The Tortoise And The Hare

I am now well into the second week of National Novel Writer’s Month, more commonly known as NaNo, http://nanowrimo.org which is a challenge to write 50,000 new words of a novel during November.

This will be my thirteenth year of doing this, and if you think the outcome is in question, I can tell you, not where I’m concerned. In all the years I’ve done this, there is only once when I didn’t get my word count verified as a win, and that year I had technical issues with my phone line which didn’t get solved until after the first of December. Back then, I had a dial-up, so that was a hindrance.

At any rate, I always manage to finish this challenge.

How I manage is another issue. And I will admit I do have tons of time to write, since I don’t work, but let’s face it, I need it. A good illustration of why I need so much spare time is what happened this Saturday at a local write-in.

For starters, write-ins are when local people who all signed up for the NaNo get together at some designated time and place and write. I am aware that there are not “in real world” meetings and groups for NaNo everywhere, but they do exist, and my local group is pretty cool.

At any rate, I did attend a write-in on Saturday, and other than writing, and a bit of chatting, one thing we do at these events is have what is termed either word wars or word sprints. These are timed events, usually for anything from five minutes to as much as a half hour, but in our group, we usually go for fifteen minutes.

The goal of these word wars is to type as many words as you can during that time. Obviously, the person with the highest number wins.

Saturday we did this twice, and just before we started the second one, I predicted I’d lose again. The fact is I usually lose these things, and Saturday was no exception. Everyone else managed to get at least twice as many words as I did, but you see, of all the people in attendance Saturday, I was the one with the highest overall word count.

In the end of the second sprint, one person in our group got nearly nine hundred words, an impressive total for just fifteen minutes, while I didn’t even manage four hundred. And yet, each year this lady usually ends up typing like a mad woman on the last day of month, frantically trying to finish before the time is up, and generally making it at the last minute, last year she didn’t even manage that much.

Now, I admit she has a lot of other things she’s doing during the month. She’s one busy woman. She honestly would never finish this challenge in time if she couldn’t type at the speed she does.

I, on the other hand, don’t have anywhere near as much on my calendar, and I can manage to write nearly every day for several hours straight, each time. And I finish the challenge long before the month is out. Last year I actually managed just over 63k words total for the month and at the rate I’m going I may well do the same this year.

After all, today is only the 11^th of the month, and in order to make 50k words by the last day of month, you will need to have written 18,333 words by the end of today. I made that last Saturday, and then some. At this moment, I’m set to exceed 25k today, and that is the number you’d need to reach by this coming Sunday.

In other words, I’m the Tortoise, and my friend is the Hare. Slow and steady wins the race. Aesop knew what he was talking about.

Happy writing everyone. J

Calendars and Challenges

At the beginning of each month, besides working on paying all the bills, I update my personal calendar and make sure the family calendar is up to date. This is generally a daunting task because two of my daughters and my husband usually have multiple doctor’s appointments each and it’s a rare week that doesn’t have something scheduled.

This month I opened my calendar and decided that my girls hadn’t told me their appointments yet, and my husband’s needed to be added too. For the whole month there was only my doctor’s appointment. 

I asked.

One daughter gave me the mere two she had while the other sent the message she miraculously didn’t have any, while I added my husband’s—one.

I looked at the completed calendar in sheer astonishment at all the blank spaces.

I can’t remember the last time my calendar was that empty at the beginning of the month.

Then of course of I dove into my week, including adding a doctor’s appointment for a sick kid. Then I’ve had to fit in trips to the vet for several pets between runs to the store for necessary things like milk and bread, which I can’t seem to keep enough of in the house. Not really surprising since I have two teenaged boys.

In between all that I’ve had to figure out where all our money has to go this month and I still have to get those bills paid, plus I’m still hard at work trying to finish my opus, and I’ve finally managed to get to the day of the momentous final event, but like Bonnie, I’ve hit a snag in reaching ‘the end’. (Neither one of us has won this challenge yet.)

As I was scrolling back, just a few pages, to check something I’d typed, I found an anomaly, a line of code that I’ve run into before.

How it gets into my documents, I have no idea. I have found there is only one way to get it out, copy and paste everything into a new document without any formatting.

Easy enough to do. And if your only formatting is line spacing and indents for paragraphs, it’s a matter of selecting all and reformatting it, and you’re done. Of course if you have chapter heading, like I do, you’d then have to do a find for the word chapter and reposition where the heading is, i.e. center it.

For most documents that’s be about all you’d need.

But I have scene breaks that would need centered. So do a find for all of those. Also not so hard.

Okay. Next step.

I have subheading that need to be flush right and italicized. Fortunately they all start the same. So do another find and change all of those.

Now it’s back to the way I had it, right?

Not quite.

Because I also had some italicized text within the body of the story, and, you guessed it, it’s all different. Now I have to do a careful hunt in the old document, with the anomaly in it, for everything that’s italicized and make sure I italicize it in the new document.  

Considering I was working on chapter 144 when this happened, and my document is well over 1700 pages, it’s a massive undertaking.

And as you can see, I’m now late making my post this morning. Plus I’m running behind on getting ready for the busy day I have.

Smile. Make the day a brighter day.

The Challenge

Okay, I’m declaring the race has been won by Konnie because I’ve hit a major snag in my story, it’s actually something I should have done a little more research on before I started writing. But now I’ve looked it up and learned what I thought was correct wasn’t, meaning I have to go back through the whole manuscript and make some major changes. I’m also not going to be able to move forward until I do fix it, because the needed changes affect how I can move forward.

And that means, since I’m such a slow typist and reader, that there’s little chance I’ll finish by Saturday. I haven’t even gotten close to the climax scene yet, and Konnie is almost to hers. Though in all fairness I should point that Konnie technically already has her ending written, due to the fact that this monster manuscript she’s writing started out at first as just one story.

One story she actually managed to write almost in its entirety in one month. And it is the main story in this larger manuscript, but after finishing that one, she started one about the sister and best friend of the hero in the first one. The time line was a complete overlap for first one, and before she even finished that one, she started a yet another story, about a set of twin boys and the sisters they like.

Well, at some point she decided she didn’t have enough of the two new stories to comprise a whole novel each, so she decided to combine all three, since all three do occur during the same time frame. Only problem is that she eventually came up with plenty more to fill, well I’m guessing, four to six novels. But I told her to worry about the length, size of the monster, after she actually finishes telling the whole thing.

Considering that the first two stories have a lot of the same scenes, in a different POV, and the third one has scenes that happened at the same time, just a different place, that it isn’t going to be easy to divide this into three or even four stories. And frankly, if she hadn’t decided to limit the number of POV’s she used, it could be way more than that.

I can think of three or four other POV’s she could have used, and frankly, two or three other stories, if not more, she could have told with those other POV’s. Yeah this is a huge story. It’s also a really good story. Personally, I can’t wait to see it finished.

  And now to prepare for Nano!

Happy writing everyone. :)

The Challenge

Last week, as Bonnie said, I challenged her to a race to the end, see which one of us could finish writing our current work in progress by the end of the month. Her main goal was to get it finished so she’d have a clean slate to start a new story for Nano next month.

My motivation is finally getting my mega opus finished. Today I started writing chapter 137 of these epic story, which is really several stories in one. There are so many characters in it and even the non-POV characters have a story line. But I’m oh so much closer. Since at least part of the last few scenes are already written (I do know how the opus ends) I know I’m almost there. I just need a few more scenes to wrap up some story lines and set up that final event.

As I look at what I have now, and the scenes I still need to write, I’m sure I won’t finish at 140 chapters, in fact, because that last event is so big, I’m pretty sure I’ll make at least 150.

Which means I could have 14 more chapters to write in just over a week.

I have ten days to write about 14 chapters.

Scratch that.

Due to plans I have this weekend, I doubt I’ll have any writing time on Saturday.

And then there’s the paperwork, bills and so forth I have to deal with. The grocery shopping. My husband’s car is down, at least until we can fix it, which won’t be until after the first, so guess who gets to do a lot of chauffeuring for the next ten days to two weeks?

But having a goal is a good thing.

Both of us are trying hard to complete our stories.

Most days we both spend time on our stories either adding to them or editing, tweaking, what we already had.

One word at a time we are both getting closer.

She doesn’t think she’ll make any more than I do, but we’re not giving up.

Although I don’t do Nano, I rarely have the time to do that much typing, I can see the value of such challenges. Setting goals with friends, people who will not only keep you on track, but race you to the finish line.

So for all those writers who are doing Nano, I support you. Keep fighting to ‘the end’, and when you reach it, go back and edit, edit, edit, until it’s the best you can offer.

I’d write more now, but I’ve got an alarm going off, I need breakfast, and my opus really wants me to finish that scene I left in the middle of so I could get this written. And I’m sorry this is late, but I really was trying to write that scene.

Smile. Make the day a brighter day.

The Race

And the race is on!

Both Konnie and I are nearing the completion of the novels we’re each currently writing. Of course, Konnie has been working on the one she’s calling her opus for like seven years, and I started my WIP last November, but at this moment, we both have about the same number of chapters left to finish them.

And it’s anyone’s guess which one of us will finish first.

Konnie is hands down the faster typist of the two of us. We’ve known that for years, but Konnie’s also the one with four of five kids at home, along with a whole menagerie of animals, including four dogs, and then there’s her husband. All of these are potential interruptions that I, clearly don’t have.

I live alone. I do have all the chores and errands she has, but not in as great a number, and unlike her, I can spend whole days writing with little or no interruptions. Well, let’s just say, in comparison to her, I don’t get interrupted that much at all. In fact, the last time I groused about interruptions, she was doing it, and it happened yesterday.

I was trying to work on my current scene and having trouble getting the order and choice of words just right. And every few seconds or so my skype would chime and it would be another message from Konnie with either a brainstorming question or a sample of what she’d just managed wanting my opinion, which of course drew my attention from my own writing. There was no way I could answer her and not have my brain focused on her work, and each and every time, that meant I had to refocus on my manuscript, which, thanks to my ADD, isn’t easy.

I’d finally start typing again, and she’d send another message!

So, yeah, I got upset. With her, interruptions are just a matter of course, and she isn’t ADD, which is probably a good thing, because her family interrupts her a lot. I don’t know how she can put up with it. When my husband was still alive, he learned pretty fast, that if I’m writing he probably should leave me alone.

I growl. Konnie doesn’t.

So, at any rate, last night Konnie challenged me to see who got to “the end” first. And this after I’d told her I’d challenged myself to finish this draft of my manuscript by October 31^st, because of course, come November 1^st, unlike her, I will be participating in National Novel Writer’s Month or Nano http://nanowrimo.org , just like I have done for the past twelve years. This year will be thirteen. And unlike any year before, which I still completed, I actually have an outline of a story ready and waiting for me to write!

But, I’m still working on the one I started during last year’s 50k challenge. Of course, that’s another story. :)

I can’t wait to see who wins this race. How about you?

Happy writing everyone!

Ramblings

The last two days I’ve mulled over what I could write about this week for my post and I actually got nowhere. As I sit down to at my computer to work on my post I still have no clue what to write about and while I should be focusing on the words to put here, my brain is tumbling over and over again on all those tasks I need to get done.

Laundry. Bills. Picking up my son’s glasses and getting my daughter’s new glasses adjusted. The cat needs shots, two dogs need their nails trimmed, and another one needs his tags renewed, the air filter needs changed, we have to get a new one. Hopefully my car will be ready today. Somebody has to do the dishes, probably me again because my girls are down for the count and my boys, well you try getting teenaged boys to wash dishes, by hand, and actually get them all clean.

And in the middle of all this my oldest has called twice in two day having a severe allergic reaction to something. So it’s looking like her sisters aren’t the only ones with severe food allergies.

Now I have a kid home sick from school, so I have to call the doctor, again.

Don’t let anybody ever tell you managing a household isn’t a job.

Half the time when I’m trying to do something, I’m “doing three things at once”, something I tell Bonnie all the time when she asks me why I haven’t done something simple yet, like answer her last question or check my mailbox.

Try talking/typing to someone through AIM while talking to someone on the phone and attempting to work on your own writing, or paying your bills, or whatever else you need to get done while four dogs are loudly announcing someone is at your door and nobody in your house seems to be making any effort to get to the door. Either that or the landline is ringing, which still means going to the front room. Oh, and you’re buried under your computer and a mound of paper work so getting up and getting to the front of the house is a production in and of itself.

(Okay, I’ve actually never had all of that happen all at once, but I’ve sure come close a few times.)

The one good thing about my strong attempt at trying to focus on writing yesterday is that I finally, after a month at least, wrote the next scene, and actually chapter, of my opus. I’m thinking I’m within six chapters of “The End”. I know I only have five events to put in and one of those is basically already written. So much closer. Maybe I’ll be able to get it finished soon.

Now to move on with another chaotic, perfectly normal around here, day.

Smile. Make the day a brighter day.