Writing

I set a plan to write for an hour today from 10:45am to 11:45am. And I did. 1220 words in my novel are now down on digital “paper.”

Next step on my plan is to make and eat lunch. I wonder what I should have.

I read an article (recommended by a friend in my writing group) today about 10 ways to stay fired up about my writing goals. It was all the things you expect, but in an order that made it more palatable. In other words, “write every day” was not the first suggestion. Nor was it the last. I loved number 3 (“Accept your messy life and your messy house”).

I’ve known this for a while. I first learned it when I was writing a test for my TEFL students. I had to figure out questions that were hard enough to demonstrate that they understood the material, but not so hard that they would be completely demoralized. I also had to make sure the questions were on the material the students legitimately should know, and not just on English language in general. When I started teaching HTML, I created a course, complete with an exam at the end, to demonstrate that students had learned something. The first iteration of the exam was fill in the blank. This made the test easier to write, but a lot harder to grade. So the second version was multiple guess. But multiple guess problems are hard to write because often the questions can be way too easy. For instance, how difficult would this be to guess the correct answer?

“I give you my word, as a Spaniard.” “No good. I’ve known too many Spaniards.”

This was the exchange Inigo and Wesley said to one another after Inigo had cut the rope and Wesley continued climbing up the Cliffs of Insanity in the movie “The Princess Bride.” Inigo wanted a chance to fight the man in black, and he didn’t want to wait. But Wesley did not want to be betrayed by a Spaniard. I joined Ninja Writers, a group of writers who are going to write a post on Medium every day. I joined thinking that instead of writing on Medium, I would write here on my own site and reap the benefits of writing practice as well as some possible publicity if the other writers deigned to read any of my posts. But then I learned that the group has a rule that you can only publicize Medium posts. So I may be dropping out of the group, or not publicizing anything I write for the challenge. Because I am not going to write for Medium.

[caption id=“attachment_1331” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] a happy cat[/caption] It’s been a while since I’ve written. That seven word sentence says so much more than it seems. I haven’t written in this blog since October. Other sites I write for have languished even longer. This would be fine if I could say I was working on other things. But I can’t even say that. I finished working on my RWD videos in early fall and then the world fell in on me. I can’t even say what, if anything, happened. Mostly because nothing happened. Nothing. Happened.

As a professional technical writer for nearly 20 years, I should have this tattooed on my bones, but for some reason it always comes as a complete shock to me. Over the last week or so I’ve been combatting what, in retrospect, was a really stupid move on my part. As you may know, I write about web design and HTML for About.com. And About.com is in the midst of a lengthy birthing process of a redesign. Part of that was the (much appreciated by me) removal of the blogs. They weren’t removing our articles, weren’t stopping me from writing, weren’t even changing how the home page looked all that significantly. (Depending upon who you ask.) But, since I find all things web development interesting, I wrote about it in my newsletter of last week. I mentioned that the blog was going away, but that I was still going to be writing for About.com, just not in a blog tool. This resulted in a minor flood of responses asking me where I was going and if my articles would still be visible on the site and were the URLs changing (and one charming character telling me to f-off and take my dime-store web design skills somewhere else, and a bunch more about my lack of education and total idiocy in as profane a tone as he could come up with.) and so on. So this week, I decided to stem the tide, answer the common questions and generally reassure the people who like me that I wasn’t going anywhere. I wrote my newsletter with the subject: “I am not leaving About.com and other questions answered.” Do you see the problem? Mark pointed out that I should have written “I am staying at About.com and other questions answered.” But the part of me that is very literal balked at that subject, as it seems to imply that at one point I was leaving, and then changed my mind. Because, you see, the problem is that people don’t read. I know there have been studies showing that people are reading more than they used to—after all, teh interwebz requires more reading than TV does. [caption id=“attachment_831” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] This is how I read most of the time[/caption] And what’s really silly about this fact is that I’ve known it a long time. As far back as 1997, I was telling my readers “people don’t read websites, they skim them.” But the fact is that this applies to almost any type of reading, especially reading online.

A few years ago I learned that my local Barnes and Noble had a monthly writers group come and meet on Mondays to discuss writing. The first month I didn’t bring anything of my own, I just came to see what the group was like. I was immediately sure I would like this group because almost everyone who did read was reading science fiction or fantasy. And I love science fiction and fantasy. I knew I was going to come the next month if only to find out what happened in the stories they were reading. After about three months, I decided to bring in a story of my own. I believe I brought an excerpt from a fantasy story I was working on. I got some great feedback, so the following month I brought a couple of HTML articles I wanted to clean up. Since that time I’ve been attending fairly regularly (except when I’m late for a deadline!) and I always enjoy the interplay, the stories, and the discussion. The group isn’t just science fiction/fantasy either. There are two or three people besides me who bring in non-fiction. There is a really interesting novel set in the 60s and at least two YA or children’s books.

I’m still having a lot of fun writing my novel. I took the first chapter to my writing group last night. They professed to enjoy it, but that may have been more relief that I wasn’t forcing them to read more HTML documents. But I did have fun reading it to them. What’s funny now is that I’ve kind of lost the thread. I think once I get this novel done, I’m going to work out more of a plot arc in advance. I still have the idea for my plot, but I found myself running through it in just a couple chapters, which is well under 50,000 words. Ooops. I think if I get the video project done in the next few days that will give me a better shot at completing the novel. I can write while guests are here over Thanksgiving and not feel guilty that I’m not paying attention to my son. And if I can get the SCA site live this week (maybe Thursday?) that will be yet another chain off my shackles. I’m technically not caught up to my required amount today, but I still feel good about my chances of winning this year for a couple of reasons:

Today was slow going, mostly because I have other things in my life, like work… that I need to do. But I still managed to get out four articles (most pretty short) of non-fiction and another 1700 words on my novel. Stats for November 4, 2013: Novel Migraines for Magic: 12,016 words Non-fiction: 6,713 words Too bad I’m not counting all the words towards winning NaNo, I’d be at almost 19K words right now.

Yesterday was tough. We had a power outage most of the day, and we spent a lot of that time driving around looking for someplace that had power so we could get some lunch and make sure we had enough gas for the generator. The power was out for several miles around us and it took a long time. But I was still able to get my novel up to over 5000 words. The words were just flowing. I was shocked at how fast it was going. The story isn’t moving along like I’d expected, but it sure is fun to write. I only got around 830 words written on my non-fiction project, but I had a lot of fun building the examples and playing with the CSS to write it. But today I really flew. In the morning I worked on my non-fiction, bringing my total there to 5233 words. That was two more articles. I put one live and kept the other back to save for a week or two. I then didn’t get the chance to work on any NaNo until after J went to bed. He was insisting both that my laptop was his laptop, and that I needed to close it so that I could take him to New York City. He has suddenly decided that I need to fly with him on an airplane to NYC. He wants to go there and then call Daddy over FaceTime from there. But eventually he was in bed and I started writing. Three hours, virtually non-stop brought my novel up to 10,242 words! I’m 1/5th done! I’m so excited. This year it really feels like winning is within my reach! Go me!