Jamie Todd Rubin's Blog, page 377

Another draft is in the books

At lunch today, I finished the first draft of what is my 7th complete story for 2010.  It is another science fiction mystery and it stands (in first draft) at 5,700 words.  I am very pleased with this one, but also a little worried.  The story reads very well, and writing the end of the penultimate scene brought tears to my eyes. But I wonder how much I am deceiving myself into thinking this story is really that good. I'm not saying its bad, but I wonder if the confidence I got from the sale to ANALOG is making me overlook stuff in the current story.

I plan on spending some time cleaning it up and making sure it reads smoothly, then I'll send it off to my trusted first readers to get some feedback and that will really tell me if I'm on the right track or not.

All told, I 've written 3,000 words today (including NaNoWritMo) and it's barely 1 pm.

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NaNoWriMo 2010 Day 4

I collapsed when I finally got to bed around 11:30 last night and I slept straight through until my alarm went off at 5 am.  For the first time since starting NaNoWriMo, I actually woke up to my alarm, rather than before it, and for the first time, I felt bleary-eyed and groggy as I made my way downstairs and grabbed some juice.  By the time I got to the computer it was already 5:10 and I felt like I was going to get a slower start today.  I could hear it raining out, and I started at the screen for several minutes, reading the Chapter 4 part of my outline and trying to figure the best way to start.  I finally resorted to a trick I've used on occasion in the past.  The scene was to open with a mission project director sitting in her office, trying to figure out how they were going to solve the latest technical challenge plaguing their project.  So I invoked a bit of real life:

Shielding the spacecraft: that was going to be the big challenge.  Shyamala Gibb sat in her spacious office, listening to the rain trickle down outside the dark windows, and trying to decide how she was going to deal with the latest setback.  She had the slightest of headaches, and the juice she was drinking unsettled her stomach slightly.

…

She glanced at the window, trying to recall the last time she was out in daylight. She arrived on campus before anyone else, and long before the sun came up.  She worked steadily through the morning, reading reports, and attending seemingly endless meetings.  She used to take her lunch in her office, quickly munching down whatever daily special was offered by the cafeteria, and then retiring to the small couch she had to steal thirty minutes of sleep.  But things had gotten so busy on the project that even that had fallen by the wayside.  As the sun swept overhead her day continued its hectic and often unpredictable pace, and before she knew it, she was once again looking out dark windows, onto a deserted campus.  Such was the life Mission Director.

Those who know me will recognize elements of my day in this.  But it worked.  Once I'd written these first couple of paragraphs, the rest flowed pretty smoothly.  While I started out more slowly this morning, I eventually hit my stride.  I passed the 1,667 word mark at 6:20 am, and the 2,000 word mark fifteen minutes later.  I ended the morning (and the chapter) having written 2,255 words.  My four day total is now 9,549 words.  I'm nearly 2,900 words above NaNoWriMo pace and 1,500 words above my personal pace.  At this point I am very pleased with my progress and I only hope that I can continue to maintain it.

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Another good writing day

It's 11 pm and I've had exactly 3.5 hours of sleep in the last 48 hours or so.  But I've had a productive couple of days on the writing front. As I mentioned earlier this morning, I knocked out 2,500 words on NaNoWriMo day 3, putting my 3-day total over 7,200 words.  This evening, at the Arlington Writers Group, we had a "free-writing" night so that people could work on their NaNoWriMo pieces together.  I opted to work on the short science fiction mystery I've been tackling, since I'm already ahead of the curve on NaNo.  During our 2-hour meeting, I managed another 2,200 words on the story, bringing it to 4,900 words. In fact, I stopped writing on the line that was the absolute climax of the story, and I imagine I'll finish the first draft before the weekend.  I expect the story to come in between 5-6,000 words.  4,700 words in one day is very, very good for me.  And I really think this short piece is a winner.

After the group tonight, a bunch of us headed over to the Silver Diner in Arlington and sat around a bunch of tables, talking shop.  It was a lot of fun. I didn't get home until almost 11 pm, and I have to be up at 5 am for NaNo, but it was worth it.

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Wrong number

Yesterday, my office phone was ringing off the hook with people calling to RSVP to some board meeting.  I had no idea what they were talking about.

"Is this extension 3456 [not my real extension]?" they'd ask.

"No," I'd tell them, "this is 7890 [also not my real extension]."

"Well I dialed 3456.  Can you just put me down for the board meeting?"

"I really have no idea what you are talking about," I'd say and eventually, the caller would hang up as confused as I.

After this had happened enough times to be obtrusive, I contacted our service desk.  It turns out that extension 3456 is my secondary line and so calls to that number go to my phone.  It turns out further that RSVPs to this board meeting were directed at extension 4356.  However, in the email invitation sent to everyone, the sender transposed the first two numbers, resulting in numerous calls to my phone yesterday.

Apparently, however, they've sorted things out. I haven't had any calls today.  At all.

Really, I don't mind.

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NaNoWriMo Day 3

Zachary had a bit of a rough night last night and so I didn't get to sleep until 1:30am.  Even then, I slept on-and-off until about 4:55 when, bleary-eyed, I finally got up and came downstairs.  I poured a glass of orange juice and then sat down in front of the computer and got started on Chapter 3.

I surprised myself in a couple of ways this morning.  Tired as I was, I thought I was going to slog through the session this morning, barely making the 1,667 word pace.  I needn't have feared.  I hit 1,700 words just after 6am, passed my 2,000 word goal around 6:20am and I finished up the morning, completing all of chapter 3 which came in at 2,504 words.  For 3 days in a row I have consistently surpassed my mark.

I also surprised myself this morning by making my first significant divergence from my outline.  That is to say that while the chapter followed what I had outlined, it became much more of an action scene than I expected and the events that took place were not events that I'd covered in the outline.  And while they got me to the same place, I think they gave it more depth and realism.  And also some possibilities that I hadn't considered.  This is one instance where the character in the scene is smarter than the writer of the scene.

I'm still not writing great prose, although this scene was less of a sketch than the others.  But as I mentioned yesterday, I am now seeing how this works, getting the ideas down on paper in a way that sounds like a story and then coming back in the second draft, once you know how everything goes, and reworking it into a thing of beauty.  However, there were a couple of places where I felt like I'd written some halfway descent lines.  I'll supply just one example:

And now they were all dead, their blackened bodies frozen in some kind of horrible rictus.

They might not be in there after all, she realized.  If the hull was breached by the explosion, as was likely since the hatch would not open, they may have been pulled out into space, seven new satellites for Pluto, a dark menagerie of moons temporarily guided by Charon around the dark waters of space.

It's not Shakespeare (or Malzberg or Kornbluth or Bester) by any means, but I was pleased with the lines.

Today's session puts me at 7,261 words for the first 3 days, more than 2,200 words above NaNo's pace, which means I could miss a full day and still be ahead of schedule.  I don't plan on missing a day, however.  Tonight, the writers group is having a NaNoWriMo writing session and I'll be there.  I'm still debating whether I'll add to the novel or work on the short story.  I'm leaning toward the latter.

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A "write-good" day of writing for me

Today began with me writing all 2,100 words of the second chapter of my NaNoWriMo novel this morning, and I was done by 7am and felt accomplished.  If that was all I managed to write today, it was a success, especially since I surpassed my daily goal of 2,000 words for the second day in a row.  Any day I write 2,100 words is a good day.

But then I surprised myself.  I have three short pieces in various states of completion, but I don't want to work on them in the mornings because I'm focused on not only winning NaNoWriMo but writing a complete draft of a novel. But I don't want to give up the short pieces entirely.  So this evening, after spending about 30 minutes reading a technical paper on black holes that serves a research for the novel, I decided to pull up one of the shorts and do some work on it. This one is another science fiction mystery, and I have very good feelings about the overall story.  So I pulled up what I'd written in Scrivener 2.0, read over what I'd written so far and then began to add to it.  I took a break to give Zach a bath, play with him for a while and put him to bed, and then I continued writing for another hour or so.  When I was finished, I'd added another 1,600 words to the story and I am very pleased with how it is progressing.

So in addition to 9 hours at the day job, voting after work, and playing with the baby, I managed to write a total of 3,700 words today.  Of course, I 'm heading to bed momentarily and I'll be back at the novel in 7 hours.  But you know what? Being able to work on something other than the novel this evening was a bit freeing and allowed my mind to wander and do things in short story form that I just can't do in the novel.  It was a nice change of pace.  I'm looking forward to switching back to the novel in the morning.  Tomorrow evening the Arlington Writers Group has a NaNoWriMo writing session so if I make my quota in the morning, I may spend that session working on the short story.

Good writing day, though.  I'm very pleased.

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New book Tuesday

Tuesday bring the release of some new books.  Here is what was downloaded to my Kindle early today:

Echo by Jack McDevitt.  The latest in the adventures of Alex Benedict.  I haven't yet finished the Devil's Eye, but once I complete that one, I'll put this one on deck.  These are always fun reads because they combine mystery and science fiction, and the universe in which Alex and Chase live is such an optimistic one.
The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 .  I had no idea that Mark Twain wrote a 5,000 page autobiography, and no idea that he requested that it not be published in complete form until 100 years after his death.  Volume 1 has arrived and I'm looking forward to reading it.

I'm still working my way, slowly, through Connie Willis' wonderful All Clear, which I hope to finish by the end of the month.  With NaNoWriMo and work and various other chores and endeavors, it's hard to find the time to zip through this one the way I zipped through Blackout.

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NaNoWriMo Day 2

Up at about 4:45am today and I got started at 5am sharp on chapter 2 of Far Away Places.  I felt like I started off a bit more slowly today than I did yesterday, and the net result was that I wrote less today, but I still beat both the NaNoWriMo pace (1,667 words) and my own daily goal (2,000 words) with a total of 2,132 words.  I finished 20 minutes early, but it was a natural break-point (the end of the chapter) and I saw no point in starting the next one.  I can start that cleanly tomorrow morning.

I'm beginning to see that what I am doing here is like a detailed sketch.  I think I might have mentioned this yesterday, but it is becoming clear today.  The prose does flow nearly as well as my prose does on short pieces.  But I can see that I am setting up the scaffolding for what will ultimately be something that (I hope) is beautiful in the second draft.  I'm laying everything out, narrative and dialog, in a messy way, but a way that will make it much easier to clean and prune when I get around it to in the next draft.  It also makes me realize that it will be the second draft that will be the time consuming part of the project.  And possibly where I will have the most fun, since I won't be under the pressure of hitting a mark everyday and will have prose to work off of, moulding and sculpting it into shape.

I'm also going back and re-reading the previous days writing, and while not rewriting any of it, I am heavily annotating it, inserting notes about what to cut, what to add, what narrative themes have been left out that need to be breadcrumbed sooner, etc. so that when I go into second draft, I have a decent set of notes to take with me on what I am intending.

So far, nothing post-worthy from the novel, but once I have something, I'll pose a passage or two that I think reads particularly well for a first draft.  But I am having fun with Part I of the novel because it plays out as a kind of dual race and that gives the pacing a bit of an edge.

Here's where things stand:

Pace
To-date


NaNoWriMo
1,677
3,354


Personal Pace
2,000
4,000


Actual
2,132
4,757

This puts me 1,400 words (nearly 1 day) above NaNo pace and 750 words ahead of my own personal pace.

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NaNoWriMo Day 1

I was up just before 5am and I'd written my first words of NaNoWriMo 2010 by 5:01.  The opening scene to the novel is a dark one and I'm not sure it's as smooth or tight as I'd like it to be, but that stuff I can worry about in second draft.  I felt like I started up a little slowly, but I soon hit a good stride and before I knew it (sometime around 6:20 or so) I'd hit 1,667 words.  As I approached the number, I thought about pausing to tweet that it'd hit the pace for the day, but by then, I'd gotten so into the scene that the next time I looked, I was past 1,900 words and I wrapped up the opening scene and completed Chapter 1 of the novel at about 6:51am, having written a total of 2,625 words, which puts me on day 1 at nearly 1,000 words above pace and which is a pleasant 625 words above my personal daily goal.

What's more, I was very pleased that I was able to work off my outline and complete the entire chapter setting up more or less what I needed to setup and closing the chapter on what I hope is a good hook to bring the reader along.  The writing could be better, but again, that's stuff I can dwell on at leisure in second draft.  The goal here is to get my first draft sketch of the story completely down on paper.  I guess we'll see. I'm actually more excited about tomorrow's chapter which I am already looking forward to writing.

When I finished writing this morning, I backed up to thumb drive (since the regular backup to iDrive won't run until tonight).  Don't forget to back up.  It would suck to lose the hard work.

Here's my daily summary:

NaNoWriMo pace: 1,667 words (1,667 words to-date)
My goal: 2,000 words (2000 words to-date)
My actual:2,625 words (2,625 words to-date)
Overall status: +958 words over NaNo pace

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The night before NaNo

So, with 4 hours to the beginning of NaNoWriMo on the east coast (and 9 hours until my first NaNo writing session), I'm pretty much all set.  The first third of the novel is outlined in detail, giving me 15 chapters which should take me through November 15, and if I stick to my daily word count goal, 30,000 words.  I expect to have the next part of the novel outline complete by the end of the week.  I actually have some of it outlined, but I wanted to leave some breathing room in case things wander during the first third.

Scrivener is all set up and ready to go.  Chapter and notes are all in place. Research for this week is accessible at a mouse-click.

My desk is clear, and my Bose noise-canceling headset is sitting next to my laptop, ready for the early morning start.

I generally don't need an alarm to wake up, but I haven't been getting up early lately, so just in case, my alarm is set for 5 am. The NaNoWriMo daily pace is 1,667 words. My personal goal is the same as last year, 2,000 words/day. The notes for Chapter 1 are available for me on the second monitor. I'm all set to go. Anyone wanting to follow me on the NaNo site, my buddy name is: jamietr. Or you can stay-tuned here for a daily progress update.

Good luck everyone!  See you in the morning.

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