Beautiful Handcrafted Animals

And I’m at 48,000 . . .

/cue music:

Some music to keep you company.

46,000 words down . . .

So, I wrote 2,819 words tonight, bringing us just inches from 40,000 (which is to say, I have my work cut out for me the next three nights), and that would be a much happier number if I hadn’t . . . deleted a drop more than a thousand words.

Still, it had to be done.  I can hem and haw all I want, cheat and play games, but that’s not going to make this a valid experiment, project, whatever you want to call it.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

11,833 words to the finish line.  The first finish line.  I figure the book is actually a little more than half-way finished.  I can’t really imagine that, a month from now, after sitting on this silly thing for freaking years, always meaning to get to it, intending to get to it, maybe even spending a night writing 1,000 or even 2,000 words (which I would later discard, or save in a file I probably couldn’t find right now), I might actually get to the finish line.

Pretty exciting.

This NaNoWriMo business is good stuff.  Yes, the pressure is a bit much, but that also keeps me going.  The last three nights have been especially rough going.  I went back over my notes and old sections on this character I like so much and discovered most of what I had was crap.  Lazy crap.  Overwritten,  over-descriptive, indulgent crap.

I was shooting for word counts and oh my, did I have them.

So, there was starting from scratch to do, and that was an opportunity to remake this particular character into something even more than what I’d originally done.  It was exciting, and I think I’m on a good track, but it certainly wasn’t easy going.

And, my eyes are starting to cross, the hour is growing silly and I have to get up in just a drop under three hours.

Three more days!

I went to sleep, that’s what happened.

About midnight I went into the other room to play with Jack the Dog and, after about a half-hour or so, the prospect of staying up to four a.m. or so just seemed bleak and painful.

“I should take a night off,” I said to myself.  “Recharge the old batteries.”

“But you’re still 13,000 words away,” I replied.  “You need every night you can get.

Now, I was considering taking a day from work to make up some difference, but that’s not happening now.  No worries.  I managed convince myself that sleep was in my best interests, so now I have double the work to do tonight.

Something else interesting: I realized that I haven’t so much as cracked open a book since starting in on the NaNoWriMo project.  Which is to say, I haven’t been reading at all.  I think I listened to Bruce Campbell’s audiobook, How To Make Love The Bruce Campbell Way, but I’m the kind of guy who always has a book on me.

Weird.

I picked up Stephen King’s The Mist yesterday and am chugging through it.  I was curious to see how closely the movie stuck to the original story (aside from the ending, which was very different, and the screaming babies, which were movie-theater exclusive).  So far, it’s pretty faithful, excepting that the book is, um, twenty-seven years old.

I was also thumbing through Jonathan Carroll’s The Land of Laughs, one of my all-time favorite books.  Have you read any Carroll?  You’re missing out, really you are.  Pick up LoL (hey, I never noticed that before), Bones of the Moon or Sleeping in Flame — any one of those are a great introduction to a storyteller who will change the way you look at the world, at books, yourself . . . lots of stuff.

Most highly recommended.

Finally, I realized yesterday that I had inadvertently given one of my characters a name which is VERY evocative of one of the inspirations for the story.  I don’t know that it would be immediately obvious in the sense that it would give away twists or endings or things, but it’s certainly not something I’m just going to toss on the table to flop, twitch and draw attention to itself like a dying fish (nice metaphor).

For the record, though, and should anyone someday actually care, no, it wasn’t on purpose.  It’s good, though, and I guess that’ll work.

Every year I go to the doctor and have what’s called a Heart Echo (not to be confused with an Echo-Cardiogram) to check me out and make sure the old ticker’s doing it’s job right.  I have a heart murmur, you see, a routine and very minor sort of health problem which is not dangerous and has no real negative side effects.

If you need to have a heart disease, this is the one to have.

A heart murmur basically means that, when my heart beats, instead of going “Lub-Dub” like most other folks’ hearts, mine says, “Lub-D-Dub.”  An extra half a noise, maybe less.

Still, we live in the 21st century and even the simplest of ailments can decide to rear up and kick you in the seat of your pants.  So every year I make an appointment and a lab tech rubs a cold, Vaseline-covered wand over my chest.

And I get to watch my heart on TV.

Have you ever seen your heart?  It’s an eerie experience.  During the Heart Echo, the tech will tell me to take a deep breath and hold it, and then to exhale.  Blow out all your air, but don’t inhale for ten seconds.  While I’m doing these respiratory calisthenics, I am absolutely hypnotized to watch the screen and see my heart rise and fall with the position of my diaphragm.

And it beats away.  In real time.

The tests take a total of about fifteen minutes and that whole time, as they’re examining my heart from all different angles, I just get to watch it there on the screen, beating away.  Beating, beating . . . how many beats do each of our hearts have in it?

I’m not going to get all introspective here, but I will say that my annual visit to the doctor is an affirmation as much as it’s a checkup.  Watch your own heart beating and try to not think about how many beats you’ve had in your life.  Try to not think about how many more you might have left.

Are you doing everything you could with the beats allotted to you?  Could you be doing more?   I realized that, like New Years, this is the time of year where I look at myself and decide I need to make changes.  Get myself moving.  Write more.  But this year, I am writing more.  I’m going to finish a solid draft of Beautiful Handcrafted Animals in the next few weeks and then I’m going to write some more.

I’ll be honest: there have been times in the past year or so when I’ve thought, okay, so I just don’t write anymore.  The intention was always there, but my discipline was sorely lacking.

Even if I miss my 50,000 words for the month of November (not happening), I’ll still have sat down and plugged away at 36,000+ words (that’s where I am at this very moment, so if I didn’t write a single word the rest of the week, I’d have that, at least) and that ain’t hay.  More than “not hay”, it’s proof-positive that I can still do this, that I do still do this.

As I watched my heart beating there on that thirteen-inch screen, I realized I didn’t need an affirmation, or a kick in the seat of my pants.  I already got it.

Another 1,082 words tonight. Much less than I wanted, and we’re really getting down to crunch time. I need a little more than 13,000 words by midnight, November 30th in order to meet the requirements of National Novel Writing Month.

Some notes on that:

First, even if I make 50,000 words by midnight Friday, I doubt very seriously if the book will actually come to THE END in that span. It feels more like I’m about half-way through the story. Things might close up faster than I think, but this isn’t a 50,000 word story.

Do you still “win” NaNoWriMo if you meet the word requirements, but your story is still going? I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, they’re looking for 50,000 words and I’m going to give them more like 75,000 words (though not by December 1st, unless I really put the pedal to the metal). On the other hand, isn’t that a triumph for NaNoWriMo? If a writer’s book becomes more than was asked for, how is that not a victory?

Second, and I want to state this for the record, I could “win” very easily, if I wanted to cheat. I’m at a point in the story where I could very easily, and very reasonably, steal a pile of pages from one of the previous drafts. I’m not going to, though. Already what I’m writing is working out better than that old stuff.

Finally, it is my intention to keep doing on Beautiful Handcrafted Animals as if NaNoWriMo was still going on. I am enjoying this approach to writing (a first draft, at any rate). It’s working well for me, keeping me honest and writing. I would like to get this draft of the book done before December 22nd, nearly a month from now. If I can pull that off, I’ll leave the draft sit for a month or so and then revisit it in January. I know the text is going to need a pile of spit and bailing wire to pull it together, but I really think I can make it something worth reading in a very reasonable time frame.

So, that’s where we stand with things. The next five days will be dedicated, in part or in whole, to banging out another 13,000 words and change. When I get to 50,000, I will mark it down as a success, have a moment to myself where I marvel at how much actual work this was, and then get right back to Galen, Kara, Joe, China and the rest.