thank you sir, may i have another?

[lookingland]

off to a slow start this morning and feeling sluggish about the whole thing.

three short scenes, 1,692 words.

5,692 / 50,000 (11.4%)

i've half a mind to stop, seeing as i've already made the day's quota and am sorta ahead of the game. but i know if i get lazy now and start slacking off, i will lose momentum and start falling in the hole.

so i'm picking three more scenes. some of the day's prompts include:

There was somethin' sweaty about Crabbits that rubbed me wrong..

That night I dreamt about a train fallin' from the sky. (ooo the train scene!)

I woke up feelin' like I's bein' crushed.

I meant to post something last night but got home late and was tired. i also realized this is the first NaNo i've done using a first-person narrative and it's a lot harder than i expected ~ i mean the writing is really bad and will need a ton of work. i'm sorta thinking that what i would like to do is try to finish the 50k well ahead of the deadline and then start the process of editing as soon as i have enough scenes to start putting the puzzle together. i can already tell that most of what i'm writing (and in some cases whole scenes) will be totally cut from the final. that's okay though, i'm exploring the characters and learning some inneresting things subtextually that will be useful in the rewrite.

how's everyone else faring?

: D

Comments

[jamiekswriter.livejournal.com]

You're doing awesome! Keep up the momentum! You can do it! :D Don't worry about the editing, that will come *after* November.

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

thanks ~ !

i'm on track ~ i just want to ease up on the speed so that the quality isn't so wretched!

: D

[java-fiend.livejournal.com]

Looks like you're making some good progress. Good luck with NaNo the rest of the way!

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

thanks ~ ! still dunno whether i will finish, but figgered i would at least give it a shot.

: D

[java-fiend.livejournal.com]

Hey, better to try and fall short than not try at all. I'm taking the plunge as well. Like you, I figger I'll at least give it a shot. :-)

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

whoohoo ~ !

good luck! i expect you will keep us updated in your journal!

: D

[java-fiend.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I shall do my best. And yeah, I imagine I'll be posting updates along the trail. :-)

[bachsoprano.livejournal.com]

Pie.....there's pie at the end of November :)

Yay you! So, what is it about first person that's giving you grief?

I am progressing with NanoEditmo....one short story down (I think...I might go back and tweak it a little this morning), several chapters of line-edits done on a friend's project, and I'm a-thinking I'm going to tackle O&F this morning...or, if I'm truly brave, Songbird...we'll see :)

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

yay pie ~ !

i think it's a struggle because i'm being more verbose than the character would ever be just because i'm thinking about word count in the back of my head.

i might give up and just start constructing the scenes more thoughfully since at this rate i will be rewriting 99% of what i'm scribbling now.

so silly!

: D

i'm so glad you are challenging yourself to do the editing thing this month ~ i'm looking forward to reading your stories! and i definitely want to see how both Once and Forever and Songbird are coming along.

[bachsoprano.livejournal.com]

i think it's a struggle because i'm being more verbose than the character would ever be just because i'm thinking about word count in the back of my head.

Yeah, that's often my problem with first too....dividing myself from the character's voice is tricky and often leaves me feeling fragmented, because at what point does the character's voice stop being my own and become his/her's, when I'm the one that's creating the voice?

Question - do you ever recycle the material that you cut from your early drafts into other things?

(And, yeah, I know what you mean about word counts....I find I catch word count-itis.....nasty disease, that. Gives hives and adverbs....)

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

Question - do you ever recycle the material that you cut from your early drafts into other things?

never, actually. usually once something ends up in the scrap-draft pile, it just composts away and i tend to let it.

i don't actually have a problem separating my own voice from the character's ~ i think it's more a problem of not being in the immediate moment with the character, rather. with this in particular i've noticed that i'm channeling Aldrich, really ~ turning this into some literary reflective autobiographical piece (for the character), which is not really what i want. i want it to be more immediate, less self-aware, and more experiencial rather than literary. i know what i want ~ i find i'm just not doing it because i'm writing so fast i'm just falling into the default of old narrative habits.

like i told jamie above. i think i'm gonna crank out a few more thousand ahead of schedule and then just try to slowwwww down. i already know that writing this particular character is easy if i just think through it more carefully (and right now i'm not).

this is me.

this is me blithering.

: o p

[bachsoprano.livejournal.com]

I had a funny image pop into my head..."Miss Blither", like those kids' books by Robert Hargreaves....:)

Interesting that you can separate the character's voice from your own....I think that's part of my current struggle. Have you always been able to do that, or is it something that you had to work on?

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

for this one character, its always been easy. i struggle more with others who i am less comfortable with. there's a couple i haven't really found a way to detach sufficiently to make them actually work for me yet ~ so i've got a lot of work ahead of me with them.

i think part of what helps me is that i've never been inclined to write autobiographically at all (about myself or things i "know" or have experienced). when there's as much separation between me as a 35 year old Catholic female writer/library school student living in the 21st century who was raised on the texas/mexico border and someone like Lewis Fletcher in 1852 ( as a seven year-old boy raised by southern baptist parents and displaced from an alabama farm into a city like Mobtown on the cusp of the civil war), there's not much we can share experientially. emotionally maybe, but only in a very vague fashion.

~ said miss blither, as she did.

: D

[lanyn.livejournal.com]

Dig your prompts! They make me want to write something, particularly that train dream one.

I get started tonight. Hopefully the brain won't freeze on me!

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

i hope the brain is nice and warm (if not downright hot!) ~

the prompts are really working great for me. every year all that's separated me from total disaster has been having these kinds of prompts.

: D