as we grew older we got less patient, but kinder
Everyone else is talking about NaNo and I'm a dreadful copycat.
Number Crunching
My aim this year is to pace myself, and not write more than 2000 words or less than 1000 words (on NaNo) on any given day of the month. This should hopefully mean that at absolute most I write 60,000 words, bringing me back to 2006 levels and teaching me about the importance of not fucking up my wrist tendons and expending some mental energy on my course/assignments. It may be a little harder to keep to this on Mondays and Fridays, but I'm sure I'll find some way around it.
Goals
+ Pace myself
+ Follow the plan that I'm drawing up for day-by-day plot points.
+ Although the main character is male, remember to write enough well-rounded female characters that it doesn't turn into something SJ fandom will beat you with a stick for writing. Failing that, write them to YOUR OWN satisfaction, self.
+ Do not pussy out of writing sex scenes.
+ Begin, unfurl, and end the story within this month, without overrun.
My friendslist is asking things like "So, how do you write? What do you eat/drink/hear/watch? Does it matter? Do you have to try, or does it just happen?" of each other, or talking about how you need to get off to a good start, which is sometimes but not always true for me [I think there was one year where I forgot that it was the first of November until about 10pm]; "Another year I spent the last two weeks in October forcing myself to write at least 2000 words a day to get used to it. I always found the best way to NaNo was to go as far over my required daily wordcount as my brain, eyeballs, wrists and spine would allow - that way I earned days off in advance so I could always relax or do other things I needed to do", which is again reasonable enough but not something which I'm letting myself do this year, as the problem is rarely "can I write 1,667 words a day" or even "can I write 1,667 words a day on one thing" - I know perfectly well that I can and in fact previous years have taken this to daft excess.
The problem isn't "can you do this", but "can I convince myself that I'm allowed to do this and to ignore all the other irritating things that I 'need' to do in order to concentrate on writing", which is I think what NaNo ends up being for; everyone else is doing it, so you no longer feel so bad about "shut up, I'm writing", and you can take a moment off to be precious about a story without worrying that if you don't write enough fanfic people will stop liking you, or that if you're not immediately on-call every minute of the day you're somehow being an awful friend.
"not to allow verbosity to triumph over quality" says another friend, which I am going to try to adhere to this year. I have a clear character voice and he leans more toward the Palahniuk than the Renault; hopefully this will result in a compact, faster read and to less time rolling around in unnecessarily lengthy descriptive passages as I wank my way toward 150,000 words or some other demented goal.
The other thing is that I haven't signed up for the challenge yet. I may, at the end, sign up and bang in the word count to keep my profile looking snazzy for next year, but I don't like the competitive-between-writes element of this any more. The point is to challenge yourself to something you feel you need to learn to do, rather than to wander around on the forums barking CHECK ME OUT I WROTE 20k IN THREE DAYS*. Yes, dear, we can all see the size of your writerwang, but as I am pretty certain those 20k are all bilge, maybe you can shut up and help other people out instead of expecting a pat on the back.
So I need to try to work on the goals I've got sketched out rather than falling into the obsessive number-crunching trap again this year.
* You have nothing else to do with those three days and a pretty good idea of what you want to wrire, and that is not especially hard. Be quiet.
Unrelately, I was trying to get Liza to hook up this last night in order to facillitate better recording conditions. As Liza lives on the other side of the world and terms like "unity gain" and "PFL" are not wholly helpful to her, and I WAS DRUNK, this was not the roaring success it might have been.
Number Crunching
My aim this year is to pace myself, and not write more than 2000 words or less than 1000 words (on NaNo) on any given day of the month. This should hopefully mean that at absolute most I write 60,000 words, bringing me back to 2006 levels and teaching me about the importance of not fucking up my wrist tendons and expending some mental energy on my course/assignments. It may be a little harder to keep to this on Mondays and Fridays, but I'm sure I'll find some way around it.
Goals
+ Pace myself
+ Follow the plan that I'm drawing up for day-by-day plot points.
+ Although the main character is male, remember to write enough well-rounded female characters that it doesn't turn into something SJ fandom will beat you with a stick for writing. Failing that, write them to YOUR OWN satisfaction, self.
+ Do not pussy out of writing sex scenes.
+ Begin, unfurl, and end the story within this month, without overrun.
My friendslist is asking things like "So, how do you write? What do you eat/drink/hear/watch? Does it matter? Do you have to try, or does it just happen?" of each other, or talking about how you need to get off to a good start, which is sometimes but not always true for me [I think there was one year where I forgot that it was the first of November until about 10pm]; "Another year I spent the last two weeks in October forcing myself to write at least 2000 words a day to get used to it. I always found the best way to NaNo was to go as far over my required daily wordcount as my brain, eyeballs, wrists and spine would allow - that way I earned days off in advance so I could always relax or do other things I needed to do", which is again reasonable enough but not something which I'm letting myself do this year, as the problem is rarely "can I write 1,667 words a day" or even "can I write 1,667 words a day on one thing" - I know perfectly well that I can and in fact previous years have taken this to daft excess.
The problem isn't "can you do this", but "can I convince myself that I'm allowed to do this and to ignore all the other irritating things that I 'need' to do in order to concentrate on writing", which is I think what NaNo ends up being for; everyone else is doing it, so you no longer feel so bad about "shut up, I'm writing", and you can take a moment off to be precious about a story without worrying that if you don't write enough fanfic people will stop liking you, or that if you're not immediately on-call every minute of the day you're somehow being an awful friend.
"not to allow verbosity to triumph over quality" says another friend, which I am going to try to adhere to this year. I have a clear character voice and he leans more toward the Palahniuk than the Renault; hopefully this will result in a compact, faster read and to less time rolling around in unnecessarily lengthy descriptive passages as I wank my way toward 150,000 words or some other demented goal.
The other thing is that I haven't signed up for the challenge yet. I may, at the end, sign up and bang in the word count to keep my profile looking snazzy for next year, but I don't like the competitive-between-writes element of this any more. The point is to challenge yourself to something you feel you need to learn to do, rather than to wander around on the forums barking CHECK ME OUT I WROTE 20k IN THREE DAYS*. Yes, dear, we can all see the size of your writerwang, but as I am pretty certain those 20k are all bilge, maybe you can shut up and help other people out instead of expecting a pat on the back.
So I need to try to work on the goals I've got sketched out rather than falling into the obsessive number-crunching trap again this year.
* You have nothing else to do with those three days and a pretty good idea of what you want to wrire, and that is not especially hard. Be quiet.
Unrelately, I was trying to get Liza to hook up this last night in order to facillitate better recording conditions. As Liza lives on the other side of the world and terms like "unity gain" and "PFL" are not wholly helpful to her, and I WAS DRUNK, this was not the roaring success it might have been.