PerExWriMo Completion.
Yep. I'm done. 50,000 words, in 14 days. Almost 13 days, but I figured I'd save the last 350 or so for today. Not a full NaNoWriMo of course, because it wasn't one novel, but it was almost that. All but about 10k I worked on a single project, albeit it one I'd thought about for a while and written a tiny bit on before.
Let's see... I wrote the start of one short story that I think has a good idea in it, but I wasn't able to develop the seed into something good, and it would probably be need to tried again from scratch, probably from a different direction. SF, sort of a 'sudden weird effect' type thing (though set in the future).
The other, and only thing I actually completed, was one of the least SF things I ever written, set in the present day, and sort of a light romantic tone, with elements of science itself, but no actual supernatural or science fictional elements to it. No science that doesn't exist. It's sort of set (unstated) at my old University and although not based on a true story, there are parts of classes I took there that were worked in.
The bulk of what I wrote was a project that I intended originally to work on as a movie script, but never made much progress on it. I think I might go back to that format, but the prose outline really helps me plot and get things out of the way. Which in a way makes the bad writing (and oh, it was bad) not as much of a problem, because I can use it for the plot outline, pare it down to essential dialog and stage directions, and the bad writing just sort of doesn't matter except to help me visualize the scenes in movie format.
The plot involves a teenager who's a terrorist without realizing it, another who dies and nobody notices, a cop who's worried he'll be laid off if he doesn't solve a worldwide massive conspiracy, and an AI who's friends with them all. Oh, and the end of the planet Earth as we know it, and the complexities of love in the future and what it means to be human. So, you know, there's light stuff in there too. It's somewhat my attempt at Singularity fiction.
I didn't get near finishing it, though. I closed off on a scene where a female AI attempts to seduce a high school girl (it sounds worse than it is), and haven't even gotten near where the world actually starts to end (but then, most of that happens in the background). More problematic I reached the point where I knew how I wanted it to end but my ideas of how to get there from where I was were becoming more and more vague. If I wanted to try for 100k words, I would have soon had to abandon it temporarily while ideas percolated.
As for some lessons learned from this go around... well, the most important was that it wasn't a grind. I was able to get excited about something and keep writing on it. Now, I'm still short on new ideas, but since my traditional post Nano rule is to take a breather (whatever's left of November after I finish, as well as all December because Christmas craziness is crazy), hopefully I'll build up some in that time.
I can also manage, on a good day, if I'm excited, about 6000 words. That may not be my maximum, but that was the maximum I did this time around, and I did it somewhat regularly. Sure, I rambled on from time to time on things that weren't really plotly (but I sort of felt needed to be stated for my own piece of mind), but on the whole, it was plot-advancement.
Other than that, I've noticed I've still got some of the bad habits I picked up from years of MU*ing roleplay, at least when I'm typing fast. That is, I tend to have long stretches of dialog, with only 'Character nods.' or 'Character shrugs.' to break up the dialog. This is a bad habit I fell into while RPing, along with the "say a whole lot in one paragraph, and have the other character address every point in the next paragraph" (on MU*s, it speeds up RP, but isn't very natural, getting strange conversational subthreads). I think in general one of my problems with dialog is expressing body language and emotions through character actions without it feeling repetetive or too shallow. Speed exacerbates the problem, but it's always there. I need to remember to keep an eye on this when I'm reading for pleasure to get some experience of how it's done. (Alas, too often when reading for pleasure I sort of immerse myself and lose track of things like this).
The biggest sacrifice of speed is continuity. I know I was horribly inconsistent on things like the exact abilities of and limits of certain brain enhancements, and the different types of AIs, both directly (stating them differently in the text), and indirectly (missing consequences of them or having a inconsistent effect, unstated, springing from an inconsistent cause in my point of view at writing it), and probably other things too, ranging from character names to the setups of buildings. In rewriting, I'd have to be especially careful of this, especially in a SF work.
A more prosaic lesson I learned is that my keyboard is worse off than I thought. Every so often the Alt key seems to trigger on its own while I'm typing, sending me into the menus of my Word program, or, at best, making it so what I type doesn't shut up (because it's waiting for me to click back in the window that I somehow navigated out of). Very distracting. :P.
Let's see... I wrote the start of one short story that I think has a good idea in it, but I wasn't able to develop the seed into something good, and it would probably be need to tried again from scratch, probably from a different direction. SF, sort of a 'sudden weird effect' type thing (though set in the future).
The other, and only thing I actually completed, was one of the least SF things I ever written, set in the present day, and sort of a light romantic tone, with elements of science itself, but no actual supernatural or science fictional elements to it. No science that doesn't exist. It's sort of set (unstated) at my old University and although not based on a true story, there are parts of classes I took there that were worked in.
The bulk of what I wrote was a project that I intended originally to work on as a movie script, but never made much progress on it. I think I might go back to that format, but the prose outline really helps me plot and get things out of the way. Which in a way makes the bad writing (and oh, it was bad) not as much of a problem, because I can use it for the plot outline, pare it down to essential dialog and stage directions, and the bad writing just sort of doesn't matter except to help me visualize the scenes in movie format.
The plot involves a teenager who's a terrorist without realizing it, another who dies and nobody notices, a cop who's worried he'll be laid off if he doesn't solve a worldwide massive conspiracy, and an AI who's friends with them all. Oh, and the end of the planet Earth as we know it, and the complexities of love in the future and what it means to be human. So, you know, there's light stuff in there too. It's somewhat my attempt at Singularity fiction.
I didn't get near finishing it, though. I closed off on a scene where a female AI attempts to seduce a high school girl (it sounds worse than it is), and haven't even gotten near where the world actually starts to end (but then, most of that happens in the background). More problematic I reached the point where I knew how I wanted it to end but my ideas of how to get there from where I was were becoming more and more vague. If I wanted to try for 100k words, I would have soon had to abandon it temporarily while ideas percolated.
As for some lessons learned from this go around... well, the most important was that it wasn't a grind. I was able to get excited about something and keep writing on it. Now, I'm still short on new ideas, but since my traditional post Nano rule is to take a breather (whatever's left of November after I finish, as well as all December because Christmas craziness is crazy), hopefully I'll build up some in that time.
I can also manage, on a good day, if I'm excited, about 6000 words. That may not be my maximum, but that was the maximum I did this time around, and I did it somewhat regularly. Sure, I rambled on from time to time on things that weren't really plotly (but I sort of felt needed to be stated for my own piece of mind), but on the whole, it was plot-advancement.
Other than that, I've noticed I've still got some of the bad habits I picked up from years of MU*ing roleplay, at least when I'm typing fast. That is, I tend to have long stretches of dialog, with only 'Character nods.' or 'Character shrugs.' to break up the dialog. This is a bad habit I fell into while RPing, along with the "say a whole lot in one paragraph, and have the other character address every point in the next paragraph" (on MU*s, it speeds up RP, but isn't very natural, getting strange conversational subthreads). I think in general one of my problems with dialog is expressing body language and emotions through character actions without it feeling repetetive or too shallow. Speed exacerbates the problem, but it's always there. I need to remember to keep an eye on this when I'm reading for pleasure to get some experience of how it's done. (Alas, too often when reading for pleasure I sort of immerse myself and lose track of things like this).
The biggest sacrifice of speed is continuity. I know I was horribly inconsistent on things like the exact abilities of and limits of certain brain enhancements, and the different types of AIs, both directly (stating them differently in the text), and indirectly (missing consequences of them or having a inconsistent effect, unstated, springing from an inconsistent cause in my point of view at writing it), and probably other things too, ranging from character names to the setups of buildings. In rewriting, I'd have to be especially careful of this, especially in a SF work.
A more prosaic lesson I learned is that my keyboard is worse off than I thought. Every so often the Alt key seems to trigger on its own while I'm typing, sending me into the menus of my Word program, or, at best, making it so what I type doesn't shut up (because it's waiting for me to click back in the window that I somehow navigated out of). Very distracting. :P.