NaNoWriMo Hiatus/I Dropped the Ball

As you can very well see, this isn't a short story - that's right, I lied.  While fiction writing classes keep you very well-honed in terms of writing new material, it does get difficult to find time to edit other things.  I imagined I'd have hours and hours of time left to me for both writing and editing, but 21st birthdays get in the way unfortunately.  But there will be a short story here by the end of December at the latest, that I will guarantee!  

Why not November?  Well, for those who remember my latest postings, I am doing NaNoWriMo during the month of November, and I highly doubt that I'll have time to edit another short story while writing this novel, along with school papers/presentations.  But all of my energies after this novel is written will be devoted to editing like a mad man - not this novel of course, that won't be edited for a good half a year.  But I'll try to have a damn fine short story by the end of December, two if I can work fast enough, but don't get your hopes up.  

Anyways, that's my story right now.  I'll try to write some poetry to post here sometime though.  Wish me luck for NaNoWriMo!  

NaNoWriMo - Do It!

I didn't expect to write anything here so soon, at least not until the end of the month, but I seem to have gotten myself wrapped into something insane and awesome, exciting and terrifying, and I thought all of my millions of billions of non-existent readers should try this too.

A friend of mine just introduced me to NaNoWriMo, which I had seen mentioned by some other friends of mine but had no idea what it was.  Basically, you write at least 50,000 words of a novel in the span of November 1st to November 30th, which comes out to around 1,667 words a day, or about 5 pages double-spaced I'd estimate, 2-3 single-spaced (if you're into that).  There isn't much of a catch - it can be any genre, including Novel-Poems, meta-fiction, and even fan-fiction, just as long as it's a novel.  You can plan it out before hand as much as you want, just as long as all the actual writing takes place in November.

Two friends and I talked about it, and we decided, yeah, why the fuck not!  The way we all figure, this will undoubtedly be a terrible, terrible first draft of things, but it'll be there to be edited or revised, probably rewritten in my case.  And if it sucks, hey, how many people can say they've written a novel!  I've actually been doing some planning for novels I figured I wouldn't do until far into the future, including some graphic novel ideas I have.  Maybe I'll use one of those, maybe some idea I haven't thought about for years, maybe something completely and utterly new I think up an hour before the clock strikes November.  It'll be a terrifying experience I'm sure - I tend to self-edit while writing, which I just won't be able to do if I hope to write 5 pages a day.  But it'll be a great experience too - one of the things that prevents us from writing, I think, is just a lack of motivation.  I could write an extra hour today, but I'll be able to write tomorrow too, so no big deal.  Except now, every day I don't write is another day I literally have to write more - shit's gonna be crazy man.

And I implore anyone and everyone to try it too!  Worst case scenario, you don't make it, but you try damn hard.  Personally, I don't think anything is lost by failing to make the 50,000 words.  A friend tells me that only one novel has been published out of all the ones written for this, and I'm probably going along genre-lines that'll make a publisher's head spin Exorcist-style, so seeing the story I wrote next month in a book jacket is not exactly one of my expectations in life.  So you really don't lose anything by trying, and you can only gain, even if you somehow only get 48,000 words, or some painful amount like that.  You've still got 48,000 words to edit into a novel!

I've actually been planning on writing one novel idea I've had, but that's not the novel I'm gonna write.  For one thing, I technically already started writing that, and for another thing, I feel like this is an opportunity to just kick back and let go - why do an idea I've been entertaining seriously when I can invent an idea as it goes along and see where it takes me!  It's been long time since I've written a complete mystery story.  In high school when I'd write, I'd start with a basic premise and just let things go from there.  Even now I hardly ever know the endings of my stories when I start writing.  It'll be a thrill to barely know the middle as well!

I'll still post something here at the end of October and November short story-wise, possibly with an excerpt of this "novel" if anything is reading-worthy, but definitely no guarantees on that.  The hardest part will definitely be writing consistently everyday, while also keeping up with school reading and assignments, and staying on top of short stories I have due for my Advanced Fiction class.  So I'll be writing a novel, a short story, and at least 2 presentations during November, not to mention reading out of Ulysses and reading a Virginia Woolf novel a week.  I might go insane.  But you gotta be a little insane to write a novel really, so why not give it a shot?  You can't even lose your sanity, I probably never even had it to begin with.

We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties (Not A Poem)

So yeah, I haven't posted here in a while!  I've written a few poems since the last one I had here, but nothing I'm really happy with, and to be honest, few of the poems I've been posting here have been all that good too.  My idea when it came to posting here once a week at least was that it would keep me writing, and I planned on having more of a variety of things, or at least more variation between short stories and poems.  I have been writing short stories, though not as efficiently as I could be, and the poems I've been writing have been less out of a true feeling for the topic/subject and more as just something to show here for the weekly post, which really just makes a bigger backlog of poems that need serious revising.

It's funny that I wrote a blog recently about the myth of inspiration at my new writing blog: Wordswords (a place where I write about writing, no actual fiction or poetry there).  I agree whole-heartedly about the myth of inspiration when it comes to fiction writing and prose, you need to write everyday if you really want to get better at writing, regardless of whether you feel like writing or not.  I suppose the same goes with poetry - you need to keep writing it if you want to keep improving at it - but right now I don't have the time to think about poetry that much.  I don't want to write a poem down in 10 minutes, then have to finish the reading I'm doing, and then haphazardly edit it later when I post it here.  You get a shitty poem, and I get something that I won't even be able to revise again for weeks or months.

So I've come up with a new posting schedule for this blog: monthly stories, possibly bi-weekly poetry.  I'm not happy with how slow it takes me to write a short story, and most of the stories I end up writing I become unhappy with anyway.  Deadlines have always helped me, strangely enough, so I'm giving myself a monthly deadline for each story I work on.  By the end of October, I plan on having an at least semi-polished short story to post here.  Obviously it won't be perfect, but it'll be at the stage where it's ready for outside criticism anyways.  Ray Bradbury could write a short story a week - sadly, I'm not him.  But I want to be!  So I figure if I keep up this pace, I'll slowly get better and more in-tuned with writing fiction prose, and maybe someday I'll crank out stories at that speed.

As for poetry, I will try to post every other week.  I say try because, honestly, if I don't have anything good, I might not post.  But for the most part I want to keep my poetic sensibilities active, so I will take my hand at writing poetry as much as possible, and I will read poetry more, and if I have multiple poems that I'm proud of, I will post them all.  Also, if I have any poems written around the time I'm posting a short story, I will post them then too probably.  Either way, I will try to keep things moving.

So yes, that's the story of this blog right now!  Fret not you faithful readers (all none of you), I'm still posting weekly at Wordswords and Nobody's Rambler, so you can always get a consistent helping of my thoughts on whatever it is I'm rambling about each week.  With all of that being explained, and a new goal in mind, I bid you adieu, perhaps to see you in 2 weeks, for sure to see you by Halloween!