Larocque and Roll

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!

NaNo 2006 Day 20: Crunch time November 21, 2006

See this?

This is my Thinking Cap (aka my Curling Hat, aka my Jayne Cobb Hat, aka The Ugliest Hat Known To Man). I’m getting down to the wire and while it ain’t bad, it ain’t pretty.

The universally excellent news is that I surpased last year’s word count over the weekend. Last year I wrote 26,685 words in 30 days; this year, I’m at 29,601 on day 20. (It sounded more impressive in my head.) Sunday I wrote a bunch of boring business-y things, like repairs and maintenance, and once again, sang the “I Don’t Care If It’s Technically Impossibly, As Long As It Sounds Good” song. And then I had an outline in which events A, B, C, and D would happen, but then I had a secondary character appear and throw the timeline off by two hours (bastard!) so now I have to figure out if I can use any of them.

I had a migrain today and stayed home this morning. I went to work this afternoon and then went for groceries. Now I’m going to go to bed without having written anything. Shit shit shit.

NaNo 2006 Day 16: Snake the Arms Dealer November 17, 2006

(Note: WordPress is pissing me off mightily these past few days. It screws up the formatting, and any and all attempts to fix it are met with frustration. This will be my fourth attempt to post this.)

So, lacking a good idea of what I was going to do with the one character who didn’t go on the shopping trip (*sigh* - it’s a long story), I decided he would be meeting with an arms dealer. Well, why not? The arm’s dealer’s name is Snake, but I picture him looking like Mario Batali. Really - go look at his pictures and try and and imagine him as a dealer of such lethal weapons as twin short swords, brass knuckles, and rapier-in-a-cane. And explosives. Then again, maybe you can. (Anthony Bourdain, though, I’d totally buy as a bad-ass arms dealer.)

It also turns out that the second-in-command makes wicked split pea and ham soup. I did not know that about him until I wrote it this afternoon.

In other news that won’t make you look at me strangely…

I don’t know what it is about The New Pornographers, but every one of their songs that I download instantly becomes my new favourite song that I play about 20 times in a row. For example, I’ve listen to “The Body Says No” ten times already this evening. I’m loving the line “Heavens to Betsy, come on let’s see” - fun!

(My second favourite lyric right now is from Dangerous Muse’s “The Rejection” - “I’d like to like you like you like me” - so catchy!)

Also - had trouble getting the excerpt page to co-operate. I’ll try again on the weekend.

NaNo 2006 Day 15: Halfway November 15, 2006

While I’m not quite haflway yet, the day is young. I find I write faster and longer in the mornings, so that’s what I did this morning. At night, I’m tired and distracted and it’s harder to sit still for that long.

The story is coming along. I’m almost to the point where I don’t know what happens next, except that there’s a naughty milkmaid in there somewhere, and an angry mob. But that’s not until much later. On Sunday night, I wrote a dialogue between two characters, including a line I stole from a sp*m email. It’s perfect for the situation, and I only had to modify it slightly. This morning I wrote a conversation between two characters which included a detailed explaination of what a flux capacitor is and what it does. I haven’t the faintest clue if it makes sense, but years and years of watching Star Trek in all its many variations has made me good at making my characters sound like they know what they’re talking about.

If I’m still coherent when I get home tonight, I’ll put together a page of excerpts.

NaNo 2006 Day 12: Catch-up November 12, 2006

I did it! I did it! Last night at 11:56, I reached yesterday’s word count! I got all caught up! From being two days behind to being back on track! Par-tay!

It didn’t happen all at once - it happened in chunks. I had breakfast, then wrote. Stopped because I hit a wall, then went and started the laundry. Thought of a way to get past the wall, then cleaned the kitchen. Then wrote, then went for groceries. Wrote, then had dinner, then wrote some more. Vegged for a few hours, then wrote and finished yesterday’s word count. It took about 16 hours, but I got all 2000 words I was behind, plus the 1667 words I needed for yesterday done.

Today has been slow. I’m feeling lazy and slow and unproductive. I’ve eaten ice cream and watched the first disc of season 1 of Grey’s Anatomy, and realized how good it is. Well, I knew, but now I really know, y’know? Then there’s the PMS - the sorrow and depression, the irrationality and hilarity, the food cravings, joint aches, fatigue, etc. This has got to fucking stop now, as it’s been two week and still no final sign of the main event (the cramps that would kill a horse). I hate it, I hate myself, and I hate PMS.

Now I have to motivate myself to write, and then go make meatloaf with garlic mashed potatoes*, trying to remind myself that I am not a bad person if I don’t eat the whole thing tonight.

(Updated to add: I hate HATE HATE the spell check feature on the new version of Firefox. It’s already ruined this post twice by adding words, breaking up paragraphs, and eating whole sentences. Grr…)

*Except that I forgot to buy garlic yesterday. I distinctly remember looking at it, because it was beside the ginger, and I remembered to buy ginger, but not garlic. I think I need to add temporary memory loss to that list up there**.

**And the inability to spell. All week, I’ve been typing out my name as “Reebcca”. I have all the letters, just not in the right order.

NaNo 2006 Day 11: It turns out the drag queen is on our side November 11, 2006

Woo! I’m still behind, but I had a plot breakthrough this afternoon! The drag queen! She knows what’s happening, and told the captain! Yay!

*Ahem*

Right - must remember to pretend to act normal. Check.

This week hasn’t been a total loss as far as the writing goes. I’m almost to yesterday’s total, and I’m only about 2000 words behind now. Piece of cake, especially with the breakthrough! If you want to read an excerpt, I’ve posted one on my profile, which is here.

In other newsy stuff, this week was my two month anniversary at my new job, and, coincidentally, has also been the week of the challenging library patron. Tuesday I was accused of being insensitive to Korean War veterans, Wednesday I had to get all disciplinarian on two separate groups of adolecents, and yesterday I had to deal with another irate individual half an hour before we closed. Joy!

NaNo 2006 Day 8: Aaaaaand, we’re back November 8, 2006

Yesterday, I hemmed and hawed and generally got nothing useful accomplished, knowing that this morning I could get up earlish and work on it.

What I didn’t count on was sleeping in BIG TIME, thus loosing all my morning writing mojo because I had to get ready for work, have breakfast, make my lunch, etc. (It wasn’t so much that I slept right through until it was waaaay past time to get up, it was that I got up twice to use the bathroom, then went right back to bed and fell asleep again. D’oh!)

I’d also hoped to have time to sneak in a few hundred words at work today, but that was not to be. I guess I’d better get cracking because I don’t want to be two days behind!

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NaNo 2006 Day 5: The christening of the fleet November 5, 2006

(You know what I hate about WP? No spell check.)

Today was a tough writing day. Hell, it was tough getting out of bed this morning, what with the cold, rainy weather outside and my warm, snuggly bed being all warm and snuggly. However, the demands of my bladder made it impossible to extend this snuggle-fest for very long, and once I’m up, I’m up.

The trouble with the story I encountered was that I hit a part of the story that I could do one of two things: sweeping generalizations now and details later, or details now and a quick recap later. I decided to take the middle way - some detail now, more detail later because I’m still fuzzy on certain aspects of the plot later on. But even the general details I needed to write about today - ship names and sizes, crew sizes, crew names, etc. - wasn’t easy. What I should have done early on was make a map of who does what and where so I could have posted it somewhere in front of me to refer to at times like this. But again - writing the outline while dealing with trick-or-treaters = not very productive. My bad. There was also the small matter of having to write a Q&A session some of my characters were attending. I really didn’t feel like coming up with something that detailed or long, so I cheated by saying stuff like, “people were asking questions about x, y, and z, and then someone asked about this that and the other” and so on.

The fun challenge I had today was coming up with names - of people, ships, and places. I have several galaxies named after the actors from Kids in the Hall, and a couple of ships named after TV shows (Jericho, Oz, and Smallville.) Then there’s Big Bertha, which I’m dying to use somewhere, and Kong, which may go back on the reserve list.

However, the best news is that I’m still ahead, if only slightly. Here’s to being able to sustain this kind of momentum.