I Said I'd Do It And I Did

Well, there it is. 50,180 words of Arkanos typed out and verified by the original, notorious word-eating NaNoWriMo word count validator, believe it! :D (Incredibly, this year it gave me 3 words. My yWriter counter says I've got 50,177 words :P But meh, can't argue with the machine ^.^)

Arkanos is by no means finished. Heck I haven't even spotted the midway point on the horizon yet. I'll be participating in NaNoFiMo and batting out some more words on it, hoping to at least hit halfway home. I know if I drop off for a long time and only pick this up to continue say next July, I know my mind will have zoned-out of the setting to such a degree I won't really remember what's happened. Especially those mid-Write or Die session epiphanies that sound great but maybe aren't which you never bother to note down anywhere, but not like you'd have time to anyway. Those will be in risk of vanishing into the realm of not-coming-back if I just drop everything now as is.

I remember end of '09 NaNo I somehow felt so exhausted and like I just couldn't drag it out of myself to continue with Electrostatic Fantasy. It was missing two, three chapters and in dire need of editing. I told myself I should keep going, to get editing and finish up by the new year. Heck no, I was exhausted and slightly exasperated with the thing (and perhaps I'm not the only NaNoer who gets this). So I decided to take a short break, enjoy the holidays and get back to it later. Mistake. "Later" turned out to be three months later, then another break and then again a bit of editing in July. And by that time I'd "relaxed" so well and truly I couldn't remember the finer points anymore. My concept of my own story was, "oh yeah, there's that mermaid guy and he goes around and they do this kinda stuff don't they? And, oh yeah! There was that one character there, wasn't it?" I felt like walking up to someone else and asking what had happened!

Thank heavens it was pretty much completely written (okay, save for the final chapter which I haven't first-drafted to this day ^v^;;)

But I am nevertheless a NaNoWriMo 2010 winner!! XD

I can't get enough of that. And I've probably 24 hours worth of sleep dept to show for it too. :) I wanted that pretty certificate on my wall and I got it. Yeah, you heard correctly. My main reason for doing all of this was to get a certificate that had the number "2010" on it and which I knew I'd earned fair and square.

Today I took a day off of everything I've been working on: the greetings card making, the novel plotting, the novel writing (oh God yes!)... just everything. I slept until 4 PM and since then have been playing Valkyrie Profile 2. Then a nip into the sauna and voila! I feel like I've had a day at the spa. ^_^

And tomorrow I'm gonna start on a project I'm quite excited about: plots the next novel which I'm planning to write during JanNoWriMo. The current name is Through the Looking Glass, and you guessed it, it's also fantasy. Wha? No it's not an Alice in Wonderland spin-off or anything (although I love doing those!) Ironically the story bears no similarity to Lewis Carroll's work at all. I'll write more on it in another post and I'll probably be updating the My Novels page eventually about it too.

Until then...still basking in this moment that comes only once per a noveling November! ^_^

Some Excellent Advice For Getting Through NaNoWriMo, Getting Unstuck In Writing And Finishing Your Novel

TYPE, DAMMIT!

Oh dang...

I'm behind!

Day 17 of NaNo and I'm still hanging at just below 25K. Thank heavens I had that 3K buffer when I decided to take a break or I'd be so deep in the ground right now.

Although I have almost finished playing Aqua's story in Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep... See? I've been doing something. ^_^

Hoping to get on and bust out a nice 3K today. And according to my trusty calculator that's about what I'll need in order to catch up. Okay, strictly speaking it's 3.5K, but who's being that pedantic? ...*cough, cough*

The slightly worrying thing is that my interest in slightly waning. It's just that I'm approaching the magical 30K mark where Arkanos Book One died last time and I'm slowing down. Fingers crossed there won't be any repeat performances. =/ Just got to keep going I guess.

Better hurry off before I get stuck doing something else online again. Like watching Bleach or streaming YouTube vids or...

Not to give anyone the idea that I've got a standard list of stuff I get stuck doing or anything...

Boo-yah!!

I guess the capitalised Week Two of NaNoWriMo is the one that gives the most trouble to quite a few writers. It was the week in which, last year, I went three days without typing a single word, and finally had to force myself onto the keyboard lest the whole thing drop entirely.

This year, without even realising it until now, I applied the perfect cure to the Week Two curse before it even started. Extended Word War!

I'm having so much fun. I'm competing with a Writing Buddy to see who gets the higher word count by Friday midnight. And honestly, it gives me such a kick in the pants just thinking about this competition I'm in.

I might be ahead right now, at 20K. But I keep thinking that if I stop and take a day off, the next time I log in, next to his username there's going to be sparkling a number 5k bigger than mine with the words "mwa ha haa" materialising next to it and I'll have to re-enact a Luke Skywalker backwards suicide dive through the Death Star.

In other words, I doubt I'd be half as inspired right now had there been no Word War.

I also keep switching playlists; although I am still sticking mostly to RPG background music tracks, except for the occasional lapse into Breaking Benjamin albums for fight scenes (they're tough enough to write as it is, I need some sweet motivation ^__^).

And I finally got that synopsis written on my NaNo profile! :D *roars and applause* Better late than never, eh?

Yesterday was such a fantastic day! After getting past the first real fight scene on Tuesday, yesterday I wrote out a big dialogue & explanation bit and it was such a breeze. How refreshing to get to write a bit that is actually my forté. I bashed out a nice 3K as well!

Just need to keep the trend going. I'm expecting that I'll need to enter NaNoFiMo (National Novel Finishing Month) in December though. I mean I'm not counting my chickens before they hatch or anything, but I'm still not seeing this thing unfolding entirely in just 50K.

Well, next two weeks will say for sure. :)

NaNo Day 5: It's All About "De Mood"

Okay, vague Little Mermaid reference there, but it is all about "De Mood."

NaNoWriMo '10 has started and I'm frankly elated as a party balloon right about now. It's going well. It's going better than well. And that means it's going A LOT better than I feared it would just a month ago. This is all good stuff.

Right this minute my yWriter is announcing a total of 9485 words exactly and I'm not even done for the evening. :)

I never did write that synopsis in time (which I still need to do) but I did accidentally find the perfect playlist for fueling my keyboard tapping passion: I'm listening to game background soundtracks!

And not just any games, the Valkyrie Profile background soundtracks! XD All hail YouTube!

And this is what I mean about "de mood." When I tune in to those tunes, it sends me right into de zone. I mean I tap, tap, tap a little, check my count, turn on some beats, tap, tap tap some more and oh goodness how did that thousand words go by?

I'm also at the end of Chapter 2. Yay!

I wrote a letter to my grandma and in it I actually (again, accidentally) wrote one of the best synopses of Arkanos to date and I saved a copy of it. I should really translate it and get it posted on here and on NaNo. But right now, I'm way too tired for that (midnight).

Okay, need to get back to typing now. Sacramento has declared an official word war against Finland on their NaNo regional forum, and that means I've got to help my guys beat them. =3 They won last year, but only by 12 words per person. We were ahead of them until literally the last few days.

But not so easy this year. OOOOh no! XD

I Find This Out Now?!

Great.

Funnily I was assuming that my backpack, which I used for carrying my laptop to NaNo meets last year, was lying safely forgotten at the back of my closet unused. But last night I sort of got thinking, "Hmm, yeah, the backpack. Should probably start getting it out right about now. Just a week of preps left." And then it hit me, shoot, it's not here!

And it's not just a matter of "oh I forgot it at grandma's." No I didn't forget it at grandma's. I didn't forget it at work. I didn't forget it in the car. I forgot it abroad.

Yes. Total shoot-yourself-in-the-foot moment, innit? So unfortunately it isn't a simple case of just popping next door and picking it up.

I've got a small job from which I should be getting a bit of coin so I can pay the public transport for November. Hopefully I'll get that in time, and then it's just a case of dashing out like a mad chicken to find another bag. Don't get me wrong, I love shopping (and I mean really love shopping). Just kind of annoying. I could use that same money to buy something more useful, like...the next Kingdom Hearts game or the latest DVD installment of Naruto.

Last week of October is turning out to be the most hectic. I'm not 100% if the money will make it in time, if I'll find a decent bag in time, and also I haven't gotten in touch with my writing rival yet. I wonder if he's doing NaNoWriMo this year?

Besides that, and it was probably kind of inopportune, but I've re-discovered the magic of my PS2.

Oh man, I wonder how November will go... LOL ^__^

Oh-ho-ooh Dear...

Yeah, umm...last post when I said I was halfway through my plotting...yeah, I kind of lied. That's what happens when you post before counting the actual pages that you've been plotting on. I'm not halfway through. In fact I think I'm more like a quarter of the way through. Yikes!

And I have *mutters while counting off the calendar* oh, just about 10 days left...

Yikes!! O_o

However, after some weaving and sewing and a bit of knitting together of the plot threads, Arkanos is still holding together and I'm daring to believe it will pull through the madness of November.

I've actually gotten into chapter four of Mistborn Book One as well, which I'm pretty dang happy about since I'm not as active a reader as I probably should be. I admit, I take a lot more inspiration from anime and manga than I should. Reading Mistborn really brings into view how much benefit reading literary novels instead of graphic ones brings to my writing. I've already discovered several answers to simple questions and confusions I had, mainly about writing style. So if I were to read a few other kinds of novels too... My general tripping point is the fact that I just take ages to read. It's not that they aren't interesting, it only that I know it will take forever. Although Mistborn is right up my alley, which is the reason I know I'll finish that one.

Dang...I never know quite how to end these things off. Same freaking thing with my novels. *Sigh* Better get back to typing stuff up then...

50/50

So October is going fast.

We're pretty much halfway through the month and luckily I'm about halfway through my prep book! Well...sort of. I'm honestly relieved though that the story is jelling as well as it is. At the start of October my biggest fear was that right about now the plot would resemble a ball of yarn after a kitten has gotten to it. Just about that level of clarity and order.

But it's actually going well. And for one, I'm not bored with it (another massive factor in whether or not a novel will die or live with me). Honestly, if all I can keep thinking about while writing is, "why are my characters bothering with this adventure?" then I just can't find the determination to get that 50k out of me.

Finally managed to clean my room as well, which is nice.

Hmm...I'm running out of stuff to say. I guess I'll leave it at this and write something giant another day.

Burning the Midnight Oil

And a bit of the wee-hours oil while we're at it.

I don't know if my being on the computer has gone a bit too far, but at least last night's late surfing was for a good reason.

Since now comes one of my equally favourite parts of NaNoWriMo, the ART!

Last year went by mostly amidst my manuscript, since I'd decided to go with a not-yet-my-darling story idea for my first time. And I didn't really get any illustration done on time. Well, actually I still haven't finished it, but why get caught up in the details...heh.

Anyway, after some toiling and three different variations, this is the banner I chose as a banner for the NaNo forums.

Only annoying thing was that I had to use the JPEG version, which came out a little...scruffy-er. But sadly, even with reduced dimensions, the next smallest file type already fell about 20KB above the max limit. Oh well, even though a new year with new toys (graphics) is a fun idea to play with, in the end it's the story itself that's the most important, isn't it?

Which reminds me, I still have to write that synopsis!

It's been fun getting back in touch with all my NaNo buddies and competitors from last year! The more I chat with them again, the more I start to itch for this coming month. Last time I had some really even and tough competition from some, and quite simply ate the dust of others. And it was fun as anything the whole way through!

So on that note, I'm going to end off on a little plug for those guys, and say that everyone on my Writing Buddies list on NaNo is a tough and awesome writer! ;)

Okay, Deep Breath, Stay Calm...STAY CALM!

Getting into the swing of actually doing something after a streak of wanting nothing more than late nights with chaining Bleach episodes, is curious but not as hard as I thought.

Okay, maybe it has something to do with the fact that NaNoWriMo is only 21 days away *whiskey shot in here*, I admit it. But still that "actually doing something-ness" carries the freshness of a tangy lemon drink :D

All joking aside, it feels good to be active in my trade again. I've mobilized from my bat cave and finally gotten on with "healing" the broken plot of Arkanos Memorycatcher. Alongside that I've updated some of my files on my magic system, made copies of my calendar pages for October and November (want to cross those days off, but don't want to mess up my awesome manga calendar XD), started posting again on the NaNo forums and eaten 15 yogurts and 32 jelly beans.

I should be reading more of the first Mistborn book too, for pointers on fight scenes and just because I think it's the cat's PJs, but one baby step at a time I guess. Haha!

I'll update the synopses and excerpts of Arkanos soon as I can during November.

And now I better get back to procrast— I mean novel related plot and writing style research.

Teehee? ^__^;;

NaNoWriMo 2010!

Yes, that last year went a lot faster than I was expecting last December. And yet, here we are! NaNo 2010 will kick off very soon and thus now begin the preparations of hoarding food and writing materials into the place that shall become one's Den for the month of November. And without a doubt, I am definitely going to bring home another certificate for my budding Wall of Stuff I've Actually Finished. Wohoo! :D

Okay, I admit it, I'm definitely a bit more nervous than I was last year. I'm going to be working on Arkanos again and now I'm untangling the plot which gave way during JulNoWriMo. NaNo is definitely bigger than its spin-off companion, but still I remain slightly worried and keep hoping that the plot will not drop off so drastically that I lose interest to write or strength to fix some barrier. But chin up, stomach in and chest out! There are definitely more up sides than down sides.

I'm truly happy about the fact that NaNo is so international now that even here in Finland there are NaNo meets which can be attended. And let me tell you how encouraging they can be! And besides that, funny and unexpected stuff can happen. Last year, when we all gathered at a café called Wayne's, a guy approached us and asked to take a picture since he'd "never seen so many computers in one place at the same time before."

Surfing about the forums, I see that the buzz is already growing! If anyone would like to get in touch and have a word war or just otherwise chat, feel free to visit my NaNoWriMo page.

May the games begin!!