National Novel Writer Month Has Begun

... and I am behind. Of course.

Why do I always do this? I know it is my bad habit of procrastination and that feeling I always get at the beginning of November that I can't finish the 50,000 words before the end of the month. I did it last year and I start each year's NaNoWriMo with such heady optimism, I am always afraid, by the end of week one, that I can not hold on to it.

But by the end of the month, I will have my 50,000 words and more. I know I will because I have a husband who's disappointment is as big as my own, except it's on his face. When it's on my face, I can ignore it. Just avoid mirrors. But when it is on his face, when I give him my word count at the end of the day, I see it and I know that I have to do better and stop sabotaging myself.

Still working at the same place. I keep reminding myself of the sacrifices we are both making for a better future. Still, I wish I could spend more time on writing. But I'm going to kill this teaching thing so that there will be no doubt that, despite wanting to leave, I can do a hell of a job doing my job.

Anyway, just a few thoughts to tide me over and so that whoever it is that checks this site once a day will have something to read.

Script Frenzy: Another Attempt At Craziness

So, I follow up my NaNoWriMo win (50, 781 words in 30 days) with a shot at something even harder, but exactly what I want to do ScriptFrenzy. ScriptFrenzy is the script writing arm of NaNoWriMo. This will be writing 100 pages in 30 days. Starting April 1, I will be hunkering down for hours per day trying to coax at least 4 pages a day our of myself.

It's harder than it sounds, thank you very much.

I will be writing two 30 minute specs - I'm not sure which now... Maybe you guys get to vote. Tomorrow or later today, I will put up the choices with a brief synopsis and you guys get to pick the two that I do. They will either be specs of show already on television or specs of my own original ideas. I want to do at least one that is already on and one that is my own. The one that is my own is the one I want to work on creating and completing in my hometown. The other one is the one I want to perfect and send to my contacts in Los Angeles and enter into contests.

I'm striving because I need to work for myself (I chafe under the rules of others) and still make enough money to keep us from being evicted while The Honey finishes school. I think it's time to get started!

PS, If you want to join me, go to ScriptFrenzy.org

I'm a Winner!

If you follow me anywhere else and if you just take a look at my front page, you'll realize that I participated in National Novel Writers Month (NaNoWriMo for short), and that I wrote my 50,000 words in 30 days and though it was hard, it was SO satisfying.

My story was crap. It was supposed to be a young adult novel, but it turned into a romance novel combining some aspects of the YA novel I started. Once again, it was crap, so no one will be reading it. Yet that crap was the best thing I've written in a long time because it showed me something I've been trying to teach myself for some time now.

1. It showed me that the first step to good writing is crap writing. When I finished that draft, even though I didn't want to do anything with it, I immediately had ideas for what I would do to fix some of the more glaring errors. That's what I need to do for my script writing, just write the first draft and then figure work on the glaring errors later.

2. It taught me to sit at my desk at any point and be able to write, even if it's crap. It's the whole, if you do it for 30 days, it becomes a habit. Now that I'm not writing for this specific goal, I get to do more things out of the house, but sitting at my little desk in my chair is something I do every night now and doing that comes with some writing, even if there is more television watching going on.

3. If you tell people what your goals are, they force you to keep it. They push you when you need the push and poor the glass of wine when it's time to celebrate.

4. I can do more than I am doing, but I don't have to stress myself out trying to do it. My initial thought when I started the 50,000 words in 30 days quest was that I wouldn't be able to do anything other than write. Yet when I went out to drink, I was the nerd sitting in the corner writing, my glass of Guinness at hand. I went to live shows and hung out with friends with my phone's notepad application to catch every thought if I needed to jot something down. I was prepared to write at any given moment will still be able to enjoy myself. I buckled down when I needed to, but overall, I didn't stress myself out to do this.

This past November was exactly what I needed to further keep me on the road to becoming the writer I want to be. Yay me!

NaNoWriMo Files Part 3

I've gotten stuck. I'm writing everything but my NaNo. Part of it is the same thing it was last week. In the middle of the week, I work both jobs, but at the beginning and end of the week, I have a little more free time. By the 15th, I need to be at 25,000 words. That's 10,000 more words in the next couple of days. But that's not going to happen. However, if I can get two days of 3,000 + words, I will be doing good. I did almost 6,000 words one day and almost 4,000 words another. The good thing is that I have the first three days off and I am also off on Friday that week. Friday has been a good writing day thus far.

In other news, I'm still writing at Hey! Media!, Snacking on Macon, and Dispatches from the Road. I guess this idea of writing every night, even if it isn't on my story, is a habit this month will help develop for me. Maybe if I get over word count, I can start making script writing a part of that instead of simply coming up with stories or just writing whatever happens to come out of my mind.

The NaNoWriMo Files Part 2

I'm at 15,000 words, which is 5,000 more than I've ever gotten doing NaNoWriMo. I had a good spurt over the weekend, but I've hit sort of a wall. I will get back down to it. I sat and wrote several posts tonight, so even though I didn't get all my words, I stockpiled posts for tomorrow's Hey! Media! posts and I wrote about Africa at Dispatches from the Road. I'm trying to be better at all this posting. I may just combine it all, although I enjoy the freedom of being pieces of myself all over the internet.

Right now, it's 6 frakkin':20 and I haven't been to bed. I've been up since 9am and I have to work from 11am - 10pm. I should be in the bed, so that's where I'm going.

The NaNoWriMo Files Part 1

I do it every year. I say I'm going to do NaNoWriMo because, when you think about it, 50,000 words spread out over 30 days with no self editor filter shouldn't be that hard. I know that I've written more than that in a shorter period of time, it's just words on a page.

But each year I've choked, getting no further than 6,000 words during the first two years and 10,000 words last year. I'm growing, but I'm choking.

This year, I'm having to re-evaluate some things and one of those things is the place writing has in my life. I'm getting paid to write. Everything I write for someone else is for pay. It may not be much, but it's something. I enjoy writing, but I have to train myself to use the pressure.

There is a pretty big group here in my hometown and they love to meet at my favourite little coffee stumping ground. It's a great place to go to write as long as you write. Unlimited coffee (well, limited by how much you want to pay), delicious desserts, and espresso based beverages - and even stuff for the non coffee drinker, like tea and sodas. Whatever you do, you will either be on a caffeine high or a sugar high so that you can get those daily word counts.

I thought about doing a daily word count, but I looked at my weekly schedule, which changes each week and from Monday - Wednesday, I'm working from 8am -10pm with two of my jobs and I decided to go by the weekly word count instead. I'm going to be so tired and I won't be able to get as much done on some days as I will on others, like this Thursday, on which I have a half day free) and Friday, which I took off completely. If NaNo started today, I could get my weekly word count on those two days and during the weekend.

So what am I looking at here? I have to write 1,667 words a day, 12,500 words a week. The daily count doesn't seem daunting. It's the weekly count that's doing it. This year, I'm doing something a bit different, creating a pre-writing outline. I have a couple of stories that could make the cut, but only if they look real pretty in their outline format. I like a good profile. Anyway, bad humour aside, I'm pretty excited about it, again, this year. I feel like I could really make it to the end of the month with 50,000 words of a story written out.

But I want to write for television, which, although it doesn't preclude being a novelist, does seem to ask why I push myself to do this. The simple answer is to accomplish some writing feat that I haven't accomplished before. The second simple answer is that all the ideas are original spec ideas and so if I can flesh out a good story with any of these ideas, I can put together a good script. And by the time I get to 30 days, the hardest part of writing my own original spec will be done. It's not rocket science, but it will take determination and I've got plenty of that.