The · Writer
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I am participating in Nano this year, or at least I'm going to try to do so to the best of my ability. ( Nano Status 2007 ) For anyone who's interested, but isn't friended to me on the Nano site, or who is friended to this journal, but isn't participating in Nano, here's a brief excerpt from what I'm working on: The sky had never interested Ivor, and the wind treated his small fishing boat like an enemy. When the breeze was light, and cool, it was pleasant, and it took some of the power out of the pounding heat of the afternoon sun, but when the sky filled with dark clouds, and the rain came crashing down, then the wind would push at him, at his boat, trying to overturn them, turning the waves into ferocious, chomping monsters, the white, curling waves reaching up with their gaping jaws to come crashing down over the boat's sides, filling it with water, pushing him to sink, or overturn. I hope everyone's Nanoing is going well.
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relaxed | |
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Hey all. Yes, I'm still writing. Not much, but I am. Finished outlining more details for Serafino which I've fallen in love with. Started a new story that runs along a sci-fi, fantasy kind of line of thinking. It'll go nowhere, but I started it. Wrote some poems. Yeah. |
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I'm not going to be able to finish Nano this year. I would love to, but my personal life just won't accommodate it at this time. It was nice to meet new Nano people this year, and see old Nano people from last year again. Good luck with your novelling, everyone, and hopefully I'll be able to work Nano in next year. |
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Uaaagh! Dear novel, UAAAGH! Love, I'm having a lot of problems turning off my inner editor tonight. Or, I've been having problems with that at the start, and with the nagging voice in the back of my head going "you have two essays due next week." On top of that, my eyes hurt. I keep writing and all I can think is, "wow, this is crap." And then I keep thinking that if I described things more, if I did more showing than telling that my word count would be higher, but I just . . . I keep wanting to write about what Serafino is when, hello! character action and interaction and dialogue should get that across. I'm trying not to just write scenes tacked on to each other, and because of that, I find myself frozen in front of my word processor going, "what do I write next?" Right now, Angelo is in Virtus' cafe meeting Johnny and the mob for the first time. I decided that rather than talking about the plague slums of Serafino, I should just . . . show them through the characters. Also, I wanted to write in second person, but that's dying pretty quickly. I might just write it from first person and make my life easier. Really, it is Angelo's story. Once again, the male character has taken over. Why must I always write men? Picked up a delightful little irony I want to run with. Honestly, I can't write at night. It just doesn't happen. I do my best writing in the morning. I'm just going to do my word war tonight and go to bed, and get up at some stupid hour like 4am so I can write until 6:30am or so, so that I can go down to the pool early and get some swimming in before class. By the way, I've now warped the genre to "sci-fi pre-apocalyptic gangster fiction" or something like that. Yeah. Make sense of that, fool.
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frustrated | |
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My novel now has a plague. I'm very behind on my word count. I'm afraid Nano has taken a back seat to school this year. I'm very eager to do extremely well in school and my hard work through September and October has paid off. Most of the marks I'm getting back are 90s. Granted, I haven't had any of my essays returned yet, and I still have three more essays to write this month for a cumulative total of 5000 words of academic writing. All three of these essays have to be researched. I also have a midterm at the end of the month. To make it even better, my teachers have decided that we must be forced to read every single work in its entirity when they say we do. My professors for both of my full courses have decided to give reading quizzes for every single book so it's not like I can do what I usually do with school and simply read most of the books and drop one. Unless I forgo sleep I can't meet my academic expectations, keep up with housework and daily errands and Nano to the extent that I want to. Now, I could easily just read some Coles notes or something on these and go for a 70%, but I want 80s, and 90s. Now, my assignments are mostly done on November 23rd. Well, let me lay out my schedule for you: Comparative Essay: November 15th (1000 words) In addition to that I have five quizzes. Now, I had planned to get ahead on these things in October and get them out of the way, but being sick for four consecutive weeks wasn't really conducive to that plan, and I'm still exhausted. Then, of course, we have other business to attend to. :D But I'm still Nano-ing. I still intend to finish, but my word count will be sadly behind until November 23rd or so. What really bothers me is that I have plot coming out my ears. I know exactly where I'm going with this story, exactly what I want to say and do. It's all very organised in my head and I'm excited about the story. My characters feel so real to me, Serafino seems so real to me and I would realistically love to be writing rather than plugging my way through Austen and Dickens, but the reality is that I can Nano any year, win Nano any time. I don't get second chances with school. Why Nano if I feel like I'm not going to "win"? I love to write, and I do love to be around other people who write. Even if I don't "win", it's still a rewarding experience and it's very good for my confidence. Believe it or not, looking at how long it takes me to write for Nano is what kicked me in the butt to realise that a 2500 word essay is short. Granted, I have to put more thought into 2500 words than I do into Nano, but the point is that I can churn out 2000 words in a day if I sit down and simply do it, just the way I churned out my short essay in a couple of hours. I suppose the real prize from Nano, 50 000 words or not, is that it's a lesson in jumping in with both feet. |
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Somehow my Nano novel has turned into a gangster story which is bad because I clearly know nothing about gangsters or gangster stories. |
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Nano isn't going well so far. Last year I started off running, built up a huge word count in a few days, and polished off 50 000 in 19 days. That clearly isn't going to happen this year. Why? Well, it's already November second and I have a piddly 400 words. Why? Well, yesterday I cranked a 750 word essay out of myself in the span of two hours because I'm freaking tired of watching myself hand things in late. Then what else did I do yesterday . . . oh yes. We went out, bought groceries, and had dinner. By the time I got home I was exhausted and only managed to crank 400 words out of myself. I'm not going to have my mornings to Nano in this year unless I get up stupidly early and I probably haven't mentioned this before but I do my best writing in the morning. I'm talking 6am. I like to get up early and write because my dreams are in my head, I'm fresh, I'm relaxed, I don't have the day bogging me down. When my first class is at 8:30 am I roll out of bed at 6am, yes, but to get ready for school. I could snag an hour of writing in between 6 am and 7am when I actually start getting ready for school and forgo that hour of pounding on my snooze button, but nothing starts the day of better than groaning, beating your alarm clock, and then curling up under a blanket. I don't know. I set myself the challenge of writing my nano novel this year all in second person. I might change my mind, write a female protagonist for a change and do some chick-lit rather than trying to pass myself off as an artist. I'm aiming for 3000 words by the end of tonight. I ned to set myself up with some hot chocolate, some good instrumental, and just type. |
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Nano has started. I jotted a few things down, but I'm in the midst of writing an essay, so I'm not going to get the big jump on things this year that I had last year. In fact, when I look at my school schedule, and my complete lack of discipline, I start to seriously doubt my ability to "win" this year. I've posted my 190 so words as my excerpt on my nano profile. Now I have to get back to work. |
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First nano meeting today. There are two things I've really come to love about nano. The first is that it gives me a chance to write, even if my writing isn't very good. I love that it gives me an excuse to add writing as a real part of my day. It's the one time of the year when I can put writing near the front of my agenda guilt free. The second thing I've come to love about Nano are Nano meetings. There's something invigorating about being around other people who write, and write for fun. Nano people are a different, and special ("special") sort of people and Nano meetings have always been, in the past, very fulfilling. Hopefully they'll be just as fulfilling this year. So far, prospects look hopeful. Also, you are sleep depraved and you know it. |
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I'm in school now. I'm currently working towards doing a Level II Writing Certificat concurrent with my BA in English. I'm looking at doing some post secondary studies in editing and publishing. We'll see how that goes. Nano's coming up again. I think I'll participate again this year. I've thought up a concept for a story, though I'm not sure if I'll be able to make it work. I'll try to do the 1667 words/day because I am trying to get my marks as obscenely high as possible this year so I can at least give myself a fighting chance rather than watching all this money and all this effort go down the drain. I didn't do any writing in August, nor will I likely do any writing in October. School is a priority at the moment and what I really want will have to wait. It won't wait indefinitely but I've learned that I need a stable base of accomplishment and part of that means I need to make myself financially secure, and intellectually credible. I have, however, become intensely interested in my school work where I wasn't before. It's kind of bizzarre to watch myself do my assignments as soon as I get them rather than at the last minute. I had three quizzes and a composition due this week -- I prepared for them all in a timely fashion and did relatively well though a certain amount of stress was involved: circumstances beyond my control and the like. I think I would like to do a half course in modern grammar this summer. It would not only be to my benefit, but I think I would be interested in it if only to relieve myself over doubt about commas and subordinate clauses and the like. I think it would be a real confidence builder. |
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Is there such a thing as editor's block? I haven't been editing the novel. I'll admit to that. I've reached a block of sorts. I want to bring out the plot more. The plot needs to be on the paper, and not something hiding in the background of what's there. What's there is needed for character development but there needs to be more story. So I have to step back from the text and break it down into scenes. I need to know what needs to happen and wher it needs to go. I need to figure out what the reader needs to know in order to follow Seff to the answers. I want to play up Morty a lot more. Montgomery needs dialogue. Seff needs to be more inquisitive. Joseph is the messenger and guide. They must stay together. There are two storylines. A story line of memory and a storyline of events. These must be seperated from each other stylistically, but how. The present will remain chronological. The memory will go in order of significance. In order of the clues. I must list the clues. Letters, dialogue, photos. There has to be a storyline, a plot. I have to sit down and write that out in a list. I have to clarify that before I can proceed. I have to make some decisions. I have to get a clearer idea. I have to put in the real work. That's the struggle. |
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I had a discussion yesterday with someone about dedication. They spoke of a boy who was so dedicated, so passionate about guitar that he would absentmindedly play his guitar while in class. I've often wondered if I was every truly passionate enough about anything to dedicate myself to it entirely, to be so dedicated as to push myself past my own limits to perfect that thing. To be so obsessive that it was my primary waking thought. To be so devoted to something that nothing else mattered. |
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It's odd. When I look at the poetry I wrote when I was 13 I can't help but reflect on how bad it is. It's outright terrible. That's the only word for it. It's typical, it's annoying. Part of me is ashamed of it. And yet I enjoyed writing it so much, and at the time it was important to me. At the time those were my deep and personal thoughts, that was my command of language and even though it seems simple to me now I must remember that back then, in my own mind, I was carving some sort of pathway for myself. And it was deep, and it was moving, and it was personal, and it meant something to me. I also realised that many of the feelings I had then are things that I've long since thrown away and what I wrote about them is the only proof of their existence. Ironically, it isn't the great things that lingered, but the smell of dirt, the way the sun would catch the bits of dust swirling in my room as it snuck in beneath my blue curtains. The way furniture polish smelled in the summer and the sound of the fan. The Christmas lights strung on the curtain rods, that one strip of dry wall that's been marked irreperably since I was 6 because dad didn't hang it properly. The sound of crinoline in my old dresses and the way I fought to not have them thrown out. The spotted pattern of my brown carpet, the half tinge of the light the way the one bulb in it was always burnt out. The little things. The little quiet peaceful things that are so ordinary that they weave the fabric of the self in such a way that while we can extract ourselves from tragedy and destiny, we can never extract ourselves from flecks of peeling paint, and floor boards that creek when you walk on them. More and more I find it is those ordinary things that stick with me. The ordinary things that have become of interest to me. The way I didn't like mustard (though I'm now I mustard fiend I'll have you know) and the way . . . The way it all is. The things that only you can see. The private things. I think I should like to write about my home. Where I grew up. I think I want to write short stories about that. About fields, and grass, and trees, and rocks, little bridges, and dirt, and mud. The little things that only I will ever see. I want to write about them because they mean something to me. Because they are me. I've started two. They haven't gotten very far. I think it would be more productive sometimes if I could just work on a project and finish it rather than juggling things, and going back and forth between things inconsistently, but then, maybe it wouldn't. But right now I'm focussing on poetry. I have five so far that I feel are my best work, but they have nothing in common with each other. Anyway, I'm still just researching markets at the moment, so I can write more in the mean time. Then maybe once I make a poetry submission I'll finally be able to settle down and write the short stories. And procrastinate on the editing work that needs done on the novel, of course. |
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Editing on the novel has been going well. It could be going better if I was focussing on it but for some reason I'm really having a hard time getting my brain out of reading mode and into writing mode. The excursion on Saturday did help a lot to improve the state of my mental processing, however. While at the event there was a woman dressed in loose, flowing clothing with a pink scarf wrapped around her head, the tassles dangling and drifting, the tails of it hanging down from her shoulder and catching in the wind. She sat on the cement steps, a notebook in her lap, scribbling, and scribbling, sitting there with the rest of them as they waited for the artist. She reminded me of a gypsy, or some sort of enchantress able to see the future or the mind. Strangely, though the artist did inspire me and after whose appearance I promptly came home and dragged two decent poems out of myself, it was the woman's scarf that sparked me and spurred me on to do something I haven't done in a long time; I watched her for a while and then found myself putting words together in my mind. Small, short ones at first, just bubbling up from the centre of a pot about to boil, and then the desperation that comes as you scrounge around the black messenger bag praying that you haven't gotten out of the habit of carrying a pen with you. The way you plead with the words, "please don't leave me," as though they were an unreliable lover, as though they were some loved one from a far away whom you know you'll never see again, or that last dream you have in the morning that fades out to nothing while you pee. In all honesty the greatest words are the words that are not my own, the unbidden words of Inspiration and yet Inspiration only gave me three words. Luck gave me a pen and an old grocery list, and Motivation and Dilligence gave me the will to park myself on the cement in the middle of the city, to scrawl out those three words, to form The Image. The strange part was the sense of embarassement when He leaned over and tried to see what I was doing. No! No! It was private and some secret shame of having him see the half formed Image over came me. His view of the words incompletely scrawled on the back of my grocery list seemed fatal to me, as though his glance into the private creation was threatening, some sort of disease that threatened. Or perhaps it's because it is private. I have never been able to write in the company of others. As the words go down there is some strange connection as though between mother and child and I think should I never have children that I wouldn't care at all as long as I could write. There's a quiet moment there as the ink goes down in its thin curled lines, a moment where this private and personal self that exists only as a vague and blurry concept, a feeling, takes form, and becomes a being. It is a moment of birth. The birth of an idea, a birth of a tangible part of the private self, and as those words go down it is also a simultaneous moment of death. The words go on the page, the feeling goes down, it becomes immortalised and yet in that moment it is no longer living and mutable. It is frozen in time. Poetry like the gift of Pompeii to the arhaeologist. Forget the artist. Writing is a beautiful catharsis for the writer that allows us to live as we dehumanise the self through description. This month I will try to get some poetry published. Then I will know where I am in relation to Expectation. This is something I need now although I can see with my own eyes that I have improved. I looked back through the folder today and found that over the last year my poetry has become much more refined than it once was. The things that were once meaningful and monumental to me now see pitiful and weak. The style I once used seems too loose, unrestrained, and careless, the words are there because they were there at the moment and less because I had chosen them. The images . . . there were no images. Experience is growth. Unfortunately sometimes growth is painful. I suppose I've accepted this now. |
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Sorry everyone. New information has come my way and I've gone ahead and gotten ahead of myself again so I really won't be moving here after all. But thank you for the support that came forth for the move so quickly. Once again, I'm sorry for all of this. I do feel incredibly foolish now. Come November I will be using this, however, as a Nano exclusive journal. Once again, I'm sorry about all of this everyone. Thank you, -N. |
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