Some links...

Through http://noggs.typepad.com/, I came across the Mundane SF Manifesto, which looks interesting.

Another blog I came across is this one: http://booksofnote.blogspot.com/

The last day!

Well, it's the last day on NaNoWriMo today, and I haven't yet hit the 20,000 words mark. Obviously, I'm not going to make it - I will be lucky if I finish the month with 20,000, and last week I thought I'd be able to make it to the magic half-way mark. I half felt like trying to stay up really late last night to do it, but I was so tired, I just couldn't bear it. Before, I thought I'd be able to catch up at the weekend, but I had too many other things that needed to be done.

Now that the month's coming to a close, I really admire the people who have managed to write the full whack. I've been struggling to find the time to write the little I've written. The good thing about it all, is that writing a novel now feels achievable, and I'm still hoping to finish mine by the end of December. I'll keep posting here as I go along, as I'm also interested in recording how I feel about the experience.

BBC - Get Writing - Homepage

I've just found out that the BBC - Get Writing - Homepage has a "mini-course" on writing science fiction. It looks like it could be fun to join (when I have the time)

BBC NEWS | Magazine | 101 years in 101 words

BBC NEWS | Magazine | 101 years in 101 words

Celebrating buzz words:

"To mark this linguistic love-in (1967), we are inviting you to create a story of 150 words maximum using as many of the words from the list below as possible. The subject is up to you, but special recognition will be given to those entries which work as convincing stories in their own right. "

Let's see...

...how much I can get written this month. I've managed to finish another chapter, so I'm happy that I can keep going - I was a litttle down yesterday evening, thinking that I'd probably given up, but just didn't want to admit it. I sat at the keyboard for a few hours with the thing open and ready for ages, but I kept telling myself that I had to reply to this email and look at that web-page. I finally got angry with myself and went to bed!

Well, I got up this morning and finished Chapter Twenty-Six. I didn't write much, but it lifted my spirits. I have come to terms with the fact that I won't finish in November, but if I can write 25,000 words by then, I'll be very happy. And then I'm going to see if I can finish by the end of the year. That's my goal now.

In a rut...

I'm still in a rut, but I hope to do something about it tomorrow. After all, there are still six days left in november - that's loads of time!

One week to go...

There's only one week left to go, and I'm not even half-way. Well, as Stompy said, even if I don't make it as a NaNoWriMo winner, I've managed to start something that otherwise I wouldn't have.

I'm not even sure of what I have written either - I'm not even really looking at it, except to keep one eye on where I'm at in the story. Well, I suppose that's the idea - just keep writing until you have enough words for a novel, and then fix it later.

A little more...

I finished a little more today, but it took me so long to start. I kept putting it off, finding other things to do until it was finally after midnight. I didn't know how to start, but that was an excuse, because once I finally sat down and started writing, it was fairly obvious where I had to go.

Well, it's now 2:09 am and I'll try and get up early to write some more. Now, however, I'm going to bed. Goodnight.

Is that it, then?

Well, it's sunday, and I'm sitting down to write for the first time in a few days. What happened? Well, life got in the way. That, and work, and tiredness.

Can I now do it? It looks doubtful. I have written only 15285 words and that means I have 34,715 words left to write. With only nine days to go, I'd have to write an average of 3,857 words a day to be able to do it.

But, I'm not giving up. I still have my personal goal - to finish before my 40th birthday (5th December), and I still think that I might be able to do that...

Well, I can still try, can't I?

As Wednesday disappears...

Another day disappears, and as the fifteen minutes that remain of Wednesday tick away, I sit down to see if I can write something. It's just too much to try and write at the beginning of the week - I'm so busy at work that I collapse when I get home and can't do anything. either that, or there are other things that I have to do. Well, I'll stop writing here now and just get on with it...

Oops...spoke too soon

I've not done any more today, so that still means I'm on 14,012, and what with 13 days left, I need to do a whopping 2,768 words a day to catch up...

There's just too much going on in my life at the moment to write every day. Still, let's see what I can do tomorrow...

Five Acts and on course...

The wordcount is now at 14,012, so I haven't given up yet. I feel happy about this, even though I'm still lagging behind, as I have managed to write about 7,000 words in the last three days. This means I'm on target, but only if I can keep up the pace.

I had a chat with my plot advisor yesterday (fortunately she lives with me, and she's a qualified screenwriter) and we discussed where I was at in the story. I'm just about to introduce the first crisis, which aparenlty seem to be fine. If the thing is considered as a five-act story, then I'm into act two. The acts for my story would be:

1) Background - who he is, etc. Introduction of other characters.
2) Crisis - he is thrown into despair.
3) Surviving the crisis (building this to a crescendo where the hero overcomes obstacles through his wits)
4) Things start to go in his favour, and he starts to see the light. This act ends with a twist.
5) coming to terms with the twist. Resolution and decision-making time.

Well, I think it seems OK, but I can worry about that later, when I have enough material to play with, edit, and reshape. For now, it's back to the grindstone. Let's see if I can polish off the rest of Act 2 in a few days.

the 10,000 word mark!

Well, I'm happy that I've reached the first major milestone - I've now written over ten thousand words. That's 1/5 of the novel, and although it's not as much as I'd hoped I would have written by now, it's also an achievement.

It's also only Saturday, and so I should be able to catch up even more this weekend if I spend a considerable time tomorrow on writing. Wouldn't it be great if I could push that up to 15,000 by tomorrow? Wishful thinking, I suppose, but who knows. I'm on a roll, and it does seem easy writign at the moment.

That's all very well, but what about the story? Well, I'm still only on the introductory part of my story. My Main Character is still in the City. However, I have managed to get him out of his flat! Phew! It took a while, but Jay has ventured out and made it to the swimming pool in his building.

I feel I have explained enough about the City and how it works now, so I am getting ready to set up the crisis that will lead to the meaty part of the book. That's when it'll become difficult I suppose, as I have no idea what he will encounter, and how he will develop. Well, I guess that's part of the fun of doing this. It's a journey into the unknown both for me, and for my characters!

I will suffer tomorrow...

It's 2:40am here and I've written a lot more. I feel happier now, but it's still way behind schedule, some 7875 words. I'm starting to feel drowsy now, almost numb. and I have to get up at 6.30 to get ready to go to work tomorrow. Oh well, that's what this is all about, I suppose. If it were that easy, then people would do this every month...

It's Week Two and I haven't finished...

...my goal for week one yet. Just over 5000 words. Isn't that pathetic? And despite my "determination", I didn't write a thing last night or this morning. Well, I was out last night and just couldn't face not sleeping in order to fulfill my quota.

Well, I'll see how much I can make up for it tonight...

Over the first 5000 milestone!

OK, there it is! Over the five thousand mark - 5385 words written. And I think I can even write some more tonight. Let's see how it goes...

This NaNoWriMo thing is more difficult than I thought.

21 days to go and I haven't reached 5,000 words yet. Still, looking at the forum at the NaNoWriMo site shows me that I'm not the only one. However, I don't want to end up being one of those drop outs. I really want to finish this month with a novel. I owe it to myself. December is my 40th birthday and I'd like to give myself that present.

so, having said that, what to do? There's nothing to it - I just need to do double whammy sessions, and as well as writing one chapter early in the morning and another late at night, see if I can double that to two each morning and night. That way I'd be able to reach 1,600 in the morning and do another 1,600 at night. Wow! That makes 3,200 a day. If I'm able to do that, then I'll even be able to take the odd day off to socialise!

Update

Update:

I have written another 750 words
That makes 3134 words in total

More or less, that leaves me with 46,866 words left to write
and at 23 days left I have to write 2,037 words per day.

OK, well, that's that then.

New Strategy: Wake up an hour-and-a-half before I normally do in order to write another chapter. That way, if I write one in the morning and one at night, I'll double my output! That would mean around 1500 words a day. All I have to do now is increase my output each session to 1000 and I'll be laughing.

Tomorrow is the day I try to do this!

JG Ballard

There's a great quote that I've just rediscovered, by JG Ballard, in a collection called 'The Imagination on Trial' (London:Alison & Busby 1981) which goes

"The writer's job is no longer to put the fiction in...People have enough fiction in their lives already, they're living the stuff, it's pouring out of the air, it's affecting everything, the ways people furnish their homes, the sorts of friendships they have, their vocabularies. I'ts quite amazing to see how people's lives are influenced by movies, television and constant advertising."

And that was in 1981. Now I think life become even more fictional. It's a shame though, that the references are all films, not novels. I recently played a game with a class of mine (I'm a teacher) which involved the first lines and last words of novels. A lot of the novels were well known (Moby Dick, the Hobbit, Catch 22, among others), but the comments were all of the type: "Ahh, yes. I think I've seen that one." Even though the game was about books, my students were already talking in terms of films.

I'm a slow writer

Hey! Well, so much for bashing out lots of words tonight. I'm realising that I'm a slow writer, and this is going to be harder than I thought. However, I will persist, and see if I can increase my pace. Obviously, keeping this other blog going doesn't help, but it comes from a different stimulus. I don't have any problem writing here, but when I'm in "fiction mode" it all seems to slow down. I guess that is what I have to work on if I want to stand any chance of finishing in a month.

Now I'm determined to get up early in the morning and write chapter three. My chapters at the moment seem to be falling off naturally at between 750-800 words, when I thought I would be ble to make them around 1000 words each. Well, that's part of this experiment I guess. you start to get to know yourself better and just how much you are able to push yourself.

Well, that's all I can take tonight. I've set the alarm clock for the morning, so if all goes well, I'll have another chapter finished for tomorrow too. Watch this space.

Characterisation

Here's what I came up with at lunchtime:

Jay Gee:
26 years old (that means he was born in 1998), thin framed, skinny, beard.
Cerebral, well-educated and good at languages.

Jay has lived inside The City most of his adult life and has hardly left his flat in the last five years; has never left his building. He works at home, for a computer company developing automatic translation software (tweaking and checking other people's work mainly). Although he obviously has dealings with lots of people through his job, he has a very superficial relationship with them, and only ever "meets" them online.

His only real human relationship in the last five years or so has been with his mother. His father died when he was very young, and he only has a fleeting memory of him, as a larger than life figure who sometimes invades his dreams. He is a very selfish person, and thinks of his mother's death in terms of how it will affect his life. This is the only form of "grief" he feels.

Apart from working, he passes his time reading and playing the flute. This he does for himself only, although playing the flute was how he originally met his once-best-friend Aimee.

Aimee:
26 years old (born 1998), dark-haired, intelligent, reflective, kind, caring.
Aimee met Jay at the music class they both started going to when they were 7.

They both played the flute. They became good friends when they realised that they were both different (odd?) from the other children. They both found it difficult to connect at school. They started going to each other's houses to play computer games and practise the flute, etc. This continued until they were thirteen, when, during an (unspecified? What happened?) incident at his house, Jay's mother caught them (doing what?) and complained to her parents. Her parents and his mother got into an argument, and Aimee was pulled out of the music class and she was told she couldn't see Jay again. Jay didn't know what had happened (His mother told him that Aimee had had to go away quickly and there hadn't been time to say goodbye) and closed himself to other people, studying and reading. He continued playing the flute and became proficient. Eventually, he took a job with the software company after studying languages at a virtual university. Aimee blamed Jay's mother and programmed her smart chip to notify her the day Jay's mother died. She told her thirteen-year-old self that she would not try to get in touch until then. This is what brings her back into Jay's life. she gave up the flute and forced herself to socialise with other people. She has been able to do this well enough, but she now feels restless and is looking for something different (she doesn't quite know what) (Note to self: How does this sound? Is it all too contrived? Or can it be made plausible?)

What both Jay and Aimee don't know (this is Isabel's ide) is that they were both "bought" illegally by their parents, and were actually the offspring of outsiders. Jay's parents were old when they got together, and his mother couldn't have children. They went to the blackmarket to "buy" Jay (why?), and so did Aimee's parents. (Is it too far-fetched, too Star Wars to say they were brother and sister?) This is why they both feel "different". On this fact hinges one of the major twists of the story - When Jay finally manages to get a DNA test to prove who he is, he is not the person he thought he was, and so cannot be allowed back in to take up his old life, which was based on a stolen chip at the time of his birth.

When Jay meets Aimee again, Aimee is working as a carer, looking after the aged. It is through the stories that they have told her, about their memories of nature, and the world as it was, that make her feel she would like to go outside and experience a different side of life. Even if it's only for a short time. She is restless and doesn't know why, and is suspicious about the way people are locked in the protective bubble of the city and do not get to hear anything about what is outside. She is also looking after her aged father (her mother died two years ago) and her plan is that when he dies, she would like to make a move.

I realised when I was writing these notes that the society has to be a right-wing, almost fascist state. abortion, is prohibited, as is adoption. The belief of the state is that only a natural birth is correct. Now is this because of a faith in a God, or due to the lengthening of people's lives, and the idea to control the poulation? There is much here that I need to think about and develop.

The story of outsdiers, and insiders also make me think of the differnece between legal citizens and illegal immigrants. Relaly, could this be a story about the treatment of immigrants in society?

27 days left to go and...

...and I haven't written much. In fact,, given that I have 49,231 words left to write after my first chapter, that means I have to write about 1,823 words a day if I want to finish on time.

However, I'm hopeful, and all fired up, especially as I have had some readers, and two of them have left motivating messages.

Stompy has given me lots of advice:

"Something that is useful to do is to have more dialogue. This has three very good effects. Firstly, it pumps up your word count. Don't just say the nurse woke him, tell us what she said, what he said etc.

Secondly, it keeps the flow going and sounds more immediate to a reader, and when you come to pick up on your writing the next day you'll feel more engaged. If you don't know what's going on, just have your characters talk to each other.

Thirdly, and most importantly, is that it helps you develop your characters and then they can get on with the story. If your characters talk to each other, your subconcious will have them say things that you didn't expect. Believe me, this happens, and when it does, they go about doing their own things and you just have to write it down."

This is a very good advice. I must admit that I had thought about the plot and where it might lead, but very little about characters. With Stompy's words in mind, I sat down over lunch and thought about my two main characters: who they were, what they were like, and this has helped me see where the story might go. Fleshing out some of the details has also given me some ideas for sub-plots that might be interesting too.

So, I shall be putting Stompy's advice into practice tonight as I pump out chapter two...

After his first comment, I wrote that I originally thought that it would be comic, and then ended up writing a very serious, melodramatic opening. Stompy told me not to "worry about the beginning, don't worry about it not being a comedy, just write it down. My attempt started as urban fantasy, morphed into High Fantasy, and then went all magical realism on me. It doesn't matter."

Thanks Stompy. This is all very inspiring input.

Whatever the outcome, I already feel energised by NaNoWriMo, and in particular the blog-a-novel community - this is so motivating, how can I not finish?

Fellow Novel Bloggers

The driving force behind Blogger's 'Blog a Novel' seems to be another Graham, who has his NanoWriMo blog here: NanoGraham

I shall be watching with interest. It's good to see that Graham's been playing by the rules and hasn't posted anything yet, although he does have character info and a plot outline there already.

The Blog as Book

I never thought of a blog actually being able to be set up to look like a book. that is until earlier tonight, when, after checking out the Blogger tip 'How Do I post a Book?', I came across this example.

It looks really good. That's what my aim is then, to be able to offer something similar when I finish.

Well, now that I've actually written something...

Well, now that I've actually written something (769 words to be precise), I felt I could finally submit my novel-blog to http://nanoblogmo.blogspot.com/, and join the rest of those who are blogging their novels.

How do I feel? well, I feel good, but I know I should have written more, as I till have 49,231 words to write, and only 29 days or so left to go! I think I'll try and write Chapter 2 later on tonight, after I finish doing all of those essential things like checking out who else is writing sci-fi in this project, if there's anyone I know who's doing it, and inviting a few friends over to keep an eye on me to make sure I stick to the schedule (although, this is something I am wondering might be better leaving until tomorrow or later, when I have a better idea if I will actually be able to do this or not.)

Ermm, another thing I've just realised, is that maybe I'll end up writing more words here about the novel, than on the actual novel site. That would be a bit strange, wouldn't it?

Oh, I also sent off for some books at Amazon. amazing what you end up telling yourself you need in order to be motivated, isn't it?

Cyber Fiction

I don't have a title yet. Hopefully one will come to me as I develop the story. Strangely enough, the story came to me on the train, sparked off by reading an article by Bruce Sterling in October's Wired, called 'Dumbing Down Smart Objects'.

There'll be more about that and my attempts at writing the novel here. Now I'm going to get started on writing the actual thing over at http://cyber-fiction.blogspot.com or I won't stand a chance. I hope you enjoy reading it, if, of course, there's anyone out there! Feel free to leave comments and make suggestions - I'll accept ideas from anyone if it helps the story get written!

Welcome to my NaNoWriMo attempt

Origins. I first heard about this project over a year ago and was intrigued, but I was too busy to even consider joining. It did sound like a lot of fun though, and I promised myself I would give it a go this year.

And here I am!

What to write? I had a few ideas in mind - ideas are easy, it's actually thinking about turning them into 50,000 word novels that cause the problem. However, I was sitting on the train, on the way home from work, reading the October edition of Wired when the idea came to me: I've always wondered if I could write science-fiction, so it'll be fun to find out.