So, another year has come along.
And, yes, I’ve signed up for the 3-Day Novel contest this year. Again.
Not quite sure what I was thinking, since I know I’m going to be working twelve-hour days on two of the three days. But when has this contest ever involved thinking on my part. I have some story ideas stewing in the back of my brain. I have ideas that I haven’t ever properly paid attention to over the years, but I don’t know that I want to work with any of those. I’d like something new and fresh.
I still have some time to properly prepare for it this time around. Three weeks to brush up on my writing skills and create an outline of some kind for whatever story I pick. (Or maybe outlines for all of the stories I might pick from.) This year, I vow to send in whatever I do write, even if it only ends up being a couple of pages.
While procrastinating instead of writing my allotted daily word count for NaNoWriMo, I came across the November PAD Chapbook Challenge, a NaNoWriMo-ish challenge in which you write a poem a day for the entire month of November. You then have the month of December to organize the poems you wrote in November into a 10- to 20-page chapbook that you send in to to Robert Lee Brewer, editor of Poet’s Market and other Writer’s Digest Writer’s Market books (not to mention the WritersMarket.com site). Not entirely sure what the winner wins, exactly. (This year’s rules don’t say, and previous year’s posts indicate it is just bragging rights.) And I don’t know if you the daily prompts he offers are requirements or just aids if you want to use them. (Again, the rules don’t say, but blog posts from previous years mention that it’s OK to stray from the prompts — the goal is to have 30 poems by the end of November and if you’re not feeling a particular prompt, you’re not feeling a particular prompt.) But it looks intriguing. And I’ve been away from poetry for a very long time.
I know. I KNOW. I’m having enough trouble with the writing I’ve committed to do. What am I doing, considering taking part in a poetry challenge as well. I know. And maybe I’ll decide not to this year. Maybe I’ll just come back to it next year, or the year after, and try it then. But I know that I’ve had poems knocking about in the back of my head since my mother died, and I’d like to get them out and onto paper. I even have a theme.
As an aside, the interview with 2008 winner Shann Palmer is really quite interesting. I love the way she packages some of her self-published chapbooks.
Robert: Also, I’ve had the good fortune to check out some of your other self-published pieces, such as A Little Bag of Love (a little bag with love poems inside) and Poems from the apron pocket (a small chapbook made from a single, multi-folded piece of paper). Both are inventive ways to package poetry. How do you go about distributing these poems?
Shann: So many ways! I stick them in between poetry books at bookstores, leave them in coffee shops, hand them out at readings, sell them at art galleries, give them as gifts, teach workshops on how to make them, hand them to strangers on the street, send them to friends in letters and cards. I thought about stapling them to telephone poles but I’m pretty sure it’s against the law in Richmond.
How absolutely cool. I was creative like that once, a very long time ago. I miss that me.
So…
Today is day one. Haven’t yet written anything but it *is* only 10:00 am. (Feels like I’ve been up for ages, and I guess I have. I woke up at about 4 and have been working and/or puttering since…mostly puttering.)
My main purpose in committing to take part in NaNoWriMo this year is to build up some writing habits. My usual approach to goals and deadlines is to procrastinate until the last minute, rush like a mad woman to try and complete everything in far too little time, and feel guilty and/or stressed when I either don’t meet the deadline or meet it but with inferior results.) I don’t want to do that any more. I want to get myself in the habit, as least as it relates to fiction writing, of writing every day, without fail.
In order to meet the goal of writing 50,000 words in 30 days, I have to commit to writing 1,667 words a day. (Let’s round it up to 2,000.) That amounts to about four pages single-spaced a day. Hmm, sounds more daunting put in terms of pages. I still haven’t decided what to write about so, for now, I’m going to go with leveraging the 3-Day Novel snippets. (They amount to about a thousand words, a mere drop in the bucket.) If something better comes to mind, then I’ll switch.
Funny, I find I really like my own writing, and I think that’s sometimes where I get hung up. Because I like it, I want it to be perfect, to be worth being liked, and so I get bogged down in editing and re-editing everything that I write. It’s something I need to be looking for over the coming month. Perhaps if I write at least 2,000 words a day, I can then allow myself to edit those words to my heart’s content — until tomorrow, at which point I can’t touch them again until the next day’s writing is done. Editing as reward for writing? Sounds a little twisted, but it might work.
(As an aside, the NaNoWriMo site is a headache to try to access. Server load issues up the wazoo. Is it like this every year? It could very well drive me insane, if I’m not already there.)
The 3-Day Novel Contest this year was interesting. And kind of educational.
This year was the first year that someone else I knew actually took part separately as well, which was both good and bad. She accomplished much more than I did, which is great for her, but I’m not sure she appreciates the reasons for my ultimate (but temporary — I *will* go back to it) abandonment, at the eleventh hour, of the story I was writing. I opted not to send my pages in — I don’t need the certificate or sticker, and there’s really no point in making someone read what I wrote if there’s no chance of it being a contender. (Why waste their time?)
I actually quite enjoyed the writing (what I did of it) of the novel this year. I felt no anxiety or pressure (perhaps that’s a bad thing), and enjoyed the process of the thing. (Got completely side-tracked by research, but that’s another lesson for another time.) And I learned more about what I should keep in mind next year, namely that I need to cultivate some writing discipline, build a habit of writing x number of words on a regular basis for an extended period of time, or I’m never going to have the discipline to sit down for three days straight and pound out a novel.
As part of that, I’ve decided that I’m going to take part in NaNoWriMo this year and that I’m going to actually write/rewrite the novel I’d started for 3-Day for it. The point of NaNoWriMo is for you to write a complete 50,000-word first draft of a novel in a month, namely the month of November. There are no prizes, just the satisfaction of completing an entire novel. (Some people are over-achievers who write two or more novels in that month, but I think I’ll aim for just one.) Yes, I know that technically the idea is to write a complete novel from scratch but I may still leverage some of the (very few) pages I wrote for 3-Day to use for NaNoWriMo. (There’s so little of it that it hardly makes a dent in the 50,000 words.) Then again, I’m not sure how much I can expand it to turn it into a novel so I may pick one of the other ideas I’ve had instead. I guess I’ll decide that on Monday.
Wakey, wakey
The weather has cooled down considerably here in the last day or so and my lack of sleep from the previous week or more of heat and humidity caught up with me. I could sleep for days in this temperature — you can smell Fall approaching, the days are getting noticeably shorter. But I can’t afford to sleep that much right now so I’ve broken out the 5-Hour Energy. (A bonus is that it not only keeps me awake, it helps me to concentrate better.) When I did sleep, though, I had terrible grief-stricken dreams that kept waking me up breathless. If my eyes hadn’t been going buggy with fatigue, I might have been better off not sleeping at all. Now I feel hung over.
Gagging that little voice
Have turned off the TV. The Apprentice reruns are still on but now my inner critic is bored of them and starting to pester me again. I’m trying to drown her out with Clive Mansell’s Lux Aeterna still on auto repeat, which seems to be somewhat effective. (The “Requiem for a Tower” arrangement of the song, used in a lengthy trailer for The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers, is very moody and grand, perfect for writing moody prose to.)
Distractions
I’d decided early on Saturday that, aside from the occasional e-mail check and daily posting, I needed to avoid the Internet for everything except research, though even the research road is fraught with perils. (Yesterday I got lost in Google Maps for several hours, looking for specific places in the town where the story is primarily set because I wanted to give it a sense of realism. I may end up creating a fictional town like the real one instead so that I can better fudge locales and details without getting hung up — I suspect Miss Inner Editor would rear up if I failed to keep a real locale real.) Turns out I need to be away from my computer completely. Without the Internet to distract me, I ended up backing up files on my computer and tidying up iTunes for several hours. Productive? Yes, but still procrastination.
Perhaps next year I will have to go old school and write in longhand.
Decisions, decisions
I spent 1/2 hour researching names for the two main characters earlier today because I suddenly had the idea that the names I’d chosen were too “modern” for the time in which the story is set. So I had to go through Wikipedia and Baby Names Hub verifying that I picked names that were reasonable for the time period — or rather that the names I picked are not ones that are blatantly modern in popularity, like Britney or Lindsay — and Google to make sure I hadn’t picked full names that matched real people. Then I lost more writing time to trying to decide which character got which name because the names affected what happened to that character. It actually turned out well because it helped to (a) solidify some more plot points and (b) gave me a new title for the book, one I like much more than its working title.
Decided to split the points of view into separate Word documents — I can sort out how to mix them together once I have written more. With them in the same document, I keep getting side-tracked by creating the optimum mixing.
Numbers of hours into the contest: 48/72
Total number of pages written: 10/100+
Music/Background Noise: Still Requiem for a Tower/Lux Aeterna on auto repeat on my iPod (set up a 2-day long playlist for it on my iPod — 52 plays and counting — which is really going to skew my last.fm profile if and when it gets scrobbled). Tried to listen to something else but nothing else got me actually typing like Lux Aeterna so lost a fair chunk of time to the “experiment” (which led to a great deal of additional distraction).
24 hours down, 48 to go
It’s just after midnight. I’ve gotten less writing done than I’d hoped to have done by this time, but there’s also been less active procrastination than I expected so I’m not horribly disappointed overall.
I realized after writing a couple of pages that I really needed to stop and work out at least a light outline of where I wanted things to go or I’d have no hope of taming my inner editor. I also realized that I had to get away from my computer for awhile. So I did a little storyboarding and some brainstorming, which really helped.
Late in the evening, I finally did an act-by-act six-card spread as described in Corrine Kenner’s Tarot for Writers (using the Deviant Moon Tarot deck by Patrick Valenza) and it was surprisingly helpful to clarify where to take the parts of the story that I hadn’t really fleshed out in my head. Two of the reversed cards were NOT where I wanted the story to go, but their upright versions seem more workable. Writing will hopefully be a little easier tomorrow as a result.
Numbers of hours into the contest: 24
Number of pages written: 2 (plus a better overall story outline and storyboarding)
Music/Background Noise: Requiem for a Tower/Lux Aeterna on auto repeat on my iPod and old Apprentice reruns on the Reality Television free preview during the storyboarding (my inner critic is apparently enthralled by the reruns, leaving me unmolested and able to think. Who knew?)
A friend of mine who lives in the Vancouver area is planning to attend the Surrey International Writers’ Conference in October.
The conference, which will be held from October 22 to 24 this year, features a series of master classes and lectures by a number of guest speakers, including Diana Gabaldon. (I haven’t yet decided if I should be ashamed of my ignorance of the other speakers, though I do recognize some of their past speakers, which have included author Terry Brooks.)
A part of the conference is a writing contest with categories for short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. First prize in each of the four categories is $1000, which is not a paltry sum. The submission fee is $15 and the deadline is September 10 this year, i.e. less than a week from now. I was considering submitting a poem or short story, but I think I’ve left it too long — I don’t know that I can put something together in such a short time given the 3-Day Novel Contest this weekend as well. And while the entry can be postmarked September 10, the fee must be received by September 10. So if I’m going to take part, I would need to (a) send both entry and cheque by courier on Tuesday or Wednesday, (b) send payment ASAP by regular mail (and hope like Hell that I will actually get something written or forfeit the fee) and entry by Friday, or (c) send entry by Friday and get my friend in Vancouver to deliver my payment in person later next week.
3-Day Novel Contest
The 3-Day Novel contest starts officially for me in about 12 hours. My imagination has been failing me for the last couple of weeks and I’d pretty much settled on trying to re-purpose one of my previous ideas — I hadn’t done much actual writing for any of them so starting over from scratch with the same idea wouldn’t have been much of a hardship. But the thought of attacking an idea I’d already played with even just a little just didn’t light a fire in me. Still, better some idea than no idea at all, and no idea at all was my only other alternative.
Until yesterday. Yesterday, I started looking at a file of story ideas I’d had a few years ago. And one of those ideas sparked my imagination and seems to be asking to be the one I write about. It was an idea for something more along the lines of a short story rather than a novel so I may have to pull a Stephen King by turning a short story into a full-length movie. I’ve been up all night and every now and then I get another piece of the puzzle for the story, which is good. I really intend to have at least 100 pages written and ready to send in by the end of the three days, something I’ve never managed to do before. I haven’t decided whether to write in first person or third, but I have a rough idea of where the story is going go as well as a rough idea of at least some of the characters.
Prepped and prepared
I’ve bought appropriately inappropriate snacks for the weekend, stocked up on my favourite energy shot, 5-Hour Energy, to help combat my usual procrastinatorial narcolepsy, and set up some iPod playlists to set the mood and minimize the distractions. I’ve told the people who would normally call me that I was incommunicado for the weekend, and there’s crap all on TV to entice me (not that it has to be good TV to bring out my inner procrastinator). I’ll have to risk the Internet being still on — I’ll likely have to do some research online so I’m going to need the access so I’ll have to figure on having to navigate and/or ignore the many distractions without the help of disconnecting the modem. (If that doesn’t work, I’ll have to block the offending sites — *cough* Bejeweled Blitz *cough* — in my Hosts file.)
I never got around to reading any of those books I’d hoped to get through, though I did get a couple of chapters into the Plot book. But that’s OK — playing it by ear with as little preparation as possible seems more “right”. Too much preparation might have dulled my potential enthusiasm as I tend to get a little OCD about things to the point that I lose interest. I bought a copy of Corrine Kenner‘s Tarot for Writers last year, and I think I might make use of one of my tarot decks and the book’s tips to help me over humps — whatever you might think of tarot as a divination tool, it’s surprisingly good as a writer’s tool. Now I just have to pick an appropriate deck for the story I have in mind (and get a little sleep) and I’m good to go.
3 Day Novel Contest
One week to go until the start.
I’d thought I knew what story I was going to write during the long weekend, but I’ve been steeped in genealogy and family history over the last week and now I’m thinking about going back to a story I’ve always wanted to write based on my grandmother. (I know only very small snippets about my grandmother and her life as she died 20 years before I was born.) The problem with it is it really wants to be based on the time and location in which my grandmother lived, which is Montreal, and my intimate knowledge of early 20th century Montreal is very limited. Do I really want to hand to spend a large chunk of my three days researching history? (Or will I have time to do that research before I start?) Should I stick with a story idea that requires minimal research?
I suppose I have a week to sort that out. Worse comes to worst, I start off the contest with a completely blank page and no outline and tough it out from there.
Morning Pages
I haven’t been doing morning pages. It really requires that I be sleeping a reasonably normal sleep pattern at least most of the time, and I’m not. I’m alternating between insomnia and narcolepsy and I see that continuing until at least after the contest. (Well, hopefully I will be on a more regular sleep pattern before then, but I plan to sleep little during the contest and that’s definitely not regular.) Once I’m consistently sleeping more regularly, I’ll resume the morning pages as I found them quite helpful for the brief time that I wrote them.
Decided to register for the 3-Day Novel Contest today, rather than waiting until right before it starts. Feeling really gung-ho about it now that I’ve been thinking about it for a few days and didn’t want to run the risk of running out of money before I paid for the entry fee. So now I’m financially committed to it if nothing else, not that that made a difference in previous years.
Morning Pages
Did the morning pages properly yesterday. Made the mistake this morning of stopping at my computer after feeding the cat and that was that. Still plan to do the pages for today, even though they won’t be start-of-the-day stream of consciousness. Need to make sure I don’t go anywhere near the computer before I do the pages from now on.
