Celebration!

That's right, I did it. I completed my second National Novel Writing Month competition. And, perhaps even more unbelievably, I don't hate my novel after finishing it. I think that's because I didn't work on it exclusively this time. It gave me more time actually appreciate what I was writing.

And I'm not done. I finished on November 28, then I took a few days off (well, I severely decreased my writing amount at least. I think I wrote less than 500 words combined). Today I start my own personal mini-NaNo. My goal for the month of December is to write 31,000 more words. Hopefully most of them will be for Rosetta. My big goal is to have the first draft of Rosetta done by the end of the year, though that will take more than 31,000 words (it's currently at 35,000, so I need to double that at least). At the very least, I should be circling in for a landing by the time this month is over.

It's going pretty well, I think. The story's moving along. Kim and my mom both seem to like it. I think I'm finally figuring out how to go from where I am now to where I need the story to be. And I've even accepted that my characters are going to do things I don't like or approve of, and I'm learning to roll with the changes (except you, Ben. You need to stay in line).

This is the best I've felt about my writing in a long time. Here's hoping next month just gets better. You can track my progress (and mood) with the progress bar on the right side.

Congratulations to everyone else who participated in NaNoWriMo. Whether you won or not, embracing the desire to write is half the battle.

Word Wars and the Art of Speed Writing

As of this morning, I'm 5000 words from completing NaNoWriMo. In the last two days, I've written 6000 words, and I hope to write another 2000 or so tonight, which will hopefully lead to my finishing this weekend.

I accomplished this with a lot of help. For the last three Fridays, I met with a few other NaNo writers in my region. Together, we sat in Starbucks from 7:30 until close, writing away and occasionally pausing to chat and relieve some of the pressure. For all three of these days, I saw word counts at least over 2000. Yesterday, I wrote 4470 words.

And they weren't bad either. I know that, by its nature, NaNoWriMo encourages you to write a lot of crap in the hopes of finding something good amidst the wreckage. The idea is that putting something on the page, no matter how bad, is better than having nothing. But yesterday I wrote two short stories in the Rosetta universe which could, depending on how things fall into place, wind up at the end of book three (or maybe somewhere in four, if there is a four). They're certainly not ready-to-publish yet, but they're solid stories that are at least tangentially related to my main novel.

To spur each other on, we engaged in word wars. Basically, you set a time limit, and everyone writes as much as possible. Whoever writes the most words wins. We did three last night: two for 30 minutes and one for 20.

I strongly advocate word wars.

Nothing focuses me quite like a competition, especially when my competitor is sitting next to me, clacking away and making me think that she's racing along (turns out she was; I lost two of the three wars). So I just kept writing, never stopping, hardly thinking, and I wound up with something that can be trimmed down to something very nice. I already have the ideas. I just need the extra push to put them on paper.

I also strongly advocate writing in groups. I thought it would be distracting, that I'd want to talk more than type. And sometimes I did, but more often we egged each other on, scolding when we got too distracted. I worked harder on those days than any other, and I counted on them to help when I fell behind in the word count. As a result of last night's (and my increased motivation today) I'm currently 1700 words ahead of where I need to be. And this blog post will only add to that.

Anyway, the moral of this story is to consider writing with a buddy. Whether it's sending your chapters to a friend or getting together with other writers for a little good-natured competing. You might be surprised by the results you get.

NaNo Update

It's amazing. Ten days into National Novel Writing Month, and I'm still within spitting distance of being on schedule. In fact, until yesterday, I was actually over my word count, and I expect to get back to that level again this weekend. While I have actually managed to complete the challenge before (in 2009), this is still a minor miracle for me. What's even more important (and unbelievable) is that I'm still enjoying what I'm writing.

I've spoken at length already about the Novel-We-Speak-Not-Of and how, even though I technically won NaNoWriMo, I felt like I lost. Well, this year's been different so far. I'm doing a couple things differently. I already explained that I'm working on three different novels and possibly some short stories (I also count these blog posts... anything that involves words being written on a page). However, I've found myself focusing on Rosetta a lot in the past week, and I think this is still working because I've planned a lot more of this story than the NWSNO. Also, I don't expect to finish it this month. Removing the pressure is key.

This is actually doing something quite lovely for me: it's reminding me why I want to write in the first place. I know there are a lot of writers who have a love/hate relationship with the actual writing process. I think any task which asks you to put a piece of yourself into it can cause that type of reaction. But for awhile I was only writing because I felt like I ought to. Vaguely, I remembered it was something I liked to do, but it wasn't calling up the same feelings as before. It's been ages since I've reached anywhere near the middle of a story.

I just finished chapter 8 of Rosetta. This is maybe a little less than 1/4 of the book, and it's just now starting to get past the basic introduction and into the main plot. I just introduced Eli, a character whose very presence apparently makes all scenes flow better. And suddenly I went from really struggling to write anything coherent or worthwhile in chapters 5 and 6 to writing my favorite chapter to date in chapter 8.

I feel like I spend a lot of time talking about how I'm finally optimistic about my writing, but this seems to be more than that. I sit down every night to hit my word count and I'm not thinking about the millions of other things I could be doing. I don't turn on reruns of Boy Meets World to procrastinate. I don't even need to be on AIM with a few friends to break up the whole writing process. I wrote for a half hour while on my lunch break today just because I wanted to. It's a lot like being back in high school and carrying my notebook everywhere on the off-chance I had a few minutes to write... just because I liked it. Except now my notebook is Google Docs.

Anyway, this is a fairly meaningless blog post in the scheme of things, but I felt good about what I was doing so far and wanted to share. I hope NaNoWriMo is going well for everyone else, and I'm looking forward to seeing other's results.