Short but...well, posted

I'm already really late on this post and my brain is fried, but I'm going to try and write something, even if it is a little short. I also realize this doesn't mesh with the "going back to 2000" thing I wrote last time, but it's really not working out anytime I try to start it. So we're doin' this instead.

I was talking to someone who wants to start writing this morning, and after recommending NaNoWriMo, remembered the existence of Camp NaNo. The August Camp has been moved to April since last year.

I'm thinking about participating. It's a horrible idea, I can tell already - the third week of April is finals week, the week after I start a full-time internship position, and all through the month I'll theoretically be squeezing in weekly posts here. In November I'm only battling minor things like midterms, and there's even a three-day-weekend for Thanksgiving. This…should be interesting.

However, I'm thinking that I'll cheat a bit and continue on with Third Life - getting another fifty-thousand words done of that would be amazing; heck, if I could get a couple thousand added, it would probably be better than what I can manage on my own initiative. 

There's something about that competitive spirit, the race, and the wordcount meter that makes NaNo seem…not easy, but certainly possible.  

I mean, I probably won't be saying that next month, but it's a nice sentiment.

• NaNoWriMo 
• Camp NaNo

A Michiganian in the Springtime

Well, the first full week of March has come to an end!

March is simultaneously a relief and a frustration of a month. I'll be up front and say I'm not made for Michigan. I love having four seasons, and living here most of my life has no doubt buffered my resistance to cold, but the dawdling end of winter we suffer through here? Not really for me.

So far, things have been good. We've broken out of our snowstorm-every-other day pattern for the time being, the gales of wind have died down, birds are coming back - including campus's geese, hooray for messy paths - and the temperature's gone all the way up to forty degrees! Forty! For a Michigan March that's practically a heat wave!

But a Michigan March is an unreliable beast. This time next week, I might open the blinds to see three foot of snow and the roads coated in ice and hail pummeling the people trying to clear their driveways. Michigan's sort of an adventure like that.

These switches in temperature are going to be the most irritating parts of the next month or two for me. It can be mid-May before the season settles on "spring", but I can feel my brain already slipping into spring mode. "We'll go on walks and go to the zoo and write outside on the porch and go to parks and the Henry Ford Estate and I can drive with the top down on my car and..."

...It gets a little crowded here in my brain.

It gets pretty nostalgic in here, too. My memory isn't the greatest, but some of the things I remember best and with the most fondness are times in the warmth. Zoo trips with my family, complete with enormously tall ice-cream cones from the snack place by the Aviary, sitting on the porch with my friends and watching a thunderstorm off in the distance, long nights in parks and long hours in the shade alongside the waterfall at the Henry Ford Estates, entire days spent working on novels with the sun pouring in and nothing more pressing than pagecount on my mind.

So as the weather temper-tantrums its way into spring and this blog-post-a-week challenge continues, I might wind up talking about the past. A lot. In fact, I have an idea for next week that'll take us waaaay back in time to good ol' 2000...

Stepping Up My Game

...So it's been a little dead around here lately. February was a busy month, and although I did get a lot done school and novel-wise, I definitely didn't do as much blogging as I wanted. ..Granted, this was the month where I had a week off...but that's not important right now! 

What is important is that I want to try and get back to blogging more often. I've been thinking quite a bit about why I keep putting posts off, and the answer is...well, twofold. Number one, I'm overworrying and overthinking, about post quality, about time, about my own expertise...about everything, really. Number two, I'm still not used to keeping an eye on things in my daily life about which to blog.

The best way to get better at something, of course, is to do that something. A lot. So I'm setting a goal - through March and April, I'm going to write a blog post by Saturday evening every week. Something is better than nothing, certainly at the rate this is going. 

Solving problem number two might be a bit trickier. Granted, enough Saturdays where I realize at nine-o'-clock, "Oh no, I need to write a blog post!" will help that set, but I have an idea that will hopefully solve the problem without creating so much chaos...

Consider this my contract with the internet, and let the Two Month Post-A-Week Challenge begin!

An Ode to Notebooks (or it would be if I could rhyme)

To my spiral notebooks and my hardbound journals. From the three-inch binders to the post-it notes. In honor of every note-taking software, be it my phone notepad or Microsoft Word.

Thank you for your pages, your canvases, your open fields of white...or blue...or green...or...y'know what, let's move on.

I know most of my scribbles never become anything more than that. I plot and plan and even though you must know nothing comes of it, you're always eager to listen.

And no matter how long you're left shelved or boxed or unopened, you remember. And most of the time, you don't even smudge the lead.

One of you can always come with me.

I appreciate that I don't always have to be on topic. Or strong. And that you never mind when I try something crazy. Or just doodle.

And sometimes, I swear, you are as much a portal as any hardbound book.

If my stories are my other world, then you are my portals to those places, and I thank you 

for always

being 

open.

Making Writing Resolutions for 2013?

Need/want some online resources to help you out?

Wordcount Meters:

Sarra's Word Meter

Requires a Facebook account as an 'anchor' for your image (doesn't postanything or pester you in any way). Easy to modify and lots of personalization available.

Svenja Liv's Word Count Meter
Very clean and classy lookin' counters. Be willing to copy & paste your counter's code often, or have some knowledge of HTML to adjust. 

Write Daily Sites:

750 Words

Write 750 words per day. The entries are kept completely private, can betagged using metadata, exported, plus you can earn achievements. 

OhLife

OhLife sends you an email every day (or however often you like) asking how your day went. Just reply to the email with your entry or story or what-have-you, and the site stores them. Again, the entries are completely private andcan be exported.

Write Or Die

Just in case you're having trouble making your daily wordcount ;)

Writing Prompts:

WritingFix's Random Writing Prompt GeneratorMight have to scroll down. The prompts were designed for school journals, but some work just fine for story ideas, and if nothing else, writing about the topic from a character's point of view could be useful.

Archetype Writing's Plot Scenario Generator

Dragon Writing Prompts

*Not just for dragons*

Language Is a Virus
Generates random writing exercises

Writer's Helpers' Writing Prompt Wednesdays

WritingPrompts.tumblr.com

Get Scribbling!

Enjoy and good luck!

PostNaNoLog : Reflections

Final Stats

Words : 50,000 (Microsoft Word)
Chapters : ~15
Pages : 91

Thoughts

Progress - Weirdly, I think this is the farthest I’ve advanced, plot-wise, during a  NaNo Novel. Usually I’m only hovering around chapter five by the end of it, and very little has happened. Considering this was The Year of False Starts and I had to do a lot of crossing out and rewriting…I’m really perplexed as to how this happened. 

Characters - Lots of surprises this year, from Roost and Peter especially. Roost proved herself more honor-focused than I’d ever expected from my snarky lady, and Peter has a streak of paranoia that should make his and Roost’s relationship quite interesting when I get them into the same scenes. Khulad and Casey fit more closely with how I pictured them - their interactions did surprise me in how easy they were to write, given the trouble I’d had with it in the past. I feel Xerxes was underdeveloped, though, and that she and Khulad didn’t have enough scenes. 

Scheduling - Oh boy. Well, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, things didn’t get off to a great start. Youmacon was fantastic, but meeting freakin’ Linkara andDoug Walker took my head right out of writing and straight into the clouds for quite a while. A visit to my friends’ place the next weekend didn’t leave me much room to catch up. By about halfway through the month, I did get my act together - at that point, I had to write nearly 3,000 words a day to catch up; I managed to get it to around 2,500 for the last week. Turns out that extra thousand words is a lot to pack in, especially when I was still busy with school. 

Music - My full intent was to use The Cider House Rules score for this novel. While I think it’ll still come into play later in the book, The Hunger Games has stolen the first part of this novel. “Healing Katniss” and “Reaping Day” in particular had a lot of scenes set to them. 

Week of Doom - The infamous “Week 2” doldrums usually hit me during week three. This year, I had Week 4: Oh My God It’s the Last Week and I Don’t Have Enough Words Noooooo!

War Strategy - Before NaNo this year, I did a lot of plot outlining and backstory work, which helped a ton. During the event, I installed and tested ZenWriter - I really like the program; it runs full-screen, allows you to put up backgrounds (I used setting-related ones), and even has some music choices and type-writer sounds. Unfortunately, its word-counter is much stricter than either the NaNo site Validator or Microsoft Word, making it a little frustrating when I needed to write a specific number of words. Still, it’s definitely a nice program to look into (and did I mention it’s free?)

2013 Plans - NOT to come into November fresh off an editing project. Inner Editor was very chatty, so I probably spent much more time rewording sentences and trying to avoid cliched phrases than I ought to have. I’d also like to take more time during October to prepare; what time I did take this year helped a lot, but I feel Roost and Peter, especially, were very neglected in the planning process.

NaNoLog: Optimism From 10,000 Words Behind

12,721 words thanks to (I assume) NaNo's word counter counting my dashed words as two instead of one. I knew I loved hyphens for a reason. 

...Considering Day 14's target wordcount is 23,338, I'm not doing so hot this year. 

This is the first year I've had so much trouble fitting NaNo into my schedule. Usually I'm pretty good about finding/making time to write...this year, though. Between school work and my mysteriously overtaken weekends (last week was Youmacon and my brother's birthday, this past weekend staying with friends), I've been doing a lot - but not a lot of it writing. 

Fortunately, I accidentally left for school an hour early (I'm not entirely sure how my brain rigged that one, either) so I wound up having two hours to just NaNo my heart out before class. Only wrote about 1,900 words - not enough to make any serious headway. 

But wow did it make me feel a thousand times less stressed. That really surprised me - making so little progress in the grand scheme of things seems like it should only have agitated me more, not calmed me down. 

I guess that's one of the things about NaNo - no matter how little you do, just doing the writing is sometimes enough. And I probably wouldn't have done that chunk of writing at all had it not been for this 50,000 word goal hanging over my head. And on my desktop. And over all my to-do lists. 

So, thanks, NaNo - for both the stress and relief I needed today.