Category: Writing

So I had that dentist’s appointment today. Due to the lack of local public transportation, my car having broken down and my being absolutely sick of throwing money into repairing that clunker, not having enough money to buy a new one, resolving to just bike around until I can save up some more, and then the bike’s tires going flat, I spent a total of about three hours today walking to and from my dentist’s appointment. Not to mention about half an hour actually at the dentist. I have a cavity I need looked at on the twenty-seventh, so that’s neat. On top of that, a friend needed someone to talk to so I spent like two hours doing that, too. I’m not going into details for the sake of their privacy, but it was a huge fucking deal.

All of this to say that the last few hundred of my 25,116 out of 25,000 words are probably going to need editing, since it’s basically just two characters sitting around talking strategy. But hey, maybe not, because one character imparting martial wisdom onto another is an important part of the scene anyway.

I have reached 23,927 out of 23,334 words for today. This puts me back on target for the first time since day five. Now for the bad news: I have a dentist’s appointment tomorrow which, on top of all the usual nastiness involved in dentist’s appointments, is going to take up several hours of time, principally due to commute. That time is going to be displaced from other things I need to get done during the day, which means that ultimately my writing time is probably going to eat the deficit even though the dentist’s appointment is much earlier in the afternoon than when I usually write. Back on the bright side, I have a surplus of several hundred words, so even if I fall behind tomorrow, it should be by little enough that I can catch up with a few more 2k word days, which I’ve been able to churn out pretty reliably.

My goal today was to get within 2,000 words of day fourteen’s quota, which is 23,334, which means my goal was 21,334. What I got was 20,791 by midnight, although by 1 AM I managed to reach up to 21,781, which means I was only an hour shy of actually being on target again. I think my current outline will take me to at least 25,000 words and maybe as far as 30,000. I’m still not especially satisfied with the quality of the work, and I don’t think that’s going to change, just because this whole project is kind of Frankensteined together from leftover parts copied or discarded from other things I was or am working on. The point here wasn’t particularly to make the best work of my life, though. The point is to kill November, and I’m hopeful I’ll be able to pull that off.

I again hit my wordcount goal for the day about half an hour too late to technically get it done in the actual day. I’m at 18,729 out of 20,000 as of midnight, but got to 19,021 before going to sleep, which is behind, but catching up. Fatigue is a growing problem: I’m bad at getting things done in November, and the further into the month I persist, the more the overall quality is declining. I have to keep reminding myself that my goal is to produce anything, anything at all, in a month when I’m normally creatively barren. It’s fine if something like 15% of what I’ve written is so bad it probably needs to be cut or rewritten completely, and it’s fine if, even after revision, what I’ve got is still far short of my best work. All I have to produce to be successful here is something which is better than literally nothing. If, at the end of the month, I have 50,000 words which someone trapped on a desert island with no other means of entertainment would be willing to read, that is victory.

16,924 of 18,334 is slightly less than the 2k I’d been hoping for, and it’s also nearly a full day behind. The problem is, my hasty outline has more gaps than I’d anticipated and my growing fatigue is affecting my ability to write words that I don’t absolutely hate. Almost the entirety of what I wrote today involved the consecration of a ritual dagger without letting on to a bunch of anti-witchcraft monks in an abbey that there’s any consecration going on. Sounds interesting, but in practice I think the whole thousand and a half-ish words of it would’ve been better off with the characters just handing the dagger off to their hobgoblin ally and asking him to make it happen. He can turn invisible, so “do [thing] without letting the monks know” isn’t really a problem for him, and he’s been weirdly absent for much of the story while my focus is probably too relentlessly on the only two characters who were fully formed when I started writing. Everyone surrounding them is only slowly growing into real, actual people.

It turns out that funerals take up most of the day. I am at 15,036 of 16,667. That is nearly a full day behind. The good news is that the loved ones of the deceased are, so far as I can tell, holding it together without my help, so I didn’t have to blindly fumble through expressions of sympathy.

My wordcount has reached 14,097 of 15,000. So far as catching up goes, this is excellent news, although it’s obviously not so much good news in terms of actually being on target. I have a funeral to attend tomorrow (I didn’t know him that well, so I’m mainly going there to fail to console family members who knew him better – he lived a very long and full life so hopefully there won’t be much consoling necessary), so we’ll see whether I’m able to continue catching up. If I can manage 2k a day on the regular, I should be caught up again by day twelve.

As predicted, most of my writing time yesterday was occupied by making an outline, and said outline is still not complete. I was able to get up to 11,573 out of 13,334 by the expedient of adding titles to the arcs. I’m setting my minimum goal to 2,000 words a day until such time as I’m caught up. Hopefully I’ll be able to get more than that, though, otherwise I’ll be behind until somewhere around day fifteen – by which point I’ll probably have exhausted my outline again. On the bright side, the arcs are way more compact, so it seems I’ve finally overcome my bad habit of taking 25,000+ words to establish a character trait which, in retrospect, could probably have been fit into 20% of that.

I have both good news and bad news re:NaNoWriMo today. The good news is that yesterday I was able to get up to 11,561 out of 11,667, which is a few hundred words ahead of the catch-up schedule I set for myself when I fell behind on day six. The bad news is that I have just exhausted my outline. It took me in the neighborhood of 2-4 hours to compose that thing, and while I have some jumping points for another arc, I’m going to need to actually plot it out (I could try to discovery write it, but experience tells me that my discovery writing devolves into meandering incoherence after about 10,000 words, at which point my will to continue the story is badly drained – this might be able to get me to limp across the finish line if I run into this problem again on day 24, but here on day seven I need another outline). That’s about the same amount of time as the Write-In on day four that got me double the words I needed for the day. All of day eight could be lost to outlining just as I’m starting to recover from getting distracted on day six. I may need to write 2k per day for a couple of days to catch up afterwards.

The good news is that I can discovery write for up to about 10,000 words if I have to, which means if this happens to me again in the final days of the month, when there’s not enough days left in November to spread out the damage of missing one, I can just plow ahead with no outline at all.

Today I was easily distracted and reached only 9,143 out of 10,000. Tomorrow’s goal is technically 11,667, but I’m going to aim for 11,143 instead. This is still more than the standard 1,667 words per day, so if I can manage that tomorrow and the day after, I’ll have caught up. This also means I don’t have to commit myself to making up the deficit in one day, which could be bad for morale if I don’t make it. But, y’know, during that write-in I totally got two full days of writing done plus change, so I’m not ruling out catching up all in one day, I’m just not committing to it either.