Chemical deficiencies

I think I have a chemical deficiency in my brain. I can't hold still, I can't concentrate on anything for more than twenty minutes, and I have thousands of thing I want to do, which means on any given day there are at least five very important things to do, which completely overwhelm me. I then put them all off until eight p.m. where I finally complete one thing and go out drinking.
There's an adage that says if you want to get something done, ask a busy person to do it. Which is why when you have all day to do something you tend to make a large breakfast, pot of coffee, shower, organize your sock drawer, watch TV, make a list of things to do, and then maybe, get to work on that thing you have to do, but if you're me, you most likely watch more TV, drink more coffee, go run an errand, organize your MP3 collection, check e-mail, go grocery shopping and make a killer afternoon snack.
I've always thought that the ony thing that separates ordinary people from highly successful people is discipline and hard work. Although the highly successful people probably didn't see the OT game between the Lakers and the Heat.

Working to live

Quick update on the job: I'm working for the yellow page people auditing contracts and entering items of advertising into the computer system. I doesn't involve much typing or writing skills. Mostly it requires learning a lot of stupid abbreviations for items of advertising, which also have abbreviations, and learning to use the computer data base to enter these advertising contracts.
It's not exactly fun, but it's not awful either. The pay is mediocre but at least I'm storing some money away. The lack of free time gives more importance to the free time I have, allowing me to work more effectively.
Great.

A perfectly bad idea

I did some holiday shopping at the bookstore today. Picked up a book for my friend entitled, "101 Things To Do Before You Die". Of course I read it when I got home. This is my kind of book. It's ambitious, and humorous, and oddly the first item is, "write a best-seller."
So I got to thinking. I'm known for being over ambitious, scheming and dreaming of outrageous things. Sometimes I follow through. I brought a racing motorcycle, which is still sitting in the garage. I never ran it, but I bought it. That's half the battle right. Most people have never bought a racing motorcycle. (Fewer have raced them.)
My life since I've graduated college (June 2004) has been a hollow disappointment. Sure I've had some good times, some good women, but my life's really isn't shaping up to what I'd like it to be. What I need is some focus, some goals, a good deadline, reminders, consequences, over ambitious projects, that kind of thing.
I'm think of taking up "101 Things To Do Before You Die" as a personal vendetta against the mediocracy of my life. In addition, here are some things I'd add to my personal list:
1. Become a motorcycle holigan
2. Buy a sailboat and/or sail to Vietnam (see no. 4)
3. Spend Christmas at the beach
4. Go to Vietnam
5. Write a novel
6. Learn a foreign language
7. Go on a coast to coast roadtrip across the US
8. Sit in a hot spring in Japan, clothing optional

Surrender

I've done it. I've given up. The Gods are cruel. The month is lost. Whatever.
I learned something about myself. I wrote forty-five plus pages, more than I've ever wrote on one piece before, and frankly, I've got a pretty good outline for a novel, at least at this intermediate stage.
I learned that the capacity to write is in me, and that being a working writer means writing, however mediocre a first draft, but simply vomiting it onto paper. The great writers are truly re-writers, but no writer became great without belching awful prose.
What can I say but I had several forces conspiring against me and I let them get the best of me. That is what separates the men from the boys. The writers from those who want to be. They write, no matter what the circumstances, with an unrelenting passion. I'm still locating my unrelenting passion. NaNoWriMo is an excellent opportunity to find passion through frenzied consistency.

On December 1st I start a contact job doing data entry. I'm not sure what that entails, and I'm a little worried because the woman who recruited me sounded excited that I could manage 8,000 ten-key presses an hour. I wondered why they calculated it by the hour. How could one possibly do that for an hour?

14,435 wds.

This novel is like riding a horse, where I, the rider, have fallen off and my foot is stuck in the stir-up, so the horse is dragging me along. I'm too far to quite, but I can't get back up, and there are so many other projects (I'm not sure how the last one fits the analogy).
I did write 4,000 pages between Monday and Tuesday, but Wednesday my total was woefully low because I have no discipline and I worked on a short film script. Today I had more discipline but I worked on the short film script most the day.
As long as I'm producing pages I don't mind so much if I'm falling behind on one thing or another.

12,100 wds.

I'm going to make this short and sweet. The determination of writing a novel--that is sitting at the computer and pounding out 1,667 words a day, or now in my case shooting for 2,667 words a day--is powerful. The high of a good days work, and I don't mean quality, I simply mean a large word count is exciting and joyful.
I've still have a long way to go and a big hill to climb. I'm just going to take it day to day and climb back into this thing.

11,111 wds.

I thought this would be a momentous occasion to take stock (11,111 words). I haven't worked on the novel much this week. There are many reasons and this journal really isn't the outlet to talk about those things, as I prefer to deal with the novel and my writing insights. In a nut shell I've had a film project that has required much of my attention and I'm having trouble finding working space.
In a way I've simply passed over week two, slept through it if you will, and avoided all the blues associated with the second week. Of course, I'm woefully behind in word count, but I pretty much have nothing going on for the rest of November, so I can catch up if I work hard.
Where am I supposed to be? Half way done: 25,000 words. I'm about 13,000 words short right now. Which, over 15 days (the number left), isn't too bad if I write and extra 1,000 words per day. No problem.
Let's see where I report in at tonight.

10,140 wds.

Time is going by quickly. I'm in the week two blues where the entire manuscript has become a mess, including my notes, the direction my plot is going, the dynamics of the main character. Everything. So I went to Barnes & Noble.
As I'm browsing, I come across the book, "No Plot, No Problem" written by Chris, who's last name shall remain secret because I don't remember it. Anyway it's his book (he's the guy who started (?) NaNoWriMo), about how to write a novel in a month.
Apparently what I'm feeling in week two is completely normal. That things are in fact shit. Week three is suppose to be much better. My word count––which I track compulsively on a spread sheet with a bar graph, averages, projected total based on daily average, words per day needed to reach 50,000---basically the works––has dwindled of late. The weekend is partially to blame but it sounds like a norm for this stage.
I'm counteracting the dwindling total by trying to write several small sessions per day, rather than sitting down for two hours and pounding out 1,666.6 words. I'll shoot for five hundred here, four hundred later, another five hundred before bed. This strategy has kept my head above water, because while I don't feel like I really wrote this weekend, just by completing seven hundred words on two occasions I'm still in it. Heck it's fourteen hundred words I won't have to worry about later.
Chris also said once you reach 35,000 it's cake.

6,884 wds.

I'm a little under my target word count for the day, but there's still hope for this evening. I did work on the outline which should make the writing easier.
My pacing has changed, which means that the story is either really boring and drawn out (probably), or I'm adjusting better to the different pace and fluidity of writing a novel.

5,234 wds.

Well, day three off and running. I hastily finished the first chapter, and thrust straight into the second, and concentrated on picking up the pace of the story, getting into some action. That went well, although I'm still worried about how I'm going to carry this story-line for 175 pages (I'm on page 19 now. Yes!). I'm not completely worried because I knew this is what I'd be dealing with. I think I'm just used to writing at a different pace, which is why this is a great challenge for me and I'll learn lots. I already see an improvement in my pacing from the novel class I had last winter. That was really hard to expand into a marathon pace. The point is it's a learned skill like a lot of writing is.
Here are some other notes I've made to myself about writing thus far:

1. Movement --- I’m beginning to learn that this is imperative. Storytelling is about movement. Sure it’s about making a point, characters, setting, but I think for first drafts especially, where your characters will be flat, undeveloped, you should strive for movement. Discover new ways to move your story forward and keep the action going.

2. Action --- Similar to movement but I think what’s important is characters should act. When things are going flat get back to the characters and how they would act. Also show the characters through action.

3. Behind the scene --- What’s really going on behind a scene? A wedding is about two happy people getting married, but often there is far more than what we assume on the surface. For example a feud between families, problems with the caterers, a jealous brother. These add richness, truth and details to your story.

4. Senses & Setting --- Don’t ignore the six senses. Describe the setting and give it a function, i.e., and action. An ocean is an ocean, and it’s beautiful, but it effects the climate of the world around it.

3,431 wds.

Today I was pretty lazy and didn't start writing until about noon. The lesson I'm learning so far is that it really doesn't matter if you've done an outline or know anything about your characters. Sure, the story sucks, and it makes you want to stop writing, but it's still possible to write a lot. And you can't really learn about writing if you're not writing.

What I'm saying is, rather than fretting about a perfect outline, or understanding your characters fully, it seems like it might be far better to write, and learn, and discover your story and its characters that way. Then, at least you're writing. You can make it better later. But this way at least you'll have something to make better.

1,951 wds.

This morning I plugged away for another 914 words. I did the math, and 50,000 words in 30 days works out to be 1,666.6 words per day. Which if you don't suffer from writer's block is only two solid hours of writing, or maybe even less.
Thus far the writing has been pretty average. I realize that my main character is a drab bore and not someone I really want to write about. With the frenzied pace I'll fix him as I go along and get back to editing him in the beginning sometime in December when I'm working on my crappy screenplay.
Then as usual I've discovered some nice surprises, an interesting character, a conflict I hadn't conceived of, a good passage. Stellar stuff.

1,010 wds.

That was something. That was an hour of output, straight through. Hardly any stopping to think. Must be pure crap. But that's how it goes I suppose. My spelling was extremely bad by the end, which isn't saying much for me but even worse than usual. The sleep deprivation I think. This definitely give me material to work with and more importantly a sense of momentum which I hope to carry on with my other writing. That sense that you're not really writing until you're outputting large amounts of text. Obviously quality is a problem but with practice, quality improves. These are some of the principals I'm operating on. Goodnight.

Check out the novel at: http://ryanjs-novel.blogspot.com/

Eve of the Storm

As Michael discovered, November is National Novel Writing Month, and a website called NaNoWriMo (http://www.nanowrimo.org/) sponsors a write a novel in a month contest, which I am participating in for various reasons. Number one, I'm crazy. Number two, I believe output is key to success and growth as a writer. Number three, nothing seems to inspire me, meaning I'm willing to try anything. The goal is to write 50,000 words, starting at 12:01AM on November 1st and culminating at mid-night on November 30th. That's roughly 200 pages, of double spaced text, or 6.6 pages per day.

As I write this it is less than 45 minutes before the novel writing contest opens. I've been excited about it because I think the push is what I need to enable my writing, in the same way that lifting weights can give you energy for the rest of your day. Plus the story idea came to me readily and went together well, maybe because of the energy swirling around me thinking about the daunting task of writing so many words. At any rate in the past I'd considered going back to working on another novel I had in the works because it's a project I'm not as personally invested in as say screenwriting, or fiction articles, in other words, it's just writing. It doesn't have to be perfect or even good, in the same way that writing a journal is easy because of the casualness and freedom. (Casualness is a word by-the-way, I just looked it up.)

But mostly I'm tired. I don't stay up until mid-night, and certainly not to think. My head has that heavy feeling, that chanting that says, go to bed, you'll love it––and indeed I would. As Michael said, it's the same feeling you get when you have a ten page paper that you haven't started due the next day––of course sleep is going to sound like a good idea.