Or Resurrection. Of this blog, that is.

One thing that a writer needs is motivation. Ideas are easy to come by. A million people have a million ideas a day. The thing that separates a writer from one of these million other schmoes, is the will to execute; the motivation to not just say ‘ooh, that would make a fantastic idea for a story,’ but to actually sit down and put pen to paper.

Motivation.

Ultimately, it comes from within. In this case, the motivation to resurrect my blog is that I told someone about it. Or rather, first they told me that they had a blog and I responded in kind. Unly (I should write a post about that), when I directed that person to my blog, I had to wryly add that I hadn’t made a blog post in ages (more than a year it turns out).

Hence this.

So sometimes it takes an externally imposed deadline, let’s call it ‘inspiration,’ but the will to follow through and meet that deadline is still derived from within. It might be pride in your own word, desire to impress, fear of appearing as someone who doesn’t uphold his word (there’s a word for that I’m sure. Forgive me, I’m a bit rusty at this). All these emotions come from within, a response to some stimulus, an outside catalyst perhaps.

Inspiration is all well and good, I just got a car load on my road trip out to Cowra to attend the Japanese Cherry Blossom Festival, but utilising that to drive your writing, that’s hard.

And easy. Or, rather, simple. All it takes is a bum on a seat and hand to the keyboard.

It is good timing perhaps. The end of another year is fast approaching and that means another NaNoWriMo is coming along too. I’ve got a mini project (very mini) to complete before then and I should probably post about how my 2015 project went, since I completely missed writing in and around that whole year.

Whew.

Feeling motivated.

Thanks Shona.

November 2014 is over and with it I have successfully completed my second NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). The following are my related Facebook posts and some commentary.

5000. Just humming along on target
50,000 words in 30 days means 5,000 words every 3 days. I kept this pace for about 14 days, which was actually slower than last year and thus was a little disappointing. When you start each day 1,666 words behind it’s a little discouraging and a buffer of surplus words would have been nice.

Cracked 10,000
This at 9pm on the 6th of November, just before my bedtime no doubt. This year I had a job to get to the next day whereas the previous year I did not. Which explains why I had more time and energy to write last year. Also my job is only part time, so massive respect to all the NaNoers holding down a fulltime job while writing.

Caught up. 15005
There was a day in there that I didn’t write one word. That’s why it’s nice to get ahead and have a buffer. But I managed to catch up by writing 2500 words in one day which was my biggest day’s word count to date.

20130. The going is tough but intermittently flowing.
I do hate slogging through scenes where nothing but crap dialogue is going on. Sometimes it just has to be pushed through. During NaNo I try not to skip ahead to juicier bits. It may not be efficient but I try to write in the order the book proceeds. And thankfully, sometimes I’m rewarded by something worth keeping, often something I didn’t even know about the characters or the plot or the world.

Wrote 5155 words today. So yeah, smashed 25k.
This was my most productive day. It started with a good patch early in the morning at the café. Followed by more writing in the arvo. And another session at night. It all came too easily. Again it was after a day of no words, a Saturday, which is the day I’m usually exhausted from working all day at the trapeze rig.

30k down. Building some momentum now
This is the period where I’m finally getting ahead of the curve with some word counts over 1666. This is where things start feeling good.

35,000.
Incredibly slow day. Then couldn’t stop writing. Maybe what I need is a video camera on me all the time.
This day the SMH came to film their article for their website on NaNo. We turned up in force at the Nerd Cave and put on our serious writer’s faces. I had planned on leaving earlier but as I said, I just couldn’t stop writing. When you’re in the flow you’re loathe to break it.

40206. Take that.
I’m 5000 words over the benchmark which means I have a three day buffer. Feels good.

Passed 45k. No where near finished though.
Approaching the end of the month’s race and yet it feels that my plot has barely begun. What have I been writing?

50,060. But it took me over an hour to damn validate the damn thing. Going to bed
I made it with three days to spare. Finished again in time for bed but then wasted an hour trying to get Word to change all the letters but keep the spaces so I could validate the word count of an essentially gibberish text document. Then it took some more time getting the website to work for me. But I had to get it done that day.

AND NOW…

During last year’s effort I asked other returners what they had written during the intervening months and most times the answer was a disappointing ‘Nothing.’ I thought to myself ‘they must not be that serious about their writing, not like me,’ and so the plan was to get at least my short story and another novel written before the next NaNo came around.

What I discovered is just how easy it was to let the year go by without reaching my goal, nay, even striving for it.
Will this year be different? I have plans for it to be. I have a friend who is a movement conditioner, which is like a personal trainer, but perhaps with a more intelligent approach to reaching our goals. With his attitude and approach I plan on getting the story mill churning.

For now I’ve got to keep the momentum up and finish this story. I feel like maybe I’m halfway through. Just another 50k, or a month’s work, right?

Yesterday marked 10 days into NaNo month, a third of the time allotted to completing the task at hand. My word count? 20,894 words. Woohoo, I’m ahead of the game. At least I am word count-wise. Plot-wise I actually do feel about a third of the way through. Considering how many words I’ve written I feel this is slow. My party has have finally, finally arrived where they are supposed to be. Almost.

It feels like the hobbits arriving at Rivendell. I’m not sure it’s good that it took a third of the book to get here but it’s a first draft and this is NaNo. Write write write. It also feels like this book will go over 50k words, maybe 60 if my gut feeling is worth anything (which I doubt it is).

So it seems I’m right on target.

As I think back over what I’ve learnt since my last entry, there’s not much new. It’s more like I’ve realised that by sitting down to type and type and type, you can actually get that lofty book in my head down on paper (electronic). It is actually possible to transform dream to reality. And this part of it is not glamorous but it is rewarding.

Incidentally, as of this typing I’ve actually passed the 25k mark, so I’m actually half way there. If I can squeeze out another 800 words I’ll have written a cool 5 thousand today but given the time I think that may be a little optimistic.

It’s been a good day. One good coffee, one bad. Lots of rain and lots of words.

Three days gone and I have 6787 words. 10% of the way there!

Had a horrible day playing basketball yesterday but came home and soaked the tired muscles. One and a half years in Japan not doing any running sports and as soon as I get back to Australia it’s the same old problems I had when I left. Oh how I miss Japan’s onsens.

After dinner I sat down to start the day’s write session. Somehow managed a couple of thousand words and without noticing it I’d hit the 5000 word milestone. In fact I’d completely leapfrogged it. No time to rest on that shallow bed of laurels however. I’m off to recharge my caffeine levels, my body is dangerously low after going without yesterday. On a Sunday! Crazy I know.

Quick recap on my first three days of NaNo (can’t be bothered typing the whole thing anymore).

Day 1: Did my first day ever of sitting down seriously to write a novel…at home. It was horrible, with my mum going about the house cleaning in the background and sometimes not the background, hassling me, asking me questions, complaining about my diet, etc.

To make things worse I was really struggling to write. One of the scenes that I imagined years back being the trigger for events was so hard to write and seem interesting on paper. The scene was far too slow and boring I thought. And I have to go through thirty days of this torture? I want to quit already. Maybe I’m not cut out to be a writer after all. Doubt already and it’s only day one!

Day 2: Chapter 2 was even worse. I slogged through it and by the time I was finally done I was happy just to be done with it. Save and close.

Sometime during the day I figured I was missing a prologue so I went back to type in a punchy action scene. This was great as it reenergized my writing, reminding me of what was good about this story, giving me hope.

Later, when I went to update my word count for the day I discovered the bottom paragraphs of Chapter 2 which I’d struggled with were missing. Gone. No amount of trying to go back and tracking changes could turn up my deleted words. I’d already saved over the complete chapter with the one in which I must have accidently deleted those words. That’s what I hate about typing with a mouse pad on a laptop, when you accidently touch it and move the cursor around, sometimes highlighting and then replacing whole chunks of text with a single letter.

After much cursing, I bit the bullet and re-typed those hated couple hundred of words. The second time round they did seem less corny and I even think I added in some improved ideas, so I the end I’m happier. I guess I can look forward to that in the second draft. Overall a good result but I’d really rather not have to try to recreate any lost words again.

Day 3: Wrote a chunk of words, getting my character to where I want her to be. I really am trying to avoid travelogue as I hate reading it. Lack of detailed planning means that I was happy to discover a character interaction that both fills in some plot holes and was an actual pleasure to write. Need more of this.

What sort of crazy word is that? It’s an acronym for National Novel Writing Month, that month being November. Of the history I don’t know much about it but it seems that by ‘National’ it refers to USA. It’s certainly a bit more global than that which is fortunate for me.

It’s a little known acronym but fortunately it’s very easy to explain to those not in the know. 50,000 words in 30 days. One novel in one month. That’s the goal and it begins tomorrow.

I stumbled across it a couple of years ago at Stanton Library in North Sydney, wondering what in the world is that nonsensical word with the jumble of upper and lower case letters? At the time I was not ready to tackle such a lofty challenge. Now it seems I am.

I had originally planned on taking the three months of the Japanese winter, mid-December through to mid-March, to write my first novel but upon arriving home in Sydney this October, somewhere, I can’t remember where, I saw that funny word NaNiWriMo. I thought to myself, that’s bad timing, I’m writing my novel in December not November.

Situations change and I’m no longer planning on spending three months snowboarding Japan’s wondrous snow. Bad timing becomes good timing and tomorrow I’m going to start writing my first novel.

There’s a lot of challenges to tackle and there’s plenty of reasons why I should not be writing a novel to begin with. But it’s November. It’s Novel Writing Month. And I’m the kind of guy who goes with the flow on these sorts of things.

Now I need to get back to preparing my plot.

Wish me luck