fanbloomingtastic

I. AM. THE BLOOMING QUEEN. OF. PROCRASTINATION!!! #nanowrimo

Bow down at my feet, oh mere mortals who think that procrastination involves just sitting around not doing stuff.

Oh no, this takes years of hard work and practice.

This involves signing up to NaNoWriMo for a second year despite all that I went through last year and then deciding that EVERYTHING is more appealing than actually sitting down and writing a novel. And I mean EVERYTHING.

Nanowrimo is the National Novel Writing Month (except it's very much International now). The aim is to write a 50,000 word (roughly 175 page) novel in 30 days...November to be exact. You can find out lots more about it at www.nanowrimo.org

 

(My badge I earned from completing the 50,000 words in a month last year)

And procrastinating about doing this is crazy (hmmm see here for why it being crazy isn't actually so crazy) because I actually seem to be enjoying writing this year's novel far more than I enjoyed doing it last year (well, so far). I decided I would start out with no plot, just start free writing and seeing where my story led me (hopefully not into a whole baring open of my soul like last year). I also decided that I would hold in reserve, in case of emergency a giraffe who wanted to be an astronaut. As you do.

And I actually enjoy writing fiction, when I ACTUALLY get down to it. It's an indulgence. I make it fun. I go to places I wouldn't normally go. I make efforts to find nice places I can go and sit and write. Coffee shops (with the added bonus of coffee and cake), libraries (and my local ones are designated 'Come and Write Your NaNoWriMo Here' spaces), ball parks, by lakes with ducks, play parks, shopping mall food courts etc. It's fun. It gets me out of the house which is something very important for me to do (see posts about cyclothymia and social anxiety on here) AND living in Phoenix I've spent the summer hibernating inside our house trying to keep out of the 109-115F (43-46C) temperatures, so now I need to make the most of more decent temperatures (mid 70s). And I reward myself with little treats when I hit my required word targets (or before I hit them, see below....).

So NaNoWriMo started Tuesday 1st November and I excitedly started writing decided I'd go and buy myself a notebook so that I could write wherever and whenever I wanted without having to arguments with the kids about getting off the computer or being antisocial in the evenings. But of course, it had to be the RIGHT notebook. So I had to go to several different shops before I found it. And then I eagerly started writing. Aaaaaand I had to look out for half-price Halloween decorations in the sales because they might all get sold out before I had a chance to look again. Aaaaand I had to do a weekly food shop to make sure we had stuff to eat and especially lots of treats that I could reward myself with when I hit my NaNoWriMo targets.

Then I started writing. No, actually then I DID start writing. Well, at about 2pm I did. Then I had to break off for the school run, and play with Melchett, and nag Goth Child about her homeworks, and then nag Melchett who'd said she didn't have any but did. And then obviously I had to cook tea, put kids to bed etc.

So Day 1 target = 1,667 words. Day 1 actual = 851 words. Not a total fail but not a great start.

And the week has carried on that way really. Including these classics first seen on my Absobloominglutely tumblr blog & Twitter:

 

"At the ball park. I have this cunning plan that I can bribe myself into getting more #nanowrimo wordage down….." (3rd Nov 1.34pm)

 

"Oops, plan failed…. #nanowrimo #carrotapproachworksbetterifyoubuyitAFTERyouhavedonework (3rd Nov 1.42pm)

 

"Pretty....treeeee..... #nanowrimo #attentionspanofagoldfish" (3rd Nov 1.45pm)

...........

"Just found myself pen cap on lip seeing if I could get other end up a nostril whilst smiling at leaves floating on breeze. I'm 14 again." (3rd Nov 1.57pm)

...........

Luckily at this point lots of people 'kindly' shouted at me to get off the internet and get writing.

So here we are nearing the end of Day 4. In theory I should have about 6,667 words written by now if I'm to finish my 50,000 in time by the end of November.

Instead I have:

• an exceptionally tidy kitchen;
• repaired a teddy for Melchett she's been asking me do for about a month;
• all the washing and ironing up to date;
• some initial research on two new costumes I'm going to make for future burlesque acts;
• half of our household filing pile that's been sitting staring at me for months actually filed;
• signed up, installed and configured Pandora internet radio, TuneIn internet radio and Spotify on computer and cell/mobile to help research music for future acts;
• surveyed friends/followers on Twitter about their favourite happy songs to start off serendipitous song discovery on Pandora;
• started pimping my ride (Bessie my trike who I've started riding to school with Melchett 2-3 mornings a week);
• caught up on the backlog of Pan-Am, EastEnders, Fry's Planet Word, 2 Broke Girls, Good Wife and The Mentalist episodes that 'needed' watching;
• taken down, packed away and bought a few new extra Halloween decorations;
• slept;
• slept a bit more;
• and many, many more things that weren't writing a novel.

Luckily I also have 4,569 words written as well. Not as many as the 6,667 I should have by this point but it's not a total disaster. The helpful statistics on the NaNoWriMo site tell me I'm on course to finish on December 13th at this rate....hmmm, not good. That's not a win.

Soooooo if blog posts are a little erratic over the next few weeks you'll understand won't you?

Unless I decide that blogging is a 'useful' procrastination from writing my novel too. Thinking of which I might tell you a bit about the plot..........noooooo, stop, don't do it, get back to writing NOW! OK inner voice of reason (mortal enemy of procrastination).

You just know I'll be back soon to tell you, don't you ;)

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Nanowrimo, I did it....but please can I sleep now?

I am soooooooooooooooo tired. I ought to be happy, but I feel kind of numb.

I'm taking that as a natural let down after working so hard at something and then it being done.

You know when you're at school or college and you spend weeks researching and writing an essay, or months revising for your exams.....and then it's all over and you don't quite know what to do with yourself?

Or if you perform, the months of putting an act together, refining and practising it, getting the adrenaline rush before performing it............and then there's the come down, the emptiness and the 'what now?'

Well, I think the fud I'm now in is something like all of that.

Nanowrimo was a fantastic experience and I'm so glad I tried it and stuck with it. I learnt so much about writing and about myself, for instance:

1. I desperately need to read more than I do if I am serious about writing. Having now tried to write a novel, I now know what I want to look out for when I read 'proper' writers doing it ;)
2. I CAN write 50,000 words in a month. And despite a lot of them being rubbish and there being huge holes in my plot...there was a lot of good stuff too.
3. Writing without a plot IS a worthwhile thing to do. I started writing the novel on November 1st with an idea about what the plot would do, with a beginning  and an end and thought that was a good plan. It didn't actually work out like that, I found I was writing too much of a memoir rather than a novel that I could enjoy writing. So in order to keep on track I had to abandon my plan and write where my story took me instead. That turned out to be much more fun, far more intuituve and has given me much better quality stuff to go on and work with.
4. Silencing my inner editor (the urge to go back and delete stuff 'not good enough', to check spellings or go off on a tangent researching background facts) was a lot easier than I thought and a very beneficial thing to aid creativity.
5. If writing using a computer (which was pretty necessary to enable getting to 50,000 words within one month and being able to upload them to be verified) then I work best away from my normal 'office' area on a laptop at my dressing table (now my 'writing desk') in my bedroom. It felt more special, more away from the 'normal world' and made writing far easier.
6. But I also want to now try writing with a pen and notebook and experimenting trying writing in different environments - coffee shops, libraries etc...I didn't feel I had the time within the nanowrimo month to try these things out.
7. To get anything good, I need to write for AT LEAST 20 minute blocks....but the ideal length of time for writing blocks seemed to be about 45 minutes.

Anyway, job done and at some point I will go back and re-read what I wrote and try editing and re-writing, but for now I'm done writing for at least a month and it's time to have some making fun :)

It's Christmas and one thing I adore about Christmas is decorating the house....and as you know I have the world's brownest house that is about 3 times as big as my diddy little cottage in the UK...so I'm going to need to make a lot of bright, cheery, colourful, glittery decorations to deal with this - and I'm up for the challenge.

So bring on the glitter, the glue and the scissors, I feel it's time for the woman once called the MacGyver of Burlesque to get making! I'll also be passing on links to some of my favourite Christmas decoration making websites in case you want to join me.

Merry Christmas everyone!

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(a very quick post, because I should be nanowrimo-ing, not much time left)

 

November has been a very strange month.

For 18 days I was writing feverishly in an attempt to write a novel in 30 days as part of NaNoWriMo - national novel writing month.

Then my parents arrived for 10 days to come and see what Arizona was like.

It's been my Dad's first time in America. Mum has been before, but only for a conference in New Orleans so she hasn't really seen much of the USA either.

It's been really interesting to see what things they've found amazing about America, the things we've become used to - the incredible wideness of the roads; not being able to see the back wall of supermarkets because they're so huge; the fact that we have drive-through fast-food AND banks, pharmacies, even churches.

So anyway, 10 days ago I decided I wouldn't be able to finish Nanowrimo whilst they are here and so I just gave up. It couldn't be done, so I didn't do it.

But the fact that I had already written nearly 30,000 of my 50,000 words kept nagging away at me. I was over half way - I knew that if I hadn't have stopped I could've made it. And this bothered me.

So two nights ago, on yet another of my sleepless nights, I got up and started writing again. I'm not saying that I'm writing anything of quality, and definitely my novel is going in all directions and doesn't have a lot of coherence BUT I wrote nearly 3000 words in 2 hours and I thought to myself - "I might still fail at getting all of this done by midnight on Tuesday 30th November (actually 11.59.59)...and remembering that I have to upload everything I've written - but I would rather fail still trying than fail by sitting looking at a computer and doing absolutely nothing".

So I started writing wherever and whenever I could. On the computer when I could. As draft emails on my blackberry when in the car. And the word count still needed started coming down.

And then I spotted something very interesting on Twitter this weekend that also inspired me - I saw the hashtag '#50kweekend' that was begininning to appear next to the normal '#nanowrimo' ones I've been watching. There are apparently lots of people who are making things even harder for themselves by writing the whole thing, the whole 50,000 words but have only just started this weekend.

I'm not sure if they are all trying to do it in 2 days or whether they will be finishing it off (hopefully) today and tomorrow. But if they can write 50000 in just 2 or 4 days, surely I can write my remaining words in that time?

So when I restarted again I had 20,019 words still to write. Tonight, with less than 18 hours to go I have now 9,995 words to go....it's possible but I'm now so tired and zonked by the whole month I sometimes can't decide whether I've already written scenes before.

It's a crazy thing to attempt, but why not go out in a blaze of glory trying to grab onto the ledge at the other side of the ravine...and many other terrible over blown analogies.

Let's see shall we?

I'll see you on the other side, on Wednesnday 1st December and tell you whether I managed the crazy idea and whether I'll ever want to write another word again.

Plus I'll tell you about my next crazy idea and monthly challenge - 25 days for 25 makings.

See you there!

(Wow, that was 594 words....shame they weren't part of the novel. Doh!)

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My name is Tempest and haven't blogged now for 6 days and quite a few hours.

 

Do you like the pouty lip? This one's even poutier...

 

 

I've let myself down, I've let my teachers down and worst of all I've let the tyres down on your car...no, I'm only joking, come back! I haven't honestly!

Actually I don't feel too bad about it at all, because although you haven't been able to see me writing I have been, furiously even though out of sight. I've been getting heavily involved in NaNoWriMo, the National (though it's really international) Novel Writing Month. I am determined that I AM by 30 November going to have a 'novel' of at least 50,000 words and become a NaNoWriMo winner.

If you want to follow my progress, here's my NaNoWriMo page where you can watch my counter hopefully go up each day and see a lovely avatar that Raphael Rufio Went created for me as my dalek self (though I'm waiting for him to shout at me for squishing it's dimensions to fit the NaNoWriMo avatar requirements).

As of last night I'm at 17150 words and it's become a really fascinating experience. I haven't written any fiction since university, so that was the Eighties. Yes, I've kept writing non-fiction, copy for news reports, websites, information leaflets etc and I'm pretty the routine and mechanics of regular writing is helping me a bit with the 'novel'.

I started NaNoWriMo listening to others saying they had no plots, characters, genres etc set and were just going to see what happened. I couldn't get my head around this - I thought there'd be no way I'd manage 50,000 and get from a start to an end of a story without SOME planning.

So in the days before November 1st, I chose my story (well a rough idea). I would do a modern day story based on the life of Saint Wilgefortis and other bearded ladies I've researched for my bearded lady burlesque routine. I wanted my character to experience some of the hardships life throws at you for being different, to try blending in, to fail at being 'normal' so to then shut herself away from an unsympathetic world but ultimately to learn to love herself for her differences, to rejoin the world again and become a force for good within it helping others coping with their differences.

If you're not aquainted with the bearded saint here's a beautiful musical and visual telling of it by Rebecca Clamp:

 

 

Anyway that was the plan. Wilgefortis has always been a very special tale to me and the amount of work I put into the act has always demanded a wider focus.

But it didn't work like that writing the novel.

Within two days Story Wilgefortis started living my life (though I sort of guessed she would) and writing the things she was going through became too intense and too painful for me to cope with right now.

But I wasn't going to give up on NaNoWriMo or Wilgefortis, so I changed tack. On day 3 she stepped into her shower, discovered it was a time machine and it transported her to a new plot...no, I'm not kidding.

Now I'm writing with no idea where my story is going, and it's fantastic. I have accepted that this month of writing is a huge laboratory in which I can switch points of view, genres, settings etc whenever I want to and just see what happens. Every day I sit down at my laptop and NO IDEA what's going to happen next until my fingers type it. I'm just typing free form stream of consciousness stuff, have introduced more characters to interact with and I'm having fun and seeing what comes out. And weirdly despite everything I'm throwing into the pot to see what happens, the story coming out actually seems to have direction.

The two greatest helps I've found are:

• setting my egg-timer to sessions of varying length - 10 mins, 15, 20 and 30 mins (20 minute sessions seem to be the best, most coherent and inventive without any struggle between my brain and my heart. 10 minutes is a bit short and 30 minutes usually drags towards the end causing me to find myself padding text with possibly superfluous descriptions, but we'll see in the 1st edit in December)
• using the wonderful NaNoWordSprints prompts on Twitter - run by 3 (I think) interns who tell us how long each sprint will be, when they start and finish and frequently throw in a 'dare' to include in the word sprint that shakes up my writing beautifully - yesterday they said to include a sudden change in weather, this caused my characters to have a huge car crash and I can't wait to start writing in a mo to find out what happens next ;)

Anyway, that's why blog posts are going to be a bit erratic during November. My parents are also arriving on the 19th for 10 days, so that will probably make posts a little more sparse - but bear with me, I won't leave you or let you down (too much) and normal service will be resumed in December when I'll tell you more about the novel I FINISHED in a month (I believe!)

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4 days, 10 hours, 36 minutes and 22 seconds until I start writing a novel

That's 4 days, 10 hours, 36 minutes and 13 seconds, 12, 11, 10.....you get the picture :)

In a moment of recklessness and rashness, I've signed up to take part in this year's NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month.

The aim is to write a 50,000 word (roughly 175 page) novel in 30 days...November to be exact.

 

I don't know when I first became aware of NaNoWriMo, I think it was possibly 2 years ago. But I've always missed the start so though I thought it sounded like fun, I've never actually tried it. Plus last November we were in the middle of moving continents. That's a pretty good excuse and I'm sticking to it.

So why am I doing this? Because I can I suppose. I'm on my 2 year sabbatical and other than volunteering for a few hours each week, and being a taxi and care service for Goth Child and Melchett, I have no other commitments. Reworking/recostuming my existing burlesque acts and developing some new ones can wait a month.

Writing a novel was also one of the things on my 40 things before I'm 40 list that I didn't achieve. Well I'm 42 now, so if I don't have a go I'm sure I'll always find things to get in the way, that I can pretend are legitimate reasons not procrastination.

This would all be perfect......except.....my parents are visiting us for the 1st time in November, from the 19th to the 29th and will want entertaining and showing what life in America is like.

But hey, writing 1,667 words a day plus living just seemed too easy ;) I have to have some sort of added encumbrance don't I? Hopefully I might be able to get nearer the 2,500 mark some days early in the month to make the task more achievable with the parents around. We'll see.

And what's the novel going to be about? Who will be the characters? What genre will it be?

I haven't got a clue yet.

 

Yes, I know you real writers are slamming your heads against the walls now at that statement. I'm bringing your art into disrepute.

In my defence, I don't believe you can write a novel fit to publish in 30 days. What I'm attempting to do is write 50,000 words as a draft...that can be rewritten and edited. I'm going to try and do something I find incredibly hard - write without constantly editing as I go. Writing in a notebook rather than on a computer. Trying out different venues to write - home, parks, libraries, coffee shops etc. To write each day and see what emerges without over planning.

That said, I'm not brave enough to set sail on November 1st without any idea of where I'm going. This week I'm working to nail down one idea that really appeals to me, a beginning, an ending and possibly sketch out some characters. But I'd really like to try just seeing where my writing takes me and whether the exercise brings out anything worthwhile. I'd also like to use the month to see what areas of writing I need to learn more about for any future attempts.

So please don't think too harshly of me proper writers, we all need to start somewhere and I could read every book there is on writing, I could go back to college and do a creative writing course....but if I don't have actually put pen to paper, I'll never know.

Oh good, that's over 600 words. Pity they weren't part of a story. And now there's only 4 days, 10 hours, 12 minutes and 17 seconds to go....16, 15, 14, 13....

(By the way, I'll keep you up to date with my progress here of course, but if you want to check out my NaNoWriMo 'author' page, it's here....and if any of you join in with NaNoWriMo too, why not drop me a note and add me as a NaNoWriMo writing buddy).

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