Transparency

Right, so...I need to stop making promises.

Seriously.

Hello, everyone. As I'm sure you've all figured out by now, Runic is not going well.

In fact, it's not really going at all.

You see, I apparently have this odd writing quirk where I make grandiose plans, prepare for those plans, promise people that I'm going to follow through on those plans...and then completely switch my plans to work on an entirely different project at the last minute (...or one month past the last minute, in this case).

It's a psychological disorder, I swear. I think I need counseling. :P

So, anyways, I'm not going to be rewriting Runic this semester. Unfortunately.

There are a variety of reasons for this, and I could get into them, but the most important one is this: I'm a lazy, undisciplined, selfish fool. AKA, I'm a bad person. But we all knew that already, so I'm not sure why this is such a surprising revelation.

Back on track with the post, now, yes?

I am writing now. I've switched to another older project: a short story I started last summer but am now expanding into a novel (it needs to be, honestly). It looks like it's going to shape out into a tight, character-focused, five-act tragedy. So...you know, the kind of stuff I've been doing all year, more or less.

In fact, let me share with you a few brief thoughts on the matter that I sent to my girlfriend in a text:

"2,271 words. Reached the end (more or less) of the old stuff. Learned some new things about the characters involved and decided on a way to fit the story into a beautiful 5-act structure. Ready to dive into new stuff tomorrow."

(Too bad it's too long to be a tweet. I like the condensed nature and reporting tone.)

So, yeah, that's what I'm working on right now. As I have said before, hopefully this springboards me into writing other things, but I'm not going to make any promises.

Until next time (whenever that may be).

Runic Progress Report -- Accountability

This is called public accountability. I hear a lot of big companies do something similar: board meetings, voter meetings, earnings reports, etc. Call it what you will. It's a rather ingenious way to motivate yourself. After all, if you know you're going to have to give an account for your actions, you'll likely follow through on goals and promises that you've made to yourself that pertain to those actions.

So that's what we have here.

Two things I want to say tonight:

1. I've "finished" the outline for my rewrite of Runic. Yes, it took way too long. I was travelling during the weekend, as you noticed. Work doesn't happen when I'm travelling.

As far as the outline goes, though, it's looking good. An intriguing opening, a solid enough ending, and a couple twists and developments in the middle. The middle bits will certainly need the most work, of course, but that's always something that I seem to work on during the actual process of writing. So...problem for another day.

With the outline finished, though, I should be almost ready to start in on the actual prose. I'm going to take the rest of this week's writing sessions to work on some much-needed worldbuilding and character development, that way I won't have to bog myself down with on-the-fly creation and/or fact-checking when I'm trying to crank out multiple thousands of words each day.

...which brings me to my second point.

2. My goal is to finish the first draft of the Runic rewrite by the time I leave for midterm break on October 12. That means, if I start writing sometime between Saturday and Monday, I'll have just around a full month to expand my initial concept from the 2009 rough draft into the bone structure for this year's edition. There's at least twice as much story and probably four times as much eventual plot involved in this rewrite. So...yeah, quite a bit to churn out.

That's my goal. This is me being held accountable. Let's see what happens, folks.

Welcome Back

Okay. So much for the productive summer.

Between class, work, and various social obligations to family and friends, I have not been able to maintain my writing goals during these summer months.

That's okay. It was all important stuff. I'm closer to graduation, farther from debt, and I've reconnected with  those I've been absent from for the past semester (most of them, at least). Overall, it's a net-positive summer, even if it hasn't been productive for writing.

But now the summer is drawing to an end and it's time for me to buckle down to finish out the year strong.

This coming week I will be attending the World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) in Reno, Nevada. It's going to be first con, and I'm really excited. George R.R. Martin will be there, and Brandon Sanderson, and Lou Anders, and Writing Excuses, and Robin Hobb, and Kim Stanley Robinson, and Pat Rothfuss, and so many others. They're going to be presenting on topics of all kinds, from game design, to world-building, to film adaptation, and so on. Oh, and there're also plays, and films, and readings, and signings, and dances, and other shows and stuff.

Wow. I'm excited. Starts wednesday. Goes til Sunday. I return monday; I leave for school on tuesday. Busy couple of weeks here...

Once I return to school, I'll be starting in on three goals, both personal and professional.

On the personal front, I'm going to be reconnecting with the friends I haven't seen since last Fall; and a part of that will be through RPG campaigns. (Side note: I'm really looking forward to these campaigns this year. It's been far too long since I've run a campaign, and they're wonderful social events for me to practice my on-the-fly storytelling.)

On the professional side of things, I need to begin preparing for graduation. Everything should line up for me to finish school on time, and I'm hoping to have a job waiting for me when I'm done.

On both ends, I'm planning to rewrite and revise Runic in order to prepare it for submission to publishers in January. I'm estimating the final length of the book to be between 90k and 120k words. Which means I'll need to write at least 1300 words each day while I'm at school if I'm to get it done at all. If I want time to revise, I'll probably want to write between 2500 and 3000 each day. But we'll see if I have time after fulfilling all of my other daily goals.

I'm confident that I can get Runic ready for submission by January. I just need be consistent in my efforts...again.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this is going to give me enough to finish my year of words (for those of you who forgot, the goal was 500k words). I'm still going to try for it, but...well, my prospects don't look good. And I don't want to exhaust myself or depress myself by holding myself to a commitment that I can no longer keep. *sigh* It's disappointing, but a likely necessity.

One final note, I'm going to be offering frequent updates from my trip this week. Today and the next few days are going to be spent in the San Francisco area here, and then Wednesday through Sunday will be a flurry of fan excitement streaming forth from WorldCon. (Excitement!) Following that, I'll be back at school and back to work. And hopefully I'll be able to continue offering updates then as well.

Until then, thank you for your time.

I Have Returned

Short post today.

Just wanted to say that I'm back from my Europe trip. It was crazy, fantastic, and filled with really, really, really old stuff (which is always a major plus for me). I didn't do any writing during the trip, as each day was so full and exhausting that I really didn't have any opportunity. Also, it was a vacation for crying out loud. I decided I deserved a break.

Which isn't to say that it wasn't productive. My subconscious never seems to give up on me, so I ended up making several impressive breakthroughs and developments on a variety of projects, most notably Runic. Does this mean I might start working on revising it again soon? Probably, but I want to finish the rough draft for Godchild before I start thinking about another project (again).

Getting back to the actual trip, I wanted to mention really quickly that Lauren and I are going to be working on a joint series of blog posts chronicling the most interesting parts of our adventure. We're going to alternate posting between our two blogs (you can find her's here) so that you can get a more balanced mix of perspectives on the trip. And also because it'll be fun.

I'm not sure when that series will start, but it could be as soon as later this evening/afternoon (depending on your time zone). We'll see, but I'll keep you posted on it.

For now, it's time to get back to work and see what good the time off did for me.

A Few General Updates

Hello,

It's been awhile since I mentioned anything concrete on the work I've been doing. So I thought I'd take a moment to deliver some updates in that regard and also talk a bit about what's coming up on the blog.

Layout


First things first, I hope everyone has had a chance to notice and appreciate the new features over on the right-hand column. If you haven't, please look over there now. Don't worry, I'll wait.

...

Okay, do you see it now? Good.

I have a progress bar! I'm really excited about this, as it means that I can share my progress with you each day/week as I update the bar, instead of making you wait for one of my infrequent updates hidden amidst my ramblings. In the future, if all you want to know is how I am along in one of my projects (or just my work overall), you can just stop in and glance at the progress bar. As i mentioned above I will be updating this thing regularly. Hopefully every day as I finish my writing sessions, but sometimes I'm a little slow. At the very least, I will update the progress bar every Monday, just to make sure it's up-to-date.

In addition, I have a "Currently Geeking" section. This is just a short list of the various items that I have either been interested in lately or that have consumed my time lately. I'll be updating this one a bit less frequently than the progress bar, but I hope to keep it changing regularly in order to let you all know what I'm wasting my time on and what I think other people should be wasting their time on as well.

(Plus, it's probably a good bet that if something shows up on the "Currently Geeking" thread, I'll likely be talking about it in the near future either here or over on The Vanishing Blog. Fair warning.)

Now, on to the actual updates.

Stalling Out at 30k

I'm at that point in my word counts right now where things get difficult.

I recognize this point now -- as opposed to the past three or four projects where I would just come up against it and shrug. It's right around the 30k or 35k mark. The writing just stalls out.

It's not that I've run out of ideas or don't know what to write next. I definitely know where the story goes and usually I'll have the next few scenes or story arcs blocked out in my head. What happens is that I simply hit a mental block and don't want to write anymore.

Naturally, this is something I have to overcome.

And I have overcome it, in the past. I've written two "novels." That is to say, I've written at length on two continuous streams of text that congeal together to form some semblance of a story.

I've attempted several others.

Each time I start a project, I can see improvement in my skills with word usage, character development, world building, and plot. My craft improves, in other words.

But this 30,000 mark is still a challenge for me.

My first completed work, "Runic," totals around 32,000 words. Right. On. The Mark. I hadn't realized this until today, when I identified this 30,000 mark as the bane of my productivity.

Now, I've talked in the past about how "Runic" needs to be revised. But that's something of a lie. Truth is, the book needs to be totally rewritten -- possibly even re-imagined. There are solid ideas in there, and the core concept of the character dynamic is a solid one (when I have the skills to pull it off), but the rest of it is flat, haphazard, and way too simple.

I think I now have a reason (aside from a simple "I-wasn't-a-good-writer-back-then" explanation). Put simply, I was brought up short by the 30,000 mark. I didn't want to go past it, for whatever reason, so I cut corners, simplified world and plot details, cheated my characters out of there development, and otherwise squeezed the life out of my work in order to maintain my secure-feeling barrier of 30,000 words.

Almost one year after starting "Runic" (which took about two months to finish), I started work on "Godslayers." It's a project that I am still very excited about -- one that I knew was going to be more ambitious than anything I had seriously attempted before. I worried that I might not have had enough practice writing completed stories and single novels and et cetera before embarking on such an epic journey (I still worry about these things, actually). In the end, however, I decided I didn't care. Epic fantasy is what I'm passionate about. So that's what I write about.

I think you can guess where this is going.

Yeah, stopped around 30,000 words.

Again, it's not that I didn't know what to write. I had just finished a major action sequence for the book -- the first of many that I've envisioned. I knew where the overall plot was going, I was beginning to settle into writing the characters. The world was fleshed out from months of research, and the plot was set for at least another 60,000 words from months of outlining.

But I just stopped. I claimed that I was growing burned-out. I needed to take a break. School was growing more busy. I needed to come at it with a fresh mind.

Lies. All of it.

I don't know what the truth is about this subconscious barrier. But if I were to make a guess at it, I'd say that it's fear on several levels:

Fear of the unknown -- I'm comfortable at 30,000 words; I've done it before, so it's not as much of a milestone.

Fear of success, perhaps -- a good portion of myself can't believe that my fragile self is capable of producing tomes like Brandon Sanderson, Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin, and others, even though my entire self wishes to do so.

It may very well be a fear of letting go -- usually by the 30k mark, the dust of my faltering first steps within the project are beginning to settle and the world is coming alive with more detail than I had initially imagined, which should allow me to set my characters free and see what they do; but I'm always afraid of what my characters will get themselves into when they deviate from my handcrafted outline (however meager that outline is).

Actually, come to think of it, the problem here could simply be that I don't trust my characters to take care of themselves. Which, of course, means that I as an author am not comfortable enough writing them yet. Which further means that I need to spend more time on character development before starting a project.

Which... is something I keep telling myself. *shrug* I never learn, do I?

Anyways, triumph moment of this story: I have made it past the 30k mark.

With NaNo, I finished off the novel at 60,000 words. Give or take. If my memory serves, the 30,000 mark was a difficult one to pass, but I'll bet I can't even remember or figure out when that was by reading the text. And it doesn't matter that I had difficulty, because I still pressed through to meet my goal (and then some).

So that's what I'm going to do here. And with every project I write go forward until the day I die.

Anyone else? Can you identify any weird mental blocks or rhythms in your writing?

The Journey to 500K.
Current Progress: 40,634/500,000 words

Runic Progress

Okay, so not an insightful rambling, but still wanted to mention this.

I finished my reread of Runic today. First step of editing: complete.

Now it's time to go through it all over again, but this time with the intent of taking judicious notes.

So yeah, this is exciting for me. Runic is the first novel I ever finished. It's not good, but I think it still has potential. So now it's going to be the first novel I ever revise/rewrite.
Truly, it is an exciting day.

Still, though, I'm kind of disappointed. I had initially planned to read through this text during my first couple weeks back at school, but now here I am about to enter Finals week and I'm just now finishing the read-through.
Oh well. It's not a big deal. And with all the other progress I've made this semester (finishing NaNo, writing so much of Godslayers, reading Way of Kings, etc.), it's hard to be disappointed with what I've accomplished. It's also not surprising that I was a bit too ambitious and that some things had to fall by the wayside during all of this productivity.

From here, it's going to be an even greater uphill climb. I write very sloppy first drafts. Characters are flat, settings are underdeveloped, plots are paper-thin, etc. I generally seem to have a solid concept of structure and theme, even if those things don't always make themselves apparent until the end.
I'm confident of my ability to rework this thing (and if I'm not, I'm still going to fake it for the sake of trying). It's just going to take a lot of effort.

But hey, I knew about that when I signed up for this job.

Back to work now.

NaNo 2010 Novel Complete

Well, that's that. The beast is dead.
Even though I "won" NaNo about a week ago, the story wasn't quite finished, so I had to keep it up for about 10k more words.

Today I put the final (optional) finishing touches on the draft. It was quite an experience to actually do NaNo right and finish it out through to the end. (I'm curious now as to how far my other efforts reached and if they would breeze by as easily as this one did now that I have some practice. Maybe we'll see some day.)

Overall, the experience was highly validating. Which I realize is the point; the NaNo organizers put on this show every year (with all its fantastic support) for the sole purpose of boosting the confidence of thousands of budding (and some experienced, no doubt) writers. And that's a great service to the writing community.

For me, this year it was simply a crazy gamble. About three days before NaNo started I thought, "You know, I'm kind of reaching a dry spot on my current project, I could probably use a break from it. Why not NaNo?"

So there I was, three days to prepare and about to leap off into a whirlwind of production unrivaled by anything I've done before. Sure, I've been writing consistently almost every day since the semester started, but this? This was borderline crazy. November is always one of the busiest months of the school year, especially for English majors. I had to be batty to think that I could triple my word count per day for an entire month, especially November.

Low and behold, the first day came and I produced well more than the required word count. I even had some energy left to go on, but I figured I should do the responsible thing and actually work on that homework I was so worried about.

The first week was fantastic, setting me on track to finish by the 25th or something.

Week two was rough as anything. The momentum from exploring the world and the characters and their interactions was starting to slow and I was having to let them do stuff, like make mistakes and drive the plot forward. (Note to self, something to work on: Allowing characters to drive plot.)

Week three came and I was barely on track with my word count and way off track with my outline. The sci-fi military heist thriller I thought I was writing had turned into a corporate mining drama somewhere in the middle of week two and now week three was devoted to living through the ramifications of that shift in tone.

Week four started out strong, but somebody decided to have NaNo in the same month as Thanksgiving, so I lost a whole day there. Once that was over I was able to get started on the word counts again and, with a little help from the buffer that I hadn't quite exhausted from earlier in the month, I hit 50k by the end of the week. NaNo was over.

...but not quite. I was still trying to pull off my sci-fi military heist thriller, after all, and I was going to get my action-packed ending come hell or high word counts!

So I hunkered down this past week to produce what I estimated would be 5k words to finish off the story and ended up being 10k (of course). But now that's it. The story is told. It's put to rest. It's sent off to friends and family who are clamoring to read it (surprisingly), and now I can turn my attention back to other projects (and homework).

So, a quick forecast before signing off.

"Declaration -- NaNo 2010"
This is finished. It's still in draft form, obviously, but it's a full story, so I'm going to put it to rest.

"Godslayers"
This will be my main project for the rest of the month. I'm hoping to reach another milestone in my outline before the end of the year, but as I'm easing back into it, I'm wondering if a month was too long to take off. I'm a little disoriented and the characters' voices are a bit thin. On top of that, we ended at a major milestone before NaNo and I'm not really sure how to deal with the fallout from those events. (Two things I learned from the NaNo: 1. Letting your characters guide the story is quite an exciting ride of emotional discovery, but I am horribly inexperienced at it. 2. I have difficulty filling the "slower" bits in between the major plot twists.) I'm going to hold myself to a modest word count for the rest of the month and I'm going to focus that word count on "Godslayers" here, but I'm probably going to have to read through it again and do another month or so of development and outlining before I can really make some significant progress. That'll probably be my project for the summer.

"Runic"
I've only got fifty pages left to read on what I had hoped would be my semester-long revision project. Well, plans go awry. I would like to at least finish reading through this time here and (hopefully) identify some structural concerns so I can start outlining the second draft for me to write over the summer.

Class Projects:
Shakespeare presentation and paper due within a week. Lord of the Rings presentation and paper slightly overdue, but I talked to the professor. I'm hoping I don't botch these up like I sometimes do with final papers, because I really like these classes and I'm actually interested in the topics I'm researching (especially the LotR one).

Development:
This is going to be the big one. I need to start developing one of my larger stories to be my writing project while I'm in England. I want to do something that I've been "working on" for a long time. One of those peripheral ideas that I keep holding off on, even though I keep doing bits and pieces of worldbuilding, because I don't think I'm ready or whatever. I want to take the stuff I've learned this semester and attack this project head-on. Unfortunately, that means I need to decide what project it's going to be within the next few days here so I'll actually have time to develop it before diving into word counts for January.

Phew. Alright. Kind of a heavy load. But that's okay. I'm looking forward to it.
I think tomorrow I'll take some time to talk about an author I admire. This one was far too much about me.
Tune in on the 25th for some fun news about next year.