Wednesday 30 October 2002

Pic of the day: All tools at hand ...

Bracing for NaNoWriMo

Only two more days! Only tomorrow, really, and then it is November. Not only does that mean I will have 4 "year ago" entries for each day, but it will be NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month.

Actually it is international and has been so for at least a couple years. Perhaps they just like the "nano-" part, it's kinda a buzzword these days. Nano is otherwise about extremely small things, but NaNoWriMo is no longer small. It has grown to become a cultural event in its own right. Not to mention an excuse to party, for those who live in areas with a few aspiring writers.

I'm still a bit sorry that I can't donate $10 to the project, but that's what happens when you rely on PayPal. They refuse to honor my Norwegian credit card, which is accepted by serious web businesses such as Amazon.com, Fictionwise.com, and of course various Norwegian web shops. I can see how PayPal would be more careful, being a barely-for-profit organization. Still, it hurts their customers such as NaNoWriMo, LiveJournal.com, and Crosswinds.net.

I still believe, perhaps mistakenly, that my hand will be the biggest obstacle to writing a 50 000 word novel in 30 days. Belatedly I wish that I hadn't played Civ3 a week's time in October. 1667 words a day (or 2000 with light editing) doesn't sound like much ... certainly I think more than 2000 words a day! But writing them can be a chore. And dictating to my speech recognition software, although a godsend in a crisis, tends to block the creative flow. Because, as one review pointed out, the software displays the comprehension of a somewhat retarded foreign exchange student before the first morning coffee.

***

As always, plotting has been light at best. I prefer to let my characters decide what to do. (They tend to do that anyway.) As for the overall structure, I aim for an interlinked group of portraits based on the same fundamental idea. The stories take place in a world roughly equivalent to our own, except that randomly even the fantastic daydream can come true. It just doesn't happen to the person who dreams it, but to someone else. So the devout Christian boy gets the live-in succubus. A reclusive 30 year old librarian gets the power to drag and drop things (including himself) in space and time. A burger-flipper gets super- strength and near invulnerability, and also becomes irresistible to women ... much to her own surprise. Stuff like that.

I see there is some debate on the NaNoWriMo forum about whether you can write interlinked short stories as a novel. The general consensus is that they need some more connection than happening in the same town, not to say world. That's OK, I did plan to have some crossover. The idea is something like Piers Anthony's Xanth novels, or the later Wheel of Time books by "Robert Jordan". Separate threads follow separate groups of people, though they are connected at a few focus points (which, in Jordan's books, don't even happen in every book in the series). Most of the time, they just continue on their own merry way, point of view shifting from group to group either by each chapter or every few chapters.

***

On a more practical note, 2000 words a day is probably a lot. It means I will probably write much less other stuff in November, including this journal. A random journal entry is around 500 words long (I first wrote 500 years here, make of that what you will) ... typically more for a gray or blue, while some greens can be less.

Today I already have started to upload my November archives. Usually I don't do that before the first in the month (what if I died the day before and never got to use those "year ago" links?) but I am so geared at NaNoWriMo that I'll even do things ahead of time! Now that's highly unusual for me, as friends and relatives can testify.

It also means less time for playing DAoC and other games. In particular, games that stress my hands will be right out. So if the first expansion pack for Civ3 comes out in November, I won't be getting it.

I'll still answer e-mail, though. Because e-mail is so rare, it won't take much of my day anyway!

Hmm ... a 732 words entry! Not bad! Let's see if we can get it to 750 ... (*Thwack self*) Ouch! That was the NaNoWriMo talking! ^_^*