Snakes and Ladders

Still Plugging Along

Project: Snakes and Ladders
Deadline: 3.15.2010 (ish)
Total Word in Draft Zero: 225267

A meal at Dennys. Trying to thwart fate and failing. An unexpected opportunity. Best friend takes action.

Writing Streak Currently at 9 Days

Project: Snakes and Ladders
Deadline: 3.15.2010 (ish)
New Words: 1118 (today and yesterday)
Total Word in Draft Zero: 23851

Tricky things: Trying not to overangst Megs while giving her identity issues to wrestle with. (Identity as Undersider, relationship to the four parental figures, relationship to her best friend, and what does she want to do with her life.)

Stuck on: Family issues.

Character quirks: City quirk in this case. Undersider politics mirror the Upsider politics of San Francisco. Everyone's got an opinion.

Worries: Do I dialogue so much that the scene isn't clear to people?

Holding Steady

Posted yesterday (Friday) to my regular journal.

Today (Saturday) I wrote again, making the Writing Streak 8 days long currently, with a total of 27 days since Xmas/StormWrite. I've only missed one day!

...........

Today marks a week since my accidental lapse in Butt-in-Chair. John pointed out, and I already agreed, that an accidental lapse was somewhat better than a "blowing this stuff off 'cuz I'm tired" lapse. I am at 7 days on the current streak and 26 days total since picking up Snakes and Ladders after Xmas.

With that in mind, I think I can institute the word count meter and the progress reports that all the cool kids do. (By which I mean, cmpriest and pabba .)

Project: Snakes and Ladders
Deadline: 3.15.2010 (ish)
New Words: 331 words (seemed like more, but I think there was a paragraph or two re-written in there as well)
Total Word in Draft Zero: 22732 (more scenes scribbled in notebooks, but not in primary file. Nothing counts until it's in the primary file.)

Tricky things: Writing the gorgons AND their snakes in conversations with other people, without losing track of characters.

Stuck on: John wants to know what the hell Chekov's Tsolian Lens is going to do later in the book. I don't know.

Hi there, I wasn't expecting you: The Atlanteans apparently declared a trade embargo on the surface Undersiders. Who knew?

Character quirks: Uncle Telly appears to be a gadget geek. (Not like Q, but like Apple fanboys.)

Playing Catchup

So, I've neglected my poor little writing blog. *pats the writing blog*

I've been updating on LJ, FB, and Twitter, but man, I just realised I had been ignoring here. (Not that anyone reads HERE anyway, 'cept Laurie sometimes.)

I'd desperately wanted to build a consistent writing habit, and nothing was working. I couldn't even get a fresh start using NaNoWriMo, because I was mid-project, and secondly, the word count pressure wasn't working for me. I viewed the whole thing as a chore. I wasn't liking writing...and let me tell you, when you don't like the writing or the art, you are not just trying to push the Sisyphean boulder up the hill, you've lost your grip and the thing is going to flatten you. I was coming home from work, completely drained, and hating sitting at the computer. It sucked.

So NaNoWriMo (or FiNoWriMo - Finish Novel Writing Month) was a failure. FAIL!

I tried something new. I had a week off--mandatory--from work. So I called up my buddy, Lise, who lives in Tillamook, and we agreed to meet halfwayish between Tillamook and Seattle in the oceanside town of Long Beach and spend four days and three nights, post Xmas, writing. We got a "storm watchers" discount at The Breakers, and thus christened our mini-retreat StormWrite 09.

I was internet-deprived by choice, although once I did make Lise look up stuff online while we were taking a break from writing.

Results for me: Another chapter and a half in Snakes and Ladders, plus various notes and plot points worked out.

Results for Lise: Got many of her world notebooks typed up and some of the roughness excised from her early drafts.

Results for our characters: suffering, suffering, and more suffering.

Things I've noted: I need to write rougher drafts. More info in the drafts, less polish. As it is, I squat over my manuscript being mental constipated until I finally give birth to draft zero. It tends to be somewhat polished for a zero draft, which is not the point, because this is supposed to be the shit I use to fertilize the plot and make everything blossom later.

Writing funny is hard. It's FUN but frickin' hard. And I've got this masochistic turn, wherein I'm enjoying undermining expectations so much that I tend to do things like take ordinary situations and....skew them about ninety degrees sideways. As Megs notes, when she wants to save the world, she recycles....and I'm trying to extract an urban fantasy out of that. And make it funny. Oi.

I'm having fun writing San Francisco. My San Francisco will be recognisably San Francisco, although perhaps not the Hollywood version of San Francisco. So far there has been a notable lack of fog, trolley cars, sourdough, and Fisherman's Wharf. There are, however, the dogs in Duboce Park, the Muni, corner pubs, studio apartments, Chinatown, tourists, protesters, buskers, micro-climates, Bay to Breakers, self-righteous cyclists, grassroots politics, and the Underside version of PFLAG. There will be street kids and homeless people, cranky cops and activists, snoopy landladies, and the coworker from hell. There will be awesome restaurants.

Since leaving StormWrite, I have managed to write EVERY DAY since. I figured it was better to get a ramp up on the non-resolution, and start before the New Year. As of tonight, I have a two week solid streak of writing in Snakes and Ladders. I'm trying to make my minimum about 15 minutes, because some nights I just feel so tired, but there has to be Butt in Chair time. And unsurprisingly, some nights I've sat down, drained and desperate, only to have words magically tumble onto the page. Other nights I've only gotten about three largish paragraphs down. But the habit is being slowly cemented into place. I staked out my place at the dining room table. I have a CD I play that is the writing CD--no words because I can't write to lyrics. The CD is Ulrich Schnauss's Far Away Trains Passing By.I've got my notebooks, and John knows if I shut the office door and sit at the table, he isn't to bother me. When I am done writing, he lets me read to him. (Not ALWAYS right away, but usually within the hour.) Being able to read to somebody almost instantly is helping more than almost anything I have ever done, as far as getting that Butt in Chair.

(We are somewhere in Chapter 8. Yeah. Chapter 8. That means there's SEVEN CHAPTERS BEFORE THAT ONE.)