NaNoWriMo: Day 30: As a long weekend of NaNoWriMo draws to a close...

I spent from 9pm on Friday night until 8:45pm Sunday night, with eight hours off to sleep/eat in between to finish my NaNoWriMo novel for this year, and guess what...

I won!

NaNoWriMo: Day 23: Not As Good As I'd Hoped

I was going in for the kill yesterday. I started with nine thousand words, and the aim was to get to 30,000 by the end of last night. Simple. Reach fifteen thousand by lunch time, twenty thousand by tea, and then do the last five thousand before going to sleep.

I only managed six thousand.

How is very simple. Although I had my laptop with me for the whole day except for when I was blogging yesterday morning and eating, I made the decision that I could watch TV while working on my story. I mean, while I was in my room I was listening to the radio while still getting my thousand words per hour done, so what was the big deal? I was just going to watch Evita and then maybe some of the music channels.

But TV also means moving pictures that you have to focus on and that crush any pictures you have in your head. So although I spent about ten hours with my laptop in my lap (an old laptop that Dad's work was no longer needing while I wait it out to buy my new laptop), I managed only six thousand words.

To top it off, on the NaNoWriMo site, they were suggesting a challenge that everyone be up to 40,000 words by the time they went to sleep on Monday night. That was all well and good yesterday morning. I'm now up to about 16500 words, and there's no way I'm going to be able to write twenty-thousand words today and tomorrow. I have my step-cousin's 21st party tonight (odd to be on a Sunday, I know), and then work tomorrow, so I'll just have to not give up on myself and keep putting one word after another.

I'll write again once I've pushed over 40k!

NaNoWriMo: Day 22: And It Becomes Serious

It's the twenty-second day of NaNoWriMo.

I have written 10505 words.

There are eight days left of NaNoWriMo.

I have 39495 words left to write.

I'd better go and write them.

(I have $2.00 riding on this. Dad's bet me $2 that I won't have 50000 words by the end of next Sunday. In times of financial crisis, you need all the money you can get.)

So what am I doing here? I'm off to do NaNoWriMo!

NaNoWriMo: Day Two

Well, I managed to scrape together 1,712 words yesterday, which is at least on target according to NaNoWriMo guidelines!

Hope everyone else doing NaNoWriMo is having fun and enjoying writing!

NaNoWriMo: Day One: The Game Plan

I was half an hour away from being awake at the start of NaNoWriMo. Just thirty minutes more, and I could have turned on my laptop, opened a new document, and started typing the first few words of my 2008 NaNoWriMo novel.

But I was exhausted, so I went to bed.

Last year's NaNoWriMo I stressed myself out by procrastinating for the first two weeks, and then in the last two and a bit weeks writing at any time I wasn't at work or asleep, and was able to 'win' (a.k.a write fifty thousand words of a novel) two hours before the deadline of 11:59pm on the 30th November, 2007.

Not this year.

This year I have a game plan, and it starts today. My plan is:
On Saturdays and Sundays, write 4000 words per day.
On weekdays, write 2000 words per day.
The NaNoWriMo people say to keep up you should write 1,667 words a day.
Therefore, if I keep to my schedule, I win. Early.

Can I keep this motivation, when I can't even bring myself to sit down and concentrate on my Writing School assignments? I guess we'll see ...

My 25th Birthday

Happy birthday to me!

Thirteen days to go ...

Current total:
Assignments submitted: 16
Submissions submitted: 8
Assignments and submissions left to submit: 16

Slowly but surely getting that number down. Still greater than one per day, though. Doesn't look good for my challenge! (And probably doesn't help that I don't feel too crash hot at the moment.)

Fifteen days to go ...

Current total:
Assignments submitted: 16
Submissions submitted: 7
Assignments and submissions left to submit: 17

That maths is probably completely wrong, but my head hurts too much and my throat is too sore to care.

I'm having a night off tonight, seeming as I wasn't concentrating at work properly (most likely due to the combination of losing an hour from the evil side of daylight saving, and the horrible cold that everyone at work's getting, and that's trying to make me feel crap as well). But last weekend was a long weekend, and I did a lot of writing-related stuff, although my totals don't show it.

Here is what my weekend looked like:

Saturday
- went shopping for work clothes (okay, more day job related than writing related), went to the art gallery (last week saw me submit an entry to the York Art Gallery short story competition - the story had to be based on a piece of art work, and there's some beautiful paintings in our city's art gallery), bought the 2009/2010 copy of the Australian Writers Marketplace, and attended a quiz night - which our table won.

Sunday
- watched a DVD of my uncle's trip to America and Japan. It was very slickly edited. Also spent time completing Writing School Assignment Seventeen.

Monday
- More time finishing Writing School Assignment Seventeen (have to teach myself to stop writing stories with a thousand cliches in them!). Started a few short story ideas, and then left them in my subconscious to ferment for a while.

So, considering the last few months where I've whined about procrastination and not being able to do any writing, I think last weekend was quite an achievement for me!

Thirty Days and Counting ...

It looks like I'm back to my evil procrastinating ways again.

And this time last week I was going so well!

It's September 22. In thirty days I turn 25. I started my Writing School course almost five years ago, and I do not want to cross out the Age: 24 and put Age: 25 on my student record sheet.

I have no plan. I had a plan that looked incredibly scary and involved writing a new story every day and editing them on the weekends.

That's not going to happen. Especially with three weeks passing in between sending each assignment ... and I have four assignments left to send.

And then there's the thirteen (!) submissions to make in order to complete the course. It's not so bad - I've partly written my way through five of them, but they're not completed.

I need to think of ways to be positive!

Seven submissions down ...

Today I hit seven submissions sent to magazines. I have sent off two in the past four days - that's very impressive for someone who procrastinates as much as I do! Out of those seven, three have been rejected, two have been accepted, and two are still being decided on. So I'm pleased with myself!

Last weekend I decided to take some time away from the house (where things like TV and the computer lured me away from writing) and I spent the afternoon in my old university's library. When I used to go there (only two years ago, but it seems like such a long time!) I always used to be writing bits of stories and novels, and so I wanted to see if I could write better there than at home. And I did actually get a lot more done, so in the future I'll be heading down there for a day every other week and hopefully productivity grows and procrastination lessens!

Too much sitting in front of a computer (8 hours at work and then whatever time I spend writing at home) has made my brain ache. Not good.

It's 38 or so days until my birthday, by which time I promised myself I would be finished with Writing School. So let's get this straight: in 38 days I expect myself to not only work 40+ hours a week at the day job, and get the 8 hours of sleep a night I require, but also to finish four assignments and thirteen stories, all of approximately 1000 words each? Is it good to doubt yourself before you've even started?

Novel progress ... sort of ... and Fan Fiction

While trying to ignore the fact that I've got four more assignments and fifteen more submissions to make before I can complete my course, I have been reading a book from the library which is supposed to help me re-structure my badly written NaNoWriMo novel. And the surprising thing is, I think it's working (although I am only two chapters in)!

I've been reading some other blogs lately, and one of them commented on another how-to-write-a-novel book. Usually I try and steer clear of how-to-write books, because I spend all my time reading them and then not doing any actual writing. But this book came highly recommended, and I made a note to search for it the next time I logged on to my library's website ... until I thought I had heard the title before.

I rushed to my Advanced Editing and Proofreading box (which my mother has taken prisoner - she won't let me start a new correspondence course until I finish my comprehensive writing one), and lo and behold, they had given me this book as one of the 'random books we decide to give you to make you think you're getting loads of free stuff with the course material'. Which was good in a way, but bad in a way also, because now the book's sitting there tempting me to read it.

But no. I have to do my writing school assignments. And my Fan Fiction. Hopefully the second and third chapters of Fan Fiction will be written and posted today. If I can find time to write around Father's Day celebrations for Dad. Maybe Fan Fiction people will have to wait until the end of the week. I've always had a talent for procrastinating!

Addicted to Stats

FanFiction.net has this new feature which shows how many people are reading my stories, and where abouts in the world they come from. It's really interesting to see. Most of the people reading my stories seem to come from America, and then there are a few from Denmark, Poland, and the Netherlands, and also some from the UK. It only shows one Australian as having visited them, so I assume that's me! :)

Contrast that with if I had a story published. You wouldn't know how many people were reading it, or what they thought of it (I find myself checking for new reviews on Fan Fiction all the time after I've put something up there. I need the praise - it's a fantastic motivator!), unless you manage to hear something through word of mouth.

Just me thinking out loud.

Writing Break - over?

I've been taking a little break from writing at the moment (in case you didn't notice due to the lack of blogging going on).

I did submit a story on Friday, though, so we'll see how that one goes!

Besides that, I've been thinking about editing and redrafting the novel I wrote for last year's NaNoWriMo, but at the moment it's just one big task - I need to sit down and break it into little tasks that don't seem so daunting.

The weather's horrible at the moment. It's cold and raining all the time. Usually, this would be the perfect weather for me to do my writing in - either in bed or in the lounge room where the heater is, but at the moment, it's hard to do any writing.

I blame the death of my laptop (well, the corruption of its hard drive, anyway).

The other thing I really need to do is get back to posting chapters on Fan Fiction. When I've been reading other people's stories who have really good stories and then they haven't posted anything new for ages, I always tell myself 'I won't do that.' And now, it's been about four months since I posted a new chapter for my current FF story. So I should probably get going on that, too.

Here's to a productive week!

Good News

My fourth submission was accepted! Yay!

Writing on the bus - can it be done?

I've started catching the bus to and from work in an effort to avoid paying high petrol prices. This has two immediate benefits: 1) I'll save an estimated $14 (Australian) a week and 2) I have two more hours each day to get stuff done in (as long as whatever it is can be done sitting in a bus crammed with sixty strangers).

At the moment, I'm taking the novels I've borrowed from the library and reading them. However, I've been reading other people's blogs who say that they actually get writing done when they're on the bus/train etc. This sounds like a good idea, however I'm too worried at the moment about people trying to read over my shoulder what I'm writing to be able to write on the bus. That, and the way the bus driver feels the need to violently test the law of inertia at each bus stop wouldn't help my writing (I could poke someone in the eye with my pen. They could sue me).

I'll just stick with reading on the bus now. Then I'll see how brave I am with getting out my notepad and pen.

Done, done, done!

Even more success: I have just sent off my story to the editor of Getting Hitched! This is big news for me, since I've been blogging about the fact that I was going to submit some work for over two weeks now, and this morning I have finally achieved something.

Now I just have to sit back and wait for a response!

While I do that, I guess it's on to Submission #5 ...

Three Hours to Success

Are you ready for this? It's almost three o'clock in the morning, I can't sleep, and I have to get ready for work in three hours.

It's also the last day an online magazine I plan on submitting to is accepting submissions. I have written nine hundred words of a story that is sort of okay but needs a lot of editing in order to get up to a standard I'd be happy with.

So there you have it. In three hours, I hope to be pressing 'Submit' on my e-mail, and seeing my story whizz off into cyberspace (It won't whiz anywhere, actually. It will travel in nice packets. Eek, sounding geeky. This proves that I should not be up this early, and should be sleeping. But I seem to have some kind of temporary insomnia, so you'll have to put up with it).

See you in three hours' time to tell you how I went (please, please let it be good news!).

One Step At A Time

I think I'm one of those people who plan too far ahead. In my head, I keep thinking you have to write this story, and then there's your next Writing School Assignment, and you need to spend more time editing your novel - and Fan Fiction - you need to post more of that story - the reviews make you want to keep writing! That's basically what the voice in my head says. On and on and on about the things I have to do.

Starting now, I will ignore the list of things to do. I will pick one, and then focus solely on that until it's finished. And then choose another one. And on it will go, until I wake up one day and find that I've completed everything that was on my list. And hopefully I will stop stressing myself out about things I really don't need to be stressing out about.

A Massive Undertaking

Why am I online at 2am?

Well, I just woke up and felt like writing! Hooray! So, since I'm awake, I'm going to read through Submission #4 a few times to make sure it sounds perfect, and then submit it before the Internet has a chance to go down again.

And then on to this week's list of tasks. Notice how daunting they are? By next Sunday, I expect myself to submit Submissions 4,5 and 6, have least got a start on 7, 8 and 9, and have thought about what kind of story I'm going to write for Writing School Assignment Seventeen. That's a lot for seven days. Especially for me.

But if I stay in the writing mood I am in at the moment, I'll be fine (as long as I keep my caffeine intake up)!

When the Internet goes down

One of the things I listed to do this week was enter a competition Allen and Unwin were holding to win a manuscript assessment. And I had sat down and written and re-written the one hundred words which explained why my manuscript "stood out from the rest". Most of my time this week has been spent thinking of reasons that don't sound cliched and predictable.

So I had finished my entry, and was just about to connect to the Internet to e-mail it to Allen and Unwin, when the ISP's host computer was down, and so I couldn't connect to the Net (we live in the Dark Ages and still rely on dial-up). Which meant I couldn't submit my competition entry, because now the competition has closed!

Why won't I submit?

I have completed my fourth submission (Yay me!). It's sitting there, in the folder on my computer, just waiting to go out into the big wide world and see what it can do. It should be attached to an e-mail right now, sitting in the inbox of the editor I intend to send it to (That's bad grammar. It should probably read: the editor to whom I intend to send it - but that doesn't sound right to me). But it's not. Why am I so afraid to submit my work? Is it fear of rejection? Fear that my story's not good enough? I give myself until the end of tomorrow, two weeks after I first said I was going to submit it. Otherwise I will never get anywhere with my writing!

Salvaging my NaNoWriMo novel

Has anyone who's won NaNoWriMo actually taken the time to complete their novel?

I did NaNoWriMo for the first time last year, and somehow managed to write most of the 50,000 words in the last two weeks of November, encouraged by my mum who believed I could win it, and wanting to prove my dad wrong, because he thought that there was no way I could get that many words done in the time I had left to write them in. I finished NaNoWriMo at around 10:30 p.m. on the 30th November.

But since then I've been editing it on and off, including adding missing scenes and getting the novel up to a respectable novel-length of about 85,000 words. While I've been editing, I've noticed one thing: you can tell that the novel was written for NaNoWriMo.

Extraneous words are everywhere. Why say something in three words, when you can say it in ten and get a higher word count? That seems to be the approach I've taken. And to write that many words in two weeks, I guess I pretty much had to.

I think NaNoWriMo was good for getting a decent start on my novel, and for showing me that I could sit down and write if there was a deadline and enough pressure from the people around me (where's that dedication now?). For this year's NaNoWriMo, I think I'll concentrate on the quality of my writing, as well as the word count, and managing my time so I have the full four weeks of November to write in, so that when it comes to editing post-November, I'll have a better starting point than I did with last year's novel!

Leading a horse to water...

There's that saying: you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

That's exactly how I feel at the moment. I'm here, in front of the computer, writing, and yet not working on my stories.

Why, brain, why can't you motivate yourself to get something done?

On a positive note, Assignment #16 came back yesterday, and my tutor said that I had written a very professional book review, so that's good!

Sitting down to write

Last night, I sat down and cut my 672 word story down to 500 words. It still has a bit of polishing to go, but I think by the end of Saturday it will be submittable.

And all I had to do was chain myself to the computer! :)

Three days in, word count zero

Okay, so not as successful as I'd hoped.

But I've been working, and there's the housework to do, and netball to play, and TV to watch ...

I know, I know. Nothing but a whole heap of excuses.

I'll have finished something by the end of Saturday. Promise.

Becoming serious about writing

I find myself lounging in front of the TV, or lying in bed, or sitting at work and thinking about how I'm going to do it. How I'm going to sit down every spare minute I have, and write. Write my novels, write my short stories, write my way into a career in writing.

But then I sit down to write and ... nothing. I might type a few snatches of dialogue, an idea that doesn't fit together with any of the other ideas I have stored away. As much as I want to write, no work gets done.

When I find myself in such a situation, I tell myself it's because I'm a bad writer. Untalented. I should stick to the day job.

Like many people, I've wanted to be a writer since I learnt what being a writer was. English was my favourite subject at school. I spent my Maths classes writing stories. And Chemistry classes. And any other class where I could get away with it.

At eleven, I was a finalist in the Nestle Write Around Australia Competition. My teacher entered the story, and I got a backpack full of chocolate and to meet Australian children's author Christine Harris as a result. I thought that was pretty good at the time.

At sixteen, I had to choose what I wanted to do with my life, so I could pick the right subjects in Year 11 and 12. There was no other choice. I wanted to be a writer. But Mum argued that writing doesn't pay well, and so I found myself at uni doing a Bachelor of Information Technology.

After uni, during the summer where I pretended to look for a job when all I wanted to do was dream up story ideas, I was a finalist in the Advertiser Summer Short Story Competition. The story I had written was very personal, as it was about a photo of my Nan when she was my age, and Nan had just passed away. My reward this time was publication.

For the past two and a half years, being published once was enough. At least I can say I've been published, I told myself.

But now, it's not enough. I want to see my name in print again, and have people read my stories. I want to take my writing seriously.

I am also in the middle of a comprehensive writing course. The assignments are getting done (I'm up to Assignment 17 out of 20), but the thing I'm having trouble with is that in order to complete the course, I have to submit twenty manuscripts to publishers. I've sent three.

So the aim of this blog is to help me take my writing seriously - to get those other seventeen submissions written. If you tell the world what you plan on doing, then you feel obligated not to let them down, and so that's what I'm going to do.

I only hope it works!