Beautiful Handcrafted Animals

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.

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.

The site and servers were down last night, so I didn’t get to post, but we’re 3,153 words richer now.  I’m closing in on 50,000 words and we’re writing about one of my two favorite characters in the book, so things should, fingers-crossed, go smoothly from here on in (not like they haven’t been smooth, but the last few nights have been a sort of a transitional period in the story, and we’re out of that now).

It’s 4:27 a.m. as I type this, regardless of what the time-stamp for the blog says.  Jessy went to bed about four hours ago and I just finished writing 895 words for Chapter Ten.

They weren’t the hardest words I’ve put down for this book, not by a long shot.

But I needed to get something rolling in just the right way here, and it took freaking house to come up with what that was, exactly.

We’re starting to head into somewhat familiar territory with things, right now, but I don’t want to fall into old, bad habits.  I’ve worked out most of what I didn’t like in previous drafts and I’m only just now working out how much of the “old” stuff I want to keep in here.

For the uninitiated, the folks who didn’t read the old blog before it got recreated more times than the Gabor sisters, the OLD story was not much more than a quest narrative.  Go here, get this stuff, come back, win your goal.  In fact, the old story was going to have some of the very literal stuff that happens now, be very allegorical.  Galen went on a quest and that quest was much more metaphorical than it’s become.

What happened was my “What If?” button got pushed by mistake.  I started thinking, “well, that’s cool, and has some nice messagey-type stuff, but what if . . .”

If it hadn’t been for that “What if?” I would have finished this book, well, back when I finished it.  The first time.  Or the second time.  I got about 3/4 of the way through the fourth time.  These were draft/editorial passes, of course, but it took that third time through for me to realize, “crap, this isn’t about what I thought it was, at all.”

I also realized my writing style had changed drastically.

A big reason for me starting back from scratch.

And here we are now.

I came up with a nice way to make this transition, and move along the next few sections of story.  There is still at least one gaping hole in the plot which I need to fill.  I also need about 17,000 words to make my NaNoWriMo goal.  I’m not worried about that (I’m hoping to have very, very productive days tomorrow and Sunday), and I think the finished produce will be more like 65,000 to 80,000 words, when all’s said and done.

I will tell you, though, that I thoroughly creeped myself out, writing tonight.  I’ve said it before, but it always bears repeating; the nights you give yourself the willies are among the best writing nights an author can have.  It’s not pleasant walking to the bedroom in the dark, of course, but it’s satisfying thinking, well, if that got to me so easily, what’s it going to do to folks who have ZERO idea what comes next?

Which is nice.

I wrote some last night, but was crashing fast and so I didn’t get to post.

I think I wrote some the night before, and had a similar situation.

So, here I am, posting for 5,201 words that have, heretofore, gone unaccounted-for.

Also, Rock Band is pure Awesome, poured into a container of Rock-Your-Face.  That is all the review you need.

So, I didn’t get to write on Sunday, unless you count writing late into what I consider Saturday night (it’s not Sunday until you go to bed, even if you go to bed at 5:30 in the morning). That’s alright, I was doing other stuff on Sunday. Would have liked to get my words but, hey, so it goes.

I got to a point on Saturday where I was stuck. Well, “stuck” isn’t the right word for it. I got to a place where I became convinced what I was writing wasn’t very interesting.

Wait. That’s not fair.

Okay. The reality of storytelling is sometimes you need to give bits of story that might not seem very important to the story at that particular point in time. More, you might have a piece of story that’s integral to the whole, but as it’s taking place is a little, “meh”.

This was one of those times.

We must soldier on when we get to this moments and so I did. Grudgingly. This was late on Saturday and though i was busy all day Sunday and all day today (until I started writing around midnight), it was on my mind.

How do I work through this?

How do I make it interesting?

How do I get through this bit of story where, by design, not a whole lot can actually happen? It needs to be like this in order for other things to happen, and have some context.

But oh, the temptation to cheat.

I read it back today before starting; I needed to have the proper tone going and to refresh my memory on where, exactly, we were (I stopped right in the middle of a scene, for pity’s sake).

It was good.

It was very good.

I was very surprised.

Sure, editing is needed. There’s a line of dialog so bad it made me cringe. Still, that’s what first drafts are for. You write, you get it all down, and there’s the framework of the story. There are the events, and the characters, and when it’s done and you type, THE END, then you get to go back and do it all over again.

It was very nice, I don’t mind saying, discovering that I actually liked the stuff I’d written. I remember it feeling very slow and that’s just not the case (maybe it felt slow because it took so damned long to write?).

So, good stuff. Also, 2,631 words tonight, and through a pile of story that I was worried would be hard, and wound up not really being hard at all.