Current Heroes

Purple Bar, die Dritte!

And this, my friends, was how I got here (no cheating at all):

What a month…once again.

Stats:

Days Where I Wrote: 7

Total Words Written: 50,219

Highest Daily Word Count: 17,402 (!)

And Then It Gets E.p.i.c.

Snapshots of a procrastinating writer’s thought process—culled from diary, chat and forums—as the NaNoWriMo clock ticks down to the deadline:

• “I have absolutely no idea what I am about to write about but here goes 1,000 words of it! Here I am sitting at All Saints, nervous about drinking this coffee because there is not enough food on my stomach. Theta is about to go look at some more of the castle and I mean the hotel, and meet some of her fellow residents, including Wren and the three sisters. As long as it gets to a thousand words and is not a nazi rape scene, we should be ok.”
• “My coffee was good. I drank it black, with an assload of pure cane sugar.”
• “I hate THEM ALL ALREADY. IS IT TOO EARLY FOR THE METEOR STRIKE?”
• “What in the bleeding fuck is wrong with my internet radio? I know that I will not be finishing this novel if I have to listen to the self-absorbed whining of Billy Corgan for the next eight hours. There is not enough alcohol in the world for that.”
• “That oh shit, I am totally just filling these pages with garbage. I think it should be called the fifth wall when the author starts ranting to herself. The fourth wall is when your characters address the audience or the author, the fifth wall should be when a bit of dialogue without warningly becomes a self-castigating rant about how much nazi dick is actually in this fucking novel. You would think I was the literary eqivalent of tom of holland, or whatever that artist of gay beefcake guys was called. If anyone ever reads this, I promise I will kill myself.”
• “What did my feathered headdress ever do to deserve this?”
• “Oh my god, this cream cheese is shitty. It is like crumbly, and its consistency has a certain untrustworthy powderiness. Yack. At least they have that awesome Jones root beer which I usually try to avoid, lest it become my new crack. Damn, that’s a poem.”
• “Twenty six seconds left in this word sprint. Not so bad, though they did not get to Vornaros. But I like Dazt, formerly black hearted Lord of the Dark Buzzing Fluorescent Lit Hellacious Wastes, I am just afraid he is becoming a silly, hottie shadow of his former terrifyingness. I need to sort my villains, stat.”
• “I find it interesting how this was the first mainly paperless National Novel Writing Month I have done. All the references in No Plot, No Problem to making notes, or buying a notebook, or having a pen…well, I wouldn’t say that I’m past that, but I made almost no notes on paper for this NaNo. Thanks to Scrivener, best writing program EVAR!”
• “I think NaNoWriMo should have a ‘Come From Behind’ hall of fame, with the people who started the final weekend with less than ten thousand words getting a shoutout. How do we do it? Of course, I have not done it yet, so perhaps I should shut up.”
• “I had not realized what had been around my neck this whole time. Ruby pulled the hatpin out of her hair and  FUCK THIS, I AM WRITING SMUT.”
• “But actually coming face to face with evil for a few minutes IRL has mad me not only want to grasp harder at all the little bits of love and light in my story, but also to take even more seriously the whole narrative, for all the delicious mess I have made of it.”

Dear BBC: is it necessary to be so totally sexist?

Here was the title of the BBC Online article:

“Men and women ‘respond differently to danger’ “

And here was the accompanying photograph:

Really? Really? In 2009?

Half Past Meltdown

Theta Pearl Whitman, I am tired of you. This will be my last NaNoWriMo with you as my main character, and I am interested to move on to other characters. For four years now, I have lived with this same cast, give or take a couple of characters. It’s interesting—they’re like a family at this point. Three novels I have written with them, or almost. And I know I have years to enjoy them on rewrites, research, editing, and fleshing out. But the heart of the novel—the dust into which we breathed life, which then took on the living body that it is—that part will be done in less than 24 hours. And that kinda makes me sad.

An era will be ended. The era of banging out my first books, my precious baby trilogy, during three wild National Novel Writing Months. Sure, I’ve word-padded; sure, I’ll have to come back and fill in the holes and perfect. But three times now, I have pulled the lever, and had lightning strike. Three times now, the monster has sat up, and I have screamed, “It’s alive!”

I can spend the rest of my life perfecting these books, or rush them out the door, misshapen but publishable. Most likely what I will do is somewhere in between the two. But the fact is, it is time to edit and perfect the creations, the monsters I have brought to life. The first spark—the moment they first sat up—will, this time tomorrow, be behind me.

The birth will be over. I will be grooming and growing them. Preparing for the creation of the next book, of which I am thoroughly intimidated. But the first three will always be special, if for no other reason than because they are the three books I was born to write. All else is pleasure.

I have barely even begun to do them justice, I know. The cumulative six months or so I have spent planning and writing the bits that I have written, barely stack up to the years in which I will have to finish them. But I will be in a completely different phase then, with its own pleasures of novel gutting and renovation. But revamping something that already exists is totally different from bringing it into being out of nothing.

If I could think of anything else to say, I would write it. That is the trouble with trying to punch the whole NaNo thing out in the last weekend. Trying to squeeze fiction out of yourself like toothpaste from a tube has its downside. For one thing, if an idea is stupid or fucks you up, you have no time to go back and fix it, or even think of a good save. You have to just keep going, even if it means changing topics entirely within one sentence, grammar be damned.

It’s not even the typing, or the fatigue in your back or eyes or fingers. It is the total dearth of ideas after a certain number of hours. When you are away from your writing, there is a golden window of hours or days that you can stay away from it. Take too long, and you lose the momentum, the thread…the spell gets broken. That is a well documented risk.

But there is a converse risk too. If you do not take any time away from your writing at all—if you attempt to do what I am doing, and not even take longer than ten minute breaks, for hours and hours, day after day, you run out of thoughts. Not words, not ideas, but thoughts themselves. Your brain just absolutely stops having any juice in it.

I can hear my imagination wheezing.

National Novel Writing Month: the Growing Insanity

I just wrote seven thousand words in 4 1/2 hours.

Some gems include:

“We’re all pirates. And we all call ourselves the good guys.”
*
Then my mind went dark, and slowly pictures began to surface in my mind’s eye, like fish swimming to the top of a pond—weird, grotesquely clored fish.
*
He put his hand on the knob again. As I stared, it glowed red, then melted into smoldering, smoking liquid, flowing through his fingers like mercury. It fell towards the floor, but vanished before it could burn the antique wood.
*
The room was stuffy and smelled like abandonment.
*
the little lavender slut boy think like he used to have befor ehe got married and stupid?
*
(Well, iv’e written about three hindred words in threeminutes, which is obvs a hundred words a minute. And look at the remarkable job I have done of it so far. I would be a lovely secretary. She’s pretty, but can she type? No, absolutely not.)

***

That’s right, folks. I am currently triple-fisting Goldschlager, sweet tea, and a Starbucks Doubleshot espresso drink. And I have come dangerlulzy close to setting my hair on fire twice tonight.

Here’s a random photo of Kiss, just to be safe:

Hunter and Pecker

Fact is, I type like a mofo, for all that I hunt and peck about a hundred words a minute, and so have to stay ahead of seasickness by heading it off at the pass with copious quantities of wine. I could knock out 1,667 words, the NaNoWriMo daily chunk, in a little over an hour. And yet, here it is again, the third time in a row that I have put the whole shebang off until the last minute, and am paying for it in stupidity and bad writing. And pointless ranting like this. Every word written here is just another word not going into my novel, but I don’t give a flying fuck about that. If I don’t take a break once in a while, my head will implode!