Larocque and Roll

NaNo 2007 Day 30: Endgame December 1, 2007

I just spent the last hour an a half in the kitchen making the components of a gingerbread trifle (it will be assembled tomorrow afternoon). Before that, I spent most of the day cleaning the house, moving furniture around, and shopping for groceries. Last night I spent almost three hours baking gingerbread cookies [1] for the cookie exchange at work today. Before that, I spent an accumulated seven or eight hours making new curtains for the windows on the main floor and a new cover for my footstool.

Prior to that, I’ve entertained four guests on three occasions for a total of six days and seven nights (I’m rounding up, I think). With those visits, came the obligitory cleaning and slaying of dust bunnies.

This is a long way of saying that I didn’t get any writing done on my story since the last update. None. My total word count this year was under 2000. I did try a few times - I’d sit down at my laptop and stare at my screen for an hour or so before giving up and going and doing something more [2] productive.

Part of it was the story - I just wasn’t feeling it. I had no plot, no characters, and no passion for what I’d written. If I’d had any of the three, you can bet I’d have made time to work on the story. As it was, it was too easy to walk away from it because I couldn’t see getting to the point where I would start to like it. And in the end, there was just no spark. To belabour the analogy, the patient had very little life on arrival and died on the table.

Would I do NaNoWriMo again? Damn skippy I would! Would I do it next year? I sincerely hope so.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go to bed. I’m hosting the staff Christmas party tomorrow night - almost everything is done except sweeping the floor, and cooking my two dishes. I can sleep the sleep of someone who is on schedule for once.

[1] Yes, I’m obsessed with gingerbread. What made you ask?
[2] Or occasionally less.

NaNo 2007 Day 6: Baby steps November 7, 2007

Sunday night when I got home, I managed to bang out just over 1700 words, which would have been great on day 1 or 2, but worrisome on day 4. Yesterday I got home and practically had to turn around and go straight back out, not getting home until almost 10. And work has been really busy so no NaNoing there.

Tonight hasn’t been a total bust, but it’s close. I now have just over 2000 words, and considering I should have over 10,000 by the end of today, that’s pretty bad. Tonight I’ve been phenominally unproductive [1], and I’ve wasted so much time that it’s better that I just stop now and go to bed.

Production note: I have a Twitter account (because I haven’t met a bandwagon that I didn’t like), and I’ve posted the feed in the sidebar; I have widgets on my browser at home and at work, and occasionally post updates using that.

[1] As far as working on the story goes. However, I have done the following:
~ Downloaded 8 songs from iTunes;
~ Listened to Three Dog Night’s Shambala 21 times in a row [2] [3];
~ Drank two cups of Earl Grey Vanilla tea;
~ Talked to the cat about the plot, or should I say, lack thereof.

[2] I was trying to use it to inspire me to write the introduction to another character, but it’s all wrong for what I had in mind. Or maybe I should just run with what I have…

[3] It is my firm belief that if you are inspired by a song, or need a song to set a particular mood, you can’t listen to it too many times in a row. On Sunday night I listened to Arcade Fire’s “My Body is a Cage” 32 times in a row because I was trying to set a mood for a funeral, and it was the most perfect song on my iPod at the time.

Nano 2007 Day 4: Where’s my word count at? November 4, 2007

It’s Sunday morning, and I’m sitting at my sister’s kitchen table. I’ve been here since Friday evening and it’s been a non-stop whirlwind of family kinds of things, including throwing a birthday party for my b-i-l. We’re not going to talk about how many bottles of wine have been consumed between my sisters, my cousin and myself. Let’s just say it’s still in the single digits, but not in the low ones. And that Vineland Estates Dry Riesling is my new favourite wine.

Enough about our drinking problems [1]. I haven’t even come close to meeting my word count for the last four days, let alone the first day. So far, I have one paragraph and a sentence on the second one. Woo. Go me.

I’m heading home shortly, where I will spend the rest of the afternoon and evening trying to meet my target.

[1] Namely, that we ran out and had to stop.

NaNo 2007: Pre-production October 31, 2007

Le sigh.

After I made my little pro/con list last week, I thought in my mind that I’d settled the matter - that I’d sit this year out and come back next year. It felt good to make that decision, and I went about my merry way.

Then I got an idea for a story.

No, no, no. I can’t do it. I absolutely have no time for this.

But it’s a good idea! And it will let you write both a story and free-form parts, for those times when the plot just isn’t there.

No! Three of the four weekends in November, I have either one or no free days. I have work/committee commitments almost every week.

You can write it using Google Docs, so you can steal a few moments here and there at work. Chipping away at the word count all day is better than trying to bang it out in the evenings.

I’m not even finished the work writing I mentioned! It needs to be done first!

You know you wanna…

Oh, fine. I’ll do it. Damn you, mind!

To NaNo or not to NaNo October 25, 2007

Basically, I just spent over an hour agonizing about whether or not to participate in NaNoWriMo again this year. My arguements went thusly:

Cons:

~ I have proven that I can do it, having won last year, after losing the previous three years.
~ I have other creative outlets; writing fiction doesn’t have the same meaning for me any more.
~ It would be nice to have my Novembers back, finally.
~ I don’t have anything prepared. No plot, big problem.
~ I have a major writing project at work I’m not finished yet, and that should come first. Overall, I’m really busy at work and I’d like to be able to come home and unwind instead of coming home to wind up for something else.

Pros:

~ Just because I did it once doesn’t mean I can do it again. That’s why it’s a challenge!
~ I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the experience, even in the years when I didn’t win.
~ Maybe not having a plot isn’t a bad thing. I can just write the first things that come to mind.

Right now, the con list is a lot more compelling than the pro list, but I can’t ignore the feeling that this is something I should be doing. The compromise my mind and heart are coming to seems to be something along the lines of “let’s take this year off, and go back at it next year!” Maybe my challenge will be to do one blog post a day.

We shall see.

It came to me in a dream, and now I have to use in my NaNoWriMo story September 9, 2007

“Hey, Kurt?”
“Yeah?”
“I was just thinking…”
Kurt waited, and then spun his chair around. Chris was already facing him. “What? What were you thinking?”
“Do you ever wonder if, when Ed McMahon is having a bad day, he goes out into his back yard, looks up at the sky and shakes his fist? And then says, ‘Johnny, you bastard! How could you? How could you die and leave me here alone? We were supposed to go together!’” Chris was shaking his fist to demonstrate.
“No, I… can’t say it’s ever crossed my mind,” said Kurt carefully.
“Oh. Okay then.” Chris swung his chair back around to face his desk. Kurt stared at him for another moment or two before doing the same.

Excerpty goodness January 1, 2007

Check it out - I finally posted some NaNo excerpts tonight! I tried not to read them closely because, while I know they’re embarrassingly bad, I don’t need to know just *how* bad they are.

Click on the “My NaNoWriMo” link on the sidebar. Eventually, there will be more, and they will be from both 2005 and 2006.

UPDATE: On second thought, I’ve password-protected it. Email me if you want the password (rlarocque at gmail period com)

NaNo 2006 Day 30: Brothers and Sisters, can I get a “Hell yes!”? November 30, 2006

NaNo 2006 Day 29: Wire-ish November 29, 2006

By tomorrow before midnight, I need to have 50,000 words. Right now, after a stunning 9k weekend, I have almost 44k.

I can do this.

Other fun things which have popped up in the story that I wasn’t expecting: a kitten named Pinkytoes Caribou McSmartypants. If that sounds like a bizarre name for an animal, it’s because it was the subject line in a piece of s*am I got a while back. I’d been waiting for the perfect opportunity to use it, and there was this kitten which needed a name, and bam! A kitten with an unusual name!

Only 6k left. Better start writing.

NaNo 2006 Day 26: The end is nigh November 26, 2006

So… tired… can’t… type… anymore…

I cracked the 38k mark not that long ago, and I should keep going, yet the fatigue is making it hard to type. Plus, it’s really late. I know, I know - my excuses are pathetic. But I’ve done a lot of writing this weekend, and I learned an important lesson this week.

What I learned is that it’s no good to tell myself that I will sit down for half an hour and bang something out. It’s all well and good to set a time limit, but how much you get accomplished varies from time to time. Sometimes I can write almost 800 words, others I’m lucky if I manage 20.

Now when I sit down, I say, “Self, if you ever want to eat dinner/watch TV/go to bed, you must produce 500/1000 words.” I’ve found this to be much more effective because I know that no matter how long it takes, I will have over 500 words written, then I will go do something for a little while and come back to it later.

So far it’s worked well, if you’re going by sheer quantity. If you actually expect them to be 500 words that make sense or move the plot along, go talk to someone else. I whimpered through a good 250 words about frozen cow embryos tonight - I wanted to stop, and the best way to hit my target was to explain why this character had seven crates of frozen cow embryos, and what he was going to do with them (sell them to another farmer). Does it have any bearing on anything else? No, not really. But it was 250 words, so I’m not going to question it too much.

Other news!

I went on a craft crawl today, and at one of the stops I met members of the local knitter’s guild. They were quite keen, and happy to meet someone around their age who shared a love of fancy yarns. As I put it, I’m in the “acrylic is crap” phase, which is good. Other things I found: a photographer with some very cool photos, which I need to find frames for, and a necklace.

That’s it for tonight!