Getting Ready for NaNoWriMo

Lunch break.  Thought I'd write something quick.

I feel like I've been talking about National Novel Writing Month for a while now.  I can't believe it is almost here!  I am pretty much terrified, so I've been trying to figure out how to prepare for it.  I'm surprised how many websites I have found online with tips.  I saw a few things I was already planning to do (let everyone know I am going to be much less available in November), but others I hadn't thought of (freeze meals for easy dinners).

Every single site I have found so far tells me I need to stock up on coffee.  Well, that's great, but I don't really like coffee.  Doomed.  I love the smell of it, but no matter how much cream and sugar I add I cannot get past the bitterness.  Luckily, there are lots of energy drinks available these days.  I'm not a big fan of those, either, but I'll try them out.  Or tea.  I think I once saw caffeinated gum at a gas station.

I have not had the chance to write lately.  I've tried a little more outlining to get me prepared for November, but I've got other things I need to work on, too.  I can only do so much and stay sane when I get home from work--granted writing can be fun, but it is still work.  I'm taking the GRE this Saturday evening.  This might sound strange, considering that I'm writing a novel, but I'm a little concerned about the Verbal section.  I bought a set of flashcards with the 500 most commonly used words, and I can't believe what I'm expected to know.  When on earth will I ever use some of these?  Sure, some are not too difficult to figure out (why would I ever use "pellucid" when "lucid" is a perfectly good synonym?), but others require pure, rote memory.  There are a good 100 words I'm not even bothering looking at.  I figure it'd be a waste of my time.

When I'm not preparing for the GRE, I'm debating with myself over the title of my novel.  I had something in my head for a while, but I realized that it had religious connotations to it.  I'd rather keep those out because I've got no such intentions for my book.  I don't even really have any explicit message in mind for my story.  I am writing it to entertain myself primarily, and others secondarily.  Either way, I need a freaking working title.  I started writing out all sorts of ideas and filled a sheet of paper with a combination of overdramatic, boring, and misleading titles.  My working title, for lack of any more inspiring ideas, may end up being A Second Life or something else that is super literal or prosaic (GRE word!)

I know I have not really written many updates lately.  I'm not sure my time will free up much in November.  Even if I do have time, I'm pretty sure I'll want to get away from computers.  Maybe I'll try to write just enough to get across my progress, but we'll see.

My plan as of now: invest in ear plugs; buy frozen dinners and coffee/tea/some random bad tasting, energizing crap; take a couple days after my GRE to refine my characters

And finally:  on Halloween night, at 11:59 pm, I will turn on my computer and write until I hit 1,667 words.  I want to start with a bang!

Hemingway experiment: write drunk, edit sober

I have decided to try a little experiment.  While Ernest Hemingway had a reputation for indulging in alcohol, he was also a brilliant author.  One of his famous quotes, "write drunk, edit sober," has always made sense in theory.  After all, the quality of the first draft does not matter.  You simply need to get something down.  Polishing comes later.  I have an issue with this, sometimes.  I find it too tempting to edit as I go, I get stuck on word choices, and sometimes I sensor things in my writing.  I thought I'd take his quote to a more literal interpretation.

I bought myself a bottle of Riesling wine, and have already made a dent in it.  Unfortunately this particular brand is a little too sweet (I should have looked that up ahead of time).  I anticipate that tomorrow morning when I have to hold a stand at the farmer's market to recruit families to do experiments, I will be nurturing  hangover.  Such is the price of writing.

I'm going to go on record, before I get too deep into this bottle, and say that I don't suggest that anyone who wants to write should drown themselves in alcohol for their craft.  I just thought this would be a fun experiment seeing as how I've got nothing else to do on a Friday night.  Also, I don't plan to get drunk so much as buzzed.

Here goes.
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Okay, so it is an hour and twenty minutes later..  I wrote about 1,300 words.  I'm not sure what I think of what I accomplished, and probably won't know until I'm fully sober.  Right now I think that, although I came up with a few good ideas, my writing isn't very 'pretty.'  It's looking fairly basic.  That doesn't really matter, because the point was to lower my inhibitions and just let myself write.  Still, I'm not convinced I couldn't have come up with these ideas while sober.  Normally I do come up with a few good ideas while writing, anyway.  Nor do I think I would have taken this scene down a notch without the alcohol.  Where is the benefit?

It was harder than I thought to write with a buzz, partially because I kept mistyping.  A couple times, I wrote an entirely wrong word that started with the same letter.  Plus it was tiring.  Unless I wanted to drink a hell of a lot to maintain this level, I knew I was bound to start to crash soon.  It's only 9:30 and I kind of want to go to bed.  Seriously?  My 21-year-old self would be ashamed.  But she also didn't have a full time job that meant waking up early to run experiments.

All in all, I'm not sure this is something to repeat.

Word count- 17327

October delays, and a synopsis draft

October won't be filled with as much writing as I'd hoped.  I recently realized that, although I don't know for certain what I would do, I really am ready to leave my lab manager position behind.  The best thing I can think to do next is try going to grad school... if I can figure out what I would go for.  In order to leave the option for grad school open, I've been preparing to take a GRE later this month.  (Is it strange that I'm writing a novel and yet it is the verbal section I'm worried about?  I did grow up with a physics professor as a father, though.)  I really should do better and study to take the one in psychology, too... but I kind of hate the idea of studying for that when I'm trying to get ready for Nano.  This is discouraging, because it tells me a few things about my priorities for my future.  I would love to write for a living, but realistically I would not be able to support myself, so I need to pick a career.  This is where I turn into a whiner and start complaining about how I don't want to do that.  I really really really need to get serious and freaking pick a path.

Plus Jordan and I have finally gotten bicycles, so we've been riding them alllllll over town.

Since I can't write about having actually written... I've decided to release a draft of my synopsis.  It's a work in progress, but I guess I don't see the need to be quite as secretive anymore.

Initially, Allie Hepner thinks the hospital room she has been visiting every night is part of a dream.  As they return and grow longer she must face the possibility that she is not dreaming.  Rather, she is waking up in the life of Candice Waybright, a woman who was involved in a car wreck Allie caused a week prior.  She suddenly finds herself surrounded by Candice’s family and husband who believe she has retrograde amnesia.  As they teach her about Candice’s life and try to rebuild their relationships Allie must figure out whether the life she worked so hard for is everything she thought it was, and what happened to the real Candice Waybright.

My biggest problem right now is not knowing what to do with Allie's life.  I have all sorts of ideas about life as Candice.  I'm excited to write it and it is much more fun... but I need to figure out how to make life as Allie more interesting.  If not, I may have trouble trying to write 50k words for Nano.

I am trying to do as little traveling as possible in November, because I would love to have weekends to shut myself off to the world and write so I can stay on track.  The problem is, I've got plans for 2 weekends and plans for another undetermined weekend.  Something tells me I may used some of my paid time off days in November to make it work.

I do plan on doing virtually nothing else in November, though.  Sorry in advance if I turn down any invitations.

I'm still at about 16,000 words.  Ack.

Breaking Bad and other writing assignments

Dexter has made way for Breaking Bad.  I wish I could say it's some joke, but as soon as I caught up with one distraction, Jordan and I launched head first into another.  We've gotten more than half way through the fourth season since I last wrote.  I think I just have to accept that I'll always have these distractions and just find a way to write despite them.

I also spent a decent chunk of time since my last post working on a submission for a developmental psych conference.  I was working on an entirely different sort of writing, and then when I emailed it to some of the professors/co-authors, one of them completely schooled me.  She reworked the entire thing (which, I hear, she often does).  Really, it is a great thing.  She knows what the panels will be looking for and how to give the abstract the best chance of getting accepted.  I'm flabbergasted I can list these professors as my co-authors.  At least if I ever finish my novel I won't be as shocked if it needs heavy editing.

I have recently started dedicating myself to half an hour of writing in the mornings, before I do much else.  It kind of gets my mind going for the day.  Plus, I'm starting to realize I'm going to be shorter on time to write, so I need to write when I can.  I've got to GOT TO prepare for a GRE I'm taking later this month.  During that time, I'd love to (but won't count on) write at least 800 words a day to warm me up for NaNoWriMo in November which would simultaneously get me to the 40,000 word goal I'd love to hit by Oct.31.  If I can somehow manage that AND win NaNo (seriously, who put NaNo in the month with Thanksgiving traveling?) I'll have 90,000 words.  Looking at my current word count, I know I've got to get more serious.

Hey, I have written 12,000 words in a day before.  Not the best writing, mind you, but I'm not looking for polished either.

I'm somewhat still using my strategy of writing out parts of conversations and then typing them up later.  I started with maybe 175 words of dialogue which, when I started typing it out, transformed into just over a thousand words when as I expanded it and fleshed out the scene.  Not bad.

I feel like I'm on a roll.  I'm going to try to write a little more.

Total word count:  16,068 (17.8% of my goal)

Lots of dialogue, and a new outline

I spent the last three or four days watching season six of Dexter.  Oops.  Jordan and I finished it last night, though, and immediately after I got back to work.

I thoroughly enjoyed writing today.  Up until now I had been afraid that my story might solely involve questions of love and right versus wrong.  I wanted to make sure I had other things going for my story.  Before today I'd had some vague ideas on how to branch out, but I wasn't sure about how to execute it.  I think I got it today, or at least a good start.  Enter more psychology material.  I'm putting my college education to good use.

The scene was a lot of fun to write, and it went by quickly.  I mostly wrote the dialogue, so I didn't slow myself down with the other details of the scene (aside from brief descriptions of what I needed to fill in the blanks later).  That came to about 1,000 words.  By the time I go through it later and add enough to flesh it out a little, I'm hoping that scene will be closer to 2,000 words.  Maybe more if I can add to it's plot. 

Writing with a specific scene in mind was so much easier that I spent the rest of my time for the day working on a more concrete outline.  The one I originally made dealt a little more with the general feeling of the book as it progressed, with a few key scenes described.  I wasn't sure how to connect certain points, and sometimes I only had a murky sense of what was coming.  I'm trying to create one that would list the specific scenes in order.  Hopefully a couple days of this will speed things up.  As usual, it won't be set in stone.  I still want to be able to change it if I come up with new ideas.

I'm debating whether I should release more information about what my novel is about.  I think I'm guarding it more than I need to, and even if someone were to try to write something similar it wouldn't be the same book at all.

I've also had a little fun lately visualizing what I have written as actual pages in a paperback book.

Total Word Count: 13533 (15%; = about 45 pages!)

The art of 'stealing'

I know that anyone who tries to write faces all sorts of time-related obstacles.  I guess I'm no different, but I've not really had the chance to write as much as I wanted to recently.  I have continued to write, though, and I'm satisfied I haven't stopped.

I'm happy with what I've written in the past couple days.  I had a general idea of what I needed to accomplish in a couple scenes, but wasn't sure how to do it.  I was fortunate today, though, and the writing came easily enough.  The scenes didn't end how I expected them to, but it feels good when a scene I write turns out differently.  I take it to mean that rather than forcing a pre-conceived plot idea to fit, I am discovering how my characters really would act.

I have finished reading Before I Go to Sleep, and have now decided it might be helpful for me to go back through a book I have read before, Replay by Ken Grimwood.  It is about a man who has a heart attack, and after that moment keeps going back and replaying parts of his life.  Although most of the book is irrelevant to mine, there are certain key points that I hope might inspire me, even apart from the what-the-hell-is-happening-to-me element.  There were a couple similarities in how we approached it, so that was encouraging.  After I finish this post I'm going to go back to Replay and see if there is something in there I can 'steal'.

I take back some of what I have said about the Fifty Shades series.  The very idea of fanfiction that underwent name changes so it could be sold as it's own work pissed me off at first.  It still kind of does, and I still hold that it is ten times easier to write a book when you are masking characters from other works as new ones.  I have done this myself (and I'm glad I did, because it was a good exercise and stepping stone), but I would never dream of trying to get any of it published because it still feels like cheating.  However, yes, everything we write comes from something, whether life or another book.  The creativity comes when you decide how to use the things you steal, because it can not exist in a vacuum.  People do 'steal,' but in different degrees.  E.L. James happened to 'steal' much more from one source.  I still frown upon it, but it still does take some degree of creativity to turn Twilight into Fifty Shades of Grey.  I guess the work fits into a grey area (pun partially intended).

What I think of the quality of James' creativity is unrelated, so I won't go into that here.

In the spirit of 'stealing,' here is a Ted Talk I have read on the matter by Austin Kleon, who wrote Steal like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You about Being Creative.  Check it out. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oww7oB9rjgw


Total Word Count: 11638 (13% of my goal)

Dissociative fugue vs. dissociative amnesia

Considering that I was a psychology major, I feel kind of foolish.  I was doing a little research on amnesia for my novel and remembered that my story might not involve 'normal' amnesia at all.  It seems more like dissociative fugue.  It has been at least four years since I took abnormal psychology, so I didn't remember all of the specific differences, and I found some conflicting information online.  It was also hard to say because dissociative fugue involves a person assuming a new identity and physically moving elsewhere... and as of now I have planned to have my character stay where she is.  I needed to look into this more, because this could change things.  I may need to iron out how my character would act before I can decide.  I prefer the idea of a dissociative fugue (mis)diagnosis, if it is possible, if only because it isn't nearly as overdone.

I wanted to find the technical clinical requirements.  I do own a copy of DSM-IV, but on top of it being somewhere in Knoxville it is also now somewhat outdated.  DSM V will be published next year, I believe.

I went to the DSM website (www.dsm5.org) and finally had a little luck.  Evidently, dissociative fugue used to be its own disorder, but it has been proposed that it be entered in as a subtype of dissociative amnesia (general episodic amnesia) in the newest edition.  A few of the criteria in DSM IV included travel away from home, loss of episodic memory, and confusion regarding one's identity.  Some of my questions were answered, but I still was not sure of all I wanted to know.  What if the person in question seems to think that they are someone else but either doesn't have the chance to leave or else does not try?  Why is going elsewhere a requirement?  Then I found a notation.  The travel aspect is an inconsistent feature of dissociative fugue.  I may be in business.

Still, I'm wondering if I can stop by and see my old abnormal psychology professor.  He still works in my department, and I occasionally see him, but he probably doesn't remember me anymore.  Maybe if I can do that I'll understand a little better and then will be able to decide how to tackle this.  I may not have to find a reason for my character to up and leave as a part of my plot.

Now, a question.  I hadn't expected my novel to go into much detail on the facts and details on all this (retrograde vs. anterograde amnesia, episodic memory, dissociative amnesia vs. dissociative fugue) but for the story to be credible I would have to include the scenes where a doctor explains these nuances.  Would that make for boring reading?  Maybe I can find a way to get one of the characters to spice it up.  Maybe I can make a character lose their mind and start speaking in tongues.

I didn't write much today.  I had a movie night tonight and I wanted to get to read more of Before I Go to Sleep.  I did do a little revising.  Editing as you go can be kind of risky, but I like to read through what I've written sometimes, and when I do I'd rather it not feel so raw.  I might not have increased my word count by much, but I improved some of what I already had.  At least it's something.

Total Word Count: 9,320