Of frenzied scripting
A quick update, for I have to actually leave the house to do things today (a rare occurrence at the moment, I tell you), but I thought that a few people who read this might appreciate it. As an ex-NaNoWriMo participant I received an email from Chris Baty, its organiser, telling me about Script Frenzy, [...]
Clicking along on bright rails
252 / 333 (75.7%) Just eighty-one pages to go. Well, probably. I can’t remember whether or not, somewhere in those eighty-one pages, I’ve written a message in caps to myself, telling me that I need to fill a bit in. In fact, I’ve just come across one such note at the end of page 252, [...]
Note to self
NaNoWriMo 2006 registration starts tomorrow. Don’t forget.
My kingdom for an update
Funny things, blogs. You can set one up without too much thought (I’m living proof of this, by the way) and happily pootle along, filling it with all kinds of foufouraw about your life, your aspirations and your thoughts, and never really think about what you’re writing. And then, one day, your workmates (hello fellas) [...]
Graham’s Theory of Writing #42
Writing is far easier when you don’t have to think about how to start. It’s true, it’s true. For the past three nights I’ve sat at my desk and stared first at the computer screen, then at some blank A4, then at one notepad, then at the A4 again. Finally, I’ve stared at my little [...]
So it begins
And so it begins. To the left, observe the first draft of Muse – or whatever it ends up being called – in all its double-spaced single-sided glory. I managed all of ten pages today – the first chapter – though it felt slightly strange, as though they weren’t my words at all and it [...]
Done
98,203 / 98,203 (100.0%) 98,203 words.Done. More-or-less, anyway. Okay, let’s be honest here. There are bits that I need to fill in, mostly marked in caps, dotted all around the manuscript. Unless I’m very much wrong, they’ll add up to at least another 5,000 words, but the story’s there, even if it’s just in brief [...]
Wherein Nothing Happens
A sudden, sickening, horrible thought hit me as I was finishing the 1,800 words that I wrote tonight: There a part of my story in which nothing really happens. Worse, though, is the fact that that part of the story accounts for most of the damn novel, or at least so it seems to the [...]
w00t, But quiet like
I’ve finished NaNoWriMo 2005, as evidenced by the image below: So that’s about half of the actual novel out of the way. At the moment, as of 50,100 words (NaNo’s word counter treats hyphenated words oddly, I think), the hero, the heroine and the hero’s mate are sat in the hero’s kitchen having a well [...]
Hm.
I wrote all of fifty words today. No, less than fifty words, in fact: forty-nine. That, my friends, sucks. And it sucks lots. But at least I stopped writing about vomiting, which is a blessing.
Nearly There
A good night tonight, after a series of thousand-words-or-less sessions that nearly had me tearing my hair out. I overcame a minor bout of writer’s block by simply not finishing the chapter that I was stuck on; there’s a thirty-six word summary of what needs to have happened between where I left off and where [...]
The Halfway Point
Well, that’s the halfway point passed, at least. Well, sort of. Twenty-seven thousand and odd words, four thousand or so of them today. I feel pretty pleased with myself. There again, though I might be more than 50% through NaNoWriMo (and ahead of time, too, which is nice), I’m only a quarter of the way [...]
The Morning After (N +00:08:51:18)
Already I feel slightly silly for taking on NaNoWriMo. I don’t know why. It’s a peculiar habit of mine to feel embarrassed about the things that I write. It’s as though I’ve induced upon myself some indignity of the slight but ultimately crippling variety, like attending a job interview with an open fly; I want [...]
N +00:00:55:37
1,142 / 50,000(2.3%) Well, fifty minutes of writing (from the stroke of midnight, no less) and I’m already past the two percent mark for NaNo and the one percent mark for the project as a whole. Not too bad a start. I got distracted though, and started to procrastinate, so I’ve stopped now and I [...]
Over Caffeinated and Underpaid
I’m ready. I’m not too tired, I’ve had a relaxing bath (softie), I’ve got my opening paragraph poised and ready to roll over the plains of NaNoWriMo. And I’ve still got over an hour to wait. It’s like waiting for Christmas, only without as many fat-and-hairy or short-and-pointy people. Oh, and there’s a distinct lack [...]
N -01:01:02
One day, one hour and two minutes until NaNoWriMo begins. I’m not nervous at the moment, though it comes and goes. I am feeling extraordinarily tired, which, given that I’ve only been up and about for about eleven hours today, does not bode well for the next thirty days. Perhaps caffeine is the answer to [...]
N -5
NaNoWriMo is starting to take its toll, and it doesn’t start for another five days. I’m horribly tired, either from sofa-sleeping for the last few days or from not being used to actually sleeping in a real bed again yet. I haven’t got much done tonight. I’m stuck at around the 25% mark on the [...]
N -6
Achingly tired, but finally rodent free. Tonight will be spent removing all traces of mouse from the bedroom before crashing into bed for a much-needed Good Night’s sleep. Of course that means less time to work on the novel outline for NaNoWriMo, but truth be told the output from the last few days has been [...]
A Sprinkling of Hippo Dust – Fit the Third
Wherein our hero finally gets round to recording a podcast, apologises for not doing so already, and then discusses NaNoWriMo and his notebook fetish. With extra slurpy noises for added effect and a little swearing for flavour. This week’s word count: 0 / 90,000(0.0%) Links from the show: Mus musculus domesticus on Wikipedia NaNoWriMo Download [...]
Promises, promises
Well, so much for promising a podcast. So much has been happening in the last week that I haven’t had the time or the energy to put one together. I have lots of pieces of raw audio, though, so I’m sure that some well-judged editing will see me right for a podcast tomorrow. It’s a [...]
NaNoWriMo and why the word count has vanished
I’ll talk more about this in the podcast (due either tonight – if I’m very, very lucky) or tomorrow) but I thought I should explain now why the word counter has disappeared from the site. This year I’ll be participating in National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. For the last couple of years [...]
