Last night was Friday. My day at school went pretty well until the final block, when one of my little hard cases who is going through a significant life change and isn't happy about it decided it was Acting Out Day. This made for a frustrating afternoon, but it's almost impossible to not feel sorry for how unhappy this kid is. Almost.... So by the time I got home, it felt like a good night to eat dinner in front of the TV while catching up on some DVR. This is the first time I have allowed myself to do that in almost two weeks. It felt awesome.
This is what my Nanowrimo Life has been like: Wake up sometime between 4:00 and 5:00 AM, drag my cloudy head out of bed and write for at least an hour. Maybe get back to bed for another hour or so when I finish, depending on if there's enough time to make it worthwhile. I try to keep this going, because I've learned I'm way more productive in the morning than I am at night. Then I go through my school day routine, beginning with the morning shower and ending with the drive home. I try to get home as soon as possible, but I know I usually will need to keep working until 5:00 or so, to make sure the next day is ready and I won't have to bring anything home to do. Because nearly every moment of spare time I have these days goes into writing.
And when I say writing, I don't necessarily mean upping my word count. The process of writing could mean reworking the chapter outlines I have from my prewriting to accommodate any story changes that have come up since I've started. These aren't major changes but there is a domino effect in play, so if one new spark of an idea came to me back in chapter 3, I need to think about how that's going to affect what happens between those characters in chapter 8. Then there's the non-revising, as I've come to think of it. To complete 50,000 words (or still hopefully at least 60,000, in my case) during 30 days you really have to keep the word count steadily climbing, and this doesn't allow for a lot of reflection as you write. If I wasn't caught up in such a sprint, I could take the time to think about why this one word I'm looking at doesn't capture what I'm trying to say as perfectly as I'd like it to. Not so much now. I can't take the time to craft the expression like I'd want to even if what I have really sucks, so I'll just go with the less-than-ideal placeholder phrase, label it with a comment so I remember to come back and fix it later, and on.
The word count push is going well. Even with one night of parent-teacher conferences under my belt, I've been able to maintain a 2,000+ words per day average. The first few days were rough. I had to struggle to find my footing, to figure out what direction I was going to go to make this version of the story as reinvented as I want it to be while still working from the same blueprint I had before. There were a few evenings when I'd sit down and just stare at the blank document and think, "So now what?" for a few minutes. I soon found it worked a lot better to consistently do what I know is a basic good writing practice: I had to make sure I was leaving off at a "good part," cutting myself off at a spot that I hadn't squeezed all of the ideas out of yet so I'd be able to jump back in when I returned. Having that starting point to return to helps a lot.
As I keep pushing forward, there are moments I can feel myself starting to ramble and get repetitive. Which usually isn't okay, but for now it is. I hate to get all artsy with the analogies, but all I need right now is the clay. I need something I can work with later, something I'll be able to sculpt and perfect into the story I already know this is, but just have to go through the little job of creating it. I know I can trim away all of the suck later when it comes to revising, so I'm not worried about it right now.
I'm a fairly goal-oriented person, so it's hard to not keep track of the word count as I write, just to be aware of what kind of progress I'm making. I was hoping that using the Pages full screen feature would help with that, but I was soon reminded that three things are displayed in full screen mode: The document itself, the word count, and the page count. So even though that mode helps get rid of several other distractions for me, it still lets that number keep its place in my brain. Which is sometimes good, and sometimes frustrates the hell out of me.
I've got the soundtrack pretty fine-tuned now, which makes a significant difference. For me, it's a big help to be listening to music while I write, if that music contains the same qualities I'm trying to infuse in the story. Being that this is a ghost story that in some ways is now leaning a little more toward a character-driven horror story, there has been some pretty dark and heavy music in my head lately: Black Sabbath. Metallica. The Cult. Dream Theater. Redemption. Tool. Coheed and Cambria. Judas Priest. Kamelot. Blue Murder. Dio. Iron Maiden. Even a little Ozzy and Nine Inch Nails. This is what I listen to pretty much all the time now -- when I'm writing, when I'm working out, when I'm driving, even when I have the ear buds plugged into my iPhone during prep time at school. I'm surprised I'm not having heavy metal nightmares from all of it.
To give you some perspective of the pace I'm at, I wrote this entire post between about 6:20 AM and 6:59 AM. I'm used to being up and working this early now. And this post alone will be close to 1,100 words by the time I finish.
What did you get done today before The Today Show even started?
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