Nanowrimo: Report from Halfway Day

Let me be brief with the bad news: I'm behind. Almost impossibly behind. As in, a little bit over ten thousand words behind. Oy. Mostly this is because it has been impossible to make the minimum every single day: life happens.

And I feel guilty just typing these few lines, since I could be working on the novel instead. How many words is this post? A hundred? Two? You wasted two hundred words on a stupid post to yer stupid blog? Yeah, that's what I thought! Now get back to work!

However, it is a nice consolation that I'm only about five thousand words behind Chris Baty himself. If even the standard-bearer of the event can fall behind and still catch up in the end, then dammit, I can fall behind and still catch up too!

And I'm pretty sure that is exactly what will happen. Because here's the good news: I'm still having a great time, and this story is showing no signs of slowing down. I plan to write another thousand words today, but even if I did no more work on it until tomorrow, I could still make it to 50k by November 30th, provided I wrote about 2,500 words a day.

Which is less impractical than it sounds.

How's that? I've discovered the power of "word sprints": Set a timer for half an hour and write as fast as you can, and don't check your word count until time's up. (When the timer runs out, it's break time, and you're allowed to be neurotic on breaks.) Invariably, you discover that you've written way, way more than you thought you possible in half an hour.

My theory is that the problem lies in checking the word count all the time. If you constantly check your word count, then you're constantly breaking your involvement with the story you're making up. Force yourself to avoid checking it, and all of a sudden you're in the flow. There have been times when I just kept working past the timer.

I've got so much more I could write about this project, but I really ought to get back to work on it. Here's to catching up!

The Release of Election Day

Well, Election Day is finally here.

Last night I joked to my wife that the moment this election ends, I will regain three hours a day for work.

It's a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. With few immediate deadlines and appointments beyond a (self-imposed) daily post to at least one of the blogs I write on, it's easier than it really should be to keep reloading my favorite news sources, to see the latest polls and prognostications. Over and over again, like a brain-damaged monkey with OCD.

Thankfully, that temptation is almost gone. Because my productivity was really starting to take a hit.

Nothing important has suffered much, apart from my mouse-clicking finger. All my big projects are moving along right on track, and I'm having no problem keeping up with the duties of my part-time day job. But one writing project has suffered a bit: Nanowrimo.

Now, I haven't been neglecting it. After a slow first day, I surged ahead on the second day, only to fall behind again yesterday. I expected as much: actually, I'm farther into this new novel than I expected I would be, at 4,238 words. But that's quite a ways short of the official yardstick for Day 4: 6,667 words by the end of today. That's almost a day and a half behind schedule.

I'm not going to make that entire gap up today, so I've set myself a provisional goal of 5,000 -- that's where I should have been at the end of yesterday, and it's entirely realistic to expect myself to get there.

Once I make that count, I'm going to try to get as close as I possibly can to the day's official goal, and close that gap as much as possible!

All I have to do is concentrate. And that means turning off the WiFi, and leaving it off until 3:30, when I'll have to stop working for a very good reason: I'm going out to an election night party tonight.

NaNoWriMo '08!

I've got a busy month ahead of me, with all kinds of articles to research and write, along with some potential changes in where my writing is going to regularly appear, and how much blogging I'm going to do each day (namely, it might increase). Even without that possibility, I can predict that my work schedule is going to be pretty full.

But that's no excuse for not writing a novel this November. That's right: I'm doing NaNoWriMo again this year.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the NaNoWriMo event at LitQuake, and I got inspired to participate for the first time since 2005. That year didn't go so well, but I'm pretty optimistic about this one. Over the past couple of weeks, I've worked out a sketchy story -- with a beginning and an end -- and I've thought a lot about the tone I want to aim for, the kind of atmosphere I want to create.

Just now I heard about an invitation to blog about NaNoWriMo over on RedRoom, so I'll be doing a little bit of that here and crossposting. Who knows, maybe I'll luck out and be selected for a bit of book consulting.

In the meantime, I've got some "real" work to do in advance, to make time for those magic 1,763 words a day.

Why I Stopped Writing a Daily Journal

[Via Garfield Minus Garfield]

Cold Start

Every time I take a break from daily writing, I'm reminded of that concert pianist (it might have been Liszt) who said "if I skip practice for a day, I know it; after two days, my wife knows it; after three, the public knows it." As far as performance goes, writing is much more forgiving than music. Ideally, the "public" should never know you've taken time off, because you will have edited out all your mistakes before the "performance" even reaches their judgment. Every line in this paragraph, for example, has been rewritten several times; more times than I can count.

I hope my struggle to make sense this morning is no longer evident in these lines. But when I take a week off, boy do I ever feel it. Just to write something as flimsy as this post, I have to return to absolute basics, and sit alone at a table with pen, paper, and coffee. Sometimes I put on some ambient music; a favorite of late has been Robert Rich's 3-disc live performance, Humidity.

Doing all that forces me to focus, of course. But equally important is the heightened sense of engagement I feel when I physically draw my words out on a piece of paper. After a while -- five minutes, an hour -- I feel fully engaged and I have to switch to a text editor because I'm thinking more quickly than I can handwrite.

There's an interesting thing I've discovered about making this switch: if I increase the font size so that the letters are about a centimeter high, I can sustain that same sense of purely physical engagement with the lines. Why should that be? My guess is that the letters are so huge, my brain gets tricked into perceiving my edits and additions as being the same kind of physical manipulations that are entailed by paper and pen.

Anyway, I've returned to daily writing with this post. Fall is always a productive season for me, and I've got quite the interesting set of projects lined up for the next month or so; I'm even planning to do NaNoWriMo again this year, about which more later. The next five weeks should be exhilaratingly busy. I'm looking forward to it.

Rare but not Collectible: Link+ to the Rescue

Recently I learned about the San Francisco Public Library's participation in a great program called Link+, which allows you to borrow books from any participating library. Most of the libraries are in the Bay Area, and a large number of libraries outside it, in California and Nevada, have also joined the consortium. It's a lot like the old Interlibrary Loan System, but a lot more efficient and friction-free. With Interlibrary Loan, you had to fill out a request form and wait for a month or more; with Link+ the wait time is a matter of days, and you place the request like a normal request, from inside the library's online catalog. All you need is a valid library card. The end result for patrons is that you can get your hands on just about any hard-to-find book that you might need for research in less than a week's time.

It's a powerful tool. For years I've been looking for a book by Geoff Dyer called Ways of Telling: it's a critical study of the English writer John Berger, published as a paperback original in 1985, and so far as I know, never reprinted. Of course it never will be published again; few people would be interested in a critical survey that only covers 3/5ths of the subject's career, and I doubt that Dyer is preparing new chapters on the work Berger has done in the intervening decades. More than that, it has been a long time since 1972, the year in which he won a Booker Prize for his novel G. and also achieved immense influence with a television program about art appreciation called Ways of Seeing (still a popular book). His fame is mostly confined to Europe; it's safe to say that in America, only those with a near-obsessive interest in Berger will seek out this book at all.

There may be only a small number of people answering to that description, but there are enough of us to make the book extremely hard to find. For one thing, Ways of Telling is the only comprehensive survey of Berger's career in existence, so it's valuable even though it ends with the mid-80's. What's more, it is written by Geoff Dyer, a man who has written at least two masterpieces himself: the memoir Out of Sheer Rage and his book about photography, The Ongoing Moment. Anybody who has a keen interest in either author, or both, is going to want very badly to have a copy of this book in his hands.

As a result, it has fallen into that vast category of books termed "rare but not collectible" by Mick Sussman in a recent essay, Attack of the Megalisters, in the New York Times. Whenever I went looking on Amazon for a copy, the price for this book was invariably in the hundreds of dollars. Today I did a search and found three copies for $50 and one for $375. These were unacceptable prices for what I understood to be a 200-page paperback, probably an apprentice work nowhere near the brilliance of Rage. (Having read most of it now, I can confirm that it is a well-written and useful text but not worth such prices.) For years, then, I simply hoped that I would stumble across it in a bookstore like Adobe Books, places where disorganization is a virtue, or the organization scheme is eccentric, and the owner might not always know the value of one title or another.

In the end, what connected me with the book was Link+. A search on that system turned up four copies in the whole consortium, and I requested the closest one, from the SF State library. Within a week, my copy had arrived at Main Library, and a search that I'd been on for at least five years was finished, and the book was in my hands. I just returned it today, after photocopying every page for my research, of course, at a total cost of one hour and $9. Not bad for an obscure book of interest to nobody but a handful of eccentrics like me.

Brian Doyle on Rejection Letters and Editing

Over at the Kenyon Review, there is an entertaining and clever essay, "No," by one Brian Doyle, on the vast subject of rejection letters and editing in general. He's the editor of the University of Portland magazine.

Fantastic quote:

After lo these many years as a magazine editor I have settled on a single flat sentence for my own use (“Thanks for letting me read your work, but it’s not quite right for this magazine,” a sentence I have come to love for the vast country of not quite right, into which you could cram an awful lot of sins), but I still have enduring affection for the creative no, such as this gem sent to a writer by a Chinese publication: “We have read your manuscript with boundless delight, and if we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of a lower standard. And, as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition and beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity.”

[via ol' reliable Ninja George way up and over there in ol' beautiful Toronto.]