Flawless Victory!

Sorta, anyway. (Link goes to the graph of my word count by day on the NaNoWriMo website.)

I mean, I think probably anyone who's ever done National Novel Writing Month has probably heard of someone who pulled off an incredible comeback. The first year I did NaNoWriMo, I was sure that the one Municipal Liason (in charge of organizing events for a given region) was going to fail, but then he wrote thousands upon thousands of words in a few days, to the point where he was beating me in word count despite my diligent adherence to meeting the expected words per day.

I've just never expected to pull one off myself. I've never seemed to be able to write more than two or three thousand words in a day, and usually I can't maintain the upper end of that pace for more than a few days at a time. This year, though, I didn't have a choice. I tried to get a few words out on November 1st, but in between helping with the Obama campaign and some dissatisfaction with the story I was trying to write, I didn't get anything else done for over a week - and when I did start writing again, I ditched the story I had started on the 1st in favor or a new one. Essentially returning me to square one in terms of word count.

The upside to this change in plans is that with the new choice of story, I was able to get fired up enough to maintain a pace of nearly four thousand words a day for the first few days, almost getting me back to par. I did hit kind of a slump in the middle thanks to a nasty case of writer's block (brought on in part by the scenes I was writing), but in the end I recovered and hit the goal line with maybe four hours left in the month.

So, what happens now? Well, in the end I wrote fan fiction. That's another thing I never expected to do; I've seen more than one story on Fanfiction.net that's over 100k words. Never did understand how people managed that kind of thing, but at this rate I'm going to be writing one of those myself. Yeah, the story's not done. Actually, the story before that story isn't done, since what I wrote is essentially a sequel to Midchildan Music, a story I started a while back.

It does simplify my goals a little. I need to clean up Midchildan Music's final chapter, post that, deal with some retcons that need to be done to Midchildan Music as a result of inconsistencies that I introduced in the story I wrote over the past few weeks (and things I don't like in Midchildan Music), and then work on finishing the story that was this year's winning NaNoWriMo project.

And somewhere along the line, I'll probably try to go back to last year's NaNoWriMo. That one didn't end successfully, but it's also a work of original fiction, and I can still try to finish that up sometime...

A Little Housekeeping

So... yeah.

I got just a teensy bit caught up in the recently-concluded political campaign here in the United States. As in, full-time volunteering kind of caught up. Oh, and when I say "full-time", that actually worked out to be ten-hour days more often than I might have liked!

Not that I have any regrets. As it happens, I don't regret it at all. Not one bit. In some small respect, the work that I did with the Obama campaign probably helped contribute to his successfully winning Virginia for the second time in two presidential elections. Which, even if Ohio was the state that "decided" the election, was certainly part of the dominant electoral victory that ended the presidential race (very) early on the morning of the 7th, rather than weeks later after all the recounts were in. I'll take that.

Anyway, posting's been nonexistent because of the amount of time that's been demanding from me. Hopefully that will change now that the campaign is over... but then again, it's National Novel Writing Month, which is also one hell of a time sink. *sigh* Well, at least I won't be short of things to talk about. And I'll probably try to look back on the campaign in more detail, too, although given my track record on that kind of promise, I wouldn't blame anyone for not believing that that will ever happen.

About the only other thing I'm changing is the sidebar, where I'm cleaning up the list of tags a little to make that easier to navigate and adding a list of blogs that I read. I can't control the content on any site other than my own, of course... and at any rate I need to work a little harder on adding content notes to my own blog, much less keeping an eye on anyone else's.

Well, that's about it for the moment. As always, thanks for reading my blog.

November's End

Well, NaNoWriMo is over. Not in success this year, sadly enough. *sigh* If nothing else, I know why it happened. Distractions took over. Too many video games. All the usual, and so on.

Anyway, I will be coming back online here, now that November's over. I don't have anything to post right away, but I've got a few ideas bouncing around that deserve fleshing out into full posts. So look forward to that.

National Novel Writing Month!

November should be called "Blog Death Month" for me. I mean, in 2009 my first blog had already died for other reasons, so I suppose that shouldn't count. But last year, when I was yapping about studying abroad, November was the death knell to that blog for the entire rest of the year.

The reason is simple: National Novel Writing Month. I've participated twice before, in 2009 and 2010, and plan to do so again this year. Not particularly because I want to be a professional author (as it stands now, I'm certainly not putting in the amount of work that'd require!), just because I like an excuse to be randomly creative. That's probably also why I like roleplaying and the like...

Anyway, among other things, this is your official notification that posts might very well be light starting from Tuesday, November 1st. I want to try and avoid seeing my blog come to a grinding halt this time around, but I know better than to promise that I'll actually be able to do that. If nothing else, I think I'd like to post excerpts from the stuff that I'm writing, pretty much for my own personal amusement.

What do I plan to write about, you ask? Well, inspired in part by what little I've seen of Madoka Magica, in part by my general enjoyment of magical girl anime, and in part by what I understand of the military, I'm going to be trying to create a (reasonably) serious deconstruction of what it would actually mean in our world for magic to exist. Focusing primarily on the Japanese "magical girl" military force in particular, which I'm calling the Magical Self Defense Force. That will also be the title. The idea practically titled itself, to be honest.

Among other things, this means that I'll be trying to depict the military accurately (although as I am an American, it will probably be more based off of the U.S. armed forces than the Japanese SDF, despite the title), hopefully while adding in the "magic" element in a way that makes it legitimately a "magical girl" style story. I've thought several times in preparing for this that I'm trying to write an anime rather than a book, yes.

The other major part of this, and the other challenge I'm hoping to prove myself equal to, is to manage to write a story that doesn't betray the feminist ideals I've been learning about lately. Writing about magical girls and the way they're portrayed would be a whole other post (probably even a whole other series of posts), so for now I'll just say this: I want to be able to write a story that relies on strength of character and plot to appeal to readers, rather than objectification; I want to be able to write a story that can deconstruct and analyze the problems with society, rather than affirm them.

At any rate! That's what I'm thinking about going into this. November's going to be one hell of an interesting month. These days (ever since I started NaNoWriMo), it always is.

The Downsides of Experience

So yeah, remember this Camp NaNoWriMo thing that I mentioned earlier...?

Put simply, I fail. I wrote one day's worth of writing immediately after midnight on July 1st, and then promptly commenced with the ignoring of the entire affair. I have not written a single word since, a full week and a half later.

Which isn't to say that I couldn't turn this around; I've seen more amazing comebacks from others before. I am forced to admit that I simply do not have the will to do so. The reason I got this far in the hole to begin with was that I couldn't seem to bring myself to write. There was always something else to do, some other project to worry about, and so on and so forth. Sadly, there's no reason to suspect that I will be able to change that in the time I have left, especially not to the degree of writing 29 days' worth in 19 days. Which means I think this particular project is dead.

To some extent I guess I'm overdue. I've had two good runs with the typical November NaNoWriMo, and I don't think I had fully committed myself to this new summer version. Honestly, I think part of that comes from greater experience with writing in general. Or at least, a sharper self-censoring routine. Part of the point of NaNoWriMo in general is that you don't let yourself worry about the quality of the writing. Pound out fifty thousand words, and worry about editing later when you have a novel to work with. I think what happened this July was that I have a slightly better sense of what mistakes I usually make when writing, and hadn't quite reminded myself of how NaNoWriMo is supposed to work.

Well, however it happened, I'm not going to be writing a novel this July. Oh well. I'll refocus on the fanfiction that I have sitting around, and there's always round 2 of camp in August...

Camp NaNoWriMo!

So there's this thing, on the Web. Something called National Novel Writing Month, in November, where the challenge is to write a fifty thousand word novel in a month. I would not go so far as to call myself a writer, but I have enjoyed this particular challenge for two years now.

Imagine my joy to discover that there's now a "summer camp" version of NaNoWriMo that's starting this summer, calling itself Camp NaNoWriMo. Same challenge, different month, as far as I can tell. And it's starting... well, in less than an hour. (From when I posted this, that is. "Already started" might be better to use.)

How could I resist? I'll be taking a shot at this, because writing is a fun and enjoyable challenge, and I'd like to believe mine is at least passable. I'll probably post excerpts and other info about the story that I'm writing throughout the month, too.

And I'm given to believe this will happen all over again in August...