change in not-Kate and my dynamic but I almost didn't want to watch it. It's oddly enough, been one of the things that has brought us to the point where we are now.

Which is a place where not-Kate is someone who I don't want to lose from my life for a long time. And it's not because she's actually an interesting enough "character" to base a novel around but because she generally amazes me.

A lot of people think I'm some sort of secret admirer to her. And while I don't admire her in that Valentine's Day sort of way, I do admire this woman a ton.

There's a line in the new Kanye West single "Big Brother" where he just breaks down and sings in the direction of Jay-Z (who he wrote the song about):

"If you admire somebody you should go ahead and tell um...people never get the flowers while they could smell um."

So in the mood of thanking everyone on Team Chicago who never gave up even when I did yesterday and kept pushing, I'm also in writing thanking not-Kate.

From not-Hoodie to not-Kate, you have been my inspiration and my muse this November (but not in the creepy sort of way) and I hope you continue on that way for years to come!

I won't say in this forum all of the events that shaped the non-fiction narrative that could have been just as good (if not a better) story than my fiction. But I almost wish I had written that story instead of the one I did. Though that still would have been fictionalized because it would have been far more interesting in reality if certain people fit into certain emotional roles which in reality they don't.

Maybe next year once the psychic space is great enough, I'll actually write what went on but in a fictionalized form. Though who knows where those four characters (only three of which actually made my novel) will be at that time. Life may still continue to get more interesting than fiction ever could.

If we keep having these serialized experiences (especially in the case of summer turning into fall turning into winter) I may have no choice but to write them.

---

This November is quickly winding down (though I don't know if it can happen too soon).

I'm already working with the ML to choose my successor as Word War Captain once I step down on December 2 (after presenting the awards).

And for the members of Team Chicago, they can't have a better Word War leader next year if I get my choice. We're even in preliminary discussions with who we might war next year. I'm not naming names, but it's good that we have a couple of people who speak European languages not English.

---

This month still might not be lost on the Toronto front. Chicago has been closing the gap all day and hopefully we can finally overtake them tonight.

I was quite upset at the end of the work day, however, as a Toronto writer who has been causing some issues wrote more words. But this person complied with all requested documentation (after a bunch of rigamarole) so everything is alright.

I think the whole thing has sort of strained my dynamic with Toronto's captain. This is sort of sad because she's the closest thing I have to a non-Chicago NaNo person who I might call "friend" (there's one in Seattle but she hasn't done NaNo in two years).

Which brings me to a bit of sad news. My only two real life friends (that is ones I talk to the other 11 months of the year) who I met through NaNo have both thrown in the towel for this year. Both Kim and Mary (aka the fastest girlz in Chicago) got their 50k so they did their part for the team.

But, more than that, I'm going to miss actually seeing them in November. It's just not the same NaNoWriMo without them. Oh well, I'll see Mary the next time a really good Brit rock band is in town. And hopefully at least one of them will make the TGIO party.

Back In CST And Back In The Game

2007-11-25T21:27:00.001-08:00

I really shouldn't be doing this since it's going to be a long day at work tomorrow (and I have a lot of stuff to do in it) but I'm sticking in Chicago's chat room to watch two of our amazing writers hit milestones - 50,000 for one and 100,000 for the other.

I figure it's the least I can do to be supportive in these virtual write-ins since I haven't attended a real one yet. I plan on going to the one of the 29th to 30th if I have anything left to write.

This novel is really fizzling out quickly despite the fact that I'm now at 53,753.

There are more scenes to write, and I think I'm about to write the climactic party scene where Tabitha stabs Andy in the back one more time in front of Kate (who finally realizes who's really on her side). From there, I should be able to wrap it up by the end of the month.

That is, if I can figure out how to make the story climactic. The whole thing is pretty anti-climactic as a whole. There is a beginning, middle, and end, but I haven't done the characterization that I needed.

Which is totally the opposite of my usual dilemma.

I think I need to reintroduce some of the people from the party in "Drugs" back into "Fireworks" because, sadly, I gave them more interesting personalities than my main characters.

---

Yes, my novel is way past salvagability.

My father asked me if I was writing this to get published and I said, "there are things in it that I can use" (mostly the observational stuff) but this novel in general is never going to see the light of day.

Though I will probably end up publishing it on LuLu for Samantha and not-Kate to read.

Speaking of which I really need to give up this blogging for the night and get back to word warring. I think I've actually got more words to say there than here.

I am exhausted from the drive home (my sister had to pick up her dog near Flint) so I actually woke up at 9:00 p.m.

In theory this should mean I'm sort of well rested and should be able to go until about 1:45 a.m. Hopefully the two Chicago word warriors will reach their goal by then.

It doesn't feel like a work night yet but I'm sure it's going to tomorrow morning.

I Broke One Of My Rules Early This Morning

2007-11-24T19:52:00.001-08:00

I know that today is an incredibly inappropriate day to do this but I'm taking a much needed break from NaNoWriMo.

I wrote 894 words just as yesterday turned into today to put me at 51,115.

I only wrote them because I was helping a second Chicago person across the 100,000 mark. That's the only thing left keeping Chicago alive, I think. We've got two power writers this year who are just incredible.

Chicago took a brief lead in the Word War again today and it nearly brought a tear to my eye.

It's still showing us with a lead of 2,073,408 to 2,068,834 but I think this lead will be shortlived as Toronto is at an all-night write-in right now. I'm still savoring it though and we may survive as our top writer is doing a NaNoWriDay which means she's writing 50,000 words today.

Which is crazy but I appreciate it.

Not that I don't appreciate every Chicago writer. I actually spent the entire day sending out e-mails to the entire team describing the awards at the end. And since it's me, I put a personal salutation in each.

Hopefully that personal touch will get people writing again. Or if not, than the awards for the people in the middle or at the bottom of the standings will.

It really doesn't feel like there's a week left in November. It feels like the month is nearly over. My brain has "blue screened" already so it feels like there's no more November for me. I'm still writing but there's nothing behind it anymore.

I don't feel anything so I can no longer feel for my characters and that's just not good.

So maybe not writing today will help me reconnect with them.

---

During the word war today, I did something that I haven't done all month - I quoted another source that wasn't mine.

I made two promises to myself. I was not going to do a dream sequence this month and I wasn't going to quote a song verbatim and analyze it.

I still haven't done the first (and it's doubtful I will) and I technically still haven't done the second. Problem was there's a line from "Man On Fire":

"A man can be an artist in anything. Food, whatever. It depends on how good he is at it. Creasy’s art is death. He’s about to paint his masterpiece."

And it just fit Tabitha trying to destroy Kate...and Andy's life so perfectly that I had to use it. And, yes, I did explain it a bit:

I’ve never quite understood you humans and your desire to blow things up. Some of you seem to like to destroy as much as others of you like to create. It’s like an art form to you. While I never saw Tabitha actually create anything, I knew from the time that I spent with her that she liked to fancy herself an artist. Now I think I realize that her art wasn’t creation at all, her art was destruction.

To be fair, I wrote that before quoting "Man On Fire" and not after. Though I think I was pretty obviously inspired by it.

I am writing a meta-novel about movies so I think it's fair. And it still means that 99.99% of the words in the novel are mine. That's just an estimate, I didn't do the math. :)

And I'm trying to be fair in all things. Some would say to a fault.

The Least Enthusiastic 50k Entry Ever

2007-11-23T20:38:00.000-08:00

As not the captain of Team Chicago in the past, I admit that I've been pretty harsh in my statements about people who stop at 50k. Now in my role as captain, I'm okay with people stopping at 50,000 but I wish they wouldn't. But as of this year at 11:16 p.m. when I hit 50,221 as the result of a word war, I was ready to throw in the towel.

Until I remembered that I was the captain of the word war team and therefore really should keep on pushing on through. But the energy is now completely gone. I wrote for three hours and 15 minutes tonight desperately trying to break through the barrier on 11/23 and now I can't even think.

I wrote 2,848 words between 8:00 and 11:15 p.m. after watching "300." Well, sort of watching. I fell asleep a couple of times during it but I've seen it before so that makes sense.

And the words, while contributing to the story, were some of the most mundane things that I've written in ages. It was basically my four main characters (and of course the envelope) sitting around in Andy's apartment just getting everything out into the open.

I mean I guess it's important since it's going to be where Kate finally wakes up and realizes where everybody's true loyalties lie. But as far as excitement level, it's about the same as mine is for the book in general right now - pretty low.

This is what I wrote on the Chicago board tonight:

Thanks. I have to admit that I sort of tripped and fell through the finish line pouring all of my reserve story into it. I have to figure out how to set the final climax into motion and not just have my characters psychoanalyze each other (though what better way to mark 50k than just trying to figure out your characters, right?).

---

We actually had four people cross the 50k line today on Team Chicago so it was a pretty proud day for me as captain.

That, I think, is the new theme for the end of the month word war-wise. Chicago just needs to pull as many people across the finish line as possible. That might not win us the war but it will be a great victory for the point of NaNoWriMo.

There's really no point to the war besides egging people on if it's not for trying to help people reach their limits and I think for many people 50k might just be that limit.

I hope there are a lot of people willing to push through that wall like I am but I'm not even sure I am anymore. I'll have to see when I wake up in the morning.

The Day Before The Mystical 50k Day

2007-11-22T20:22:00.000-08:00

Alright, this is just weird. Everybody in my house is already asleep and it's not even midnight yet. This is actually a problem as I don't have a car to go to Black Friday sales if I wanted to since my mother is already asleep and it would be her car that I'd be borrowing.

Thankfully after last November's various debacles, there is no need to buy a new laptop this year. No sparks flying out of my power outlet or anything like that. I think the only thing that I would even care to buy would be this MP3 player that is in store in quantities of 20 and I would only wait out for that because it sold out on the web.

It's probably not even a voucher item so waiting out for that sort of thing would be pointless.

This leaves a problem. I need to be awake at about 4:00 a.m. to get in line and bust the door down at 5:00 a.m. And I guess I could probably stay up and write for another four hours or something but that might prove difficult.

If only today were yesterday. I was up past 2:00 a.m. writing away doing word wars. While I only wrote that 1,015 words yesterday, from midnight to 2:00 a.m., I actually wrote 2,488 words. Add in my 1,055 from a writing session just prior to this and I'm at 46,101 words.

Tomorrow might prove to be a bit of a busy day (getting a family portrait for the first time in seven years which means a haircut in the morning) so I'm not 100% sure this will happen.

But, tomorrow will probably be the day that I hit 50,000!

And 23 is a mystical number all arounds so I can't think of a better day to do it than tomorrow.

Unless I'm exhausted from staying out all night.

---

I got an awesome text message earlier this evening from my friend Mary (squirrelgirl22). She's been sick for the past few days and has been frozen at 47,000.

She told me that she's feeling better now and she's got 15 chapters left to write.

I don't even know how many chapters I've written half the time but that feels like quite a few words about to flow through her fingers.

Of course now Toronto has sort of taken control of the Word War holding about a 10,000 word lead consistently throughout the days. This isn't insurmountable and we have surmounted it more than a few times but I liked the days better when we were in the lead.

Well, maybe tomorrow will be a mystical 23rd day of November and we'll finally take the lead back once and for all.

Spending More Time Explaining Than Storytelling

2007-11-21T20:10:00.000-08:00

I am absolutely exhausted right now. After I wrote the blog entry yesterday, I actually did a few more word wars and ended up at 41,543 words at just after midnight.

Of course I didn't get to sleep until 1:00 a.m. and then today was a very long, rainy car ride back home to Michigan. I didn't write a single word in the car. The first half of the ride was with not-Kate (she actually sat in the back seat knitting with my sister's dog - though the dog was not, in fact, knitting) so I didn't want to be rude and break out the laptop (unless it was for not-Kate and I to watch part of a DVD or something).

The second half after dropping not-Kate off with his father (though her father was not being dropped off), I just didn't bother getting my laptop out of the trunk.

After my sister and I got home, I ended up just falling asleep as I usually do when I get back to my parent's house. I woke up just in time to watch "Kid Nation" and then attempt to write about half an hour later.

In 75 nerve racking minutes of writing today, I squeezed blood from a stone 1,015. I now stand at 42,558 words.

Not exactly the word burning that I wanted to do on the first day of the long weekend (extra long for me) but I can call that my travel day. And I'm disobeying ML orders and not even thinking of taking a day off tomorrow.

Tomorrow is traditionally a day I lock myself in my room and just write, write, write.

The problem was actually that I backed myself into a corner yesterday by getting the envelope trapped in a police car in an evidence bag. But I got to use these words:

“there’s more honor among thieves than these fucking artists. You’d think they were from Toronto or something.”

Yeah, that was a John Hancock moment. :)

Today, however, I worked my way back out of it by having the envelope just fall out of the car. Yeah, it seems like Deus Machina but I did get to write an explanation:

Thankfully what you humans call “bureaucracy” saved my life. Or simple error might be a better term for it. I was placed in a large pile of things in the “fucking pigs.” It felt like I was I was back in Kate…and Andy’s apartment except it was a bunch of plastic carrying cases with other things inside of them. The pile was equally messy, however and just like in the case of Kate…and Andy’s apartment, I just fell out of the car when the door was opened.

In the movies of action that I carry, things like this are happening all the time because in those, the officers are pretty much incompetent. But these two officers hadn’t shown themselves to be that to me at all. Still, I was sure these things had to happen and this wasn’t random coincidence, much as the envelopes and some of you humans would probably think that it is.

I just fell out of the “fucking pigs” and there was too much commotion with the party slowly exiting in a relatively calm manner (a couple of voices screamed “fucking pigs” on their way out but it was otherwise uneventful) and the officers looking to see if anyone else would like to join them on their way back “downtown” for them to notice that me, who ironically when I look back, sort of started the set of events into motion had fallen onto the ground.

While I’m glad they didn’t since I didn’t end up “downtown,” I’m a little relieved that I didn’t end up in the incinerator anyhow. As the officers were pulling away from the party in their “fucking pigs,” they almost ran me over a few times.

One human did see me, however, and it was Hoodie.

I'm really going off the plot in the story as of late. I just switched the narration to Andy and Hoodie having a conversation and Little Green Envelope just transcribing what they said about what they said at the hospital.

I have an explanation written into the story for this as well:

But you can’t always choose your point of view in situations such as this one. I just have to hope for the sake of the rest of the narrative that Andy and Hoodie are as reliable at telling a narrative as I am.

So in summation, today was basically 600 words of explanation and 400 words of story.

Tomorrow I can hopefully get back to the actual story and write a lot more than 1,000 words.

Today Was A New Day, But Yesterday Was The Worst

2007-11-20T19:57:00.000-08:00

Tonight it has been established that I sort of suck at sprints. But I think that's because in the entire four years that I've seriously done NaNoWriMo, I think I've done about five of them. Tonight was actually two of them. One was a 15 minute sprint where I wrote a grand total of 434 words.

Usually dialog, which I'm writing a lot of, goes really quickly for me. But I think the problem is I'm writing things like police and ambulance dialog which is something that I've only done once before. And that was a cop in an alternate history who followed British law and not law from the United States.

I'm getting into some really unknown territory as I've never witnessed a drug bust.

And I've got a problem. The Little Green Envelope is covered in the cocaine that Tabitha is overdosing on and he's sitting there in Andy's hands. So naturally the cops are going to want to confiscate him. Sitting in an evidence locker will totally lose my point of view. So I have to figure out a way that he can stay unincarcerated and get him to the University of Chicago hospital where Kate is currently in the waiting room and Tabitha is currently getting treated for a drug induced seizure.

Backed myself into a word corner here. Andy or Donovan need to be quick on their feet and with Donovan that's a fat chance.

I don't want to make the cops idiot but this is a story told by an "envelope of action" and it is an action movie convention to have the cops dumb and the kids (by kids I mean a group of late-20somethings) smart so it will make logical sense for this to happen.

I should even have Little Green Envelope pontificate on it.

---

So, yeah, the Word War.

Yesterday went from bad to worse. The 12-year old from last year who I thought wasn't on Toronto's team this year upped her word count by 85,000 yesterday evening.

Suddenly the substantial lead that we had evaporated and we were down by 8,000 words.

There is something stinky in Denmark here as she made the comment in chat yesterday that whatever she writes from now on has to have a plot. I get the impression she's writing stream-of-conscious with no plot.

It's being resolved by the three captains right now but can I just say that any doubts I had about the unity of Team Chicago were really put to rest today.

Instead of throwing in the towel (like I almost did yesterday when I found out and some of New York's writers almost did as well), Team Chicago rallied during the work day and we were actually ahead for most of today - at one point by 10,000 words. Though now we're down 8,000 again as one of their writers did a huge jump (one that is working hard for every word so I don't begrudge them).

A five day weekend beckons for me and a four day weekend beckons for most though so hopefully we can put this thing away going into the last week.

smwalter, who I'm just going to say it pretty much has Chicago's Most Valuable Writer award in the bag, organized a chat tonight and six or seven of us are typing until our fingers fall off.

Well, I'm typing until midnight because I have to wake up and pack tomorrow before having breakfast with not-Kate and then my sister driving us to Michigan.

Hopefully Toronto won't know what hit them. And, regardless, we've now opened a 100,000 word lead on New York City. Wow!

Anyhow, yesterday did go from bad to worse but today is a new day. And hopefully by the end of it, Chicago will have recovered, I will have recovered and the rest of November will be a breeze.

Even if up until this point the breeze is carrying more than a whiff of crap stink!

By This Point Next Year, I'll Be Writing Romantic Fantasy

2007-11-19T20:43:00.000-08:00

Since I had to drive Amber to Union Station to catch a train back to Michigan this morning, I got to work at 7:45 a.m. This meant I got out of work at the same time as not-Kate. I ended up driving her home. The crazy thing is that the car ride home played out exactly just like one chapter from a novel. I couldn't have made it up any more interesting than it actually happened.

We got in my car in the parking garage near my work and before the car was even out of the parking spot, she said to me, "I have a date tomorrow." She had mentioned to me a couple of weeks ago that a friend of her roommate's was interested in her and so I figured it was him. I asked and it was confirmed.

Now not-Kate and me were in pretty much the same situation two weeks ago. She had a boy interested in her and yet he hadn't asked for her number. I was interested in not-Kate's friend and did not have her number yet. She basically had told me that if I wanted the number, I should get it from her friend. Well, the boy she was interested in asked not-Kate's roommate for not-Kate's number and then not-Kate's roommate asked not-Kate if it was alright if she gave him the number.

Of course it was since not-Kate was also interested in her roommate's friend. And not-Kate thought it was awesome that he finally asked for her number.

I saw the parellels and not-parellels of the situation and pointed out that I had asked not-Kate for her friend's number two weeks ago. Seeing that I was right, not-Kate agreed to text her friend right there in the car and see if I could get her friend's number.

By the time we were on Jackson heading past the United Center, I knew things were not going to go as I hoped. Not-Kate's friend texted back asking why I wanted her number.

Not-Kate turned to me and said, "why do you want her number?"

Of course I could have said a lot of things, but I didn't get much sleep yesterday so I said, "why do you think?" She said, "I know why you want her number, I just want you to saw it."

I said, "because I think she's awesome and I'd like to..." I couldn't really say the words. They seemed too real.

I just got really silent. Figuring the funny way out was the best way I said, "tell her I'm a telemarketer and I think she's a good target audience for what I'm selling." Then I said, "wow, that sounded really wrong."

The words were revised to, "he's a telemarketer. Why do you think?"

Not-Kate texted the message over and there was no response for a while. When it came back, I knew from the "awwwww" that not-Kate made that the news wasn't good. She said to me, reading the text message, "I just don't think of him in that way."

Which, of course, the logical side of me says makes perfect sense. I mean, I've only talked to her three times and one of the times was sort of a disaster because it was at a party at not-Kate's house where I was feeling pretty under the weather. But the other two times people who have been there had pointed out that we seemed to have some sort of connection.

And I sort of thought we did as well. We could at least exchange lines like from some sort of old male/female movie from the 1940s. And being as she's into movies like I'm into movies, I figurd that was a good thing.

I said to not-Kate that I had thought she had talked to her about this and that was why at her party, she had said, "you should ask [her] out." She even said this a couple of weeks ago, "you should have asked [her] out."

I thought it was only a matter of doing the asking because I believed the hype and I believed it had already pretty much been settled that she was interested slightly as well.

A few minutes passed before not-Kate got another text message from her friend saying, "I don't want to hurt his feelings. I think [he's] a blast!"

The girl who ended up inspiring the feelings that I'm writing the novel around did not seem to think that at all. I don't know what it is, but I think somewhere along the line, I've become like a homeless guy looking for a job. I'm seemingly too far gone down whatever path, and it honestly seems to be age, I'm down to be in a relationship or even seemingly get a date as of late.

All I'm really looking for recently is a chance and I don't even seem to get that. Even from girls who I thought had already considered the option and were willing to give me that chance.

I don't think all is lost yet and I hope not-Kate puts in a good word for me. But, with not-Kate's friend out of the picture as far as prospects go, now I have none. There are no girls out there that I'm interested in enough anymore to actually ask out. Now if a girl came along, I'm always willing to give almost anyone a chance (crack addicts and stuff, not so much, but friends of friends and the like). But I don't think there's a single girl interested in me out there.

Anywhere.

I mean, Amber, who still for some reason seems to think I can't do much wrong, said to me on the ride to dropping her off this morning that she didn't think if the two of us met now we would work. And this was after positing yesterday night that the present me and the present her (were she not in a relationship) might work unlike when we were together eight years ago.

It's only a matter of time before I can't write these romance novels anymore as I'll have completely forgotten what the concept even means.

---

I figured I could come home tonight and take solace in the fact that until December 1, I'd have other things on my mind and could bury this rejection.

I even had a captain's meeting tonight where I had to think of everything but this girl in coming up with the awards for the team and such. But even that couldn't distract me.

I did set an example of working through adversity and pounded out 1,562 words of the party scene (where Tabitha has a mild drug induced seizure). It's set the scene for a confrontation between Andy and Kate in the hospital waiting room (Andy, against Kate's objection helps carry Tabitha down the stairs from the party to wait for the ambulance) that really sets the stage for the end of "Drugs."

I started to imagine the envelope getting stoned off the cocaine that Tabitha cut with him but I think that was too light for what's happening. I can't write funny right now. Even though that's the one thing that I apparently still have going for me even if it just results in girls thinking I'm a blast and still not date material.

I don't know how funny the rest of the story is going to be. After all, this was a major blow.

---

I did cry inside with happiness a little earlier today with a message left by our ML Tim on the Chicago board:

I just wanted to take a moment to say how awesome displacedbeatnik is for leading the Word War this month. He's been a great motivator, and has been on top of things from the day he emailed me about word war negotiations with NYC and Toronto.

I think, after all is said and done, we should all chip in and buy him the biggest pint of whatever libation he desires.

Aside from that, everyone in Chicago has made me proud to be the Windy City ML this year (especially when it comes to talking smack on the ML board with the Toronto and NYC ML's about who will win). Thank you everyone for putting so much effort into this years NaNo.

This just made me think that there is some good left in me in some way and that I just can't get these girls to see it. But I've been thinking that for quite some time. Maybe that's the problem. It's not that I'm completely unimpressive it's that I'm no longer in situations where the people can be impressed by it.

Though that's the other thing with this girl. She has been and I just remember as I was mostly drunk singing "Punk Rock Girl" for karaoke and her singing along. I thought that she at least saw that I was capable of being pretty awesome and not just some hollow depressed shell. And maybe she did. I don't know.

Maybe this can all be a scene in next year's novel.

That Late Month Depression Is Hitting Early

2007-11-18T20:01:00.000-08:00

I'm really trying to stay positive here but my analysis for Team Chicago says that we are absolutely f*c*ed for the same reason as we lose these Word Wars all the time. We start out this brilliant display of enthusiasm and then the bottom drops out - literally.

We stand nine people behind New York City in the place where the Word War is going to be won or lost, people at 20,000. The only reason we're still ahead is that we have 10 wonderful people who are over 50,000 words already compared to New York City's six and Toronto's five.

But even here there's a dark cloud to ruin the silver lining. We have three writers who are finished with their novels. This is an amazing, wonderful thing, and I wish I could actually be one of them. The problem is that they're not going to be adding anything more to their word count. And that's fine for them but it's not the greatest thing ever for the team.

I think we still have about 42 writers who are still trying to get to 50k so we can still pull this out but our lead over New York City has been sliced to 35,000 words out of 1.57 million (we have 1.57 million, they hacve 1.53 million plus some change).

I mean that's as close as the Florida election in 2000. And we all know what one county screwup did to that one.

Myself, I'm not really helping matters since I didn't hit my goal today of 38,000. I stand at 36,716. I should be able to make it if I do one more writing session but I'm waiting for a phone call from a friend who needs to stay "downtown" (she's a suburbanite if you didn't catch the terminology) before she leaves for Michigan tomorrow.

I didn't even finish watching "Zodiac" today.

I'm just depressed all around at the present second because of real world issues totally apart from the word war.

It's just up until this point in the month, the word war really has been the one thing that's been a constant stream of good news in my life. Hopefully it will be again since we still have a lot of Chicagoans still writing.

I just think our lead is about to become extinct and we'll have to hear it from New York City for an entire year.

I think maybe the entire Chicago team is cynical. Which is a good thing in real life but compared to the cheerleading convention that is Team Toronto or the brooding determination of Team New York City, it's not a recipe for success.

---

Oh yes, my actual story. It's in a spin cycle right now as I don't know exactly how to play out the set piece of the party.

I really want Tabitha to overdose on drugs but I can't seem to get to that point. I think it might be better if Kate does it and Andy saves her. He's at the party with another woman right now (and is trying to make Kate jealous) and I think it would be best for the story if this happens.

Except right now I have it so that Kate is about to confront Andy on the dance floor in front of this other woman. Problem is the P.O.V. is not in the right place for there to be any confrontation that the Little Green Envelope can overhear. He's at the DJ booth (the narrator) and they're on the dance floor.

I have set up the piece alright, I guess. But I don't know where this is going to next.

And if that's the case, I don't think I'm going to hit 70k. I know what people on the team are going through right now. I just don't know how to make it better for them so they can get the words that we need to win.

And it sucks. Too bad I'm not writing the book about depression this year.

FUCK!

After A Night Of Research I Return With Words

2007-11-17T22:34:00.000-08:00

Another Saturday night and another missed day of writing here on Retentivewrimo. But that's o.k. With the time change to the Pacific Time Zone that blogspot does, it doesn't look like I missed a day. This unlike what it does on the NaNo site where I can't figure out exactly where it cuts off a day for the tracking chart. Then again, I don't think they know either since the little calendar graph I have on the right side of this page keeps changing colors.

Right now for today (yesterday) it's reading green so that's good. Though according to my calculations (which of course do not coincide at all with the site), the 2,265 words that I wrote today should probably be that bright green color.

I don't know where these words are being counted since I wrote them all between the hours of 4:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. It wasn't like I had a 2:00 a.m. writing session of anything.

Had I done that, I would have felt guilty since I told the Toronto captain that I wasn't going to write anymore after she went to sleep.

I now stand at 35,188 words which last year I didn't reach until November 24. It funny because by then my morale according to last year's chart was at a 3. Last year on the 17th, it was also at a 3 and I was in Michigan for my friend Wellman's wedding (where I was his best man). I wrote 0 words during that time even though the wedding was in the middle of nowhere.

This year since I actually like my story (to a point, though I'm not in love with it) I probably would have at least tried to write from my room at the little Bates Motel on the outskirts of the sticks where I was holed up.

According to the neat-o spreadsheet, I'm actually scheduled to finish the novel one week from today (or reach 50,000 at least). Not ironically since it's a common calendar trait, I'll be in Michigan when I finish the novel. Though not for a wedding (though there is one on Sunday that my sister and I are not going to even though we were both invited), just for Thanksgiving.

And the day I'm actually scheduled to finish is the 24th. The exact same day that I was at my lowest point last year.

Though maybe, just maybe, I'll actually finish earlier and push on to the 70,000 or so that I'm aiming for (though am now behind pace to achieve by quite a margin).

---

So what was I doing tonight instead of writing?

I was doing research.

I didn't end up going to the old school punk concert (I think it was sold out) but reverted to my original plans to go to this dinner party just west of my apartment. The food was spectacular and the conversation was surprisingly good.

It was my friend Samantha's friend Teddie's party and he's one of those writers that writes 12 months a year. So at his party were actual writing students from Columbia College (which I make fun of in my NaNo but I didn't tell them that). And I ended up at a table with four of them. They asked, after talking about their professors in the Masters of Creative Writing program for a while, "so are you a writer too?"

I told them that I was but not a very good one.

"That's okay," one of them said pointing at the woman at the head of the table, "she's not a very good writer either."

The table temporarily fell silent before she said, "that's okay, I'm really not."

I also had a nice discussion with another one from a journalism background (like me) who has the same problem I do. That is, he writes endless dialog ("quotes") and then his characters exist in a vaccuum.

And he's getting his master's degree in creative writing so I don't feel too bad. I think it might just be a writing style.

I wanted it to be a bit more froofy there so I could get how the artsy half talk. But it was actually pretty down to Earth. I was invited out to this party in Pilsen (which is exactly the situation and place that the chapters I'm writing currently happens) but I just decided to go home instead.

Now that would have been exact research.

But I don't think I would have been able to stand it.

Instead, I got a text message from not-Kate that she was not enjoying the hipster bar in our neighborhood she was at (she actually lives a block away from where the dinner party was) and that I should stop by. So I did.

I guess that was enough hipster aggrevation to spur me on for the night. As was seeing not-Kate on the weekend. Since she's the only one who's said that she really wants to read it when I finish.

Which means I have to finish. Which means that I'm pushing past 50,000. Hopefully.

My sister and I are also giving her a ride back to Michigan on Wednesday (she lives about halfway so we're dropping her off at a Taco Bell off the expressway). So that will be a good way to make sure I write over Thanksgiving.

Maybe even edit it in December. Who knows.

The Weekend Is Blown Before It Starts

2007-11-16T21:26:00.001-08:00

I was going to watch a movie tonight. Well, instead I wrote. Which is pretty good although a bit of opposite world. I wrote 1,919 words in a mad sprint between 9:00 and 10:15 this evening. My total is now at 32,923.

In my novelling numeroly, that's a pretty good sign. It's why I didn't write another word.

That and I finished Chapter Twelve. It's scary that when I actually write this year, I'm only doing half a chapter a day. Tonight's writing killed the momentum a bit as it was just a bunch of ripping on Tabitha's boyfriend Donovan (which is a bit of an inside joke because not-Tabitha once had me listen to a Donovan song and actually thought I might like it - though he did have an awesome Scottish accent in it).

I think, since I'm writing in humor/satire/parody that the novel sort of needed a really funny scene but I've lost all the tension from the end of "Pets" as I've went into "Drugs." Though I did set into motion the party scene where the three main characters. I think I have to promote Tabitha to MC status as she gets as much page time as Andy and more than Kate. Damn you Tabitha for taking over my story!

It is sort of sad that I've given Donovan more of a story than I've given Kate.

He's basically got five roommates who hate him because he screws up all the time and just doesn't get it. His line is, "what's the worst that could happen?"

It's from this line that I think I finally shattered the fourth wall after kicking against it the entire time (the narrator talks to "you humans" reading the novel for pete's sake):

“And you have just brought in a 90-inch flat screen rental television that is only balanced on a stand. A stand that people will be dancing around.”

“We can, um,” Donovan stammered, “put up a rope or something.”

“A rope?” the bald man asked.

“Yeah,” Donovan repleied, “like at a museum or something.”

“Like at a museum or something?” the bald man said repeating Donovan’s statement as a question for the second time. Then he went off on his own script saying, “where are we going to get a velvet rope at this time of night?”

“What’s the worst that can happen?” Donovan asked.

“It’s a good thing we’re not in a novel,” the bald man said, “or you just really sealed our fate right there.”

Sadly, I doubt that scene will ever see the light of day after it goes through the beta reader(s).

---

I really need to sit down and scribble away in my writer's notebook since I've now introduced three new characters who make their first appearance in "Drugs." I keep saying they won't continue into "Fireworks."

But Donovan probably will.

I'm thinking that he'll probably end up pretty crucial to the story, dumbass or no dumbass.

Maybe he can even be a counterploy when the real war between Andy and Tabitha begins. Though I don't want to make Andy too evil. Kate can't be the only redeeming character in the story.

I have hit a dilemma. I don't know what to write after the party (which will probably take up my weekend). The whole premise of my story is that it can only be narrated by the Little Green Envelope. So once the party is over, I'm not sure where he's going to be.

And I can't make the entirety of "Drugs" the party.

Though moving on to "Fireworks" would mean that I'll finish my novel in November probably so maybe I should. I was going to have Little Green Envelope get lost on the streets of Chicago but that's probably almost as silly as six people in an art collective arguing for an entire chapter.

Not that this happened in my novel or anything. :)

---

Tomorrow's not going to be a great writing day.

I was just going to go to this dinner party with Samantha (though I'm not her +1) but now I realize Stiff Little Fingers is in town tomorrow as part of this old school punk festival. So now I think I'm going to that all day.

The first band I want to see is The Methadones and they play 5th so that will probably be around 4:00 p.m. And I'm not going to stay for Naked Raygun (I'll probably stay for 7 Seconds who play between SLF and NR). Despite the Chicago pride, I've never been a fan. But I think I'm seeing the Joe Strummer movie "The Future Is Unwritten" at the Music Box tomorrow night at 9:40.

So it's basically writing between about noon and 3:00 p.m.

It's sort of sad that NaNo more on the weekdays than the weekends, but I guess that happens sometimes. Next weekend in Michigan, I'll probably write more.

The Midway Pep Talk For Everyone

2007-11-15T21:15:00.000-08:00

Sometimes NaNoWriMo can be a lonely place. Now, of course, being a four time participant, I've managed to pick up a lot of internal people along the way but to the outsider it's still sort of a weird thing to do to write 50,000+ (I'm aiming for 60,000) words in one month. And there are, of course, some people who won't let you forget the fact that it's not a normal thing to do.

But one thing that I found today is that when people find out those words serve a noble aim, they get behind you 100%.

I told the girl who told me that I am not going to write her into my novel (shame because she would make an interesting part of a composite character) that I was the team captain for Chicago in our word war against New York City (I don't tend to mention Toronto because no one hates Toronto), she suddenly became incredibly excited about the prospect of every word I type.

"You need to beat New York City," she said, "put them in their place and show them what an awesome city we are."

I wish I could singlehandedly beat New York City. But it's the team that's really doing it. I feel like I've barely contributed the last couple of days.

And then I talked to my friend Kim toward the end of the work day. Kim is an incredible writer (though she writes short-form fiction and not long-form fiction) who is actually part of the Second Story group. If you get a chance to see this group of writers, they are incredible. I recommend their monthly readings at Websters Wine Bar as one of the best excursions in Chicago. So I always worry that people like her will be weary of speed writers.

She's actually extremely supporting of the endeavor.

As I was describing to her the plotline for this novel, she actually said it sounded like a great idea. I get that a lot. I just hope that I'm doing the unique perspective of having a Netflix clone envelope narrate it justice. I always worry that my prose doesn't exactly match up to my mechanics.

If I could ever get the two to coincide, I could actually probably write the other 11 months a year.

When I told her about the word war, she was equally excited about it and equally as keen of Chicago beating New York City.

It's funny that the NaNo powers that be are always saying, "tell your friends you're writing to keep yourself going and make sure you finish." Well, if you tell them that you're doing their honor a favor by writing, it really doubly makes sure that you finish writing. And that you don't stop writing until 11:59:59 on November 30 to boot.

Oh and if you tell them the money raised goes to literacy programs and such, they'll really think you're not just on a writing ego trip. :)

---

I finally cracked 30,000 tonight (30,306).

I wasted a lot of time. I came home from work and took a nap. Then I woke up and watched the Democratic debates (I was an Edwards supporter but Bill Richardson really impressed me tonight as did Joe Biden - if only he didn't go around making racist comments - so I may switch to one of them). Then I watched "The Office."

So 8:30 p.m. rolls around which is usually when I start writing on a Thursday.

And I had the best intentions to do so on this particular Thursday as well. But then I went to check the word war real time standings (one of the Toronto participants made this incredible app that updates at the same times as the NaNo site) and there was a chat room added.

I ended up in the chat room until about 10:00 p.m. at which time I said, "I really have to go and actually write something tonight before I end up with my first 0 writing day of the month."

And I did write. I finished Chapter 11 (or as I like to call it the bankrupt chapter) in which Tabitha, looking for her boyfriend in Pilsen, finds out about the party that will bring all of the characters back together. It's not the most action filled chapter I've written (though the dialog is sort of funny) so I think it goes right along with my tradition of writing Chapter 11s that are spaces to breathe with how boring they are - hence why I call them the bankrupt chapters.

Though I can't say I wasted all my time in the chat room. I actually was writing the mid-month pep talk for the Chicago Word War team.

Which read as follows:

If you're reading this, you've made it to the middle of November. No matter how many words you've written, that in itself is an accomplishment. Many writers don't even make it close to here (as you might notice the site has gotten a lot faster). This unfortunately, seems to include some of our team.

If anyone knows the whearabouts, of the following people and their NaNoWriMo status, please let me know (or post it here in the forum): Hats, joycer, KimmyKatt, robinmj, Sandylul, stacykathryn, and superberg. The odd thing is, none of them are really even that far behind since they all started out pretty fast.

I know some of you are at 50,000 already (congratulations esepecially go out to smwalter who has already finished her novel and written 50,000 words).

We are still rocking away as Team Chicago and have 22 of our writers ahead of schedule. 29 out of 55 have broken 20,000 (and a 30th is just behind).

But despite our rocking at the top and in the middle, there is something worrisome. #35-#45 on our list (and I'm just going by the numbers on the Elumir's rocking: http://www.elumir.com/nanowrimo/) seem to be falling by the wayside a bit and losing ground on their New York City and Toronto counterparts.

I don't know if anyone actually said this, but at least in the case of word wars, "wars are won and lost at the margins."

I know it may seem to some of you in that range like 50,000 is a long way away, but take heart. For one thing, look at all the people up at the tippy-top. A lot of them have written more than the 35,000 or so words that you are from the finish line. Thanksgiving is not in the rear view mirror yet for us (though I know if your family's like mine around the table, sometimes you wish it could be). And Canadian Thanksgiving is over!

But even if you don't think you can make 50,000, there's still wonderful personal bests to achieve and maybe that perfect scene to write. NaNoWriMo isn't just about the people who write 50,000. It's about the people who write 20,000 and 30,000 and 40,000 as well. And even those who just write 10,000 words in the last two days to prove they can.

An internet friend of daevient and I (at least I think he's daevient's LiveJournal friend as well) wrote 40,000 on November 29 and 30 locking himself in a Kinko's. So anything is possible.
And if you need motivaton, it's a little scary. We've had our lead over Toronto sliced almost in half. The reason? Some of the people who might have otherwise been left for dead have come back and are writing with a flouish (padys and Litharukia).

You might think the people at the top of the list are where the difference is made. Really, it's the people toward the bottom of the list who make all the difference in the close one.

In the immortal words of Peter Gabriel (though sung by Kate Bush), "don't give up, you still have us."

Even if you're not cruising to 50,000, remember we're all going through the same thing and we're here for you. And your words count just as much as anyone's. And in the end, you guys can be the difference maker. How much power is that? Don't abuse it. :)

Joycer has actually checked and said she had been handwriting her novel so that makes me breathe 14% easier.

I think I did my job as captain there. That's the other thing the people at work told me. That I need to get the people who stopped writing to start again. I hope I can accomplish that as Toronto has a couple of people who have started again mid-month and if they write like they wrote last year, Chicago may be in serious trouble.

---

Speaking of mid-month. I think I'm going to write from midnight to 12:45 a.m. like I did back on the first. I think it's a fitting way to start back up again.

I don't think I'll get the same 1000 words I did back then though. Things are just going a bit slower as I move into the "Dead Zone": 30,000 to 40,000 words. It's a scary place and I hope everyone reading this gets through it. Even if you're from New York City. I just hope you New Yorker get through it on about November 28.

Speaking of which, I didn't forget the link from yesterday: http://jaybizz.blogspot.com/.

This woman is seriously amazing as not only is she the only other NaNo blogger that seems to blog daily but she's also leading Team New York City with over 100,000 words. And I thought I was verbose!

The Earliest Closing Day Of NaNo In A While

2007-11-14T19:58:00.000-08:00

According to Blogger, this is the 100th post I've made to this blog in a little over two years. Which, of course, is saying something since I only use it for a little over a month each year.

And by use, I mean, blabber away about my own novel and whatever Word War I'm in and whatnot and give unsolicited advice.

I used to actually post links to other people's blogs and that sort of thing but I've been pretty much all consumed this year. Though in this consumption, I actually stumbled across a decent blog from a member of Team New York City. Course now I've lost it so let's not bring that up. Maybe tomorrow at work I'll find it again and maybe even post it on the sidebar.

Which reminds me how bad a community member I've been as of late toward my NaNoBlogging brothers and sisters. I haven't even listened to the NaNoWriMo '07 Podcast. I used to eagerly await each new one because Derusha is teh awesome (she, unlike me, actually pays attention to the greater NaNo world around her). Now I haven't even listened to the official Podcast and it's on Episode #3.

This is the same thing that happened last year. I got so involved in Chicago that I forgot there's a whole bunch of people out there not in Chicago, New York City, and Toronto who are actually noveling this month.

Tomorrow marks the unofficial halfway point (I saw unofficial because the official halfway point is when the clock strikes midnight and turns tomorrow in November 16, 2007) of NaNoWriMo. So it's as good a time as any to make a second half resolutions.

I'm going to at least try to listen to the Podcast backlog at work tomorrow. Workload hasn't really been allowing me to get a solid five minutes of listening to anything recently especially catching up from Tuesday today.

And I'm going to try to surf the various boards again. I haven't done that in a few days. Though the genre boards and the like seem to be calming down. It looks like a lot of people haven't made the halfway point this year. Which is good for the speed of the site for sure.

That includes about 12 members of Team Chicago but, hey, our "keep" rate is higher than the NaNo average.

---

Not-Kate heard a piece on NPR yesterday about NaNoWriMo so that's sort of cool. Oh wait, I just realized. That's probably the piece recorded at the kickoff party.

Not-Kate goes to sleep pretty early so she's probably not awake but I'm going to text her now.

Anyhow she said, "and I was like you do that."

So, at least there's some recognition of it from a few co-workers. All but one who are slight basises for the characters but still.

Speaking of which, Hoodie, who is a combination of my friend Kyle and myself (but more myself) is about to make a reappearance as a DJ in the story spinning at the party that brings the three primary players back together. So that should be sort of fun.

Anyhow, now I'm just filling words.

---

I set a simple goal for tonight, to hit 30,000 words. That is just not going to happen.

I didn't take a nap after work so I'm exhausted. Even though I stand at 29,473 right now, the thought of even 526 more words (about 30 minutes) seems like a sisyphisian task.

One night I have to just say no to another writing session and I think this is the one.

If it means a faster 526 words tomorrow or the ability to actually write at lunch it's good. I need a recharge like no one's buisness and 30,000 is probably about my halfway point so this is as good a time as any.

Good night world. For once I mean it.

My Eyes Are All A-Flutter With The Sick

2007-11-13T18:42:00.000-08:00

One thing that I'm not going to try and do next year is organize any write-ins for the west siders. I'm pretty jealous of Toronto because if one of them organizes something, it seems like every writer in the city shows up. Or maybe it's just my location, time, or just me. But I was at Atomix Cafe tonight as was posted on the Chicago boards and had a great time having a write-in with myself.

I think part of my problem is there's a much longer North Side write-in going on simultaneously to it. Since I drove to Chicago and Damen anyhow, I might as well drive to Chicago and Wells. Cripes. I should have checked that before scheduling. They're only two miles apart. But, to be fair, it's two miles west.

Next week there's not a near north one scheduled, so I'll go ahead and still give it a go. But from 5-9 or something. I don't think anyone wants to attend a two hour cram session. That is, unless they do the near north one again.

I did have some amazing vegan chili and two mugs of warm cider (that really hit the spot with how I've been feeling recently) so it wasn't a total waste of time. Oh and I kicked out 1418 words as well (in 90 minutes interrupted by eating). I now stand at 26,782.

Which puts me still soundly in 18th place on Team Chicago.

And I think all 17 people ahead of me were at the other write-in. :)

---

I have no excuse for not writing more today. As a reward for finishing Part One (finally!) yesterday night after checking in here on Retentivewrimo, I called in sick to work today.

Or I ended up sick because I was up really late breaking through the "Pets" barrier.

I wrote the following prose to get the ball back rolling:

“I’ve got it.”

Tabitha held me high in the air as if she was holding up a trophy she just won for winning a race. And in a way, that analogy isn’t far off because I could tell that she felt that she had won me, in a battle of wits if nothing else.

“He gave it back to you?” Kate asked.

“Without even a fight,” Tabitha said, the glow of victory still showing on her face.

“What did you do?”

“I slept with him.”

There was almost a look of terror on Kate’s face as the words came out of Tabitha’s mouth. “You did what?”

“I’m just kidding Kate,” Tabitha said, putting me down on top of the DVD player, “why would I ever do that? I mean, he’s not a bad looking guy or anything, but have more faith in me than that.”

“So what did you do?” Kate asked again, this time a bit more weary sounding of what Tabitha’s answer might be.

“I beat the crap out of him,” Tabitha grinned.

“Come on Tab,” Kate said with a hint of displeasure sneaking into her voice, “he’s about a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than you. And you know while he’s above hitting almost any other woman in the world, he’d really like to throttle you.”

“He wouldn’t stand a chance. Those kickboxing classes really come in handy.” Tabitha cut a karate chop through the air with her small hand.

“T-a-a-a-b. What did you do?”

“I’ve known that boy for longer than you have,” Tabitha said in a way that I could almost hear Andy’s voice when he had said the same thing to Kate a few days before, “I know all of his weak spots.”

“What-did-you-do?”

“I told you already, what’s any boy’s weak spot? I kneed him right in the peas and carrot and took it from him lickity split.”

“I still don’t believe you.”

“Fine,” Tabitha said, “if you really have to know.”

“I do.”

“Let’s just say that he has a much weaker spot than that, and I hit him there instead. I told him that I’d convince you to take him back if he gave me back the Little Green Envelope?”

Kate’s mouth dropped open as if the extra space was needed for how much her volume was about to raise.

“Why would you do that? Why? You know I don’t want him back.”

“Trust me on this one, will you? That asshole isn’t going to know what hit him by the time this is done.”

“Tabitha,” Kate said, “does he really deserve for you to try to ruin his life? He’s not a bad guy. He was always faithful to me. He and I just weren’t meant to be together.”

“Kate,” Tabitha said, “there are things I could tell you from that boy’s past that would make anything I could possibly do to him seem like ‘nah, nah, nah, nah, boo, boo.’ Just trust me on this one.”

“I trust you,” Kate said wearily, “but somehow I get the impression that Andy does too.”

“This is for all of womankind,” Tabitha said in a grandiose tone, “why would I sell out a sister? We’re all in this together.”

There was something so convincing in the woman’s voice that I looked at the Little Green romance Envelope and felt as though she was turning against me as Tabitha spoke just for being a male envelope. Good thing she didn’t, because we were both about to embark on a long trip back to the warehouse.

Remember a few entries back when I said that I was going to have to take flack for this book being anti-woman? Well now I'm really going to take that flack!

I should have actually broken 25,000 last night but instead I broke it while I should have been at work. I definitely have to go in tomorrow so I'm going to wrap this up. I have to deal with a New York issue before I do. I <3 being Word War captain sometimes, let me tell you.

I'm just a few inches away from sending the envelope to a post-apocolyptic New York City just so I can destroy it in this novel. Seriously.

It Was Less Troubling When They Hated Each Other

2007-11-12T21:04:00.000-08:00

Fate help me. I have just written 1,376 words more in the same chapter that I've been writing for three days. Well, truthfully, I just split the chapter so it's now partly in Chapter Eight (where Kate drops the Little Green Envelope back to Andy) and partly in Chapter Nine (where Tabitha goes to get the Little Green Envelope back from Andy if he gives it to her or not).

I had to make so many decisions on the fly in this chapter and the mood changes so many times that it seriously felt like I wrote 5,000 words tonight. To only be at 24,073 is actually shocking to me. The reason is partially that I didn't check the word count at all since I felt like I was in a flow that I haven't felt all novel.

There is a slightly major problem with this last bit of writing, however. It was supposed to really set the conflict for part two of the novel. I almost had Tabitha and Andy hook up (they were "seeing each other" for a time three years prior to the start of the novel and Tabitha broke it off because she thought it was getting too serious) which would have really created a conflict all around.

I think I wrote the chapter so there was a palpable sexual tension between the two. I mean, I did have Tabitha offer to sleep with Andy. They definitely had a pretty physical relationship in the past it would seem. But Andy rejects the advance and Tabitha is more embarassed by it than anything. Then they get to fighting again and Andy is ready to kick Tabitha out the door (more drag her by the wrist) when Tabitha basically says that she's got a plan to get Kate and Andy back together.

Andy listens to this plan and I leave the chapter as I wrote it right now with the two of them sitting on the couch and Tabitha explaining the way things are to Andy.

It's not the world's funniest chapter. And it dragged out a lot of really personal storylines for me (not based on any of the characters in the book, but on completely different people). It got so emotional that it even shut Little Green Envelope up. I don't think that there was really anything to make fun of it was so intense.

This is the last few paragraphs of what I wrote tonight:

“I mean, look at us,” [Tabitha] said, “can you ever possibly have pictured us together? And I don’t mean behind closed doors, but out in the world? There isn’t a single way in a million years that it would have worked. And maybe I think that if you could just get your act together that you and Kate could work out. It’s not like you weren’t working, you just have to quit acting like a jackass.”

“Is that your plan,” Andy said, still sounding as if the air had been let out of him, “for me to stop acting like a jackass?”

“It’s certainly a start,” she said. “What you need to do is be the you that I knew a few years ago. I don’t know what’s happened to you. It’s like you’ve lost the will to be a nice person.”

“I still am,” he said, “you just don’t see it because you’re the last person in the world that I’d want to show it to.”

“That’s too bad Andy,” she said, “you ever heard of the ‘best friend test’? It’s an old saying that if you really want a woman to like you, she’s not the one you want to convince. Or, that’s not totally true. She’s obviously the one you want to convince. But the person you want to convince the most after the girl herself is the girl’s best friend. If you’ve got her than you’re pretty much home free.”

“Does that rule still apply after three years?”

“Boy,” she said, “it applies until either the girl or the best friend is in the ground.”

This is not the Tabitha that I wrote up until this point at all. There's nothing seemingly vicious in this dialog at all. She actually seems like she's not flighty or at least trying to act that way. It's the Tabitha that I think would be the Tabitha where she's not putting up a front. Similarly, it's the Andy where he lets his guard down as well.

Of course since neither of them are entirely trustworthy characters up until this point in the story, either of them could just be trying to get an advantage over the other emotionally. It's the undertone of exploitation in the scene that I might want to play up more if I ever go back and edit this into a second draft.

After all, based on the limited dialog, it was only a few minutes since they were at each other's throats.

I think either Andy or Tabitha have to say something to set the other one off. But if the round-and-round starts again the chapter may end up being 20 pages that I don't finish until way after mid-month.

Talk about screwing up the pacing in the name of a word vein.

---

The Word War has really started to mess with my mind I think. 24,073 puts me on pace for 60,180 for the month (I have the spreadsheet projection, I didn't actually do the math).

Yet, somehow I feel as though I'm really far behind. This is probably for the best though as it will actually push me to finish the story in November.

I sort of wanted to use NaNoFiMo to blow the dust off of my 2005 alternate history novel, "Stars, Bars, and the Crown" and finish it. I left it pretty much at the climax. I just worry that the resolution won't match the intensity of where I left off.

This novel is so personal and that one was much grander (even though the central story is interpersonal) that I don't even think I'm preparing myself for that one writing this one. I created whole worlds for that one (there are six newspapers of various political bent in that one and I actually wrote coverage of various story events in all six perspectives) and this one takes place in two apartments - so far.

But it's starting to get to the point where this one might pick up some steam. We'll have to see.

The Best Four Words In The NaNo Dictionary

2007-11-11T21:21:00.001-08:00

Phew! That was a close one. After talking far too much smack on the New York City boards the last couple day (capped off by me mistakenly claiming that Chicago was the basis for Metropolis), Team Chicago didn't let me down with its word count. I think I'll leave it up to the couple of team members who are over on the New York City board regularly to hold up the fight since I'm just screwing it up.

The Word War totals for the second count, turned out to be the following:

1. Chicago: 978093

2. Toronto: 925719

3. New York: 910024

What's a bit scary and what I didn't post in my message on the boards is that we barely won week two and Toronto's pace may catch them up with us soon. For week two, Team Chicago wrote 397,807 words. Team Toronto wrote 392,608. And Team Chicago already is down to 45 members still writing. Though I don't know what that looks like on the other teams. I'd imagine they're down around 80% of people still involved in NaNoWriMo as well.

I did send Toronto's captain a congratulatory letter on moving up to 2nd.

I'm not going to go so far as to say that if we can't win that I want Toronto to win because that comes with its own bit of embarassment if they beat us two years in a row. That being said, I don't want New York City to win if we don't either since those guys seem to have a huge ego about being the "only city that matters."

And I love New York City (else I wouldn't spend over a week there each year) but I'm beginning to get why my roommate hates everything New York City as he's Illinois born-and-bred.

I should have actually taken this whole competition as an omen. I started Eli Manning of the New York Giants over Donovan McNabb today in fantasy football. Manning had o.k. numbers (13 fantasy points) but McNabb just went off for four touchdowns (37 fantasy points). So I am going to lose (barring Matt Hasselbeck suddenly getting injured on the other team).

At least Team Chicago brought a smile to my face tonight or it would have just been an awful day (I actually lost in all three fantasy leagues, one to the last place team in a league where I was 8-1 going into the week).

---

I really have to turn in early tonight as I went into work this morning and discovered that I may actually have to do my computer liaison job to a large extent tomorrow.

There are some things I discovered in Word 2007 that I'm going to have to show everyone in my department how to do. For some silly reason our I.S. department decided not to include me in the testing rollout (though I did get to see some of the new features as they did include not-Kate) even though my department does things that no other department does such as desktop fax rosters to the various states - which I found today I couldn't do.

I even have to show everyone how to print on our company letterhead since this is totally different.

What I really want to do right now is write since the last scene flowed like melted butter. I forgot what it feels like to hit a word vein since I hit them so rarely these days.

I actually enjoyed writing the scene where Tabitha comes barging in to Andy's apartment to get Little Green Envelope. I wrote some funny lines even. Like these:

“I think what you should do is give me back the keys,” Andy said.

“Or what? You’re going to call the police?”

“I could do that,” Andy said, “after all I’m not the one who’s breaking and entering, am I?”

Tabitha seemed to go into pause mode at this one. The rapid fire responses she had been giving stopped in their tracks like she had taken a bullet in the head and was just waiting to drop to the ground.

“No but…” Tabitha’s pause mode ended.

“Just give me the keys,” he said, “and we’ll pretend like this didn’t happen.”

“It’s not breaking and entering,” Tabitha said quickly, “because Kate gave me the keys.”

“Kate has, or I should say had, a right to those keys. You, little red headed devil, do not.”

So it turns out that I was right after all. Maybe Tabitha did have horns that only other humans could see.

“Her name’s on the lease too,” Tabitha said, now back to almost full speed from her slow motion, “so she still has a right to these keys, and um…”

“Um, what…”

“Give me back the DVD and I’ll sleep with you,” Tabitha said so quickly that I could barely make out the words.

I also actually wrote an action scene (not that kind of action scene, this promise never comes to fruition) where the two of them rush to get the DVD. I shouldn't really call it a scene since it's a couple of paragraphs, but whatever.

Point being, what's wonderful about this is that my characters are starting to take over the story so hopefully the writing will get easier. I even had Little Green Envelope speaking for me when he said, "well that was unexpected."

Those are the best four words in the NaNoWriMo dictionary and when they count as four words all the better.

How To Get One Word Out Of Thousands

2007-11-10T20:06:00.000-08:00

Ugh! So what was my excuse for only writing 2.25 hours today (to bring me above 20,000 but barely - 20,835)? I spent the afternoon arguing with member of the New York City team about the comparitive ethnic diversity of restaurants in Chicago versus New York City. And then it tangented into a bit of a spat with one particular member of the team about if the United Nations was in New York City or if it was an independent entity.

Anyhow, it was pretty pointless regardless. The embarassing remains will be on the New York City Word War thread for the rest of the month. Actually until next October.

Though it did get me nice and ready to write a fight scene in my novel. Too bad there was none to be written. About all I got out of it, word count wise was to get to use the word "jacktard." Which is what I wanted to call the other person but I had to keep it civil. Now I remember why I don't use interweb bulletin boards for the other 11 months a year.

The portion of my novel where I actually use the word "jacktard" is quite possibly the first spit milk line that I've written in a while. The whole section is generally humorous so here it is:

“Don’t forget,” Andy said, “I knew Tabitha way before you did. I think I know her at least as well as you do. She’s got you on a pretty tight leash, right?”

Kate went into pause mode for a second before admitting, “like a drill sergeant. Surprised she hasn’t made me drop and do pushups yet.”

“I never made you do that,” Andy said, “at least you can give me credit for that.”

A little laugh came out of Kate. “As long as you promise no axe play,” she said, “I’ll come upstairs. But only for a few minutes, okay.”

“Don’t worry,” Andy said, “I haven’t bought an axe in the time since you moved out.”

If I could have dropped myself to the floor, I would have when I saw the apartment. It was absolutely “spotless” (as you humans would call it but I’ve noticed that you humans usually don’t decorate your apartments with spotted patterns to begin with so aren’t all your apartments “spotless?”). And there was a new carpet in the room with the television. This was what Kate’s eyes seemed to be focused on.

“Nice carpet,” she said.

“Thanks,” Andy replied, “it matches the drapes.”

“You really are a jacktard,” Kate said trying to hold back a laugh for a reason that I really couldn’t understand, “but a jacktard with nice new carpet.”

High quality writing all around but at least I brought the funny for once with my human characters. I sometimes feel like I'm writing two novels. One breakup melodrama with the human characters and then the narrator making fun of it all. I don't know how that's going to play with an actual reader.

Though I guarantee at least one person who is going to fall out of her chair when she reads that line. And it's going to be not-Kate.

---

Right after I wrote those lines, I actually had to go into the Romance thread and requested assistance. See Andy tries to seduce Kate into having "that messy thing that you humans do in the room with the bed" (as the Little Green Envelope calls it) on the new carpet.

And I wasn't sure yet, at this point, if I should have her take him up on the offer or not.

So I posted a thread called "Do they or don't they" in the Romance genre lounge. It's a place I'm never totally comfortable even though my novel is a Dude Lit novel (or a satire of Dude Lit novels) and therefore technically a romantic comedy (like "High Fidelity").

But they were very helpful. At least the first person who responded (I'm assuming it was a woman because in my times in there, I've come across maybe four other guys) was and he or she gave a definitive, "no."

So they didn't. Instead I just wrote this melancholy scene where Andy stands in the doorway feeling rejected for about 10 minutes after Kate walks away down the stairs and out of his life again.

And then the Little Green Envelope makes fun of him. See the cycle?

Actually that doesn't happen but I don't want to give too much of the plot away. Even though I'm sure I'll excerpt too much in the remaining time in NaNoWriMo.

---

I still mean to finish "Pets" tomorrow. I think that I've written about 3,000 words too many in it. The envelope was going to be mailed back in the original plotting the day that Kate moved all of her stuff out of the apartment.

This is the event that triggers "Drugs" (or the part called "Drugs" though I was going to have Andy turn to drugs).

Now I think that instead, Tabitha is going to bust into the apartment and take the DVD for herself and shove it (and probably Andy's head) into the mailbox. That will then set off "Drugs."

I blame the Word War for these extra words. I'm putting off starting "Drugs" until I know what's going to happen in it just so I get a word count every day. Not that I'm not fond of what I've written extra in "Pets" it's just not the pacing that I wanted.

Inside The Inside Of My Mind

2007-11-09T20:39:00.000-08:00

The best part of NaNoWriMo is not even realizing that the cable is out. But, since the cable is out, I don't get to wake up early tomorrow and watch the footcer (my favorite team Fulham is playing Liverpool). Though I probably will wake up early anyhow (it's the 11:00 a.m. match on Fox Soccer Channel so it's not really that early) and write.

Or like last Saturday I'll crop some photographs as I have other year-long creative endeavors that I can't just stop in November. This is what I did last Saturday. The good news on that front is that I don't have my cropping laptop (the one that hooks into a full sized monitor which for some reason the one I'm writing this blog entry on doesn't) as I've loaned it to Samantha.

So really I have no excuse not to just write all day tomorrow. I'll find some excuse to write almost nothing I'm sure but that's not the plan right now. If you look at the awesome new widget on the right side of the page, last Saturday is a little red day.

Though my word count (18,651) is not setting a good example for most of Team Chicago so I really should do something about that and there's no better day than to start tomorrow. That sounds pretty slacker until you consider that there's not really much time left in today (an hour here in the U.S. Central Time Zone).

I'm still not feeling totally well so maybe I'll end up sleeping all day tomorrow, who knows.

---

I did something today that I haven't done all of NaNo, I wrote at work.

We're getting new computers on Monday at work. As departmental technology liaison, that's going to be a pretty hadesish day for me. I only mention this, however, because I wanted to get one last day of writing in on my old work computer.

That computer has served me well for three NaNos so it deserved at least one more college try. I wrote 592 words on it during lunch.

It's sort of odd writing at work, especially considering that I managed to leave myself on a Tabitha rant yesterday. It should have provided real life inspiration that the real life Tabitha was around (though the character is moving further and further away from this starting point and becoming pretty unrecognizable) and she and I are (I don't know if she knows this) on a "piss me off and I'll put you in my novel" mode right now.

I guess I've started to feel guilty that I'm badmouthing her so much thusfar in my novel. But since it's no longer her except for one aspect, I don't feel as bad.

It's really more an indictment of all Chicago artists than it is of any one. And since that's a reoccuring theme for me, I think it's all good. Though some others might disagree.

Today was actually an awesome day at work full of good times and laughs. Doesn't make for writing a really negative chapter next about work (if I choose to do that). I'm not feeling that negative right now in general so Holden Caulfielding isn't on the agenda.

Of course I'm about to watch a movie so maybe getting to sleep late will put me in a more bitter mood. I figured I'd be full of piss and vinegar this November but maybe writing everything down has been a bit too cathartic.

---

One thing did raise my ire today though. The fact that I left the words I wrote at work at work. I was actually amazed when I wrote in the filler words how long that it took. It's sort of refreshing that I can now write faster in the context of the novel than I can outside of it.

I shouldn't really put this on here, but I'm going to anyhow:

[17362 17362 17362 Get This From Work on Monday 17362 It Talks About Kate Trying to Put the Little Green Evelope’s neighbors back in piles and Tabitha yelling at her and saying that if the situations were reversed, Andy wouldn’t do the same.

It establishes the fact further that Kate is still trying to help Andy even though she’s mad at him. It would have been good to have this but you were in such a hurry to get out of work that you left it there.

You are sort of an idiot for doing this, but, hey, at least your laptop didn’t explode like last year so you’re doing something right. Well maybe you’re doing something right but I bet you won’t go back and read the 17362 words that you’ve wrote so far, will you?

Yeah, this will hopefully never see the light of day even though I’m probably going to post this on the blog tonight or at least talk about it.

65 more words and I’m back at 17000. It’s harder to talk about what I wrote than it was to actually write it.]

CHAPTER SEVEN

[17362 works to establish Tabitha as an artsy fuck. Her apartment is just what you’d expect with all the right books (which Little Green Envelope calls written narratives) and all the right films and such.

It also establishes her a pothead who likes to “wake and bake” but Little Green Envelope doesn’t judge her.

I leave it up to the reader to judge her in that regard or not despite my obvious hatred of the character from beyond the fourth wall. I mean, I can see why Kate sticks by her and all but there’s not much redeeming about her yet. I’ll have to change that. She’s not entirely one dimensional.

Neither was Cassandra. For the record. But I already talked about that in the blog yesterday so typing it here to kill words is the heart of redundancy. 17362, I’m almost at 17,362 so I can start writing as soon as I take a nap. Though I need to get dinner. That’s very important. Can’t write exhausted tonight because I need to write something to latch onto tomorrow. Maybe Kate taking the Little Green Envelope to work so he can see first hand if her job really in unfulfilling as she seems to think it is.

It probably is. Kate is sort of spacey but she’s got a good perception on things. 17362. Almost at 17,200 now. It doesn’t seem like I wrote this much at work but I was writing for a solid half hour. Well, maybe not solid but at least trying to write at work on the last day on my old computer. I’m so flippin’ tired now that I don’t want to even write the hundred filler words I have left.

But I’m going to because if I can’t write 100 filler words, how am I going to write anything tonight?

Should I even write tonight? I mean, I’m not going out but maybe I should watch a movie. I have “A Lot Like Love.” It would be good to watch a romance movie since I’m writing about them. Yeah, I’ll probably do that after I drive to Taco Bell and get food. I have to go grocery shopping tomorrow.

17362. I feel like I’m singing “Seasons Of Love.” So I’ll just say that I left off where Little Green Envelope is talking about how silly Hollywood portrays marijuana use. And these here are the last nine filler words.]

I've always said this is truly a window into my mind during the month of November so now everyone can see how the gears turn behind the scenes. Or even further behind the scenes than I put on here.

It can sometimes be a pretty scary place, I have to admit. :)

I'm Writing This With Words, Not Non-Verbal Cues

2007-11-08T20:09:00.000-08:00

I'm violating my own cardinal rule of NaNoWriMo to write this entry. I stopped mid-chapter in the middle of a scene that I'm actually writing at a pretty good clip (up to 15,883 words) to "pick up" the Blogger. I always tell everyone who will listen (or isn't listening) that that's a simply brilliant way to kill your word count.

But I figure gathering my thoughts to continue writing is still doing something productive to the speed noveling end.

I keep having this reoccuring thought as I'm writing this latest scene. Kate has returned to the apartment to pick up her things to move out totally with Tabitha in tow to help. And I keep having flashbacks to my 2004 novel (which is, I haven't mentioned, still available in its entirety on LiveJournal as it was serialized). In that novel, Emily the FMC goes to Europe with Cassandra. Cassandra is the MMC's cousin as well as being Emily's best friend. Throughout the first part of the novel, which just like this one takes place after a breakup, Emily keeps having second thoughts about breaking up with Scott. Cassandra is always there to remind her that Scott is a douchebag (though I wrote that novel before douchebag was the word-du-jour) and why they broke up in the first place.

Well flash forward to the present time. In this scene Tabitha keeps reminding Kate that Andy is a douchebag as Kate has second thoughts about breaking up with Andy.

That's not the big problem though. The bigger dilemma is that Tabitha is quickly turning into Cassandra. She's adopting her mannerisms and everything. The big difference is that Tabitha is artsy and Cassandra was just, for lack of a better adjective, slutty.

I think their motivations are going to turn out to be incredibly different. It turns out that jealousy is Cassandra's driving force. I'm not sure what Tabitha's force for trying to keep them apart is yet. Maybe it's entirely altrusitic. Maybe she can just see, as hopefully the reader can, that "those two just weren't meant to be together." In the 2004 novel, Scott and Emily were, or at least I tried to write them as meant to be together once they got their own crap together.

So there are major differences but I still can't help but think that anyone who read my 2004 NaNo is going to think I'm just repeating myself.

I said I wanted to return to my roots for this one but I didn't mean in that way.

---

At the Chicago International Film Festival, my friend Samantha and I went to see "The Age Of Ignorance." This is the new film by the French-Canadian director Denys Arcand. He's the guy who won the Oscar for "The Barbarian Invasions" (well deserved because that movie was all sorts of awesome).

At the Q&A session afterwards, an audience member accused him of writing weak, unlikeable female characters. He tried to defend himself saying that his female characters were deeper with better motivations than the audience member gave him credit for.

I hope to never be in that situation (though it's doubtful this novel will see and audience of more than three or four people tops) but I want to defend myself in advance.

I've always tried to write female characters as stronger than their male counterparts, just in different ways. Someone reading this novel might chastise me for making Kate a bit touched (to put it nicely) just like Emily suffered from clinical depression. And they'd further state their case by saying that Tabitha is just controlling and slightly one dimensional.

I'd like to point out that in my 2005 novel, it's Mia (the MC's girlfriend) who holds everyone together and is the voice of reason and not Liam (the MC) who sort of bumbles through life while thinking he knows it all.

Sure Kate is just about bat crap insane at this point in the story and sort of wishy-washy in maybe wanting to take Andy back but I'm not trying to make her a weak character. After all, she had the strength to walk out in the first place (which the girl that she's not really based on was really proud of).

I just write characters with issues. All my characters may be a little weak in the grand scheme of things, male and female. I just don't know any Harrison Fords or Glenn Closes in my real life who are ready to take on the world and make it their oyster. All the people I know have flaws. It's those flaws that make us human.

To write otherwise to me seems really dishonest (as would making my characters infinitely likeable).

---

Before I start tangenting again to entirely forget what I wanted to write on yesterday, I'm going to get down to it.

Dialog.

As I've mentioned, my friend Samantha is NaNoing this year (at least I think she is - she's yet to recover her word count after her laptop got stolen from her apartment a few days ago). While we were driving on Saturday to see my friend Adam's play, she confessed that she hadn't written any dialog in her first 3,000 words or so.

I was shocked. Dialog to me is the most beautiful part about writing. To think that some people are scared of it or avoid it for other reason befuddles me.

But, lo and behold, Samantha is not alone in this fact. I found an entire thread on the boards questioning if dialog is even necessary. I can't find it now (too bad NaNoWriMo has taken down the find people by where they've posted for now) but there were seriously a third of the people in the forum who said, "don't worry, you don't need dialog."

Um, what?

I mean, there's non-verbal communication and it's a crucial part to storytelling but an entire novel, NaNo or not, without dialog is not worth the paper it's printed on. No one, and I mean no one, cares about a novel that says, "they did this and then they did that and then this happened."

While an insanely high amount of communication is non-verbal, human beings communicate with words.

On the positive side, I have this to say. To anyone who's afraid to write dialog because they think it sounds inane - humans talk inanely. Now there's a point where the dialog becomes really bad and that's at "hello." The problem is never the dialog, it's where the dialog starts and stops. It's been my experience that dialog should advance the plot in the same way that action does. If you don't mention someone walking every stop, don't include the greetings and the goodbyes.

Other than that, pretty much everything is fair game.

And I guess if you want to write a dialog-free novel go ahead it's your NaNo. I'm just not swapping with you.

---

Well that was sufficiently negative.

To close this on a more positive note, here's a link to an awesome video that I got off the Chicago boards. It was posted in response to a post by our ML (and since today is ML appreciation day, can I just say that TimSimms is doing an outstanding job with Chicago) and I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe.

One person at work actually said it was the funniest viral video she had ever received.

Now that I hyped it up, here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBHOL1PcPR8

There's proof that dialog doesn't have to be even slightly human to be human. Enjoy!

Even Though I Made The Game, I Wasn't Thinking About It

2007-11-07T19:59:00.001-08:00

I thought it was going to take the weekend and me collecting my thoughts to get me back on the writing track. At work this afternoon (I ended up going in after all though if this were an NBA injury report, I'm day-to-day for tomorrow and Friday and if it was an NFL injury report, I'm Probable for tomorrow) I was actually fretting that I was done for. It's a bit early in the month for that to be sure but people have dropped out over less than writer's block.

But tonight I got back in track by jumping ahead a little bit to a couple of ideas that I had earlier in the month. The one that provided the most word count was having the narrator talk about Little Green Envelope sex. At the kickoff party, I thought it was a good idea (or at least a funny one) to have them engage in human activities - including that. But as the month has actually begun, I decided that the story was better told by keeping boundaries between the Little Green Envelope world and the human one.

So instead I think I wrote an amusing section of the novel:

I know that some of you humans are probably getting all sorts of ideas and asking all sorts of questions about us Little Green Envelopes by this point in the narrative. You’re probably saying to yourself “do they do what you humans do in the room with the bed?” or “do they ever want to switch their genders?” or “do they ever want to send themselves to the incinerator?”

The answers to those questions are “no,” “sometimes it happens by mistake but we don’t attempt to,” and “no.”

But the first question is the one that’s most important here as I’ve raised the subject. It would be virtually impossible for us to do that messy thing that you humans do in the room with the bed. After all, we can’t move ourselves. And we all have the exact same parts (and we’re lacking the parts that you humans have that lets you do that messy thing in the room with the bed). But if you want to picture how that would work if it could, then go ahead with your own narrative in your “brains.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if you humans sometimes take two of us envelopes, lip the flaps and start to put the corner of one of us into the open slot of the other trying to imitate the messy thing that you humans do in the room with the bed. And of course you wouldn’t even know that you’ve got a good chance of smashing together two males or two females. Which there is, of course, nothing wrong with. We Little Green Envelopes appreciate our brothers and sisters from that genre a lot. But I know that I’ve just disgusted quite a few of you humans with that thought so I’ll quit fast forwarding.

But first, can I just say for the record that we would get no enjoyment out of that act the way you humans seem to. In fact, it’s actually quite painful when you smash us together in any way or pile us on top of each other (though it does make it easier to converse close together since we can’t control our volume) or bury us or put out fires with us or kill insects with us by smacking us against “the wall” and crushing them. I don’t know why you humans think that because of our physical appearance we’re so good for doing all of those things when really all we’re supposed to be used for is carrying movies through the mail.

So if you get nothing else out of this narrative, just remember that fact.

I felt a public service announcement preview right there. I’m sorry.

And I finally had the Little Green Envelope come in contact with the Little Green romance Envelope that Kate had rented and which she watched the night before she broke up with Andy and left. I know I had planned that in advance but I don't know when I was going to put that in. I figured it was going to be just before the story moved out of the apartment by the envelopes being sent back. And I think it still is.

I think I'm getting close to the end of part one of the novel. I even made "part" markers. Since the novel is "Pets, Drugs, and Fireworks" part one is called "Pets." Part two is going to be called "Drugs." And, I know everyone is going to have figured this out by this point, part three is going to be called "Fireworks."

Part one has a lot of the mention of the cat that Andy owns so I think it makes logical sense. Part two is going to have Hoodie dragging Andy to a party where a Bruce Lee movie is going to be shown as background entertainment and where there will be some crazy activities so that goes along with the "drugs." I've yet to have any reason to call part three "fireworks" yet but I'm thinking the story is going to end around the fourth of July. And there will be quite a few emotional fireworks since it's the third act.

Part one has really been sort of mundane like "pets" would indicate. It hasn't left the first apartment so it's very fitting. I just hope if anyone reads this, they can survive "Pets" and get to the, hopefully, more exciting "Drugs" and "Fireworks."

I've also had a lot of exposition by the Little Green Envelope in part one so it's almost like he's treating the humans as "pets" (ironic since he has no control over them and is the possession and not them). But since the three acts of a traditional novel are introduction, conflict, and resolution, I think I'm fine with the "pets" chapters being that way.

At least I'm justifying the novel thusfar in that way.

I think at 14,000 words (13,981) like I am now I'm needing to get a little more conflict into the story and I will very soon. Pets really needs to transition into drugs post-haste.

---

13,981 means I'm now on pace to reach 60,000 words this month. But the Word War has made me feel pretty inferior in that regards. As usual Toronto's got this one person who's decided to set their sights on 150,000 words. This one isn't 12 though so that's good.

They have stated that they are going to reach 50,000 tonight.

I look at my novel and I guess there's nothing that I haven't written thusfar that I couldn't have written in the first night or two if I had really pinned myself to my chair. Well except that very meta first fight scene since my roommate was vacuuming obsessively on the 2nd. But had I found something else for them to fight about it could have worked just as well.

I keep thinking part of my problem is I'm breaking at weird points. I'm leaving myself wanting to write the next chapter and all but I'm sometimes breaking mid-thought from exhaustion or whatever. I look back to my 2004 novel, still the most successful and thinking that I wrote that only a chapter at a time. If I couldn't finish the chapter, I wouldn't start it. Of course, those chapter were only about 1,000 words so I could do that. These are five or six pages a piece.

Next year I am going to write chapter to chapter again. I just have to get a story that's more easy to serialize.

---

Speaking of the Word War, Chicago won round one! I'm shocked to be honest, but the final standings for October 1-6, 2007 were as follows:

1. Chicago: 580286
2. New York City: 572825
3. Toronto: 533111

Of course the only standings that matter are November 1, 2007. Still this is the first time we've ever been ahead of Toronto in any count so I'm psyched.

I've actually put together a Rhapsody playlist of all-Canadian artists to egg myself on. It contains The Tragically Hip, Our Lady Peace, Barenaked Ladies, Bruce Cockburn, Leonard Cohen, and Neil Young.

There's no real soundtrack for my novel yet which is why I probably don't have the feel of it yet but maybe that's for this weekend. I'm too busy writing right now for that.

---

I have some thoughts on dialog but I think I'm going to go back to writing and try to hit 15,000 tonight (some people are going for 20,000 today but I'm nowhere close even if I wrote for a solid two or three hours).

This Chicago Weather Is Good And Bad For The Novel

2007-11-06T21:36:00.000-08:00

It should be a good thing that I'm writing tonight's blog post after I should be asleep and dreaming (as I try to be part of "all good people"). But really it's just because I was sick as the proverbial dog today (which is why it's annoying that my cat is in really good spirits and trying to interrupt my writing on a regular basis) and I slept from 5:30 to 8:30 this evening.

I cancelled the West Side write-in I was so out of it. I was, thankfully, not too out of it to remember to do so.

If I call in sick to work tomorrow, I'll feel guilty writing. But not too guilty. Since, after all, most of my writing has been done under the covers anyhow. If I could cross my arms and shiver in this sudden Chicago cold snap while writing, I would do that. Next year I'll have to figure out a way to make that happen.

---

Today I figured I had to tell the person who I basically stole the story from that my FMC's life was based on what happened to her.

She took it surprisingly well. There's this other girl at work who told me that if she's included in the story, she will be extremely pissed (and it's not the one who another character is based about 80% on thank goodness).

All that the person whose story I was inspired by asked is that I make the MMC a complete asshole. And, well, that's not too far from real life or the story. Thusfar he is. Though I don't like writing one sided characters so I'll have to give him at least some redeeming qualities.

I did tell her the truth that the main character isn't her (she actually has personality traits more closely related to someone else). Just a person in the same situation that she went through. And it's not like I set out to steal her story - it just happened because I've never been in the situation where I've been co-habitating with someone who just doesn't care and she has.

What's amazing was that she figured out that she was the inspiration for the MC without my even telling her. Unless she's reading this blog. Which is possible. In which case, "hey H."

Though I don't think it's really hard to tell which four people are the four which the four characters so far are based on. This other person (the one who doesn't want to be in the story) guessed right off the bat. Then again she knows pretty much everything that I could possibly have used for inspiration so maybe others, even those who are close to the events (those few events in the novel that might actually have happened) might not be able to guess.

---

Tonight was when I ran the numbers for Team Chicago for the first time, and we're looking good in some areas and in others, I'm slightly worried. Here is the report:

Now that the team is set, we can get down to the dirty business of comparing our word count to the other two regions. The three team captains agreed yesterday that we'll post them every Sunday but to get a starting point, we also agreed to post them either tonight or tomorrow morning.

Keep in mind that these word counts are inaccurate the moment they're posted (almost). But since it's past midnight in the Eastern Time Zone where our two opponents reside it's fair to post our closing word count for November 6, 2007.
Right now, Team Chicago stands at 580,286 words. That's an average of 10,551 words per team member.

The closing number that goes by the 1,667 words per day count is 10,000 on the 6th of November. So that means that on average, our team is ahead of pace to average 50,000 words (52,753 to be exact). We currently have 26 of our 55 team members (47%) on pace to break the 50,000 word mark. Let's try to beat last year when we had 37 of 47 (79%) members of the team as NaNoWriMo winners!

We actually have our top three Word Warriors from last year (rosemilk, Tungsten Monk, and Panstygia) back on the team so things are looking good to avenge our loss to Toronto.
If we each write an average of 50,000 words, we'll end up with 2,755,000 words. That's the goal more than anything; except for beating the snot out of New York City and Toronto of course. :)
I tnink it's important to remember that we're a team so we want everyone to succeed in getting their 50,000 words. That being said, here's a little internal competition to egg everyone on. Here are our top 10 writers out of the gates:

1. CrimsonBlood - 33,8732. squirrelgirl22 - 26,1553. rosemilk - 24,9144. cavafy - 24,9055. LeeB - 20,3616. Panstygia - 18,6447. atlantistale - 15,0868. smwalter - 15,0719. TimmSimms - 14,97910. daevient - 14,576

Congratulations to all of you for being way ahead of schedule. You inspire me at least if not the rest of the team. Each week I'll also post the five people who made the biggest word gain in the week (or in this next case five days) prior.

Keep on typing Team Chicago and write early, write often!

Which reminds me, I need to change my signature back to the "write early, write often" slogan. I think I'll do that now instead of going to sleep. Maybe I'm not all good people.

I Should Have The Little Green Envelope Write These

2007-11-05T20:42:00.000-08:00

In the three NaNo novels that I've written up to this point, I have been really good about creating composite characters or just making the characters that populate my pages up from scratch. This year, I've apparently thrown that writing technique to the wolves because, thusfar, the only two characters I've mentioned besides Kate (who as I've mentioned is half based on a real person) and Andy (who's just the side of me that I'm not proud of) are based almost completely on real people.

One of them, who doesn't even have a name except for "hoodie" (Andy's friend from work who lives in the same neighborhood) and Kate's best friend Tabitha (who I think I straight out stole from what I once said my friend Samantha should name her main character except the character isn't based on Samantha) are based almost 100% on real people.

And the worst part is, I didn't even bother trying to disguise Tabitha's identity. In real life the character that Kate is based on really is Tabitha's best friend. At least in the context that I know both of them. And, of course, what situation would I put Tabitha in except for the exact same situation as reality. Gave me a chance to talk a bit of smack that I shouldn't have talked, but it was cathartic to a point.

Though I think I can be a bit forgiving to myself as the original novel was going to be about Tabitha. Or Tabitha was going to be one of the two MCs (the female one, though I have been known to switch genders and keep all the personality traits of two people to disguise them).

Tomorrow, or maybe for a half an hour tonight, I'm actually going to have Andy call Tabitha and the true extent of their prior relationship (which is completely fictional, by the by) is going to be revealed. Who knows, maybe I'll actually get a subplot out of it. Fate knows my novel needs one of those as it's approach 10,000 words rapidly (at the time of writing this, I'm at 9,253 words).

Maybe Andy will even do something really bad just to screw over Kate. Though Tabitha apparently hates Andy in the novel and is really tight with Kate so this might not be a viable option.

---

And maybe I can actually write something humorous in this interchange. Thusfar all the humor has still come from the Little Green Envelope and his lack of understanding of humans (and the fact that he thinks he understands them a lot better than he actually does).

He's even been the vehicle for pointing out the satire. And I think that's a worse narrative crime than anything that I've done in creating characters.

Though I do like what I wrote tonight about his musings about the phrase, "I'd rather get a root canal.":

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Andy. I don’t know why you humans, especially you humans in the larger cities, are suddenly so fond of saying that word three times. In the older movies I transport, a simple “yes” or “yup” or even “h’yup” (if the setting is right – I notice a lot of dust around in the movies where that is used) suffices. “Of course, who else would she be staying with than the person I would rather get a root canal than call?”

Do you humans actually ever get presented with that choice? I think of all of the phrases you throw around, this is the worst. It’s as if there’s nothing worse in life than going to the dentist. Though I do have to say that in all of the movies I’ve transported where this scene is carried out, they do make the dentist’s office seem like a pretty scary place. There are all sorts of torture instruments just lying around and some male human (almost always) or a female human (occasionally) in a little white coat sticking them into where you talk while you squirm in either pain or just fear.

I would have to think that even if you chose the root canal, all it would serve to do was put off the other choice for a little bit until you had to do that eventually. I don’t see the human or whatever with the other option going, “well I know you just had the traumatic experience of the root canal and all so you can skip this horrible business meeting where you have to talk about a big cardboard page with some lines on it today. Or, let’s face it, you just had a near incinerator experience with the male human in the little white coat so let’s just say you never have to talk about the big cardboard page again. You made your choice and I’m proud to say you chose ‘root canal.’”

---

I didn't get a chance to do much writing tonight in general (my goal was 10,o00 words) since I was in chat for two hours negotiating the final teams for the Chicago v. New York City v. Toronto word war.

Turns out the teams are 55 people. I negotiated for this because person #52 and #53 were on the team last year and both got 50,000 (both are well on their way this year). It was a compromise because person #55 is the only one in the entirety of the Chicago volunteers who haven't broken 1,000 yet.

But in their request to be on the team, they said that they wanted to be inspired to write by being on Team Chicago. And if the word war inspires even one person to break the 50,000 mark than it's done its job.

That, of course, is my Kate side talking. The Andy side says that the point is to kick the behinds of both New York City and Toronto. I don't even know what the Little Green Envelope side would say. But chances are it would be way funnier than anything said by my actual MCs.

I Think My Goal Is To Write 1,700 Words In Here Per Day

2007-11-04T20:11:00.000-08:00

Now I've backed myself into a bit of a corner. I had my first moment of NaNoWriMo where I typed something completely unexpected. While my narrator was pontification on how often he used words in the past tense, I came to this realization (scarily, I almost wrote "he"):

"But I’ve used the word were too much. It’s like rewinding to a time when I knew them as Kate and Andy, as opposed to Kate…and Andy. Maybe I tip my hand too much in that they don’t get back together. I’m not the best at foreshadowing even though one of the advantages to being a Little Green Envelope is that I get to see everything at once. I know that you humans are all thinking that this is how the narrative arc is going to go. But this isn’t the story of Kate and Andy. This is the story of Kate…and Andy."

So, crap. I had the original thought of the story that they got back together at the end and he ends up back at their apartment for a happy ending. Now they don't get back together at the end. I try not to write predictable endings but I think for once my novel is supposed to have a happy ending at least. So now I have to find a way to get Kate and Andy both happy and both growing as people separately. And I guess that's the reality of a situation like they're in. From what I've written so far, I could have had them realize they needed to adapt a little piece of each other that they themselves were lacking. I had that happen in my 2004 novel even though that didn't have a happy ending.

I guess telling two disparate storylines ends up with a higher word count. But I'm trying not to write to the competition this year. That just ended up making me miserable last year with the finished product.

Though this year's competition is going to be huge. Chicago, New York, and Toronto buoyed by MLs who support the competition may have 50 people. Being team captain, I at least have to try really hard to get way about 50,000.

---

Speaking of word counts, I wrote the following bit of old NaNoWriMo experience in one of the forums. It's about daily word counts:

Per day word counts don't work.

If you miss a day, you end up trying to double up. Or triple up - or quadruple up.
I don't aim for words per day, I try for scenes per day. Or, even parts of scenes per day. Today, for example, I was going to write this fight between my two protagonists. No matter how many words it took. I got tired so it was only 1,500 and it's not done yet. So tomorrow I finish the fight (I did stop it at a logical point, when the initial aggrevation ended) and I'm going to try and write two other scenes as well.

Also, I write to word goals. My first goal for tomorrow, for example, will be 5,000 (right now I'm at 4,180) so the fight will probably be about 820 more words. 5,000 is also the end goal for day three in the 1,667 method but this is coincidental.

If you write in this method, you're not watching the counter and it's amazing how much faster the words pile up. If you stop once you get your 1,667 it means you're probably ending mid-stream and might find it hard to pick back up.

And I stand completely behind that. Chances are if you are checking your word counter (I almost said, "if you humans are checking your word counters") than you're not really enjoying what you're writing. If you're in the flow, just go with it. If that means you write only 500 words in a day than you do. Some other day you'll probably be closer to 5,000 when you hit a word vein.

So call me cynical but, hey, I've completed this thing three times so what's to say I'm wrong?

I know people have completed it writing right around 1,700 words per day, but it's a dangerous precipice.

Out Living Life As Well As Writing About It

2007-11-03T22:19:00.000-07:00

So it looks like I missed my first day of November blogging on here. There are worse things that could happen during November for sure.

I did buy my writer's notebook at about 2:00 p.m. today and then went home and took a nap while watching this special on the History Channel on what an earthquake would do to New York City. Here's a hint - total destruction. Kind of what like the mad writers of Chicago are going to do to them. As of yesterday evening, which was the last time I could actually get on the NANO site, we already had 10 people above 5,000 words. And my friend Mary was already at 20,000. That girl can flat out write.

Then my friend Samantha, who is also NANOing called saying how tough it was to write once she actually started.

She has written about three scenes and is only at 4,000 words. I told her that she needed to add more descriptions. She told me that she hadn't done much dialog yet and I told her that dialog is half the fun of NaNoWriMo. We ended up discussing it a lot. Sad thing is, she's got way more anecdotes to work in than I do. If I could borrow her life (she's writing semi-autobiographical) and work some of that in with my unlikeable characters (she hates movies with truly despicable types in them) and my dialog than together we could set the speed writing world on fire.

After that, I sat down for a solid hour and finished off the fight scene. I won't say what Kate and Andy fought about but it involved a different sort of stain than the cat left. I think it goes to the lengths (no pun intended) that the dysfunctionality of their relationship has reached before the reader is dropped in.

Tomorrow's (later today's) writing is going to involve Kate finally deciding to walk out of the situation and Andy searching for her all around town (using his cell phone of course since if he actually physically searched it would involve going out of the narrator's view.

I haven't plotted too far ahead so once the breakup happens, there's no saying where the path of the Little Green Envelope will go. I'm guessing he's going to go back to the warehouse where the reader gets to meet some other Little Green Envelopes and such. I know he's going to be sent to a cheesy party where Andy is going to show up so he can catch back up with his storyline soon after.

But I have no idea where it's going to go after that. So at about 10,000 words it's going to get difficult again. I'm just going to relish the words while they're still coming.

---

Even though I wasn't writing tonight, I did do something speed writing related.

I went to see a play at former Editor Adam's theater. More to the point, I went to see a collection of 18 scenes. 9 of which were by the original playright, Suzan Lori-Parks and 9 of which were interpretations of the same name of the scene by Chicago playrights and other writers affiliated with the theater.

It was a great experiment in what different authors can do with the same starting point (in this case a name).

Even though some of the scenes left a lot to be desired.

It's off to sleep now though as I have to go into work tomorrow. After that, I hope to get to about 8,000 words (putting me a bit ahead of the game). But I'm sure I'll get distracted a bit more. The good thing is, I'm not falling behind. I'm just not getting ahead either.

I just have to start thinking further ahead. Something has to happen that's exciting. I just have to figure out what that is.

Fighting Sleep More Than Writing Fighting

2007-11-02T20:35:00.000-07:00

Not too much exciting to report today. I wish I was writing a workplace novel because my most interesting anecdotes seem to come from there. Today a co-worker and I got in a conversation about a spy in our office who watches everything we do. Now, that could make a good storyline in itself because the changes in my work's organizational culture over the past few years has been something to write about.

But I'm trying to write in satire, humor, and parody and there's already an abundance of way better material in that respect. I'd feel like I was stealing from "The Office" and "Office Space." Plus, some people are having a hard time keeping a sense of humor about the whole situation.

So instead of changing gears (though I could have the Little Green Envelope be taken to the workplace of the two main human characters if I really wanted to) I went ahead and wrote the scene that I've had churning in my head for about the last 24 hours.

The two main characters were given last night. The "male human" is named Andy and the "female human" is name Kate (short for Catherine). I shouldn't say who is the main part of the conglomeration for these characters as it may get me in a severe amount of trouble.

So far all we know about Andy is that he's a workaholic (and no, he's not based on Andy from "The Office" though that thought did cross my mind when I named him) and at home he's a total mess. Kate hates her job because she feels unappreciated and is constantly cleaning the apartment. It's a bit of "The Odd Couple" meets "The Break Up" so far if I'm using the movie comparison that much of my novel is based on.

So, yes, back to the fight scene. It's a very short fight so far (about 1400 words) over the messes that the cat leaves on the floor of the couple's apartments. But, really, the undertone to Andy is more about the fact that Kate uses vacuuming with her iPod on as a way to really avoid the situation (so I guess I also have to add to the personality traits that she avoids confrontation through ecapism). On Kate's end, the fight is about how Andy doesn't think the crisis she's going through at work matters.

I'm going to have the fight revive tomorrow (a few hours later in the story) since I know it has to get way more heated than I can get it to be in my exhausted state right now.

The fight's subject was actually the first bit of post-modernism to sneak into my novel this year. The way I figured out what the fight was going to be about was that my roommate was vacuuming for about an hour tonight - while I was trying to watch "The Next Great American Band." I thought to myself, "how long does it take to vacuum half of a friggin' two bedroom apartment in Chicago?"

I actually had Andy say something similar to Kate (I didn't say it to my roommate) except they live in a one bedroom so I adjusted accordingly. I really have to get my writer's notebook tomorrow and map out Andy and Kate's apartment. Yeah, I wasted my time watching television.

The person that Kate is loosely based on would be deeply disappointed. Though I have to say none of Kate's mannerisms thusfar are based on this person, just the situation she finds herself in.

Well it appears as though my talk about the office did have some bearing on tonight's writing after all though.

---

The goal tonight is to get some sleep because tomorrow I want to have the full energy to finish off the fight scene. It's got to get way rougher than it did. It's not the gran mal fight in the relationship, but it's pretty close.

And I can't build up enough anger to translate it into the characters if I can barely keep my eyes open.

Where My Worst Is Good Enough

2007-11-01T17:47:00.001-07:00

Just like the past couple of years, I didn't do a bit of pre-planning for NANOWRIMO. This year I've been even worse than usual. I didn't even buy my writer's notebook. This has been the highlight of past years leading up to NANO. Technically, it's the time that I consider the month to start even though I almost always do this in October.

Though I have real life money problems to blame for this more than any neglect. I'm going to do this tomorrow because tomorrow is when I actually start.

Thusfar, I've written once. I wrote when I got home from the Hold Steady concert (even though I was there for the openers Art Brut. I could have gone to sleep, but I really wanted to get a start sooner than usual. I wrote for about 30 minutes when I got home at 12:15 a.m.

I wrote like a storm and got 1,037 under my belt before I went to sleep.

The key was that I'm actually using a narrator this year as opposed to that third person omniscent voice in the sky. As I mentioned before, the narrator is a plastic "envelope" for an environmentally conscious movie-to-your-home company (called Little Green Envelope).

What I discovered yesterday in starting my novel is that he's sort of bitter with his place in life. He's always referring to "you humans" to describe the differences between Little Green Envelopes and you and I (the collective you).

He has no name and I don't think he's going to. Though other "envelopes" are going to have to refer to this one at some point so he might have to.

The "you humans" that appear in the novel are going to have to have names. But I don't think they're going to appear until what I write tomorrow. And when I have to start thinking of names, I'll actually have to come up with things like personality for the characters.

The next bit of writing is going to be the little green envelope apologizing for not understanding the rules of narrative writing since he's only seen movies. I hope that this will allow satirization of movies at some point in the future. There's going to need to be something since I don't know what the plot is yet. Then again, I didn't know that in the similar novel in 2004 either.

---

It sounds like it, I'm sure but I'm already hanging around on the "NaNoWriMo Ate My Soul" boards.

There is an interesting thread called "Anti-Nanoers" in which a LiveJournal entry by a guy with a giant stick up his bum about NaNoWriMo is linked. He goes off for the entire entry about how no one who does NaNoWriMo is a real writer. He's more bitter than my narrator but a lot of what he says is true.

There are way too many people on the site with dreams way bigger than their talent. But I think most people get the fact that you can't write the Great American Novel in 30 days. I saw an icon on the NaNo LiveJournal community today that said, "your worst is good enough."

I think most people by the middle of their first year, unless they were already pretty good writers coming in, realize that NaNoWriMo is somewhere between a 30-day brainstorming session and just a way to have fun writing things that will never be published.

I know if I were worried about getting published, I would never in a million attempts write a novel where the narrator is a Little Green Envelope.

I Am Writing A Novel About Envelopes - Seriously

2007-10-28T19:01:00.000-07:00

Today is my half birthday. Not that this is important to NANOWRIMO but since I no longer write on LiveJournal much, I decided to post it here on Retentivewrimo.

More important than today to nearly everyone else writing a Nano in Chicago was that our kickoff party was yesterday evening. I went to this amazing yearly event at the Double Door afterwards (a concert where six bands dress up as six other bands and play a mini-set of nothing but the other band's songs - which this year included covers of Pearl Jam, Culture Club, The Misfits, and Alice Cooper) so this is the first chance I've had to write about it.

We officially announced that Chicago is battling both New York City and Toronto this year. That was a lot of stress on Friday since I wasn't sure a three way battle was going to work (irony, my novel is about a love triangle). But in the end I think it's going to be fun to battle two teams at once. Thankfully it's not battling them combined.

Rematching Toronto will certainly be interesting. There is a bit of bad blood there due to how some people on Toronto conducted themselves in 2006. But I don't think that person is around this year. 12-year olds have short attention spans.

---

The new ML threw together quite a shindig at the Uptown Writer's headquarters.

I completely forgot to take out my camera, however. So unlike last year, there's no documentation that it ever happened. There were a few familiar faces but a lot of new ones as well. Really I think there were only about four people left from my first NANO party (the TGIO party in 2004).

I ended up in a little group in a corner with my friend Samantha (this is her first year after she thought about it the last two) and a guy from NPR (well, freelance).

It was during the conversation we were having the last hour of the party or so that I finally came up with a novel idea.

It's a little bit weird. But I am writing in humor and satire so I can kind of get away with it and still be considered fiction and not fantasy.

The main two characters in my novel are going to be Netflix envelopes. Or, well, envelopes from a movies-by-mail company very similar to Netflix. One is going to be a romance envelope and one is going to be an action/adventure envelope.

How to actually make a system of delivery where the same envelope gets sent to different addresses is going to be the issue. Maybe they'll be Netflix-esque sleeves.

Anyhow, they'll be anthropomorphic. And I think the metaphor goes along with my original thought of the difference in language between men and women.

There is going to be a parellel human storyline (this was something I discussed with my friend Kim, a short story writer, at the bar yesterday and she thinks it's a crucial thing) but this will be the first time I have a non-human protagonist. Though it's not an elf or anything.

I think the hardest thing to do is not have the story turn into "Cars." But at least I'm off and running with the idea.

Finally Getting Back Into NANOWRIMO Mode

2007-10-24T09:39:00.000-07:00

In the past couple of months, I've been watching the "Up" series from the United Kingdom (off of Netfix of course since I'm an addict). This is a major documentary project from Michael Apted (who also directed fiction movies like "Gorillas In The Mist" and "Nell." In 1964, a cross-section of 7-year olds from across England (sort of sad that Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland were not included) were selected as the future of England in the year 2000. Each seven years, these participants are filmed for an update on their lives.

There weren't any extras on the DVD until "42 Up." But on this one, I watched the director's commentary (it's something I don't usually do but I love these films) and Apted states that he includes the families of the subjects to track the time that passed because people don't look that much different between 28 and 42.

Well I can tell you that having started doing NANOWRIMO at 28 and now being 32, I definitely feel different.

Yesterday was the first time in 2007 I really went on the boards. And I ended up not going to sleep until 1:45 a.m. Today I'm out sick from work. I remember nights of writing in my three earlier attempts in the speed writing mecca and I know I stayed up way later than that almost every night that I wrote.

Looks like that's not going to happen this year. So I'm just going to have to actually write during daylight.

---

I don't know how that revelation is going to effect my word count. It can't be entirely healthy for it. But more of a problem is I have lost my inspiration.

I was going to write my novel based on this crush I had on this girl that was totally unrequited. The general idea of the story was the difference in languages between men and women and how the same event can be interpreted entirely differently.

It was going to be a return to the he-said, she-said of my novel from 2004. This formula worked for a lot of words as it was almost like writing two novels at once. Though in this one, I think both characters are going to be in the same city. In "Why Sleep When I'll Only Dream?" one character was in Warsaw and the other was in Paris and the only interaction they had until about 60% through the book was via e-mail.

In this case, I would run into the stumbling block of having to repeat the same story twice. And that is just boring to me.

But back to the dilemma. A couple of weeks ago, I went into my office to catch up on some work and the only other person around (it was a Sunday) was this girl. Anyhow, she had no idea I was there and was blabbing away on her phone in this voice that just bothered me so much. It was a voice I had never heard from her before and I had this, "what was I thinking?" moment.

Now I'm just pretty much indifferent to the whole situation and it's killed my desire to fictionalize it. I probably still will, but it's not going to be the same. It was never going to be the exact plotlines anyhow as that does not make for good prose.

---

I kept thinking in the 20 days between logins on the NANO site that I was probably missing my chance to get involved in Chicago's word war this year. It did get mentioned on the "welcome back" thread in the region's boards but nothing was firmed up before I started a thread on it yesterday.

So far Boston seems to be a likely candidate (unless they challenge New York City or like Detroit last year challenge their World Series opponent city - in this case Denver). Toronto's planning something with themselves so a rematch isn't going to happen. And people want to beat up on St. Louis again but that never felt like a fair fight back in 2005.

I'm hoping to be captain again this year (after losing the post in 2006). And hopefully Chicago will get back above .500. We're definitely not going to put the team together too early like last year and get people in mid-October who are geeked about NANO and then never even start writing in November.

So I guess procrastination may help Team Chicago's cause.

It's not really helping mine as far as what I'm going to sit down and write in 2007.

Killing Off NANOWRIMO The Right Way

2006-11-30T08:50:00.000-08:00

While I take pride in being on the first page of the Chicago authors on NANOWRIMO, I do it with reserve. The reason for this is that I know how many people reach 50,000 and then just stop. I'm sure many of them could get to 60 or 70 thousand or even more if they kept going.

And there are also those who got to 55,000 and actually finished their novel (*cough* novella) and they're the ones I'm really jealous of because they keep more in the spirit of the competition than I do.

But this year, as I've mentioned before, is going to be different. I'm going to write "the end" during this month because I'm killing off all of my main characters. In fact, I've grown so enamored with the idea that I've proposed it to the boards in the thread "Kill Off Your Characters Day (November 30)."

I even made some pretty simple rules:

Every one of your main characters must die.

They should die as close to 11:59:59 local time as you feel comfortable with.

You can delete the whole thing on December 1 and have them come back to life.

It's part of NANOWRIMO so you can pretty much disregard rules #1, #2, and #3.

I figured people would just love the idea but I can't believe how many people have said, "I can't kill of my characters, I want to use them for the sequel, to finish the novel in January, etc."

I have to keep explaining to them that the delete key (or well the highlight text and delete function) can be your friend after December 1. I don't think it's anyone's fault. I think NANO has hardwired everyone into thinking that when it goes on the page, it stays on the page, inner editor be damned. But that all goes out the window tomorrow.

Thank goodness.

---

Though I do have to say that I've been writing a lot slower since I hit 50,000. Yesterday I actually only wrote about 1,500 words. Now that seems like a lot (it's almost daily pace, after all) but that was in 3.5 hours. I wrote more on the train this morning I think (well at least pace-wise).

During my mini-write-in (is that too many hyphens?) with rosemilk, I spent more time jibber-jabbering than actually writing.

The problem was that I have two characters trying to break into separate buildings (one into a warehouse in Chelsea and one into a doctor's brownstone in Gramercy Park) and not being a thief myself, I was having a hard time figuring out how either thing would be accomplished. One of the characters is a thief so he's figured out what to do but the other one is just shaking a fence trying to force a lock to come off.

I actually ended up writing "STUPID FENCE! STUPID FENCE! STUPID FENCE!" in my novel in frustration.

Which gave me an idea. I've often wrote a bit post-modern in that events from my personal life make it into the novel as they happen. For example, a reader could always tell which sections I wrote on an airplane because it will be a character using either a flight metaphor or actually discussing being on an airplane or just flat out being on an airplane.

Next year I'm taking it a step further. I'm going to go flat out post-modern and write in my frustrations, wonderments, etc. right into the novel as a narrator. It will be like NANOWRIMO meets RETENTIVEWRIMO.

Of course I'll have to figure out what the real plot is so I don't just write some sort of literary free rant for 50,000 words. That's what my LiveJournal is for. :)

Speaking of which, one of my favorite topics from the forums is this one: Comparing previous novel(s) to this year's: Better or worse?.

Take a guess what I said.

---

Remember a few entries back I talked about wanting to get on the forums more? Well maybe that wasn't such a good idea. Almost immediately I got into a bit of a spat in the Polling Booth about using quotes from your own novel in your signature.

Now I've been in the middle (and caused) some nice wars on the forums in my day but this is the first one that ever got the attention of Cybele. It wasn't for comments I made, it was a battle between two of the super-posters.

Well I did say that I wanted to get the attention of the NANOWRIMO staff, right?

Mission, I guess, accomplished.

Two Weights Off My Back In One Day

2006-11-28T21:29:00.000-08:00

There's one song that I didn't mention that's in constant rotation on my Rhapsody because; 1) it's embarassing and 2) it has nothing to do with New York City. "Maneater" by Nelly Furtado has had its fair share of spins in this ending days on NANOWRIMO. I should have just made it my end of the dare had I lost to Greensong in our 1 v. 1 30-day word war. It's not like it would have been a punishment.

As it stood though, I won the challenge by about 40 minutes.

She verified her novel at about 10:30 Eastern and I mentally gave her the win. I got basically to the same point she verified at (50009 words) at 10:10 p.m. Central (I think 10:06 p.m. was the exact time). Being a total idiot, I calculated that somehow our possible writing times evened out at the end of the month. Of course she was able to start an hour earlier so I had an hour more to write to win.

And so I won.

It's such a hollow victory since she's such a nice girl that I just don't want to gloat. Now that doesn't apply to the whole of Team Toronto who I know Chicago has lost to badly but I still want to write on and beat more members of.

---

The funny thing is that I got to word 49,000 by writing one last anti-Toronto screed. To set the scene, all of the MCs have contracted a water borne virus and are having flu-like symptoms. Two of the characters have made their way to Madison Square Garden where there's a shelter. Standing outside of the arena, they have the following exchange:

“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” Anthony said, grasping at his stomach, I feel like I just took a vacation in Toronto.”

“I know,” Allison said, isn’t it the worst feeling you’ve ever had in your life? It’s like you want to throw up but you’re too bored from the malaise to do it. Well, like Toronto you have to get it out of your system as soon as possible. Just think of Niagara Falls and maybe it will come again. Or stick Moonshine’s paw down your throat. Don’t worry, he’s declawed and his neutered. I did that a little too late though, I’m afraid and he produced some mutant offspring. They weren’t fit to live in New York City so me and the ex-boyfriend I bought Moonshine with shipped the litter off to Toronto. Last I heard they were letting the cats roam the streets.

They say if you listen really closely, you can hear the mewing of the packs of cats that roam the streets of Toronto looking for scraps of food. It’s been said that they’ve mated with the rats and cockroaches up there to produce a breed of not quite mammal and not quite insect horrible beast. Though the last I heard, the Canadians were considering replacing the maple leaf on their flag with this horrible freak of nature.”

“Wow,” Anthony said, “your cat must be pretty famous up in Canada.”

Allison nodded. “Well it’s not like there’s anyone else famous up there. I mean look at who they consider a celebrity. Rick Moranis? What’s up with that? I mean that guy’s about as funny as Moonshine’s cat pies, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” Anthony nodded, “Toronto’s pretty much worthless. I mean, they couldn’t even handle the power that is Madison Square Garden.”

“I don’t even think they could handle the Meadowlands. And when you’re city’s not even as good as New Jersey, you’ve got a lot to answer for.”

And then I set off to write one of the best chapters that I have so far and one that might even give the story some direction. It involves the insane survivalist Brian and his illegal activities. It will give the other characters a lot of choices to make and maybe even a final confrontation.

Hopefully they'll accomplish this by midnight in two days because I plan on killing them all off of the water borne disease at that time and writing "the end."

I'll resurrect them in December and write the real ending but I just want to, for once, finish the novel in November.

---

The reason that I don't know the exact time I finished this year is that I really obsessed over my 50,000th word. Last year I let it go freeform and came up with "respect" in the middle of a paragraph about a well known underground leader walking into a bar (along with a rabbi and a priest but not really). This year I was talking about the scheme to rob a doctor's brownstone and 50,000 was in the middle of the pre-planning of the theft.

I was lucky enough to come across "night" vision binoculars. But, well it wasn't luck since I kind of restructured the paragraph to list the binoculars at an appropriate place.

This probably took more time than any other distraction since I had to turn on my inner editor to hit the right word. But I hope to forget that I cheated long before I forget what the word was.

---

Not that I didn't have other distractions today.

Today was the day that I had to go back to the dermatologist and get the "interesting" mole on my back excised. That went flawlessly (the dermatologist described me as a perfect patient who didn't even twitch during the surgery) and I even had about 45 minutes to write in the waiting room. Of course what I didn't do right was eat breakfast and apparently the local anasthetic lowers blood sugar.

The nurse actually had to give me some pretzels on the way out.

After grabbing Taco Bell, I came home and basically collapsed with exhaustion. I was surprised how little the spot hurt for the first few hours (even after the numbness wore off) but now it's starting to get a bit sore. Once I woke up it was off to the races with Greensong.

There was one other distraction. I picked up my broken laptop at Best Buy yesterday and today I hooked it up to a monitor and copied my first 7,500 or so words onto the memory stick I got over Thanksgiving.

I had a pleasant surprise. I had been going on the assumption that I had written 7,751 words before the crash. Turns out I had written 7,951 words. The problem is that I basically duplicated a bunch of the same prose in the first few paragraphs of the restart.

It took some time to work the stuff together and I only ended up with a few extra words but it beat the alternative.

I seriously thought I was going to have to "redrum" the thing and write "I had 7,751 words here but now they're gone" a bunch of times to make up the words. Or I guess I could have just written 57,751 words by the 30th. But I'm glad I'm now over 50,000 so the pressure off and I don't have to compose my second highest NANOWRIMO title ever.

Thank goodness I can now concentrate on just finishing the thing! I've got a writing meetup with rosemilk tomorrow so I know I'll write at least once more.

The weight off my back is a lot more than the chunk of skin they took out, let me tell you. :)

It's The Memories More Than The Words

2006-11-27T20:05:00.000-08:00

Today I finally went back and listened to all of the back podcasts of Wrimo Radio. For those who haven't listened to Episode Number Three, I highly recommend it. In fact, I wish various chapters of the podcast were available on mp3 because the episode contained the greatest few minutes of Wrimo Radio in the two years it's been going. The part that I'm referring to is where the woman gives the pep talk.

In it she talks about Team 2006 as a whole. And while I've often referred to Team Chicago in regards to the city v. city word wars, I've never really thought about all of NANOWRIMO as a team before. Sure we all want to see each other succeed (though I do have to admit there are a few people I wanted to see fail, I'm not going to lie or name names) but to think of all of us united by a year is an amazing concept.

She talks about WRIMOs past and WRIMOs future and how each year is a little different and each person who participates, for one year or those who have competed in all seven (like the woman interviewed on the front page of nanowrimo.org today), leaves a mark on the entity that is NANOWRIMO.

Being as I've been doing this for three solid years now (and four total), I have actually seen people come and go and it's sad. And now there are the retirement threads starting all over the site since the month is drawing to a close. I wish I could find the actual thread to link it but there's one in particular that even in its depressing nature is uplifting.

I found it in all places the Ontario::Toronto lounge (see it's a sort of friendly competition so I actually care about them as people) under the topic, "Retiring from Nano next year... ?"

One of the members of team Toronto starts the thread out like this:

"This has been my sixth year doing NaNoWriMo. I won the first year, lost the second, and I've won every year since then. And each win has always been a struggle, but I've always seemed to manage it.

And now, I'm thinking of retiring from NaNo.

This story that I've written this year is one that finally feels like I could mold it into an *actual* piece of coherant fiction. It took me six years to push through the garbage in my brain to get to a story worth telling. And I guess, that is what Nano is for?

Anyway, I'm sure I'll change my mind next year when November 1 arrives and I start itching to write, but for now, I think I will retire."

It's always sad to see anyone go (even if they are contributing to a word count total that's kicking your city's butt) but I think if there's any reason to go, she's found it. If you've accomplished all of your NANOWRIMO dreams, the only reason to go on is for the comraderie, the fun, and the memories.

I know of people who just hang around the forums and the chat room with no intention of finishing their novels (some don't even bother getting word count) just to be a sort of watchful alumni guardian angel. And these people are every bit as much of the community as those of us who are striving for 50,000. It's one of the things that makes NANOWRIMO great. Only the most hermit Wrimos among us don't feel something about the group that attaches them for life.

Once a Wrimo, always a Wrimo whether you're writing in November or not!

Personally I have no desire to retire after this year despite the fact that I accomplished everything I wanted to do in 2004 (write a novel from beginning to end in 30 writing days even if that stretched into December a bit) and that this year's novel had been a serial adventure in pulling teeth (I still don't know what the final obstacle is going to be and right now the characters are just fighting with each other). I don't do NANOWRIMO any more for some sort of 50,000 word challenge. I do it for the people and for the fact that nothing brings my thoughts of where I am in a given year in my life together more than NANOWRIMO.

For that reason, I'll be doing NANOWRIMOs until the site no longer exists or until I'm no longer alive in a November (or at least too feeble to have the energy to write). One day, I picture someone going through my things and finding 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 Lulu bound completed and unedited or half-completed speed novels written in November.

NANOWRIMO is my macro journal. I keep all of my thoughts on LiveJournal throughout the year (though most years better than this) but it takes NANO for me to get every one of them on paper.

And for that, if nothing else, I'm thankful to November and all of the people who I come in contact with that month, I'm grateful to NANOWRIMO and I'm not going to retire no matter how many times I'm beat.

---

Speaking of Teams, I really did choose the right 1 v. 1 partner for the Chicago v. Toronto challenge. I know I said this before but Greensong is awesome.

She actually NANOmailed me to make sure I was still writing when I went through that big break last week. And today we've been battling nearly number for number on our way to 50,000.

Right now, we're both in the 44,000s. Though I have one more hour tonight where I can beat her word count for today (I will have a one hour advantage at the very end if you want to talk about sprinting for victory if we're in shouting distance). And when I put 1,000 words between us, I will actually be entirely back on track with the 45,000 recommended words by midnight tonight.

See, it's this sort of thing that makes NANO great. When else would that last paragraph ever be written? Anywhere?

---

Oh and before I forget, congratulations to my one and only first year participant buddy Svenny (well he's Michael like me but that's his name on LiveJournal) who beat 50,000 in his first year today!

Now I'm proud of most of my buddies when they cross the line but especially him. I feel like the proud papa of a newbie even if I didn't necessarily inspire him to participate (though I think the first time he expressed interest in doing NANO this year was in my LJ last November).

Only four people and me left to cross the finish line on my writing buddy list. And the next one looks big as well. COME ON SHANU (who wrote 38,000 words last year but just gave out)!

---

TOTAL CURRENT WORD COUNT: 44,783

Those 10,000 Words Just Sort Of Vanished

2006-11-26T20:18:00.000-08:00

One of the least known or most forgotten facts about Tupac Shakur, besides the fact that he was a huge Kate Bush fan (not shitting anyone, watch "Tupac: Resurrection") is that he was born in New York City (112th Street and 7th Avenue in Harlem). He's so associated with the west coast (mostly due to his role in the fued with Bad Boy Records on behalf of Death Row Records) that nearly no one considers him a New York City artist.

But the saddest irony of his death is that he never abandoned the East Coast despite being killed over being said to do so.

Why on Earth do I mention this? What on Earth does this have to do with my novel? Just about everything.

Tupac Shakur has provided the theme song to my novel. It only took 26 days to establish what song best fit the mood of the story and oddly enough it turns out that it's Tupac's "My Block". The lyrics to the song itself had nothing to do with five white twenty and thirty somethings trying to survive after a storm surge floods New York City but the theme of block identification is so crucial to my novel this year that it fits too perfectly.

It only took almost 40,000 words, but I finally came up with the equivalent of a title song for the novel in the following passages:

"The entire trip out of Greenwich Village had been a trip down memory lane for Beth. Sloggin away from the river on 10th Street, she took a look at the buildings where she and her boyfriend had strolled on many a sunny summer night, including just a few month prior. Turning up Hudson Street, she remembered the smells of pies and fresh baked bread coming out of the bakeries. When that piece of her neighborhood turned into Ninth Avenue and continued to head uptown, she thought about the times she had rode her bicycle to work when she had come in late intentionally just to watch the families play on the sidewalks or the artists and philosophers chatting away under umbrellas with mid-morning beer and wine in front of them and their hands gesticulating widely.

Greenwich Village had given way gently to Chelsea north of 14th Street as it had so many times in the past as Beth’s cohorts argued away. That had been why she had been so preoccupied and hadn’t bothered to stop them. She knew the borderline was not as well defined as most people would think it would be between the bohemian West Village and the ritzier Chelsea. Beth knew that despite the difference in the clientele at the restaurants and bars, there was one thing that remained the same – the people who had not been driven out for decades.

No matter where you looked in New York City there were always two New Yorks, the new New York with its gentrification and the old New York with the three generations descended from immigrants. She had a jealousy of this fact because it was something she would never be a part of in New York City. It was something she had left behind in Boston, walking the same streets that her grandparents had played in the 1930s. She had played with the same people’s grandchildren. It was like the generations were united by the same buildings and the same roads and the same families and the same memories. Nothing seemed like it could ever sever this connection. Some families moved away and some new ones moved in to be taken into the living, breathing block. People died but the block lived on, the city couldn’t be killed.

But what was the most depressing about the past few hours was that it had become obvious that the city could be killed. If you took out all of the people at once, the city was no longer the city. The neighborhood were no longer the neighborhood. The blocks were no longer the blocks. New York was nothing more than a lost city. It might as well have been Atlantis despite only being buried under feet of water and not miles. It hadn’t taken a volcano burying it in yards of ash to turn New York City into Pompeii. And while New York City had the advantage of having been evacuated by-and-large before its death knell could have been sounded and the people could return, it would never be the same again.

The people who had stayed behind had already begun to reshape the city in their own way and it hadn’t always been for the best. But they had begun to stake claims to their new surroundings even if it was just temporary. Or those who hadn’t relocated had begun to re-establish their old social orders like they had in the building that had provided temporary shelter. Maybe it was harder to break down the real New York City than just a little disaster. Maybe the real city would be resilient despite how many people from the new city left after losing the place they had chose to temporarily hang their hat. Maybe the city would start breathing and pulsing again once the system had the water removed from its lungs and maybe it would be a stronger city without all of the hangers on – herself included."

There's nothing about lullabyes in there but that's the whole title theme of the lost city in a nutshell.

---

I actually almost established the complete sountrack for my novel this year. I'm sure that there's a thread on nanowrimo.org to list this but I haven't run across it yet.

Most of the tracks are by New York City artists or are about New York City. This is partially for inspiration and partially because I feel guilty about destroying that piece of the United States for word count in a novel that almost no one will ever read.

These aren't in a good order or anything but here they are:

"Emerge" by Fischerspooner

"My Block" by Tupac Shakur

"Points Of Authority/99 Problems/One Step Closer" by Linkin Park & Jay-Z

"Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)" by Jay-Z

"I Run Shit" by DMX

"He Got Game" by Public Enemy

"La Vie Boheme" by Johnathan Larson (a track actually demographically correct?)

"New York" by Ja Rule

"New York City" by They Might Be Giants (way too upbeat to be influential)

"New York City Boy" by Pet Shop Boys (another demographically correct song?)

"New York Minute" by Don Henley (definitely fitting)

"Perfect Day" by Lou Reed

"Sleep Tight In New York City" by Black 47

"Super Bon Bon" by Soul Coughing

"Beth" by Kiss

"Total Eclipse Of The Heart" by Bonnie Tyler

"Lullabye" by Ben Folds Five

"Lullabye (Goodnight My Angel)" by Billy Joel

"Lullabye" by Concrete Blonde

"My List" by The Killers

"Lullabye (Goodnight My Angel)" was actually the song I heard on the radio that inspired the whole novel this year. It was the line at the end that goes, "someday we'll all be gone...but lullabyes go on and on...they never die...that's how you...
and I...live on and on," that inspired the immortal neighborhood idea. Anything can kill off humans but a city takes more to take down.

I'm sure that there's some Interpol or something that I could listen to in order to inspire me as well but I'm too busy trying to frantically write currently to really put much thought into the theme music for the novel - hence my google-esque search of Rhapsody for New York songs (though I got rid of many of the ones that came up).

That list is as much of a mish-mash as the novel itself. No wonder the writing process has been such a mess this year. Priority number one for next year needs to be getting my musical acoompaniment house in order before starting.

---

I guess it's better late than never on the soundtrack since it has helped me to write 4,390 words today after I was ready to give up the ghost yesterday. That sentiment is how "My List" by The Killers ended up on the soundtrack with its chorus mantra - "don't give the ghost up, just clench your fists!"

That and I'm taking off any rules that I had as far as when I wrote. I used to only write when I had time to get a good flow going (crap, I am listening to too much rap) which was usually about an hour. But since I haven't seemed to be able to get any chunks that large except for the evening, I'm now writing in as little as 15 or 30 minute blocks.

Whenever I have time to boot up my laptop, it's getting a workout. Today I had six separate writing sessions including three sprints during the drive home from Detroit this afternoon.

For anyone else reading this who needs a last push, there's a thread called, "4 Days. What Are You Doing To Help Yourself Finish" in the NaNoWriMo Ate My Soul forum.

Hopefully they'll be more helpful.

Ordinarily at this point in the month, I'm about 6,000 words ahead of where I am now ready to finish around the 28th. This year, I'm trying to urge myself on so I don't how much encouragement I have for everyone else.

Remember how I said that I was going to reach 50,000 over the long Thanksgiving weekend? What I meant to say was 40,000. :)

What I Did To Procrastinate The Last Two Days

2006-11-24T19:13:00.000-08:00

I think my excuse that I didn't have my laptop and that was why I was going slower (or well stopped) was not a very good one. Early this morning, I went to Office Depot and bought a new HP Pavillion dv6000 at a Black Friday sale and yet today I've wrote 854 words (all the introduction to a chapter). While I'm going to write more tonight after this entry and get to 1,667 (like that will help), I don't think I'm going to get to 50,000 this weekend (but congratulations to squirrelgirl22 who became the second one of my friends to do so when she did it today).

Truth be told it was my own fault that I didn't write more yesterday night. Originally grabbing the sales papers I had planned to go to the 9 to midnight sales at CompUSA and so after Thanksgiving dinner my little brother and I set off for the Novi Town Center (next to the Borders I used to work at) to wait for their deal - a $399.99 Compaq Presario.

The only problem with this strategy was that it was $629.00 before a rebate. That was something at that time at night that I didn't want to put on my debit card.

So when it came time to get the voucher that would let me get the laptop, I started to get cold feet. The final apprehension was when I realized that the system they were selling at CompUSA had nothing but Windows XP built in. At this point, adding up the cost of all of the free software that the other places stuck on there (like Quicken) I decided it wasn't a high priority to get that laptop.

So when they ran out two people before me, I almost felt let off the hook. Though when the person two people ahead of me decided they didn't want it as well I almost still went to grab it. A couple of Indian dudes who had jumped ahead of me in line grabbed the final voucher instead.

I still went into CompUSA because they had great deals on memory (and because I was supposed to pick up a $4.99 router for my brother that ended up selling out before I got to it) and decided to look online for a similar Compaq Presario I had seen on circuitcity.com for $399.99 OTD (which I could have picked up the next day).

But when I got home, Circuit City had stopped selling their yearly laptop special online. Headdesking a few times for basically passing up my chance at the Presario, I finally decided that head out and brave the elements for the second year in a row.

I drove by the Circuit City first and saw at least 50 people and knew I wouldn't get the computer there. So then I drove to Best Buy where they had a secret Toshiba Sattlelite (the computer I was running on for the last few years) that they didn't advertise. Each store had 18 of them so I figured if there were 50 people there as well that I'd get one for sure. There were closer to 300.

Earlier in the day I had checked out every sales paper with a computer and remembered that Office Depot had a couple of good deals. I recalled that there was an Office Depot on Haggerty Road in Northville Township (about five miles southeast of my parent's house and the home of Michigan's governor Jennifer Granholm). I passed right by it at about midnight because the lights weren't on.

I tried to continue southeast to Livonia Mall and didn't see any Office Depot (or anything else) and then couldn't even find Wonderland Mall (also in Livonia). Finally I went back to West Oaks back in Novi (where the Circuit City is) thinking there was an Office Depot - turns out it was an Office Max.

Finally I broke out my cell phone and using T-Mobile Web looked up where some Metro Detroit Office Depots actually were. Turns out my instincts were correct and the Office Depot was where I thought. Driving back down there I pulled up and was ecstatic when there were only 11 people in line. Of course the problem was only three of the $249.99 computers were guaranteed to be there. But I was so tired I threw down my sleeping bag at about 1:15 a.m. and just hoped when I woke up, it would all be okay - or else I don't know what I would have done.

I woke up to the sound of an employee saying they were going to pass out vouchers shortly (at 5:15 a.m.) and stood up with my fingers crossed.

Turns out the $249.99 computer sold out far before me (they had five or six) and I would have had to get there at about 11:00 p.m. just like any other place. But I did get one of the eight of this computer they had.

So here I am finally back on a laptop and ready, I guess, to write.

Well except for one small problem or two. The first is that I have to go back to Office Depot tomorrow and get my rebate form (I paid $629.00 right now instead of the $429.99 final price) and to some other stores to get refunds on some impulse purchases that I shouldn't have made (like an off-brand DVD recorder at CompUSA that just happened to be sitting by the register).

And then I'll come home and write.

Yeah, that's the ticket. I'll write tomorrow. I have no excuses anymore since I just spent a bunch of money on this word processor for the last seven days of NANOWRIMO and then an internet toy for the rest of the year after all.

---

TOTAL WORD COUNT: 35,491 words

The Days Of NANOWRIMO Keep Disappearing Like Magic

2006-11-21T21:55:00.000-08:00

The moment of NANOWRIMO that I hate happened yesterday - the first of my writing buddies crossed the finish line. Now it's one that's writing 100,000 words this month so she's still in the grind of things for long haul (of nine more days) but I still have a "green bar" on my list!

Congratulations Kim (it's always her or Mary that gets to 50,000 first).

But there's an accomplishment that I'm sort of proud of as well. Today the last person who doesn't write their entire novel in the last 48 hours or didn't start crossed the 30,000 mark. This was accomplished when Greensong crossed the line this evening (putting the pressure on me to write more).

I think, and this would be awesome if it happens, that every one of my contacts is going to cross the 50,000 finish line this year!

That's a screenshot for the ages if it happens. It's not that I've given any of them any extra support (hades, I keep forgetting to even listen to Derusha's podcast) or anything but I guess I like being surrounded by people who didn't quit and who I know are doing the same thing at many of the same times trying to write.

---

Or, more the case in the last two days, trying to not write.

Tonight I only bet one game so I didn't watch basketball. Tonight's distraction came from flickr. And in-between staring at other people's pictures (taking photographs is so much less intense at times than speed writing) and actually posting a couple of my own for only the third time this month I only wrote 1,559 words this evening.

But that does put me over the 2/3rds mark...one day behind schedule.

Now long time readers will know that I don't always agree with Chris Baty but here's one thing that I do agree with him on. Get out of the 20,000s if you're still there. You might run out of plot when you just get over the 30,000 line but at least you're on the downhill plane and can hopefully cruise toward the end.

Me, I'm just trying to end the scene I've been writing for two days that was supposed to end about 1,000 words ago at the 2/3rds mark. This scene marks a change in focus and intensity and so hopefully I'll have lots of time not to get interrupted.

I seriously lost my train of thought on the novel by stopping where I did yesterday. I should have chugged on through no matter what the cost. Staying up until 4:00 a.m. - PISH! I did it all the time two years ago.

---

I've been thinking a lot about my novel from two years ago and how I'd probably like to revisit it. Not that I think there's anything that can make a brilliant piece of writing in there but I think tonally it's something I would enjoy reading right now.

For those people who read the novel back then and cried through the last 20 pages or so, you'll be "happy" to know that I thought about those pages tonight and nearly broke down in tears myself.

It frustrates me to no end that I can't write anything that poignant or whatever now.

Actually I just wish I had some dramatic events to cause the sort of rising action that both of my previous attempts have had. I'm still just meandering on the same level of danger in the story and for a story about a flood, there's been surprisingly little peril.

But I just saw "The Prestige" tonight and remembered what escalating danger and tragedy look like in art so I've been a bit inspired. Though I could never in a million years write anything like that movie. The technical knowledge alone would throw me into a state of pedantic babble.

And then I probably wouldn't even make 30,000 as I wouldn't have the heart to write about half of the horrible things that the author of that movie did. I keep saying that next year I'll be crueler but it never happens.

Maybe next year I should just go totally fluffy and then I'll accidentally stumble into tons of scenes with tragedy - the opposite of the usual.

---

CURRENT TOTAL WORD COUNT: 33,816 (I guess only 1,200 behind)

NANOWRIMO Is Not My Only November Gamble

2006-11-20T20:17:00.000-08:00

Anyone or any city that I'm word warring with can thank one thing for how far ahead you are going to get with my dilly-dallying tonight - basketball. Now I know it's Monday night and I know as a male in the United States between 18 and 49, I should be watching Monday Night Football (and I do have money on the Giants) but NCAA basketball is capturing my interest completely.

As I may have mentioned, I like to gamble a bit. Well, today is a big day for college basketball - the first day of Feast Week. Feast Week is a coin ESPN termed to describe the fact that there are a number of Thanksgiving week college basketball games. Since some of them start early in the morning in Hawaii, it was like a day of footcer except with college basketball so I figured I'd actually win money instead of just breaking even (I lose at football big time).

So I said I'd play until I lost. Right after lunch, Memphis played Oklahoma and I figured Memphis would win with ease - they did (+$5.45). With this win, and to spite this Purdue fan who I talk sports with all day, I took that bet into a hopeful Georgia Tech victory over Purdue - it came through (+$10.45). Duke was somehow (maybe crack in Las Vegas) favored over Air Force by only six. I figured that was silly and put $10.00 on that to win $9.09. That paid off pretty easily - though there were a few scary moments (+19.54). And then we got into the real distractions. I played a parlay where if Kentucky and Marquette both covered, I would win $15.47 (on a $5.95 bet). So I was constantly checking the score. It was only when Kentucky lost (on a last second DePaul shot in garbage time) that I wished I had been spending that time writing my NANO.

I did pull over the 30,000 mark right as Kentucky pulled into an 11 point lead I though they could keep (I needed them to win by 8) before I went to sit down in front of the T.V. full time.

Well now thankfully all of that is over and hopefully in most post blog writing session, I'll be able to actually write 1,200 words an hour or so (my average) rather than the 500 I average when I'm half attentive to the television.

---

On the previous mentioned word wars, I didn't mention what was happening in the Chicago v. Toronto one last week because it was too depressing. Well, the news isn't much better this week.

The score as of this morning was: Toronto 916,771, Chicago 753,203.

We wrote a ton this week and somehow lost ground. Not as much ground as before but still a good amount. The only good news out of it all was that all of our writers who are hovering around the 10,000 word mark are still writing. And that's the point of the word war, after all - to give those who are struggling extra incentive to succeed.

Though I do wonder if I can get a good over/under for the last 10 days of writing - the NANOWRIMO equivalent of a hockey third period on how much ground we can actually make up. Or at least place a bet on Toronto to cover. :)

Oops, mixing up my two obsessions here.

I do want to bet that I will reach 50,000 though and hopefully there are no doubters. Even though my laptop is now officially toast (to repair the monitor is somehow magically more than the computer originally cost) - though it can be hooked up to a monitor and used as a better version of my desktop.

Still I will lock myself in my room over Thanksgiving and will come out, hopefully, with at least 45,000 words. Or in a final push maybe even go over the top. I've never failed to hit 50,000 over Thanksgiving and even though this year it's earlier I hope to keep that streak alive.

Though don't bet on it.

Another Few Hundred Words Wasted

2006-11-19T21:03:00.000-08:00

Back from the hinterlands of northeast Michigan (another one of God's great creations and they sing no end of it/he/she/their praises for making it let me tell you) and back to writing.

The wedding I was the best man in was interesting to say the least. I related the whole story this morning in my LiveJournal entry, "Back In Chicago After My Little Crazy Vacation" so I won't relate the whole thing again here. Needless to say, there wasn't very much time to write. I had 0 word count the two days I was in Michigan plus the night before I left as I had to see my weekly movie (I've seen a movie at one of my two neighborhood theaters for 47 weeks straight) and pick up my rental car.

So all of that being ahead of pace, that's out the window.

By the way, for those who read that LiveJournal entry and wondered how many words that was, it was 2,027 words. If you combined those with the words I actually wrote in my NANO novel today, I'm back on word count pace and over 30,000.

It's just too bad there's no way to work that into the novel.

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I did work a wedding anecdote (though it was actually at a bat mitzvah the story happened) in my NANO to finally get the wheels rolling again. It a story about the last time I saw my grandfather (dad's side) alive. He was nearing 85 years old and it was right before the Altzheimer's really started to take hold. There was a bat mitzvah in Michigan of one of my father's cousin's kids and my grandfather flew up for it.

Even though not everyone in the room was related to him, they all knew who he was. And the reverence everyone showed him was amazing. For most of the wedding he sat by himself in a corner surveying a room full of people of all ages he had seen growing up and just smiled. It was like the culmination of his entire life and I would have to think it was one of the last great moments.

Over the weekend I met my friend who I was best man for's grandfather - an old Ukrainian man who came over in the middle of the century - and it was a similar situation with him (though not as much since the bride's side dominated the attendees) and it occured to me a theme that I wanted to touch on in the story - the respect people have for people who survive to old ages.

I guess no matter what else we aspire to, most people aspire to one day be in that position - to be able to look back on our lives and just smile at all of those around us of all ages who we touched in some way (even if it was second hand).

Which pretty much brought me back to the first few words of the novel and MC Anthony reflecting on his own mortality. And getting back to square one seems to have been just what the novel needed.

Even if I didn't even hit the 2,000 word mark today.

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TOTAL CURRENT WORD COUNT: 28,896 words

You're My NANOspiration Bonnie Tyler

2006-11-15T20:30:00.000-08:00

As much as it seems to be relaxing today to have my characters reflect on everything that just happened in Chapter Ten (including the first event that almost deserves to be under my title "Lullabye For A Lost City" - a title which I feel I'm cybersquatting on until someone who's actually writing a tragedy for NANOWRIMO takes), it does feel like I'm kind of treading water (pardon the pun).

Pretty soon every character will atrophy into the internal monologue of the first few chapters and that can't happen.

The problem is that I don't have time to breathe myself and figure out what the characters should be doing instead of breathing. I think I want to put something mafia related into the book and it would definitely be possible to have Brian (the psychopathic survivalist) being chased down by the mafia now that there is absolutely no law and order in New York City. It would be something, right?

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The reason that I don't have any time is that I got a phone call today saying the wedding in Michigan (and we're not talking southwest Michigan where they still get Chicago radio and television but way up in the pointer finger portion of the mitten) that I'm the best man for is on Saturday and not Sunday.

Yes, I am the best man ever. But I warned my friend John that he'd be better served getting someone who didn't live 6.5 hours away to do that duty. :)

The point of mentioning this is that I thought the rehearsal dinner was on Saturday and that I wouldn't have to leave Chicago until Saturday moring.

And that's a not so fast.

I have to leave Chicago on Friday early in the morning (before rush hour on the Kennedy, Dan Ryan, and Skyway make life difficult) to get to West Branch, MI (you can do the Yahoo Maps, it's not going to be a fun drive) by 3:00 p.m. to check into my hotel room and then go to the rehearsal dinner.

Then I have to get the groom really drunk and then get him to the wedding on time.

That doesn't leave too much time for dilly dallying or NANOWRIMOing.

I did postpone my minor surgery that was scheduled for tomorrow to the twenty-eighth so that does leave the time I get home from work until when I have to go pick up the rental car at O'Hare (my car won't make the Indiana border, that's almost a guarantee) to write but after that, it's probably Saturday evening after the wedding and even then the bridesmaids, groomsmen, and such will be trashing the happy newlywed's house.

I think the reason my friend made me the best man is that he knows I'm on Wellbutrin and can't drink (he's a pharmacist). That doesn't mean I can protect their house. :)

But, hey, I missed NAWRIDRUNI this year so what better way to make up for it?

Long story short though, whatever word count I reach tonight will be very near to my word count through most of the weekend. I was going to press for 30,000 tonight but sleep would probably be a good idea.

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Damn ABC for taking away my inspiration tonight!

I make no secret that my NANOWRIMO this year is very heavily influenced by "Jericho" and "The Nine" (though in no way steals any storylines from either). And CBS brought me my post-apocalyptic survivalist inspiration with a very good episode of "Jericho" tonight.

ABC let me down by showing the 2-hour premiere of that new Taye Diggs show.

I needed my character driven post-traumatic event story inspiration and I didn't get it! Damn ABC!

Though on the way home from work today I remembered what one of my pre-NANO inspirations was when it played on my MP3 player (I broke my iPod Nano from last year during the summer when I stepped on it) - "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" by Bonnie Tyler.

I seriously almost named my novel this year, "Turn Around Bright Eyes." But I think I need to save that for some dude lit. :)

I've been playing it on repeat trying to get into that mood of hope and pathos that song invokes. It's not working but at least MP3 didn't let me down like ABC.

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Just some of my favorite threads from the board for some levity if you're looking for a break (and so I have them somewhat bookmarked):

"The Let's Praise Ourselves for Excessively Minor (or Major) Accomplishments Thread!" - a thread to celebrate the littlest uplifting parts of writing.

"There comes a time in the life of every bad LitFic novel..." - a thread describing how in a multitude of different NANOWRIMO novels in the Lit Fic categories, characters somehow end up in Paris. This actually happened to me two years ago!

"How often do you check your word count?" - like a Kinsey poll on masturbation, looks like we all do it more often than we admit to.

"Teh 50K Green Bar" - adventures with everybody's favorite 13-year old. This thread is one of many when her own Toronto teammates tell her to shove it.

But this one wins the internets...

"Do Your Characters Ever Pee?" - really self explanatory.

And remember, we're all just living in a powder keg and kicking off sparks!

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CURRENT WORD COUNT: 26,421 words

Okay, I'm Almost At 25,000, And Still Not Sure What To Do In NYC

2006-11-14T19:32:00.000-08:00

I'm just about to make the final push to 25,000 which will actually put me ahead of the game by a significant margin for the first time this NANOWRIMO - I'll actually be a day ahead of pace (which makes sense since I'll be missing an entire day this weekend since I'm the best man in a wedding in Michigan). The recommended word count for the end of the day today is 23,333.

Though there is a small problem. The reason I've stopped writing right now is that I just finished Chapter Nine and the group is out of the building.

I know that now they'll have to deal with being homeless for a brief time and that the people from the building across the street are going to help them but then I face the big question, "now what?"

Of course I know the characters from different world will interact with each other, complex societal issues will be discussed, and taboos will be broken. But they can't just sit around on a fire escape and kill time for the rest of the novel.

I mean they could as I could have them internal monologue and I could pontificate in the third person for 25,000 more words (though I'm hoping for more) but that would be boring.

Not to sound too fantasy here, but fantasy thinking is needed. I need to think of a quest for this group of five intrepid strangers to accomplish that only they can do. And it's not like these people are the Mayor of New York City or anything so it's got to be something that an ordinary group of people can do.

I'm thinking they should just try to get to Brooklyn somehow to try and find one of the character's parents. But that's kind of a boring thing. But at least it gets them started in some direction other than sitting.

Kind of what I'm doing right now. Sitting waiting for something to happen to my characters in my mind that I can put on paper.

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NANOWRIMO has finally hit the big time this year it would seem. It used to be that I would talk about my NANO and people wouldn't want to hear about it. This year, as I'm not that proud of the dreck I'm writing, I don't initiate a conversation with anyone about it.

But the weird thing is that people at work are asking me about it.

In fact, I went to dinner with my friend Maggie who works in our Washington D.C. office and she actually pried information out of me about what I was writing. She also brought in a cover story from the entertainment section of the Washington Post on NANOWRIMO. Of course, like every year it was published after November 1 so I don't know how much good it did in getting people from the D.C. Metroplex to sign up for NANO but it is a paper of record running a story in a prominent place.

Then, of course, you had Yahoo making NANOWRIMO a news headline on November 1 (which was a big thing since it was just before the election) and a bunch of people coming in for that.

Each year NANOWRIMO is getting bigger and bigger and it's now something that's almost part of the national vocabulary. I don't think it will ever be something Paris Hilton thinks is hawt or anything but it definitely feels good when four years ago it felt like no knew what this speed writing contest was all about.

Now when I'm not the only person in my office doing NANOWRIMO (my office, being an real estate appraisal education company has actual editors for our text books and such) or when I see people frantically typing away on laptops on the train, that's when I know NANOWRIMO has made it.

But, I actually kind of like the fact that in some circles it's still the butt of people's jokes (mostly because I myself don't take it that seriously, I just do it for the thrill of writing a novel once a year).

So when I saw this in Busy's blog, I kept meaning to link it, but I didn't.

Home On The Strange's So, What Are You Writing For NANOWRIMO.

Maybe if I write Groundhog's Day slash next year the process will go smoother than this one.

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CURRENT WORD COUNT: 23,375 words

Writer's Blocks Are Like Asymetrical Moles, They've Got To Come Off

2006-11-13T19:17:00.000-08:00

When you're a crochity old fart at NANOWRIMO like I am, eventually you start to notice things (and if you're the retentivewrimo, as soon as you notice them you have to blog about them). A magical cure for writer's block seems to have happened to me yesterday.

This hint of the ages that I can offer to everyone is this: DELETE WHAT SUCKS AND IS HOLDING YOU BACK!

I know this is counterintuitive since the whole goal of NANOWRIMO is trudging ahead at all costs. But not if what you're leaving behind is doing nothing but adding an albatross around the neck of your novel.

For example, I changed an entire passage from characters walking down the stairs of a building calmly and running into a man with a gun to them ducking smoke and then running into a man with a gun. Sure it seems like a subtle difference but in reality, it's huge. It's created a sense of urgency that up until I rewrote those 2,000 words or so the novel was lacking.

Sure I could have just had the building start collapsing around the people at the point in the story I was at, but I would still have been left with the boring, no drama portion that preceeded it with questions like, "boy that fire spread really suddenly, didn't it?" haunting me the rest of the way.

The scary thing is that I've gotten so into this scene that it's already run to five pages and it's just getting started. Talk about pacing problems. The characters have all been going through things pretty quickly and now as they have to jump out a window it slows down to the speed I should have been writing at all along.

One thing I obviously haven't learned yet is that I can't merely outline some chapters and in others go so in depth they take up half the novel.

Guess crochity old me still has a lot to learn in his fourth year.

---

Another odd post-modern thing happened in my story today (like the plane incident). While my characters in the story are battling with a window, apparently my landlord decided to have new windows intalled in my apartment today. It's too bad because they actually had to break through an old storm window in the novel and now I've got brand new ones that are much different to describe.

One thing I think that's not going to sneak into my novel is that I'm going under the knife on Thursday.

It's nothing serious, hopefully.

I went to the dermitologist today to get a mole at my chest which seems to have grown over a chicken pox scar looked at. Well, that mole is absolutely harmless it turns out and I was, of course, lectured by the skin doc as though I was wasting her time.

Luckily or unluckily, it turns out there's a mole on my back by the shoulder blade that's apparently become assymetrical and needs to come off before it possibly turns into melanoma.

Since I waited six weeks for the original dermitologist appointment, it's pretty obvious that the mole surgeon isn't someone to be asked, "is there a better day for that?"

So the good news is that now I have Thursday afternoon to write. The bad news is that after the half hour procedure, I'll have a bunch of stitches in my back and maybe even be on painkillers (though apparently this excise and biopsy is relatively painless).

As if I needed just one more thing to distract me from writing.

At least since my laptop is still broken, I'm forced to type sitting up anyhow so thank goodness for small blessings.

Then again, with how much better my word rate has gotten since I switched from laptop to desktop, maybe it's an extremely large blessing.

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CURRENT WORD COUNT: 20,089 words

Taking A Break From Writing My Script For Jerry

2006-11-12T20:19:00.000-08:00

Just taking a break from "Seinfeld Under Water" (though that was the Upper East Side and I'm writing about the Lower West Side) to check in and express my nightly frustration with the crap progress of my novel.

I'm not sure if I remember correctly from last year's Wrimo Radio what the second week was supposed to be but apparently it's the week where novels start writing themselves as people have become familiar with the characters.

Well I'm very familiar with my characters in the same way that Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld were familiar with theirs. If the five main characters in my novel were sitting at a diner in New York City, I could definitely have them discussing things with Beth, who has emerged as the main character (but who still has no last name) going, "did you ever notice?" and the other four, completely fleshed out, nodding their heads and saying the things that they should say based on the personalities I gave them.

Or maybe I can just be Jerry Seinfeld. "Did you ever notice how slightly bossy women with Napoleon complexes are actually really good at taking control in dangerous situations?"

I think everything is going according to plan because I never planned on having Beth become the leader of the group, it just made sense. Anthony is too neurotic and would be afraid of sticking his neck out. Allison is too shy. William is too much of a pretty boy and Brian is just not sane. Though I think Brian will redeem himself at some point by proving that he too can be helpful to get out of jams (after all, he is a survivalist).

Though I think the difference between me and seemingly everyone else who is past the halfway point is that they actually know how people will prove themselves.

Me, I'm just writing an episode of "Seinfeld" where the gang finds themselves in a burning building and Elaine develops organizational skills as opposed to just having a silly dance.

The irony? I never even liked "Seinfeld"!

---

One of my favorite lines in "Thank You For Smoking" is the one where the lobbyist is pitching the idea of more cigarette branding in movies. The movie producer thinks it's a great idea and says to him that he likes the idea of having cigarettes in space.

The lobbyist says, "but wouldn't cigarettes blow up in an all gravity environment."

The producer looks him square in the eye and says, "we can fix that with a few words of dialog, thank goodness we invented the..."

I had one of those moments tonight though I haven't yet gone back to correct it. I have my main characters plus about fifteen other people jumping out of Anthony's window to where the water is (it's less than a story down). Part of the way I increased the word count of this endeavor is that I made it so there were going to be people who couldn't swim who would need to be rescued. Where would they get put? Oh, on the fire escape of the building across the street.

This of course begs the question...

WHY THE HADES DIDN'T THE PEOPLE IN THE MC BUILDING JUST USE THE FIRE ESCAPE?

Well because that would have only taken six words of dialog to explain: "they climbed down the fire escape."

No, that would be far too simple and logical. I have to have them jumping out a third story window into almost three stories of water below. But now I do have to go back and insert the bits of dialog as to why the fire escape isn't there.

And you're damn skippy that will be more than three words.

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I've come to the conclusion that I'm hoping that everyone over 25,000 words (with a few exceptions of course) have written nothing but crap.

Though really there's only one person that I wish this on truly. There's this one person on Team Toronto 2006 who's over 50,000 words. Ordinarily, even if they are on the opposing team, I'd have nothing but huzzahs for them. Except, this person has apparently wrote 39,000 of those words in the last two days.

And they're 13.

Now that seems a bit suspicious to me. Not that 13-year old can't write (I bet a lot of them are writing better novels than I am this year) but 13-year olds who write that fast have got to be kicking out just a bunch of crap.

I trust no one who writes more than 5,000 words a day. Doesn't matter the day. Any day of the 30 if you write more than 5,000, I don't trust you. Unless it's the last day and then I don't trust you either, but I do admire you.

How can I say this? Because I used to be one of "you people" and I don't trust myself. :)

Though maybe that's just the jealous talking.

I can't believe that two years ago I wrote 93,000 words in 30 days. Where the hades did that me go to? And they were 93,000 pretty good words to boot. This year, I'm on pace for 44,280 of the worst words I've ever written.

Unless I pull a rabbit out of my ass and come up with something interesting.

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Though I do have to say that I found some bit of relief in an unlikely place, on the This Is Going Better Than I'd Hoped forum.

Yes, on that soul crusher of a group of discussions was one called, "How Many Words Did It Take You To Set Up Your Story? Or Will It Take You ...."

Some of the answers are downright shocking. There are people who have almost 30k of exposition. 30k or exposition! I thought 14.5k was bad. I bored myself with the characters all living in their own heads for that long (which is really only 40 pages in reality but it seems like a lot in NANOWRIMO time), I can only imagine what those people went through.

They must be really big "Seinfeld" fans.

Maybe I can convince them to read "Seinfeld Under Water."

Just Your Average Novel All The Way Around

2006-11-11T20:44:00.000-08:00

This is certainly an odd sensation. Ordinarily I want to hop right off of writing to write about it over here. Tonight since I'm finally at the point where the building catches on fire setting the protagonists (that's what I need, I need an antagonist, no wonder my story sucks this year - person v. nature just ain't working when nature isn't that fierce so far) "free" into the streets of New York City.

It's not like I know what's going to happen once they get there or anything but at least now something is happening that will keep the fingers flying for somewhere between 3k-5k.

Well if the fingers have ever really flown this year.

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I did a calculation of the veterans on Team Chicago (sadly there are only 10 of us) and their word counts last year trying to discern some sort of pattern and there definitely is one.

Those of us at the bottom of our city's word count were toward the bottom of last year's final count as well (though we all reached our 50k).

Currently those involved in our inter-city word war for the second year running shake out as follows:

1. Dieundonne - 35,500 words (2005 total: 67,086)
2. Peter S - 24,897 words (2005 total: 58,356)
3. Squirrelgirl22 - 22,611 words (2005 total: 61,767)
4. Dawaterrat - 20,005 words (2005 total: 65,204)
5. Bre - 19,555 words (2005 total: 54,742)
6. Panstygia - 16,668 words (2005 total: 70,282)
7. Dispalacedbeatnik - 15,071 words (2005 total: 53,229)
8. Vegas658 - 11,269 words (2005 total: 53,726)
9. Jlizak - 8,980 words (2005 total: 50,094)
10. Scud-O - 8,425 words (2005 total: 50,079)

So it looks like almost everyone propping up the table of the experienced writers (except for Panstygia) are those people who just try to pace themselves out to the 50,000. This maybe isn't the best of news as we're still quite a bit behind Toronto (60,000 at last count) but are gaining rapidly.

I chose a Toronto one v. one buddy recently and it looks like I made the right choice.

Greensong from the "city to the north" (though Toronto isn't north of us so much as Winnepeg is) did a calculation on the Ontario::Toronto board and she came up with the following:

"Subtracting last Sunday's numbers, we've written 132,053 words this week so far, but Chicago has written 183,360, and that's 28% more than us. We're still leading, but we've got to keep that energy up :)"

So it doesn't look like a 750,000 word demolition like it was last year (and it is fun that it's this close at the one-third point) but it looks like Chicago may pull this out after all - even with those at the top of our city word count list not participating in the competition.

It will be interesting to see tomorrow night once the official week two count is in how each person matches up with their direct counterpart. I'll laugh if Greensong is in 20th place or so like I am. Right now, we're within 1,000 words of each other.

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Speaking of Chicago, there's another member of Team Chicago named Axmxz who is right around me in the word count.

There's a thread on the Literary Fiction forum called, "No dialogue" in which a fourth year named jedisquid posted that he had written 8,500 words without using any dialogue and that he might write the entire novel not using any.

AxmxZ had the following to say about that:

"To be honest, it sounds dreadfully dull. Okay, James Joyce could write hundreds of pages without dialogue - but you aren't James Joyce. I'm kind of guilty of writing the same way, and as dream-like or whatever that may be, a whole novel of that would put anyone to sleep."

Methinks he's taking NANOWRIMO a bit too seriously (though to be fair the original poster did ask for feedback on the writing style).

Here's my response to the OP:

"I have to part ways with my fellow member of Team Chicago 2006, Axmxz. I think the way he's writing it sounds absolutely fascinating.

Certainly the end result might be boring but as has been said before, if he pulls it off it's going to completing a very difficult challenge. And it's going to be the kind of unique challenge that NANOWRIMO is all about.

This month isn't about writing great novels unless that's what you set the month out to be. This month is about pushing yourself to whatever limits you see fit. For most people just writing 50,000 words is that challenge but for others it's more - especially since I notice jedisquid is a fourth year participant.

I think his novel is going to be special out of the whole bunch that we all turn out because it doesn't follow conventions and I think he should actually try to write all 50,000 words, or even complete the novel, without a single word of dialog for that reason alone.

This is the kind of thing that is special enough to end up in the Q&A section for sure."

I actually wish I had thought of a challenge like that. After last year's genre busting, I didn't set a very high bar for myself. It was like I stepped backward into my comfort zone (though the action-adventure part could prove to stretch my boundaries for sure) and now it's costing me word count in boredom.

A no dialog challenge might have been just the kick in the pants I needed.

Or maybe more to the point a no inner monologue challenge. I'll have to put that on the back burner. I definitely want to come up with something unique for 2007.

I realize that my experience of NANO-ing has always been just about average (besides retentivewrimo of course as very few people blog their every NANOWRIMO emotion) these past two plus year (well, three plus if you count my 2003 mis-start). Next year, I want to do something different.

There's my goal. To end up in the Q&A section!

Now that's some challenge!

The Day I Get My Yearly Novel Case Study

2006-11-10T20:17:00.000-08:00

It seems like once a year while I'm writing my novel, there's an incident that happens in my actual life that is seminal to the year's topic. Or if not influencing the topic while I'm writing the topic at least has something to do with the topic.

As I've mentioned a few times in not so pleasant ways, this year's novel so far has been about the boredom that happens at first being stuck somewhere with no escape possible but with no immediate danger - or at least very little.

Well today on the way home from Dallas I got stuck at Milwaukee General Mitchell Airport after my plane was deverted from O'Hare due to weather conditions.

The entire plane ride home was a bit of a nightmare. We were supposed to get out of DFW (because Dallas DFW would be redundant) almost 45 minutes behind schedule as the weather conditions in Chicago were planned for by air traffic control. But we actually ended up taking off from Texas quite a bit early and before I knew it (as I was writing some NANOWRIMO stuff of course time went too quickly) the captain had made an announcement that we were less than an hour from O'Hare and were about to start our initial descent.

Then over Des Moines, Iowa the reality of the situation set in as we were put in a holding pattern. We held and held and held and were warned it could take up to an hour before we were given clearence to proceed into Chicago from the southwest. However, 20 minutes later we were told by the captain (I love a captain who gives constant updates as to why things aren't going right rather than letting my mind race) that we were being brought out of the pattern and were going to be approaching Chicago from the northwest instead over southeastern Wisconsin.

As we descended into O'Hare I was scared out of my wits because the plane was being wind sheared left and right in a way that I'd never been through that low to the ground (I mean we could already see cars moving on the streets) and all around us thunder was crashing loudly and we could see lightning.

Still the pilot was doing his best to put us down safely close to home (though with how the wind was blowing I wouldn't have been surprised if we got blown so far off course I landed on my roof). Though at the last minute even his will gave out and probably 300 feet off the ground he pulled back up.

As soon as we were at a safe altitude, he came back on the speaker and let us know that we didn't have enough fuel to go into a holding pattern around O'Hare (since we had used it all making crop circles) and that we were going to land in Milwaukee.

While it wasn't preferrable to do this, I had all sorts of contingency plans like taking the Amtrack home the 1.25 hours between Chicago and its giant northern suburb or even sharing a rental car home with my seat neighbors (everyone had escape on their mind right from the start).

That was until we all found out that we had no gate in Milwaukee and we were going absolutely nowhere - not even inside the airport. We sat there on the tarmac in heavy rain in Milwaukee (though not nearly as bad as in Chicago) with no fuel and with no chance of escape. But at least we were safe on the ground.

Though the pilot did decide to put a hint of danger into the equation by letting us know that we couldn't refuel until the lighting storm stopped because, "the last thing [we] wanted was to be in a big metal object with gas being poured into it if we were struck by lightning."

We kept getting updates every few minutes and they were never good. It seemed like there was always another hour to go before we could get fueled and get off the ground. Who I felt bad for were the people who had a connector flight to Milwaukee who had to be flown back to Chicago and then try to get a flight back to Wisconsin (of which the last one of the night had probably already left). There was one guy on the plane who needed to catch the last flight of the night to London out so he could get on another plane to India for an important business meeting.

I could only imagine his stress levels as mine were going through the roof and I had nowhere to be. The confined space, the lack of food (the poor woman two seats over from me hadn't even ate before she got on the plane because it was a really short flight), and the boredom were really getting to me.

Still, everyone on the flight managed to keep a pretty good disposition considering. People were cracking all sorts of jokes about pretending to be flight attendants and breaking into the liquor stashes or hijacking the fire engine that accompanied the fuel truck and driving it back to the terminal (where they'd take a bus to Chicago under similar dastardly means).

But the one thing that I noticed was that like in the novel I'm writing people of all different walks of life began to talk to each other like they were long time friends even though most of us had never met before. The two women next to me were swapping stories about their children, people were talking about their jobs. Hades, I even got into a conversation about New York City (speak of the devil) though I didn't let on why that was central to my mind right now.

Finally we took off and within 20 minutes (it really is a piddly flight) we had touched down in Chicago. The captain joked, "it's another on-time arrival at what appears to be O'Hare...the connecting flight information is...good luck with that." Sure enough, we were four hours late, on the dot.

While I expected people to be really angry at the captain (despite the fact that it was the weather's fault) everyone took the whole thing really well (though I didn't hear the people at the airline desk trying to negotiate the rest of their trips).

I guess what the night showed was that people really do resort to humor when the situation looks bleak but isn't dangerous. It's not just some sort of Hollywood created mechanism. This case study made me feel somewhat better about my novel (though not as much so as writing over 2,000 words today during the flight and the El ride home).

Though I wish the study hadn't been such a pain in the behind!

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CURRENT WORD COUNT: 13,997 words

Not Where I Wanted To Be At The End Of Day Nine

2006-11-09T21:48:00.000-08:00

I have to apologize to NANOWRIMO this year because I'm really not that into it. I think the only reason that I keep going is that I don't want to let the rest of Team Chicago 2006 down and I hope to mine something out of the current novel for use in future years when I have more energy to put in the effort that a good NANOWRIMO experience deserves.

I don't know what exactly I'll mine out of this current novel since there isn't much of a plot to take out. There's a bit of characterization and maybe a few lines but there is nothing happening. There isn't even any interpersonal conflict to make the thing interesting yet. And I guess that was fine in the first couple of thousand words but now almost 12,000 words in and at the one-third point in the month, I should at least have some idea how to make the book exciting.

I've never had this problem before. Even with "Why Sleep When I'll Only Dream?" which consisted of two people traveling around Europe, I knew exactly how the characters were going to get from Point A to Point B and what needed to happen to them to come to the realizations they needed to come to. Here, the best I can think of is having the homophobic character come in contact with the homosexual character and have the two need to depend on each other in some way.

Sure it's not a bad plot but I've always prided myself in being in no way that derivirtive.

I came to the realization that I hate my novel when I was writing the meeting between Anthony and Beth and Allison and the best conversation I could come up with is Anthony and Allison singing Cub's "New York City" (made popular by They Might Be Giants) and having Beth get jealous.

Yeah, that's interpersonal drama and people overcoming the odds like I had planned at the start of the month.

I think it's time to give the novel the jolt it needs and have the building catch fire already. It feels as though I should have gotten to this point in the rising action a long time ago so I wouldn't be this bored with my novel.

Oh how I long for the days when I had likeable (or more to the point interesting) characters, funny scenes, and ideas on how to make the plot twist and turn. This year I planned none of this and now with only 20 days left, this lack of forethought is really coming home to roost on my psyche.

It's really no plot, big problem this year.

I'm not the kind of person who can just keep writing about random misadventures until I reach 50,000. Something's going to have to happen soon or I'm going to get so bored I'm going to stop writing.

Or maybe I just need a good night's sleep to think about it. The problem is the last two years my dreams helped me out because I knew the characters and my subconscious did what my conscious mind couldn't. This year's there's nothing.

And nothing when you're trying to write 50,000 words about it actually turns out to be less than nothing - it's a discouragement.

---

CURRENT WORD COUNT: 11,967 words

Trying To Bring The Funny Back

2006-11-08T18:47:00.000-08:00

So it would appear as though I have taken to writing in uncomfortable places since my laptop decided it needed a bit of a spa vacation. And I don't mean the back of a Volkswagon ("Mallrats" forever!).

No, yesterday night after taking a flier to watch the election results (the silent majority of left leaning independents have spoken!) and to see "Marie Antoinette" (which convinced me that no matter how much my NANOWRIMO sucks, it will never be as bad as most anything by Sophia Coppola), I started writing again just after midnight yesterday at 24-Hour Laundromat in Bucktown.

I was hoping that I would at least hear some interesting (albeit scary) dialog from other people who regularly do their laundry in the wee hours on a weeknight. But it was more me sitting in a hard-floored corner with my laptop actually plugged in (something I can't do during the day at the same laundromat) and enjoying the fact that there were no screaming children. The discomfort came in the fact that the place was quiet except for some "700 Club" ripoff blasting on the television instead of the election results I'd rather be seeing.

If the constant thought of getting mugged in the parking lot wasn't disconcerting, I think I might do my laundry when all good people are asleep and dreaming more often.

Today is even less comfortable than that as I'm at a sleezy extended stay motel in Dallas on the ground floor watching people walk right outside the window. Hey, I guess getting mugged at gunpoint will make for interesting writing, right?

But at least I'm writing again. Not that it was anything good. I really need to have things actually start happening now that I'm 10,000 words in or so. I think I've introduced the characters through introspection enough now and it's time to have them start battling zombies in the streets of New York City.

That one was for Kim. ;)

I did slip back into a little bit of the comedy novel I was supposed to be writing from the beginning:

---

“You’re bad, Muriel” Beth said again punching him in the arm. That motion was really starting to bother Anthony as did the movie that Beth had just quoted. I mean sure he was a gay man but there were certain limits that he didn’t cross and Abba was one of them. He thought it had something to do with the last girlfriend he had before he came out who dragged him to see “Mamma Mia” on Broadway. The headache still lingered when he thought about it. Muriel’s Wedding made all the pain and agony come rushing back.

Beth didn’t wait for any further response before she pushed open the fire door that led to the stairway and walked into the darkened hallway. The stairwell had been dark enough only being lit by a combination of small flashlights but all the flashlights had to do was light the next step up. The hallway proved a very daunting task for the souvenier flashlights shaped like the Statue Of Liberty. Beth had been quite glad that she had found a use for such a kitschy item a couple of years after she and Steven had picked them up for their very kitsch value.

The problem with kitsch is that once the novelty wore off all they were left with was a pair of crappy, useless flashlights with small pen light beams. The odd thing was that she didn’t even like kitschy objects – unless you counted Barbra Streisand.

Though the flashlights were coming in a lot more handy in climbing the stairs that Barbra Streissand. Beth chuckled a bit, she thought softly, at the thought of “Babs” providing accompaniment on their climb to the top. But she chuckled loud enough for Anthony to hear.

Anthony asked her, “what’s so funny?”

“Oh nothing,” she said, “I was just thinking about how useless Barbra Streissand would be in this situation. She’s be freaking out if she broke a nail or something.”

“Yeah,” Anthony agreed, “she’d probably have that millionaire ex-husband of hers buy her some slaves to carry her up the stairs or something. But you know who’d be really useless in this situation?” Anthony asked.

“Who?” Beth responded.

“Abba,” Anthony smirked.

“You are the absolute gayest gay man that I’ve ever met,” she quipped, punching him in the arm again, “because only a gay man could think about Abba at a time like this.”

---

Sure it doesn't really advance the story and it's slightly offensive (though I'm not going to write p.c. characters since that can be seen as a weakeness of mine) but at least it made the writing enjoyable again to get into the "The Breakfast Club" aspect of my novel - where the people who are going to be depending on each other for survival also can't understand each other - and made me want to write again.

And write I have to because Toronto is talking more crap than ever in the Word War. I kind of liked St. Louis better because we were the aggressors of taunt. Now we're like the victim.

I did write something over the past couple of days. In the Literary Fiction forum, there's a thread called "You know you're writing Literary Fiction..." in which I came up with the following:

---

YOU KNOW YOU'RE WRITING LITERARY FICTION WHEN:

When in your story a gunshot is not the signal for the beginning of an action filled chase scene but instead is the prompt for two character to discuss city noises in New York City in a post-9/11 context; as well as why people in cities always say, "it was probably a firework" when they know full well that it was a gunshot.

When a character has spent every time she has the P.O.V. examining the movements of her cat looking for a deeper meaning.

When which floor of an apartment building your characters inhabit has a direct relationship to how detached they are from the events around them.

When you've come up with two or three of your central metaphors before you've come up with even one subplot.

When you ignore descriptive paragraphs because they just distract from the conversation taking place in the novel at a given point.

When your characters live inside of their own heads more than even you do in your real life.

When you think you may have discovered the meaning of life on page 16 but by page 25 realized your theory was b.s. and have a character knock it back down to size. And the counter theory takes up two or three pages.

When you say to yourself, "it's not that my novel is too dense, it's that people are too dense," because you already know you're going to get upset when no one understands your metaphors.

When you find yourself grabbing your old Philosophy 101 text book more than you find yourself grabbing the dictionary or thesaurus.

When your reference books weigh more than your CPU because you worry any deviation from reality might take you into a different genre.

When you get into arguments with your fantasy writing friends about why a sword to them is just a sword and in no way Freudian.

When the first time you used a quotation mark was word 3,500 and you're actually a bit proud of that fact.

When you start incorporating the family back story of all of your characters that might or might not have anything to do with the plot just so the reader can figure out each character's psychoses by name.

When all of your characters are dead on the first page and have yet to find out the whole story is told in flashback.

---

The last one isn't actually the plot of my novel. Because giving away a twist if that was a twist, that wouldn't be funny.

---

CURRENT WORD COUNT: 10,686 words

The Difference Between You And Me Is That Your Laptop Is Alive

2006-11-07T12:26:00.000-08:00

Yesterday night life conspired against me to keep me from writing. I got home from work and set down to typing almost immediately. I think I even added a couple of hundred words before the inevitable happened - my laptop's monitor finally gave way.

I tried to revive it by opening it and closing it fast as had worked before but that only made it worse. Finally I gave up and took my laptop to Best Buy to get it fixed.

After having to go to Customer Service to get my receipt from the day after Thanksgiving last year reprinted, I found out that even though I bought the laptop less than a year ago it was no longer under warranty. The manufacutrers warranty from Toshiba was for 90 days parts and labor. The person working at the Geek Squad desk was shocked since he had never seen such a limited warranty before.

Long and short of it, I had to spend $79.00 to ship it off to Best Buy's repair vendor (they only do software and hardware installation and trouble shooting) and will know in about a week what is wrong with it.

The Geek Squad member seemed to think it was a loose connection (after joking that the blue lines that were all the screen showed were his favorite movie) and if it is, hopefully the $79.00 from the initial consultation will cover the repairs as well (if the parts and labor add up to under $79.00, I won't have to pay any more).

While listening to the sound of dollars flying out of my pocket, the hazy proclaimation I made last year flashed through my head, "I don't need the Best Buy warranty, I'm only going to have the computer for a year or two."

The next time I buy a major piece of electronics, I'm going to get the warranty.

That's not the big problem though. The big problem is that my laptop is probably going to be in service for over a week. And I've gotten very set on doing things on my laptop. I *could* have resorted to writing out the novel or I *could* have went to work on my desktop. But the thought of getting out of the laptop groove and trying to write any other way just made me not want to write.

So instead I just watched the pre-election coverage on MSNBC.

The good news is that I'm leaving for Dallas for work tomorrow morning and will be on the business trip until Friday. This means that I'm allowed to check out a loaner laptop which can't be returned on Friday (as my plane lands at 2:30 p.m. and there's no way I can get back to work by 4:00 p.m.) so I have it over the weekend.

And then I guess Mr. Spoiled is going to have to work on his desktop after that.

Tonight I should get a lot written, however, as I have to do laundry while watching the election results and there's nothing that makes laundry go faster than trying to squeeze out NANOWRIMO words (which always makes the time go way too fast).

And then the plane tomorrow and then seven hours of boredom between checking in students and giving them their certificates (if you don't know, I'm an adult educational - licensing courses and continuing education - administrator for real estate appraisers) and then another plane and waiting in the airport.

There's no reason why I couldn't write 10,000 words before the weekend.

Well except that I'm lazy and will probably be looking for some excuse not to write like my lucky laptop being broken.

NANOWRIMO Somewhat By The Numbers

2006-11-06T10:33:00.000-08:00

If you want to know what I personally think is the best NANOblog on the web (which I'm sure everyone is waiting on with baited breath), it's Writing Sya.

What I love about her blog is that I think she's the only NANOer out there who both blogs and is a bigger stat geek than I am. Whenever I'm trying to put off writing, I like to do various searches under the Authors tab on the site. And in the past I've published some of that research on here. But Sya, she takes it to an art form.

Today she compiled a list of how many average words there are per genre.

Erotic Fiction leads the way with a 4403 word mean amongst all people who noted this as their genre of course.

Chick Lit is last with 3345.

The odd thing about that descrepency is that the ML in the Chicago region joked at the Kickoff Party that she's labeled her story as Chick Lit because she didn't want parents to see she was writing Erotic Fiction. I'm wondering if that's actually a common experience.

The labeling of genre is always an interesting thing in NANOWRIMO. There is a discussion every year on the Literary Fiction boards asking what can be classified in the king of all genres. :) And really it's not an exclusive club.

The only thing that separates it from general fiction is that we're all full of ourselves (and of course focusing more on the internal emotion rather than external action). ;)

Well a lot of people are full of themselves this year as Lit Fic is the fourth most chosen genre behind Other, None Listed, and, of course, Fantasy (with 9545 people classifying it as their genre). This may be the first year, however, that Literary Fiction outpulls Science Fiction.

Preach on my internal monologue heavy, plot light brothers and sisters!

---

Speaking of stats, the first week's numbers came out in the Chicago v. Toronto city word war and they're not good.

As of the official count this morning, Toronto is ahead 303,841 to 190,693.

Well at least that's what one of our two captains posted. Thankfully I kept a spreadsheet of my own. We're actually only behind 303,841 to 256,536. Still that's about 1,500 words (or basically one day) per member of the team.

What's killing us is that Toronto has four writers over 20,000 already and we have one. Our 10,000+ people are even (13) and we only have one more 0 person than they do. So I guess I'm part of the problem as I'm still at 7,500 or so.

I'll have to remedy that tonight.

The Novel Begins To Take A Shape That I Haven't Written Down

2006-11-05T22:07:00.000-08:00

Last year in this blog, I usually made it a point to compare where I was word-wise in my 2005 novel with where I was with my benchmark 2004 novel (the benchmark for so many things including actually finishing in 30 days combining the days I wrote in November and the days I wrote in December).

While I can still do that this year by looking at my LiveJournal entries from last November, I inadvertantly deleted my spreadsheet. It's probably for the best as I would just be anal about beating last year's totals. Then again that does go with the theme since I am the retentivewrimo after all. :)

There are a couple of comparisons I want to make though.

The first is that last year on November 5, I was staying in Brooklyn which visiting New York City. Totally forgetting this and somewhat randomly, I mentioned Brooklyn in the part of the story I was writing. Though I did it with knowledge of Brooklyn that I wouldn't have had last year.

While I was visiting the ancestral borough (my grandmother on my father's side was born there though the other three sides stayed in New York for about the amount of time it took to process them through Ellis Island and one of the four sides even came in through Canada) last month, my friend Lynn got into a discussion with the cook at the bar where one of her friends bartends while I was visiting both of them at the bar in question (whose name I don't remember but it's in Carroll Gardens).

Lynn grew up in Williamsburg before it became a yuppie community. She's a mixture of races (white, black, and Asian) which, if I remember correctly, wasn't that unusual for Williamsburg. But she used to cross over into Carroll Gardens back in the day and she related the dirty looks that she got in the neighborhood because it was all Italian at the time.

I took this and made it into part of Anthony's story.

His parents as I wrote them still live in one of the sections of Brooklyn that's mostly Italian and he relates part of the reason that he left home (that his parents are basically racist and can't handle blacks and Hispanics moving into the neighborhood). Though I think when he reveals more of the reason he left Brooklyn for Greenwich Village (I think it would only take one guess for anyone who knows New York City to figure out what reason a young man would have for moving to "The Village" to be around other people) I'll actually relay more of the actual story as opposed to eluding to it.

This also let me explore a bit of Beth's past. I made it so she comes from an Irish-American family in Boston with a strong, uncompromising yet free spirited (probably a hippie I haven't decided yet) mother figure. And I got to contrast this with the patriarchy that Anthony grew up in.

Which brings up the other big difference from last year to this one that I want to mention.

Last year I did a ton of research into Detroit's history as well as the War Of 1812. Two years ago, I did the same for Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest, and Prague (it helped that I had been to four of the five) as well as looking up other things like security measures at Charles DeGaulle Airport.

This year I'm in similarly new territory for myself as I'm dealing with a flood. I really need to look up elevations of various places in New York City because eventually the five main characters in the story are going to leave the apartment building the story starts out in and I need to know which parts of the city will suffer from the soup bowl effect as happened in New Orleans.

The funny thing, well not so funny as it will kind of ruin the story, will be if Greenwich Village is actually one of the highest places in Manhattan so it would be dry as the water collected elsewhere. Memory serves that the borough is lowest at the bottom and highest at the top but that could be wrong.

Anyhow, beyond the scientific portion of the novel, what's really a more important difference is how I was keeping track of the details. I had little maps of Detroit with pencilled in landmarks and everything last year. This year, nothing. I don't even have last names for my five main characters.

Anthony has a last name, Trablisi, but Beth doesn't yet - though I'm thinking maybe Fitzpatrick and neither do the other main characters, William, Allison, or Brian.

Though as the novel is progressing, they are developing personality traits and stories. What I should really do tomorrow is stop for a second and write down what I've created about the characters so far.

But I probably won't as I'm pretty happy that I'm now a few hundred words ahead of pace and don't want to get behind again.

---

CURRENT WORD COUNT: 7715 words.

Blowing Toronto To Timbits In My Own Way

2006-11-04T14:04:00.000-08:00

It's entirely possible I'm taking the "Blame Canada" city v. city challenge too seriously. But it's much more fun battling Toronto this year because I think they smack talk more than even we do in Chicago. They're pretty scary since they already have a handful of writers over 10k and we're struggling to get off the ground.

But I did my part this afternoon by writing an entire portion of a chapter doing nothing but bashing Toronto.

---

This afternoon I had a bit of writers block as to what to do with one of my characters and so I had them go off on an anti-Toronto screed. The character, named William, is basically a really proud New Yorker. Not just proud but downright disdainful of other cities (in the first chapter he compains that Washington D.C. will probably be helped in evacuation before his New York City). Well who else would be more natural to just go off on Toronto than that character?

The scene is that he's come to the conclusion that New York City is going to be isolated for a long time from the flood that was caused by a storm surge from a hurricane that hit New Jersey. After he concludes that there are no sirens, no noise, no anything that would give him and others trapped in various midrises around the city hope, he examines his situation (I'm a lit fic writer, right?) in the following way:

---

"Maybe they weren’t coming after all, William thought. He figured there had to be support services all over the city still up and running but he hadn’t heard any sirens. He looked out his window and felt a slight feeling of vertigo looking down toward the street. All he could see was a strip of blue running down the middle of the street where it used to be a strip of black with a white broken stripe down the middle.

The street was so desolate and so, he hated to think it, dead that he figured he had been transported from New York City to somewhere small and insignificant like Toronto. One of those cities that pretended to be a real city but was somehow lacking anything that could make it worthwhile except for some Indian restaurants downtown. He thought, "you could pretty much burn that whole city except for a few blocks of Yonge Street to the ground and the world might actually be a better place."

He had never seen such a boring city with so little to offer in the way of architecture or nightlife or attractions. He only wished he had a northern view out of his apartment so he could stare up toward Midtown Manhattan and see the gleaming skyscrapers to get the dirty, dirty thought of Toronto out of his head.

His thoughts turned back to the police and then by the obvious logical chain, to donuts.

"And screw timbits," he said aloud to no one in particular, "why would anyone want to eat something that sounded like some guy’s unmentionables."

For William, it was all about the Krispy Kreme deep fried donut holes.

"Oh Krispy Kreme," he said hoping that there was one left standing in the area when New York City recovered from the flood. "Hell," he said again out loud, "I would fly to Chicago for some Krispy Kreme right now." A city with no Krispy Kremes, that was a joke to William. There were more good donut places in Syracuse than there were in Toronto.

Now depressed he navigated his way back to his apartment in darkness as deep as the blue of Lake Ontario that he wished had washed over Toronto instead. He wondered why his beloved city had been the one washed away and not that craphole to the northwest.

How he wished the city had been burned to the ground during the War Of 1812 while it was still a fort and they had chose not to rebuild it abandoning the land to packs of wild dogs.

"Go Rangers," he said to himself angrily under his breath. Sure Madison Square Garden might be gone but it would still have a better hockey team than the Maple Leafs. Even the Chicago Blackhawks are better than the Maple Leafs and they were terrible.

And it disgusted him that they didn't know how to pluralize leaf. It was one thing that Boston, he thought, another waste of civic planning time and energy couldn’t pluralize sock (and neither could Chicago he thought but he couldn’t blame the whole city for the south side) but leaf, come on, that was one of the first words a kid could learn.

The only thing that bothered him more than this grammatical error in judgment was that they spelled colors with a "u." While part of him could admit that was the more classic spelling, he appreciated that the United States had dropped the "u" long ago. It’s "ko-lor" he said aloud, not "col-o-ur."

And he didn’t even want to get started on a mental path about the Blue Jays or Raptors. Why did Toronto even bother?

All these thoughts about Toronto were making him want to throw himself out the window onto the flooded patch of West Sixth Street that ran below his window.

Death would be better than living in Toronto, he concluded."

---

Of course that won't make any post-NANOWRIMO edits but it was really fun to write. And, hey, it was almost 1k. ;)

Now I Have To Figure Out A Way To Flood Toronto

2006-11-04T06:28:00.000-08:00

Looks like it didn't take long for me to miss a day in the blog (well not really since the entry prior to this one was written right after midnight but blogspot, being Pacifico-centric registered that as 10:00 p.m. back on the 2nd). I do have a good excuse though, yesterday was the 2006 Chicago Kickoff Party.

I've made sure to not miss a gathering of the Chicago municipality since the T.G.I.O. party back in 2004. The reason is they're like high school reunions every single year. When you're getting NANO-middle aged like me ("back in my day, we used to write on desktops, we didn't all have laptops like today.") it really becomes almost a once-a-year family.

Though this year there was a good and a bad aspect to the kickoff party. It's amazing how many first years that we have in the municipality this year. When I arrived at Marcello's Father and Son Restaurant on North Avenue just west of Old Town, I was taken aback by how many people that I didn't recognize.

We're extremely far from a clique in the Chicago municipality but usually there are a few people you expect to be at any gathering. I hope nothing is wrong in our little family. Checking out the Chicago list, there are the usual suspects posting in the forums so I'm sure they just had other plans.

But it's good to have new blood for certain - even if they are clogging the server. Well, maybe not them but whoever joined after seeing NANOWRIMO on the front page of www.yahoo.com. It's pretty amazing how big time little NANOWRIMO has gotten.

Though I think I say that every year.

Seeing all the new people made me go back and look at the Chicago municipality by sign-up date. I'm all the way up to #41 on the list meaning quite a few people who have been around for longer have gone by the wayside. Can't say I blame them as coming up with a novel (despite the amateurish nature) once a year is a challenge.

There were a couple of people who were there who have been around for longer like #32, rosemilk (who in reality is named Kim despite the fact that I can never remember that). She always finds a way to bring something interesting to the party. This year it was a giant pencil she had bought on E-Bay as part of her Halloween costume:

And she actually does write with that novelty pencil on occasion.

Another thing missing from the Chicago kickoff party was Sam Hultgren. The NANOWRIMO radio host has become almost a fixture (I haven't listened to Episode One this year so I don't know what he's up to that would cause him to miss the party) since we're his home municipality (he's like our Chris Baty almost). But not that there weren't people asking questions like, "how do you sharpen that giant pencil?" Turns out Kim uses a knife.

No wonder there weren't that many people at our table. Though we were far from the only crazy ones.

But don't you have to be pretty crazy to accept this challenge in the first place? No wonder the opening parties are so fun.

---

There was one announcement that was made at the party that got a great ovation. As I've mentioned, Toronto challenged us (isn't that a change of pace, Chicago gets challenged as opposed to having to track people down) to a Word War this year.

The announcement was that there is a new rule this year that is in place for both sides: if you insult the other side in some way in your novel, it counts as a double word score.

So I broke out my laptop and wrote the following piece of prose right at the party:

"'Are you from Toronto?' Beth asked, teeth clenched.

'Do I smell like cheese?' Anthony screamed back through the door. 'If I was from Toronto, I would smell like cheese.'"

I've since changed it to Tim Bits because, well, it adds a couple of words and because we've been making fun of them about their Tim Horton's donuts (though growing up across the river from Canada, I can say that Tim Bits are actually quite tasty) in the forum topics devoted to the war.

I seriously thought of changing the city that gets destroyed by the flood in my novel from New York City to Toronto. Sure a storm surge on Lake Ontario big enough to flood Toronto would be less realistic than a storm surge on the Hudson River big enough to flood Manhattan but then the whole novel could count double word score.

If only I was writing last year's novel and could have burned Toronto to the ground during the War Of 1812. That would have been fun.

In all, it was great to see how excited Chicago has gotten about the Word War this year (I guess destroying St. Louis last year gave us confidence), even those who aren't directly involved.

---

I wish I had checked out the message boards to be a captain of Team Chicago this year (totally missed the posting as I figured captains would be selected at the kickoff party) but it's less stress I guess. Especially since I'm still behind on the writing.

But no longer by that much.

Propped up by the buzz from the kickoff party (even though I didn't drink at all) I went home and wrote 2,000 words. And this morning, I plan on writing more. I'm up early enough.

---

CURRENT WORD COUNT (damn counter site being broken): 4379 words.

Paradise By Laptop Lights

2006-11-02T22:20:00.000-08:00

Ah that went much better. After going to see "The Illusionist" tonight at the little bargain theater by my apartment, I came home and sat down to writing. Well after checking my sports bets on bodog.com (since last year, I've developed a slight gambling problem - that being that I can't seem to pick the right teams and that's a problem) and playing around a bit on the NANOWRIMO message boards.

It seems as though each year I'm getting a bit more scarce on them. Which is, of course, the opposite of what I should be doing as I should be relating the experiences of the past three years to the new people.

Not that I avoided contact with other NANOers completely as I have posted a couple of times to the NANOWRIMO group on flickr.

But I've just gotten really turned off by hearing the new people go through what I've already gone through (both the joy and the pain) as if it's something new (which to be fair to them it is). Yeah, I'm a selfish that way. But not for long as I really am going to try to get out there like I did in 2004.

The big problem is that I don't have a genre this year. I can't even hide behind literary fiction as it's a disaster novel and there's not much action yet in this action/adventure. In fact I've gone 2000 words without even much interaction. There has not been a single piece of dialog yet.

And the crazy thing is, I don't even really care that there should be in the opening scenes at least. But I do think there's some good observational stuff. The escaping walls of water can come later. Or whatever I do with these characters I vignetted in the first chapter. Two of them are about to meet up so that's a start toward something relatively chatty I think.

Oh, but I do like some of the inner monologue so far.

And as I promised, here's the morbid opening:

"The moment that life changed for Anthony from the carefree days of youth to the cold reality of life was the moment that one realizes that one day all he knows will cease to be. Beyond just the idea of death, the human condition that everyone shares planted itself firmly onto his shoulders like a burden to carry when he realized that the idea of himself will one day cease to be. The last vestige of comfort the could have been that his works and his deeds would live on no longer even gave him respite when he realized nothing he had done would have seared itself into anyone’s long term thoughts for more than a few years.

And even then, he had thought, those people who his life had intersected wouldn’t live on much longer or for even less time than he would.

The idea that 'no one dies while their memory lives on' stopped being reassuring when Anthony delved below its surface. If that’s the case, he had realized, than really one only lives on for a generation or two. He couldn’t nave anyone further back in his own family history than his grandfather. That would mean thousands of generations of thousands of families lost to the ages if his experience was the universal one. Thousands of generations washed away on a sea of time."

I guess if I accomplish nothing else, I did put down those thoughts on a piece of paper - er on Microsoft Word. So NANOWRIMO's not a total waste this year.

The Difference Between Me And You Is Your Laptop's Not On Fire

2006-11-02T17:24:00.000-08:00

One of my all-time favorite album titles is from noise rock band Mclusky. Their 2004 release was called "The Difference Between Me And You Is That I'm Not On Fire."

That album title was fairly fitting to my NANOWRIMO experience so far. When I went to plug in my laptop this afternoon to write, it actually almost caught fire. It wasn't a battery thing like with all those recalls (I have a Toshiba). Something went horribly haywire in the power adapter (the third this laptop has had in less than a year) and it started kicking out fire like a little acetyline torch.

My room still smells like burning plastic.

My laptop is fine. This is good as my desktop doesn't really exist anymore except to provide my roommate with an extra hard drive. But it's still freaking me out that even my computer is revolting against my doing NANO this year.

Not that it takes technical issues for me to not be able to write this year so far (as if this year is more than 45 hours old). I've also had health issues.

I took today off work (time when in most years I would have been writing) to go to the doctor to get checked out for a case of dizzy spells that I've been having. Turns out that I have some sort of crap in my inner ears (the doctor described them as "little particles") that's causing me major health issues and that it's being exacerbated by a major sinus infection.

It's so bad that I got put on Avalox. Avalox is one of those, take for one week because it's so powerful that more would actually harm your body. It's in the same family as what the military gives soldiers going into possible biological warfare (but a much lesser dosage and in pill form and not in inject yourself or die form).

So that makes me a bit sleepy and somewhat lackadaisical. But I guess no more sleepy and lackadaisical than the infection itself.

After the 1025 words at midnight on the first, I've actually only written an additional 373 words - one more introductory vignette. But I will try to pick up the pace a bit tonight. I am, after all, a notoriously slow NANO starter.

And, well, the kickoff party for Chicago is tomorrow night so NANO hasn't even really started in the region yet. Yeah, that's it, it hasn't started yet. :)

That means I'm actually ahead of the game. ;)

The Beginning Of The End Of The World Novel

2006-11-01T08:57:00.000-08:00

Each year I've tried to choose a song to guide my muse. In 2004 with "Why Sleep When I'll Only Dream" it was really easy. "Hallelujah" was kind of the theme song of my novel like it has been so many other creative endeavors. But, you know, just to be original I decided to use the original Leonard Cohen version.

And there was a self-referential moment in the story where the female MC, Emily, comes to the realization of why the male MC, Scott, used to sing to her like a lullabye that version and not the Jeff Buckley version.

Sure it was just a tretise of mine both padding my word count and measuring the comparative merits of the two but isn't NANOWRIMO about vanity paragraphs and soapboxing?

Last year was a little more complicated as it was an alternate historical fiction. To say that any song would have ended up word-for-word in a different history as it did in this one would be stretching things. But last year's song was "The Big Fella" by Black 47.

Actually it was pretty much the whole Black 47 catalog as I tried to write from an American perspective what the struggle for Irish freedom (which Black 47 writes about so often) might have felt like.

The first two years the tone of the song fit very well with the tenor of the story. The down nature of the Leonard Cohen and the hopeful fighting spirit of the Black 47 guided my fingers across the keyboard.

As far as this year's selection goes, it remains to be seen if the spirit of the song and the spirit of the story ends up corrrelating.

This years song is "The Story Of Willy" by New York City (choosing two NYC bands in a row, pish, next year it will have to be a Chicago one) spoken word and musical collective King Missile:

"On the morning of the day of the Apocalypse, Willy woke up and made himself bacon and eggs and rye toast
He did usually eat bacon, but since today was such a special day, he figured why not,
Like most people these days, he had a hard time keeping his food down,
But that didn't stop Willy from eating, he enjoyed food to much.
Willy went outside, he loved to breathe fresh air, but he went outside anyway
He decided to head across the street and visit his good friend Bob.
When Willy got to Bob's house, he found that Bob, in utter despair,
Had shot himself in the head,
"Some people have no patience whatsoever" Willy proclaimed,
Well, I'm not going to kill myself, I'm sticking it out,
Today's a special day, the last day of planet Earth and I'm going to enjoy myself
Maybe today I won't go to the health spa,
Maybe I'll just stay here and drink all of Bob's beer
Or maybe when Bob's wife comes home, I'll take her out dancing
Yeah, that's it, dancing I'm going home to get changed
Willy raced out the door into the street, not noticing the runaway steamroller, that flattened him into a pancake in less that one second
The World would have to end without Willy."

Based on the first 1025 words of my novel that I wrote yesterday night, the song making light of the end of the world is pretty fitting. I wouldn't say that the four characters that I've written brief introduction vignettes about so far make light of the situation they're in so much as they're jaded about it.

After all, they are New Yorkers.

A flood turning 14th street that runs past their midrise apartment building in Manhattan into a canal isn't so much a sign of impending doom as an inconvenience. One of the characters even wonders how long it's going to take for the situation to be fixed by streets and sanitation because New York City can't possibly have shut down. It's just not conceivable.

He even jokes to himself that the only city along the eastern seaboard that the government will restore before New York City is Washington D.C.

This character lives highest up in the apartment building that the characters start out in so I guess in less than three pages, I've put in my first metaphor - the closer the characters live to the level the water is at, the more they grasp the significance. The two characters closest can actually think about the death and destruction that the flood must have caused, the one highest up can't. These are where the satire comes in so far.

I guess I could carry this further to the penthouse but I think that's going a bit too much into archetypes to have them be distant.

I'll post the first couple of paragraphs (they're pretty morbid) tonight as it's time to get back to work. But I'm uplifted by the fact that I want to get back to writing.

That's something that I hadn't expected out of this year's novel. At least without musical assistance.

Prepping The Two Important Little Barz

2006-10-31T21:46:00.000-08:00

Just about to jump into NANOWRIMO writing with two feet in a way that I haven't been doing with the web site this year.

But I did just play around with the widgets a bit and came up with the two most important ones, the two Word Wars I'm involved in. Whenever I write that the BBS in me wants to come out and spell it Word Warz.

and

Oh, it is so on this year!

I actually finally went to CVS at 6:00 p.m. or so today and got my writing notebook and am ready to hit the keyboard running. But I fear this is the year the keyboard runs me over. I still don't have any clue what will fill that notebook. Last year at this time I already had central characters and a basic outline of the first five chapters or so.

This year I don't even have a name for the character the novel opens with. I know it's going to be someone who avoids any situation that he (though I'm sure there will be a female protagonist at some point) thinks will be stressful or, more to the point, generous.

Whether this character will end up being a hero, an anti-hero, or just a casualty is beyond me at this point. I guess it will be up to how much I like the name. Though I think again, especially with this year's topic, that I'll have difficulty killing off any character.

That is, despite the fact that the whole thing takes place during a cataclysmic disaster. Oh, this is going to be a long November.

Finally Writing About NANOWRIMO When It's Almost Here

2006-10-30T18:21:00.000-08:00

RETENTIVEWRIMO IS BACK ON THE WEB! :)

---

So tomorrow is apparently Halloween. I've done absolutely nothing to prepare a costume or anything so I'm not going to dress up for work. As far as I know, there are no parties so I'm not going to dress up for any of those either.

I think I'll just watch the NBA double header and actually think about what I'm going to write for NANOWRIMO.

Not that I needed any more reason to write a speed novel for the fourth year in a row but today decided to sign up. So it's not just the word war against Toronto that will encourage me on but also the person who sits in front of me at work.

All it's going to take is an idea.

I was originally going to write a satire, but I'm just not in a very joking mood as of late so I think I'm going to go with the mood.

I think I'm going to do what I said I was going to do last year and write a story of survival after a disaster. It's not going to be like "The 9" or anything where it follows the survivors after the fact and it's not going to be like "Jericho" (is it fitting that NANOWRIMO starts on a Wednesday) where it's during a post-apocalyptic disaster.

I want to do something like the stories that were on television last year post-Katrina but I don't know if I can write something like that from ground level. I'm just not good at the whole action adventure getting out of sticky situation thing.

Concentrating on the mental anguish is more my game. But I think I want to tell a lot of it in flashback.

And then the next step is choosing a point of view. I'm thinking first person but that will probably go out the window.

One thing that I do have is the first couple sentences of the novel but I won't put them here since that would be cheating the word count as nothing is supposed to hit the page prior to midnight on November 1 (which is really really close).

But since I've had the opening sentence in my mind the last two years (well the last three years but three years ago I don't even count since the opening sentence was almost all I wrote), it seems to be how I should start out.

And I'm sure I'll end up writing more than 50,015 words or so. If I don't I'm going to lose pretty much every challenge that I'm taking part in.

No More Filibustering On My NaNoFiMo Novel

2005-12-17T09:56:00.000-08:00

There are weekly challenges on nanofimo.org to write 7,000 words from Monday when you wake up until Sunday when you go to sleep. Last week I failed miserably but this week I'm going to try and actually get a little smiley face next to my name (the only reward and it's on the honor system). To accomplish this feat, I have to write 2,561 words in the next two days.

11,232 / 30,000
(37.4%)

If I can't do that, I might as well throw in the towel on the whole excursion.

The word count may be made a little more difficult by the fact that I'm going to West Lafayette, IN tomorrow to watch my youngest sibling graduate from Purdue tomorrow. But I should be able to write 1,200 words or so on the car ride before my laptop battery dies.

But, I'm going to actually attempt the "improbable" (but not the "impossible") by doing the whole over 2.5k today. It should only take a couple of hours but I keep putting off NaNoFiMo to make sure I stay ahead with watching the movies.

I'm at a point in the novel now where I have to decide exactly how the novel ends. This is the exact point where who the spy really is becomes transparent (and as we've learned in the United States recently, transparency and spy are not mutually exclusive) so I have to decide on one of three storylines to end the novel.

And, I think this time I'm actually going to have Liam get arrested, no false alarms. It feels like about six weeks ago that I asked on the nanowrimo.org boards (even though it was only about a week ago) what arrest procedures were in the United Kingdom. I will get 30,000 words this month but if I don't get my act together, there's no way I'm going to write "the end."

It's gotta go down today! There will be no filibuster!

The Second Half Of December Begins With Nothing Accomplished

2005-12-16T06:15:00.000-08:00

It's really hard to believe that we're halfway through December. I'm definitely heading for a failure at trying to complete my novel this month. The whole 0-0-3,000-0-0-0-3,000 word count method isn't working very well.

9,836 / 30,000
(32.8%)

Hey look, I'm only 5,000 words behind pace!

Though I think the 3,000 words that I wrote a couple of nights ago are somewhat acceptable. I ended up finishing the chapter of the aftermath of the Emily/Liam "affair" and am now in the final push to the end.

The final obstacle that I have to overcome is finding a way to make sure that people mistake Liam for the police informant and I think I've come up with a pretty decent plot to try and accomplish this. Whether it's complex enough to actually grab a reader, who knows, but it's worth a try.

Yesterday was supposed to be the day that I broke 10,000 words in December but I did everything in my power to fail at that it would seem. Instead of trying to write, I watched "The Island."

And that movie absolutely sucked!

So Long As I Don't Write A Cover Of My Novel Next Year

2005-12-11T20:19:00.000-08:00

Even if you didn't participate in NaNoWriMo this year, there's a good reason to listen to the final official podcast from the site. You can hear the mysterious voice of yours truly extolling the virtues of participating in the event multiple times.

As I've stated a lot of times, I'm not exactly proud of my voice. But it's the first one that you hear after the host and Chris Baty's (also known as the deity of speed writers everywhere who shall not be blasphemed). Also on the podcast, you can hear rosemilk talk about writing over 110,000 words.

squirrelgirl22 didn't make the podcast this year that I could tell but she spent the majority of the TGIO party telling Sam Hallgren (the host of the podcast) that she didn't want to be interviewed after last year's drunken fun - and then getting interviewed anyway. I'm sure whatever she said was more articulate than my ramblings that made the cast.

The podcast is available at http://www.nanowrimo.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=60.

Despite my protestations about Chris Baty's refusal to encourage writers to finish in December, I have certainly been heeding his words quite well. I did sit down and write 3,232 words yesterday evening which ranks as my 4th largest daily output of 2005 but other than that, I have been majorly slacking.

Nothing seems to be breaking my habit of not writing. But, I guess after cultivating that for 27 years, it takes a lot to break it, even in the current three. :)

6,793 / 30,000
(22.6%)

I also wrote 508 words this afternoon at the laundromat. It would have helped if I had a table to set my laptop on but I've never seen the place so packed on a Sunday afternoon.

Part of the reason today was a little slower was that I hate a mini-climax yesterday with the next morning after the awkward scene between Liam and Emily. I can't give too much away, but I felt every bit as drained as the character when I wrote the words that I did to make him feel drained.

And there is my big problem as a writer that I have to overcome. I just can't pull the trigger on having really bad things happen to characters. In the last two days I watched two of the most no-holds-barred movies in existance, "The Devil's Rejects" and "Saw." The people who wrote those screenplays (especially Rob Zombie) had no problem in having horrible things befall characters they carefully crafted.

Next year, I'm just going to get in a really angry mood at the end of October (pity all those in my life at that time) to be able to just rip the shit out of my characters. Well, I guess that's not the problem exactly. I don't have a huge problem inflicting damage on my creations, it's that I have a hard time having other creations doing it to them.

One of Liam's big characteristics in "Stars, Bars, and The Crown" is that he doesn't have the heart to do anything that might be necessary to save himself and others. And while, thankfully, I don't have to make choices like that in my own life, I have the same problem in my novel. It keeps the "bad guys" from becoming caricatures, but it also prevents the novel from reaching the next level.

I'm also going to write next year's novel from multiple points of views. What was I thinking having a single P.O.V. this year? I did two P.O.V.s with "Why Sleep When I'll Only Dream?" so it's not like I haven't accomplished it before.

Next year, I'm thinking three P.O.V.s. And in third person omnipotent. Technically this years is in T.P.O. but it's only because there's a narrator voice.

If I do a rewrite of this year's NaNo novel, it is being ripped to shreds and the P.O.V. is being spread out. I allude to a lot of events that will become fully separate chapters where they are written on-screen as opposed to off.

Yes, it could sound a little bit more like a real novel as opposed to a confused young adult wandering around aimlessly. :)

The World Cup Draw Aftermath Is That I'm Still Sick

2005-12-10T14:02:00.000-08:00

So I am officially sick today. I woke up at 2:00 p.m. this afternoon feeling no better after 11 hours of sleep than I did yesterday evening.

Somehow I've managed to not waste the day entirely as I actually cleaned my apartment halfway and throw out two garbage bags worth of newspapers. My apartment is no longer a frozen time capsule from October 31, 2005. :)

However, I still need to do at least two things. The first is watch a movie (I've been doing really well as I've watched eight movies in nine days of December), most likely "Saw" or "Devil's Rejects" - alright, maybe I am still frozen on Halloween. Then I actually have to sit down and put hands to laptop keyboard and work on finishing my novel.

Pish, the problem with having so much extra time on the weekends is that I seem to be apt to waste it pretty well.

Reviewing What Happened Yesterday

2005-12-09T07:09:00.000-08:00

I finally got my act together yesterday night, sat down and finished Chapter 19 of my NaNoWriMo/NaNoFiMo novel. 860 somewhat awkward words later, the uncomfortable scene where Liam cheats on Mia with Emily is written.

3,053 / 30,000
(10.2%)

I saw it's uncomfortable because that's the way I designed it. Basically I took the middle ground where Emily is intentionally seducing Liam and the protagonist takes the bait, rationalizing it as "doing it for the cause" because he's still not sure if Emily is wired. So what's the best way to make sure there's no recording devices on her? Get her naked of course (at least in Liam's mind).

The way I wrote it is that the door and the scene close right after Emily closes Liam and Mia's bedroom door behind the main character. I'm thinking they don't actually have sex but enough has already happened that Liam has officially cheated on his fiancee for real in the way he thinks (and whether this is actually happening or not) his fiancee is cheating on him with Matthew Starwood.

Now, Mia is not going to see it that way and it's going to make a good part of the story later on (though at the rate I'm going, that's not going to happen until April).

Now comes a really exciting part of the story where the happy tryst of sorts is broken up by a knock at the door by Officer Charlton who's come to arrest Liam.

Yesterday, for only the second time since the start of November, I used the "Character and Plot Realism Q&A" forum on nanowrimo.org to pose a query on arrest procedures in the United Kingdom.

I did this because I don't want the scene to be unrealistic. I needed to clear up things like: are there miranda rights in the United Kingdom and do they arrest people in the name of the soverign?

The answers turn out to be yes (but they are not required as in the United States) and no. But a Brit who answered my question said that he thought in an alternate reality there would be nothing wrong with someone being arrested "in the name of the queen."

So I think I will have Officer Charlton say this. If it turns out my beta readers are disturbed by this, I'll just take it out later.

When I'm going to write Chapter 20 remains to be seen as this weekend I'm going to try to clean up my apartment and such. I know I'll start and probably write a good 2,000-5,000 words this weekend. But with how long a lot of my chapters are, who knows if this will mean finishing it?

The Reward For Hard Work Means Nothing

2005-12-06T07:24:00.000-08:00

So I still didn't pull the trigger on the evil thing yesterday night. I wrote another thousand words or so and got right up to the point where the event was going to happen, before I stopped writing.

I almost wish I were blogging this novel live since this would be the perfect place for a pick-a-path book type question.

2,193 / 30,000
(7.3%)

Basically what the situation comes down to is this. Mia is on a campaign junket in northern Ohio with Starwood and Liam (who suspects his fiancee is carrying on an affair with the candidate) is home alone in Detroit.

He figures that this is the perfect time to bring Emily (his ex-girlfriend before Mia) around and let her know to get out of her job spying for him at the Cane and Candle. Liam, on the verge of a nervous breakdown confronts Emily on what he heard from Callum, that the two were an item.

Emily gets really angry, tells Liam that she can't believe he doesn't trust her after "all they've been through and all they've done" and starts to leave. This gets Liam's worry up as the suspicions that she's in cahoots with the police get aroused again.

The situation now is this. I'm tempted to have Emily just rip off her blouse and scream, "do you see a wire here?" to Liam (earlier in the book, Liam had Mia search Emily) and who knows what happens from there.

Liam could either:

Take the high road, tell Emily that he trusts her now.

Cheat on Mia with Emily because he suspects Mia is having an affair.

Have Officer Charlton bust in an arrest Liam on Enemies of the Commonwealth charges, meaning Emily is the police informant.

I don't think that the third is an option since I don't think I'm ready to reveal who the informant is yet. The second one is probably the one I'm going to take. But that's what's making the scene awkward. Do I really want to take that path for the rest of the book.

Liam is fast becoming very unlikeable and I didn't set out to make him an anti-hero.

At least I've got a lot of time at work to think about it.

Feeling Very Not Nice Today In Early December

2005-12-05T11:17:00.000-08:00

Why I'm in a pissy mood today has nothing to do with "March Of The Penguins" though I seriously want the time I spent watching that "documentary" back. In the time it took to watch that, I could have shoved a lot of eggs up my ass too!

No, I'm pissed off today because I got to sleep at 2:15 a.m. yesterday.

Oh I could have gotten to sleep earlier for sure, but I decided I was going to do the speed noveling world a favor and redesign the NaNoWriMo spreadsheet for NaNoFiMo. I don't know how the designer did it, but he managed to hide a secret formula somewhere in the mix that I can't redesign.

So the whole spreadsheet only shows 30 days on all the charts, leaves some cells blank, and puts weird numbers in others. But, in general, it's close enough for government work.

It's like that Coke Zero ad with the tranquilizer dart. Except I want to put that dart in the designers neck over the secret formula. :)

Though the whole reason I suddenly got so interested in the spreadsheet was that I finally started NaNoFiMo at 12:15 a.m. yesterday. I wrote until one and got 1,036 words.

1,036 / 30,000
(3.5%)

These words don't really add much to the story but I had a nagging thought going through my mind that I needed to get on paper. That thought was "why would anyone be willing to die to free themselves from an economic inferiority when they're no direct political control?"

I figured I had to explain that before I got much further into the book. Apparently Liam and company feel there is a secret shadow government from the United Kingdom controlling the United States in my alternate historical timeline. Whether that's true or not, I think I'll have to establish before the end of the book.

Tonight's writing should be fun as I think I'm about to have something very evil happen. We'll have to see if I can go through with it or not when the time comes.

Why I've Been Putting Off NaNoFiMo

2005-12-04T20:50:00.000-08:00

I had an entry for tonight all written that was relatively NaNoWriMo free but my laptop had connectivity issues and ate that entry. I'm hoping that I can't blame the TGIO party but ever since I connected to Fado's network, my laptop hasn't had a good connection at home.

Not that I can blame this for the fact that while I've been a big booster of and have even posted on the boards of NaNoFiMo, I still haven't written a single word in my novel since the conclusion of November.

I had big plans to do so this weekend but I instead chose to try and get ahead in my Netflix quest (which I mentioned in the interview so who knows if it will make the final NaNoWriMo podcast) and have now watched four Netflix movies in four days watching both "Carlito's Way" and "Carlito's Way: Rise To Power" today.

These actually go along with my NaNoWriMo quite well as they're underworld movies. I haven't watched a good political radical movie in quite some time. That's my next goal since I should watch at least a couple of movies based on underground revolutionary movements before I start to do my editing. I've pretty much got the ethos of that particular subset of fiction ingrained but it doesn't hurt to refresh every now and again.

Both movies deal heavily with my primary theme of "who can you trust in a world of lies?"

And they were especially helpful in the fact that, at least in the prequel, it's not the major players in the drama. It's not the kingpins being discussed, it's low-level management. They don't pull the strings, but they have the resources. It's pretty much the same level as mine and proved some good pointers on how to make this low level interesting.

Hopefully, my tales of low level political underground operatives is at least readable at the current time because besides being NaNoFiMo unofficially, December is also NaNoTraMo - I just made that one up - National Novel Trading Month.

Last year turned out to be a nightmare since my trading partner never finished beta reading mine (though I can't blame her because it was pretty rough) and the one that I got was Science Fiction written by a 14-year old who padded his word count. I have no problem with word count padding but I wish he would have put back in the contractions before handing it over.

The whole thing made me go cross-eyed. :)

Though I do have to admit that by the end, I did really want to know how it turned out (unfortunately there was no ending). That's the thing about most NaNo novels. My friend Todd, who's not a NaNoer but knows a lot characterized them as the following, "all plot." And, yes, most of them are stories without deeper themes but some of those stories are interesting.

This year promises to be much better. I got a romance novel from a 19-year old and reading through the first few paragraphs, I'm actually quite interested in what she has to say. If for no other reason than she has an epilogue where she goes through all her story's possible shortcomings.

It does look to be a pretty simple story, but a very interesting one.

My book, on the other hand, poor girl is a very complex story and very boring. :)

She lists religion as one of her primary interests on the NaNoWriMo site so I was a little worried about that, but she promises there aren't any religious overtones so I'm happy with that.

We'll have to see.

Well, I'm going to cut this one relatively short since my goal for tonight is to get to sleep around midnight. I swear that I'm going to start NaNoFiMo the day after the night I get a good night's sleep.

I should be helped out by the fact that "Prison Break" has ended its season but won't be helped out by the fact that I still have "The Sea Inside" at home to watch to make five movies in five days.

Tuesday I should have no movies from Netflix so that's my day. ;)

The TGIO Party Or Never Discuss An "Anti-British" Novel In Front Of A Brit

2005-12-03T21:55:00.000-08:00

This afternoon was the Chicago TGIO Party for NaNoWriMo and unlike the kickoff party, there are no pictures. The turnout was notably smaller than the half-a-million that we seemed to have at the start of November, but it was still a pretty impressive 20 or so.

Sam from the WrimoRadio podcast was there (as like I've said before, he's our resident celebrity for Illinois::Chicago) and unlike the last two times, I did not escape an interview this time. So if you hear someone babbling about NaNoFiMo on the wrapup podcast in a little under a week, we'll pretend like it's not me. :)

Chances are if I do have a quote make the podcast it will instead be about the philosophy of returning to the competition for a second (or third or sixth) year in a row. I stated that my objective for this year now that I proved in the first year that I could write 50,000 was that this year I would write 50,000 better words.

Though he asked me my comparative feelings about my two novels and after thinking really hard I said, "your first one is always special."

I don't think that one's going to make the podcast since the last thing Chris Baty and company are going to want is people thinking after the first it doesn't mean the same.

Thankfully rosemilk was there to correct me that "each novel is special because they're different. So, expect to hear her instead.

I'm not cynical about NaNoWriMo by any means, I'm just not eloquent and so I went for the one-liner. ;)

It wouldn't be a TGIO party unless I offended at least two people though, right? The first person was this Brit living in Chicago who was one of our great members of Team Chicago 2005. theakson is the name he goes by on the nanowrimo.org boards. Anyhow, Sam was interviewing me and asked what my novel was about. I told him the whole plot, but I think all that the other writer heard was anti-British.

Yeah it didn't go right from there. Especially after I told him that I was going to Manchester in April. Being a former Londoner, he compared Manchester to being south of the Mason-Dixon line and said that it was pretty much a crap city (my words paraphrased, not his). Later he accused me of "barely being able to speak English" and being "a serial killer." The only thing missing was him punching me in the face.

Though I swear I'm never going to get a crush on him. ;)

The second person I offended was someone who is a big poster of the Character and Plot Realism Q&A boards on the NaNo site. I said that some of the people on there scared me because you can ask, "how do you properly dispose of a dismembered body?" and people will answer.

He let me know, right then and there that he was one of the people who answered that question when it was proposed. He later went on to explain to us how to sneak a pocket knife onto a plane (I won't repeat it here since, you know, I am writing a novel about government surveilance).

And yet I'm the axe murderer. :)

You know the day is not going your way when the ML accuses you of being a cradle robber.

Anyhow, there was some positive conversation during the course of the day too as I reconnected with some of my writing buddies who aren't on LiveJournal like mjmiguelito (and I learned that he's actually a Fire fan, who knew) and had conversation with my little clique.

I swear, however, that cute girls grow on trees in the Chicago writing community as there were more than a few again this year. But that's not why I go to these things, I swear.

But the most important development was that snowowl (who I found out today actually has a LiveJournal account) and reliantfc3 verified the final results of the Chicago/St. Louis Word Count War.

And, as I reported back on the 30th, Chicago romped by approximately 750,000 words. About the end of the party, I got a wireless signal so rosemilk, squirrelgirl22, myself, and the few people who were left posted the following message on the St. Louis boards (this time under my name and not rosemilk's) called "We Own You St. Louis":

"Greetings from the Chicago TGIO party!

You are now officially our bitches. We beat you by over 750,000 words. Yes that is almost a million.

We regret to inform you that we may have to challenge someone of our own statures next year. We are considering London. If you do not bring your "a" game next year you are gone.

No longer our peers. :(

Well, better luck next year when you challenge Cleveland. They may be a little more your speed.

And we did outdrink you.

So there."

So far no angry e-mails like rosemilk got at the kickoff party. So far. So there's the big news. Snowowl and I kicked around the London idea for next year and we'll see how it flies. We'll probably still challenge St. Louis because no one seemed to object to multiple challenges this year, we just started small.

And finally I got into an argument with some Chelsea fans (stupid Chelsea/Middlesbrough match was on at Fado) because this one girl didn't even know who Fulham was. I mean, here's this girl wearing a Chelsea jersey saying that Manchester United is the Yankees and not Chelsea and she can't even acknowledge there's another team less than two miles from their own ground that are in the same division.

That and when I said, "there's another club in West London," she started naming off all the East London clubs.

So I guess I don't feel too bad because she's an idiot at both geography and footcer. ;)

Today when I got home I watched "2009: Lost Memories." This is an alternate history movie where Japan is still in control of Korea because Japan and the United States were allies in WWII (there's a lot more to the alternate history than that, but this is the cementing event).

Anyhow, as most of the commenters on IMDB have already posted, "nice idea, shame about the movie."

See, the problem with it is that the alternate history is corrected through time travel. So they set up this alternate history and then go back in time to correct it. It was basically switching genres from alternate historical fiction to fantasy mid-stream (and as rosemilk and I were discussing, the two can get pretty close at times with only real world physics and zoological constraints separating the two).

But the idea was great and pretty close to my novel. The Korean terrorist group trying to get the time traveling device even meets behind a bar. Looks like I'm not the first to think that a logical location for secret meetings is the back room of bars. :)

When they first go into the room, I actually said, "crap, there goes my story right down the tubes, it's already been done."

But I'd like to think mine is a lot different since mine focuses on the terrorist group and not the police (like the movie did) and actually is a little more character driven. Not that "2009: Lost Memories" didn't have some amazing characters (it's a Korean police officer and a Japanese police office going head to head even though they start out on the same side and each has their own motivations) but there ended up being a lot of explosions.

Still, while the movie was only slightly above average (and a lot of people don't even give it that much credit), I appreciated it because I haven't delved into other people's alternate historical fiction since I began to write mine.

It's good to see that I uphold some of the conventions and shatter others. That's what I try to do in each genre I write in.

Speaking of which, I think rosemilk and I dared each other on the train (though I was pretty drunk at the time) to write in each other's genres next year. So I have to write fantasy and she has to write historical fiction, literary fiction, or romance.

That should be a hoot!

I think we'll just do that in April for NaNoFools (since I guarantee our novels in the other genre will be unintentionally funny anyhow) and call it a day. :)

A Very Happy NaNoWriMo Wrapup

2005-11-30T21:58:00.000-08:00

In two minutes National Novel Writing Month draws to an end and checking out my friends list, congratulations to the following:

rosemilk (who wrote a positively astounding 111,888 words), squirrelgirl22 (61,767), infanttyrone (51,858), ivymere (50,526), reliantfc3 (50,022), oracleofdoom (50,009), and bandersnatch_02 (who was doing it on the sly, so much so that he didn't register his word count on the site, and last reported 50,003 - the last of which was "better").

Honorable mention to hollowpoint who fought the brilliant fight to the end and finished with a very respectable 40,270 words. I'm sure he's going to kick 50,000's ass next year!

I'm incredibly proud of all of you! Thank you for making November an enjoyable experience!

And of course I'll give myself a pat on the back for finishing with 53,229 words.

53,229 / 50,000
(106.5%)

Wow, 106.5. Sounds like the frequency on the FM dial that a really bad country station would be on. :) I guess it beats 88.5 or something which would have been good music but a sad word count percentage to finish at getting so close.

It was good news all around in the little corner of NaNoWriMo that I'm the closest to. Team Chicago 2005 in our challenge with St. Louis ended up with 38 of our 47 team members completing their novels.

Yes, you read that right reliantfc3. That was 38 out of 47. :)

The final word count is still to be tallied by the MLs but I'm thinking that St. Louis' 23 winners aren't going to hold a candle to Chicago.

Overall, I finished 25th out of writers who list Chicago as their location. This includes some people from the suburbs (who listed Chicagoland as their location and the like) but I'm glad to finish on the first page again. Overall in Chicago proper, 130 writers of the 668 that are in the city (though that includes people who signed up in past year who didn't even participate this year) finished their 50,000 words.

I'm proud to be on the first page of such a prolific group for the second year in a row.

Go ChicagoWriMo! Overall Illinois::Chicago finished #8 in word count as a region!

Looks like the windy in our city also counts on the keyboards.

The final sentence that I wrote in November 2005 was at about 3:30 p.m. this afternoon (I took the day off from work hoping to hit 60,000 but that just didn't happen). The final sentence of my November noveling was: "Don't worry, you'll get your fiancee back when this is all of this is over."

I think it's a pretty fitting final set of words even though I myself do not have a fiancee. So, the final two words I wrote for NaNoWriMo were is over. I like to count the final five words as it has a better ring to it, though, "all of this is over."

Not necessarily the end like they're theoretically supposed to be. But isn't "the end" derivative to the extreme anyhow? :)

I was a little bit worried stopping there since I figured that would see my word count and write 3,500 words this evening just to beat me. But, in the end it's good news there too as the final one v. one Chicago/St. Louis word war ended with the following results:

incendiarymind: 53,229 words
reliantfc3: 50,022 words

I hope we're both around for round #2 of the series next year!!!

Tonight was my night of celebration. I went to Mama Desta's, an Ethiopian restaurant at Clark and Belmont (a pretty famous intersection here in Chicago) just south of Wrigleyville - of course that designation is a little misleading as both Clark and Belmont and Wrigley Field are both technically in the neighborhood of Lakeview and Wrigleyville is just a sub-neighborhood.

Ethiopian is my favorite cuisine on the planet (and tonight I finally decided after much consideration that Korean is my least favorite) so it was an absolutely wonderful treat.

But the night got even better as I went to see my favorite band of all time Dinosaur Jr. at Metro (which is in Wrigleyville proper). For those who remember my Lollapalooza rant, I was pretty upset at JayLouMurph for playing nothing off of "Green Mind" because Lou wasn't in the band at the time. Tonight they remedied that situation by playing "The Wagon."

The set was far from perfect but it was a good reward for finishing just the same.

I think I'll just have to top it for NaNoFiMo once I actually write "the end" as opposed to "all of this is over."