NaNoWriMo 2012 – Day 2
After my relatively slow start yesterday, I came to find myself stuck again. For some reason I just couldn’t get into the right mindset to start today and so I spent my day with everything but writing. I swear, at some point I was even cleaning out my kitchen cupboards, just to get away from that blinking cursor! The problem was mainly that I was just in too good a mood to throw myself into the paranoid mood of my main character. With distance these things never turn out that great, so somehow the circumstances were all wrong.
23.30 and I thought, damn, there is just no way I’m going to write a word today. Well, I was wrong. I filled a bath, took my iPod with me and started typing away. Half an hour later I had managed to write 545 words and I was soaked and relaxed with a bit of the heavy feeling you get when your bath is just a tiny bit too hot. Still far away from my target of 1700 words, but it’s a start and more than yesterday.
I am not worried yet by the way. Just because I have some difficulties right now to get into it, that doesn’t mean that it will stay like this. If I feel inspired I can easily write 3000 words in one day. I just need to get into the right working mindset. I am also not bothered about reaching the 50,000 words in a month. If it happens, good, if it takes longer, also good. At the moment I’m mostly dealing with other things anyway, so the writing is just a bonus. I’ll just take it one day at a time.
NaNoWriMo 2012 – Day 1
So, today started NaNoWriMo and I was quite happy to get started. Or so I thought in theory.
What actually happened was this: First I woke up and didn’t really do any work right away, because I wanted to read something first. Then I thought, well, first I need some breakfast anyway and fried myself some egg and bacon and gobbled down some avocado as well, all while listening to a podcast. When I looked at the time it was already 12.30! Now I really had to get started! What did I do though? First I restarted my computer – I do that about once every few months, but a few days ago something crashed and since then it has been acting up. Once it booted up again I remembered that I hadn’t done any software updates lately, so I fired that up and another 15 minutes went down the drain. Then I saw the state of my computer desktop and decided to de-clutter that a bit. Once I was finished with that I realised that I was hungry again and got myself some yogurt. Oh well, if I eat something, I might as well take a little break, so I watched an episode of X-Files.
By now it was 3.30 pm and I was starting to get annoyed at myself. Stupid procrastination! Finally I sat down and started with the work. However, quickly I realised that I was utterly unprepared. I hadn’t read what I had written before and after all, that had been months ago! While I was reading through that stuff, I was smoothing things out a bit here and there, adding a few words, a couple of sentences. When I reached the end I thought … well, fair enough, I can work with this, but immediately I drew a blank as to where to go from here. No planning, no brainstorming, well, I had done nothing. I pressed about 300 words out, but then I was just at a loss as to where to go from there. It was a couple of hours later and I decided to take a break and have some more food with another episode of X-Files, before continuing with the work. Since that episode was a “to-be-continued” one, I got sucked in and one episode turned into 4. Suddenly it was 9pm and I was tired already!
No, no, no, I thought, this is not how this should be going! So, I finally sat down and did the leg work. I looked at the structure and scenes I had so far and then started to collect ideas. The problem is that the part of the story that I have already, came about pretty much through associative writing, drawing on actual things that happened to me a few months ago. Of course I put an entirely different spin on the events, by completely changing the interpretation and now it’s as far away from the actual events as it could be. Still, it was somewhat born out of a specific situation. Continuing this fictionally was the idea, but really, there needed to be a red line, a story, and not just some ramblings that connect by mere chance. It took quite a bit of staring at the blank page to finally get into it, but in the end I collected quite a number of interesting ideas for scenes.
So, all a bit of a difficult start, but I think tomorrow will turn out quite a bit better, now that I have actual scenes that I can just write down and see where they lead me! I really should have done this stuff yesterday, but oh well, you know how these things work!
NaNoWriMo 2012
Well, tomorrow it all starts again. The big NaNoWriMo writing challenge! Last year my dad participated in it and achieved his 50,000 word goal. I myself wrote a novel of 80,000 words at the beginning of this year and one month of it was spent writing 50,000 words in just the same way as during NaNoWriMo. This time round, I will join the actual challenge as well. From experience I know that I can make the word count in one month, if I concentrate a bit. I also really wanted to get back into writing regularly, since I am basically stuck at home at the moment due to a recent flare-up of a chronic illness, which makes me feel entirely uncreative.
These last few days I have been working on blog posts for my numerous blogs and I’ve generally brought myself into a writing mindset, so that I can just jump right in once November starts. I will make an effort to keep you updated about my progress on achieving my 50,000 word goal. The project for this month of writing will be the one that I alluded to in my last post. Here a short description:
The novel will be an exploration of mental driftwood. The main character jumps from association to association in a world coloured by paranoid delusions, dreams and coincidences. It will be accompanied by visual fragments, photographs or graphics that relate to the content in one way or another. The idea is to take normal everyday occurrences and interpret them in a way that is bound to seem threatening to the main character. The reader in this case will have to decide for himself whether he wants to get drawn in by the visual aids and the use of the pronoun you, or pull away into safer waters if that is possible. Main themes will be urban alienation, loneliness and depersonalisation / derealisation.
So far I already have quite a number of words, 11,000, so the goal for the end of November will be 61,000 words. At this I will probably not stop and try to get to 70 or 80,000, because 60,000 is still a bit short for a novel in my opinion.
bearable is barely enough 