November 2, 2009
Day 1!
Written a day late. Yesterday, I just got back from the batizado (sort of like a capoeira convention), and didn’t get much time to actually write down anything. I did get about 6000 words, but that’s about it; considering how much I’m writing this month, that’s still 10K behind. I’ve got to get to 30k by the end of this day, and my writing speed isn’t all that great at the moment.
I’ve decided that I want to do something about capoeira, so my first story is an un-outlined story about a capoeirista:
Every step takes me further from my house. One of my sanctuaries. Every step, closer to my own personal prison.
School.
Oh, I know what you’re thinking. “School”. Yeah, whatever, I’m just another emo teenager who doesn’t know the way of the world, who’s getting all wound up by something as totally inconsequental as school. Even high school. But, let me ask, if you’re forced into a situation that you didn’t like, and you couldn’t do anything about it, but you want to bitch about it, you would, right? Say you’ve been reassigned to the night shift for the next four years. That’s when your friends all go out and party, when your wife or husband is home, and you want to spend time with them, right? Not at work. And you sleep during the day, so it’s not like you can get together for lunch or anything like that.
School is like that. Except the people at night shift are jerks, and make you do more work, and you’re not even getting paid.
You remember what school is like now, right? So, yeah, I might be another little emo kid, but, remember, there are little emo kids in all of us that bitch and complain
to people we don’t even care about, about people who bother us far more than they should be really allowed to.
There’s not a whole lot of capoeira stuff right now, just setting things up. I’ll be back with more things for the November 2nd entry.
October 23, 2009
Outlining
I’ve decided that outlining my work might actually be a useful idea, especially since I’m working with a rather large chunk of words here. What I’m doing for my outlining is just writing down a list of main characters, throwing in a bit of description for them, and doing a point-by-point list of what happens to them. For example, for An Unaccustomed Wine, here’s a bit of the outline that I’ve got so far:
Max: Biochem/Physics double major. Ambitious and friendly.
Geoff: Art major. Standoffish, loner, no social skills. Gay.Max has no fine arts credit.
Max joins art class.
Max sucks at art.
Max asks Geoff for help.
Max learns Geoff is gay.
Max starts getting better grades in art.
Jeanine has existential crisis about her life.
I throw in about 35-40 points for each story (for a 50K story), so I get to write 1500-2000 words per entry, a couple extra points in case some of them run short (which some of them undoubtedly will). So far, I have An Unaccustomed Wine done, and I’ve got about half of my vampire ninja/werewolf pirate story (after finishing up the first 35, I realized that there was still plenty to tell, so I’m bumping the wordcount to ~75K-100K, or something like that). Hopefully, it’ll be easier and far less stressful with this outline, as basic as it is, than running free with little sense of direction. Something like this might even help edit the stories that I already have finished.
I’m still far behind on Gothic Trance, but I’m slowly getting there.
October 22, 2009
October Plan Revision
I’ve decided that it’s a bit of a ridiculous idea to write more that 50K for October in preparation for November. I’ve decided to bump back my second, non GothNo, novel to November proper, discounting the ~6.6K words that I had already written for it. It’ll help for when I need to write, but I can’t think of what to write about; it’s already mostly planned out, and even has a title: An Unaccustomed Wine.
Just in case anyone’s interested, here are a couple excerpts from my GothNo, which is called Gothic Trance at the moment (it’s not a very good name, admittedly…):
September 1st.
I wake up on the cold dirty ground, and I am sore everywhere. I have never slept like that before, and I don’t want to sleep like that again. I’m hungry.
The apple is still there. I almost think that it is a better idea to eat pages from this notebook than it is to eat the apple or the remains of the sandwich.
I start walking. I don’t know where. I might even be heading back towards Cale, and the drug, and all those sculptures. I don’t know.
I come out into a backyard. It takes me a moment to recognize it, but it is the backyard of a house. There is a fence outside it, and a dog playing in the back, chasing butterflies. I walk up to the fence and reach my fingers through. He abandons his butterfly chance and licks my fingers. I’m so hungry, I would even eat butterflies, if I could catch them.
September 2nd.
I’ve never cooked anything before. Cale mostly did most of the cooking for me, and he is pretty good at it. I don’t have to worry about whether it is overcooked or undercooked. He puts all the spices on it, and picks out the perfect wine, usually red, and the perfect silverware, and the perfect utensils, and the perfect sides. Cooking is something that he is really good at doing.
I am not good at cooking. I cook it far too done, and it tastes like charcoal.
September 3rd.
I’m hungry again, and I don’t know where to get any food. I’m wondering about the town, and there are people everywhere. Some of them look at me, and I don’t know if I want them to. My dress is torn, and I look homeless, or as if I was a prostitute. There have been several men that have looked at me with an odd expression. I got away from those men as fast as I could. I can guess what they were thinking about.
No one recognizes me. It’s an odd experience, since most of the people that I have met before have known who I am. But, I’ve met those people at my showings, so of course they know who I am, and know what I do. Here, I am anonymous. It’s an odd feeling. I don’t know if I like it or not.
I have stolen several times, for food. There is a store that had fruit near the entrance. I put several apples into my bag and left the store. Later on, when I looked at the apples, they looked too much like the drugged apple that I took from Cale, so I didn’t eat them. I’m still hungry now.
I am still shaking, and I can’t stop it. Everything seems to be getting worse and worse. My vision isn’t as good. There’s nothing to stave off the symptoms. Once I passed out in the forest from lack of food and lack of water. I got up several hours later even more tired than before. I don’t know what I should be doing.
That’s from the first part, in Poppy’s POV (which is in diary format, as well as present tense, which doesn’t make much sense, but hey); the next is from Aster’s:
Cale sometimes eats. I eat when I’m able to, and there is always food. I wonder if it is delivered, because there’s no possible way for these two people to raise crops on their land, especially in the dead of winter. Neither of them ever leaves this building. The food arriving is a miracle, marvelous and delicious, and deadly, all at the same time. I eat as much as I can at once, since I don’t know when I will be stuck in my room, physically incapable of moving.
Cale eats apples and lettuce. That is all I ever see him eat. No condiments, nothing else. He leans over the sink, in the only human action I ever see him do, and slowly peel the apple with a small knife. His elbows and shoulders shake from all the drugs that he has ingested, but his hands are startlingly calm and fluid, his eyes focused as he slowly carves the peel away in one long strip, and cuts slices off the apple. Small circles. Almost all the apples are perfect spheres, another oddity. His slices are almost perfect circles.
He cuts up the heads of lettuce the same way, in circles, eats the disks. Once time I saw him eat an entire plant in one sitting, leaning over the sink, staring out the window, slices of lettuce in his mouth.
And it’s about Cale, the last main character (who might or might not have a POV section; he’s sort of the Mr. Rochester of the story, and it’d be weird to have him have his own POV.
And, now, a little bit from An Unaccustomed Wine:
Max sat down on the couch, after Geoff directed him to shove all the books off of it. “So, why am I in your room?”
“I…” Geoff stumbled off, and flushed.
“What?”
“I’m sorry, I overreacted.” He turned towards his computer and logged on.
“What do you mean?”
When Geoff didn’t answer, Max grabbed a shoe and lobbed it at the back of his chair. Geoff jumped, and glanced over his shoulder.
“Yes, I’m… jealous,” Geoff muttered.
“Really?”
“Yeah, and, well… I’m gay, too, but that has nothing to do with it. It’s just… I hate it when I hear about people getting together, when I’ve never been with anybody.” He started playing with a pen, twirling it around his fingers.
“That’s petty.”
“No, it’s… maybe.” Geoff hugged his knees. “I don’t know if you know what it’s like to not have anyone.”
“Well, I’m not one to be single all the time, if that’s what you mean.”
“You don’t understand what it’s like. It’s like there’s a division between you and the rest of the world. There’s something that everyone else has that you don’t, some… deficiency that you’re only barely aware of.”
“What about your friends? Don’t they count for anything?”
Geoff gave Max a blank look.
“You don’t… Oh, Christ…” Max groaned and covered his face with his hands. “Getting a gi-boyfriend isn’t going to solve that, you know.” He sighed. Geoff looked back at his computer. “For fuck’s sake, are you serious?”
“Fairly.”
“How in the world can you survive without friends?”
“I told you, you wouldn’t understand what it’s like. It’s not something you can understand.”
“So, you’ve never had any friends?”
“No.”
“What… what do you do with yourself?”
Geoff raised a brow.
“I didn’t–” Max groaned.
“Guess how I got so good at drawing. Friends weren’t—and aren’t—important to me. What is important to me is being able to draw all of this, and support myself off of it. That’s all I want to do: draw. Nothing ever comes close.”
I love the dynamic between these two characters. They’re so fun.
October 21, 2009
Hello, World!
Please excuse my utterly cliche and uninventive title.
Here we stand, on the precipice of what is considered normal reality, about to fall into the brinks of the abnormal, subnormal, supernormal, bizarre, and unpredictable (add other adjectives here: __________).
NaNoWriMo begins in ten days. That’s right, ten days. If you haven’t started or joined up, go do it. Now. The owl commands you.
In a way, I am completely unprepared. I don’t know what I’m going to do, or what I’m going to write, usw, but that’s part of the fun. I might pull out a notebook and jot some semblance of outlines before I begin.
Some things about myself: I am Oka, two-time NaNo winner. I first started in 2006, when I first heard of NaNoWriMo. The sad part is that it happened to be in the middle of the month, and I only got about 9 000 words completed. The next year, I threw myself into the flesh heap with aplomb and came out on top with 70 000 words. In 2008, I decided to take an extra leap and completed 250 000 words total.
This year, my new word goal is 500 000 words, twice last years. I’ve been thinking about raising the word count every year, but it seems as though the wrist and finger damage might be too much to really trade off the extra word counts. I’m excited at the idea of making a possible ten drafts in the next month, but that also means that those are ten extra drafts that I have to edit into submission and make decent stories out of them.
At the moment, I am writing two warm up novels, one of them a GothNoWriMo, the other not so lucky. I am far behind on the both of them; the longer of the two is still halfway behind. Hopefully this does not foreshadow my progress during November proper.
