fine whine

Well, I have failed. I had good intentions to write my NaNo novel but never got around to making that a reality. I could list off a whole bunch of excuses starting with disenfranchisement from the election and continuing on with the whole lack of an overall plot until the twelfth, but really I never had the motivation in the first place for the sci-fi novel I'd planned about killers from the fourth (spatial) dimension. I chalked up 3446 words before giving up completely, most of that in protracted expository dialogue (and I typed another 1359 words of notes about the book).

Hoping to salvage the month, three days ago I began work on another novel, one nearer and dearer to my actual life. This time around I came up with 14,703 words (no notes, though) of musings on my life as of late, particularly about my dreams. I meant dreams in both common definitions of "nighttime imagination things" and "hopes and aspirations", and I wrote out a lot of personal stuff, briefly and occasionally fictionalized, about those topics. I talked about jobs a lot, and also a bit of my childhood. It was pretty good stuff, and I'll likely post parts of it somewhere here on my website, eventually. There are a lot of misspellings and other errors in there, though, since I typed almost all of it on my Palm with my fancy new keyboard.

I must admit that I really like typing on my Palm. It's just such a neat idea, and the keyboard never ceases to amuse me as an example of really good engineering. If ever I am faced with another typing assignment I'll probably forego the computers altogether and use this instead, I like it that much.

As for the next Nano, I intend to try again and win it. I have another year to prepare, and this time I think I'll make an actual outline, instead of a paragraph for the first section, another for the last, and some ellipsis dots between them. Failing that, I'll hack the contest. The last good idea I had before stopping thinking about Nano altogether was to write a Groundhog's day scenario wherein a good amount of the action is repeated and thus the text could be duplicated. Of course the devil would be in the details, particularly the ones that set apart the iterations, but creativity should help that. I thought I'd have this happen to a small group of people (researchers in deep space or current-day rogue scientists not unlike Michael Crichton's guys in Timeline), one or two of whom would have a sense of deja vu each time but never the same ones. The protagonist(s) would have a tough time getting persistent information in such a scenario and the solution would need to be clever. I could even go about doing this thusly: write a story to the best of my ability and divide its eventual word count into 50,000 and repeat as necessary. So it's sort of cheating -- I'm willing to give it a shot if it pushes me out of short story territory once and for all.

This is not to say that I've had a month of bad writing. I'm slowly catching myself up on the daily updates, and some of them are worth looking back upon, I think. For me, at least. After all, I wrote some five thousand words on this page for the month, so can I count those too? That would just about push me over the half way mark if I combined every word I typed in the month, I think.

Well, there's always next year.

Back when I was planning out my PTO I'd picked today as the token day to finish out my novel. I had no way of knowing then that by the time I would reached this day I would have already given up on writing not one but two separate novels. This is in fact the case, as I posted on this Nano forum post, excerpted below in its entirety for those who do not want to read the rest of the conversation or are merely too lazy to click links:

I've decided to throw in the towel. I lost motivation about midway through the second day, plugged along with a couple hundred words of easy expository dialogue here and there until the 12th when I had a late night revelation of what I thought was a plot. I furtively wrote it all down (I wasn't at home nor near a computer) but in retrospect it's really only the skeletons of the beginning and ending. I'm missing the whole middle.

So I wrote nothing until Thursday the turkey day, when I conceded that a book I didn't care to write would be tough to make someone else care about reading, and I started over with a very slightly fictionalized account of my life, and where I am with careers and dreams and whatnot.

I milked a good 14,000 words out of that before losing steam, and today I am throwing in the towel. Last year I wrote 48,000 words about not being able to write, but this year I don't feel like mustering the effort to do those other 30,000 (if I keep the fourth thousand words I did for "Killers from the fourth dimension"). I'm sad to do it but unless I cheat I can't win this year, and it's a big step for me that I'm not going to try to cheat, I think. After all, I usually resort to cheating in video games before I give up.

I didn't care enough to even name my protagonist. For that matter I didn't even use a placeholder: I merely referred to him exclusively with personal pronouns.

Moreover I did consider cheating. What a hollow victory that would be, to claim that I'd won a contest judged on the honor system with no prizes other than personal satisfaction and individual pride. I could've easily found fifty thousand words to post, as I had already sized up the words I'd posted here this month. I even considered tracking down all the emails that I'd sent and replied going back to the first, but before I got too far along that shady path I saw the wisdom of my ways and posted my concession. I'm disappointed with myself and feel very defeated, but I'll move on easily enough, I think.

I have a much greater respect now for the people who succeeded in writing not only novels this month but novels in general. For now I think I'm a short story author. Do I even have a novel in me? We'll know next year, I guess. Time to play some video games and start the deluge of library reserves that have been stored up for the whole month, I suppose.

I posted some 7,634 words today to my secret NaNo blog/word counter. Almost every one of them was typed on my Palm so I can't say for sure they're all from today, but either way that's not unimpressive considering the lack of progress and motivation that has characterized this venture this month.

The pieces were all in place for one of those rags to riches tales, of my triumphant ascent from faceless drone to a high salaried position behind a desk in a corner office. I had even worked a couple stints in various mail rooms, come to think of it. But the signs were wrong, the pieces dashed. I was back at square one, albeit with a bunch of clothes I’d gotten pretty cheap and a discount card that was probably good for some time yet.

So begins yet another chunk of my second stab at a novel for this month, a last-ditch effort to salvage NaNo and come out with my dignity semi-intact.

1,407 words today... I'm trying to be optimistic, and verbose at the same time. Neither is working out too well at the moment.

So it's the day after Thanksgiving, and I took the day off. Not for any particular reason or activity (Jessica needed to work today, after all) but just because I could.

So what should I be doing? Today's a big day for shopping, but I want nothing. Today I should be thankful for stuff, which I guess I am but not so much that I need to write it down.

Writing. That's what I should be doing, as I am several tens of thousands of words behind on my novel. So writing I did, starting an entirely new 'novel' that is mainly recollections of my dreams, some fictionalized and others not, and woven around them are contemplative pieces about my hopes and aspirations, at least career-wise. This is pretty high-concept, I must admit, especially considering that my first attempt at a novel this month was about "Killers from the fourth dimension".

I still think that book has some legs (as they say) but I don't really feel like getting behind it at the moment and giving it a big shove.

I'm not generally one to pick favorites. You can look at it as a sign of great integrity or great insecurity, but either way I just can't consistently a shortlist of the entertainment greats (or colors or foods or anything else for that matter). That said, to claim to be "not generally one to pick favorites" often leads to explanations longer than this one and after that, bewildered expressions. To save people the trouble, I often pluck titles out of the air as "favorites" just to grease the wheels of polite conversation and discourse.

Movies-wise I generally champion 1997's science-fiction/anti-fascism epic/spoof/actioner Starship troopers, more for the reactions it gets than for any actual affinity I have for the misunderstood gem.

That said, I do love the film.

I've never settled on a token favorite music group or album, however. Mostly when I'm pressed I just mention the ones I'm borrowing from the library, at long as they're moderately well known. Other times I just think back upon my collection and name names that pop up more than a couple times. In doing either I often omit the discs that I really do enjoy, oftentimes much more than the recent ones or the multiples.

After all, the Crash test dummies have been trying out a lot of new things on their more recent albums, but they're leaving out the stuff that makes it worth hearing.

But I digress. Today when I was walking around I was happy to be listening to Visual Audio Sensory Theater by VAST, which you've discovered if you're lucky and which you like if your tastes run parallel to mine.

Well, Lars Ulrich likes VAST too, but don't hold that against either of us.

I really like this album, and all the more so for having discovered it all on my own. Way back when I worked a pair of jobs for a summer, one of which saw me clocking in at midnight and out just around dawn. My commute, as it were, was about a twenty five minute drive, several miles of which was through Sand Run Park, a two-lane blacktop path through some of the most scenic bits of the Cuyahoga River valley.

At one point the road dipped through a river. I usually slowed down for that bit.

I knew those roads very, very well. By the end (and once I knew the way traffic and the deer worked) I was able to drive through the park with only my parking lights lit, and occasionally did so without incident. Being a foolish teenager I sometimes would do the same whilst steering with my knees, employing equal amounts of leverage and stupidity. But none of this matters. It was when I put aforementioned album into my player today that I recalled the first time I played it, moving stealthily through the park.

The disc, for those who don't know it, starts slowly and quietly with some strings that build up a sweet theme until abruptly switching over to a crunchy electric guitar riff. Then it starts to rock, and with great samples and instrumentation thrown in for the ride it makes for a good album all the way through. It hit me hard the first time I heard it and it sounds no worse these so many years later.

That isn't the part that matter so much either. The greatest part is the fact that it was a complete surprise to me. Back in my hometown there was this little shop called The Record Exchange that had two great bins of discs priced twenty five cents to two fifty, and I looted it often in those days. By now I have probably fifty or sixty such CDs littering my collection, and to be sure many of them are trash.

The occasional one does stand out, and such was the case with VAST's debut disc, which found its way into my hands as a four-for-a-dollar promo disc in a barely-labeled envelope.

Sometime since I've given that one away and replaced it with the genuine issue, and that was the one to which I was listening today. Today when all of this came back to me and I decided to write it down.

So, well, thanks, Record Exchange.