T.R. Neff's Blog, page 10

Day 12 of MyPeNoWriMo

Today I hit the halfway mark of the 50,000 word goal! Yay!

Day 12

If you’ve read the previous posts, you read (or maybe heard elsewhere, it’s nothing new) that you should measure more against your own achievements in self-improvement rather than someone else, because you can always find “better” out there and that will just drag you down. What I am seeing with my writing here, and for the last few NaNo, that where I used to struggle to get that 1667 words-per-day done, taking a few hours, I can now, in the span of an hour, hit well above that.

Granted, the first draft of anything is always going to be shit, but I can guarantee even my writing has improved along with the wordcount. Definitely not world’s bestseller good, probably not even salable good, but less-revision better. In the span of a single hour, with the exception of one day in that chart above, I am hitting the +1667.

So, how did that happen?

Persistence. Just keep at it, and you find all the right skills falling into place. I might even be able to go faster if I implemented several things:

Get my hands on a decent headset where I can dictate my words instead of being limited by my early morning non-existent typing skills*.NOT go back and constantly correct the typos the autocorrect misses. That’s a discipline in itself, but I still worry that I may have typed something so egregiously wrong that I won’t know what I meant when I go back to revise. It’s a useless worry, and one I’m trying to get better at ignoring. Now I just save the “go back and correct spelling” for immediately after my session so I won’t lose the context.I’d be totally remiss if I didn’t mention the resources I’ve used, like Chris Fox’s book, 5000 Words Per Hour. I haven’t hit that at all on any occasion but I’m definitely not down on myself because of it (see what I mean about not measuring against someone else?). I didn’t think I would magically improve to that kind of word count overnight, but I have improved steadily, which is the key.

Anyway, thanks for reading this far. And if you’ve had improvements to your writing using these or a different method, I’d love to hear about it. Until next time…

*I have excellent typing skills once I get going, but my fingers are lazy first thing with only a cup of coffee. I’ve been typing almost all of my life, starting with my brother’s “Trash-80” from Radio Shack. He taught me how to program in BASIC on it, as well. You know, If… then… go to. I miss that beast.

Day 10 of MyPeNoWriMo

Well, boys and girls, it’s that time again for an old update on the progress of the work. Looking good. The more observant of you may notice that I added a bold to certain numbers in the “Written” column. They’re the days I surpassed my personal goal of 1100 words per session (30 minutes). While it’s a fruitless and disheartening battle to compare yourself to others (since there will ALWAYS be someone better than you), it’s never a bad thing to measure yourself against your own goals and measure your own progress.

Ten days down, twenty to go

Funny thing too, I hit exactly 1000 words as my average per session. Nice milestone, since I’m patting myself on the back. I’m usually a lot more humble but hey, I can be proud of myself sometimes too.

I still haven’t decided if I am going to stop at 50K words (I’m currently on track, barring any emergency, to hit it on 25 NOV 21), or keep going to see how many more words I can crank out for this project. My work tends to grow during revision*, so if there’s a definite word count it’s better for me to leave it at the lower end before revision so it won’t behave like some blob devouring everything in its path and growing larger and larger until its out of control.

*I’ve been measuring that growth through various lengths of stories, all the way up to my published novel, Umbra: A Post-Apocalyptic Mystery, and it comes out to an average of 35%. Yikes!

Day 8 of MyPeNoWriMo

Just beyond one week in, and I’m feeling pretty good about my progress. You can see for yourself:

MyPeNoWriMo 2021, Day 8

As you can see (or not, because it’s small and frankly even I would need my reading glasses for that fine print), I’m a bit ahead of the game, with a probably finish date of 25 NOV 21. My average words per day is 962 so I’m feeling okay about that one. Not fantastic, just okay. I read through some of the other books and articles on writing so many words per day (Chris Fox’s and some other author whom I am just too lazy to go find her webpage at the moment, but if you’re interested, drop me a line and I can find and send a link or post here).

I also introduced a subplot that will (I hope) make it a little more appealing for those of us who love military science fiction as well. I don’t see this going far beyond 50,000 words, though. As much as I love a good Pohl/Asimov/Heinlein, I want this one to stay on the lighter side* of writing. My guess is that it will end up bloating, however, as my work tends to do during revision.

I’ll be the first to admit I have to rein that in.

Thanks for reading through my ramblings all the way to the end. Don’t be afraid to share, or point and mock if that’s your thing. That’s all for now.

*No, that is not a reference to the Force or the jedi. Besides, my work tends to end up on the Dark Side…

Day 6 of MyPeNoWriMo

I’m doing something a little differently today, because I’m a nerd who wants to share my neediness.

Every year when I would participate in NaNoWriMo, I wouldn’t just use the tool they provided on their site. I made my own in a spreadsheet. It evolves, not only from year to year but from day to day as I am writing, as I want to know of different statistics. Now, I wish I had saved my previous’ years and archived them to see what has changed, where I’ve improved or fallen behind, but I didn’t (changing over to a new computer didn’t help, as I purged a whole lot of stuff). I will probably make an archive file and just drop each workbook in from now on. So, here it is, in all its “Indigo”* glory:

As you may be able to guess, I’ve built in some formulae and conditional formatting. The only fields in which I enter information are the “Total”, bolded, and the time/minutes. The rest is all calculated. And this one is rather Spartan compared to my previous years, as I would do percentages of the day’s work and conditional it red or green if it was over or under my average. You can also see clearly that I highlighted the days in yellow to give me a sort of in-tool calendar, where I could catch up on weekends or the holiday – Thanksgiving for us i the United States in case you are reading this elsewhere. But I’m ahead by a few words.

On the original sheet I also have a single line of calculations that show me my average words per sprint (30 minutes each sprint). Today that stands at 947.6, which isn’t great, but any words on the page is better than staring at a blank screen.

Oh, and this is only one tab I added to my vast file on “career-since-I-started-tracking” word counts. I used to have a lot of this built into Access, but had to move away from that due to the cost and I am trying to rebuild in LibreOffice’s version, but there’s a learning curve that I didn’t have time to tackle before November.

You should see my other spreadsheets and databases.

Yup. Nerd.

*The color that looks like a dark lavender to me is apparently Indigo to LibreOffice. Whatevs. Still purple to me.

Day Five of MyPeNWriMo

Alright, so I skipped a day. I realize that there are some of you who may get updates and sending one out every day seemed a little excessive once I got to thinking about it. I’ll post this one now and maybe wait a couple of days.

Here’s for the last two days:

Day 4

Daily Wordcount = 20844:30 total hours spent writing8473 of the 50,000 goal16.95% of the first draft

Day 5

Daily Wordcount = 1723 words (I got up cranky and cold and really didn’t get into a groove of writing. I may add more later. And my coffee got cold too quickly.)4:30 total hours spent writing10196 of the 50,000 goal20.39% of the first draft

One would think that I’d have plenty of writing groove after the bizarre dreams I was having involving some woman I didn’t know in my house being impaled by a collapsing bridge (yes, you read that right) and a Zebrelephant in my yard (you read that one right too).

I’m actually trying a different method of writing this go-around. I spent a little time here and there in October coming up with some basic ideas for the novel to write, and then wrote out a basic plot of what I wanted to cover. I picked up a copy of Take Off Your Pants (no, it’s not porn, more of a reference to pantsers and this time I am definitely not an affiliate of the author, Libbie Hawker) to try things a little differently. The book got me to look at a few elements a little differently so proved useful for setting up some of the ideas floating around in my head and I recommend adding it to your writer’s toolbox. I still used my tried-and-true for some of the fleshing out, which is like a chimera of Save the Cat* (not an affiliate), 45 Master Characters (still not an affiliate) by Victoria Schmidt – the latter not so much the characters part as the “masculine” and “feminine” journey bits at the back of the book, a few of Holly Lisle’s books and classes**, and a few outlines I had from all the way back in high school, all of it meshed into a kind of flowchart that depended on the main character(s), genre, that sort of thing. Maybe one day I will post my flowchart.

If you’ve read this far, thanks. I can get carried away sometimes.

And for those of you who may actually be wondering WHAT I decided to write this year, it’s a science fiction romance. Yeah, I went there. The basic-basic-basic idea came to me decades ago as a confluence of multiple sources of influence.

Stellar 7, which I played to death on an AmigaEmpire, a video game I also played to death on the AmigaEnemy Mine, watched on Showtime and fell in love with the story after I watched it and discovered what it was really*** aboutCinderellaHeads We’re Dancing, a pretty cheeky song by the wonderful Kate Bush (her The Sensual World album is a masterpiece)

I originally had the scenes envisioned for a completely different story, and actually wrote them out at one time but that was almost thirty years ago and that writing is long gone. But the idea was still there floating around out of sight in the back of my skull, when I stumbled back over an artist by the name of “celldweller” who used to be Circle of Dust. Not ironically, the CoD album Disengage became my soundtrack while I played the aforementioned Stellar 7 and Empire (in the latter, I named my ships after CoD songs****, particularly loving “Yurasuka” for that purpose, ha ha ha ha).

So, yes, a science fiction romance. There are other influences creeping in, but this draft is already too long.

Thanks for reading so far, and I’d love to hear about your influences for your current novel, especially if they seem so utterly disconnected that something new just has to be created from the parts.

* Back in the day when I found this book, that’s all it was. It bloated after the death of its author, Blake Snyder, into its own little empire, which I find incredibly weird. Useful, but weird.

**Like I said before, I can’t recall if I’m still an affiliate but that’s not an affiliate link anyway. If you go over there and buy classes you can join the forum for free. If you do, drop a line to say “hello”.

***I suspect the reason it didn’t do well in the box office was that it sounded like some generic sci-fi flick about geology and mining rather than what it is, a buddy-story of heartwarming caliber, where the “mine” is the possessive, not some hole in the ground.

****Song titles on the Disengage album are taken from C. S. Lewis’s science fiction novels, Perelandra and Thulcandra, although he should have named one “That Hideous Strength” as well…

Day Three of My Personal Novel Writing Month

Or MyPeNWriMo (yeah, whatever).

First things first:

Daily Wordcount = 2605 words3:30 hours spent so far writing (I do 30 minute sprints, at least an hour a day but today a little more)6389 of the 50,000 goal12.78% of the first draft, details for my fellow golden brains out there.

And some of those more attentive may wonder why there’s no Day 1 or 2 post. Well, it’s because I was working frantically to get my word count out there. Alright, I admit it. I wanted to post, planned to post, and forgot to post until today. While I have my personal nerdy worksheets to track my progress, I thought I’d share to hold myself accountable.

That brings me to an interesting thought: successful* novelists have been working and publishing a lot longer than NaNoWriMo has been in existence, and many kick out more product than just that one novel drafted in November. How do they do it? I suspect it works much the same, except on whatever scale they use. My first self-published novel, Umbra (shameless plug) was written during NaNoWriMo but revised outside of that window along the guidelines of Holly Lisle’s How to Revise Your Novel**, and took a little longer than a month. Maybe it shows, so if you feel like reading it and letting me know in the reviews…

So here I am, putting myself on display like I rarely do. Just so you can point and laugh when I stumble. Not to mention a record to my accomplishment or failure. Who knows, I may even post a synopsis or scene or such. We’ll have to see.

I may not update it every day, so if you’re interested in knowing when I do post, subscribe or click that RSS feed (is that still a thing? I’m out of the tech loop. Probably for the best.).

*Success is subjective and YMMV. My definition of successful is equivalent to “making enough money to eat and keep a roof over my head, and maybe have a little left over for the fun stuff now and again.” Some will only count it successful when they sign a contract with Hollyweird to turn their 1300 page magnum opus into the next blockbuster hit.

**I honestly don’t recall if I’m an affiliate of hers anymore or not, but there you go. I warned you. But if you’re interested in revising a written novel, she’s got the best method I’ve found so far, and a decent community of folks who will help you along your writing path.

Why I Left the NaNoWriMo Community

Way back in 2006 or 2007, while working at a local bookstore, I came across a nifty little box of writer tools with the title “No Plot? No Problem!” by Chris Baty. I snagged that puppy up quicker than you can repeat the title, and as soon as my shift ended I popped that box open and pulled all the goodies out to take a look. The premise was to write and write and write within that 30-day timeframe, not to go back and edit but get words, even cruddy words*, on the page. It had a calendar, a button reading “Novelist” or “Ask Me About My Novel” or something I can’t remember now (and I’m too lazy to go get the box and take a look inside), inspirational cards, to be read one each day. Down-to-earth humorous inspiration, not that cream-puff, flighty-dream garbage. I think there are even “I-Owe-You” coupons exchanging chores with loved ones during the time period, but I never used any of them because at the time I was mostly on my own.

After buying that box, I whipped up my first novel in 30 days. It was sheer crap, but it was an honest-to-goodness complete novel that I had finished. I picked the entire thing apart, and while I have no clue where the original draft is (probably got lost in the myriad moves over the last few decades of my life), parts of its still live on in my novel Umbra:A Post-Apocalyptic Mystery, like some literary Frankenstein’s Monster (oh, wait, Frankenstein’s Monster IS literary…).

Chris Baty founded NaNoWriMo, and it follows the same course as the NPNP toolkit. I’m not exactly sure how I discovered it (mentioned in the booklet most likely) but I signed up right away and eagerly awaited November to roll around so I could start banging out the words on my keyboard.

I participated almost every year, with a few hiccups in there because of major life changes, either incomplete years or having tons of new responsibilities that sadly superseded my love of writing.

Now, I rarely participated in the forums or the Facebook groups, but I arrived in my new home and shiny, happy me thought it would be a fantastic fresh start to link up with other authors in the new region. At the time I was active on FB, so I joined the group there.

Eager to introduce myself and get my feet wet, I joined a discussion about which software people favored for their NaNoWriMo project. The software I used hadn’t yet been mentioned in the thread, so I brought it up and said something nice about why I liked it (I can’t even recall what it was at the time, but I use Scrivener now almost exclusively and love it. Free plug for you there, Literature & Latte). Within seconds, waiting to pounce like an angry cat-lady**, some screeching shrew jumped on my post about how much she hated that software, listing everything that was wrong with it (making up a lot or listing features I liked as bad) and called me an idiotic moron for even bringing it up, let alone liking that. Some “loving and tolerant” community for you right there. Needless to say, that was my last post. The last thing I needed was some angry beast taking out her frustrations on me when I was in the community for support. I didn’t even wait around to see if they dealt with Madame Poor-Life-Choices in light of her awful behavior***.

Welcome to 2021’s NaNo, and I eagerly awaited the revamped site and the go-ahead to get in there and list this year’s project. Getting the nod in an e-mail, I went to the site. Lo and behold, I caught the feed from the NaNoWriMo twitter account, and… they were posting NOT about writing, or getting more people to join, promoting literacy and all the good things that come with writing.

Nope. They were bitching about Texas’ abortion law. It became clear to me that a) they had NO idea what they were complaining about (too long to discuss here but I doubt anyone on the staff actually read the bill they squawking about), and b) that they were far more interested in pushing ideologies that have nothing to do with literacy and writing, turning a good site into a polarizing billboard. It was far from the only post like it.

Well, good for them. I thought they were all about writing but they showed their colors. They probably had before, but until that feed, I had not seen their true colors.

Maybe you can’t keep your mouth shut about politics, but I can keep my wallet shut from donations. At least they showed me their true colors before I spent my hard-earned money.

I deleted my account right away.

Luckily for me, I’m something of a spreadsheet nerd, so I set up my own and it’s eagerly awaiting its first daily word count, come NOV 2021. While it may be nice to have a community of… Wait. I was going to say “like-minded” individuals, however I know from many experiences since the FB one, in-person and virtual, that THAT so-called community of “welcoming and tolerant” individuals are anything but.

So, are there any other writers out there who abandoned the site but continue to write?

/rantoff

*I think it was Ernest Hemingway who said something to that effect first, but whoever said it, the truth is that all first drafts are shit.

**Don’t get me wrong, I love kittehs. It’s just a creepy coincidence that people who obsess over their collection of felines (like they’re Funko Pop dolls and not living creatures) do have the same angry, lonely personalities. Not to mention the same nasty smell in everything around them and the squalor in their homes. Clean your litterboxes, people!

**I’ve since come to discover this is the normal for a horrifying majority of people on the various social media sites, who turn there just to chase and troll and shriek at other people, the only way they know how to cope with the lack of a decent character traits. Genuine people with decent lives just live them; they don’t spend what little God-given life they have chasing others down to demean, berate, harass, harangue.

Let’s Face It… I’m Terrible at Blogging

Everyone on this planet should be honest with themselves in all things. After all, how can we start our own character arc of growth if we don’t admit the truth (most often some fault we refuse to see, let alone examine and excise)? So here’s one of mine: I am terrible at blogging. Maybe the articles or what I write is interest but that’s not really the blogging. Blogging – “weB-Logging” requires more of the latter than the former. Logging was a HUGE deal back when I was in the military. It was almost like “if it isn’t logged, it didn’t happen.” Significant gaps in any log book would cause considerable consternation. Especially late at night, when you got stuck with the watch and there was literally, in many cases, no notable activity. That leveled some scrutiny in your direction: “Were you sleeping, Petty Officer Neff?” to combat the questions, you’d note pathetic things:

0235 (that’s 2:35 AM for you non-mil folks) heard noise in maintenance room. Investigated but found nothing. (Note: you ALWAYS heard noise from maintenance rooms. You know, like machinery…)

Logs were a very important tool then and so very long before that, and will be in the future (Captain’s Log, Star date blah blah blah). The one thing they had was consistency. Which I do not. Unless I’m consistent at being terribly inconsistent… conundrum for another time.

This the bottom line is I am bad at blogging, and that’s the first step, admitting it. Now I just have to do something about it without setting myself up for failure (again).

What about you? Encountered anything that is essential to your success in any endeavor that you know you needed to overcome?

Horrorshow – Normalcy

So, now that normalcy is back, I can address the second part of my blog post I started way back here on the Horror genre.

Funny, that word “normalcy”. See, that’s where real horror rears its ugly head. When blessed normalcy is destroyed, it opens tiny breaches in the walls of our lives that let the horrors in. Anyone can tell a gross-out story that’s more like a wrecking ball smashing into the house–yes, it hurts, but unless you’re blind, you can see it coming (and if you are blind, you can probably hear it coming). REAL horror is slow, the cracks in the foundation where water seeps in and undermines the wall that will bring it down without warning. We’re left picking through the pieces, trying to make sense of what happened and not being able to reassemble even a fraction to recreate the life as it was “before” the horror.

Some post-apoc stories address this in a way that embraces Horror – a future of no-holds-barred version of humanity, where civilization and the things we take for granted are memories. Only those willing and able to exert force against others stand a chance for survival, and even then it’s the slimmest line between who wears the white hat, and who wears the black. Anarchy descends, confrontations become brutal and bloody over the dwindling resources. The lucky ones die first.

There’s another kind of aspect with that concept of “normalcy” that has a very odd highlighting event: Chernobyl. While I grew up with it in the news from half a globe away, others faced it as their horrifying reality. Chernobyl still sits among the world’s concerns after decades, not just because of the extensive political corruption, cover-ups, incompetency and lies. No, the real horror ran a lot deeper, faced by those who responded to the disaster and those who lived in what is now known as the “Exclusion Zone”.

For the first responders, they were just doing their jobs, putting out the fires caused by the explosion, all the while being assaulted by a ghost – incapable of being seen, being heard, being felt – that had very real teeth. The bodies of these men began to betray them with that insidious poison, robbing these strong men of their ability, their dignity, even the comfort of human touch, exchanging it all for intense pain and suffering only death can remove it. THAT is horror.

And the normalcy of the people who lived around there, who may or may not have known about the explosion that rendered the countryside unlivable. Those in Pripyat were forced to leave, and leave everything behind, being reassured that they would return in a little while. Others, the people who only knew their farms and patches of land found themselves approached by the soldiers either ripping them from their homes, unable to even take their pets (to be razed, hauled away and buried, with literally nothing but the underlayer of dirt left behind. I will not mention what happened to the pets.) or who warned them of that invisible threat. They couldn’t understand why they couldn’t drink their cow’s milk, eat their hens’ eggs, or the potatoes grown in their gardens. A scientific concept becomes a beast, a vampire that drains the blood of normalcy from a people innocent of any involvement in its cause.

HBO’s Chernobyl has gotten incredibly high ratings for its depiction of the events surrounding the disaster, and while it wasn’t a “horror” show (like that horrid other movie that tried to capitalize on the creepiness of an entirely empty city) it captured that helplessness in the face of such a threat, as innocent people paid for the sins of their government’s corruption and lies. Wolves, politicians, soldiers – all these things the people could see coming, but the threat of radiation… Few armors could keep such a beast at bay, and no weapon – except time – can remove its threat.

THAT is real horror.

Public Service Announcement

You’ve heard “Save early, safe often” a thousand times, and probably AFTER you’ve lost that masterpiece manuscript you just KNEW was going to skyrocket your writing career to the stars and forever engrave your name in the granite monument of literary genius.

But what about “Save somewhere else.”?

Yeah, I should have done that. Now I’m panicking because some of the projects I’ve been working on could possibly be lost for good, unless my old friend (you know who you are) comes through. See, my motherboard on my laptop decided it was no longer going to function. Just like that. I encountered a black screen of death–sort of. The laptop still powered up, but all I got was a black screen. Couldn’t get it to go into Safe Mode, couldn’t get it to stay powered on for more than two minutes.

Bloody but unbowed, I got another laptop and some peripheral equipment to be able to read the drives I’d had in the old one. Except now the drives were reading as “Unformatted” and “Unallocated”. Panic mode! Like I said, I’m waiting to hear from my friend on whether or not the data can be pulled so I can get my files and keys for downloaded software licenses that were there. Including my Scrivener, which will make me very, very sad if I have to purchase yet another license (long story).

Anyway, the moral is save your important stuff somewhere else, and preferably in multiple places.

That is all.

Next week, back to the horror. Until then…