Preparing for NaNoWriMo for the first time

This is my first NaNoWriMo. At the beginning of the month, I began planning for my first novel. At the beginning of next month, I will begin writing it.
This is a big step for me. Up until now, I’ve never even attempted anything more than novella length. And most of those attempts fell short, and ended up being on the longer end of short story length.
To keep myself writing when NaNoWriMo starts, and to ensure that the story doesn’t derail, I’ve been planning. Plotting. My planning process seems to be something between the super fast style of the pulp fiction of old, inspired mainly by the writing advice of Michael Moorcock, and the much more detailed and complex style of the snowflake method. Twelve pages of planning, notes, ideas, seven of which are purely an outline.
And I’m not done yet. I have two more weeks to work on planning, and I intend to use those two weeks to my advantage. When November starts, I will be ready. Despite the fact that the second half of the month is bisected by both a holiday and the busiest time of the year for my job, I am going to win the NaNoWriMo competition. And I am going to try my damnedest to actually finish the novel itself, since the contest only requires 50,000 words, and my novel will probably be somewhere in the realm of 80,000 or more.
The practice runs I’ve been doing with the fan fiction I’ve been writing have proven that I’m capable of hammering out 4000 words a day easily, as long as I know what I’m writing and I don’t have to stop and figure it out every few minutes. Which means that the planning I’m doing should be enough to provide fuel for the fire.
And if I can finish the novel in November and edit it by the end of December, I very well may decide not to bother with a New Year’s Resolution this coming year. Because I’ll already have a novel ready to submit to agents.

Fractal storytelling

I’ve started planning out the project I’ll be working on for NaNoWriMo. And somehow everything fell into place to make the entire story structure fractal. Since I am shooting for a fairly simple action/adventure pirate story, I read a bit of Michael Moorcock’s advice on how to churn out an action/adventure/fantasy story in a short amount of time. Some of the advice might work for my project, some not as much. Either way, I did take his advice on how to structure the entire novel. Four segments of about 15,000 words each. First segment, introduce the character and get them into trouble. Second segment, pile on a little more trouble. Third, pile on so much that there doesn’t seem to be a way out. Last, have them claw their way up through it all and make it to the end. Simple enough.

However, as a way of getting a bit of practice and getting myself writing a lot of words on a daily basis, two weeks ago I started writing some fan fiction. Something simple, mindless, character driven. Plot didn’t really matter. Just something I could churn out. If you’re really curious, it can be found here. I’m not planning on putting it on this site because I’m not sure I want to deal with any copyright issues on a site where I’m hoping to sell some of my work. But at the time, I’d been watching the Star Wars: Clone Wars series, and I decided to just continue along with the same character during the gap between Episodes III and IV. No real plot, just character driven stuff with occasional plot happening to drive the character’s decisions and actions.

Somehow, I found myself falling into the habit of writing episodically, much like the TV series. Every four chapters seemed to be a single half hour episode. With a similar format. Introduce, pile on trouble, more trouble, finality. So I found that to be a good style that worked for me, allowing me to churn out plot points that way. So I decided to use that format for my novel, only instead of short 1000 to 1600 word chapters, I’d just collate all four into a single chapter.

Moorcock recommended doing six chapters in each 15,000 word section. However, with the style I was going for, four chapters fit that expectation. And, of course, as I sat down today to iron out my outline for the first quarter of the book, I found that I followed the same pattern: Introduction, trouble, more trouble, resolution.

So it appears that my novel’s structure will be fractalized all the way down to the chapters themselves. This, of course, makes me want to start planning for a quadrilogy.

… after November, of course.

I have a confession to make.

In the last week and a half, I’ve been writing… fan fiction.

Yes, I admit. I started writing a few months ago, and last week I decided to start dabbling in fan fiction as a way to write something steadily to make sure I churn out at least a thousand or more words a day, and a way of writing something where I don’t have to design the world and the characters. Something that can be relatively character driven, so I can just churn out a chapter without much planning ahead of time.

I can see why people get caught up in it. It’s easy to find fans and immediate responses to your work that way, even if it doesn’t mean a whole lot in the long run. For me, I’m treating it more as a writing exercise. I think I’m going to start planning and plotting for a story that I can crank out this easily and this fast, and try to have all the planning done and ready for November. So if I can get into the swing of churning out this many words a day (last night I churned out about 4000 in the span of three hours.) maybe I can actually participate in NaNoWriMo this year.

I just recieved my 5 year anniversary gift

from the part time retail job I’ve held while trying to finish school. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. That means it’s been nearly six years since I uprooted myself and moved from America’s humid crotch to a place that actually has four seasons. In a week my girlfriend/editor/co-game-designer/artist/general-partner-in-crime and I will celebrate our four year anniversary.

Time is a funny thing. Never there when you need it, always slipping away when you least expect it. I stopped writing when I was about sixteen or so because my work just couldn’t live up to my expectations. I was just competent enough not to fall into the Dunning Kruger effect, but not competent enough to rise above it. It took another fifteen years to garner the life experience to understand why, and what it was lacking. When I was young, I thought I’d be a writer by a young age. Now I’m looking at the ripe old age of 32 heading towards me on the horizon, while still struggling to finish my four year degree that I ran out of money for back in 2003 and working a minimum wage job just because it’s the only thing I’ve found that fits around my schedule.

But around that schedule, I’ve continued with my game design. And I’ve started writing again. I’m finally actually doing the things that I started doing as a child, and eventually grew to love doing to the point where I’d hoped to make a career out of it.

I still have that hope, hence why I bought this domain name and started writing here. I hardly wrote a word for fifteen years, and yet looking back, I realize that the entire time I still thought of myself as a writer. A writer who just wasn’t writing, which always seemed a bit fraudulent to me. And the moment I put pen to paper again (figuratively speaking. I have terrible handwriting, but can type 120 WPM easily) it just reaffirmed it. I’ve been a writer my whole life. My half-a-lifetime hiatus didn’t change that. At the time, I couldn’t see how I could call myself a writer when I wasn’t writing. Hell, I still feel like I was being a fraud for all that time. And I lament all the time I spent not practicing my craft.

But looking back, I can’t help but notice all the times I found some excuse to expound upon whatever it was going on in my life. Even if I knew no one would read it, I posted long notes on facebook detailing the methods I used for brewing mead. I wrote a blog about beer tasting, even though I’ll be the first to admit that my taste for beers is usually limited to the strong and dark. I tried my hand at doing video game reviews online. I started writing sourcebooks for the pen and paper role playing games that I’d been developing.

But that wasn’t enough to feed the itch. Now the stories are being written again.

Now I just need to make the transition from ‘writer’ to ‘published writer’.

Waiting for that first rejection letter

All right, so I’m not actually expecting a rejection letter as it isn’t a traditional publisher I just sent the first four chapters of Murder Most Fowl to. Amazon has started publishing serials on Kindle. And while they’re willing to publish most anything on Kindle, I think they’re trying to do at least some basic quality control for the serials, since it’s such a small subset. And I don’t blame them.

I am hoping that they accept it, of course. At the very least it’s a way to earn money from the serial that I’m going to be writing anyway. At best, it’s another channel to get readers. I’ll still be posting the audiobook chapters here, and I’m debating whether to post the full written chapters as well.

Recording woes…

Or at least an attempt to record that made me say, “Whoa…”

The last few days there’s been some construction on the road behind my apartment. This has, of course, made it impossible to record anything for the audio version of Murder Most Fowl. So, when I awoke this morning to a blissful silence, I decided to make the best of it. However, mere minutes after the *ding* of the toaster, a territorial bird decided to make his presence known.

This was not a beautiful, warbling mating call. This was a simple call to announce his territory. Territory that seemed to be right outside my window. And the call was a single note, repeated every half second, for more than an hour. I couldn’t see the bird. But I could sure as hell hear it. Clear as a bell. In every room in the apartment.

When the bird finally stopped, I thought I was going to be able to record.

It turned out that the bird stopped because the construction workers had shown up and scared it into silence.

Luckily, they seemed to be close to completed with their work, and their work abated a couple of hours before I had to leave for my job.

And that’s when the cricket started.

It was louder than the bird. Much louder. I could have sword that had it not been for the direction of the sound, I would have thought that the cricket was in my apartment.

Finally, an hour before I had to leave, there was finally a true, blessed silence. So I recorded. I took a few takes, fixed it up as best I could.

It turns out that the mediocre microphone in my laptop is actually far worse than I had originally thought. I suspect there was some kind of odd driver error, because certain sounds would trigger it to go into what I called ‘underwater mode’, where the sound would go from cheap and fuzzy to suddenly sounding like the computer had gotten water in its ears. And since I was recording straight, uncompressed sound, it must have been a problem with some kind of data compression that runs between the microphone and the computer itself. It was, in a word, unusable.

Needless to say, I started looking for alternatives. Cheap but good quality USB microphones. A working computer fan to get my desktop computer working so I could use my professional quality microphone. (A few years back I spent a decent chunk of money on a good soundcard that had various audio in/outs for actual recording. About a year ago, literally two days after I had gotten the laptop I am currently using, my desktop computer’s processor started randomly overheating and it became relatively unusable.) Then an idea occurred to me. I grabbed my iPod touch and opened up the ‘Voice Memos’ app that came with it. No bells. No whistles. Just a simple way to record what it hears. I pressed the record button, turned it over (since the microphone is on the back next to the back facing camera) and started reading.

And viola, a large violin.

… I mean, voila, clear, usable sound.

When I was done, I emailed myself the sound file. Since I had already done several (now dry, ironically due to the ‘underwater mode’) runs already, I did it practically flawlessly, and the file required very little in terms of editing. It was clunky, took several steps to do, but worked. Perfectly. And this bothers me. A lot.

Because I hate macs.

Yes, I’m an artsy type who has more wine, language, beer and music snobbery in three minutes of time in my pinky toe than most people have in their entire bodies and over the course of their entire lives. And I’m a mac hater.

When they’re used for advertising purposes, stereotypes are usually bullshit.

There’s no fundamental difference between a Mac and a ‘PC’ in this era. I put PC in quotes because technically a Mac is a PC. It is simply a PC that is put sold by the Apple corporation and uses the proprietary Apple OS. Mac is a subset of PC. PC does not mean Windows. Windows is just the dominant operating system used nowadays. Mac is just a competitor.

No, what I hate is the closed system. I may be an artsy type, but I’m the type of artsy type who likes to make things on my own, from the smallest bits possible. The only computers I’ve ever owned that I didn’t build myself were the two laptops I’ve owned in my lifetime and one hand-me-down desktop. The fact that you need to pay a hundred dollar license to Apple just to be allowed to become a ‘developer’ for either their computers or their iDevices baffles me. How in the nine hells do you expect to be able to cater to the needs of all the users if you make it so that small, independent programmers can’t make and distribute the little handy apps that can fill in the gaps that users need, but aren’t always big enough to be addressed by larger companies? The answer is: they don’t want those gaps filled. Their design culture for the last decade or so has been to make devices, then tell the user what they can do with them. The entire premise of an Apple device is just alien to the way I use technology. I am a human being. I use whatever tool I need to accomplish my goal.

Which, in this case, means that in order to accomplish the goal I have at the moment, I use the expensive Apple device that I bought a few years back with the intent of becoming a developer for it, because my love of creating stuff and hopefully making a few bucks doing it outweighs my moral outrage at their design culture. The device that I didn’t end up actually developing for, but instead used it as a portable email device when I went back to school, then as a portable music composition device when I discovered Music Studio, (highly recommended for the musician on the go, BTW. Or if you prefer synths to orchestral instruments, NanoStudio is also awesome. But I digress.) and now I use it as a portable, wireless microphone for my audiobook.

… maybe I should see if my phone has a voice notation app. It would save a few steps, instead of emailing it to myself I could just plug it in and transfer the files.

Wait, that’s another reason why I hate Apple.

Because with iDevices, you can’t do that. And there’s no reason for it. It’s just a design choice.