National Novel Writing Month

Can you write 50,000 words in 30 days?

You can find out if you try National Novel Writing Month.

Call it nanowrimo for short. The folks who started the crazy enterprise say it is, "A fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30."

I've tried nanowrimo three years and succeeded twice. This year, I'm going for it again.

Two keys things equal a high word count.

1) Get rid of the internal editor. You know the one who lives in your head and tells you can't, shouldn't, couldn't, nope, not good enough, make it better, better than better, sorry it's not perfect. If you don't have one of these lovelies, you are a lucky, lucky writer.

My internal editor is a sharp lady, about a 105, with ruthless taste. She is sometimes mean and nasty. I imagine she only has two bad teeth. The other 30 teeth are long gone, lost in multiple verbal brawls. She loves red ink. She can paralyze me at times, but I've become good at converting her into a force for the good because who would want to read raw, clunky, and baaaaaaaaaad writing? However, even internal editors need vacations. So for the month of November, I gear up and hunker down. I've got to get 2,000 words a day which can take anywhere from 1.5 to 2 hours. No time for my internal editor, which brings me to the second key point.

2) Ignore everything and anything which would take you away from getting your writing done. This may include but is not limited to: dishes, laundry, the really good book your friend told you to read, TV shows you like or don't, phone calls, online forums (they are a dangerous black hole sucking up anything coming near them!), and people in general. My personal favorite thing to ignore is sleeping, but this creates some interesting problems during the daytime.

Everyone may have their own best advice. Certainly the folks putting on the show, who maintain the National Novel Writing Month website do a great job of keeping you going. But really, the long and the short of writing a novel is you have to spend the time writing and writing and writing and writing the novel.

Nanowrimo is a just the hyperdrive way to do it.

Any takers?

Found jump drive -- Lessons Learned

1. Efforts to find jump drive: On Monday, leave work early; go to scene of the incident (cafe and market); ask staff about jump drive; look around; be annoying to other customers; put up flyers on bulletin boards, flyers include picture of lost jump drive, owner's first name, cell phone number, and email; walk home retracing steps of Sunday afternoon.

2. Ways to make peace with the loss: Eat veggie chips and ice cream for dinner, and spend evening reading a page-turner thriller, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson.

3. Random check/still obsessing: This morning look in all pockets of Patagonia fleece jacket, not the jacket worn on Sunday.

4. Discovery: Find jump drive in pocket!

5. Unresolved mystery: why oh why did I move the jump drive from its regular location (small pouch in purse) to a pocket of a jacket that I wasn't wearing that day? What was I thinking? (Obviously was not thinking at all.)

6. Lessons learned:

a) Label jump drives.

b) Do not put so much work on one jump drive.

c) Sign up for 2 GB free storage with mozy.org.

d) Buy external hard drive or new computer this weekend.

e) Password protect everything.

Lost Jump Drive

They go by lots of names: jump, flash, or thumb drives. They are easy to use, store a ton of writing, or whatever else you need them to, and they are tiny enough to carry around wherever you go. In your purse.

Tiny enough to lose. Like I did tonight.

I have a ton of writing on my little gizmo. All of my current projects and drafts. Yes, I also back up all my writing on the hard drive of my computers and email myself current drafts to two personal email accounts as an added precaution. I have the projects I'm working on, and even ones that are on the metaphorical shelf, saved. So what then is the problem?

Well, on that jump drive I kept about 10 years worth of work, and not all of it was password protected. Lost. Out there on the cement somewhere, about to be run over by a bus, tucked in a corner forgotten, or even worse...somebody is reading my stuff right now this very minute before it's submission ready. Raw writing. Crappy drafts. Hundreds of them. God help me, but it's a feeling that will make you sick to your stomach. (The journals were password protected; at least I had enough sense to do that, hallelujah!)

I've called both Cafe Zoka's and the little grocery story where I bought some soup to see if anyone turned in my thumb drive. Tomorrow I will visit the cafe, the grocery, and walk the same way home to see if somehow my personal jump drive jumped out of my purse or my pocket along the way.

Learn from my mistake: if you store your writing on jump drive, please do the following:

1. Password protect all the files that you don't want some stranger, rightly curious maybe or bored silly, to read.
2. Email yourself copies of your work and save in multiple locations.
3. Label your drive with your name and cell phone number.

P.S.
And if you see my jump drive (pictured above) somewhere in Seattle, can let me know?

Thoughts on revisions

Nearing 9:00 p.m. and time to write. Another trick is to plug into loud music and spent some time spewing words into the pages of a computer journal. Then once you have a flow going, switch over to the project at hand.

in reference to: Echo Arna (view on Google Sidewiki)

Novel Revisions

Do you have a novel stuffed in a drawer? Gathering dust on a shelf?

Novels do not write themselves. And unfortunately novels do not re-write themselves into polished, readable, and marketable manuscripts. I have at least six draft novels in house, all neatly arranged on the Writing Bookcase, a bookcase which is almost as high as the ceiling. And I promised myself after a summer of watching Battlestar Galatica and Firefly come September I would begin to work.

September is over and I have been working steadily on re-writing one of those novels to get it to the point where I am willing to shop or hunt for an agent. I want to fix the flaws before I send my manuscript off into the world. Here are some tips, tricks, and things I have learned along the way:

1. Carve out a dedicated period of time to write every day; make that dedicated time realistic for your life and schedule. My writing time is now between the hours of 900 p.m. and midnight. I work more than 40 hours a week, need to eat after work, I am not a morning person, and likely never will be, so nighttime is it.
2. Be consistent. Yes, I like to organize my sock drawer, read books, play with the cat, call a friend, and sleep. NO, I cannot do these things between 900 p.m. and midnight.
3. Be generous with yourself. Even an hour a day is a good day's work. A half hour a day is ok. All those half hours and hours will add up in the end.
4. Set a daily goal for revisions. Initially, I decided a chapter a night would be my goal, which was unrealistic. So it became half of a chapter every night.
5. Get feedback on your manuscript before you start revising, but be specific about soliciting feedback. I am lucky because I have family and friends who are readers, writers, and editors. I have 2 first readers at the moment, providing line by line edits on my draft manuscript. One is a friend who is professional editor, and the other is a familymember. Both are generous and kind; both love to read and write; my friend the editor loves YA fantasy so it is a good match; my family member is also a writer but of poetry; she is exacting in her reading tastes and has been systematic in her edits, ruthlessly eliminating the word that, which apparently I love so much I use the word least 2 or 3 times on every page.
6. Be generous with anyone willing to read your manuscript. Give your first readers a printed copy of your manuscript and buy them postage stamps so they can mail their edits back to you; buy them Indian food dinners and lattes. Wait patiently. They are doing you a HUGE favor. Never criticize their feedback. After all you can decide to accept or reject their edits.
7. Line by line edits from first readers make a great road map, but not the only one. If you do not have family and friends who would be willing to read your draft and provide feedback, then share manuscript with a critique group, and if you do not yet have such a group, get one. A critique group can offer you opinions on thorny problems (e.g., should I use a prologue or not?)
8. Have a notebook of problems and issues in your manuscript. I call my notebooks blue books and I jot everything down which needs some fixing. I write by hand in my blue books. Examples: Chapt. 14, page xxx, how many villagers total? Also, write about Z's experience. Or, Chapt. 14, page xxx, D versus d. Dreamworld ok, but Dreamer, Dream, Dreaming? These notes are cryptic, but that is my point. You know what the problems are in your manuscript, but having a log or record of them-page by page-is an invaluable tool. I also use my blue books as a brain dump, where I throw thoughts and musings about the manuscript down on paper, so I do not mess with the manuscript as I am revising it.
9. Keep your back stories in a separate location and use them only sparingly in your manuscript. I am going to start revising the second manuscript this month; the first fifty pages of manuscript #2 are back story on a character I like a lot. But the back story has got to go: I am going to cut those pages, save them elsewhere, and move on with the revisions.
10. Make decisions. This is the final and most important point. Maybe you know exactly what you want to say and how you want to say. Maybe your manuscript is perfect. If so, then congratulations! You do not need to read this article. I, however, have to decide whether or not to use the prologue, whether I should capitalize the letter d every time I use it in the words dreamer, dreaming, and dream. I need to decide if my main character Z should be active in the scene in Chapter 14. (The answer is Yes, he should.) Re-writing is decision making in action.

Remember, this is work but can be thrilling. Writing a novel is like sailing solo across the ocean. Revising a novel is like sailing solo across the ocean a second time: you know what to do, but you would foolish not take charts, GPS, radio, food, water, sailing lessons, life vest, repair gear, etc. And of course, there are as many ways to revise a novel as there to write one. Good luck!