1,000 Words a Day: January Breakdown

After starting this 1,000 Words* a Day experiment, I thought I’d see how many words I’ve written since December 31st (I started a day early so I wouldn’t forget) – then break them down between the various stories I’ve worked on, to see where I’ve made the most progress.

TOTAL: 46,163 (?!?!? Was not expecting that number!)

NIHILISM: 11,689
EDGE: 4,450
SHADOW’S VOICE: 4,830
THE THIRTEENTH HOUR: 140
WAKING MAGIC: 2,545
SWITCH: 1,694
ICARUS BURNING: 7,141
GESTALT: 8,212
GEAS: 4,097

Summing up the stories doesn’t reflect the total, because there have been times when I counted words for a day only to erase them the next day and start over from scratch – and some of these are only the amount I wrote on the story in the past month, not the length of the stories overall.

Still…it’s pretty telling, don’t you think? It’s sure as hell indicative of what I need to fix in my writing workflow.

I have enough words written for half a novel, but I don’t have half a novel. I have fragments of several novels.

Which is what I expected out of the first month – and while it’s good to know I can write half a novel in a month (without the reckless lack of premeditation that characterizes NaNoWriMo), this demonstrates more than anything a need for consistency. But that’s why I’m doing this. This an exercise in building discipline, making a habit out of writing every day as a professional should; I may be a pantser, but even pantsers have to have discipline and dedication. That discipline comes in stages: first conditioning to write every day, then conditioning to write decently every day instead of page-vomiting to get to the word count, then conditioning to stay with one story and see it through rather than just waiting for one to strike inspiration and hold my attention long enough to finish. I’d say I’m fairly well along on the first two, and getting close to the third. I’ve told myself I’m going to finish NIHILISM, and that’s that.

So let’s see if I can get a good 30,000 words on NIHILISM in February, ne?

Tangent: Last night I finally saw Avatar. In 3D. Yes, I know I’m late. And while I enjoyed it a hell of a lot, I remembered why I don’t do 3D movies: my eyes hate me for a full 24 hours after. Last night I spent wandering around with my eyes terribly strained, struggling to restore depth perception in a truly three-dimensional world after two and a half hours spent viewing recorded images projected in multiple layered depths of field. I bumped into a lot of things. And this morning my eyes are just sleepy and sore, with a little difficulty focusing on things beyond a certain distance. I came away better than Hikaru, though. By the time we were even halfway through the film, he had a migraine so bad he could barely enjoy the movie.

As for the movie itself: it’s pretty much what I’d heard. Beautifully rendered visuals (slight disconnect between real and CGI, more obvious than people say it is), plot a mashup of about five or six other already-good movies, with your classic “white savior learns the old ways**/plight of the natives” storyline with some heavy-handed Earth Mother / environmentalist / corporate fatcat stuff thrown in.

It was still a damned fun film, with engaging characters and heartfelt emotion. And some damned awesome action. Just because I recognize it for what it is doesn’t mean I didn’t love the hell out of it. (And enjoyed that we ended up rooting for the aliens, not the humans, just like in District 9.) I’d like to see it again, actually.

…just…not in 3D.

Final note: I’m not saying much about the Amazon / MacMillan debacle. Others have already said it far better; just hit Google and you’ll see. But I will say that I was one paycheck away from buying a Kindle, and now I’ve started shopping for a Sony Reader because of this. And I’m not the only one. One consumer’s voice often makes no difference. But anger enough consumers, especially when those consumers are both writers and avid readers…and you’ve basically screwed yourself.

 

 

*I can’t type that without thinking of the “1,000 Words” song from FFX-2, and now it’s stuck in my bloody head.

**That’s the one thing I try not to think too hard about, as it would ruin my enjoyment of the movie since it’s a pet peeve. It wouldn’t make me as touchy as films like Last of the Mohicans and The Last Samurai, but that could be because oh, hey, I’m not part blue cat-person. But still. From the perspective of a non-white person, those movies can be a little insulting. And I’m sticking my fingers in my ears and saying LALALALA because dammit I LIKED Avatar and I want to keep liking it.

I am so late for work right now.

…and I’m posting anyway. This morning on Twitter, @inkyelbows posted a link to the 1000 words / 500 words challenge; you pick one, and then try for the next year to write either 1000 words a day or 500 words a day for six days out of the week. If you make it more often than not, you keep posting the badge on your site. If you don’t, well, hang your head in shame and take the badge off.

I’m giving the 1000 words challenge a shot, if only because I think it’ll be a nice kick in the ass – until I forget about it / get sidetracked by life / get writer’s block, which I inevitably will. But maybe it’ll motivate me to pick up the pen again sooner. So I start today, after I finish work and some web design stuff I need to focus on. Maybe I’ll stick a widget in the sidebar to post daily status, or something.

Wish me luck.

Slippery.

If you ever get the chance to see Cirque du Soleil, take it. We went to the Banana Shpeel show at the Chicago Theatre last night, and I had the most wondrous time. The show was a mixture of slapstick comedy and Vaudeville musical, and was staged with a glee that was entirely infectious. You wouldn’t think you’d enjoy watching people dance and perform borderline inhuman feats of acrobatics so much, but they do it with a certain jubilation that just sweeps you up until you wish you could move with them. The performers are amazingly talented, a few of them with singing voices so clear and pure they leave your chest aching with the beauty of it.

My favorite part was that even when doing choreographed dance numbers, all of the performers had just a touch of individualism. Their costumes weren’t uniform, but had little personal quirks. They moved in synch, yet with their own style that made each stand out on their own; Hikaru wondered if it was just because they didn’t practice the choreography enough and couldn’t keep time with each other. That might be the case…but honestly, I enjoyed that they didn’t. It made each dancer an individual, rather than part of a faceless, robotic mass. And even if they didn’t match each other perfectly, it didn’t seem disjointed and didn’t detract from how smoothly their motions blended with the music.

The performance was only marred by two things:

1. The enormous Herman Munster clone with the giant head who sat in front of me and kept weaving from side to side, making it impossible for me to get a good view of the center stage performance. Not only did he talk loudly over the singing, he also farted copiously and quite fragrantly – and when he got up to leave at the end of the performance, he and his companion had the nerve to look back at us with their lips curled, making veiled and disparaging comments as if trying to pin the blame for his methane-induced foulness on us. Dear Mr. Munster: I don’t know what you ate before the show, but I’d suggest excising it from your diet. Or, you know, performing an exorcism on it. Because kee-rist, your fumes actually stung my eyes. Most businesses have to pay fines for emissions like that.

2. My eyes. With the winter munge creeping up, my eyes keep filming over to the point where not even an entire bottle of eyedrops helped much. I missed the additional nuances lent by seeing the performers’ facial expressions and the finer details of their costumes, but even missing that didn’t detract from the delightful exuberance of the show.

It was still a lovely night out, highlighted by a delicious (if rushed) dinner at the Wildfire Steakhouse. If you ever visit Chicago, I’d highly recommend it. The food is mid-priced, but there’s nothing middling about the cooking; I had the cedar-planked salmon, and I’ve never tasted fish that delicious outside of New Orleans. Also, toasted almond martinis. You know how I am with my martinis. Wildfire’s martinis topped my previous favorite, the jolly rancher martini at the Improv Comedy Club.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got. I’ve got a whole day to write and edit, so best not waste it.

Although is it sad that now I kind of want to write a story about a dance troupe?

Phoenix.

Human beings are sponges, absorbing new experiences, influences, information and constantly adapting, changing, reshaping ourselves in response. New things impress upon our psyches, change the way we operate, change the way we think and feel. We are swayed, we are pushed, we are shaped by our surroundings, the things we hear, the things we see, the things enforced upon us. Never the same from one minute to the next, our glass of water neither half empty nor half full but stirred with drop after drop of everything but water to create a freakish and dynamic concoction at once original and entirely derivative. We are nodal points of a life’s accumulated sensation, and our old selves die and are reborn from one breath to the next.

There’s a story idea in that somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I can find it.

Yet.

Random and brief.

We so need to get the pictures from our trip to Canada developed. Niagara Falls is a beautiful natural wonder. You don’t really appreciate the power of that much water succumbing to gravity until you’re standing at the prow of a boat with white water roiling beneath you, spray churning around you, and the heavy roar of millions of gallons falling down towards you, glittering with a thousand tiny rainbows.

I’m on another new laptop – an early Christmas present from Hikaru. I’ve destroyed yet another one; my Dell just went belly-up last week, and I had a hell of a time recovering any data that wasn’t in my last backup. The new laptop is spiffy and sweet, and Hikaru is the most wonderful boyfriend ever for getting it for me. Now if only the touchpad wasn’t an off-brand rather than a Synaptics, as the drivers don’t include touchpad controls, I can’t turn off tap-to-click, and I’m going batsnot bonkers with my clumsy hands making it do a thousand things I really don’t want it to do. On the plus side, I’m exercising my creativity coming up with inventive new ways to curse the damned thing.

I’ve applied for a few editorial jobs, just supplemental income for my daily writing work, though a couple are full-time (so the writing would end up being my side work I’d do in off-hours). The full-time ones are actual office jobs, which gives me a little quake of fear. I haven’t done the office thing in years, and I’ll admit: I have a slight phobia of leaving the house for too long after my robbery-at-gunpoint incident, and especially of going places alone. But I think I can handle it, and it’d be good for me. Wish me luck that I get called in for an interview.

I need to update my “on the shelf” thing in the sidebar. I finished ELS ages ago, and it was a lovely book – well-written, imaginative, with wonderful characters and an amazing world. I’m currently reading The Evolution of God by Robert Wright; it makes me think of Sujit, oddly (only Sihaya will get that, I think).

Also, next month they announce the winners of the Esquire contest. I’m allowed to hope, right?