Fall's Back

The calendar has come back around to fall, with its various seasonal trappings. The parade of holidays is underway, the days are shortening, the weather is changing. Here in northern California, the past month has brought a shift to less chance of sudden heat waves and more of sudden rain.

November has several traditional associations, including US elections, so I'll remind you to vote if there's an election happening where you live. I'll also remind you that any writers you know might become especially weird next month, due to November's connection with extreme writing.

If you're reading my blog, you're probably aware of National Novel Writing Month, an annual event that encourages writing a 50,000-word novel during the 30 days of November, for the joy, challenge, and community of it. You may not have heard that the nonprofit organization which provided the infrastructure for NaNoWriMo shut down earlier this year. Despite this unfortunate development, the spirit of NaNo survives. Plenty of writers will still push themselves to meet big goals in November, either solo or as part of a group, whether or not they're specifically counting to 50k. (One place to find resources and an encouraging newsletter is NaNo 2.0, a more modest endeavor launched by NaNo founder Chris Baty and other longtime volunteers.)

The spirit of NaNo always calls to me in the fall, and while I'm not setting myself any word count goals, I will be using November as motivation for increased writing progress. In my last update, two months ago, I shared photographic evidence of the planning I was doing to sort out structural changes and make decisions before moving ahead. The planning stage dragged on for longer than I intended, and I'm ready to get back into serious writing mode.

It's Tradition

December is the time to look back and reflect on accomplishments of the year that's ending, or even more dangerously, to look ahead and declare hopes and intentions for the year to come.

My hopes for the following year are always big. However, I never want to say too much about that, because I'm conscious that eventually I'll be looking back at whatever I wrote and comparing it to reality. So I tend to focus on accomplishments.

My accomplishments are usually pretty big, too. But often they don't feel that way to me, mainly in comparison to those hopes I still know about even if I didn't write them down. Which makes it all the more worthwhile an exercise to tally up what I've done and see that it's not nothing. As I reminded myself a few months ago, a major reason I document my progress is to help me recognize how much progress I've actually made.

A year ago, I was in the middle of a novel draft that I started in November for NaNoWriMo 2022 and continued to work on daily until taking a year-end break. Right after the beginning of 2023, I resumed this daily writing practice and maintained it consistently until I reached the end of the draft in late February.

While that draft was less than I'd hoped for in terms of cohesion and general story-shapedness, I'm pleased by my diligence in creating it. For four months, I committed to writing at least 100 words every day, and sustaining that kept me moving forward. I developed a pace that let me accurately estimate how long the project would take, something I dream of doing again, though I'm sure it will be harder when my standards don't keep dropping as I approach the end.

I think that with a solid outline worked out, I can write the next, better draft with the same sort of sustained energy. I did imagine I'd be doing that by now, or at the very least, be preparing to start early in the new year. Once again, my hopes exceeded reality. Still, when I remember how disconnected and vague that last draft was, and compare it against my sense of the story now, I realize I made plenty of progress over the rest of the year. Slow progress, but progress nonetheless.

The bulk of this year went toward a lot of brainstorming and a lot of research. With both, I've been frustrated at not more efficiently arriving at the solutions, but that's how it goes. Occasionally good ideas seem to spring up effortlessly and randomly, but more often getting at them requires probing deeply, sometimes in what might be the wrong direction.

My work throughout the spring was somewhat scattered, often iterative, occasionally perhaps misdirected. It was also interrupted by a number of breaks. Moving into summer, I focused in on character and plot problems, including with the help of sticky notes. I also went down a deep hole of research and worldbuilding that may or may not end up having enough prominence in the story to justify the work I put into it. It's all part of the process, really!

Much of the fall involved burrowing down more such holes. I put in some solid, consistent hours over the last few months, but it sometimes felt of questionable value. While I spent the previous two Novembers in fast-paced NaNoWriMo writing mode, this November I stalled, stuck on what seemed like an unsolvable problem, and that was demoralizing.

But good news: In early December, I hit upon a more elegant solution than anything I was aiming at. The idea felt like it sprang out of nowhere, but experience tells me all that earlier thinking helped me get there. In any case, I've triumphed over a big problem that was flummoxing me, and I'm ending the year on a high note. Many other story problems remain, but those will wait until 2024.

As always at the turn of the year, the unknown future feels full of promise. Here's hoping!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ In an interactive data visualization at The Pudding, Alice Liang explores trends in romance novel covers: "Today's newest romance novels bear a stark difference to the rotating stacks of clinch covers one might find at a used bookstore or estate sale. In that era, publishers sought to differentiate their novels from their competitors with a distinctive style, but still kept to a common enough language so that a browser would know a book is romance at first glance. Now, most romance novels are illustrated, brightly colored, and have a distinctive pop art style, but they still have a recognizable common language." (Thanks, Lauren!)

Everything Old Is Novel Again

I spent all of this year working on a novel. For my life in general, this is unremarkable, but that wasn't how I spent 2020 or 2021, and the return to full-time noveling has been a welcome development. I'm pleased with what I accomplished this year, and I'm especially glad to have found my way back into a comfortable writing groove.

The first ten months of 2022 were all research and planning, in slow preparation for expanding last fall's hastily conceived and written NaNoWriMo draft. I didn't allocate all those months as effectively as I might have, but I did work consistently, and certain aspects of the story and its world gradually became clearer.

In mid-October, with the start of NaNoWriMo coming around again and providing the pressure of an external deadline, I turned the year's ideas into an index card outline. That gave me enough of a structure that I was able to begin a new draft on November 1, and I've been writing every day since then.

In November, I passed my personal 25,000 word goal and ended the month with 30k words. I was afraid I might lose momentum once the mass writing challenge was over, but I've been setting myself weekly word count goals that provide sufficient motivation. Today I hit the 50k word milestone. That gets me to approximately the midpoint of the outline, which is where I want to be, because the goal is not merely to accumulate words but to make progress through the chapters so I end up with a story-shaped draft of a manageable size.

I wrote at least a bit every single day of November, and of December so far, and that's been helpful in sustaining my progress. I'm ready for a break now, but I'll try to not completely lose contact with the story while I take some time to relax and recharge. In January, I want to pick up where I left off and keep writing until I reach the end. Then there will inevitably be more planning, and more drafts, in the now-familiar cycle of my life.

As the seasons turn once again back toward brighter days, I wish you all a happy novel year!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Silvia Moreno-Garcia, writing for the New York Times, examines how the term "magic realism" is overused and why it matters: "Magic realism once referred to the literary style of a loosely connected group of Latin American authors who penned works some 60 years ago, but in the English-speaking world, the term has become synonymous with Latin American writing in general. Picture every work by a British writer being called 'Austenesque' today, and you get an idea of this phenomenon."

NaNo Update

It's week 4 of National Novel Writing Month. I can confirm that as I planned, I will not be attaining 50,000 words this November, but I have already reached 25k, my tentative personal goal.

My half-NaNoWriMo has been going very well. I've written every day this month so far, and most days I wrote a thousand or more words. A thousand words a day feels like a sweet spot for me: high enough that I have to keep pushing forward, but not so high that I end up typing every random thought simply to make word count. It feels like a sustainable pace that I can continue on past November, as long as I keep the flexibility of having some shorter days and breaks.

Tracking my words and having a numerical goal is great motivation, and it's ensuring my progress doesn't grind to a halt whenever there's a decision to make (which is constantly). For example, I got to a point in my outline where some characters were supposed to have a tense discussion about a particular area of conflict. I didn't have any notes about what setting or context this scene might happen in, so I had to think of one on the spot. I considered sending them on a hike, but then I immediately had a million questions for myself about logistics and location and what other activities would fit the story better than a hike. But I didn't have time for any of that, because I needed to write the scene, and what's important about the scene is the conversation and how it leaves each character feeling at the end. That's what's moving the story forward, and that's what will most likely persist into the next draft. The details of the hike that I scattered in around the conversation can easily be changed in revision. Once I've written the entire story and can examine it as a whole, I'll have more basis for determining whether it would be most useful for these characters to habitually take hikes together or play games or do some activity I'm definitely going to invent to be popular in the hundred-years-from-now setting of the novel.

Next up in my outline is a scene in which two characters start a collaboration that becomes significant for everything that happens in the rest of the story. I don't think I've sufficiently established why they decide to collaborate, but in the interest of pushing ahead, I'm going to get them started anyway. Filling in the missing steps can happen in revision. So can addressing the many unknown details throughout this draft that I've marked with square brackets, like "They discussed [something related to somebody's job]" and "the program to do [whatever], which was located in [wherever]."

I've been thinking of this draft as a model of a bridge, constructed of popsicle sticks and string in a somewhat haphazard manner. It may not be possible to drive even a toy car across it without jumping over gaps, and it's certainly not designed for real traffic, but it should wind up approximately the right shape to represent the bridge I want to build.

The 25,000-plus words I've written so far are a much more solid start to this novel than what I wrote last NaNoWriMo. A good word count for the finished draft might be somewhere in the vicinity of 100k, but I'm not sure where I'll actually end up, or how that might relate to the length after revision. I know I've written a lot of long, throat-clearing passages that will be streamlined or cut, but I also have all those holes and brackets to expand.

After today's writing session, I'll be taking a few days off to gather with family and friends. Next week I'll get back to work, and I'll keep writing into December and beyond.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ B. A. Shapiro shares her visual and mathematical plotting strategy at CrimeReads: "So how the hell does one go about writing a novel with such a large unconnected cast and so many intertwining plots? Well, how about Excel spreadsheets, bar graphs, bubble maps, pie charts and scattergrams? Not to mention intersecting and overlapping normal curves. Not the usual items in a novelist's toolkit. But my tools, nonetheless. Granted, I have a math background—one of my areas of specialization in graduate school was statistics—and everyone knows that being able to invert a matrix is a prerequisite for a successful literary career. Or not."

Getting Scary Real

It's the scariest day of the year: The last day to get my novel plans settled before I have to start writing on November 1! (Doesn't that imply tomorrow is scarier than today? Whatever, I have more urgent details to focus on.) Yes, as I teased a month ago, I'm going to use National Novel Writing Month as a reason to stop planning and start drafting this novel (again).

I'll be working on the same project from NaNoWriMo 2021, but my goals are different this time. Last year, most of my ideas about the characters and story were nebulous, and in my pursuit of 50,000 words, I churned out a whole slew of scenes, experimental character sketches, and authorial musings about possible plot directions. It was a fantastically creative month that gave me a solid foundation for working out what I actually want this novel to be. None of that NaNo material (except maybe snippets here and there) is directly usable for the next draft, but it was all useful.

This November, I'll be starting the novel fresh, with the goal of writing the beginning of a decent, coherent first draft. I don't expect to write 50,000 words, because that pace might result in generating too many words I have to throw out later. But I do want to use the collective word count challenge to keep me motivated and keep me writing. I'm tentatively aiming for 25k story words. I won't be counting all the notes I'm also sure to write, because tracking those would be more of a bookkeeping hassle at this point.

I've spent most of this year reimagining the novel, figuring out the world and characters, and outlining a plot. In truth, nearly all the plot work happened in the last two weeks, because of the power of a deadline. Faced with a pressing need to make progress, I turned to trusty index cards for the first time in many years. Once I began scribbling (almost illegibly) the ideas in my head onto little rectangles and moving them around my rug (obviously designed for this purpose), it was amazing how quickly the basic shape of the story emerged.

Slipping Into The Future

Time certainly does keep passing, in that fast-slow way it has, and somehow it's late September, a moment-lifetime ago from last September. The calendar calls that a year since I first got excited about a new idea that led to me participating in NaNoWriMo again and writing a big mess of words that will form the basis of an actual novel. But surely it can't be true we're three-quarters of the way through 2022 already, because I intended to have a real draft of that novel written by now, or at least started, and instead I'm still in the planning phase.

I don't know why it remains such a surprise to me that novels take a long time. (I'm sure none of my blog readers are surprised.) In March, I was looking back on my naivete from January: "I thought I'd take care of a bit of research, sketch an outline, and be ready to start writing a new draft in a few weeks." Naturally at that point, I was still busy researching and worldbuilding. And of course I was doing the same in May, the last time I posted an update on this project.

I have not yet stopped focusing on worldbuilding, along with researching the real science behind the future world I'm creating. I've been developing the story's characters and plot as well, but every time I make progress in those areas, I realize there's more I need to understand about the details of my imagined future in order to fit the pieces together. My goal is to write scifi that will be convincing and coherent to readers, and that requires me to become an expert on the science of my fiction.

I'm incredibly eager to have the story elements settled and the plot outlined so I can begin writing. But I also don't want to write a draft that's another mess because I'm making every single decision on the fly. I've written plenty of drafts like that, and many good ideas have come from them, but so have many rounds of revision. That method takes a long time, too, so I'm trying this way with the planning time up front to see how that goes.

November is only a month away (somehow), and I may end up doing some sort of NaNoWriMo challenge to move this novel forward. I'd love to be ready to start writing by then, but if I'm not, maybe at least I'll manage not to be too surprised.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Heather Schwedel spots a trend in the Protagonist Does a Thing formula of book titles: "In 2017, we learned that Eleanor Oliphant was completely fine. As you may recall, there was a bestselling novel all about it, titled, appropriately enough, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. Soon, a wave of syntactically similar book titles followed, all involving simple sentences containing the female protagonist's name: Evvie Drake started over. Florence Adler swam forever. Eliza started a rumor. Britt-Marie was here."

All Part of the Process

It's been months since I posted anything about writing, but that doesn't mean I haven't been doing anything about writing. What I've been doing, though, is certainly more "about" writing than actual writing. But that's part of the process, and I am slowly (always too slowly) continuing work on the novel I started in November.

At the beginning of this year, I reread the scenes and brainstorms that made up my NaNoWriMo draft, and I was pleased to discover a lot of it was pretty good. It was a mess, but a promising mess. I liked the characters I'd started to develop, and I had ideas about how to further complicate their relationships and make their lives more difficult. (Sorry, characters. I do like you, I promise!) The story world and premise still interested me, and I was excited to figure out more details. In January, I thought I'd take care of a bit of research, sketch an outline, and be ready to start writing a new draft in a few weeks.

Well. I guess if I didn't have an eternally optimistic outlook on my writing, I wouldn't be able to keep going. Because of course it's been rather more than a few weeks, and I haven't started that new draft. But I have done things!

→ I researched many topics extensively, including more than a few topics that are largely irrelevant to the novel.

→ I began an outline but couldn't decide how to refer to the characters since I wasn't sure about the hastily chosen names in the NaNo draft.

→ I renamed all my characters, some multiple times. (Sorry again, characters.)

→ I reorganized my notes, some multiple times.

→ I learned how to use Scrivener features I hadn't tried before, and then let enough time pass without using them that I may have to learn again.

→ I mused about the world of my story, producing thousands of words that won't go into the draft. (This is a for-real accomplishment and essential step.) Some of the worldbuilding even drew on a portion of that extensive research!

→ I felt overwhelmed at the thought of the work ahead of me, while simultaneously imagining the joy of having the work behind me. Now I just have to figure out how to insert myself into the middle part.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Alexandra Alter at the New York Times looks at how writers are incorporating the pandemic into their novels: "Given how much the virus has dominated our lives, a flood of pandemic fiction is perhaps inevitable. And several authors said they believe it is necessary, noting that unlike the fire hose of news coverage about Covid, which can leave readers feeling numb and overwhelmed, fiction can provide a way to process the emotional upheaval of the past two years."

Here Again

Here we are near the end of another year, the time to look back and cringe over whatever forecasts and hubris may have been expressed a year ago. Last December I had enough sense to keep a damper on my expectations, though I did still declare my belief in 2021 "growing gradually better." Progress has been a lot more forward and back, up and down than most of us might have imagined. I am grateful for the ways science made 2021 less frightening than 2020, and sorrowful that disease and human factors produced another year of tragedy nonetheless. I will predict nothing about what's ahead for the world. though my hopes are for the best, or at least the not-worst.

I remained extremely fortunate this year, staying healthy and safe, with many opportunities for joy even in the difficult times. Writing came easier than last year, and I was focused on fiction projects during more months than not. In 2021, I revised a short story to completion and began submitting it, and I built a solid foundation for a novel idea I intend to keep working on.

The short story was one I wrote in three days during August 2020 and did two more drafts of (well, maybe four, depending on how you count) before the end of the year. I spent much of the first half of this year on a slow, careful revision to address weaknesses pointed out by early readers and get the story into the shape I wanted. Then there was one more fast, intense, deadline-driven edit to make it as good as I possibly could, and I sent it out into the world. I received a polite rejection from the first publication I tried, and more from the next ones, because this is a competitive market, and there are so many good stories out there. I'll keep trying with this story, as well as mulling over some other ideas that might become short stories.

Getting started on developing a new novel idea was my biggest creative accomplishment of the year, even though I'm still a long way from having a solid draft. I'd been feeling a lot of angst about a lack of new ideas, so it was a relief to hit on a concept that has promise. I spent October on worldbuilding and preparation for writing, and November doing NaNoWriMo for the first time in many years. I successfully wrote 50,000 words that will form the basis for the large amount of planning, outlining, and drafting I have ahead. Go, me!

Also in 2021, I was active early in the year with FOGcon's virtual events committee. It was fun and rewarding to help create online gatherings for our usual con attendees, as well as welcoming far-flung speculative fiction fans who would never have made it to our small local con in person. Since the summer, I've been less involved in organizing, but others have continued to put on a series of great events that will extend into next year.

This was another year where simply getting through was achievement enough, and I am pleased and fortunate that I have so much else to report. As this year of uncertainty winds down with more uncertainty, I hope you have something to celebrate. I'm wishing everyone the best.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ For The Millions, Mark Cecil talks to other authors about the emotional payoffs of stories: "If you're going to end high, you have to start low. If you're going to end low, you have to start high. The beginning is reverse engineered from the end. Most character arcs can be boiled down to this: 'It’s a story about a character who begins at X and must overcome Y to get to Z.' But in the writing process, Z comes first. Without Z, you don't know what Y or X must be. Without Z, you don't have a story."

NaNoWriMo Success!

I've completed the National Novel Writing Month challenge to write 50,000 words of a new novel in November. As I posted last month, this was my return to NaNoWriMo after many years away, and my hope was to kickstart the drafting of a novel I was still very much figuring out. What I wrote this month didn't turn out to be so much a first draft as a lot of finding my way into the world, the characters, and the story. The demanding word count goal forced me to make progress much faster than usual, and while that speed produced some garbage, it also sparked some new, surprising ideas. So I consider the month a success at all levels.

To reach the 50,000 word goal (the length of a short novel) in 30 days requires writing an average of 1667 words each day. I started out the month keeping to about that pace. The first few days were slow while I tried to remember how to not worry so much about sentence quality, and as I stopped to think up names for every character who appeared. Then I eased into the NaNo groove and began writing faster and with more abandon. Some days meeting the word count was easy, others it was a slog, but I made myself get my words in every day.

About halfway through the month, I'd written every scene I'd imagined in advance and then some. I had the setup for a story, not much sense of where to go next, and many doubts about whether there even was anywhere to go. I'd already written some scenes and character explorations that fell outside the main storyline I was writing, so I decided I'd better do more of that, plus some writerly musings that I'd allow into my word count. Writing down my streams of thought about plot and character turned out to be an even faster way to generate words, and I realized I could probably reach 50k before Thanksgiving and be able to relax over the holiday long weekend. I ended Wednesday, November 24 with 50,108 words, recorded my win, and then happily put the story almost entirely out of my head.

Now I'm ready to start looking again at what I produced in the mad rush of November. About half the words I wrote are the first part (and a bit of the middle) of the novel this will eventually become, though much will change based on some new directions I worked out later. About 10k words are me posing questions to myself like "Where are the current characters headed, and what would improve their arcs?" and then brainstorming answers. The rest are experimental threads of trying out different character voices, backstories, and world details, and some of those turned out to be the most compelling stuff I wrote. In the final three days, I came up with two new characters who I'm excited to figure out more about. This mess of words is hardly a novel, but it's a lot of good material toward a novel, and I didn't have any of it a month ago.

I'll be letting these ideas percolate as the year winds down. I may start on some research and outlining, but most of that will come in the new year, when I intend to get back to work on this story in a major way. The NaNoWriMo site is set up for tracking word count goals at any time, and since I found the graphs there motivating, I may give myself another goal early in 2022.

I'm glad I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo again this year. The real goal of the event is the satisfaction of writing some words that wouldn't have been written otherwise. I've been happy to hear from many friends who also accomplished that success, regardless of whether they technically won. Congratulations to all of us!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Elisa Shoenberger at Book Riot offers A Tiny History of Miniature Books: "I was over the moon when I found out that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a famous collector of miniature books, amassing 750 of them, some gifts from Eleanor Roosevelt.... He's not the only president to have engaged with little books. There was a miniature book for Theodore Roosevelt when he was campaigning, [book expert Anne] Bromer said. Many years later, President Gerald Ford worked with a printer in California, Bromer noted, to make two miniature books of his speeches, which he signed." (And don't miss the link to the 1832 miniature guide to birth control.)

NaNoWriMo Is Nigh, Once Again

It's nearly the end of the month, and so, as revealed in last month's peek behind the curtain, I'm up against my deadline to post another update.

More specifically, it's the end of October, which means it's almost the start of National Novel Writing Month. For many years, I spent every November writing first drafts at full tilt along with a growing number of writers around the world, in pursuit of the goal of producing 50,000 words in 30 days. NaNoWriMo changed my life and introduced me to many friends, and I have fond emotions about it every November even though the last time I participated was 2010, when I quit ten days in.

Well, the big update is that this year, I'm NaNoWriMoing again. In that post last month, I talked about the new idea I'd just starting mulling over, and I talked about how much I need deadlines. Early in October, I figured out that my new story concept was novel-sized, and the calendar had a perfect deadline just waiting there. In this case, it's the pressure to start writing on November 1 that I need most, because otherwise I might remain stuck in the planning stage of this novel forever.

This idea requires a lot of worldbuilding, and I've been plugging away at that all month and forcing myself to commit to a bunch of decisions about the story world. My sense of the plot is a lot vaguer than I wish it was, I'm still narrowing in on who the characters are, and nobody has names yet. But I know at least the first few scenes, so I'm going to start writing on Monday, and I guess I'll have to come up with something to call these people by that point.

I'm aiming for 50k in November, but I don't anticipate reaching the end of a novel, or even emerging with a coherent first half. There's so much about this story I'm still imagining, so I'm planning to write scenes as I think of them, expecting that they won't necessarily be in order and may often serve as backstory that doesn't belong in the book at all. I haven't deliberately written this way before, although of course I have written many scenes that were later moved or removed. I hope to find this method useful, and freeing.

I was amused/discouraged to discover that I had the same plan going into my last, failed attempt at NaNoWriMo. (And, yeah, weird fact, my final abandoned NaNo novel was about an apocalyptic pandemic.) This time around, I have a much more solid idea despite all the details left to figure out, and I'm hopeful about staying excited. I'll let you know how it's going, maybe even before the very end of the month.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ R.E. Hawley at PRINT analyzes an popular cover trend in Behold, the Book Blob: "As a marketing tool, cover design can get deployed to bring algorithmic logic back to the physical world. 'If you liked The Vanishing Half, you might also like You Exist Too Much and The Death of Vivek Oji,' these covers seem to murmur enticingly from the bookstore display."

Wait Till It Comes Around Again

Well, here we are much of the way through November, already into the hectic rush of the end of another year. I started the month with ambitious plans of drawing inspiration from the NaNoWriMo energy in the air and devoting bigger chunks of time to revision. That worked out for two or three days, and then there were some plot developments on the new house remodel that sucked up my attention. I never really managed the "NANOWRIMO AMOUNT OF FOCUS" that my all-caps to-do item called for this month, and writing progress has mostly trickled along. Our new home is proceeding more quickly, at least, and it will be ready for moving in next month. My manuscript will be ready next year, surely.

A year ago, November also began with high hopes. I was excitedly embarking on this revision that's still underway, and I wrote more or less the same thing about harnessing NaNoWriMo energy. Then the election happened, and focusing on writing got a lot harder for quite some time.

Of course, even under ideal conditions, I'm not super great at consistently putting hours of concentration into writing. Or maybe the issue is that conditions are so rarely ideal. Real life presents a constant distraction, which is a lovely thing as often as it's not. I knew I'd written about this issue before, and I found this post from many years ago on the topic, when naturally I was engaged in another revision of this same novel. Because let's not forget that I've been doing this over and over for a decade.

But hey, the tail end of the year is all about annual traditions, right? Some year it might be nice if my custom evolved to working on a different novel or revived making the most of NaNoWriMo. But I'm incredibly fortunate to get all this time for writing, and for that and so much else in my life, I'm truly thankful.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At The Millions, Adam O'Fallon Price explores the nature of both first- and third-person narratives in this Defense of Third Person: "We constantly divide our attention between the first- and third-person points of view, between desiring the shiny object in front of us and figuring out what it means for us to take it: who else wants it, what we have to do to get it, and whether it's worth taking it from them. In this sense, close third person not only accurately models human cognition, but omniscient third does as well, since, while we cannot read other people's minds, we are constantly inferring their consciousness--their motives and feelings. The human experience is a kind of constant jumping of these cognitive registers, from pure reptile-brain all the way up to a panoramic moral overview and back down, and human ingenuity has yet to invent a better means of representing this experience in art than the third-person narrator."

Horror Story

For Halloween, I present a list of scary facts about my novel:

→ It was ten (ten!) years ago that I wrote the first draft of THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE for NaNoWriMo 2007.

→ At that time, the 2026 portion of the story took place at the far reaches of the near future, while the late 1990s section drew on my recent memories. Today, the 90s are a historical setting, and by the time people can purchase my book, 2026 might be their credit card expiration date.

→ The first draft only took 30 days to write. Sure, it's 83,000 words of mediocre prose, the characters are simplistic, and the plot is a mere sketch of the story as it currently stands, but I got from start to end in a single month.

→ I'm now on the fourth major rewrite of the novel. Counting less extensive editing passes, this is at least the eleventh draft.

→ Despite all the research I've done over the past decade (decade!), there are still endless details in the manuscript that remain to be factchecked or rendered more accurately.

→ I've written or planned out several other novels in the years since beginning this one, and I'm still just as far away from finding a story that might eventually turn into something worth publishing.

These are the terrors that haunt me in the night. I wish you all a better sleep, a happy Halloween, and a successful NaNoWriMo!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Annalee Newitz explains for Slate How to Write a Novel Set More Than 125 Years in the Future: "Possibly the most difficult part of building a future was coming up with little details, like the euphemisms people use for slavery, or how they access the internet. Characters have to do things like eat, turn on the lights, and get wasted on a night off. These mundane details lead back to larger questions. What powers the lights? My novel is set after peak oil, so do the lights run on alternative energy? Batteries? Are the lights in fact just glowing bacteria living on the ceiling? Also, when would my character go out to a club? Do we still have the concept of weekends in the future? Do adults socialize mostly in the evening, or are work shifts so arbitrary that they might consider it normal to go to a raging party at 2 p.m.?" (Thanks, Jamie!)

It's Novel Season Again

Since I last reported in, the aforementioned revisions have been keeping me busy, and I'm making good if gradual progress. I devoted a solid, necessary chunk of time to planning the next draft of my novel but avoided getting trapped in that stage forever, so I'm now on to rewriting based on my plan.

My planning this time mostly involved making outlines, for some reason multiple partially overlapping outlines that I eventually had to merge together. Using these outlines, I tested out different ideas for new plot directions until I settled on the sequence that works best. I dealt in advance with many of the time-consuming logistics that so often stall me in the middle of writing, such as determining how to place a specific set of characters together with the motivation to discuss a certain topic, or deciding whether events should be shown, summarized, or skipped past with blank space. The scene-by-scene outline I wound up with gives me a place to keep adding any notes I think of while working on different scenes, or while lying in bed trying to sleep.

Tearing apart text I've previously worked so hard on is always scary (insert Halloween sounds), and I was nervous to begin actual revision, but I'm getting back into the swing of it. It's satisfying to recognize that I'm creating even better text, and I'm excited about putting my new plot and character ideas into action. Of course, I'm generally the least excited about writing at whatever moment I have to force myself to sit down and begin, but once I've stared out the window in despair for a few minutes, I tend to find that somehow sentences are coming together and time is passing and oh yeah, I guess I really do like this writing thing.

I haven't participated in National Novel Writing Month in years, but I'm still well-conditioned to find November an excellent month for writing productivity. As I'm cheering on my NaNoing friends, I hope to gain inspiration from the wordiness in the air this time of year. I don't have a specific goal in mind for next month, but I do intend to buckle down and focus on my novel (which originated as a NaNoWriMo project long ago).

In other seasonal developments, we've finally had some rain here in northern California, though the weather keeps climbing back to summer temperatures. While I do prefer sun to not, it's been such a hot year that I'm looking forward to chillier days and a chance to snuggle inside the cozy sweater I finished back in February, just before the weather started warming up. In case winter never comes, I've also started knitting a lighter weight sweater. And since the real purpose of this paragraph is to brag about my knitting accomplishments, I'll point out the two wraps I completed this summer.

Onward into autumn, and good luck to everyone embarking on NaNoWriMo or an alternate challenge!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ The Millions shares a comforting/panic-inducing conversation between Whitney Terrell, Emily Barton, and Alexander Chee about spending ten years or more on a novel: "Working so long on a book is a scary proposition in the supposedly 'fast-paced' media culture of the 21st century. But it happens more often than one might think. The three of us sat down to share strategies and retrace our steps in the hope that our experiences might provide a practical map -- or at least give some hope -- to other writers engaged in a long work. Here are our notes on a decade in the literary wilderness."

Wrapping Up and Winding Down

The end of 2015 approaches, and I'm ready to switch my brain to vacation mode. Before I sink into a revel of books, knitting, and sugar, here's an update and overview of my writing year.

At the end of October, I mentioned I was a month into a new novel that I was writing with very little plan in mind. Yesterday I completed that first draft. I brought the characters and situation to a reasonable point of closure a bit past the 50,000-word mark that defines a novel in NaNoWriMo. The manuscript concludes with a self-indulgent epilogue that gives every character a happy ending, which was my reward for pushing through to the end.

Nobody gets to read this story. It's not at all good. Though I didn't restrict myself to writing in a single month, I basically NaNoWriMoed this first draft, and in true NaNo fashion, there are some tiny brilliant bits that emerged as surprises in the course of writing, and the rest is discardable. The premise turned out to be only marginally fruitful, and everything interesting happened in the subplots. I do like how many of the characters evolved, and some elements of the story have potential, so maybe certain parts could be salvaged and turned into something else. But that's a concern for another year.

At least I can report that I wrote a novel this year. I learned some things in the process and reminded myself what first drafts are like (bad). I derived some satisfaction from following through on a large project. It kept me from running wild on the streets or the internet for a couple of hours each day.

The more significant and satisfying writing endeavor of 2015 was yet another revision of THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE, which occupied me for the first half of the year. After confronting the fact that my manuscript was just too long, I shortened it by over 20%. By now I can't even remember how I possibly achieved this feat, so I'll have to review my series of posts about The Incredible Shrinking Manuscript.

All throughout the year, I've continued fiddling with the outline I keep talking about that I hope will eventually become another novel. This has been mostly a background project, and while I'm making gradual progress with it, I don't have any exciting milestones to announce.

I had a lot of fun this year composing blog entries that explore my childhood writing. Reading and analyzing the bizarre things I wrote as a kid has provided me with great amusement each month, and I'm glad my readers find these posts entertaining as well. I have more gems to share in 2016.

My final ongoing writing project is producing reviews of every book I read. The monthly recap format has been working out well for me, and I'll probably continue with that next year. Stay tuned for a January post with my favorite books of 2015, reading stats, and so on.

I'll wrap this up with two non-writing notes. First, for those who didn't see it elsewhere, check out the sweater I finally finished knitting and assembling this fall, a year and a half after starting it. And lastly, let's not forget that in 2015, we learned that I am a treasure chest once owned by the Visigoths.

May your 2015 wind down with some moments you can treasure. Here's to the end of another year!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel considers genres and the myths of popularity, with statistical analysis and an overview of ongoing debates: "There is an odd cognitive dissonance that happens in these conversations, where we are simultaneously supposed to believe that literary fiction is 'mainstream fiction' and genre fiction is 'ghettoized,' and also that literary fiction is a niche nobody reads while genre authors laugh all the way to the bank."

Nearly There

Since my last revision update two weeks ago, progress continues apace. There have been no more repetitive conversations about ice cream, though I did find that frequently, my characters experience intense situations as a "frozen moment", "some frozen span of time", or a "frozen silence". Which isn't too far from frozen dairy confections.

In this revision pass, I've noticed a theme to the different issues that needed fixing at the beginning, middle, and end of the story. (This is separate from my previous tripartite classification of easy, medium, and hard problems.) For the beginning chapters, I had a lot of notes about explanations and character traits that I had to better establish by adding details and bits of backstory. The middle of the novel mostly required shortening, and that's not too surprising, given that "sagging middle" is a common manuscript diagnosis. Now I'm deep into the final section, and for these end chapters, the common issue is that certain things don't tie up as plausibly or satisfyingly as I hoped. I would venture to guess that a great many revisions could be structured around these same types of beginning, middle, and end fixes.

I mentioned on Twitter that since I'm going to end November with significantly fewer words than I started, it's like I'm doing a reverse NaNoWriMo. My friend Lilly says this means I've leveled up, and I love that way of looking at it. However, I have also spent the month often feeling envious of my NaNoing buddies as they experience the excitement and thrilling terror that comes with writing a new story. I'm looking forward to the time when I'll be able to work on something other than this novel and embrace the messiness of a first draft again. But in the meantime, to everyone doing NaNo: Good luck on the final week, and I salute you!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Beyond the Margins, Julie Wu looks at What Writing the Second Novel Is Really Like: "A couple of writers compare writing novel two to having amnesia--'a rare form...where you remember everything except how to do your job,' says Julie Kilber. Amy Nathan describes it as 'seeing someone you are sure you know well, but not remembering her name, where you met her, or what your connection is to her. And then, trying to figure out how to say hello without revealing any of that to anyone.'"

The End Is Here

Recently this blog has been mostly reading and not much writing and revising, but lots of writing and revising has been going on behind the scenes. And as a result of it all, I am very happy and relieved to announce that I have reached The End.

You should feel free to cheer and applaud now. I'll bask.

Yes, it's true: I have finished the last chapter of the novel that I started revising more than two years ago. This revision has taken so much longer than I expected, and I have made so many predictions that proved to be laughingly inaccurate. But I see in that post from the beginning that I wrote, "At this rate, I'll be finished approximately never." So I came in ahead of deadline after all!

This is not the first time I've completed THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE. I originally wrote the story in a month for NaNoWriMo, and later I started over from scratch and wrote a much stronger novel based on the same ideas in eight months. I didn't anticipate that I'd be starting from scratch again this time, but I ended up changing far more than I left intact.

When I was making plans for this revision, I thought the second version was sort of close to what the story ought to be. That didn't really take into account that I was already intending to make big, big changes, and I came up with plenty more changes as I went along. Plus, while writing this draft, I worked more carefully on the quality of my prose than I ever have before (or than I ever had the ability to before, since I keep improving as a writer the longer I write). That all took time.

But I'm very happy with what I've produced. I think it's good -- and I hope I still think so once I read it! I know many of you are eager to read as well, but it's not quite ready. As I warned you too long ago, I need to fix some continuity errors and other uneven parts before I share it. I've learned my lesson, and I'm making no predictions whatsoever about how long that's going to take.

For now, though, I'm giving myself the week off to relax, celebrate my birthday, and spend some more time reading.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Hal Duncan demonstrates How to Write a Sentence: "There are many things you want to say in a sentence, but you can't say them all. Decide between them. There are many ways a thing might be said. Decide between them. There are many words on the shelf, close enough to hand that you could grab any one of them and just chuck it in there. Don't. Stop. Look at those words. Decide between them." (Thanks, Effie!)

Human Foibles

1. The best cure for an intense aversion to the idea of ever writing anything again? Start writing.

2. Warning: This treatment may not be effective on a Friday afternoon.

3. I finished the overhaul of my first chapter that I was so absorbed with last week. I've sent it off to my critique group, and we'll see if they agree that it's looking good.

4. Returning to my revision where I left off wasn't as easy to get sucked into. But this week was kind of distracting.

5. If I were doing NaNoWriMo, I'd probably be really behind. Except that if I were doing NaNo, that in itself would keep me from falling behind.

6. It's Friday afternoon.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Christopher Gronlund endured a really terrible movie to bring us Better Writing Through Birdemic: "Somewhere into the opening credits, which drag on and on and on and on, it hit me: people can learn some writing lessons from watching this movie mocked by the RiffTrax crew (or by watching old episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000). The things they make fun of are the things writers shouldn't do."

Ramping Up

Deadlines and goals are useful. I mean, duh, right? They certainly work well for me, so I always have this nagging feeling that if I were operating with a real deadline on my novel, I'd be a lot more productive and probably finished by now.

What qualifies as "real" in my head is a funny thing. I've successfully met the deadline for National Novel Writing Month many times -- and without it, I might never have written any novels -- but the penalty for failing is only self-flagellation and maybe some mild disappointment from friends. I'm great at self-flagellation, so I ought to be able to set up a personal arbitrary deadline at any point, and I can create the potential for mild disappointment by announcing it on my blog or even just telling a few people.

I guess I have done that at least once, when I committed to an hour count goal last November as a parallel challenge to NaNoWriMo. I met my goal, and it helped me be more productive than usual. I was kind of intending to repeat the challenge a couple of months later, but that never happened.

I'm constantly making goals for myself about when I'm going to finish this scene, this chapter, this whole damn draft. But I never make them real by telling anyone else, so they're meaningless.

Thinking about this more, I realize that I'm only comfortable committing publicly to a goal based on a certain amount of time (or in the past, a certain number of words), not to one involving progress through the story. That's because I can't know for sure if a scene or chapter will be painless to write or will require long thought and agonizing over every sentence. I'm afraid that if I have to meet a deadline, I'll rush when I shouldn't, and the quality will suffer. Which would be a counterproductive use of productivity, so of course that's why I'm not comfortable with it. I mean, duh, right?

Therefore, here's another hour-based goal. Back in the spring, I did an assessment of how much time I spent working, and I wasn't pleased with the results. I resolved to push myself to focus more on writing each day, and that's been going pretty well, if you overlook a summer full of breaks. I'm currently more satisfied with how much I'm getting done.

So now it's time to boost the numbers and raise the stakes. I'm going to increase my hourly goal each week for the next four weeks. At the end of that time, I'm going to post about this again and tell you how well I'm doing.

And if I don't, your mild disappointment will rain down upon me! Believe me, this is one of the scarier fates I can imagine.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Author Keith Ridgway confesses in The New Yorker's Page-Turner blog, "I don't know how to write.": "I've written six books now, but instead of making it easier, it has complicated matters to the point of absurdity. I have no idea what I'm doing." (Thanks, Nathan Bransford!)

It's How You Use It

If you're familiar with National Novel Writing Month, you'll know that the event revolves around word count and that the goal is to write a novel of 50,000 words. You may also be aware that 50,000 words is much shorter than most novels published for adults these days. The type of book I'm writing could be twice that, or more. (Speaking very, very roughly, a published book has around 300 words per page.)

Since the beginning, I've been expecting this novel to be on the long side -- and no, for those of you out there snickering, it's not because I have an embarrassing history of producing ridiculously lengthy manuscripts. THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE contains three distinct stories, so it needs a good amount of space for all the plots to unfold. I've put a lot of attention into deciding what belongs on the page and what doesn't, and at this point I feel confident that the book will be the correct length to tell the story, with no excess.

I wrote the first draft of DAMAGE during NaNoWriMo in 2007, so I was keeping careful track of the word count. It came in around 80,000 words, and I was pleased to know that I'd have plenty of room to add more to the story. When I wrote the second draft from scratch two years later, I also kept track of my daily word count (though I'd forgotten about that until I found the spreadsheet today). The second version of the book was 110,000 words, a size that seemed appropriate for the story, with even a some leeway to expand.

During this revision, I haven't focused much on word count. I'm rewriting within an existing document, doing a combination of adding new material and removing old text, so tracking words is a less useful metric. Instead, I've been keeping track of hours worked. I've also been thinking about the number of pages in each chapter and noticing the page count that's always visible at the bottom of the window.

Obviously, there's a relationship between page count and word count. They increase and decrease together, and you can estimate one from the other. But I hadn't been making those estimates, and I hadn't been running the word count feature. And more importantly, I wasn't doing any of the math about how many of the pages in the document (which contains all the novel's chapters) had been added in the course of working on this storyline.

So I was surprised when I finished the second storyline (yay!) and discovered that it's significantly longer than the first one I revised. This isn't a disaster, and I was aware that the second plot was turning out larger than planned, but the actual numbers were unexpected.

See, the story that takes place chronologically last, which is the one I revised first (sorry, this is complicated), serves as a sort of frame for the other two storylines. For structural reasons, the frame story has more chapters than the other two. I also intended to add the most new material to the frame (it's really more than a frame) while keeping the other two plots fairly stable. Therefore, I concluded that the frame would be longer than the other two.

When I revised that first storyline, the chapters tended toward a consistent length. I started the second storyline and was a bit alarmed to find that the chapters were all turning out longer. I decided that was fine, and I guessed that as a result, the two stories might be about the same size. At no point did I do any actual math on this to see how far off my guess was. In hindsight, the page and chapter discrepancies clearly meant I was creating far more words and pages for the second story.

As I said, this is not a disaster, and I'm continuing to stand behind the length of the manuscript. The third storyline will have the same number of chapters as the second and is supposed to be around the same length -- but I guess we'll see how it goes.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Theresa Stevens at Edittorrent talks about how to build complexity into texts without undercutting the integrity of the story: "complexity is built up in small moments, but each of those moments must be clear in and of themselves. If the contradictions in your narrative aren't presented in a clear way, in a way that allows the reader to easily grasp them, then you're not building complexity into the text."

What Have I Done?

Last week I promised to give an in-depth answer to the question "How's your novel coming along?" and the real question "What are you doing to your finished novel that's taking so long?" But first I want to provide the context for my revision by explaining what happened before I got to the current interminable stage of the process.

I came up the seed of the idea for THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE in the summer of 2007. I spent some time planning out the story and researching over the next few months, but I was mostly focused on revising a different novel. That November, during National Novel Writing Month, I wrote a complete first draft of 80,000-plus words in thirty days.

The first draft of DAMAGE wasn't terrible for a novel written in a month. It was my best NaNo effort to date (and would turn out to be the last NaNo novel I was happy with). I shared the manuscript with three or four friends who understood the nature of a NaNo draft and knew that the story and I weren't ready for any serious feedback. Then I returned to the novel I was already revising.

I didn't even look at DAMAGE again for over a year. When I read through it, I was reasonably pleased with what I'd written and started to think about focusing on it again. In the summer of 2009, I began the second draft. Only I didn't want to run into the problem I'd recognized in past revision attempts, when the presence of the original text made me too conservative in my edits. So I decided that I'd essentially write a second first draft that was based on the original story but not comprised of any of the same sentences.

I'm glad I used this method for creating the second version of DAMAGE. The original had some good things going for it, but it was only barely the story I wanted to tell. The plot was simple and contrived, and the behavior of the characters often didn't make a whole lot of sense. By rewriting from scratch, I gave myself the freedom to find the novel's true potential.

It took about eight months to write the second draft. I was very happy with it, and I felt it was stronger than anything I'd written before. But the real test would be sharing it with other readers.

I have wonderful, insightful critique partners who are generous with both praise and complaint. Through sharing and discussing the manuscript, I learned about the novel's strengths and its still considerable flaws. This second version was on the way to being a great book, but it needed more. More connections between the storylines, more coherent character motivations, more reasons for the reader to care about what happened.

While I didn't agree with every single thing my critiquers said, they were mostly on target, and the suggestions they made led me to even more ideas for improvement. I started giving the story a really, really hard look and thinking about what needed to change so that this time, I'd get everything right.

Later this week: The exciting tale of spending a very long time stuck in the revision planning stage.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Jason Black offers some dialogue advice at the #amwriting blog: "It's not about how you write the dialogue, but rather, how you decide what the characters should and shouldn't say: rely on shared context. When real people talk to each other, a prime strategy for economizing on words is not to say anything the listener already knows."