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Saturday, November 09, 2002
Hello, everyone. I've been really super-busy the last few days. My schedule has been jam-packed with not writing, and I simply haven't had any time to post to my blog.
I decided to take a break from writing on Thursday because I had dinner plans and because my hands really suffered from my massive binge on Wednesday. I went out and had a great time, and in the process I made a discovery: I'm really good at not writing. I did such an impressive job, in fact, that I decided to follow it up with another session on Friday. I was getting tired of not writing at my house, so I went over to m@'s to not write. Although we got some good not writing done, I was a little tired and distracted, so I ended up writing about 1200 words. It was a minor setback, but I can overcome it. I'm sure I'll have my concentration back tomorrow so I can get back off track.
To stimulate our impulse to not create and reward ourselves for a job not done, m@ and I went to the movies. One of the trailers we saw was for the new Charlie Kaufman/Spike Jones film Adaptation, about Kaufman's attempt to adapt a book into a film script. (Just go with it.) At one point, Kaufman is in the office of a man who is presumably a studio suit.
"The book has no story," Kaufman complains.
"...so make one up," the suit says.
In return he fixes the suit with an incredulous look indicating that this is the most ridiculous and impossible request that one could make, especially of a writer.
I know EXACTLY how he feels.
The movie to which this trailer was attached was P.T. Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love. I thought it was wonderful. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I found it funny and weird and uncomfortable and exhilarating. I won't ruin it for you by going into any more detail. It's one of my favorite movies of the year so far.
I decided to take a break from writing on Thursday because I had dinner plans and because my hands really suffered from my massive binge on Wednesday. I went out and had a great time, and in the process I made a discovery: I'm really good at not writing. I did such an impressive job, in fact, that I decided to follow it up with another session on Friday. I was getting tired of not writing at my house, so I went over to m@'s to not write. Although we got some good not writing done, I was a little tired and distracted, so I ended up writing about 1200 words. It was a minor setback, but I can overcome it. I'm sure I'll have my concentration back tomorrow so I can get back off track.
To stimulate our impulse to not create and reward ourselves for a job not done, m@ and I went to the movies. One of the trailers we saw was for the new Charlie Kaufman/Spike Jones film Adaptation, about Kaufman's attempt to adapt a book into a film script. (Just go with it.) At one point, Kaufman is in the office of a man who is presumably a studio suit.
"The book has no story," Kaufman complains.
"...so make one up," the suit says.
In return he fixes the suit with an incredulous look indicating that this is the most ridiculous and impossible request that one could make, especially of a writer.
I know EXACTLY how he feels.
The movie to which this trailer was attached was P.T. Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love. I thought it was wonderful. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I found it funny and weird and uncomfortable and exhilarating. I won't ruin it for you by going into any more detail. It's one of my favorite movies of the year so far.
| NaNoWriMo Update | ||
| Total Word Count: | 20,238 | |
| Today's Word Count: | 1158 | |
| +/- Schedule: | 4.90 days ahead | |
| % Complete: | 40.48% complete | |
Thursday, November 07, 2002
I bet you thought I was done writing for the day, didn't you Mr. Pogue?
| Total Word Count: | 19080 | |
| Daily Word Count: | 5640 | |
| +/- Schedule: | 5.22 days | |
| % Complete: | 38.16% complete |
Tuesday, November 05, 2002
Today I participated in the biennial American nose-holding tradition that is Election Day. I have been extremely put off by the election this year. Perhaps it has something to do with the 374,000 telephone calls I receive every week from computers armed with audio recordings urging me to vote for Candidate X or Candidate Y. Or perhaps it's because of the 185,000 campaign flyers I receive in my mailbox every day, sometimes from two competing candidates on the same day. It's fun to go down the list of issues and watch them contradict each other ("Candidate Bill Johnson is the future of our state!" "Candidate Bill Johnson is a huge jerk!"), but I'm always afraid to get them too close together for fear that I might be destroyed in the violent matter/anti-matter explosion that would result.
The telephone calls are what really get to me, though. The risk these campaigns run by calling me on the phone is that their candidates will receive the same response I give to telemarketers, in which I curse them to spend an eternity roasting in Hades, where they will be disemboweled by Lucifer's own hellhounds and have their hollowed out corpses roasted on a spit over a roaring bit of brimstone and have their innards strung up on a rack and forced to listen to someone telling them for the 1 million gajillionth time why they (the innards) should switch their long-distance service to MCI. That's not exactly the type of response you want to engender towards your candidate, so if any campaign managers are reading this, my advice is to discontinue telephone canvassing immediately.
At any rate, I went and did my duty and voted. It was hard. I didn't really like any of the candidates, and I'm very baffled about how some people can get so excited about a person that they will march up and down in the cold waving signs at people, like the campaign workers outside my polling place this morning. I'm all for political activism in theory, but I'm not seeing much out there that deserves such a response.
Personally, I am dangerously close to adopting an "all joke candidate" voting policy, except that I'm afraid the joke candidates might actually win. Can you imagine the horror Jesse Ventura must have felt in the 1998 election when the returns came in and it became clear that he was actually going to win, and that would have to give up his life of wearing a feather boa and making lots of money in favor of running Minnesota? If anyone was cursing the electorate that night, I bet it was him.
Oh, yeah, and then there's that whole novel thing. I wanted to go to my RPG group tonight, so I only had an hour after work to write. I got a decent number of words in for the time I spent, but the writing is crappy, crappy, crappy. I haven't felt terrible about my writing so far this year, but today I fell back into the same trap I did last year, which is just relentlessly trying to connect the dots of my plot and not paying any attention to writing anything particularly good. I really need to slow down and start writing material I actually like, rather than material I think should be in there. Oh, and I wrote myself into a major contradiction between what I thought the book was going to be about and what I need to happen to move my story along. I don't know how I'm going to resolve that little problem.
The word count crown for today goes to Mr. Pogue. I am way too tired to write any more novel tonight, and I wanted to get a blog entry in, so I'm not even going to try to add any more words. You win this round, but I'll be back. Just wait until I'm brave enough to venture back into the E. coli infested booths of Taco Time. Then you'll see the words start to fly.
The telephone calls are what really get to me, though. The risk these campaigns run by calling me on the phone is that their candidates will receive the same response I give to telemarketers, in which I curse them to spend an eternity roasting in Hades, where they will be disemboweled by Lucifer's own hellhounds and have their hollowed out corpses roasted on a spit over a roaring bit of brimstone and have their innards strung up on a rack and forced to listen to someone telling them for the 1 million gajillionth time why they (the innards) should switch their long-distance service to MCI. That's not exactly the type of response you want to engender towards your candidate, so if any campaign managers are reading this, my advice is to discontinue telephone canvassing immediately.
At any rate, I went and did my duty and voted. It was hard. I didn't really like any of the candidates, and I'm very baffled about how some people can get so excited about a person that they will march up and down in the cold waving signs at people, like the campaign workers outside my polling place this morning. I'm all for political activism in theory, but I'm not seeing much out there that deserves such a response.
Personally, I am dangerously close to adopting an "all joke candidate" voting policy, except that I'm afraid the joke candidates might actually win. Can you imagine the horror Jesse Ventura must have felt in the 1998 election when the returns came in and it became clear that he was actually going to win, and that would have to give up his life of wearing a feather boa and making lots of money in favor of running Minnesota? If anyone was cursing the electorate that night, I bet it was him.
Oh, yeah, and then there's that whole novel thing. I wanted to go to my RPG group tonight, so I only had an hour after work to write. I got a decent number of words in for the time I spent, but the writing is crappy, crappy, crappy. I haven't felt terrible about my writing so far this year, but today I fell back into the same trap I did last year, which is just relentlessly trying to connect the dots of my plot and not paying any attention to writing anything particularly good. I really need to slow down and start writing material I actually like, rather than material I think should be in there. Oh, and I wrote myself into a major contradiction between what I thought the book was going to be about and what I need to happen to move my story along. I don't know how I'm going to resolve that little problem.
The word count crown for today goes to Mr. Pogue. I am way too tired to write any more novel tonight, and I wanted to get a blog entry in, so I'm not even going to try to add any more words. You win this round, but I'll be back. Just wait until I'm brave enough to venture back into the E. coli infested booths of Taco Time. Then you'll see the words start to fly.
| Total Word Count: | 13440 | |
| Daily Word Count: | 2036 | |
| +/- Schedule: | 2.91 days ahead | |
| % Complete: | 26.88% |
Monday, November 04, 2002
I was really dreading the novel tonight, so I tried out an old writer's trick that I heard about: I arranged little cardboard cutouts shaped like Ikea furniture on a piece of paper so I could figure out what my new den should look like.
In case you hadn't figured it out, I am in major procrastination mode. I am jumping on the slightest distractions with a kind of gusto not seen since I was 7 years old and the ice cream man was driving by our house. Even the most dreaded tasks seem like never-ending fun. "Cleaning the bathroom? Hey, that's not my novel! Let me at it!" I almost engaged a telemarketer in a conversation tonight just to get out of writing. I've also noticed that I like to eat when I'm procrastinating, so when I went grocery shopping tonight (another chore I tackled in lieu of working) I protected my health by purchasing Reduced Fat Cheez-Its instead of the regular kind. I will now accrue fat 40% slower than I might otherwise have while I sit around not accruing words.
At about 8:30 I finally got to the point at which I could procrastinate no more. I couldn't figure out how and where my character should find out that he was dead, so I sat looking at a blank page for a long while. Then I got frustrated and just said Screw It! He's...in a boat. And someone just tells him he's dead - the guy driving the boat can do it. Fine. My first sentence was, "Doug woke up in a boat." The second was, "'You're dead,' said the boatman."
And that was that. Once I made that decision, I wrote for three hours without looking up. The words flowed from my brain like I imagine wine would flow if I ever drank wine. Once again I find that the key to writing is just sitting down and frigging writing.
In case you hadn't figured it out, I am in major procrastination mode. I am jumping on the slightest distractions with a kind of gusto not seen since I was 7 years old and the ice cream man was driving by our house. Even the most dreaded tasks seem like never-ending fun. "Cleaning the bathroom? Hey, that's not my novel! Let me at it!" I almost engaged a telemarketer in a conversation tonight just to get out of writing. I've also noticed that I like to eat when I'm procrastinating, so when I went grocery shopping tonight (another chore I tackled in lieu of working) I protected my health by purchasing Reduced Fat Cheez-Its instead of the regular kind. I will now accrue fat 40% slower than I might otherwise have while I sit around not accruing words.
At about 8:30 I finally got to the point at which I could procrastinate no more. I couldn't figure out how and where my character should find out that he was dead, so I sat looking at a blank page for a long while. Then I got frustrated and just said Screw It! He's...in a boat. And someone just tells him he's dead - the guy driving the boat can do it. Fine. My first sentence was, "Doug woke up in a boat." The second was, "'You're dead,' said the boatman."
And that was that. Once I made that decision, I wrote for three hours without looking up. The words flowed from my brain like I imagine wine would flow if I ever drank wine. Once again I find that the key to writing is just sitting down and frigging writing.
| Total Word Count: | 11404 | |
| Daily Word Count: | 3389 | |
| +/- Schedule: | 2.7 days ahead | |
| % Complete: | 22.81% complete |
Sunday, November 03, 2002
Blargh. Writer's block. I put a lot of words on the page this weekend, but in the process I wrote myself completely out of ideas. Doug has to go meet God next, and I have no idea what He's going to say, so I've been procrastinating. Everything I wrote today was basically just stalling for time because I don't have a clue about what should happen next. I even went out a bought a book about Heaven to give me some ideas. It hasn't helped much so far, although the only part I've read is an autobiographical essay about Jung's near-death experience in 1944. (Weird book.)
Speaking of psychologists, I had a fascinating Freudian slip in my novel today. I wrote the sentence, "The person is forced to writhe in agony for all eternity," and it wasn't until five minutes later that I realized that what I'd actually typed was, "The person is forced to write in agony for all eternity." Oops. I guess my subconscious is a little angry that I wouldn't take it to the movies this weekend.
Speaking of psychologists, I had a fascinating Freudian slip in my novel today. I wrote the sentence, "The person is forced to writhe in agony for all eternity," and it wasn't until five minutes later that I realized that what I'd actually typed was, "The person is forced to write in agony for all eternity." Oops. I guess my subconscious is a little angry that I wouldn't take it to the movies this weekend.
| Total Word Count: | 8015 | |
| Daily Word Count: | 1221 | |
| +/- Schedule: | 2915 words ahead | |
| % Complete: | 16.03% |
Listening: Blackalicious, Blazing Arrow (Thanks to EdC for this recommendation!)
Reading: Nothing, remember?
Wow, a lot of words today. I really made up for my slow start. I had a writing session this evening before dinner and another one tonight at 11 PM, and I made nice progress in both. I got my main character killed off tonight, so I can finally start making some progress in my story. That guy just wouldn't die...
I was feeling good about my word count total, so I checked the word count numbers on the NaNoWriMo word count page so I wouldn't get cocky. (Sort by Word Count to see the current leaders.) Someone called Stromie claims to have written 100,873 words already, which I find somewhat hard to believe. I suppose it's physically possible - it works out to roughly 2100 words per hour, or 2500 if you assume 4 hours a day for sleeping and eating - but I'm still skeptical. Even if we throw out Stromie, there are still 7 people with over 20,000 words already. I'm quite happy with my 6800, thank you.
I've found that I can get about two hours of solid, productive writing done before I lose steam. After that I get distracted and start looking for other things to do. Today I had three two hour sessions, which is pretty good. One of my distractions this morning was putting my novel in SourceSafe. For better or for worse, and at the cost of several cool points, my novel is now archived and protected from accidental erasure.
My mouse hand is starting to make carpal-tunnely complaints, which is not good. I need to give my hands a little rest tomorrow.
Reading: Nothing, remember?
Wow, a lot of words today. I really made up for my slow start. I had a writing session this evening before dinner and another one tonight at 11 PM, and I made nice progress in both. I got my main character killed off tonight, so I can finally start making some progress in my story. That guy just wouldn't die...
I was feeling good about my word count total, so I checked the word count numbers on the NaNoWriMo word count page so I wouldn't get cocky. (Sort by Word Count to see the current leaders.) Someone called Stromie claims to have written 100,873 words already, which I find somewhat hard to believe. I suppose it's physically possible - it works out to roughly 2100 words per hour, or 2500 if you assume 4 hours a day for sleeping and eating - but I'm still skeptical. Even if we throw out Stromie, there are still 7 people with over 20,000 words already. I'm quite happy with my 6800, thank you.
I've found that I can get about two hours of solid, productive writing done before I lose steam. After that I get distracted and start looking for other things to do. Today I had three two hour sessions, which is pretty good. One of my distractions this morning was putting my novel in SourceSafe. For better or for worse, and at the cost of several cool points, my novel is now archived and protected from accidental erasure.
My mouse hand is starting to make carpal-tunnely complaints, which is not good. I need to give my hands a little rest tomorrow.
| Total Word Count: | 6794 | |
| +/- Schedule: | 3394 words ahead | |
| % Complete: | 13.59% |