NaNoWriMo and You: the Advice of a 50/50 Success Story

We're gearing up to my very favorite time of the year, Halloween.  After that, though, comes my second-favorite season: National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo.  I won in 2011, and the result was Leech.  I failed miserably last year and haven't been able to restart the project since then.  (Perhaps because I have been away from the poisonous influences that inspired Eat in the first place for several years now, so call it a backdoor win?)  Here's what worked for me on the year I did win:

1) Routine.  Find out how you best work and stick to it.  When I was in college and working out of longhand in a notebook, I could sit down for five minutes and absolutely disappear into the work before popping right back up again.  (Apologies to the professors who got sixty percent of me at best.)  During the window between graduating and grown-up work, I learned to write from a laptop from an hour before I had to get dressed for the obligatory degrading retail job.  At my first Big Girl job, I took my laptop with me and physically removed myself from distractions during breaks and lunches.  Now that Ye Old Day Job is in a neighborhood where it's honestly not safe to carry a laptop with you, I work out of a thumb drive.

2)  Find the vices that help you, find the vices that hurt you, and eliminate accordingly.  I am, believe it or not, a morning person.  I wake up a good forty-five minutes before I actually need to and spend it dancing about, drinking coffee, and talking to myself.  My weakness for terrible pop music (I've given up and resigned myself to worshipping at the altar of Katy Perry) lends to that; so, for the month of November, it has to go in favor of character playlists.  (Except that Bonnie is a mixture of hip-hop, punk, and punch-your-fist-up diva ballads, so this might blow up in my face on the bop-inducing front.)    I'm also a fan of the vino.  Since I have a good feeling that my best work is going to be done in the evenings and on weekends, that is also going away for the duration of the month.  The iPhone will also be placed in someone else's hands during working periods.  But you'll pry my tea and white noise out of my cold, dead hands. :)

3) Know how you write.  I'm an outliner.  If I pants it, the bones of the story just aren't there, so I freak out and toss a perfectly serviceable tale.  I outline ahead of time, being careful not to give too much on the truly sweet scenes (so I'm still having fun when I get to them), and then step back to look at the whole picture.  I'm a little behind on Bonnie's outline, but this series has been in my head for so long that I know exactly where I want her to land.

4) Just write the damned old thing and don't worry about editing.  You are not publishing on December 1st.  The important thing is to get it out, and throw yourself a party afterwards.

Delivery day!

Was actually two weeks ago.  I'm kinda lazy.

Yes, Siren is done and off to the betas, and I'm leaping forward to do the outline on Bulletproof.  I hope to have Siren out by the end of the year, but you know me and promises by now.  Naomi, as I have said before, was a difficult character to figure out.  For so much of the series thus far, she's been either a side character or a pushing point between Ophelia and Marcus.  She's been something that the other characters have to act against rather than her own self.  I think I finally found that self.  A good thing, as Naomi's role in the Grand Finale is huge.

And now looking forward to NaNoWriMo and Bonnie, my dear Bonners.

The most important event of the fall.

The weather is probably starting to cool if you live above the equator.  (Please, send me some.)  A lot of people out and about in the meat world with are extremely excited about the beginning of football season.  Yay, pigskins and violence!  Well, as much as I enjoy bacon and hitting things, my interest in sports rests in the negative, so my main reason for loving fall is this: TELEVISION PREMIERE SEASON!

Nikita: About to have its last hurrah, I'm afraid.  The third season got a little more sci-fi than its world could support, I must admit, but Nikita as a character, and the show as a whole, hit the right notes far more than the wrong.  I'm going to miss her terribly.

Arrow:  Back for a triumphant second season!  I've always been predisposed towards liking Ollie, but I have to say that Ammell is the best Ollie I've seen to date.  And the ensemble cast is perfect.  (I do wish someone other than Katie Cassidy had been cast as Laurel, though.  If--and I pray, I pray to the writer gods--Laurel is ever going to become Dinah Freaking Lance, she's going to have to step up hard.)

Elementary: I started watching this show mostly out of spite over the truly awful, racist, sexist bullshit hurled at Lucy Liu.  Once I settled in, however, I found myself honestly enjoying it.  Johnny Lee Miller hasn't been one of my favorite actors in the past, but he brings a brilliant nuance to his portrayal.  And Joan!

Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D:  Oh, please.  Like you didn't see this one coming.

Sleepy Hollow:  Or this one, either, for that matter.

I will never grow up past twelve.

Ye Olde Day Job is holding a "secret pal" game to boost morale; the basic gist is that we each have a secret pal that we're giving little gifts to each week, with a big reveal to take place in October.  Clearly, my secret pal knows me extremely well.  I wrote everything in longhand until I graduated college and got my first laptop (this is what happens when you're po'...and even as I type that I can picture the truly po' folks out there lining up to kick my ass, so never mind).  Though I've joined the modern world and do my drafting and editing out of a computer (likely thus saving myself early-onset arthritis in my fingers and wrists), I still do all of my outlining out of notebooks.  The prettiest notebooks I can find, with pens containing the shiniest and most childish of ink colors.  I carry them about, I cuddle them, I know this is strange.  A coworker actually had to ask me if I needed them removed from my possession until the day was over.

I might have bared my teeth and growled a little.  I'm not perfect.

However, now that I'm close to finishing Naomi's book (an admittedly hard birth), I'm starting to think ahead to post-Super things.  (Now you watch Bulletproof kick the living crap out of me.)  I've had a series of books centering around the Lilith myth chasing me since high school; they sort of haunt me.  I can't think of a better place to put the outlines.  Putting dark books under happy veneers always amuses me.

(Yes, that is my desk, and the rest of it is even worse.  I actually had to frame the picture carefully to avoid revealing people's sensitive information.  But I know where everything is!)

Fellow geeks, I say unto thee: chillax.

Yes, we've all heard the news by now.  Yes, Ben Affleck is going to be Batman.  The sky is falling, DC is doomed forever, we're all still going to see this movie but we are by-God use our Comic Book Guy voices as we do it.

Guys.  It's going to be all right.  Allow me to make a plea on behalf of Benny.

1) Gigli was a long time ago.  Lord help me if I was still held accountable for all of my lapses in taste and judgement over the years.

2) Argo.

3) Hollywoodland.

4) His directorial history.  I highly disliked Man of Steel on the basis of its being too grim and failing to understand the ultimate optimism of Supes in the slightest, but DC has decided to take their cinematic universe in a darker direction and it is what it is at this point.  Batman is a noir figure; Affleck is excellent at noir.

Give the man a chance, oh intarwebs.  I thought Chris Evans and Mark Rufalo were going to be steaming piles of cat mess when they were announced, and I could not imagine any other actors playing Steve Rogers or Bruce Banner now.

I just want to throw this out there.

So...Miley Cyrus, she of legal age, does a sexually provocative performance to Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines."  The world is horrified.

Robin Thicke, he who came up with the song in the first place, does a sexually provocative performance of "Blurred Lines" with Miley Cyrus.  The world says, "Nice suit, bro."

Male privilege doesn't get much more blunt than that, folks.

Ah, we are such strange creatures.

As I was a-writing today, I had to do something-awful-to-a-character-I-love/make-a-character-I-love-do-something awful/all-or-both-but-they-triumph/I'm-melodramatic-they-get-a-torn-nail at Ye Olde Day
Job.  And I broke down crying.  I mean, the ugly kind.  It was not a polite, ladylike lament.  There was snot.  People were concerned.  And I was completely at a loss as to how to explain it.

This is the thing.  I tend to grok towards certain character types, but I don't do Mary Sues.  (If anything, I'm often told that my characters are too snotty and aggressive.)  My persons all have quirks and flaws, sometimes very deep ones*.  I'm used to dealing with characters Being Very Naughty or going through Very Naughty things.  I giggle when I kill my darlings.  WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME HERE?  I used to be objective.  I swear I was.

...well, I could fake it, anyway.

*I am a sad little redemptionista.  I love watching characters fall to their very bottom and then scrabble back up, bloodied and wiser.  It ties both into the part where I love them and where I'm a wee bit sadistic.  All I can say is: I used to be in fandom.