Erich T. Wade

Today begins NaNoWriMo, which I have decided to participate in this year. Crazy, I know. I’ve been working a lot on Zosias lately, mainly with my friend Pip (more on that later). I’m also still working on Derelict, though I’ve moved it to the back burner for now; most of my daily writing has been on Zosias, with adjustments made for the fact that word count is a really bad way to track game design. Kat and I are also looking into buying a house, and we’ve collectively decided that I should look into a part-time/night-shift job for a while. So tentatively November looks like this:

• *Write about 1667 words per day on a new project. This conveniently takes care of my “write 1000 words/day” goal quite conveniently, as well as my daily task to write 500 words of prose, anywhere, on anything (which is strictly speaking part of the word goal anyway). I’ve got about four different ideas for this book, and will hopefully have settled on one by the time I start writing later today. Regardless of which one I pick, the working title is “This Novel Will Fail,” because it amuses me to attempt to employ reverse psychology. The reason I find reverse psychology so funny is probably because I learned about it from Bugs Bunny.
• Write about 500 words or one chunk of game design, story background, campaign notes/plans, or whatever. This is a complete non-issue. As far as I can tell, I don’t get writer’s block on game design. This is probably at least partially due to the fact that the Zosias design team consists of four people, we have several fantastic friends who regularly playtest, and I’m involved in about two and a half Zosias campaigns right now. (One I run for my wife, one my wife runs for me, and one I’m in the planning stages of.) It’s hard to sit through an entire gaming session without running across three or four parts of the rules that could do with addition, expansion, or change.
• Read a book every 2 days. I haven’t blogged about this goal, and it’s not a super-important one, but the reasoning goes something like this: I like to read. I set myself a goal, roughly via Shelfari, of reading a hundred books this year. I’m way behind. If I read a book every two days until the end of the year, I’ll be almost caught up*.
• Obtain a house. Or continue the process thereof.
• Look for/work at a job. We’ve decided that it would be a good idea for me to get at least a part-time job for a while, not least because we anticipate unexpected expenses once we have a house. Plus: We’re making it pretty well on Kat’s income, which means that whatever I bring in is pretty much extra. This will likely go toward frivolous expenses such as savings and paying off old medical debts. There are at least half a dozen ways the schedule could play out here, but one thing’s for sure: I’m probably going to have to adjust my sleep schedule again. Silly me.
• Continue being Summer’s dad. Obviously I won’t be an entirely stay-at-home dad any more, but I’ll still be the primary go-to parent. See, I can put some of my stuff aside for awhile if I need to. If I miss a week on the novel, well, it’s nothing  that hasn’t happened before. Kat’s going to school online right now, and I gather they’re a little less understanding about missing weeks.

Luckily, being Summer’s dad isn’t usually all that grueling. Sure, sometimes it involves convincing her to sleep when she’s convinced the bed is made of hot needles. But sometimes it only involves reading her one of her favorite books twenty-seven times over the course of an hour. And sometimes, we sit down and watch the 90s Spider-Man cartoons together. She loves those**.

*It’s a good thing this is a self-imposed goal, because I can define “book” however makes me happy, and sometimes when I’m busy it makes me happy to count each book of a manga or something. I’ve been meaning to read the Rozen Maiden manga, and I wouldn’t mind rereading the Megatokyo books and/or the Chrno Crusade manga.

**So do I.

Now that I’m mostly adjusted to my new sleep schedule of getting up at 4:30 (and, more importantly, staying up), it’s about time for me to take the next step in my nefarious plan. (Sorry, self. I should have warned you there was a nefarious plan involved.)

John Scalzi recently decided to stay off the internet until after noon or 2000 words of pay copy, whichever comes first. (By “recently” I apparently mean “Holy crap, that was all the way back in January? Where did the time go?”) I thought this was a brilliant plan at the time, and still do, but until recently my ability to adopt something similar has been dramatically crippled by my general state of non-sapience prior to noon.

But no more!

I’m about as adapted to a morning schedule as I’m likely to get any time soon, and I have summarily used this morning free time to do some amazing things. I now occasionally answer emails. I finally finished Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces. I started using Remember The Milk, which I still need to mention at some point. But I haven’t gotten around to using this time for its original intended purpose: writing.

Hence, for the foreseeable future– assuming no significant failures of self-control on my part– I’m going to be staying clear of most of the Internet until noon or 1000* words on Thursday-Monday**. So I guess I’m going to go do that now.

*Historically speaking, 1000 words is very reachable for me when I get a few hours to write and am not completely blocked. I strongly suspect that I’ll be able to pull closer to 2k when I get into the rhythm; time will tell. (I actually need to average about 1700/day to hit my current target for draft 3, but a lot of those words will be scenes I’ve already written imported from draft 2 and tweaked to fit.)

**Tuesday and Wednesday are my Saturday and Sunday, being the days Kat has off right now.

Current music: Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes, via Pandora. Turns out this is great music for waking up in the morning. (On a related note, I love the new Pandora interface. Anyone else have thoughts on it?)