… I expect to not only get OUT during my vacation, but to write as well. And not just measly little blog posts, but real, substantive stuff. Some of which will likely be posted, some probably not, but all in all I expect to see a sharp upswing in posts here either during my week off, or within the week after my return depending on access, etc.

Last night Jean and I met up with Kerri at one of our new favourite downtown finds: Veritable Quandary. We had an outstanding dinner, as expected, and found ourselves engaged in deep conversation for the majority of the evening. It turned into a very relaxing and enjoyable three hour dinner and drinks. During this time we covered a gamut of topics, one of which speaks to my plan for next week….  writing.

I know I have at least one story to tell, but I need time and energy to focus. Time and energy I never have during the work week, and the weekends I’d rather be recovering than ‘working’ on a book/short/story/blog/whatever. I expect next week to find that energy and time and dig in deep with as much as I can to put down as many words to (virtual) paper as possible. What comes of it, is again, anyone’s guess. Which story comes out is also a bit up in the air, though I more distinct ideas about that. In any case, expect me to be fairly silent and then inundate you with posts.

As for my trip…. well, I may even enable Facebook places for the week. Who knows, stranger things have happened

It is amusing how some things can be right under your nose for so long, then the oddest little things brings them all to light.

Case in point: Ben Zander apparently shares the motto of the 3 Drunken Celts, albeit phrased a tad differently: “Don’t take yourself so goddamned seriously.” (The 3DC motto being “Never forget the funny“, I am sure you can see the similarities here.)

Of course the real funny for me in all this is the path I took to find this out: I began reading Seth Godin’s “Linchpin” as a recommendation from a colleague and collaborator in the social media spaces (my former boss, Kelly Smith). Kelly had read the book previously and found it had some key insights for us in how we may improve our collective efforts…. as well as our own individual paths.

While reading, I came to page 50 of “Linchpin” and was amused to find reference to one of my best friends employers, Ben Zander. It seems Seth is quite the fan of Ben (and Roz) Zander, as I came to find on page 59…. and even more so as I spoke to my friend about the discovery as I figured she’d be amused. And rightly so, it turns out Ben and Seth are quite good friends.

Bemused even more, I relate the story to Kelly, who of course reminds me that she is also a huge fan of Ben’s, and had even referenced him a few times in some older blog posts after he had spoken at the Rational Developer’s Conference back in 2006 (sadly two yeas before I joined Rational). During our chat, she pointed me to the following minimalist blog posting:
Remember Rule 6

And so the loop was closed for me, and the funny not forgotten.

Truly, what a small world this is; and able to deliver such a serendipitous message right when I needed it (As a tangent, perfectly in keeping with our organization’s KCS ideals of knowledge ‘just-in-time’!). Sometimes it is surprising what a struggle it can be to not take myself so “goddamned seriously”. Thank you Ben, and the 3DC for being this constant reminder!

No Time for a real post. But I do have time for this:

50,205 words in the bag.

Yup. I “won”. And by won, they mean I completed 50k+ words in under 30 days to form a fiction novel first rough draft. A VERY rough draft I’ll admit.

This doesn’t mean I am done working on it, rather it means that now I get to -really- dig into to what I actually wrote and massage it to make this fiction novel readable. I honestly am not even the least bit happy with what I created here, so a LOT of editing is in my future. But what I AM happy with is the fact that I was able to produce 50k+ words in under thirty days and keep them all focused on a basic story line.

I promise you all this: when I have a moment, either over the vacation days ahead or possibly into next week, I WILL post the Title, Synopsis, and Excerpt.

For now, just revel in my joy that I’m DONE!

To try and help pump out my word count this weekend, I opted to push myself even harder with very specific set goals and limits to try and compete with myself. To that end I found Write or Die, a great website that lets you set a number of words and a time clock to countdown. If you stop writing for a few seconds, bad things happen, so you literally have to keep writing until your time is up or you hit your word count. fun stuff!

So, from http://lab.drwicked.com/writeordie.html I give you my latest count set at 1500 in 60 minutes:

	1893
62
lab.drwicked.com

	1618
58
lab.drwicked.com

Right off the bat, it seems some of my friends are still a bit confused as to what this all is. Let me explain… no, no time to explain, let me summarize:
NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.org for more details). The concept here is to produce a 50,000 word short fiction novel in the Month of November.

That said, I am now squarely in week 3 of this challenge and am finding that at 31,034 words down I am also encountering those week 3 doubts. I am sure that this novel is utter rubbish that any 3rd grader with a mind for story telling could write. I didn’t believe thejamez when he said I’d get to that point back around the end of week one. I figured that I knew it was bad, but it wouldn’t be the worst thing ever written. Silly me. I am up to my eyeballs in doubt. Luckily, I have done enough reading over the course of this ‘experiment’ that I know this is exactly what –everyone- encounters during week 3, so my hope is not lost.

The words are more difficult to find now in day 18. My daily word counts are still barely making grade, and are taking longer to obtain. I’m sticking with it none-the-less. I’m nothing if not stubborn. Still, I feel like I am reaching to push the story along. I have the deep sense that this first draft, once completed at the end of the month, will have a very short existence in its current form, and will hopefully not resemble anything close to what it is now, once I am able to focus in on editing next month.

I just need to continue trudging through the words and not pay attention to my brain; just build the count so I can move past the doubt and into week 4. Of course this weekend will be the toughest yet. Since I won’t be in a position to put down many words between the 26th and the 30th, I am hoping I can get to 50k by noon on the 26th. But, that means ending 4 days early, when I am already a day or two behind the curve.

All in all, it should be an interesting week between now and next Wednesday.

This week has been a bit more miss than hit, mainly due to a metricbuttload of work and a night out on the town Tuesday evening. Combine the higher work levels and lower sleep levels, and you get a burnt out Jason. Last night I only managed to pull out 611 words in two hours before tossing it in.

No major revelations about the process yet this week, other than I am starting to another break in the story coming soon since I can’t visualize much of where it is going again. The last few pages have just been building out a scene and characters a bit more but not progressing the story at all. It seems when I start to feel stagnant in the story, as I had started, a major break will be seen in the next day or two. I am hopeful that will happen since I need to play a bit of catch up with my word count after missing last night by well over half, and coming short a few times at the beginning.

The good news is that my count to date is at 19,055 total since Nov. 1st. Not too shabby. Oddly enough, I actually am beginning to expect to build the word count much further past 50k after November when I start editing, since I have a feeling the first 19k here are rushing through some key pieces which need to really be flushed out much further. Who knows, this text may have some legs on it yet.

Saturday was pretty much a failure all around for me. Wordstock was essentially just a book fair with some authors reading passages from their books. Neither is my cup of tea since I find I am rather annoyed by author readings (there is a reason they are writers, not orators) and shopping for books is only fun for me when I am looking for something particular. Jean brought home a stack of tomes, so she made out well and the day wasn’t a total loss for her.
Back at home, a quick nap turned into a lost afternoon into evening, and the drive to do –anything- had completely vanished. Two dvds later and we called it a night.

Sunday was off to a slow start as well. I sat down around noon to get some writing done and found that some system maintenance had to be done, requiring a reboot. So I addressed those issues before digging into my word doc (so as not to interrupt my work flow for a system restart). Three hours later and I was just opening my draft doc to start writing. Nothing like system maintenance to steal hours from your life.

Luckily I was able to pull out just over 3500 words again within about three hours time, making up for the loss of my Saturday in terms of pure word count and bringing the grand total thus far to 14,886. This puts me just slightly behind track for 50k words by Nov. 30th, which I should be able to recover if I up my daily count to 2k per day instead of the 1600 I have been shooting for. This will also take care of the travel at the end of the month where I doubt any writing will take place at all.

On the actual story side, things are starting to come together and are finding a bit more clarity. I’m starting to see the characters in a bit more dimension and they are pushing the story forward as a result. It seems to be working its way into a techno thriller, but I think it is way too early to really make that call and define the genre. I feel a sense of excitement as well as a sense of fear moving forward. I want to figure out how the story plays itself out, but I’m also wondering how I can pull off another 35,000 words by the end of November. I’m not sure the story has that much in it. I have a feeling towards the end of this little project, I will be going back into what I have written here at the beginning and build out some scenes even further to make the 50k goal.

Friday was off to a rocky start, even though I had taken it as a vacation day. Or, perhaps, -because- I had taken it as a vacation day is what led me into a half day of doddling, watching a movie, a random nap, cooking some lunch, etc. I got nothing down on paper before noon.

After lunch, and a nap, I sat down to punch out at least 1600 words for the day. In all honesty I had hope to nail down substantially more since I had the whole day to write, but that didn’t seem possible when I started. The motivation wasn’t there, and it was slow going at first.

But…

I tried something new: The location and two characters weren’t taking me anywhere interesting yet, so I built out a scene instead. Starting tight with a vague concept of something I had been rolling in my head for a bit (prior to NaNoWriMo), I pushed out just over 3500 words in about three hours. Whenever I’d hit a snag, I’d toss in two dashes separated by a return so I can go back in and fill in missing stuff in December, and then continue pushing forward wherever the story was taking me. It was quite a relief to finally be interested in the story. The motivation that interest provides was the biggest key for me yesterday, and hopefully into today/tomorrow.

Speaking of which, in a moment Jean and I will be heading out to go take a gander at WordStock, http://www.wordstockfestival.com/
The timing is impeccable, and there will be a NaNoWriMo booth as well as an area for NaNos to site and write together… should be intriguing at the least. Plus, it gets me out of the house and in the midst of intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals alike. That should be good for my atrophying social muscles…

Plus, dinner in the city is always nice. The only downside is I am not sure how this will affect my 1600 word goal for the day. Perhaps I’ll just need to bang out another 3500 tomorrow.

So I sat down last night to work out a better tactic to move this piece forward in a direction I could sink my teeth into, or if not, at least a direction I could see. I failed to that end yet again, as I still have no idea what I am writing about, even with 7k+ words about two characters, and now, a location to boot. I figured I try taking a hint from something I heard long ago, that location can often be a solid character. I though that since I was just focusing on building characters and getting words on the page, that this may be a key for me to build out a third character without flooding my writing with a bunch of people. Additionally, this would hopefully force me into concrete imagery as well, since it is easier to descriptively write about solid places in ‘concrete’ terms… ok, that was bad, but hopefully you get where my head was on this angle.

Suffice to say I am as equally dispassionate with the location as I am with the two characters I have already worked on. This, I can assure you, is going to make it much more difficult to pull 1600+ words a day for another 3 weeks to make the 50K mark. I need to find my interest in this all. My two characters are flat, one dimensional, and lifeless, but worse, I don’t care what happens to them; which is the death of any piece of fiction. I need to care about something here, otherwise this is an exercise in the abundant use of unnecessary and unconnected adjectives. Hmm, I guess that last sentence kind of proves the point, doesn’t it….

I was hoping that pushing through with a location would spark some sort of emotive connection to this all. I want to be passionate about my characters. I want to care what happens to them. I want to know who they are. And this is the problem I have with fiction; they can be anything I want them to be, but not until I care about them, and I wont care about them until I know more, and I wont know more until I write more, but I can’t write more until I know what I want them to be. BAH. Travelogues and diaries, and ed-op columns, and general musings on life are so much easier than fiction. All I have to do is write about things that exist. With fiction I have to create things which don’t. And that, my loyal readers, is NOT EASY.

So, today, I am going to step away for a bit. Do some laundry, watch some crappy TV, and try tot relax. Rest up. Build back those reserves of emotion that have been drained from me for the past few weeks and then sit down this afternoon to really crank out some big time word counts. I will not focus on ‘trying’, I won’t over think it like I have above, but rather I will just sit down and continue building these three characters until something snaps, or until I hit 50k, whichever comes first.

My Twitter update last night pretty much said it all:
“AcdntlPoet… pushed through a hard fought 1658 words in an hour and a half. Today felt like blood from a stone, but the words still came.”

I was exhausted, physically and emotionally from the long day of work that was behind me. Because of that, I fear the 1658 words that came out last night will end up on the cutting room floor at the beginning of December when I start editing. To this point I haven’t read ANYTHING I have written, but I have the sense that one of my old problems and criticisms from my creative writing classes has reared its head again: lack of concrete imagery. As I pushed through last night, working to attain a 1600 word evening, I knew as I was writing that I was missing that solid item. What ended up coming out was just more esoteric internal babble surrounding the character, not describing or showing, but platitudes and clichés.

So, tonight and into tomorrow, the focus is concrete imagery. Still need to build out the characters more, and I have the sense that I am on the edge of some surprise to me, but it’s not quite attainable with what I have yet. I’ll be working to 1600+ words tonight again, and have the day off tomorrow, which I am thinking I’ll use to play catch-up from the beginning of the month and perhaps over achieve for the days later this month when I know I won’t be able to put any words down at all.

I’m also finding that fiction is not one of my strong points. The act of creating something from thin air is daunting, and what I can muster seems only thinly veiled from real life. I find writing about reality much easier to accomplish. I find I work best when a definitive structure is present. With fiction, it seems to me, I have no map to guide me on the way, leaving the journey a rambling mess of a path, at the end of which I find I haven’t gone nearly as far as I had hoped I would, and didn’t experience anything out of the ordinary or exceptional.

Not surprisingly, I have the same problem when I go out to ride my motorcycle; without a destination chosen, my journey is stalled at the beginning not knowing whether to turn left, right, or continue ahead. Some of my best rides were all based around particular destinations, providing that structure to work within and find the most enjoyable way to get there. Not knowing what to write about is leaving me in that same space currently. I fear I will make three right turns and end up finding my journey was a short circle leading me back home.