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/.

The kitchen's looking pretty frickin' clean!

I first heard Ursula Rucker on 4 Hero's Two Pages album. Although I had no idea who she was, she kept turning up in music and was absolutely unmistakable every single time: she has this smooth, beautiful, flowing voice which she uses to deliver these uncompromising, triphammer words. Last night I heard her on soma.fm, speaking beautiful poetry over a King Britt track, and decided to find out who she is. Surprise surprise, she's a rising poet with a lot to say.

Check her out.

- Ursula's website
- Wikipedia article
- BBC - Urban Review - Ursula Rucker, Supa Sista
- A couple of her albums on amazon
- An article on her, which reprints her poem Return to Innocence Lost
- An article on her which captures some of her feelings on things (on poetry slams: "I don't want to stand up and bear my soul and have someone give me a 1 to 10. That's bullshit.")

Well, it wouldn't be nanowrimo without some shameless, shameless deviousness on my part. I have made my 2500 word quota today by, I shit you not, creating an entire email exchange. Yes, complete with headers, quoted replies, sigs, the works. A tiny taste:

From: !{splendor, flavor, tggh}!trex!dromiceiomimus!obsequious.j
Subject: Thread: [hominids] Pimpin' 
Date: November 11, 2005 5:58:31. Morning. Central Standardized Zone.
To: !{vesuvius, splendor, ice-9}!solicious!jupiter!callisto!hominids 
Reply-To: !{vesuvius, splendor, ice-9}!solicious!jupiter!callisto!hominids
 --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------
||||||| I remain unpersuaded.
|||||| 
|||||| Weak, dude. Weak.
||||| 
||||| You're the white Ursula Rucker.
|||| 
|||| Yeah, well you're the white FUCK YOU.
||| 
||| That... doesn't even make sense.
|| 
|| How about this, I'll say it slowly: FUCK. YOU.
| 
| You are the soul of wit. 

Brevity is the soul of wit. I'm the soul of FUCK YOU.

I'd *almost* be ashamed of myself if not for the facts that:

- I composed the whole thing by emailing myself back and forth over an email list I'm on, and now everyone is waking up and reeling at the carnage, which is just amusing.
- I composed it over the hours in which writer's block was sapping my other, more conventional efforts.
- It really did help me figure out a couple of the characters.
- It took well over an hour to format.
- I have no shame.

As always, the rest can be found (now in convenient PDF format) at http://schizotypal.org/nanowrimo/2005/. Yeah, the page breaks could be handled better, but hell, you get what you pay for.

Well, just shy of 2,800 words so far. Still not up to quota, but it's an improvement, and I'm happier with what I'm producing. I find it's wildly helpful to steal a few minutes (while commuting, eating, whatever) to sit and think about what I want to write that day, and to take a brief break every few hundred words or so to think about what I'm going to write next. That all may seem obvious, maybe it is, but yesterday I was taking more of a balls-out just-sit-down-and-go freewrite approach, and I found that it was much more difficult to squeeze anything out. Anyway, as always, you can watch get your cheap, sadistic thrills by watching my progress at http://schizotypal.org/nanowrimo/2005/

Here's an excerpt:

The cylinders in the clock rolled and rolled and rolled and finally hit 2:00 AM.

A small motor turned. The latches slowly retracted and the left half of the bed scissored downward, dropping Simeon's naked form onto a chilled plate of thin steel. Simeon started away, the cold running through his back. He gasped and coughed, choking for air, desperately trying to catch his wind, writhing around on the plate. For a few moments he retreated instinctively into a fetal ball, rolling back and forth like a pill bug in the hands of a sadistic child, trying to minimize his contact with the metal. He found the part of him that liked it, that felt the bite intimately and welcomed it, feeling the shock and the cool pain, hiding in his minority of pleasure. For a moment that worked, he thought he could feel the plate warming to his hip and belly and shoulder when he shifted an inch and it felt like his flesh was sticking and tearing off his muscle. He yelped and rolled sharply to the left, arm shielding his nipple, and slid onto the cool, forgiving concrete. Simeon staggered to his feet. A chill ran down his spine, shaking his body, and he stumbled around in a small circle for a moment, murmuring incoherently to himself.

Simeon looked over at Selia, still lying on her side of the bed in blissful, ignorant slumber. He stood there, heat slowly leeching from his bare feet, staring at her, so innocent and warm. She made a small noise and pulled the thick, soft comforter over her face. He stood and watched for several long moments, his mind slowly trying to digest a melange of questions and dream fragments and recurring disappointment, and turned, and slowly trudged towards the washroom.

It was another morning.

He made his way to the toilet, dangled his testicles just over the hole and slowly collapsed downward onto it, the paint warming to his butt. A switch flipped and his bladder released itself. He sat for a while, hunched and immobile, emptying into the bowl. When there was no more he reached for a thin washcloth, wiped the urine and sweat from his undercarriage, dropped it into the hole, pulled a lever - at which the toilet exploded into a roar of activity - and lumbered up towards the door, which he threw shut with a swipe of his arm.

Simeon turned towards the wall now and spent a while staring at his face in the mirror, tasting the sleep in his mouth. He looked at his face for a while, searching around the stubble and cheekbones and nose and eventually, for a moment, could see his eyes. This seemed to ground him in himself, warming his thoughts to the next few steps, making him able to instinctively perform the next act.

Simeon turned and shuffled three feet to the right, towards a vertical cylinder in the wall made from cheap semitransparent plastic, grasped the latch, and stepped in. He closed the door behind himself, reached up to manipulate the nozzle in the ceiling directly above him, slid a small level towards the center, and punched a button. A hail of water opened up upon him, instantly drenching him and driving him to his knees with its force. He rolled around in the bottom of the tube for a moment, alternately trying to expose and protect his sensitive areas, gasping as water rolled down his head into his nose and mouth.

The water shut off.

More...

What an atrociously, atrociously, atrociously bad start. Well, whatever, it's a start. Feel free to peek at it here from time to time.


As I begin this story I know where it will lead. It is where all stories must lead: it is the end for Sebastien, for Obsequious, for Selia, for Simeon, for myself, for you. There are no surprises here. I’ve always been ham-handed with foreshadowing, and I apologize, I truly do, but as I sit here, with these chemicals coursing through my veins, I cannot help but feel that a basic degree of honesty is in order.

Again, I do apologize. I sincerely promise that I’ll attempt to keep the literary devices to a minimum...

Alright, campers, Everything has been outlined to death. Well, no, but it's been sufficiently planned out, anyway. Enough bitching, enough excuses.

This is gonna be nappy. At this point I'm gonna have to clock about 2,500 words a day. I can do it, but it's gonna be fuckin' ugly. I love you all, but don't expect to hear anything from me aside from terse, random updates about this project for the next three weeks or so. During that period, expect me to be a total flake and a hermit. Until we get near the end of the month, when we can all go out on a triumphant birthday/victory intoxication rampage. Or maybe a delicious eating rampage. Or a sleeping rampage. Or lord alone knows what.

Assuming I make it that far.

Which I will, you fucking naysayers.

Feel free to periodically either encourage or naysay me, depending on your mood and temperament. They both help.

Anyway. Now we finally begin with the actual writing.

I feel sick to my stomach.

I think that's just the whiskey, though.

Anyway. Now we finally begin with the actual writing.

"Obsequious Jones."

What does that name mean to you? Does it mean anything? Have you heard it before? ANSWER ME!

Sebastien or Simeon? The latter name is perhaps more rich with geeky meaning, the former simply sounds better.

Hm. Still not as developed as I'd like. Still, it's moderately developed. I see three (six?) stages/chapters/acts that it goes through, and I have a very specific idea of how it should end. It's a strange feeling for me to know how something ends before I begin it, but in this case it's somewhat inevitable; I arguably understand the end better than the beginning. I don't have as strong a sense of the characters as I'd like, but that can be sorted out. There's a lot of mania I haven't figured out, either, but I think I know enough to figure it out, and from there it can build itself. In a weird sort of way it's almost like I'm rewriting my first novel, but in a completely different way.

Anyway, I might take a few minutes tomorrow to think about the characters a little, but I think I've got my skeleton. If I wasn't exhausted I'd be excited about it, like I was two or three hours ago.

I now understand the basic premise, and the loose arc that the story will take. I see how some of the themes can hook into it. Needs more refinement, but I see the rough shape of it. I like it.

Nanowrimo seems very apocalyptic this year.

Whiskey is my friend.