i considered posting pictures of my guacafeast tonight, but then i thought: a picture is worth a thousand words.
so if i were to post a picture, much less several pictures, i'd be in the black for several thousand words, and how am i supposed to become a better writer with so many word credits on my ledger?
3k words today. if only they had the slightest relationship to the novel, i could have counted them toward the 50k. alas, they are entirely distinct, which is too bad, because 3k is rather prolific for the 50k effort.
the spock character is saving my arse. he rants and raves, and nothing fills up pages like a john-galt-style lecture about stuff. toss in the fact that spock has a foul mouth (especially when sober) and we've got extra capacity for filler.
i've made it to 41k words. i'm not going to make 50k by -- hey wait, holy crap, it's 12/1. i'm definitely not going to make 50k by the end of november, then. but i am going to make 50k. turns out that's 150-200 pages. a novella at best. but i'll have 50k words to distill into a decent short story, which, i think is the best i can hope for considering how loosely this stuff is all tied together.
it has been a fantastic exercise and a very trying experience. there's nothing more disheartening than laying out what i think is my best effort, 1600 words of difficulty, then reading 2 sentences of Vonnegut and realizing I've got nothing.
But Vonnegut says, in the last book he wrote, that we should write to entertain ourselves, tell us stories out of our imagination.
I agree. I wonder what Spock will say next?
It turns out Spock is a burger flipper by trade. Who knew?
passed the 30k mark. had another semi-inspired bit, i guess, depending on your idea of inspiration. details follow. if you replace "spock" with "me" and "samson" with "victor" then i have pretty much plagarized myself. but then, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so i guess i've flaterhyd myself.
I'M THE LORD OF THE DANCE!!!!
QED.
passed the 25k mark, after i'd decided i was done for the day, i was inundated with an additional 1600 words that i had to write. so i wrote them. they're crap, but they're also among the best stuff that i've written so far. i seem to be at my best when writing of dreams, and it gets tiresome because writing about dreams keeps me from writing about the "actual stuff". it's hard to write a novel about dreams.
anyhow, in case you're wondering what constitutes "the best so far" of my crummy novel, posted for your curiousity is what i just wrote, which is a good indicator of the themes of the novel, on account of its about the tenth recapitulation of the central plot point of the story.
i heard on the radio yesterday that normal mailer, whose works i have never read, would write 1500 words per day.
to make my target of 50k words this month, i need to average 1666 words per day. i'm supposed to do better than mailer?
i've begun setting myself a 30 minute timer. i find that in 30 minutes, with good flow, nonstop, i can bang out 1k words of horrific crap. if i'm still going at 00:00:00, i continue until the flow stops. i managed 1600 today.
hooray, i beat norm.
last night, lightly drunk on dubbel and tripel, i reached some sort of sweet spot, and cranked out 1000 words in 20 minutes. i have not yet reviewed them so i cannot say whether they make any sense. i recall thinking at the time that i was being a little more repetitive than usual, but not allowing this to stop me. flow was what i was after, and the liquor seemed to have brought that.
a proud, age-old tradition i joined last night, i reckon, of drunken writers banging away in a dark room at the keyboard, listening to electronica on their borrowed sennheisers, committing to paper bog knows what and hoping that some of it will be useful in the morning.
how special.
i just made a character a lance corporal.
i dont really know what that is.
i wonder if that will come through?
i'm 1/10th of the way there. i may actually make it. whether it will be coherent or not has already been decided: it will not be.
last night we watched the director's cuts of 4 of the last 5 episodes of NGE, and watching them, i despaired in two areas:
area 1) i realied how much i was intending to rip off the story
area 2) i realized just how poor a storyteller, characterizer, and writer i am
i'll try hard to be original, but that gets in the way of word counts. i'm trying not to edit myself much, that also gets in the way of the wordcounts (ast least, this much i picked up by my unthorough reading of the nanowrimo website).
i seriously wonder whether i'll have much to salvage at the end of the month. at the same time, i am pleased that i finally got the write a scene that's been in my mind for a decade, now. it was the first one i wrote.
another thing i find interesting: as i write, i'm coming up with new stuff. new characters to add, new characterizations of the characters, new ways to connect the characters, new ways to express the "themes" (term used loosely) of the "plot" (even more loosely used).
anyhow, this is kind of what it's like to be a writer, i guess. i imagine that after several consecutive monthly novels, i'll have gained teh writing disciple to actually produce something good. until then: more daily crap.
it's going. 3400 words so far, that's almost exactly on target. if i keep up this pace i'll be at 51k words by the 30th.
of course, i won't keep up this pace, and this pace isn't even my pace: i wrote far more yesterday than today. and sooner or later i'll run out of Great Ideas and have a fat block. and of course, november is the worst possible month for such an exercise, but that's the point of it.
i remember reading paulp's attempt, and he got off to an enthusiastic start too, which petered out definitely by hte end of hte month, and possibly by mid month. i'll attempt to avoid that, but no promises.
