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strange_aeonsIt's National Novel Writing Month. Not being the fan of suffering that ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lstone makes me out to be, I am not participating, though I know at least two and a half people who are and have enjoyed, in this time when they most need my support, mocking them relentlessly.
Aside from the suffering, I'm not participating because I'm already working on a novel, bits and pieces of which (primarily the funny ones) those misguided few of you who friended me during my long hiatus can find in my back posts if you're interested. More accurately, I was working on a novel until ... August 20th ... of last year. Jesus Christ. I knew it'd been a while, but I hadn't realized it'd been over a year.
Anyway, the point of this post is that while I know I can't write fifty thousand words in one month without having to compensate by spending the following three months wearing underpants on my head, I do have a novel at around the forty-five kiloword mark that is sorely in need of some attention, and getting it up to the fifty kiloword mark in November is a not unreasonable goal. Yes, I'm setting the bar very low here. I decided to spend most of the month dawdling and rereading what I already have so as to create an element of tension. Really. Not because I'm lazy. And today I wrote 1028 words, which isn't bad at all.
I see why I stopped — aside from the fact that I'd written thirty thousand words in forty or fifty days and was exhausted, the last couple of paragraphs I'd written were crap and needed to be trashed, but the boundary between the crap and the decent stuff above that was difficult to spot. I spent at least an hour fiddling with that section figuring out what to cut.
It surprised me how quickly these people came back to me. Rook has his sudden flashes of rage, Sweeney always seems to have a plan, even when he's working off the cuff, Q're¹ has ... her.... Oh, shit.
This novel has required me to do a lot of research, but I don't take notes, because I tend to be good at remembering this stuff. But for once, my memory has fallen down on me. Q're has some kind of neurological condition that gives her grand mal (tonic-clonic) seizures and causes some kind of eye problem that makes her eyes more bother to use than they're worth since she's got a compensatory sense. Possibly nystagmus. I have no idea what this condition is anymore, and I spent about an hour bonding with Google to no effect. You people are pretty geeky. Anyone have an idea? I may have to start posting to rasfc again, I'm sure someone there will know.
(I wonder if I made a research error somewhere along the line and thought that nystagmus sometimes accompanies epilepsy. It doesn't, as far as I can tell, but it does appear as a side effect of some drugs used on epilepsy, and a mistake like that would explain a lot. Actually, given the way magic works in this setting, I might be able to work with that.)
I'm not back in the swing of things yet, so there aren't many funny bits to post, though this made me laugh when I ran across it while reading through the stuff I'd already written:
This paragraph is a bit overblown and is probably going to have to go, but I wrote it at around two thirty in the morning and I was feeling punchy:
On a wholly unrelated note, don't say I never told you what I want for my birthday. Actually, this is progress. Last week I was steving the original ofursulav's Twigjack, which is twice as far out of my price range. At this rate I should be wistfully eyeing something I can actually afford, such as a shiny bead or a new pencil, sometime next month.
¹ I feel the need to justify this name again. She and her sister are from somewhere unspecified in Indonesia, and she was named after the maiden aspect of the pre-Islamic Arab triune goddess Al-Lat, who shows up in Islam as one of the daughters of Allah. Or possibly one of his wives. Okay, I've forgotten that too. That, and I needed a character with a Q and/or an apostrophe in her name to round out the central cast, since I already had a character with a normal but unusual name, a character whose name is a noun, a character with a made-up name that sounds silly if you read the vowels wrong, and a character with no name.
lstone makes me out to be, I am not participating, though I know at least two and a half people who are and have enjoyed, in this time when they most need my support, mocking them relentlessly.Aside from the suffering, I'm not participating because I'm already working on a novel, bits and pieces of which (primarily the funny ones) those misguided few of you who friended me during my long hiatus can find in my back posts if you're interested. More accurately, I was working on a novel until ... August 20th ... of last year. Jesus Christ. I knew it'd been a while, but I hadn't realized it'd been over a year.
Anyway, the point of this post is that while I know I can't write fifty thousand words in one month without having to compensate by spending the following three months wearing underpants on my head, I do have a novel at around the forty-five kiloword mark that is sorely in need of some attention, and getting it up to the fifty kiloword mark in November is a not unreasonable goal. Yes, I'm setting the bar very low here. I decided to spend most of the month dawdling and rereading what I already have so as to create an element of tension. Really. Not because I'm lazy. And today I wrote 1028 words, which isn't bad at all.
I see why I stopped — aside from the fact that I'd written thirty thousand words in forty or fifty days and was exhausted, the last couple of paragraphs I'd written were crap and needed to be trashed, but the boundary between the crap and the decent stuff above that was difficult to spot. I spent at least an hour fiddling with that section figuring out what to cut.
It surprised me how quickly these people came back to me. Rook has his sudden flashes of rage, Sweeney always seems to have a plan, even when he's working off the cuff, Q're¹ has ... her.... Oh, shit.
This novel has required me to do a lot of research, but I don't take notes, because I tend to be good at remembering this stuff. But for once, my memory has fallen down on me. Q're has some kind of neurological condition that gives her grand mal (tonic-clonic) seizures and causes some kind of eye problem that makes her eyes more bother to use than they're worth since she's got a compensatory sense. Possibly nystagmus. I have no idea what this condition is anymore, and I spent about an hour bonding with Google to no effect. You people are pretty geeky. Anyone have an idea? I may have to start posting to rasfc again, I'm sure someone there will know.
(I wonder if I made a research error somewhere along the line and thought that nystagmus sometimes accompanies epilepsy. It doesn't, as far as I can tell, but it does appear as a side effect of some drugs used on epilepsy, and a mistake like that would explain a lot. Actually, given the way magic works in this setting, I might be able to work with that.)
I'm not back in the swing of things yet, so there aren't many funny bits to post, though this made me laugh when I ran across it while reading through the stuff I'd already written:
It also occurred to him to wonder if he'd ever regain the use of his, at this point, completely numb left arm, though he'd already wondered this several times in the last few minutes and planned to do so again shortly if something wasn't done about the arm situation straightaway.
This paragraph is a bit overblown and is probably going to have to go, but I wrote it at around two thirty in the morning and I was feeling punchy:
He had seen snow in photographs, but they hadn't prepared him for the reality of it, the way it blazed under the grey-white sky. It was terribly beautiful, but in an inaccessible way, not like something he should be able to touch. It reminded him of Sweeney. They were the same color.
On a wholly unrelated note, don't say I never told you what I want for my birthday. Actually, this is progress. Last week I was steving the original of
ursulav's Twigjack, which is twice as far out of my price range. At this rate I should be wistfully eyeing something I can actually afford, such as a shiny bead or a new pencil, sometime next month.¹ I feel the need to justify this name again. She and her sister are from somewhere unspecified in Indonesia, and she was named after the maiden aspect of the pre-Islamic Arab triune goddess Al-Lat, who shows up in Islam as one of the daughters of Allah. Or possibly one of his wives. Okay, I've forgotten that too. That, and I needed a character with a Q and/or an apostrophe in her name to round out the central cast, since I already had a character with a normal but unusual name, a character whose name is a noun, a character with a made-up name that sounds silly if you read the vowels wrong, and a character with no name.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-25 07:23 am (UTC)And I don't think I'd dare buy you anything sharp. Not that I could afford it, either, seeing as how pencils and shiny beads are my budgetary limits these days (except, of course, when I completely blow my budget for the next two months by buying a video game, like I did last week).