I signed into my Nano page to take a look at things this morning, to see what’s changed, to see if there were any interesting articles to read that I hadn’t already perused last year. And no, nothing yet. Posting doesn’t really pick up until October, when the articles begin rolling in again. And November 1 is the first pep talk from Chris Baty, the founder of the very first National Novel Writing Month.

This marks my 8th year participating, and if I finish, will be my 7th year finishing. Which means I have seven drafts sitting on my computer waiting to be read or edited. This year, I feel a strange pressure on me to finish something good. Even though I know I advocate the same thing that Chris Baty advocates (don’t edit, don’t delete, just keep going, etc), lately I’ve been feeling like that strategy is no longer working for me anymore. The last three or four years, at least.

Is it that I’ve run out of good ideas? Possibly. Am I expecting too much out of myself? Also possibly, but I’d hate to think it is for this reason that I’ve stopped writing entirely. But I also know that all decent writers have one thing in common: they write. They write consistently and they write every day. They are disciplined in this habit, and it is for that reason that these kinds of writers succeed while sometimes-writers do not.

Then I think that I have set up a vicious loop for myself. At the end of November, I’m always spent. I tell myself that I’ll take a month break and then try to start writing small things again. That month inevitably ends up being eleven, especially as my own pace of life has accelerated. This is not discipline.

Discipline is writing every day, writing in my journal once a day, even if it is only a few lines. My discipline has faltered. I can say this about a lot of things in my life lately–my eating habits, gym habits, and now my writing habits.

I want to change this, though, and I’ve started to change my diet and exercise habits already.  The writing bit? I don’t know. Maybe with Nano this year, things will be different. Last night, an idea came to me, one that might hold enough possibilities to sustain me through this coming November. And, if executed right, could be a halfway-decent story.

After I had this thought, I realized that for the first time in four years, I actually have an idea for NaNoWriMo.

I think playing Fallout before I go to sleep gives me bad dreams. A few nights ago I woke after seeing my dream self run screaming hysterically out of a room, away from some perpetrator. Two nights ago I had a dream that just left me feeling bitter and resentful when I woke up, and last night I dreamed that my house was the only one–in the middle of a family dinner, no less–that was swept up by a series of tornados that came through the area. I lived in a wooden/corrugated metal shack, which was then destroyed against a brick building. The last part of the dream had my father gasping in the driver’s seat of a car, unable to breathe, while shouted for my cousin to take the wheel (we were in the back seat, petting his dog).

I didn’t think I’d have anything to really blog about, but it appears that I do.

A couple of books for the rest of November. I should finish over Thanksgiving, a much-needed four day break.

1. Diary – Chuck Palahniuk
2. The Borgia Bride – Jeanne Kalogridis
3. The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
4. Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana – Anne Rice
5. Until I Find You – John Irving

I finished The Borgia Bride on Saturday night, and it was an appropriately fluffy story with a decent mix of sex, violence, betrayal, jealousy, blah blah blah. Slightly less fun than a Philippa Gregory book, but interesting and quick.

I’m interested in The Road to Cana because it’s written by Anne Rice, who wrote the (beloved) Vampire Chronicles. I’d never thought that she was particularly religious, but I suppose in my mind I can see how vampirism and religion may go together. She received a lot of crap from people about her sudden switch from vampire novels into books on Jesus’ life, and so I’ll try one. Well, it’s the second in the series. I don’t think I’ll have missed too much (and it was the only one my library had).  Oh, and the other reason I want to read it is because it seems to coincide with the rekindling of my roommate’s faith, which I find highly ironic given his flagrant bigotry and intolerance of others different from himself. Actually he’s Catholic, so maybe that makes perfect sense. Either way, apparently I’m not allowed to proclaim my atheism or make fun of religion anymore in my house because it’s too offensive (I politely asked, then, if my roommates would stop making fun of gay people and my own ethnicity in front of me, at the very least, since I find that offensive, and was met with something akin to sarcastic disregard. Wonderful!).

Anyway, John Irving is always a favorite, and I happened to be wandering through that aisle when I suddenly remembered that I liked an author whose last name begins with i. So there. A good way to end the month, before I start reading Harry Potter again (agonizingly slow, I may add, as only three chapters a week or so, so I don’t get too far ahead of my friend, who is reading along).

In other news, NaNo is coming along fine. I hit the 38,000 word mark last night. Hopefully I can finish this weekend (as I should hit 44,000 words Friday night) and get it over and done with, to move on to other projects.

Actually, this is the first year that my story does not seem to be wrapping up very soon. Most of the stories I’ve written I’ve been able to wind down pretty quickly, or at least hit their halfway marks at around the same time as I hit 25,000. Am I just losing my touch? Do I suck so much that I’ve just drawn it out for thousands of words???

I guess we’ll see when I edit it (if I edit it).

Only a little under eight hours to go before NaNoWriMo officially kicks off for 2008, and if you can’t tell, I’m incredibly excited about it (for anyone who may have me on their buddy list on Gmail… I’ve only been counting down all week).

Anyway, in celebration, here are some tips that I have found work to get me to 50,000 words each year the last 6 years!

• Start as soon as you can. The earlier, the better. Just to begin at all is great. Start out strong and you’ll have a better chance of keeping up the habit throughout the rest of the long, grueling month. I start at midnight and write my first 2,000 words. Conveniently, when I wake up Saturday, I can write the next 2,000 words (but be 2k words ahead) as though it’s my first day. I begin again feeling like I’m already ahead of the game!
• Think about your month beforehand. Decide how important this is to you. It irritates me when people write long posts in the forums about how this is their third or fourth year and they’ve never finished because life gets in the way. Well, tough. Life gets in the way of everything. And so does work, and reading, and driving, and all the other things you want to do that aren’t writing. NaNo is kind of like going to the gym. A lot of people promise themselves they’re going to do it. So they do, for the first week, and then it gets hard and they stop. Then the gym membership goes to waste and they beat themselves up over how they once again didn’t finish something they started. So think about your month in advance. If you can set aside time each day to write, you may be able to finish 50,000 after all. If not–if you’re traveling, or work three jobs, or just can’t afford an hour a day every single day–then maybe this isn’t for you.
• DO NOT EDIT WHAT YOU WRITE. Don’t think about it. Don’t worry about continuity, transitions, nothing. DO NOT EDIT. Worrying about how much your opening sucks, or how much that entire paragraph just didn’t work will only stifle the creative process. And NaNoWriMo is about writing, not editing. The worst thing you can do is start second-guessing yourself the first week. If you decide to go back and alter your opening, for example, you’ll probably be unhappy with everything else you write. And if you focus on getting this 50,000 novel perfect the first time… well, you probably won’t finish. Hell, you may not even begin. This isn’t to say… don’t edit spelling mistakes. Obviously, you can fix those. Just don’t go back when you’re 10,000 words in and change everything at the beginning because it’s not 100% wonderful. Just…let it go.
• If you work well with music, then plan a playlist. I find this fun and relaxing when I’m stressed about characters and plot. I typically pick instrumental, moody music, because it can help set the tone of a certain scene. If you like quiet, that’s all right too (but that probably means you won’t work well at one of the Write-Ins or at a coffee shop).
• Back up your novel in several places. Sometimes I write at work, so I carry my novel around on a flash drive. Depending on how liberal your employer is (or how much down time  you have), you may consider this. Instead of writing at the crack of dawn, for example, or late at night when you’re tired from work, you can work a bit during lunch. This’ll take some of the stress off when you’re worried about setting time aside each day.
• Set a word goal for yourself every day, and meet it! I can’t stress this enough. Writing willy-nilly just doesn’t seem to work. I aim for 2,000. The recommended word count on the NaNo site is 1,667, and that allows you to finish in 30 days. At 2,000 words a day–just a few paragraphs more–you finish in 25 days, or with 5 days to spare, or 5 days “off.” Not bad, eh? Some days it’s absolutely grueling getting to 2,000, but most days it’s not. And on those terrible days you don’t meet goal, make sure to make it up the next day. You will see lots of progress in your word count meter, and feel better about reaching goal if you can do 2,000 a day.
• Describe things in vast detail. This pads your word count, and will probably make for anchored scenes. Since I typically loathe rendering the surroundings, this is a good exercise for me. And hey, if it sucks… just wait until you edit your finished novel to cut out some of the garbage.
• DO NOT EDIT WHAT YOU WRITE. Huh. Did I say this already? Silence your inner critic. I don’t care what it takes. Ignore that voice. IGNORE IT. Probably the most important thing to remember, hence why I repeated it.
• Write with buddies. It’s just fun, and you can support each other. And it’s nice to know that you’re not alone in your month-long torture session.
• Try not to think too much about your plot. I find that when I outline everything, I limit myself. It becomes boring. I like much more when the characters surprise me. About halfway through, just like getting a second wind when running, they begin to take on lives of their own. When I start, I have a general idea in mind. Maybe some vague direction. But I do not write it down and say, “Well, I’m starting _____ and then ___, then ____, and then it will end like _____.” You may suffocate your characters that way and exclude other fabulous ideas that may occur to you while writing. Just let it flow! And finally…
• Just write. Writing anything at all is great. And even if you don’t finish… there’s next year. Or December, if you’re motivated.

Just 11 days left to NaNoWriMo, my seventh eighth year participating.

While I’m excited this year, I’m also a little concerned. The first few years I had lots of ideas of what to write about, but the last two or three, I haven’t. Last year’s novel was a complete and total disaster, and I say that while using ‘disaster’ in the NaNo sense. All NaNo novels are probably disasters, but this one was so utterly and completely horrid that I haven’t even bothered to reread it.

But last year’s was one of my first years attempting a more ’serious’ tone in my NaNos. Some people say you should just stick to your strengths in order to get the thing done, and sometimes I truly believe that I should just do that. 50,000 words takes forever to write if you’re just a plain, average writer like I am. It takes a whole month (haha), even steaming ahead at a steady 2,000-words-a-day pace, which is still a hell of a lot of words to write regularly. It’s even worse when your idea is crap, won’t go anywhere, and therefore forces you to resort to old tricks and themes you’ve written about before. What I did two years ago, after almost quitting from sheer boredom and annoyance, was reintroduce some sci-fi elements back into it. And what I got from doing that was a horrible, confusing mess.

That’s not to say I haven’t done that in years past. In my second or third NaNo novel, there were spots you could see where I completely murdered a main character so that I could introduce a new one and go in a different direction and still keep the 16,000 words I had accumulated. It’s not cheating, but it sure does make you feel like crap.

So this year, I’m stuck between two ideas. A friend mentioned that I should do this because it’s fun. Write to my strengths–and those would be generally sci-fi elements. Aliens, zombies, or monsters, with some sort of comedic or parody element attached.

But what if I want to do this to learn? Can I write a ’serious’ novel and maintain it for an entire month? Do I want to really buckle down this fall and get a move on writing my first literary novel (that doesn’t suck so completely that I would rather just pretend like I didn’t write for NaNo last year at all than talk about or reread it)?

I had also thought of splitting the project in two, but now my conscience is forbidding that. It has to be a novel, not a group of short stories that I am going to write. I don’t think I’m going to let myself almost cheat and do that instead of writting a fully fleshed out (albeit short, clocking in around 50k words, which is around 80 pages depending on the font used) novel. I’m putting my foot down.

As I write about this now, suddenly the idea I had for a ’serious’ novel is looking less and less likely. It plays out in my head more like a short story than a gripping novel.

So maybe the idea given to me about zombies and space travel will work after all.

Anyway, to lighten the mood a little, here are some behaviors I find myself succumbing to during the month of NaNo, behaviors that I wouldn’t normally indulge in except that for the last seven or so years, I have done NaNoWriMo.

To get through NaNoWriMo, I…
• stay up as long as it takes me to finish my 2,000 words for the night, yes, despite the fact that I always refuse other times to stay up any day of the week no matter what the reason… I think the record was 3:45 AM, on a work night
• turn down offers to be social, since after work and the gym it’s NaNo writing time!
• turn the porch light off on Halloween night early, so I can sit in front of my computer with a blank page open, ready to begin at exactly as midnight strikes
• secretly work on NaNo at the office, or during breaks, which explains the sudden consistent appearance of my flash drive in the computer
• indulge in super-caffeinated beverages on the weekends to help me write (although I haven’t had to resort to Red Bull or anything like that yet… Plain coffee and soda for me!)
• listen to Mozart’s Requiem on repeat, because it provides 80 minutes of structured music as a background to my writing. Other favorites are Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and most of what Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard produce (words or songs with lyrics tend to throw me off and distract me)
• get up around 6 AM to fit in writing
• catch up on weekends, or write more than I need to so that I can have a day off during the week but still stay on track (record is 4000 words extra over a weekend… two days off during the week!)
• fantasize about what my characters will do next, obsessively, the entire month
• become nasty and short-tempered to the outside world when my novel isn’t going well
• want to read long passages to who unfortunate callers on the phone when my novel is going well
• check my word count on everything I write, at work and elsewhere, during November
• play with font face and size on the novel to make more or less pages (depending on how accomplished I want to feel)
• choose names at random out of the phone book
• use you, your life, and anything you’ve ever said to me as inspiration for novel fodder, characters (villains, most certainly, if you’ve ever crossed me for any reason), and events
• write on Thanksgiving, even with family there, if I haven’t finished my novel yet (this probably won’t happen this month)
• am strapped with guilt the day after NaNo ends, because I’ve gotten in the habit of writing every day for so long that there is suddenly a void when I stop

11 days!!!

NANO! NANO! NANO! NANO!