Struggling with Nanowrimo

I am nearly on track but I wasn't prepared and I am having trouble finding material to write about.

My story is titled The Crowded Sky

Clearly the title needs work. Or at least the attribution does. 

My main problem is, I have a high concept but now I need the nitty gritty, the human stuff, to take place within the concept. And that picture and those planets were all the 'world building' I did beforehand. I am now making up countries to fill a few planets and moons and inventing names and so on. Its all a mess.

I am hugely indebted to the Nonsense Word Generator  for helping me with placenames.

And to discussions of Proto-Indo-European Language or PIE.

I will probably not be on pace by the end of today but I have completed a normal day's minimum and so and filling in for previous days- I am catching up.

Nanowrimo started

A Nanowrimo miracle occurred! In the summer I bought a bluetooth keyboard for my phone and computer. Then the bluetooth on my phone no longer connected all the time - it's an old phone. Yesterday, I tried the two again and the connection was smooth and constant. I was ready to type in a variety of locations! Here is one example:

I walked at a slow but constant pace (no choice about the consistency on a machine after all) and typed at a slow and inconsistent pace. I think I was more thoughtful. Anyway, it was forty fewer minutes sitting in a chair so the whole thing was a net positive so far.

Time to dig in on the writing. I've many words to go before I sleep.

And so it begins.

1200 words done. It is 1:46 am on November first and I am going back to bed. I need another five hundred words - and want more - but I have made a good start on NaNoWriMo.

Dang cold here in Incheon. I don't remember Busan being this cold on Nov 1. It might reach minus one before sunrise this morning. I'm sitting at the kitchen table, wearing slippers, three layers of shirts and a scarf (and pants, but that part isn't unusual).

TWIC: Grants, Writers and writing, Spoon, Pelee Island Retreat, pay

On Quora, the question How do you write a good grant proposal was asked and answered.

The answer (so far there is only one) is to find examples in books or in a Google search.  Most such proposals are generally vague and dry so adding some detail and working to make them interesting is important to be noticed.
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Jeff Vandermeer's Wonderbook is one of the most beautiful I have seen.  Now I need to read it.  He has given lectures on the same content using images found in the book.  Find it here.  The image below, from the link and the book, has been shrunk. Click on it to a somewhat larger size or follow the second link to see it full-size.

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'Verbing' is annoying for some people.

If you’ve ever been in a conversation with someone who makes liberal use of the verb form of summer – which is, coincidentally, also its nominal form – you’ve probably rolled your eyes at such egregious snobbery. Unless, of course, you were simply waiting your turn to share about your own summering, in which case it is probably correct to assume you also enjoy yachting, golfing, and cardiganing.

and

Indeed, in 2007, when Mike Huckabee was a candidate for the Republican nomination for US president, he used it on the campaign trail to differentiate himself from his Ivy League rivals: “For my family, summer was never a verb. We never summered anywhere.”
Well, plenty of other people have summered – for more than 500 years. According to Trish Steward, assistant editor at the Oxford English Dictionary, the verbal use of summer “goes back quite a long way,” its first recorded use being 1440.

I believe this is described as fossilization of a language.  The words and forms you heard as a child will always the the 'right' ones.   Verbing doesn't bother me that I can recall. As a competitive swimmer, the verb 'medalling' was common enough that it never upset me.

Other examples that affect me are Gonna, Wanna, and Hafta, but the one that really grates on my ears and seems common in the UK is "Haven't got". It's "Don't have", for crying out loud!
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Twenty-eight thousand words in a single flight.
The article is difficult to summarize but here are his main points.

• Sleep during take off.
• Laptop on lap rather than chair table.
• Headphones, Ommwriter, Flux and background music
• drink a lot (of water) and don't eat.
• Get up every three thousand words
• Do exercises (ten pushups or squats) in the galley areas a few times
• Save frequently.

The author travels business class and can plug in his computer so he has power for the whole flight. I love Ommwriter (the Mac version is better) and Flux apparently resets the lighting so your eyes don't ache in low light situations.
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The latest Hugo Awards shenanigans.

Question: If you could pick a single writer to make an effective, compassionate statement about identity politics to a divided literary community, who would you pick? Would it be a schizophrenic, autistic person who’d authored an e-book called Space Raptor Butt Invasion?
For years, writers and fans of science fiction and fantasy have been confronting that first question. And inadvertently, at the behest of right-wing trolls, the answer to the second question has recently become yes.

Via.

Beautiful (and moving) piece on @ChuckTingle, the Hugo Awards, Elves and Shoemakers: https://t.co/q7GVYmTlHy

— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) August 27, 2016

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I know things that I didn't even know I knew.

Things native English speakers know, but don't know we know: pic.twitter.com/Ex0Ui9oBSL

— Matthew Anderson (@MattAndersonBBC) September 3, 2016

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Will I make money as an artist?

A toast to every artist who has a piece of art out there with 10,000+ shares/likes and less than 5 sales pic.twitter.com/OvAv0D1V30

— Kate Leth (@kateleth) August 28, 2016

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Lessons for Story Tellers at the World Domination Summit

(2) You can always edit more than you think
What it is the point we’re trying to get across with this story?
And then,
What can I cut out, but still get this point across?
It’s brutal. But in the end, I managed to edit some stories down to 30 seconds – which gave us wiggle room to add some details back in

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Spoon! Jimmy Diresta makes one.


Boingboing has a quote from him with a link that didn't work for me.

As a dabbler who hasn't done enough continuously enough to learn by doing, videos like these are wonderful.  At the beginning, Diresta makes his block on two sides with the rough shape of his spoon.  Of course, once he cuts on axis, the marks have been removed. What does Diresta?  He applies glue to the part that will be next cut off and rebuilds his block. Then he cuts again and the rough is cut free top and bottom, left and right.  That was worth the price of the video right there.

And a graphic reminder:

This image was many places. I found this one on Reddit.
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Pelee Island Writer's retreat funding on Indiegogo.

The funds raised in this one-time effort will be used for the start-up costs for the Pelee Island Book House and Writers' Retreat. Known for its beaches and birding, the island's quiet beauty makes it an ideal location. Perks are offered at every level,

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Work free, for exposure.
I, uh, am attempting to write a (very) short story for this blog every week - see 'click bait' for stories - to produce content for this blog to attract eyeballs and good feeling from readers so that when I publish a book,there'll be some people to read it.  Maybe even pay for the dubious pleasure of reading it.  These stories are free - and that is probably a realistic measure of their value - and i do it for exposure.
Of course, I am doing this by choice, on my own platform.
At For Exposure, there is a long list of screen caps showing people asking for artists to work for free and getting angry when the artist asks for money. The above link is to a Twitter account and I think the examples are collected here on Imgur. As always, I have shrunk the images. To see them fullsize, and many, many more, follow the link.

Ha. Vulva owners!
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And more on the same subject. Vice allegedly treats its freelancers badly.

IN AN ERA OF JOURNALISM in which freelancers have grown accustomed to being treated like disposable cogs of news production, Vice appears to be in a league of its own.
Interviews with more than a dozen freelance journalists suggest the young, edgy news organization heralded as the future of journalism also has ushered in a new low for its treatment of freelance journalists.

Via Boingboing.

Someday never comes

Maybe today I'll write.  I have the time, just like I did yesterday and the day before.
Fred Clark at Patheos Slacktivist might as well have been discussing writing while discussing Untold Millions are still Untold:

This was a song about the importance of evangelism, which was a major theme in our church. Not evangelism itself, mind you, but the importance of it. We believed, fervently, in the importance of evangelism, and we demonstrated this belief by gathering regularly for sermons on the topic of the importance of evangelism, and to sing songs like the one above reaffirming our commitment to the idea that evangelism is really quite important. (To be fair, I’ve experienced something similar in mainline Protestant circles where the importance of justice is a major theme.)
This preoccupation with the importance of evangelism produced a constant state of guilt and anxiety which, in turn, occasionally prompted us to actually attempt the thing itself.

Clark has written two books and you can read an excerpt from one and find links to both here.
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Yeah, I'll finish my book someday.

I want to be obsessed

A lot of psychology is biology and I know a fair bit in that field.  One course I took, Animal behavior, was  a strong introduction to the subject.  In this post, I will write about what I think of as obsession. I think I follow the basic definition Google offered at the top of its search window:

an idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on a person's mind.
plural noun: obsessions
"he was in the grip of an obsession he was powerless to resist"
synonyms: fixation, ruling/consuming passion, passion, mania, idée fixe, compulsion, preoccupation, infatuation, addiction, fetish, craze, hobbyhorse;

but I want it clear I make no claim to the psychological definition of the word and that I find the casual use of 'OCD' to be annoying.

I recently wrote to a friend about our obsessions.  He put himself on a strict diet for two weeks to see what would happen and one result was he dreamed and lusted for the wondrous food he would eat after the two weeks had passed.  In 2015, I gave myself the goal of running 183 times in the year. I, uh, like talking about the thing I was obsessed with; that can't be a surprise, but it really isn't a subject relevant to this blog.  I'm still going to write about it, but I posted it in the 'read more' or 'under the fold' area.  If you want, you can find it there.

The point of the longish story below is that I set goals and stuck to them pretty well, even though I didn't really enjoy them. Or I enjoyed them but also found them exhausting and irritating.  My friend, struggled through his labour and doubtless enjoyed seeing his weight drop and feeling physically better even though it presented a physical struggle.

I have a blog post from Asana open. It is called Working from home? Here’s how to stay on task.  I really should read it. I'm good at finding such articles, and I read many of them.  Reading is good.
It would be much freakin' better if I convinced myself to follow such articles!

In the eighties and early nineties, I watched Prisoner of Gravity, as TVO show about science fiction and fantasy books and movies. In season four and five, there were episodes with advice for writers.  One point I remember from those episodes was the advice, 'If you can find something else to do, then do that instead'.  You needed to be obsessive and driven to write for it to work.

I have a job.  I'm an ESL teacher and I work to make the subject interesting to my students, many of whom are there chiefly because they have to be.  I have large periods of time off and I always plan to revamp my teaching and try new ways.  And I do, I still think I am a good teacher, but not nearly as much as I could.

I started this blog to document my research into creativity and to understand how to do and how to teach it.  I definitely know enough that I should be a creative person now. And when I have a problem, I use creative methods to find a solution. But I am not producing much, if any, more than I did when I began at Creativiti Project.

So, here are more than fifteen hundred words about writing that aren't directed at the story I have been trying to write for the past few months. It seems that I need to trick myself to write.

I am creative.  I need to be obsessive.

I love Grant Snider's comics and this one seems a relevant.  I have shrunk it here, follow the link for the full size version or ways to buy it. I added the red circle:

I either need no other work or I need other work I want to avoid.  Actually, I would probably avoid both.

Bowie's process

Word count

Jan 11: -- 
my God, how have I left it so long?

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First, the iron would be mixed with nickel and heated to.... Okay, not Bowie the knife maker, although such ideas led me to this (Note, as always, and so also with other images in this post, I have shrank it somewhat.  For a full-size image, follow the link.  For a somewhat larger image, click the image):

I don't mean to make light of David Bowie's passing, but honestly, I never owned an album or CD of his.  Of course, I know Major Tom and his, "We can be heroes" song - that was him, right?

Still, I naturally have respect for the man and his work.  How did he remain relevant for 50 years? What was his process? From Stephen Collins.

Good to know.
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Many science fiction authors of days of yore believed the future would be one of ease for the everyday man.  Okay, at least one author did.  It seemed so obvious that I just accepted it.  Boingboing looks at why this probably won't be the case.  See also Humans need not apply (Youtube link).

The future is difficult to imagine. I am at home in Ontario.  Well, I am at my mother's home, which feels like home when I am in Canada.  I looked at and threw away a lot of old papers, including my elementary school report cards.  I didn't want my son to see how terrible a student I was.  One thing that caught my eye was the low marks I received and commentary on my terrible spelling.

Nowadays, does spelling matter?  For important documents, I use spell check.  For informal docs, notes and chats, bad spelling is a sign of comfort with the other party - "I'm so relaxed in your company that I don't have to overthink my conversation."

Still, I somehow am more relaxed in theory about spelling but spelling errors still leap out at me when I read a book, so it has some value.  A more notable and common group of errors involve grammar and word choice.  They're, their, and there. "My family aren't..."  Spelling seems to be an easy problem for computers to solve; grammar less so.  How will education change to address this?  Will people simply change in their tolerances?  In teaching ESL, I simultaneously note every absent 'a' and 'the' and find I have no trouble understanding the text.  If it doesn't degrade understanding, perhaps the new frontier of tolerance will be grammar variance.

Does my reader(s?) have any predictions for the future?  Actionable ones we can make money on or even include in art so we look like prophets in ten or twenty years (or five)?
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Periodic Table Battleship. Via Boredpanda.
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Traveling as I am, I find it difficult to listen to podcasts.  This discussion with David Ben looks like it would be interesting.  Ben's personal website is here.
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ESL teaching time savers.  Gotta say, this link is the least related to my blog's topic.

Create an entire culture

Word Count

Jan 5, 2016: 589 words

I am mostly healed up, but still suffering  from sinus headaches.  Merry Christmas and all that!  Time to get into writing!
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We Imagine a People.  Alexander Jaffe threw a birthday party for an entire (imaginary) culture.  The party went all day and in the morning, neolithic art was conceived and technology was added throughout the day.

TWIC: goodriter, Sci Am and old illustrations available online.

Word count

Saturday, Dec 19: 0

- but it's early still.

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A friend on Facebook linked to Goodriter, a site with lots of gifts for people who share their email address.  As he said, you might be opening up yourself to lots of spam, but there is definitely a lot of stuff to be collected. Click on the image to better see some of the names and titles available.  I took screenshots of only the first titles in each category so there are many more books, classes and audio files.

The first course I clicked on had a sign up deadline of Dec 21.  I don't know if that is three days from time of registration or a hard deadline.  Nor can I recommend for or against the courses.

Indeed, as ML for Busan region, South Korea in Nanowrimo, I was given many ebooks on writing - "how to write fight scenes" and "How to write horses" and more.  I have no idea if any of them are useful.  Do(es) my reader(s) have any opinion on the subject?  Once I have finally finished a first draft, I think they will be of greater value as I turn my imagination into something believable enough.

I am posting the link here and now because of the quickly approaching deadline.  Hurry and decide if the books and more are of value!
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Sci Am has excerpts from a book on how to cultivate your creativity:

Openness to experience—the drive for cognitive exploration of one's inner and outer worlds—is the single strongest and most consistent personality trait that predicts creative achievement.
Among the “big five” personality traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism), openness to experience is absolutely essential to creativity.

...
Openness as a personality trait hinges on engagement and exploration, but it is also more complex and multifaceted than that. Openness to experience comes in many forms, from a love of solving complex problems in math, science and technology, to a voracious love of learning, to an inclination to ask the big questions and seek a deeper meaning in life, to exhibiting intense emotional reactions to music and art. Visionary tech entrepreneurs, world travelers, spiritual seekers and original thinkers of all types tend to have highly open personalities.

...
Mental processes on the schizotypy spectrum may interact with protective mental qualities such as greater intellectual curiosity, improved working memory and cognitive flexibility. Indeed, in 2011 neuroscientist Hikaru Takeuchi of Tohoku University in Japan and his colleagues studied people with no history of neurological or psychiatric illness and found that the most creative thinkers among them were those who were able tosimultaneously engage their executive attention in an effortful memory task and keep the imagination network in the brain active.
You never know—some of the most seemingly irrelevant or “crazy” ideas at one point may be just the ingredients for a brilliant insight or connection in a different context. It bears repeating: creativity is all about making new connections.

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I don't have the technical skills, but if you can get this code to work - please explain how - you should be able to remix some dance music.
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Some cool old book illustrations are available online for downloading. I found this in searching for Canada.

Via Boingboing

Remix and medicine

Word count

Thursday, Dec 17: 210

Friday, Dec 18: 0

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I typed myself into a bit of corner yesterday and will either have to throw away some words or adjust the next part of the story.  I think I will stick with this turn of events because it occurred naturally and maybe the course I had plotted would be more artificial.
As for today, I had an endoscope and I don't feel like doing much of anything.  There was no special reason for the 'scope, I hadn't felt any unusual pain or anything.  In Korea, everyone my age gets an 'scope every other year.  We'll see what the results are in a week.
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Boingboing, in two separate posts, looks at Star Wars without Star Wars -an examination of how movie influence each other.  Many SW (Episode IV) fight scenes resemble Kurosawa's work and other scenes seem to be more expensive remakes of older films.  And, many newer films use SW icons and settings.

I have (partially) written an steampunk story and a paranormal teen (no major romance theme) story and the latter was heavily influenced by Alexander Key's Witch Mountain and The Case of the Vanishing Boy books.  In the former, many secret societies in 1800's Europe are undergoing schisms and fragmenting into competing groups. This is a direct homage to Michael Flynn's In the Country of the Blind.  As Cory Doctorow quotes someone who quotes someone earlier, bad artists copy, great artists steal.

The relentless demands of advent

Word Count

Wednesday, Dec 16: 601

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A few years ago, my mother gave me a fabric Advent calendar for any year.

One of the many things I like about this calendar is that I am not giving my son chocolate every day.  But finding novel stuff to put in it is a challenge.  My son got a  triceratops head carving today and will get this owl tomorrow.

I am not as proud of the triceratops carving but was still fun to work on.

Slow going on my book and poor financial prospects for artists

Word count

Tues, Dec 15: 635

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If any reader comes here out of the blue and is not familiar with the blog, Thanks!  And, I finished Nanowrimo on November 30 and am trying to keep writing.  The number above, and at the top of all my posts for this month, is of the words added to my Nanowrimo story.
I am glad I have continued writing but this relaxed pace of less than a third of the Nanowrio requirement has its problems.  In the bit I wrote today, the heroes traveled a total of two hundred meters and the plot has not really advanced much.  There might be fireworks tomorrow, or maybe it will be Thursday.  The problem then, is that things are happening so slowly at 500+ words a day.  As my story has more than five POV characters and the majority are not involved in this week's action, I am at risk of forgetting plot and character details.  I think I need a slower pace after Nano's demands, but I will need to increase my numbers in the new year.
AC Fuller of Writer 2.0 uses the number 5,000 words a week as a reasonable goal - or maybe only as number picked out of thin air, I don't know.  It would be 220 more words a day for me so that makes a good goal.
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Iggy Pop can't live off his art, so what chance do Youtubers have?
Just Between Us personality Gaby Dunn (this link is to youtube, so naturally video autoplay) says:

[We] make money from ads that play before our videos, freelance writing and acting gigs, and brand deals on YouTube and Instagram. But it’s not enough to live, and its influx is unpredictable. Our channel exists in that YouTube no-man’s-land: Brands think we’re too small to sponsor, but fans think we’re too big for donations. I’ve never had more than a couple thousand dollars in my bank account at once. My Instagram account has 340,000 followers, but I’ve never made $340,000 in my life collectively.

Write for your audience -and more

Word Count:

Monday, Dec 14: 420 

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Ruben Bolling recently discussed Sandak's famous claim about his audience:

“I don’t write for children. I write – and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’”

This confused Bolling until he heard Jules Feiffer say he wrote for both adults and children. "Both.  I write for the kid in me."

I hugely love Bolling's Tom the Dancing Bug comic and read it every week. He describes his work thus:

In addition, I realize now that when I write “Tom the Dancing Bug,” I’m not really writing for some abstract, whole “me.” I’m writing for the adult in me – that part of me that is interested in sketch comedy, absurdist humor and political and social satire.
But, speaking of plot twists, here’s the M. Night Shyamalan-type kicker at the end of the story: It turns out that even as I wrote my very grownup comic strip for 25 years, I’ve been also writing for the kid in me the whole time!
When I want to write about income inequality, I use “funny animal” Carl Barks-like comic book characters....
When I want to write about religion, I use a brightly colored, caped superhero.

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Khiatons offers a round up of science news that seems perfect to power Sci-Fi stories. A few examples:

Carbon Farming Gets A Nod At Paris Climate Conference 

Computer learns like a human and (sort of) beat the Turing Test 

Engineers build biologically powered chip 

Google Teams Up With Scientists To Track STD Outbreaks 

Diagnosing malaria with a cell phone

This appears to be a weekly thing.  I don't think the links carried through so follow my link to Khiatons page for them.
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Backstory: You're doing it wrong Lisa Cron explains a common problem with backstory - it stops the 'now' story and is mostly an info-dump.  Here is her suggestion:

...the protagonist’s backstory must be layered into the current action. Rather than learning about it “objectively,” readers want to experience it through the affect it has on the protagonist now, in the moment.
Here’s the secret: Backstory becomes present – and therefore active – when it’s influencing what your protagonist is doing, thinking, considering. That is the wavelength your reader is wired to respond to, because that’s where your protagonist’s motive lives. We don’t simply want to know what your protagonist does, we want to know why.

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Jon Winokur collects quotes about writing.  For some reason, I am giving only a fragment of a quote he has collected from someone else.  Anti-plagiarism habits die hard:

It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, ...

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I don't want this blog to be only about writing. I recently watched a woodcarving video by Dennis Stallings and finally see how the eyes should be done. I have always made googly eyes or bulging eyes.  Here I see how to inset them a little.

Are women perceived as less creative?

Word Count

Sun, Dec 13: 582

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Before getting into the article, let me say here that the double tab bar on the Sci Am website makes reading there a chore.  I copied the pasted the article into a Wordpad document to be able to read it comfortably.  As seen above, there is a 'Scientific American' bar in White and a 'Now reading' bar in black.  They took up valuable real estate on my notebook's screen.

An article at Scientific American suggests that the answer is yes.
Daisy Grewal looked at a variety of studies and found that when the gender of an architect was known, the perceived creativity of their work declined.

The participants then answered questions about how creative they thought the images were. When it came to architecture, the participants rated the images as more creative when they thought the work had been done by a man. With fashion design, there was no difference in the creativity ratings

In this and other studies, the definition of creativity was discussed:

The data that the researchers were most interested in was the percentage of viewers that applied the adjective “ingenious” to a talk, since it was the adjective most closely aligned with creativity.

...
...found that people’s general beliefs about what it takes to “think creatively” show substantial overlap with traits we more closely associate with men, such as competitiveness, self-reliance, and risk-taking.

Workers in design fields showed less bias but people getting their MBA clearly faced bias

Proudfoot and colleagues found one-hundred and thirty-four senior-level executives enrolled in an MBA program. As part of the curriculum, each executive was anonymously evaluated by their supervisors and direct reports on several dimensions, including perceived innovativeness. Looking at the evaluations in terms of gender revealed that the female executives were judged by their supervisors as less innovative in their thinking compared to the male executives

Neoverse writing contest

Wordcount:

Saturday, Dec 12: 1290 words

Neoverse short story writing contest. I don't have anything ready to enter but it looks great.  To me, as a cynical middle-aged man, it looks almost too good.  Big prizes and no entry fee. Caveat scriptor.
The stories need to be between 1,000 and 5,000 and the deadline is Dec 20.

via freedomwithwriting.

Maintaining momentum after Nanowrimo

Word count

Sat Dec 5: 544 words
Sunday, 0
Monday, Dec 7: 960 words
Tuesday, Dec 8: 730 words
Wednesday, Dec 9: 438 words*
Thursday, Dec 10: 591 words

Some Nano authors in Korea are posting their website and blogs on the Nanowrimo in Korea Facebook page and I thought I would mention them here.

Evydraws - and also writes, i presume
Simon writes, too.
Marcus Medina is nearly done and ready to publish his book.  I think it is a sequel to Yscariot: Neo-Alpha.
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I'm a fan of AC Fuller's Writer 2.0 podcast and he recently had Helen Sedgwick, an author and lawyer, on his show to talk about various legal issues.  Among other things, she offers a free set of instructions for asking music companies for permission to use lyrics in a book.  This information is specific to the US but probably broadly applicable elsewhere.
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My understanding of genre writing versus literature is that literature is more character-driven while genre writing is more plot-driven.  I'm not big on divisions myself, but that's a fair starting point to understand the differences.  If you are worried about plot, Angela Meadon has a post on planning and organizing your plot.

The story is set in a world similar to ancient north west Africa and the plot is loosely based on the fall of the Wagadu Empire. I realised, about 37,000 words in, that I was quickly loosing track of my characters and their goals were getting fuzzy. I didn’t know where the novel was going.
I wasn’t prepared to throw out the whole thing and start again, because I think I have some good work in there and I’m not prepared to give up those words. Not yet.
What did I do? I read.
Step One
I started with a revision of the Heroes Journey, the 12-step structure of mythical stories that just about every novel I can name adheres to. The official definition, from the link above, is:

[-deleted - follow the link for it]
I got out some colorful pencils and sketched it out for myself:
[-deleted image - follow the link for it]
Step Two
The next thing I did was to write out my plot according to the three act structure.
This is very important, I wanted my story to have a tight, compelling and satisfying structure. I want readers to be drawn in by the flow of the story as the characters move through the world. I needed to make sure that I had my three acts properly laid out from the beginning.

Seriously, there is good stuff at that link - at all of them, really, so click on over once you have finished reading my drivel.
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*438 words is not only less than my intended minimum but I also threw out a few hundred words of yesterday's output as well.  In addition, I had typed more in Ommwriter and accidentally hit CTRL V instead of CTRL C.  Ommwriter doesn't have an 'undo' button.  After cursing to myself, I rewrote that bit.

For Busan area Nanowrimo people

Hello Writers!

Back up your novel! And think about doing the same for all your important data!

Writing!

I was once an athlete, a competitive swimmer, and the third quarter of any event was always the toughest. I, and most swimmers, would dive in at the start and struggle to hold back a little in the first quarter. By halfway, we would feel tired and the fun aspect would fade. Once we were in the final quarter, the end was in sight; our competitors -who were often good friends - were beside us and we would go fast.

Too obvious a metaphor? Over-stretched? At least I didn't use the phrase "Dig down and give it 110%". Oh. sorry.

This is a strange competition. Even more than when I raced the two hundred freestyle, this race is against ourselves. Your race is against yourself. I had to complete two hundred meters. You have to complete what feels good for you. That's it.

I hope most of us are on pace or close to it for 50,000 words. I am but when I look at some other word-counts, I feel inadequate. Some people have managed 50,000 already! But my story is mine. Those fast writing people deserve credit and admiration but so does anyone who, uh, digs down and gives it the best effort they can.

I must admit that though I have completed the 50,000 words twice before, I have not gone beyond that. To my embarrassment, I have stopped typing on November 30, at perhaps 55,000 words, and walked away from my story. Next week I'll write about what I need to do in December and beyond.

For this week, let me keep the focus on finishing the month and thinking about what I, and hopefully you, are learning about writing. I am learning that despite the many terribly constructed sentences, I am also writing a few beautiful ones. I am a capable writer. I have learned I am not ready to be a full-time author but I am an author and this is something I can and should continue with. More trivially, I have re-learned the grammar of writing dialog and how to write fight scenes.

I don't know if I am the Motivational Leader type of ML. I'll end that part of the letter here.

Next, the final events for Busan Nanowrimo:
On Sunday, November 22, I will be at BEXCO from 1:30 to 4:30. There is a design exhibition going on and the Busan Art Museum is across the street if you need inspiration. See photos for details. For family reasons I cannot stay longer than that. I will try to arrive early enough to visit the museum or the expo - fee unknown - before I write.

For the weekend of November 28, 29, I am set on the teahouse in Seomyeon. This blog post has the details. No one has made suggestions for a day or time, so I will go with Sunday the 29th, from 1:00 pm until 5:00. If someone is there and not quite finished, I will stay longer, cheering gently from across the table. good luck writing through that! From the blog post:

                     "Just come up from the Someyeon Subway station Exit 11. As you come up from the underground do not U-turn,

                        do not cross any streets : Just walk 2 doors straight around the curvy corner and you'll see..."

                       "Straight ahead the green red and black sign and there, on the ground floor Hyung-Cha !

                        There's lots of seats and a great place to meet! Best Wishes and Stay Steeped! --M.W.T."

Seoul has a Thank God It's Over event planned for December 5. I will not be traveling to it. So I think we need a local event. We started in Gwangalli, perhaps we should finish there as well. I'm thinking a coffee shop and maybe dinner in the area as we see fit. Provisionally, Dec 5 at 4:00pm at the same Starbucks we started at, the one at the west end of the beach, near Geumnyeonsan stn.

Brian

creativitiproject.blogspot.com

Hernandez's first draft completion notice

Ivan Hernandez, half of the third greatest Game of Thrones podcast (I can't keep up the joke - the frikkin best GoT podcast), has tweeted his completion of a first draft to a book. This isn't that big  a news item, but he included a screen shot of his word count and it included surprisingly specific data. Click to enlarge:

I wonder what tool he is using that specifies which character set it counts.  It doesn't mention Arabic, Japanese or Cyrillic, but Chinese and Korean are mentioned.

My novel from last year's Nanowrimo included three named Chinese characters and one named Korean but was written entirely in English. The many Russians, Nepalese and Kazakhs all have their names written in English so I have many Russian character but the word count would ignore them.  Not racism, cultural blindness, I think.