I'm Not Dead, but My Muse May Be

Well, NaNoEdMo was a spectacular failure. :D I have a new job and new livestock and all of that seemed to throw my life into enough chaos to keep me from writing for awhile. Now that I'm settling into my new routines and trying to write again, I can't seem to find the words. Even my fun writing seems to be fighting me, though I am managing some role-playing.

I am exploring one aspect of writing, though, and that's theme. Holly Lisle has been including a series of articles on theme in her newsletter, lately, and they got me thinking. Now, there all sorts of definitions and explorations of theme out there, especially among the literary crowd, and even more theories on whether and how to include them in your work as a writer. To me, though, theme is just a fancy way of answering the question, "Why do I care enough about this story to write it?" From there it can be used for a whole lot of things, from character development to tying subplots together to generating motifs, but at its essential core it's just there for me, to keep me focused on what the story means to me. I do it without even realising it - even my fun writing and my role-playing characters tend to have themes when I stop to think about them.

I'm thinking about starting to make myself daily exercises, or possibly daily stories. If I do, I may post them on my LiveJournal as locked posts, since I don't see any way to restrict access to my Blogspot posts. It's remotely possible that I may end up using bits of those exercises in works I'd like to publish, and I don't want any issues with rights.

So here's hoping I start writing again soon, and then make some real progress on my projects.

Already Quite Behind

Well, so far I haven't been doing great at NaNoEdMo. I've only managed 4.32 hours since I signed up - and I should be at 16.17 hours.

Last week I did manage to focus on RoB&F when I got any writing done at all. I'm editing in chronological order and am currently done with 13 of 49 scenes. I will be adding a whole lot of scenes before I'm done, so my scene total should change along with my progress.

There are 21 days left in the month. To win I need to spend 2 hours and 15 minutes a day editing. That shouldn't be hard if I can actually make myself focus.

Progress Update

I've been bad at posting lately, but partially that's because I haven't been making as much progress as I want to.

I've come to the conclusion that E&L is just a slower book to write than RoB&F was. It's a much more complex plot, deals with more difficult themes and takes place in a much more detailed world. It's my "drama," as opposed to RoB&F, which is more of a "romantic adventure." (These are in quotes because they're actually both fantasy - these are my own, random ideas of what subgenres I'd categorise them as.) I'm going to have to adjust to only managing about 500 words an hour or less. But I am making some progress on it, however slow.

I'm not writing down much for TAWS, but it's definitely percolating. I've got a very good grasp of the themes of the books and the interpersonal conflicts the main characters will struggle with. What I need is the actual plot. Well, really, a MacGuffin. The plot so far is very literary and I not only want a primary conflict that will suit a fantasy setting better, but I want the characters to deal with this personal conflict in a pressure cooker of other crises - I want the intensity of a huge threat to motivate them and I want the pressure of a deadline. That way they're not just sitting around moping about it or finding ways to avoid it, which I would find very boring to write or read. I did share what I have so far with the Word DaWGz, which was really fun. I'm very secretive about my work overall, since if I let myself talk about it I'm less motivated to write about it, but this project is still early enough in development that it doesn't feel dangerous to share it. They seemed to really like the idea, which was heartening.

My main focus right now, though, is RoB&F. I realised today that it's March and that's National Novel Editing Month, a spin-off of National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to spend 50 hours editing in 31 days. I was already thinking about doing it, and since I've been needing some motivation lately, I signed up. I'm not going to kill myself to "win," but if I do manage to get 50 hours done that should get me most of my way through the first revision pass. In good news, the more time I spend with this book (so far) the more I like it.

Inspiration

I love Thursdays. It's great to spend all day talking with other writers. And tonight I wrote some stuff in Ordinary Dreams & Writing (my evening writers' group) that I really, really like.

I love it when I come away from something with that giddy, thrilling feeling of "I really am a good writer!"

Progress

I haven't done any writing today, but I did manage to apply for unemployment payments, so I should hopefully be able to pay my rent for awhile. I also may be able to work freelance for a bit, which would give me more writing time. And yesterday, in addition to getting laid off, I managed to finally get E&L to a point where I can really start writing it and got 897 words written. It's a start.

So Much for My Writing Schedule

So today I got the news that my hours at work will be reduced to nothing and I need to find a new job. Things could be worse - I shouldn't have to worry about money too much while I job-hunt - but I'm a bit worried about my writing goals.

With this job I worked part-time, flexible hours at home. I somehow doubt that I'll be able to find another situation like that. Once I'm working full-time and commuting, finding the time and energy to write is going to be a lot harder. Right now I'm scheduled to write 20 hours a week and I've been managing to be productive about 10 - 15 of those hours. I'm kind of scared to do the calculation of how much time I'll have to write once I'm out of the house 60 hours a week or so.

Outline finished!

I finally buckled down and did it, and I finished the outline for RoB&F yesterday. I'm using a nifty free program named yWriter to organise my editing notes; I've never used any writing software before and am finding yWriter to be helpful, at least for this project.

I did all the prework for this novel in about an hour. Seriously. The project I'd had lined up for last year's NaNo wasn't working, it was day 5, and I decided to scrap everything and start with a whole new idea. Amazingly, the project worked. But it does mean that I have more work to do in the editing stage.

I also figured out and wrote down the theme, summary, character arc for the main character and a few other important bits, the way Holly Lisle recommends in her One-Pass Revision Workshop. I did it a bit backwards from her - I outlined the book and made editing notes before I figured out the theme. That was largely because after 50,000 words in 30 days (actually, I wrote the last 30,000 words in about 6 days), written without an outline, I needed to get an overview of the work before I could verbalise out what the book was about!

Next I'm going to go through, scene by scene, and make the changes I've noted. After that it'll be time for a read-through and to send it out for others to look at. I meant to only deal with major structural revisions on this pass, but I think I'll end up dealing with all the problems I see right now, and hopefully minimize future passes.

Today I managed to finish the bulk of the pre-work for E&L as well. I can't see anything else I need to figure out before I start writing, at least. I'm going to start writing and see if I get hung up again.