NaNoWriMo – Lagging behind

Like a runner in a marathon who stops for a drink of water handed out by some nice volunteer and then decides to stoop and tie her shoes, only to realize that she’s looking at the backs of all the people she was previously in front of, I am falling behind in my bid to complete a 50,000-word manuscript during the month of November.

I haven’t worked on my project in two days. It couldn’t be helped. I have a few other projects that need to be attended to this month. And, you know, life. Not that any of that is a valid excuse; I’ve known since the beginning of the month that I was going to have to halt word production a few times in order to keep other, more important, projects in motion.

What could be more important than a NaNoWriMo novel, you may ask? Let me tell you – a novel (novella, actually) that’s really, truly, honestly, going be published next year and needs edits. A class which I’m designing for my employer. My freelance income. A dire shortage of socks that’s been plaguing O’Connell household for a good week or so. Phyllis.

Still, all those seem like thin excuses for not novelling. The few thousand words that haven’t been written this week plague me, and tomorrow I catch up. I may try to type a little bit before sleep tonight, just to see if I can get a jump on tomorrow’s word count.

Actually, no. I just want to see if I can duplicate Saturday night’s sleep-typing incident.* Which, by the way, is actually a thing. In the comments on that post, two of my former roommates reported similar sleep-typing incidents (neither happened while I was living with either of them, unfortunately.) Check it out. One of the incidents is NaNo-related.

*By the way, I’ve worked a little more on that passage I wrote in my sleep. If you’ve been following these posts, you’ll be happy to know that Ted has resolved his gender issues. I still haven’t managed to figure out what a truck’s “babing” is, though.

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Nanowrimo, or typing with my eyes closed.

I’ve been behind in National Novel Writing Month.

I don’t have a list of my worst sentences from each day for you, as I did last week, because I haven’t been able to write every day this past week. I have, however, mostly managed to write enough words to fulfill my daily word count. I’ve done this by harnessing my undiagnosed ADD and writing in short sprints. I give myself 15 minutes or 30 minutes or even an hour to write as many words as possible, and usually a couple of those will generate the 1667 words I need. Or I’ll bring a notebook with me to class and write by hand, then type it up when I come home. I usually find that 100 handwritten words will generate another 400 while I’m typing. I’ve also been writing very late at night, which has helped my creativity.

None of that, however, kept me from falling behind.  Yesterday I had to hustle to catch up.

Last night, I got home from a party, put on my pajamas and set out to type 2,000 words before bedtime. I almost did it, but not quite. Instead, I fell asleep at my computer when I was 28 words shy of 20,004, which was my goal. For the last 100 words before I fell asleep, I was apparently typing with my eyes closed.

Because I have no worsts for you, I’d like to share the paragraph I wrote with my eyes closed. It’s barely in English. Heck, it’s barely in broken English. One character, Ted, who I didn’t even remember this morning and who I apparently invented while I was sleep-typing, changes gender mid-paragraph. There is also a marked lack of punctuation. Enjoy. Or don’t.

Ted is covered in sweat. He’s been running from the over turned jeep. Athough it only takes a large saupods to cover th =e diance between  jeep and barn, it has taken Ted much loner to do so. He’s out of break and covered in sweat. When He’s allowed in the babing of the truck, he stinks of fear.

“We have a problem,” he says

“What problem.” Dalena is sympathetic to his workers who have to work in the hot sun.He has no idea what she’s talking about.

Ted wipes his sleave aganst the dress ode. Rgiht.  The problem is, he says, that there are more instances of the same

More of the same what, you may ask? And what is a “dress ode?” Will Ted ever get to the bottom of his gender issues?  All valid questions. We’ll never know, because I fell asleep before ending the paragraph. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this. I may pretend that I just never wrote it and move on. But I won’t be deleting it. I need the 110 words.

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NaNoWriMo is like a fairy tale, and there are some scary fairy tales out there.

After 7 days of writing, I am 11010 words  into my National Novel Writing Month project. I’ve learned some things about myself in that time. Mostly, I’ve learned that I can’t really write for Nanowrimo until it’s past my bedtime.

Example: I spent a good part of the day on Friday trying to write my 1600+ words so that I could have the evening free. I think I might have squeezed out about 300 words. As soon as the clock struck midnight, I became a rampaging word machine. This happens every night, like one of the Grimms’ more sadistic fairy tales. I’m tired. I want to go to sleep. I’ve spent four hours trying – and failing – to focus on writing. Then – bong, bong, bong – it’s midnight and I can’t stop typing.

This sounds like a good thing and it can be, but remember in the original “Snow White?” (Not the Disney version, the real one that medieval people used to terrify  their children back when cable and the Paranormal movies didn’t exist .) The evil queen didn’t – oops – accidentally fall off a cliff in that version. No. That was too humane. She was the entertainment at Snow White’s wedding reception. The dwarves and the good people of the kingdom put a pair of red hot iron shoes on her feet and made her dance until she fell down dead.

This is kind of what my post-midnight writing is like (without the torture and death and dwarves.) I’m exhausted. I can see that I’m not writing good stuff. But I can’t stop until my eyes start closing all by themselves. It’s weird, because when I’m writing what I consider to be my “serious” writing, my best work happens between 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. I do revisions  and careful, slow writing then. But when it comes to inventing bizarre plot points and to  spitting words out at a furious rate, I must need to be half-asleep. Possibly my internal editor is no longer functioning at 1 a.m. Who knows?

It’s kind of fun to know that different times of the day are good for different kinds of writing.

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NPR & TMZ? OMG!

I consume many different kinds of media. I read my local newspaper in the morning, I follow several journalists on Twitter, read various news websites throughout the day and I read magazines like the New Yorker.  Two sources of news, however, command more of my attention than any other.

I’ll tell you about the one I’m proud of first. I spend a lot of time listening to two of NPR’s programs: All Things Considered and my favorite,  Marketplace, which has made business news palatable to me. Not only does Marketplace partner with the Freakanomics guys,  whoever is in charge of their music is awesome. No other business program lets me know how the stock market did during the day using “We’re In the Money” or wah-wah trombones, which is the only way I can understand it, since the actual stock prices make no sense to me.

My other big news source? Not nearly so highbrow. I read the kind of  gossip news that’s “reported” by the paparazzi. I’m talking about the sort of celebrity stories that pop up in my news reader when I attempt to check my email. Gone are the days when I tried to change my Yahoo settings so that real news would show up instead. I’ve given up. Now I want to know which teenage set of twins have moved into the Playboy Mansion with Hugh Hefner. And yes, I’d love to know how Kim Kardashian is coping these days.

None of these guys will be winning a Pulitzer anytime soon. But it doesn't keep me from reading them.

No matter that these news sites elevate useless people to celebrity status. No matter that it’s a waste of time to read it.  No matter that the agents of these sites are irresponsible journalists who infringe on the lives of famous people, sometimes putting them in physical danger. And yes, I’m aware that if celebrities were animals, there would be an outcry against this kind of unethically gathered news. But since the paparazzi is considered to be the price of fame, the only protest we ever see comes in the form of each new single and/or video released by Britney Spears.

The unintended consequence of spending so much time on two disparate news sources is that I’ve begun to mishear things. A few days ago, when the stock numbers were being read, I thought that Cher had fallen six percent. This summer I  was convinced I ‘d heard that Björk finally had a tax plan. And this week, during a story about a power plant, I heard that Japanese scientists had the Situation under control. I know what the reporter meant, but that didn’t stop me from seeing , in my mind’s eye, Michael Sorrentino from The Jersey Shore being held down while Japanese scientists forced him to put on a shirt.

I do know that I have to give up the celebrity news. There are nights when I’m not feeling great and instead of a junk food binge, I find myself wandering through the links on TMZ and OMG, clucking about Leann Rimes’ weight and trying to determine for myself is Ashton is really cheating on Demi. And no trip to a gossip site would be complete without checking in on Lindsay Lohan. But these binges are never satisfying. They’re like the spiritual equivalent of eating a meal from McDonald. I go in thinking I’m being wicked and indulgent and I come out feeling kind of sick.

So yes, I should definitely cut back. But I’m not going to lie. I’ll miss mishearing the news.

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Weekly worsts – National Novel Writing Month

I think I might have mentioned in my last post that National Novel Writing Month is not about quality; it’s about quantity.

A group of friends and I celebrate this, by exchanging our best and worst sentences at the end of each day of National Novel Writing Month. We started this years ago, when most of us worked in the same office and after we sent the best-worst email, you could hear the others laughing at their desks. I am aware that it’s Saturday, and not many people check blogs on the weekend because they’re away from their computers and out living their lives, but I thought I’d extend part of the tradition to the this blog.

In the spirit of NaNoWriMo, here’s a sample of some of the worst writing this week has produced. Of the 7192 words I’ve produced so far, these are the most unfortunate, and that’s saying a lot.  Normally, I don’t like to share my creative writing online, but since all of this is really bad, none of it is likely to make it into the finished manuscript and I don’t feel the need to keep any of it a professional secret. Some of these sentences are lame. Some are bizarre. Some are just stupid.

Nov. 1 – Amazing how a person can be so afraid of something one minute and so fascinated by it the next.

Nov. 2 – “Steve, what about the kids? No one’s going to want to come here if you’re killing their favorite dinosaurs.”

Nov. 3 –  She removes her purse from between her arm and ribs and gestures toward the window with it. (The logistics of this one boggle the mind.)

Nov. 4  – “I don’t do primates.” (Good. Wait a minute. What?)

A little anti-climactic, I know. But we’ve only been noveling for four days. I’ll try to write really horrifying ones in the next week. I promise  to get back to you all with a full seven days of lame sentences next Saturday.

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