Oops.

December 7th, 2011

Did I say 275? And final? I meant 276. And final.

I forgot to include The Masterharper of Pern in the Ninth Fall time period, what with it being a prequel to Dragonflight and all. But seeing as how I remember it being one of my favorites, it pretty much has to go in.

Also, erm. Most of the shorts set in the 9th fall are collected in A Gift of Dragons, with the last one in that collection generally considered undatable, so . . . I guess that’s on the list, too. *cough*277*cough*

What are you looking at me like that for? It’s a static list. I swear it’s static. As long as none of the five or six or so active series on it publish any more books before I’m done, it’s going to just hold still. Right? Right.

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2012 might last a few years, reading-wise.

December 7th, 2011

Right, I’ve finished the final, definitive version of the my 2012 reading list. I’m not going to repost it here because it’s long, and most of it has already been posted. A couple of notes:

  • The list, based on the NPR Top 100 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of All Time, and subtracting those books I have read, currently stands at 275 books.
  • This is because there are a crapton of series in there.
  • In many cases I could probably skip other books in the series but prefer not to.
  • In some cases I have decided to skip other books in the series for various reasons.
    • For example, I’ve previously read numerous Drizzt books, but never the Homeland trilogy, so I’m just reading the Homeland trilogy. Yes, I know I said I’d skip the Drizzt books this year. Shoot me.
    • For another example, I’m not only reading the first Pern trilogy; I’m reading the rest of the books in the Ninth Fall era. This only comes to about ten of them, and the Ninth Fall is my favorite time period in the series. I may also read some of the 9th fall shorts, like The Girl Who Heard Dragons and Runner of Pern, which puts me in severe danger of accidentally reading the rest of the stories in the collections they’re in.
    • For a final example, only one of the books in Pratchett’s Discworld series is on either list. I could read the whole Discworld series, but it’s forty books long and then I wouldn’t have any more to look forward to. Pratchett’s books are tasty treats that I save and savor.

This list is looking more and more like a two- or three-year goal, especially considering that since setting the goal I’ve read 37 books, of which 12 were listed titles. This is almost a perfect ratio of 2 non-list books to 1 list book – indeed, the only reason it isn’t is because I’m not at a number divisible by three. The next two I’m likely to finish are Dragondrums, which is listed, and Legends from the End of Time, which isn’t, and if that goes as expected it will be a perfect 2:1 ratio when I hit 39 books. This is not intentional, just amusing.

And, erm. If I maintain that 2:1 ratio, this list might take a little while.

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Literary Sketching

December 1st, 2011

A couple of days ago, Jay Lake posted on his blog about deliberate practice, and the literary equivalent of doodling in a sketchpad. This is a topic near and dear to my heart; it’s something I’ve been trying to do off and on for some time now, in one way or another, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not. It’s what I use 750words for, mostly; sometimes I just use it as a journal, but more and more often it’s where I throw up the first drafts of blog posts and scenes. That’s where I’m writing this, right now, as a matter of fact.

I find the practice of literary sketching to be very valuable. Sometimes I’m not sure what I want to say, or how I want to say it, or if I want to say it, or if saying what I think I mean will just end up making me look like a jackass. Often, I’ve let this prevent me entirely from blogging about something, because I never got myself to commit to writing it. The solution, of course, is to just write it out and see what happens. Scalzi talked about something similar last month when he was talking about being thankful for writing:

“This organizing and structuring that comes through writing comes in handy for me, because it means that I have an outlet to express thoughts I have that run deeper than “I have to take out the trash.” My wife understands this perfectly well; on more than one occasion, after I’ve completely fumbled expressing something to her, she’s said to me “you need to go write that out.” And I do and then I actually have a way to express that idea, so that the next time I try to verbalize it, I have a framework and a method that doesn’t involve increasingly wild hand gestures and the use of the phrase “you know?” every five or six words. Writing makes me a better verbal communicator, funny as that sounds.”

I work the same way. I’m very text-oriented: I’m the sort of person who gets irritated when someone tries to read me the text off a Magic card aloud, because I can’t make heads or tails of it until I actually read it. Apparently it works the same way with stuff in my head; I never thought about it that way before, but there you go. And really, what excuse do I have for not realizing this sooner? Since it springs immediately to mind, I apparently know about the E. M. Forster quote, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”

Another example of the benefits of textual doodling: when Kat and I were first dating – the first, oh, six months or so I’d guess – I had a document entitled Notes To Me, which I’d basically pop open and scribble in whenever my mind was wandering*. Later, I’d hand it to Kat so she could read my random mind wanderings, which she would annotate and we would discuss. Sometimes these discussions would be verbal, but very often they took the form of what we called “Quiet Clicky Conversations,” where we’d pass our (er, well, my) laptop back and forth and type at each other. This had the advantages not only of being more private**, but also made it easier for us to discuss a lot of things – we were both fairly socially awkward, and I don’t know how we ever would have gotten to the point of being able to talk verbally about everything if it hadn’t been for that intermediate step. Also, as previously noted, sometimes writing your thoughts out really helps you notice when you’re being a jackass, a state of being which I know I was guilty of many times but which I cannot recall Kat ever having occupied.

I think of this sort of thing as disposable writing. I write with the knowledge that what I’m writing isn’t going out in public, so I’m free to just write it out and not worry about anything. Then, if I accidentally write something I really like, I can salvage it. This is good practice for novel revision, which is often a long process of taking lots and lots and lots of work and dumping it in the bin. It’s valuable to have written it, but throwing it out still stings. Sometimes, though, you don’t know if something will work until you try it; it’s better to try it, because it might work really well, but you shouldn’t get too attached because if you adhere to the policy of trying all the stuff you’ll find that most of it doesn’t work out. That’s been my experience, anyway.

Using 750words.com helps with this because it forces me (well, encourages me to force myself), every day, to write three pages of just . . . whatever. And since I’m going to be writing a bunch of unfiltered stuff anyway, if I want to screw around with something that might not work, it’s not really wasted writing – the alternative was something even less useful. So, even in the slightly-less-than-a-month with breaks I’ve been using it, I’ve already got several things I started and scrapped, and at least a couple that were just random musings that I then turned into blog posts. Yay for that.

On an unrelated closing note, I’ve noticed a trend in my blog posts lately; whenever I remember to categorize them, if they fall into writing or life, they usually fall into both. So, apparently writing is a big part of my life. Duh, right? Part of this is likely sample bias because I’ve been working on NaNoWriMo, but I doubt all of it is.

*This would be the document in which I verified that Wordpad does, in fact, handle stupidly large documents fairly gracefully. Of course, my laptop at the time had only 512 megs of RAM, so there were some fundamental limits that forced me to eventually start the New Notes to Me, but that’s beside the point.

**Most of these conversations took place in the hallways of ASMSA. If that sounds strange you probably never went there; the school was an old hospital so it had great big hallways, but virtually no coed lounges, so most people hung out in the hallways and eventually ended up with a stretch of hallway that was staked out as theirs.

Current music: Well, I wanted to listen to Simon and Garfunkel, so I queued up The Sound of Silence, but then I got distracted. So I listened to that, then a whole lot of nothing. Fitting?

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NaNoWriMo 2011

November 29th, 2011

Yeah, I’m calling it. Time of death is 22,974 words.

I’m going to set This Novel Will Fail (whose secret title is Hypernode) aside for a while, work on Derelict, play some Skyrim, do some reading, sleep, that kind of thing.

So, where to from here? Well, Derelict’s deadline for Draft 3 is December 20, so that’s what I’ll be working on this month. In its current state it’s pared down to not much more than an outline with a few scenes slotted in; yWriter says I need to average about 4k words a day from here forth to hit the word goal, but of course a lot of that is already written and waiting to be slotted in. There will need to be some new scenes drafted – quite a few, actually, as the focus of the book is changing a bit from previous drafts – and a lot of connecting bits still need to be written. After that I’ll be working on Draft 4 from (hopefully) Dec 21 to Feb 20, which is going to be cleanup; there will be a lot of rewriting scenes, fixing the kinds of continuity errors that crop up when you write a book over the course of several years and change the plot direction numerous times. Plus a lot of the current scenes will need to be cleaned up because they’re just not that good, and I left fixing them for a later draft.

I have come to think of first drafts* as the notes from which I will actually write the book. First drafts of stories are very rough for me. I don’t write linearly, so I end up with scenes scattered all over the book, and I’ll write scenes just to see whether they work or not. Then I’ll leave them in the draft, tucked away in the corners, for me to step in later when I’m revising. yWriter’s strength is also its weakness here; its design makes it very easy to write lots of little scenes and squirrel them away in your book, but it’s not as good for taking a section that needs to be complete and just writing through it. What I really want is a way to view and edit multiple scenes or chapters in one editor so that I get the flow as I’m reading through it – like a traditional word processor. I finish reading one scene and instead of breaking myself out to click on to the next one, I just keep reading, fixing things as I go. I can do this by exporting and working in another word processor, of course, but re-importing to yWriter was . . . messy, the last time I tried it. Probably what will happen is, at the end of draft 3, I will export into something like RTF or ODT, and then I’ll do most of the work for draft 4 in OpenOffice. Note that this isn’t necessarily a complaint – yWriter is amazing in a lot of ways, it’s just that it doesn’t happen to be a traditional word processor in addition to a nontraditional word processor. There’s a limit to how much I’m allowed to complain about that, and I think I’ve reached it.

*And make no mistake, with the changes I’ve made, Draft 3 is a new first draft of Derelict. Not the first first draft, but a first draft.

Current music: Same station as yesterday. Still really good. I think it’s time I make a new main Pandora station, where I’m pickier about how much I have to like something to thumbs-up it.

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Oh right!

November 29th, 2011

I completely forgot to include a postmortem on my first day of timed writing here.

Hm. Note to future self: Do not assume that a given proportion of work time to break time is right for you without evidence. You may not have many opportunities to use this advice, but you should nonetheless heed it if you can.

Let’s do a little bit of simple math here. I exaggerated yesterday when I implied that I write a sentence or paragraph on average between breaks. It’s really closer to 300-500 words or so. Typing out a scene of 500 words or so usually takes me, say, fifteen to twenty minutes (if it’s going slow). Then I need a break. As I said yesterday, these breaks should be right around ten minutes, as far as I can tell. (I actually suspect 7-8 minutes might be better now. That’s one of the benefits of having a timer.)

Anyway . . . that math does not work out to 90 minutes of work and 30 minutes of break. It’s closer to 45/30, which sounds worse but shhhh, I’m getting stuff done. The times I locked up worst today were when I tried to force myself to work through the long periods when I’d already used up my 30-minute break. About halfway through my writing time (total, not block) I punched myself in the face and changed what I was doing, because, as it wasn’t helping, it needed to change. In short, I think I can safely throw out two of my three timers, and just keep the 10-minute one I use to keep track of my breaks. I’ll probably still run stopwatches to see how much time I use total in actual writing vs breaks, out of curiosity and because the knowledge might help me, but I’m putting 90/30 to the side for now.

This may all change tomorrow. I mean heck, it did last time.

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November Approaches Its Grim Denouement

November 29th, 2011

Which is to say, I think I’m done writing for the day – probably. It’s going surprisingly easily, for some values of easily, and I have 3500 words down today. This brings my total count to 22486 words, or, you know, not quite halfway there. If I write about 14000 words each tomorrow and Wednesday . . . yeah, that’s probably not going to happen.

So that means I get to pull out the drastic, nigh-suicidal ideas, right?

Unlike today, I have all of tomorrow off. Er, probably. See, I might be getting a call about a job, and who knows how that will affect my day. Hopefully it will complicate, and not simplify, my schedule. Anyway, tomorrow my dear daughter is with her grandparents all day long*, which means that I can probably focus on doing stupid things to my writing hands. My plan is simple. Elegant. Insane.

I shall go to TVTropes.com, and I shall click on the random page button. I will read the trope. I will then write a scene of not less than 500 words using said trope. I will then close that tab, read the next trope that will have inevitably opened, and repeat. Should I ever run out of tabs, I will evaluate the health of my writing hands and the amount of writing I have done, set said evaluation aside, and click the random trope link again.

If you have not heard from me by December, send help.

*Cue maniacal laughter. No, no, wrong track, that’s the hysterical laughter you have there.

Current Music: Pandora station based on She’s So High by Tal Bachman. This station is pure magic. I’m afraid to touch it. Every song that’s come up has been a massive favorite of mine, often long-forgotten. Here, have a list:

Absolutely by Nine Days; All For You by Sister Hazel; There She Goes by Sixpence None The Richer; 100 Years by Five For Fighting; Broadway by The Goo Goo Dolls; Roll To Me by Del Amitri; Push by Matchbox Twenty; Yellow by Coldplay; and Dare You To Move by Switchfoot. Wait, and now Free Fallin’ by Tom Petty.

Yeah, so I thought I was exaggerating when I said that every single song was a favorite. Um. Yeah, no, I totally wasn’t. Daaaang.

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Red Goals and Timers

November 27th, 2011

On the recommendation of one of my fellow local NaNoWriters, I recently installed a handy little program called TimeLeft. It’s a very straightforward program; it lets you put little floating timers on your desktop, which stay on top of everything and can easily be dragged to more convenient locations as necessary. It’s a deceptively simple software gadget. I’m trying it out as a means of helping me parcel out my writing time; Lifehacker recently shared a tip suggesting a 90/30 split of work time – 90 minutes working, 30 minutes taking a break. It’s a good idea.

Now, I’ve heard these tips – or versions of them – before. Work for X time, take a break. Use a kitchen timer. That sort of thing. It’s a good idea, and I’ve known for a long time that it’s a good idea, but I never implemented it until now. Why? Because my writing process is constantly in flux.

I know the way I write isn’t optimal — not for me, and probably not for anyone else, either; and I’ve determined, through trial and error, that trying to change everything at once doesn’t work (and fails to do so in a spectacular fashion). Sometimes I try new things and they don’t work. Sometimes I try three new things at once, crash, and throw them all in the bin, only to discover a year later that two of the things are helpful and one of them just doesn’t work for me. (I try to avoid doing the latter these days.) So really, it’s kind of that these tips came back around at the right time for me to work them into my process. And they help.

It’s worth noting that, though the proportions are right, actually writing for 90 minutes straight and then taking a 30-minute break is just flat not going to happen for me. It’s really not. I don’t work that way. I write a paragraph, I wander off and think about it, I write a page, I dig out an iron vein in Minecraft, I get distracted and dig out sixty more iron veins in Minecraft, I build a small fortress in Minecraft, I get an idea and write a sentence. That kind of thing*.

It’s really the middle part I need to get under control; I need small breaks in the middle of my writing to refresh my mind, but the benefit plateaus very quickly. Five minutes might not be enough; ten minutes should do the trick; fifteen minutes is not significantly better than ten minutes. The types of games I like best are open-ended games like Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, The Sims**. It’s very rewarding to drop into one of those games for ten minutes and dick around***, and it’s very, very easy to accidentally spend six hours instead.

So: Timer. Check it. I set the writing timer for 90 and the break timer for 30. Any time I take a break I pause the one and start the other, and vice versa. Because I want time to play Minecraft later, I keep one eye on the timer, and after around ten minutes I pop out, with twenty more minutes if I want to stop and read an article or something later. Alternately, I set a third timer for ten minutes and run it alongside the break timer. Or, I lose track of time and use up all of my break, and now I have to write for seventy-five minutes straight. I’m still working out the bugs in the system.

Breaks, it should be noted, are mental health breaks – reading articles, playing minecraft – not things like stretch or bathroom breaks. (For those, I pause both timers.) Also, 750words counts as a writing activity, as do blog posts. Basically, the point of the writing blocks is to get rid of the writing portion of my red tasks.

This leads incredibly un-smoothly into my next bit, where I idly list my red tasks; the tasks I set to priority 1 (color-coded red) in Remember The Milk. The red tasks are the ones I try to finish before noon, and the ones that I won’t let myself play Skyrim until I’m done with them. Like, at all. Yeah, it’s pretty harsh. Right now the list looks like this.

  • Write:
    • 750 words unfiltered (at 750words.com)
    • 500 words public copy
    • 500 words pay copy
    • 500 more words pay copy
    • 1667 words on This Novel Will Fail (right now, I’m aiming for a lot more than that); this can overlap with the 500 tasks
    • Daily word count in Derelict (it’s alright if this is delayed until December)
    • Write one chunk of game design or background. I have this listed as about 500 words, but experience shows it to be closer to 250 – I’m actually going to change the tooltip on it right now.
  • Do a load of dishes (best done while Summer’s awake)
  • Do a load of laundry (best done while Summer’s awake)
  • Caffeinate (this part is really important, and, yes, sometimes I’m derp enough to forget)
  • Check email and clean out inbox (first thing in the morning, usually while my tea water is heating)
  • Usually, cleaning one of the rooms in the house (today is the living room)

This is obviously rather specific to this November. Right now it theoretically involves writing somewhere between 3000 and 4000 words, depending on whether I do any drafting in 750 words, whether I write a blog post, etcetera. Realistically it involves much more than that; I have 17300 words on This Novel Will Fail, and four days left. I’ll let you do that bit of math. Pray for me. Cast a spell. Send cookies. Do whatever it is you do. :)

The general form of the red list – that is, during months when I’m not trying to kill myself – looks a bit like this:

  • Caffeinate
  • Check email and clean out inbox
  • Write:
    • 750 words unfiltered
    • 500 words public copy (may overlap with 750)
    • 1000 words pay copy (may overlap with 750)
    • 1500 words current novel (may overlap with 750, 500, and/or 1000)
    • 250 words/1 chunk game design (may overlap with 750, 500, and/or 1000 if prose)
  • Perform 4 general and 1 specific household chore (often dishes/sweep/vacuum/laundry/room)

Which means on a general day I’ll get a decent amount of housework done, write somewhere from 1750-3000 (or more) words of various types, drink coffee, and check my email. These are my before-noon tasks, which gives me about six and a half hours to get it all done and be on schedule – noting that it’s not the end of the world if it takes me until sometime in the afternoon, it just means I’m probably not emptying Google Reader today.

Unrelated: The time is now Oh God O’Clock in the morning, and I missed the ding at the end of my writing timer on account of it blending into the music or something. Bugs, I tell you. Working on them.

* This all assumes that I’m doing this during a time when Summer is asleep. She usually wakes up around 7:30, and can generally be persuaded to take her morning nap about ten, so on a good day I can probably get two writing blocks in during the morning. Realistically her morning nap is unreliable, so if I get a second block in I can roughly double the amount of time and halve the productivity of it because I’ll be busy entertaining/feeding/cleaning/chasing Summer.

** It took me forever to realize that that’s not a vastly disparate list of games at all, and that the factor I love about them is the open-endedness. Sometimes I’m thick that way.

***Except for The Sims. Ten minutes is almost long enough for your save to load in that game.

Current Music: Cake’s albums Comfort Eagle and Fashion Nugget, with a bit of Three Doors Down before that because the albums together come to about 85 minutes. I basically love every song on these albums. Every song on these albums is on my favorites list. Er, no, wait, now Cake is over and we’re on to Billy Talent I and II, all of which are also on my favorites list. Going to bed now.

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Depression: This Is So True

November 19th, 2011

I’ve been meaning to link the latest Hyperbole and a Half post for a while. Here you go. I’m guessing most of my followers are already familiar with Hyperbole and a Half, but if not, go click through some of the Best Of links. Unless you’re short on time, you won’t regret it.

I mostly wanted to link this because it is so, so incredibly true, and Allie does a fantastic job of describing what is fundamentally pretty damned complicated. Like me, she had basically no good reason for getting depressed, which is honestly pretty irritating. I haven’t yet reached the point of the depression magically going away – not exactly – but it has been letting up quite a lot, and I honestly can’t say why. I’m tempted to say that the fact that I’ve been writing more lately is part of it – I’ve been getting more writing done again since before NaNoWriMo – but, well, I’m not entirely convinced that I’m not writing more because I’m getting less depressed. Maybe this will all be clearer in retrospect.

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Bloody November

November 19th, 2011

So shortly before the start of this month, I published a rather daunting list of things I have going on this month. Seeing as how we’re around 2/3 of the way through the month, this seems like a pretty good time to follow up with a post on how it’s all going. Give me a moment while I open up the old post . . .
Right. My goals, in the original order:

Write About 1667 Words/Day on This Novel Will Fail (NaNoWriMo)

This is the main reason I haven’t updated about November before. I think I’ve mentioned in the past that I don’t really enjoy talking about stuff when it’s not going well, but seeing as how this is a tendency I’m trying to get over, here goes.

The truth is, this is actually going very well.

That statement needs a qualifier or two, though. See, I’m way behind on NaNoWriMo right now. Way, way behind. As of the end of yesterday, I had 16.5k words written. As of the end of yesterday, to be on schedule, I *should* have had 30k. So there’s a difference of about 13.5k in there somewhere. How many words I need to write per day depends on how you interpret the deadline – yWriter5 tells me I need to write 3043 words/day, while NaNoWriMo.org claims I need 2805. I like the NaNoWriMo version, as it seems to interpret the last day of the deadline as a day on which I can write; I suppose yWriter is basing its number on the assumption that there might be an editor expecting to receive a manuscript on the last day of the deadline, which is fair.

But tangents aside, I’m about 8 days behind on NaNoWriMo, with twelve days to catch up. Can I do it? Sure. Will I do it? God knows. I sure as hell don’t. Will I be upset if I “fail?” Hell no. Part of the reason I planned such a stressful November for myself was to push my limits, to see what I can pull off. Another reason was to try and break me out of my bloody long block on writing in general, and Derelict in particular. Both of these have been rousing successes. Earlier this month I blogged that I had broken my previous all-time-high word count by about 1-1.5k when I clocked in at around 3500 words at the end of the day. I didn’t blog about it last Friday, but I hit a little over 5k words that day, which breaks my old new high by a similar margin. This is a big deal for me. Several other local NaNo-ers I’ve talked to say that they usually have at least one day during NaNoWriMo where they hit 10k. This feels like a thing that could happen to me. Bearing in mind that this time last month I considered 2k/day something I could probably eventually reach, but didn’t expect to get much past that, this is a huge deal.

So: NaNoWriMo. I’m way behind, but win or lose it’s been a huge success this year. Moving on.

Write 1 Chunk of Game Design (or something) Each Day

On target. I’d be somewhere into next month if I let myself mark off future tasks as done here, but that would defeat the point. Pip and I have been making huge strides on Zosias, mostly regarding spellcasters and spells. For the first time in about five years, Zosian spellcasters have one master list they can refer to when selecting their spells, instead of around six. (There are good reasons it’s been a mess for so long, but that’s beside the point. Also, in my home games there’s still the 3.5 Spell Compendium, Complete Book of Eldritch Might, Arcana Unearthed, and Arcana Evolved: Spell Treasury to dig through, but that is truly beside the point.)

Read a Book Every 2 Days

A little behind – either 3 or 6 books behind, depending on how you count it. I added some “finish a book” tasks on various odd-numbered days to bring my total count for the year up to 100 if I get it all done. I am not in the least bit concerned here – my behindedness here is basically a fundamental property of Skyrim coming out and Minecraft hitting 1.0*. Since I plan to read through the Chrno Crusade manga again soon, which is seven books long and likely to take me an afternoon or so, I actually count this as on target.

Obtain a House

Failed. It turns out that the fellow who pre-approved us for a home loan was incompetent or something. Luckily my realtor wasn’t, and with the help of her and a banker friend of hers, we found out that he actually couldn’t finance us before we were out a thousand dollars or so on inspections and appraisals, which was preferable to the alternative. This was actually a bit of a relief, because the process of getting a house is pretty stressful. We’re going to wait a year or so, until we’re in a better position, and try again. We should be in a better position by then, because there is reason for tentative optimism in:

Look for a Job

As noted above, tentative optimism. The job market is definitely a hell of a lot better than it was when we moved up here . . . two? three? two years ago. “A hell of a lot better” is not necessarily “good,” but still.

Continue Being Summer’s Dad

Rollicking success. Summer still exists, I’m still her dad, and we generally get along quite well when I’m not denying her God-given right to as much candy as she believes herself capable of eating.

In Summary

Generally speaking, November is going crazy good, especially considering the daunting list I had going into it. Of my stated goals, I have one fail, one behind schedule but fundamentally successful, and four on target. There’s also my ninja goal of “keep working on Derelict draft 3,” which is mildly suicidal but theoretically on track. I had a 10k day on it this week, which sounds more exciting than it is because the day’s work basically involved slotting 10k worth of useful scenes from draft 2 into places where they would fit in draft 3, and occasionally editing them slightly or making notes for future edits. So mostly copypasta. It’s clear now that draft 3 is going to be another rough draft, with a fourth cleanup draft to follow; assuming that I get draft 3 done by December 20, I tentatively plan to finish draft 4 by February 20.

Well, I’m signing off for the morning. November isn’t going to finish itself. Er, you know what I mean.

*I had my first Hardcore-mode death. I was crossing a frozen tundra at night on the way back to my base while watching Desert Bus, and I stepped in a 1×1 hole with a lava lake at the bottom. It was actually a pretty awesome way to die. I liked that world, but I like this story more.

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Update on Daily Writing Goal

November 9th, 2011

A little while ago, I stated a new goal to stay off the Internet until I had 1000 words written or noon, whichever came first. This goal, as intended, helped a lot; while I haven’t always stuck to it, it’s nonetheless served me well, and I’m getting better at not accidentally opening Google Reader. (I tripped, and my faceplant typed reader.google.com in the address bar. Honestly! Would I lie about something like that?)

For a few reasons, though, I think it’s time to update my goal. 1000 words is rapidly ceasing to be a significant challenge. There are a lot of reasons for this. One is NaNoWriMo (not that you’d know it from my current word count). One is perseverence. One is 750words.com. One is this blog. When looking back at my goal, I realized that its original definition was a bit shaky. Scalzi specified pay copy, and for a good reason: he does a lot of blogging, and sometimes writes some very long posts, but his goal was put in place to force him to get professional writing done. I put in my goal for a slightly different reason: I noticed that I wasn’t doing enough writing, and I was forcing myself to write at all. I should mention that I actually quite like writing; I just happen to be easily distracted by things like Dwarf Fortress, good books, and raising my daughter*.

Well, as it stands, I’m writing plenty. It’s time to update my goal. Now, I like 750 Words – I waxed eloquent about it yesterday for almost half as long as I waxed eloquent about Wordpad – but I’ve come to realize that finishing my daily post to it and marking off one of my 500-word tasks in Remember The Milk isn’t very satisfying. Apparently, my goal was to force me to write publicly, and my brain didn’t bother telling me because it didn’t think it would come up. 750 words is unfiltered journal-style writing, which is good and useful and everything, but is also something completely different from a novel or blog post. The only people who will see it are myself, my wife if she reads over my shoulder, and anyone who hacks into my account. This blog post, on the other hand, will be seen by all five of my subscribers (hi, guys!) and approximately seventeen million of my adoring fans when I publish a best-seller. I thought about dividing my new goal into 1000 words of pay copy** and 1000 words of public*** copy, and allowing them to overlap, but then I realized that anything that qualifies as pay copy is by definition public, so I wouldn’t actually be changing much. Sooo . . .

New goal: 1500 words of public copy before noon, only 1000 of which have to be pay copy. No internet for me**** until I finish it up (or noon). That sounds good.

Current Music: Pandora station based on Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer. Right now it’s playing Hurts So Good by John Mellencamp, which isn’t really my favorite song. I don’t dislike it, but I’m looking forward to the station getting back to the really good stuff like Summer of ’69 and Message in a Bottle.

*There’s a balance to be struck here, obviously.

**Pay copy is anything that I might eventually manage to get paid for: novels, short stories, and . . . well, that’s it for now. I need to get a column somewhere or something.

***Public copy is anything that is, or might eventually be, public. This includes pay copy, blog posts, lengthy comments, and more!

****Obviously not no internet. I can’t very well publish blog posts without it, for instance, and I check my email in the mornings to make sure I’m not missing anything important. Pandora is pretty important to my writing process, some days. Mostly I’m just trying to keep myself out of Google Reader, I guess.

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