Tuesday, November 23
NaNoWriMo update
Yep, 6200 words I wrote on Saturday, and not just in a single day, but in about three hours of work. This factoid impresses my brother, apparently, who says he can get 1500 words in two hours. When I'm rolling I can type about 1800 words an hour (more if they're shorter words....)(of course, that's only 30 words a minute, a crummy rate for even a lousy typist); when I'm dragging and forcing it I can still excrete (?) 1200 or so words per hour. Of course, most hours of the day I write nothing -- zero fiction, unless you count the propaganda I spew at work -- and am lucky (this month) if I can get even 2 percent of my total alive hours into typing/writing time. (That would be about 4 hours a week, for the more literal minded of us). Not quite enough to crank out the 50k needed in November to be a NaNo winner. Two hours a day? I'd be there with a week to spare, as I have been the last two years.
My brother also suggested I must have a dynamite story to have such high word counts when I write. Dynamite story? Hard to say. It's engaging to me... but I have no idea if anyone beyond me would find it interesting. It is fun to see how the characters take over a story, though. If you can dream up a half-dozen people and set them free in a well-imagined world, you've got a novel. Doing it takes some of the magic out of the process, but then I'm more convinced than ever that there's not a lot of magic involved in writing a novel, just a bit of dedication, a spark of creativity and a lot of hard work and keyboard time. Putting in the time, like any endeavor of course, is that matters. What did Woody Allen say? "Eighty percent of success is just showing up."
Of course, there's plenty of writing magic in a good novel.
Bottom line is I still have crazy dreams of reaching 50k this month, but as I'm still sitting at 21,000 or so, I've got 29,000 words to go. And a glance at my calendar now shows exactly seven days left. That's 4200 words a day. Serious typing ahead of me on this coming holiday weekend.
Ouch.
My brother also suggested I must have a dynamite story to have such high word counts when I write. Dynamite story? Hard to say. It's engaging to me... but I have no idea if anyone beyond me would find it interesting. It is fun to see how the characters take over a story, though. If you can dream up a half-dozen people and set them free in a well-imagined world, you've got a novel. Doing it takes some of the magic out of the process, but then I'm more convinced than ever that there's not a lot of magic involved in writing a novel, just a bit of dedication, a spark of creativity and a lot of hard work and keyboard time. Putting in the time, like any endeavor of course, is that matters. What did Woody Allen say? "Eighty percent of success is just showing up."
Of course, there's plenty of writing magic in a good novel.
Bottom line is I still have crazy dreams of reaching 50k this month, but as I'm still sitting at 21,000 or so, I've got 29,000 words to go. And a glance at my calendar now shows exactly seven days left. That's 4200 words a day. Serious typing ahead of me on this coming holiday weekend.
Ouch.
