I’ve been curious for a while what my traffic statistics look like, and too lazy to check. I guess now I’ll know.

Anyway, a quick writing update: Due to the aforementioned, I’m not where I hoped to be in Derelict. That’s okay though, because around the turn of the year I had some really good ideas for it. Ideas of the sort that work really well with the world and framework I have in the story, but pretty much require it to be a very different book. So, I’m doing what I should have done a long time ago: putting Derelict on the back burner, and working on something else as my primary writing project. Conventional wisdom is that if you have a book you’ve been working on half your life, you should stick it in a drawer and move on to the next one, and then maybe come back once you have a few finished books under your belt. I’ve resisted this, and to be fair it’s not universally true – see Patrick Rothfuss – but it really is good advice. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit fed up with Derelict at the moment, anyway.

So, for the time being, Derelict is on the back burner, and I’m making Zosias my primary writing project.

Right, that about covers it for now. Current music: A Thousand Miles, by Vanessa Carlton. Er, no, now it’s Haru Natsu Aki Fuyu Daisukki, by Mini Mori. For future reference, these songs do not pair well. Also, wtf is the latter doing in my playlist or, you know, on my computer? Sometimes listening to old music collections is dangerous.

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.

• 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.