Ecce Signum

So here it is, a few days after the wrap-up of National Novel Writing Month for 2021. Somehow I found the time and focus to write my 50,000+ words, crossing the finish line in the early evening of November 25. Our Thanksgiving plans were upended so I took advantage of the extra time to push through to the end.

2021 was, in the parlance of our times, a hell of a year. Between the new reality of life in the middle of a multi-year pandemic, unexpected expenses, and the loss of three friends and my mother, I didn’t think I would have the energy, time, and focus to start a new project, much less see it through to completion.

But complete it I did, or at least complete the 50,000 words needed to win NaNoWriMo. I attribute this to several factors in my life here in the COVID years.

First, my wonderful partner, who herself is a writer and so understands the need to have time and space to work on creative projects.

Next, our cats Poe and Pepper, who insist that I am out of bed every morning at 5:00 to feed them. I am a morning person anyway, so this is not a big deal, though before the cats arrived I would get out of bed between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m. I put that extra time to good use, getting in a solid couple of hours of writing at least five mornings a week, even though the amount of words I produced in that time varied wildly, depending on my energy level.

Third, I tried something new this year for the structure of my writing: Instead of going chapter by chapter, as I have done with past projects, I created 30 blank documents in Google Drive, one for each day of the month, and on each day I wrote exclusively in that document. If I ended the day in the middle of a previous chapter, the rest of that chapter would go in the new document.

I don’t know where I got the idea for this approach, other than that I have kept a daily (-ish) journal since sometime in 1991. The point there isn’t to write a set amount, but to write every day. There is no pressure to complete something. To borrow a phrase, the journey is the destination.

And this approach worked! I kept a running tally of my word count in a separate spreadsheet, and I appended the word count of each document to the title at the end of the day, so I could see at a glance where I was with respect to my goals. At no point during November did I drop below the minimum daily average of 1,667 words. And I didn’t miss a single day of writing before I hit 50,000 words.

I can’t say that this approach will work for everyone. And I don’t think it will work for those years where I write a collection of short stories instead of a single novel. But having November broken out as a series of quasi-journal entries made it easy for me to write every day, even if some days I only wrote a couple of hundred words. The days where I wrote 5,000 or more easily made up for the slow days.

As for the quality and content of what I wrote, I think it was improved by removing the pressure to complete “a chapter” by the end of the day. Certainly the words came more easily and I found myself getting into the flow of the story more easily. And in my experience the draft is just better when the writing is easy.

That is not to say that the editing part will be easy. No matter my frame of mind, I wrote 50,000 words, only sketchily-planned, in a month. This draft, when complete, will be not yet even be the first draft. That will come after the round of edits which I use to e.g. make sure the characters have the same names from one day to the next, and that a character who was killed on day 2 doesn’t suddenly reappear on day 20, unless that was the plan all along.

So I would call my NaNoWriMo 2021 experience an unexpected and unqualified success.

Another brief post, because life is busy right now.

Four new books arrived at the house in the past week. The first three are from an order I placed with Books and Mortar. The last is from a recently-fulfilled Kickstarter.

First up is Out of the Ruins, an anthology of apocalyptic stories edited by Preston Grassman. Since I like writing stories in the “salvage punk” subgenre, it seemed appropriate to read stories about events which would lead to the state of needing to salvage to survive.

Next is Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, the sequel to the most excellent Gideon the Ninth, which I read last year.

Next is Shadowboxing by Joseph Rios. I picked this one up based on a single poem of his which was featured in the Poem a Day newsletter distributed by Poets.org. This is the first book of poetry I picked up in many months.

Last is the Volume 19 of the Girl Genius comic created by Kaja and Phil Foglio, titled Sparks and Monsters. This one was a long time coming, thanks to *gestures at everything* happening during the course of production. But it is finally here, and it is wonderful as usual.

In reading news, I spent a couple of hours at a laundromat this week, which gave me time to read four of the five stories in Jean Davis’ collection Dreams of Stars and Lies, which I picked up, oh, some time ago. I read the fifth story on Friday, making the book the only one I read to completion in the month of November.

I also made a little headway in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which I will probably finish by the end of the year. Maybe.

In writing news, on Thanksgiving Day I passed 50,000 words in my story, Racing the Flood Down to the Sea. That puts me at about 75 to 80% done with this the pre-first-draft version of the book. If I complete it, and if it seems to have potential, then at some point in the future I will edit it to get a proper first draft. Then the real work will begin.

I have written more in the past two weeks than in the entire previous year. I wouldn’t say I have recovered from anything; more that I have grown accustomed, finally, to the way things are now. The new abnormal, if you will, which could also be a newbie-friendly version of the New Weird genre. Like, Annihilation for junior high.

But whatever needed to click, clicked, and now I can write freely again, if not well. I am a little out of practice.

Four new readable things arrived this past week at the Library of Winkelman Abbey.

First up is The Interim by Wolfgang Hilbig, the most recent delivery from my subscription to Two Lines Press.

Next is the new issue of the ever-excellent Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, to which I will, one day, submit some writing.

Next is the latest issue of Jacobin. I have cancelled my subscription to this one as, though I like the magazine and appreciate what they do, I have a stack of over two years of mostly-unread issues sitting in my office.

Next is the latest issue of Salvage, subtitled “The Disorder of the Future.” I will continue my subscription to Salvage for as long as they continue to publish. Though their topics are grounded in the present their viewpoint seems to be about five years ahead of the consensus reality, and I find that invaluable as I think about the events of the past few years.

In reading news, not much has happened because I have been too busy…

WRITING! NaNoWriMo started on November 1, and as of this post I have completed 17,000 words, or just over one third of the 50,000-word minimum to be a NaNoWrimo Winner. One third in one week is a comfortable buffer and I think I have it in me to get to 50,000 by the end of the month, though I have looked that particular gift horse in the mouth enough times to know that I shouldn’t take my time/energy/motivation/health for granted.