NaNoWriMo Day7

I am not competing in this year's NaNoWriMo.

I am not aiming to gain the very lovely fish biscuit of an icon on my Author's page, and I'm not set on the bragging rights that come with completing the 50K in 30Day challenge.

I am not giving up anything to achieve the 50K goal.

I continue to check my social media and play a round or two of various games. I definitely am still watching my K-Dramas. (Lee MinHo does not wait for word count!) I'm not giving up even a minute of time spent with my nephew who is at a very precocious 2 and finally calling me 고모 as I have demanded. (It took a stuffed Pororo all the way from Korea to earn the title, but I am not above bribery.) I have a demanding full-time job that takes a lot of care and feeding and if I'm missing any of it, it's not for my part-time job because both deserve that respect.

I am not attending any Write-Ins.

I am sure my fellow WriMos are terribly lovely people, and I wish them the best of luck, but writing now has to be a solitary sport. I used to have a team. And it was an amazing, talented, frustrating, overly-dramatic team, but if I rely on a team, I'll never fill out more than my limited characters. If I go to a write-in, I'll do what I would do anyway or not do what I should be doing.

More over, the Write-Ins are fleeting. There will be no Write-In to go to in December to get me going.

And see, that's the thing: December.

I am aiming for a deadline.

I am aiming to get something down on paper every day, with the deadline of a First Draft due November 30th. That draft is due no matter that I am in San Francisco for a week, that I have a relative visiting for the first time in 25 years, that I have approximately four Thanksgivings to attend the last week of my deliverable.

My draft is due on that date and if I miss it I'll fall off of schedule, because I have made an agreement with myself to actually achieve this deadline and this deliverable, and it has minimum expectations. It doesn't matter that there's a website, and a crew of people, and a mobilized Social Media forum for this event, because what it comes down to is what I've agreed with myself to accomplish, and I owe myself this chance.

I am building a habit.

I haven't built up a word bank, though I am slightly ahead. I don't have a buffer ready for all these things I have planned. And that's because more important than the deadline is the process, the habit. I get up in the morning and I write a little, or I plan a little. I work all day (ALL DAY) and then at home I decompress with the latest translated (or half translated as the case might be) drama that I'm engaged in, and then I write some more.

I have promised myself an hour each day, and that's what I'm giving myself. An hour of writing. Thank goodness I have another habit to fall back on (probably the better term is addiction) that allows me to spew out 1.5K words in an hour and still be on track to meet my goals. If I want more, I can take more, but I can't take less, and that's the key.

Now, here's the funny thing:

I'm doing more than I was before.

I have added to my life, not taken away from it, and yet, I'm getting up earlier each day, I'm getting to work earlier each day and accomplishing more at work. I'm spending MORE time with my family than typical.

So, that's one week. We'll see about one month. I dare hope we'll get to one year.

NaNoWriMo Eve

Well, I've prepared about as much as I'm capable of right now, not knowing what all else I need to do.

I have a world built. 

It's very complicated with lots of back history. If this story (or one of the others in the series creating itself in my head) becomes a hit, you'll even begin to learn something about it in the companion works, because the world is for me, to know that this place is lived in, and round and suitable for characters to have enough hooks and challenges and reality to breathe and grow.

I have a story arc. 

It's simple, Act 1 we learn that there is a mystery, Act 2 we solve the mystery, Act 3 we deal with the repercussions of both the mystery and the ignorance that was found in Act 1. I can't give much more than that right now because all I know is the outcomes, and not entirely how we're getting there.

I fully admit to being a "Discovery Writer" and I'm very okay with that right now. I have ideas of scenes I've jotted down. I have settings. I have a core group of characters that will, no doubt, grow. I have an inciting incident and a direction I'm going.

I have a character I know.

When I start a story, any story, the main character is 90% me in a weird situation. By the time anyone else interacts with that character, she's less than 10% me, and more the me I'd become in the situation I've put that character in. This may sound Mary Sue, but you'll have to watch, I have a healthy enough sense of self doubt, and now, knowing this and then reading some of my work a fear I may self-harm, but fear not. It is only my characters I like to torture. Live is challenge, there's little beauty in perfection. One can only find joy in simplicity if they've tasted the complication.

I have no doubt about producing 50,000 words in 30 days. 

Even with a full time job, family, friends, and an unhealthy K-Drama addiction, 50,000 words in 30 days is not the challenge. So that's where my zen comes from. My unhealthy addiction in the 90s was AmberMUSH, and if I typed less than 300,000 words in any given month, I was probably dying or moving (which happened a lot back then).

Here's what's going to get me to the end: This is the draft in which I tell myself the story.

I stole this idea from one of the plethora of writers who has done exactly as I am doing and writing about writing. And, this is one of the many pieces that resonated. I don't have to tell you the story (unlike aforementioned MUSHing which was shared story telling and the words that came out needed to be the logical next steps of the tale so the other person can do their piece). This just needs to be my story to myself, the one I'm telling in my head without realizing it.

Come December I'll go back and re-write this story for you, the reader, but until then, I may share it with the few people who are basically extensions of me, and can help me see where I've gone sideways when I'm too close to the action.

I don't have an Outline.

Most importantly, I don't have a chapter by chapter outline. I do this for two reasons:

1) I can't even think that rigidly for my characters right now, there are important pieces of their desires and motivations that I can't see until I've learned more about them.

2) The wise group at Writing Excuses has spoken many, many times on Outlines (or lack thereof) and Mary Robinette Kowal made the statement that Chapters are a form of Pacing, which clicked so strongly in my mind that I became okay with the lack of an outline in the suggested manner I see everywhere in the NaNoWriMo blog-iverse.  For a story I am not telling to anyone but myself, why do I need pacing?

So, most likely, the first thing I do December 1 is sit down and take the story I've told myself and write the outline for it. It will be a very complicated outline, with multiple trails and story-lines, and, like most things I do, probably end up looking like a spreadsheet. But the pacing and the flow and the story for others is what gets an outline, not a first draft to myself.

So, with that, I keep looking for inspiration for my characters and my world, and work out the niggely bits that are bothering me and at this time tomorrow, I should have written at least 500 words