When I got into work this morning, I found out our network was dropping in and out. Which makes my usual task of loading databases that are in servers 900km in Sydney, quite hard. The network can stay active long enough to load a news article or a new Google Docs document for this post, but not much else.

But there’s one thing that doesn’t require a network connection: writing.

My novel is on a USB Flash Drive that I bring everywhere with me and since “dropping out” of NaNo on Day 10, I’ll be honest, I’ve barely written anything. This is despite my pledge to keep on writing “at my own pace.” Now is the perfect opportunity, and yet I’m blogging instead.

See “my own pace” is quite a relative and contextual thing. For the most part, “my own pace” means writing sweet fuck all. There’s hardly time for writing amongst work, politics, spending time with my partner and relaxing. Yes, I’ve said it before, capitalism stifles creativity. And there was always a danger that dropping out would just mean I didn’t write at all. There was the danger of burn out, where you push yourself so hard that writing could become a chore, or you just don’t feel like writing anymore.

So with many projects on the go, and new ideas coming in, and the network acting screwy, I don’t really have much of an excuse and it’s obvious that I should be writing.

So I’m pledging to write 300 words today. At least 300. That’s a pathetic goal really, but it’s better than the zero words I’ve written in more than a week. It’s just a start. It’s the day when I return to prose and give my muse some stimulation.

writing, NaNoWriMo, routine

Word Count: 8,600

It’s Monday morning and so not being in a good mood by default should make writing this post harder than it was already going to be. But for some reason, I’mok . This is technically my NaNoWriMo ’08 concession post, but I don’t feel like I’ve lost. In some ways, it has the feel of my throwing in the towel during NaNoWriMo ’05, I wasn’t giving up on the story, just the pace and deadline.

So I’ve written 8,600 words and can quite reasonably hit 15,000 which was my bare minimum goal. The buzz and people around me at the beginning got me started and without pushing myself at all, I got out around 6,500 words in the first weekend. But as much as the buzz is motivating, fitting writing around full-time work and maintaining sanity with a personal life means that you can’t maintain that pace without cracking. To do so, would make writing a chore and an interference in my daily life. Therefore, I’d start resenting it.

So it’s without too much regret that I announce my retirement from NaNoWriMo ’08, whilst planning to continue writing the novel at my own pace. I hope to at least write 15,000 words by the end of the month and finish plotting my novel.

On Saturday, events surrounding me and Margo going on a house inspection led me to work out a new angle around building to the climax of my novel. It’s a good one and adds a new character during this later half of the novel. I’m just letting my mind process it before I set out to plot that part.

Also, due to the coming recession and thoughts of the rise of the Far Right during the Great Depression, my mind has gone back to a vague short story idea linking zombies and racist/fascists. I’m letting that one settle too.

NaNoWriMo, writing, Hadeon, Great Depression, zombies, racists, fascists

Word Count: 3,085

National Novel Writing Month is just over sixteen hours old now and considering the amount of typing I’ve done, writing this blog post is a tad cathartic. One I changed font and it serves as a refreshing break. Weird, I know.

So I was basically listing scenes right up until the start and my plan isn’t quite done yet. I have 48 scenes. It looked like it was close the final climax and being wrapped up by scene 50 but I added a twist and it’s able to go on a bit longer. That’s not just filler, I swear. It would’ve disappointed people to end at that point.

I started right on midnight dosed up with too much caffeine. I started blaring Drowning Pool and Carpathian through my massive Sony Headphones and had like 1800 words by 1am. I woke at like 12 this morning to continue work and after two bursts of 15 and 20 minutes, I’m up to 3085 words and still working on this first scene.

It’s good, I like it a lot. It’s full of anger and aggression and really shows one of my characters really well. The heavy angry metal music has been working well to get this out of me.

I plan to keep writing to 4,000 words today as I’m using the rush and momentum of everyone starting to get ahead and make me feel confident. So far, it’s working.

writing, NaNoWriMo, Hadeon

Last night, I went out and had a wine and a few beers. I was just relaxing, not getting too drunk though, I was quite merry by the time I got home. Well, amongst my drunken conversations, my ending came up and my alcohol fuelled brain made a painful decision at what kind of needed to happen at the end of the novel.

And then when I woke up slightly hungover this morning, my brain was able to clear the foginess and clarify my vague breakthrough last night. I rambled to Margo a bit until I had worked it out. I worked out how the ending would work, even visualising some critical ending scenes.

What’s the ending like then?

Well, I can’t really tell you, so you’ll have to read it if I get it on the shelves one day, but what I did learn was that a lot of the time it’s just too hard to resolve every character in every way. Once I learnt I could let some things go, it opened up a space to resolve some other stuff. I’m happy with that.

So with that worked out, I planned to finish writing my synopsis tonight but instead lost track of time and spent too much time in front of Foxtel and watching Skins so it will have to be tomorrow or another day.

But tomorrow I am off to Melbourne’s NaNoWriMo kick off party BBQ thing at Albert Park. I met some of the Melbourne ‘wrimos’ at pre-NaNo drinks on Wednesday, which was lots of nerdy fun so am looking forward to hanging out with these writers.

writing, NaNoWriMo, ending, Albert Park

Wow, nearly a week without blogging. Which is a bit odd but I swear I’ve been a good little writer. It’s just work again, I mean I’m doing more actual work and finding less time for bludging.

Though at home, writing is going very well. As of last night I’ve had fifteen days in a row of writing 500 words a day or more. I think that’s quite an achievement for me. It’s still mostly random flash fiction or vignettes, some containing my characters for NaNoWriMo, others just random characters. Sometimes I use it to try writing certain scenes with certain criteria. Last night I wrote from the perspective of two women.

The planning is still going. On the weekend I remember a trait of my main character that was going to play a small part, and brought it out more which adds some more push to his relationship with the woman in the small town he moves to. And many thanks to wilfulone, a fellow member of the Absolute Write Water Cooler, as she continues to be the critical ear I need to work out my plot and make it stronger and more defined.

Working out the climax and the ending is still proving hard. Part of my reasoning for dwelling over the climax and the more action-based scenes is that in the past, I’ve seen these scenes as making up a large part of the story and then when it came to writing them, these scenes lacked substance and did not last long at all. I felt they didn’t last long enough to live up to my idea of how significant those scenes were. So I’ve been thinking, to the point of overthinking, how these scenes are going to play out.

Added to this is a need to find a climax that leads into a satisfying resolution for both main characters. Is there a way to rationally plan your ending, or do you just have to write it and go with the flow?

writing, planning, NaNoWriMo, plot, ending

It was weird posting Sunday. I never do it. I hadn’t done it in ages, mainly because the best time for blogging is at work, to make the most of those usually wasted eight hours. But I guess it was a special occasion being so pumped at writing so much, and so consistently.

I hadn’t blogged so far this week though, mainly because, honestly, I was waiting for people to comment on my odd flash fiction piece and my recent post.

But of course NaNoWriMo is bearing closer, and I need to work the plot for Hadeon out in full. I don’t want to start writing on November 1 not having thought out the whole thing because what if I work out something that could happen later on that needs some change of the plot at the beginning so that it works? Too much fiddling around and rewriting for my liking.

As I said in my last post, I’m mulling over what actually happens in the climax. It’s hard and I finally found some help, offered by someone in a writer’s forum I’m a member of. I emailed her my whole plot worked out thus far and am waiting for a response. Even the act of writing it all out like that helped and gave me a push in thinking for myself.

I need to work out what the characters are looking to resolve by this point in the story and in order to do that I need to flesh out my subplot regarding the new town he moves into and a female character he meets. I’m well on my way to doing that. Suddenly last night I totally changed this character and her relationship to the main character as I flesh out her backstory with some of the other people in the town.

She’s no longer the love interest of my main character, as too often female secondary characters end up, and she’s a far more deeper, more complex and interesting character now. In a sense, she plays a role in changing my main character’s own perception of women and personal relationships which should help to resolve what happened to his own relationship at the start of the story. Hopefully this will give me more to play with to put towards the ending.

In the course of this, some half decent possible endings came to me and I jotted them into the back of my notebook.

Do your endings come naturally? Do you have to plan them? If so, how do you work them out?

writing, NaNoWriMo, Hadeon, endings, plot

It’s just after lunch on Sunday here. My weekend’s consisted of nothing much at all, and that’s the way I like it because it gives me plenty of time to write and stuff, which recently I’ve been craving seeing work has sucked up most of my time.

I went to bed at 3am last night, having written 1700 words of wordwars and flash fiction, as well as made considerable breakthroughs in the plotting for Hadeon. Having recruited my housemate to do NaNoWriMo with me, we did a wordwar before she went to work, racking up over 500 words, and then last night I went solo with another two wordwars.

These are quick and easy improvised stories, or parts of stories. They don’t have to be great. They don’t have to go anywhere. And they certainly don’t have to make sense. The point is to just write and free up your writing muscles, to get comfortable with putting words down. It’s a warm up for a month where people try to write a whopping 50,000 words in one month, even if I’m not attempting that full goal.

But I also worked on some plotting for Hadeon, trying to think through every point of the story from start to finish. I’ve written and recently rewritten a ‘blurb’ for Hadeon, and at the moment am working on a detailed synopsis for the whole story. I’m at the point now where I’m working out what happens in the main climax, and therefore how it is meant to end, how the whole thing is meant to be resolved.

The thing is, I’ve worked out what needs to happen, but no idea how it’s going to happen. One character needs a resolution and closure for the novel to be allowed to end. This in turn will resolve the other main characters story arc.

It’s getting there. I’ve never gotten this deep and far into a plot before and it’s exciting. It’s exciting to work out new and interesting things about your characters everyday. And it’s exciting that I’ve written more than 500 words, 6 days in a row, and after today, hopefully 7.

writing, Hadeon, NaNoWriMo, planning, routine