Thursday, November 1, 2012

NaNoWriMo Day 1

Word Count: 1,208
Total Word Count: 1,208
Daily Word Goal: 1,667
Words Remaining: 48,792

Well, that was a lot harder than I remember. It's been months since I wrote, and the main thing I took away from this experience is that the hardest part about starting a new book, or starting writing at all, is that you not only have to think of what happens, but you also have to do so while wrestling with your self doubt.

The entire time that I was writing this I kept thinking to myself how much what I was writing sucked. And it does, it really does. I just never realized how much my internal editor was keeping me from writing. While I didn't meet my word count, I'm considering this a good start for being out of the daily writing game for months at a time.

I'm not really doing this to finish the whole book in a month, though it would be nice if I did. My real goal here is breaking past that barrier I haven't been able to break past. Namely the barrier where I'm so used to doing this that continuing is a lot easier to do than it was before breaking that barrier.

I actually noticeably hit that barrier while I was starting out podcasting. I got to a point where it just didn't feel worth it. But I had co-hosts that wanted to continue, and so I did, and I ended up not only enjoying myself, it's actually gotten easier to actually get the podcast done.

Of course editing it is a completely different matter...

I'm considering this first day a success, now I just need to get my writing done earlier in the day so I can feel more accomplished. When I'm not berating myself for how crap my writing is that is...

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

The BownBlog - Open For Business

I may not have been the most consistent updater of this blog, and there are two reasons for this. One, I've been trying to focus more on my review blog, so a lot of my writing blog updates fall by the wayside. Two, I haven't been writing fiction nearly as much as I should have. Thus, without anything substantial to say on this blog, I let it drift into obscurity. But, as a ploy to try and get myself writing again, I've decided to actually participate, and complete, NaNoWriMo. And as part of that attempt, I'm ressurecting this writing blog.

I'll be providing daily updates on my progress, as well as making the attempt to write some other writing related posts. But mostly, for now, I'll be updating this blog daily, to gather my thoughts after each day of writing.

My goal right now is to complete a book, I've started several books, but haven't gotten all the way to the end with any of them. Part of my problem is lack of focus, I think of something cool, but once I start working on it, I think of something even cooler, so my previous project suddenly becomes onerous and is abandoned. I won't let it happen this time.

The book I'm working on is actually inspired by my cousin's toddler. During a family visit, the first time we'd gotten together since he'd been born, he came face to face with me for the first time. Keep in mind, I haven't cut my hair in about a year, and my beard had several months worth of growing under its belt. As a result, the kid wouldn't stop staring at me. He never got close, but every time he walked past me, he would just stare like I was the most fascinating thing in the world.

By the next family get together, everything had changed. Gone was the childlike fascination, in its place was something entirely more...annoying. The kid took one look at me, and broke out into tears. I could move to close to him the entire night, without him wailing like I was some kind of frightening, hairy beast.

This gave me an idea, for a pseudo-horror middlegrade book. Where the monster is a wizard, menacing a young boy. From that I got the idea for, and plotted almost the entire story for, There's a Wizard Under My Bed!

The premise is that young Carter wakes up one night to the smell of rotting eggs and soured milk, and finds that a wizard has accidentally opened a portal under Carter's bed, and he is not happy about it. When nobody believes a word he says, Carter decides to go through the portal under his bed, and bring back the proof himself.

The basic structure of this story came to me fairly easily. Which either means it's a shallow idea, or I'm better at this than I actually realized. Either way, I decided a few weeks later, that I would make this my NaNoWriMo for the year. I hope that actually using the website to log my progress will encourage me to actually finish. I'm planning it to be a little more than 50,000 words, so what I'll probably be doing is starting off at the recommended word count for the month, but hopefully after that I'll be able to pick up the pace.

My plans beyond that are to finally finish editing the original draft of Dragon's Egg. I have a version of that book that is still unfinished, but I'll come back to that later, as it's more YA than middlegrade, and I need to get the middlegrade version presentable. After October I'll be spending at least the first part of November editing that manuscript so it doesn't suck. I'm not entirely sure how long that will take, but I intend to spend the rest of that month tying up some loose ends on my unfinished stories. Namely, I intend to complete the YA edition of Dragon's Egg before moving on to my next book, Swords. After that I can't  be sure what I'll be doing next. I'll have to play it by ear.

But for now, my tentative schedule is:
October - There's a Wizard Under My Bed!
November, First Half - Edit Middlegrade Dragon's Egg
November, Second Half - Finish YA Dragon's Egg
December - Swords

Hopefully actually planning this out will give me a chance to stick to my schedule. I'll try to keep up to date on my blogging, but for now my main focus will be getting my writing done every day. Whatever time I have after that will be spent blogging. I know that I've said similar things to what I've said in this blog post in the past. But this time my resolution is tempered by the fact that I've had consistent exposure to a normal job. While I do have a pretty good job, I've learned that I won't be able to stand a lifetime of working a regular job like this. So, for the sake of being able to live the life I want, I'm going to do my very best to finally get something published/actually get something finished.

And if that means forcing myself to go back to old stories and finish them, then so be it.