I Won NaNoWriMo!

I clocked in at 50,133 words with about two hours to spare. I fell behind a bit this month, so I ended up writing 5000 words today. And look what I got!

That's the winner banner from the NaNoWriMo website's secret (or not-so-secret) winners' page.

This project is really just about personal fulfillment, so I don't "win" anything more than glory, satisfaction, and 50,000 more words of fiction than I had before. But that's something, and it was such, such fun!

Same time next year, then. Can't wait!

Written Kitten!

This one's for the intersection of "people doing NaNoWriMo" and "people who like kitten pictures." (Then again, who doesn't like kitten pictures?)

There's a website that I've started using this month which rewards you for meeting your writing quotas with pictures of kittens:

http://writtenkitten.net

I've started thinking of my daily wordcount numbers in terms of kittens -- i.e. if I set it for one kitten picture every 200 words, then 1600 words translates to eight kittens. It's actually quite helpful!

You can also set it to show you pictures of things other than kittens. For example, puppies:

http://writtenkitten.net/?search=puppy

That is all. Happy writing!

It's the Season for NaNoWriMo

It's that time of year again... NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, begins today. The challenge, in a nutshell, is to write 50,000 words of fiction -- roughly the length of a very short novel -- in one month. (It sounds mad, but this will be my sixth time doing NaNoWriMo, and hopefully my fifth time "winning.") You can track my progress via the little wordcount bar on the right.

Towards the end of November, my life might look something like this (which I consider a fine use of the Thanksgiving holiday, for the record):

So, friends (Romans, countrymen), forgive me for being a little antisocial and non-responsive for the next thirty days. I haven't fallen off a cliff, I promise.

Challenge for 2013: Cover-a-Week

It's the beginning of a new year, which means that it's time for New Year's resolutions. I've been thinking about my next big project (NaNoWriMo, which I've been doing since high school, isn't quite new anymore). Here it is: I will record one cover song every week this year.

The idea is borrowed from several musicians I admire, namely Jonathan Coulton with his "Thing-A-Week" project, and Victoria Vox with her "52 Covers" project. I first started considering it because I noticed that, whenever I played the ukulele for my friends, I always ended up playing the same five or ten songs. I've owned a ukulele for about a year, and while I have written a few songs, I haven't really increased my repertoire of covers. So I thought I'd take a leaf out of the NaNoWriMo book (pun intended!) -- having your wordcount on the website for everyone to see really motivates you to get in those 50,000 words -- and make this a semi-public project, so that my friends can watch and poke me if I don't post a video that week. (Having a built-in component of accountability is especially important for this sort of endeavour.)

The rules:

1. I will post a new cover song every week. I will do my best to adhere to this schedule (posts will most likely happen every weekend), but I'm allowed to make up for weeks I've missed or anticipate missing by posting more than one cover on some weeks.
2. The posts will be public and easily accessible via YouTube.
3. During weeks when I'm especially busy, I am allowed to use songs I already know. Given that my current repertoire consists of six or seven songs, that's about a month-and-a-half of free passes. I think that's fair. (Unlike JoCo and Victoria Vox, I'm not a professional musician.)
4. I'll try not to cover too many songs by the same artist. (I don't listen to that many artists, though, and not all of them produce uke-able songs.) 
5. (Not a rule, but...) I'm open to requests!

In addition to learning lots of songs, I'm also hoping that I'll improve my ukulele skills. As it stands, I would consider my current level of ukulele-playing serviceable but not impressive. I would say I've hit a bit of a plateau in the past month or two; I've also been watching YouTube videos of Jake Shimabukuro, who makes everything I've seen anyone do on the ukulele pale in comparison.

I'm also told that I ought to get some sort of (cheap, functional) external microphone to plug into my laptop. Anyone have any suggestions? (Or for that matter, do you think it necessary?)

And that's my New Year's resolution. Wish me luck!

Another November, Another Novel

I won! 

That is, I produced, according to the official NaNoWriMo word counter, 50,023 words of fiction in the month of November. And this is a story I intend to keep and work on, that I'm not sick of after a month of staring at it nonstop, so I'm quite pleased.

Doing NaNoWriMo at home was quite a different experience from doing it in college. For one, Thanksgiving threw off my writing schedule more than I anticipated. At Stanford, Thanksgiving break was actually quite productive in terms of wordcount; there were no classes, little (pressing) homework, and most of the other students went home -- leaving me a few solid days of writing (and hanging out with the friends left on campus, when I was feeling burnt out). At home, I suddenly had all of these social engagements for the holiday, which left me very little time to write. You can see from my stats that I was on target, writing about 1667 words per day for the first two weeks of November. There's this horrible flatline period right around the holiday when I didn't get in any writing. And, in a bout of insanity, I somehow managed to produce a little over 10,000 words in the last twenty-four hours of NaNo.

Now that I've got a lot of raw material (much of which I will likely end up binning), I need to do all of the research I didn't do before November rolled around. This might end up changing the story some -- who knows? I'm really looking forward to hunkering down and reading up on English history over the next few months.

And I did end up meeting some cool people through NaNo write-ins and such. Huzzah for new friends!

A Dispatch from the Garret (a.k.a. NaNoWriMo 2012)

As most of you know -- and if you didn't before, you probably noticed the widget in the sidebar here -- I'm doing NaNoWriMo again this year.

This is my first time really doing NaNoWriMo in New York. My first two years of it were during high school, which I attended here in the City, but this is the first year in which I'm really participating in the community and its range of social activities (mostly meeting other writers and pounding away at our laptops in coffeeshops, which is actually social in a weird way). It's been a lot of fun -- I hope the community doesn't dissolve after November, which I'm told often happens. I hope to make some friends by the end of this.

I'm also quite excited about my novel. I'm trying something new this year. I've done a lot of fantasy novels of various stripes; this year's is historical fiction, which entails a lot of research. I didn't do nearly enough before the month started, as I realized by the second week or so; I expect to spend quite a bit of time the next few months reading up on the construction of early Gothic cathedrals, and British evacuees during the Blitzkrieg, and the inner workings of art museums. I can't wait! I've got this lovely old textbook on medieval English sculpture waiting on my desk.

And so, back to writing. (I'm already behind!)

Why I'm Not Doing NaNoWriMo This Year

It's November, which means it's the time of year when thousands of writers around the world buckle down and write a novel. In a month.

I've done it four times, and I've won it three (see the sidebar). But this is not a been-there, done-that kind of post. In fact, I've been quite excited by the novel I have brewing in my head -- it's been living there for a few months, so real that I could almost touch it. (I wonder if it wiggles, like Jello?)

Rather, it's to do with this post. It's my last year here, with all of these wonderful people, and I don't want to spend a month locked in my room away from them. I have the rest of my life to do that. I want to have more pie nights, and attend lectures, and play midnight Catan. The novel can wait another year. Stanford won't -- it'll whoosh past if I'm not careful. (That, ironically, reminds me of this Douglas Adams quotation.)

So that's that.

I won National Novel Writing Month!

30 days, 50071 words written, 6 scarves knitted. It's been quite the adventure.

(There are more than six scarves here, but two of them are unfinished, and three of them are from October, if you remember the last picture.)

It was awesome. It was absolutely worth all the sleep deprivation, all the stress, all the time spent holed up in my room pounding away at the keyboard at ungodly hours. The community was amazing, both my class here at Stanford and the online community that sprang up around the forums and chatrooms as everyone raced towards 50K.

And I actually rather like my novel this year! I haven't really gone back to the other two 50K+ NaNo novels I've written, simply because I didn't think they were really worth editing. (Well, that's not strictly true; I did edit one of them extensively, or tried to, but hit a wall about halfway through -- I think I got through seven or so chapters -- and decided that it just wasn't good enough.) This year's... we'll see. I like it, still, after spending a month wrangling with it, so I think it has some small glimmer of promise.

Anyhow, for those interested, my stats page and user info are here: http://www.nanowrimo.org/user/127574. You'll notice the few days towards the end when I pulled all-nighters and pounded out about 6000 words a day. Worth it, all of it, even so. Don't ask about the plateaus in weeks two and three.

Time to catch up on everything -- work, reading, friends, sleep, life. Same time next year, folks!

Bulbous Bouffant

One of my NaNoWriMo classmates showed this to us a week or two ago -- maybe it's because we were so burned out after typing away for hours, but we found it very entertaining in a spacey, surreal way:



I often find that if I say a word many times, it starts to sound strange and somehow incorrect to my ears. And some words are just irrationally funny-sounding if you really think about them. Or maybe I've been writing for way too long.

Chris Baty at Stanford

My NaNoWriMo class has evening workshops every Tuesday, and this week, Chris Baty (founder of NaNoWriMo) came to dinner with us! He told us the story of how NaNoWriMo became what it is, and I got him to sign my copy of No Plot, No Problem!, and we did word sprints, (not necessarily in that order) and it was fun times for all.

And then, lo and behold, we were written up in the Office of Letters and Light blog (OLL is the organization that encompasses NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy.):

http://blog.lettersandlight.org/post/1536511865/nanowrimo-takes-stanford-by-storm

I'm all the way in the back in the picture, so you can barely see it's me.

It's over 9000!

My wordcount, that is.

I only very recently learned about the etymology of that particular internet meme, and just now have a singular opportunity in which to employ the phrase. I am amused. :)

NaNoWriMo

starts now. My posting will probably be much less frequent this coming month, since I'll be spending most of my "free" time typing like a madwoman. And knitting scarves.

That is all -- I have a novel to write. Happy All Hallow's!

Edit: I've added a widget to the sidebar so that interested parties can track my wordcount in realtime. ("Aethyr" is my username on the NaNoWriMo website.)

One Idea for a Novel

This is what I'll be writing about next month:

A boy accidentally strangles a horse with a monstrous vine, and has to figure out where in his muddled ancestry the vine came from, and why.

Three Ideas for a Novel

Narrowing nine ideas down to three:

2. A boy accidentally strangles a horse with a monstrous vine, and has to figure out where in his muddled ancestry the vine came from, and why.

3. A genius hermit discovers a way to talk to dead people, and can’t handle all the living people who want to talk to him about it.
6. Two assassins are hired to kill a god.

Nine Ideas for a Novel

This quarter, I'm taking a creative writing class on NaNoWriMo (that is, National Novel Writing Month). It's exactly what it says: in November, we will be writing 50,000 words of fiction, which is the lower bound for the acceptable length of a novel (though nowadays, that's usually considered a novella).

I've done this thrice in the past, and have "won" twice. (Winning is merely hitting 50,000 by the end of the month; there's no compensation except for the satisfaction of having written.) So for all of you who think I'm a really harsh editor, trust me, I've been in your shoes.

Anyhow, for class, we are supposed to blog about the process, our stories, &c. To wit, the first assignment:

Nine Ideas for a Novel:

1. A girl is kidnapped by an prodigal angel and must find her way out of the seven circles of Hell.
   
2. A boy accidentally strangles a horse with a monstrous vine, and has to figure out where in his muddled ancestry the vine came from, and why.
3. A genius hermit discovers a way to talk to dead people, and can't handle all the living people who want to talk to him about it.
4. A priest has to save the world from a god whom nobody believes is evil.
5. Decades after a bloody civil war, a monk who has been hiding all the records reveals that the war didn't happen the way everyone thinks it did.
6. Two assassins are hired to kill a god.
7. There is a room that runs the world, and one of the people in it wants to destroy the world, but nobody knows which one it is.
8. A boy is kidnapped by the pirate captain of a magic carpet, and steals the captain's genie.
9. An airship cadet is convinced his classmate was murdered by international agents, and tries to find out why.

What do you think?