MangoWriMo

I haven't done NaNoWriMo in years. Haven't even paid much attention to it in a while, but I decided today to give it a shot, in my own matty way. The average Mango script runs about 1,250 words. 50,000 words means about forty Mango scripts. I only have about 45 left to write in total to finish this year, do the promised personalized episodes for super-donors, and do 2016's MuchoMangoMayo.

http://bewarethehairymango.com/

The thought of all those shows has been dogging me, especially because I've only been able to get one Mango done a week lately. I'm going to push myself now. If I can do MangoWriMo and it doesn't destroy me, it will make life much better after November.

Here we go!

NaFlaWriMo

My take on National Novel Writing Month will be National Flash Writing Month. I'm going to write 50,000 words of flash fiction this November. Let's say 250 words a piece (Though that's not in stone) so we're looking at 200 stories. I believe this is in line with my goal as I may try to sell some of them, and expand others to short stories. I can use goofy ones for the Beware the Hairy Mango podcast.

That's all for now.

V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N!

I'm on vacation this week and it will be like the song says except for all the fun stuff. It's a writing vacation. Wheeee! But seriously, this is the type of vacation I've wanted to take for years and haven't. I've taken a week off while everyone is in school and I plan to do a lot of writing. I'm shooting for about forty-five hours and that's probably more than I've ever done in a week, even including NaNoWriMo. It's not all actual writing, there's going to be an awful lot of revision, really. And I like revising a hell of a lot more than Mur Lafferty or Paolo Bacigalupi, I can tell you that. I'm finally going to have a draft of Process Five that I can show to first readers in a day or two. I'll probably take care of Fiction Crawler 6, do some work on my novel and who knows what else? It'll be a big nerdy good time. I'll celebrate on Saturday by seeing Watchmen with the former wife.

In Twitter news, I'm starting a question of the day. If you're on there and feel like answering, have at it. If you're not on there, get on there. You can find me on Twitter as upwithgravity. No, I am not disheartened by the fact that nobody answered my first question today. I posted it at an odd time and maybe it wasn't a very good question. These things take time to catch on.

76, Big Silly!

I'm a big silly. Number 76 has been off to the races for two weeks and I haven't even mention it. It's a little poem called A Spec Fiction Writer's Lament.

The last few months have been less than stellar, from a production standpoint. I've noticed that when I get on a roll, I get all cocky. Then I confront my arch-nemesis, Process Five, and I'm stopped dead in my tracks. I'll have to sneak up on that one and take it down bit by bit, beat it up in a long war of attrition.

November promises to be very productive of course, as it's NaNoWriMo. I'll keep you guys updated. Last year I e-mailed lots of friends regularly on my progress, and they cheered me on. This year, I'm just going to do it on my own. Friends are great but I don't want to treat them like a crutch. Besides, last year was the hard one. This year I already know I can do it and short stories come easily to me. Now whether or not I produce fifty pieces of flash fiction or five novelettes or something in between, we'll just have to see. But I'm going to have fun. I haven't been very creative for the last month and a half, so I imagine brilliance will just squirt out of me unbidden. Tomorrow night it begins!

Again With The NaNoWriMo!

It's taken many years, but I'm now so comfortable in my spazziness that changing gears every month doesn't bother me anymore. This is me. I'm a spaz. "So," you might be asking, "What now?" I'll tell you what now.

After spending most of the year certain that I wasn't going to do NaNoWriMo this year, I found a reason to do it. First, the reasons to not do it: 1) I didn't need another abomination of a first draft novel that would take untold effort to rein in. 2) I need to get some short stories written, damn it!

Well, one of the cats at StarShipSofa mentioned the Rebels forum on the NaNoWriMo site, for people who trash the rules and do their own thing. I decided last night to do my own thing. So I am going to do NaNoWriMo this year, but I'll be writing first drafts of short stories instead of a first draft of a novel. At fifty-thousand words in the month of November, this could give me anywhere from five to twenty short story first drafts, depending on the lengths of the stories. So there.

I'm in it.

NaNoWriMo Update 12/30/07

Hey isn't this two days late? Yes, and not only that but December was a big bust! I got next to nothing accomplished this past month, save for a few blog entries. You might think I’d be disheartened, but looking back on past Decembers, I don’t feel too badly. I’ve had some crappy Decembers (In terms of writing productivity) followed by some fantastic Januaries. So, new year, new you, right? Now if I come back with another do-nothing update all of you should gang up and kick me squarely in the seat of my pants. But I’m not worried that you’ll have to. I’ve felt a lot of my non-writing frustration in the past two weeks as well as a burning desire to jump back into things now. And, if worse comes to worse, I’ll start wearing skirts. I’ll be back with some progress on January fifteenth. Talk to you then.

NaNoWriMo Update for 12/15/07

What? I thought it was over!

Hello everyone. I thought I'd keep my NaNoWriMo supporters updated on the progress of the novel over the coming year. I'm planning to send out update on the 15th and 30th of each month.

Not much new stuff has happened with the book so far. I've spent a lot of the last couple of weeks catching up with things that I didn't do in November and Christmas shopping. What I have done, is mapped out a series of deadlines for each draft of the book with the goal of October 30th, 2008 for sending out the book to a publisher. Then I can take Halloween off and start the whole process over again. Right now I'm re-reading the book to see what I actually have. As I do so, I'm making minor corrections, making notes and putting the scenes in the order I want them. I can also see what scenes I still need to write as I find gaps. This part of the process should be finished in just a few days. After that, I'll take a week or so to write rough drafts of those missing scenes.

If anyone has any questions on the process, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer them. I've never finished a novel before, but I'm applying my short story development method to this book (My longest short story being only about 11,000 words) and that should be good enough. If any curveballs come up, well that's life, isn't it? There's always something to learn to make the next time better.

The Big Finish

I have done it. 50,000 words in one month, and it's not so much that which impresses me, It's the nearly 26,000 words in the last five days. I have stretched myself, and learned that I can go a bit farther than I have before. I wrote nearly twelve thousand words on Thursday, about 4,500 more than I ever have before in a single day. And on top of that, most of those words made sense when they were strung together.

The novel's got a working title of "Twilight in Mumbai," and it's still going to be a long while and many drafts before it's beautiful. But it's cool that I have the first draft of a novel, a beginning middle and end and it's not too bad. Subsequent drafts will be longer of course. I'm hoping that you'll be able to read it in book form.

NaNoWriMo Update #3

Here is where we stand: I just broke the 24,ooo mark today. So that means, instead of averaging 1,667 words a day like I was supposed to, I've averaged 1,000 words a day. So that means I've got to do 26,000 more words in the next six days, or 4,334 words a day. So that means I've got a crazy-ass pile of work sitting in front of me, seemingly impossible, you'll say, considering my track record over the past three weeks.

I am not throwing in the towel. I'm still hammering away at that count, day after day. Thursday the 29th is the day of reckoning, a day off right near the end. It may prove to be one of the most miserable days of my life. Throwing down 1,ooo original words isn't that hard and really, that's all that I have to do.

Twenty-six times.

Twenty-six times in the next six days. Seems easy. Hasn't been so far. But how could I let all of you people down?

NaNoWriMo Update #2

Not a lot to report on except for the definite lack of progress. I delivered two big fat goose eggs this weekend so, on top of my already lagging wordcount, I'm now over 6,000 words behind where I want to be. Egad! No matter, the toughest happenings of the month, I think, are now behind me and I hope to get back on track.

I have to admit, I'm trying a little to hard to make decent stuff come out of me and that is not really in the true spirit of NaNoWriMo. However, I'm sure there will come a day this month where I need to catch up so badly, I'll just throw down thousands of words worth of whatever dreck pops into my head, so don't count me out yet.

NaNoWriMo Update #1

Well, we're a little over a week into it and things are going okay. They say week two is the hardest, but I started tripping up a couple of days ago. My drive fell off and so went my word counts. As of this moment, I'm about twenty-five hundred words behind where I want to be. I'm currently sitting on 10,804 words.

The story is shaping up to be a science fiction tale set in India about a hundred years from now. It features a group of adventurers who set out to turn the social injustices of the cities on their heads. That's mostly all I know so far, other than the fact that I've come up with a few ideas that really interest me. I have an idea of what's happening, but being only about one-fifth into the first draft I understand that things could turn out very different from where I think I'm going.

So, that's all for now, except for this tip for my fellow National Novel Writing Month participants: Utilize your space bar. I can't stress this enough. If you ignore this you'll find yourself working your ass off for an entire month and only having one word to show for it.