This just turned up in my inbox, filling my heart with dread:

Dear Esteemed Wrimo,

It's that time again.

NaNoWriMo has officially opened for its eighth noveling season, and we'd
love to have you back for another raucous and productive November.

To reactivate your 2005 account, just head to www.nanowrimo.org and click
on the User Login Tab

Twice I've done it. One was a success, one was not, and both consumed an enormous amount of time and thoughtspace. I don't think I'll do it this year.

Well, I'm throwing away my complimentary nanowrimo smokes and calling it quits this year. I suppose I could generate tens of thousands of words of filler, but I don't want to. I began to care about my story, and that's pretty much the kiss of death with nanowrimo. I had constant writer's block, I grew progressively more resentful of the thing, and yet I didn't want to settle. You just can't have it that way. Like they say: good, fast, cheap, pick any two.

I'm going to finish the story, but it may take a while. A friend of mine once told me to remember that if you write a page a day, you'll have 365 pages in a year. That sounds kind of obvious, I guess, but it's a useful perspective. So that's how it'll go. A page a day, and as long as it needs to take.

So be it.

Eight days to go. Eight days, and thirty-four thousand words to go. I'm fucked.

Last week I just sort of stopped writing. I don't know why, but I just couldn't get anywhere. I'd fire up the word processor and just stare at the page. And it's ridiculous.

The problem, I guess, is that I walked into this with a Grand Vision. Grand Visions kill me. That isn't to say that there's no place for them, but that place isn't up front, first thing, right away.

I can still do this. And I will. I will do this. I'm going to have to scale back considerably, but I can do this. This is within my power, I know that it is, I just have to get past all of the stupid bullshit that I set myself up for.

So it goes.


I just check my deck of Oblique Strategies. It said, "Be less critical."

Well, with a couple thousand words of added exposition, and several thousand words of cheap tricks (the utterly shameless 500+-Question Network Personality Questionnaire) I'm now at 15,095 words. That's nearly a third of the way there, and I've still somehow managed to avoid introducing the actual plot. Well, whatever. The important thing is that I get it done. I can go back and expand it, I can revise it, I can tear it down and rewrite it from scratch. For now, the only things that are important are that I get a draft done, and that I do it within the next two weeks. I can do that, and now I'm back in the running to do that. That's all that matters.

Anyhoo, here's an obligatory excerpt, the rest is at http://schizotypal.org/nanowrimo/2005/:



A taxi pulled into the middle of an empty lot. It parked and shut off its lights. A small light went on inside the cabin.

A while passed.

A taxi pulled into the middle of the empty lot. It parked next to the other cab, and shut off its lights. The cabin light of the first taxi went off. They rolled down their windows, and sat.

A while passed.

Across the street, Simeon stepped out onto his balcony, shivered in the frigid air, pulled his coat tight, and sat in the nearer chair. He opened up a fresh pack of Jamaican Gold marijuana cigarettes, drew one out, and lit up. He took a deep breath, held it for a moment, exhaled a small, sticky white cloud, and relaxed into his seat.

He sat there a few moments, just staring off into space, thinking nothing, seeing nothing, and then he noticed a star, and remembered where he was. He watched a handful of tiny flashing dots slowly cutting a thin invisible line towards the airport. There was information encoded in that, and for a moment, Simeon wondered what it was. He watched the lights for a while, and then noticed the star again. It twinkled slightly against its halo, again the rich oranged-blue of the night sky. He searched the sky for other stars, and found two.

In the night around him, the city opened up and under and over him in flowing waves of rooftops and balconies and darkened windows and radio dishes. Street lights and shop signs rolled endlessly beneath him, dotted with scattered, anemic trees, rippled with power lines, cresting with illuminated billboards, undulating by zoning restrictions, by economics, by history, by fashion. Simeon’s corner of this was neither old nor rich nor fashionable, and traffic was sparse around here this late at night. He sat for a time, slowly going through cigarette after cigarette, watching a handful of cars trickle irregularly down the streets like little glistening rivulets of rain. His let his mind wander to think of thin, rambling slices of everything, to think of nothing in particular, shaking softly all the while. And then, once the fingers of his smoking hand had gone comfortably numb from the cold, and his mind and shoulders and back had grown sufficiently soft and pliant, he put the pack and his lighter back into his pocket, found his feet, and went inside to sleep.

A while passed.

The first taxi rolled up its window, started its engine, turned on its lights, and drove off.

A moment passed.

The second taxi rolled up its window, started its engine, turned on its lights, and drove off in the other direction.

I just got my weekly nanowrimo pep-talk email. An excerpt:

Abandon the quest for pretty sentences. Beautiful language is small-stakes writing. We're doing something epic here. We're aiming for completion. We're shooting for the dramatic arc, for the roar of the crowd, for the ticker-tape raining down on us in slow motion as we type our final sentence, run one last word count, and then close the book on a truly triumphant month.

Should I do that? Should I just flatly sacrifice quality for speed? That is sort of the whole point of thing, I suppose. But I've done that. I've done nanowrimo just to do nanowrimo. That was worthwhile in many ways, but I've gotten that. This time I was hoping to produce something with a little more quality, a little more coherence. Frankly, I'd like something that I can revisit in a month or two, edit, and do something with. I was even going so far as to think of forgetting the deadline and just let the thing take as long as it takes. Then again, that's a recipe for disaster. The minimal structure of nanowrimo is the reason I've done what little I have.

Of course, in another sense it's all moot. It doesn't feel like I'm producing quality, it just feels like constipation: a slow, painful effort whose outcome I'm certainly not going to brag about, but which is significant nonetheless. Everything I write is sophomoric and ham-fisted (nod to the fang.)

Val mentioned that she found the best parts of my last effort were the digressions, the rambling. There's something to that, I think. When I just write, when I just let myself speak in words, it's painless, effortless. But then... all you get are random emails and blog entries and crap. Trying to impose some sort of overarcing narrative on the thing causes it to squeak to a near-halt. That's always been a huge problem for me, and it's one of the things I was hoping to address this month. And, to be fair, I am addressing it. Not well, not intelligently, but I'm certainly not ignoring it.

See? Over three hundred words right there, including the ones I stole. Painless, effortless. I just spat them out. It's the spitting on cue that's the bitch of it.

I guess the solution is to just do it half-assed. Do it half-assed, spit out whatever comes up, follow my little attention-deficit impulses wherever they might lead, and just let the thing be whatever it's going to be. Then I can return to it in a month or two and rewrite it from scratch. Maybe that's what I need to do. Maybe that's what I need to do.

Tell me what you think happens to people when they die.

Check it out: I've found a new nanowrimo buddy.





God bless you, Mr. Torrancewater!

So I'm trying to think of morbid, fucked up kind of stuff, and then the universe just starts giving it to me in big heaping spoonfuls. Meat pillows, videotaped cat funerals, body modificiations, etc. There is a symmetry to all of this that I almost find profoundly disturbing.

I have a feeling that this month may get odd.

It appears that I average about 600-700 words an hour when I'm just writing. That's with little to no editing, and just enough thought to keep things reasonably coherent. If I make a point to actually try to think of compelling, interesting things that are happening, try to decide where things are going, etc., it takes about three to four times as long to get that word count. On the other hand, if I just sort of do a balls-out stream of consciousness babbling nonesense kind of thing I can clock over a thousand words an hour. If I go with some gimmick (such as an email exchange) the word count varies, although it'll probably be between 600-2000 an hour. I need to average 2,750 words a day to finish by my birthday, 2,444 words a day to finish by the end of the month.

Including today's work so far, I've got just over 6,700 words. Offhand, I'd say I've been averaging around 1,000 words a day, of the days I've been writing. That's partly because I'm trying to establish things in fairly concrete, boring terms right now. I want to set up a moderately stable foundation so that I have a basic understanding of the world before I start doing things to it. It should only be 2,000-4,000 more words before I start doing interesting things, and at that point I should be able to do more with stream of consciousness writing and pick up the speed a bit.

Now back to the nano mines!

Only 6,048. I've pulled out of worse, but damn.

Fleshed out the stuff with Tilapia on page 12. Added a little bit to the end. Bleah. As always, http://schizotypal.org/nanowrimo/2005/.