NaNoWriMo 2012

NaNoWriMo is upon us now, once again. I've said (maybe not here) that I wouldn't be doing it this year, and that turned out to be a dirty stinking lie. Oh well. It was sincerely meant at the time, but two days before November something went "twing" in my head and an idea for a book, almost fully-formed, sprung out of my head and demanded I give it my best effort. And so I am.

As of last night I've been above or at "par" (1,667 words per day) every day of this month, which is A. a massive improvement over previous years, and B. there is no "B". And part of that I credit to NaNo's usual turbo-charging of my productivity: I work best when I have a clearly defined goal and a tight deadline to get it done in. Always have, probably always will.

The problem is that every time I finish NaNoWriMo, all that motive power simply collapses on me. This is, I understand, normal for a lot of people who participate in the event. They get their 50,000 words done (or not), they say "Okay, quick break and then I finish/revise this thing", and then a year later their work is still sitting in a drawer gathering dust.

This has happened to me. Four times, in fact. Let's revisit the ghosts of NaNos past, shall we?

- Hellscraper: A haunted house story set in a skyscraper. Can you tell by the title that I tried this in college? It's the only time I haven't finished NaNoWriMo successfully. I might revisit this one day, I certainly like some parts of it, but not until I can come up with something a bit more character-driven.

- Servant of the Fae: This was inspired by my wife's attempt to explain what the Anita Blake books are about. I didn't quite get it, and came away with the idea that Anita is being repeatedly gang-raped by the cast of a Hammer horror film. And I thought to myself, "Okay, so what if Anita gets shut of all the geasa and curses and ardeur shit futzing with her head, and the Anita from book one comes back... In that case, how many monsters are going to die in really painful ways?"

I tried to answer the question, but at the time I really didn't have the skills to do it satisfactorily. It's a complex story with a lot of POV trickery and it's not at all appropriate for pantsing. I am still working on it (promise!) and I fully intend to get it ready to send out to publishers. I can't not do that, because the bastard narrative is so insistent at this point that I really can't refuse to write it. It's just going to be awhile.

Feel free to "steal the idea", by the way. (How many writers actually worry about that?) I assure you that based on that story seed, you haven't the faintest fucking idea where I am with it right now.

- Neverland: I never really had a proper title for this, it was just Peter Pan seen through a very dark lens. I did finish a story that topped out at 50,000 words (and boy did it need filling in in the middle), but I don't think I'll ever revisit the idea, mostly because Peter Pan is an intellectual property death trap thanks to Disney and the original author's decision to leave the copyright to a charity. But also, there's a comic book version of the same fucking idea called Neverland which is currently in print, and which I'm eagerly waiting for someone to sue out of existence. (Not really, more power to them if they get away with it, but it would be an interesting case.) It's published by Zenescope, the same people who do the "dark cheesecake" versions of Alice in Wonderland.

It's fairly obvious.

- The Gentleman's Society of Unholy Abominations: This was last year's, which I've talked about before. Basically a monster mashup that fell apart when I realized the Wolfman isn't public domain. That doesn't make the story unworkable, but trying to fix the problem (badly) when you're halfway through writing a story really makes it unworkable. I did get a great word count on this one, something like 100,000 words in the end, but it was sort of a festering collapse of a book at that point and I couldn't bring myself to return to it.

Aside from not checking on intellectual property laws, you'll note that my main problem with these stories is that I haven't been planning the damn things properly. Which is why I'm going over Servant of the Fae with a fine-tooth comb, making sure I have a detailed outline (scene by scene if I can manage it) before I set pen to paper again.

And yet I'm doing NaNoWriMo again this year, despite four previous failures of product. I suppose you might ask, "Is there something wrong with me?"

Well, no. Part of the fun of NaNoWriMo is that it is fun, a challenge that you set for yourself one month out of the year to just generate words without worrying too much about quality, at least for awhile. And even if all I generate is another spectacular failure of a novella, I have to ask: So what? I've been buried in outlining and brainstorming for so long that the need to write actual scenes and dialogue and descriptions and plot is overwhelming. The worst thing that could happen this month is that I improve my skills a little bit and end up chucking the result in a trashcan. Still a net win.

Forward, onward, and upward. Now if you'll excuse me, I've still got 40,000 more words to write.

The Mythbusters vs James Cameron and Plot-Induced Stupidity

I love the Mythbusters, okay? I don't watch the show as often as I'd like, mostly because my wife isn't a fan and I have to compromise on our TV time.

But a Titanic episode? On whether Jack could have survived at the end of the movie? That compromise is going my way.

Be warned, spoilers for the episode follow. I guess spoilers for Titanic have already happened, but we're a decade out, people, go see the movie already!

Walk in the Rain

10:14 pm. Miserable weather, a stupid spitting rain that might as well be a cloud of flies.

The dog is walking me into a cul-de-sac when I hear a noise on my left. There's a woman standing in an open doorway, a complete stranger in slippers and a long shirt with wild hair, hissing at my dog.

"Oh no," I think, "what madness have I stumbled into now?" It's dark, but the woman has a mad silhouette. Is she on some drug? Heroin? Meth? I think of her coming at me with filthy nails at my face - permanent scarring. I'm not likely to fight her off with Lina's leash in one hand and a bag of shit in the other.

The dog of course thinks "Friend!" and starts running across the street. "No, Lina," I say, tugging her back, "not now." But there's no way out of the cul-de-sac without passing this madwoman again, and she's still hissing even when I'm halfway around the circle.

Then the noise stops. I look up and she's gone from the doorway. Is she following - no, a silhouette in the house, a light turning off. What in-

Then it hits me: the woman was calling her own dog, some tiny breed that I missed in the wet. Relief washes over me, closely followed by a tree dumping its load of rainwater down my neck.

Back home in the light, dry and seated with a drink at hand and the dog eating kibble, I stop and wonder what I look like on these stinking nights. A pale, half-dressed bearded figure with a blue bag in his hand, cursing and dragging against a twenty-six pound animal that's running right at you, teeth bared and straining so hard that it's choking itself? Just another lunatic stranger, passing in the night.

On Angels In Manhattan

So, Doctor Who mid-season finale. Without spoiling anything, I enjoyed the episode and I'm looking forward to seeing where the series goes from here. Now I'm going to do a slightly more detailed review, and talk about some of the narrative challenges I think Steven Moffat had to face while writing it. So stop reading now if you haven't seen the episode yet.

Oh Hi

Forgot you were there. Well, not really, I just keep coming up with hideous ideas for blog posts that I should not write in a million years. Seriously, nobody needs to read yet another political rant for the next two months.

But I Just. Can't. Stop!

I've also been kind of busy in meatspace. My house now has functioning hot water pipes, repaired drywall, a pane of glass which is not cracked, two new sets of blinds, a new cubby shelf, and a brand spanking new desk which my wife kindly purchased for our five year anniversary and which I will be putting together as soon as it gets here.

Five is the Wood anniversary, I'm told. Stop sniggering. I got her a jewelry box. It looks lovely.

My current desk is one of those small-but-serviceable metal computer desks that lets you sit at a terminal and not much else. It is falling apart because it was put together shoddily (by moi), or because it was manufactured shoddily in the first place. I can believe either or both. The keyboard tray is currently sitting at a 40 degree angle where my feet ought to go. I am ready for a replacement.

Does the Goodwill take a partially-assembled desk? It still works fine as a desk. Just not, you know, as a desk with a sliding keyboard platform thing.

Oh yeah, I also rebuilt my entire home network after my venerable wireless router (God bless the Linksys WRT54GS!) began dropping connections about every other day. There is only so many times in a week I am willing to pull the plug and count to thirty. I replaced the wizened blue box with an Airport Extreme, which means Apple hardware has finally penetrated my home infrastructure. (iPods don't count.) Setup was a breeze once I remembered to power cycle my modem, and my whole network now runs on a sexy MAC-filtered WPA2-encrypted stream of secured data. (Thank God for firmware updates, or my TiVo would still have me stuck on sad sad WEP.)

All of this, of course, is a distraction from what I'm supposed to be doing, which is Writing The Book. Or more properly, Prewriting The Book.

Everyone says you should outline, except for the people who say you should never outline, and I'm done listening to them because I always come out with something that bent at non-Euclidean angles halfway through. I don't believe a first draft should be perfect, but I do expect it to be coherent enough that I don't have to re-plot the entire book when I'm done drafting it.

Here's an example: I tried pantsing a Victorian-era monster mash that included all the classics: vampire, werewolf, Frankenstein's monster, the works. Then I found out halfway through that the original Wolfman, Larry Talbot, isn't public domain, he's a Universal property. But I was already halfway through the damn book! So rather than go back and fix it from the ground up, I just made another character the werewolf. And then that didn't work, so I made him not the werewolf. Without going back and editing anything.

What I ended up with was a manuscript where one character ceased to exist halfway through, and another character ended up acting like three different people. And the same thing happened to a few other characters - they grew and evolved into completely different people as I wrote, but because I was out to get the first draft done done done, I didn't take the time to go back and fix the cardboard cutouts they were earlier in the story. So when I finally got the draft done, I was stymied trying to figure out where to start revising. "From the beginning..." Yes, well, no. I needed to note down the needed changes, which meant nailing down what the characters were actually going to be like, which of the multiple-choice plots I was going to keep and which I was going to cut...

In short, I would need to outline the damn book as if I was starting from scratch. Better, I think, to just outline the book first, then write the first draft without letting it fly out of control halfway through.

I'm happy to report this has worked for some short fiction pitches, but I'm running aground on the latest book (which is not the monster mash - I'm leaving that on the back burner until I can do the necessary Victorian research). I don't think this is a fault of technique, but just me being too unmotivated to get notes down on paper. And maybe a minor fault of technique - I'm taking plenty of notes and jotting down ideas, but I haven't quite got everything organized in a way that makes sense to me yet.

But! Not giving up. That's what they want you to do. But unless I have a few epiphanies between now and November, I'm probably sitting out NaNoWriMo this year. I still think the challenge is great if you want to prove that you can be productive, or if you feel like testing yourself. But I keep generating 50,000 words of complete gibberish that falls apart on revision. I'd rather take my time, plan ahead, and get an ambulatory first draft I can eventually coax to full health.

Even if it takes a long damn time.