Intersection Logs

(In other words, I'm participating in NaNoWriMo, for the fifth time since 2008.)


I even made a cover of sorts. I still have a couple of days to figure out the rest of my plot. I'm deliberately not driving myself crazy trying to follow all the plot templates at once, this time, or even worrying too much about whether my viewpoint character is a sufficiently proactive protagonist; I just want to be writing again, after a hiatus of more than a year.



( Image Credits )

The Windows 7 Upgrade setup program's background image features a cute little dove with an olive branch. What exactly is Microsoft trying to say, I wonder? Please don't hate us any more? I'll reserve judgment on that until I see what it looks like when it's done.

This was a Phoenix weekend, and I have not embarked on any ambitious writing projects. Oddly enough, a completely new story-seed did drop into my brain somewhere around Picacho Peak yesterday, complete with first scene, setting, and three-and-a-half characters. And a title: Stone and Silver. Still not going to drive myself crazy trying to Nano, though; this month is going to be tough enough without that.

Well, maybe. Haven't really made up my mind about this one yet.

Get yours here.

I have finally printed out the Behemoth novel-so-far, all 100K words of it. (85k? that was me conflating my guesstimate of 85% completion with the 85k words total I wrote last year, I think.) Twenty pages at a time, 179 pages total. Plus wastage, where it skipped a page and all the other pages in the batch are out-of-phase. Cheap laser, inexpensive paper; not professional tools.

I've had fiddlier, slower printing experiences. Like printing out my PhD thesis on a 2-min-per-page dot matrix printer with a BBC micro that could only handle about half a chapter at a time, and there was one chapter where I had to load a different set of handcrafted symbol fonts between pages. Like printing a different novel-length thing in four-sheet signatures on a 2ppm bubble-jet without a sheet feeder, hand-feeding every sheet four times. That was ... a while ago, though.

And now the laser printer wants me to order it a new cartridge. Fortunately, I did that a long time ago, and the replacement is sitting on top of my filing cabinet at work.

For the first time in months, my writer-brain is itching, but I can't decide where to start. So, a poll!




[Poll #1398394]

It feels like a year in which I spent most of the time not writing. I do seem to have drafted about 85,000 words since Jan 1st, though -- 28K on a failed nanowrimo and the rest on the Behemoth novel mostly in an incomplete round of thing_in_150 earlier in the year. I didn't finish the Behemoth novel, let along the nano-thing (which is actually the exile planet novel, provisionally titled Thule), though, so I feel like a failure. Also, I didn't revise anything at all. (And I'm not at a point where I want to even think about submitting.)

I think for 2009 I should try not setting rigid wordcount goals; there are too many traps there. What I do want to try is something like writing at least something -- even if it's only a bit of outline or a few sentences -- say five days a week. The next couple of weeks are not a good time for starting new habits, as I'll be out of the country from Jan 2nd-10th, but I'll see what I can do.

Also, I know I haven't been posting much lately, and I haven't even kept up the Friday Flowers for the last couple of months. I'll try to be better about that, too.

I'm at a bit over 8000 words. Yes, that's way off the pace; on the other hand, it's 8000+ words I didn't have before, and I've been a wee bit distracted by watching history happen. I'm also not too worried, because I wouldn't have even attempted this if I wasn't intending to take a chunk of vacation at the end of the month. It seems that I can't push myself to do more than 800 words or so on a work night, and writing early in the morning is just not possible. I am moving along faster and with less inhibition than usual, but I still have to stop and think to some extent, and ask Word what the green squiggles are about and then decide whether it's right or just blindly applying the wrong rule.

but I've signed up (under the same username). And cleaned the apartment in preparation.

It is now slightly thereafter ...

But that wasn't what I wanted to post about.

I'm feeling somewhat disenchanted with the Behemoth novel at the moment. It's been stalled at just over 100K words, give or take a few brief false starts, since May or thereabouts when the heat and the travel started to make it hard to keep to routine, and I can't rouse myself to much enthusiasm for finishing it. There's still a lot that needs to happen in between now and the ending, certainly more than 20K worth; hero and heroine have only just met, after a long online acquaintance, for one thing.

The trouble is, I have a horrible feeling that the words so far are not only the wrong words, but describing entirely the wrong subset of events. There's a multi-planet-spanning civilization on the verge of economic collapse in the aftermath of a war a generation ago, a tragic Ahab-esque Captain, hyperspace pirates and enigmatic aliens and a peevish semi-sentient computer ... but most of what has actually happened on stage so far seems to involve messing about with thumb drives and cellphones, drinking coffee, and trapesing through endless corridors. Once I get to the end, I'm going to have to go right back to the beginning and try to find the right bits to put in instead.

It might have been more efficient to start with a proper outline, but nothing happened when I tried to write one. If I didn't have three more or less coherent novel-length objects lying around, I'd be starting to think I wasn't cut out for this novel-writing business at all.

I wrote 515 words tonight, which is admittedly not much, but more than I've been doing. (I got about 800 words last month; most of my computer time was going to digitizing slides.) For the record, the wordcount as of yesterday was 102,002.

The AC hasn't been fixed, I think, but mercifully the weather hasn't been too terribly hot today, so it's bearable. Sort of.