I think most of the people who find themselves anti-NaNoWriMo need to step back and figure out what they really have problems with, and try to focus on those things.

Be pro-editing, if it’s unedited and poorly edited books that bother you.

Encourage and educate people re: using Circles more effectively, to share posts only with those who are interested, if you don’t like your social media to be full of NaNo updates Oct-Dec.

Maybe just try to realize that there are power laws at play: Roughly/over 80% who attempt NaNoWriMo don’t finish (not even the word count, let alone an ending), and after doing it for ten years I can tell you that around 80% of those who do finish (as well as nearly everyone who doesn’t) have no interest in publishing their books – often they barely want it seen beyond their family/friends, if anyone. Anecdotally, I’d say that of the fraction of a fraction who have any intention of their book seeing the light of day, probably 80%+ know they need to spend time editing & polishing it (which is why NaNoEdMo exists, since much of the same need-a-goal-and-deadline still applies to any non-dayjob activity for a lot of people).

Oh, and then there’s the fact that, for me and most everyone I know who enjoys NaNoWriMo, it’s primarily about being social and having fun meeting other like-minded people while we all work on our own creative projects. Even the most curmudgeonly-anti-NaNoWriMo people I know tend to encourage activity of the same description, as long as it isn’t NaNoWriMo. Being social and collaborative and creative and building a network of thousands of local community groups all doing the same thing, all over the world, each allowing people to express themselves and make and meet creative goals and meet new people… Who cares if a tiny fraction of the creative work that comes out of it is professional quality? Do you rag on your grandmother’s knitting circle for not being aware of the market realities of the textile industry? Get a grip. Stop being anti- and find a way to be pro-.

When I started outlining the first book, a few days before November, I determined that at least the first book wanted to be over 65k words. Because of what I’m planning on doing with them, I want the books to be roughly the same length. Consequently, my word count goal for the month was set at, roughly, one hundred and thirty thousand words. Which is about 4,334 words/day, every day. I kept up a pretty good pace for the first week, almost ten days, then began to taper off. This was largely due to difficult things taking place in the story, but once I’d lost my momentum, around 50k words, actually, I wasn’t able to regain it. Different things kept happening, coming up, interrupting, et cetera. I didn’t finish the first book, yet. I wrote to the point that one of the main characters from the other book is introduced – I need to know what he’s like, what he’s been going through, where he’s at, and how the events about to take place in Sophia’s story are going to affect Emily in hers before I can write them. So I stopped that one and started working on the other.

The outline for that one seemed to imply that it wants to be shorter, which is especially frustrating since Sophia’s story seems to have gone even longer, currently on track for somewhat over 70k words. We’ll have to wait and see how that one actually ends up, but so far the chapters want to be short, too, which is frustrating – but maybe later chapters will want to be longer. Meh. I’m sure it’ll all work out alright. When I get around to writing it. Probably slowly over the next month or so. I predict a lot of workdays writing. Maybe not 5k-10k words/day, but some.

It’s more important to me to get the books written well than to stress out over any artificial deadlines. I recently determined that, by the time I’m done working on these two books, I’ll have spent around a thousand hours on them, between research, planning, writing, editing, recording/editing, and publishing them. Trying to rush any part of the process for books I’m investing so much time in seems inappropriate. So, I’m trying to get back into the right frame of mind for writing these books. This one is a tough one, for a whole stack of reasons I’ve mentioned on Google+ as I run into them, but I’m dedicated to doing it, and doing it well.

Anyway, I’m over 60k words so far on the novels this month, so I’m a “winner” of NaNoWriMo. I may write more this week, depending on what else is going on, perhaps another 10k-20k words… but I don’t expect to finish the first drafts of the two novels for at least several more weeks. If you’re interested in helping me with them, in becoming a ‘Beta Reader’ of my unfinished books, to give me feedback on them before I move into the final editing/layout/recording stages, comment or email me, and I’ll add you to the list, then send you copies of the books when I’m finished writing them.

Anyway, as happens in NaNoWriMo circles as November approaches, a familiar meme has arisen in recent discussions with friends and family members; the idea of pantser vs. plotter (or pantser vs. planner – interestingly, I like both plotter and planner as words, but not pantser at all, so having a choice between two frustrating formations is worse than having no choice at all?). For those of you not in the know, this is a question of whether one writes “by the seat of their pants” or one plans/plots out their book ahead of time.

My sister, who was recently named one of the MLs of the Phoenix region (after only 1 year’s participation!), attended a pre-planning meeting with several other Phoenix NaNoWriMo participants a couple of weeks ago. One of the things which frustrated her was their assertion (the other writers in the group) that if you weren’t planning out every little detail of your books ahead of time, down to a minute level, you were a “pantser”. My sister doesn’t feel like a pantser; she has a plot laid out, outlines her chapters, and has a firm grasp on what her book is about, who the characters are, and what they’ve got to go through. She and I agree that a pantser doesn’t really have all those things. A real pantser probably doesn’t have any of those things. I’ve done that several times, myself, sitting down in front of a blank page/screen with literally no plan -no characters, no plot, no setting, no theme, nothing at all but the blank canvas of the page in front of me and my imagination behind me- and watched a book flow through me and onto the page as if by magic. When it works, it works splendidly. I often, in that situation, find myself startled, surprised, and delighted as I read the words a sentence or two behind where my hands are working and learn what happens next only after I’ve written it. In fact, in my most-planned novels, the full outline for the book and the plot and the characters and the conflicts, the chapter-by-chapter breakdown of events and pacing … has all fit on the front of one piece of paper… but has been a hundred times more planning than the books I’ve “pantsed”, with structure, length, pacing, and character arcs all carefully crafted ahead of time and the rest of the story and details fleshed in as I wrote. But I always knew where I was and where I needed to be and in how many words and what route to take, and I considered myself a planner, even if the exact words to get there, the characters’ exact thoughts and dialog and a lot of the specifics were unknown to me until I wrote them.

Which leads me around to what I wanted to post about tonight; I think the line between pantsers and planners is really a false division. Divided that way, it certainly isn’t black and white, and the division isn’t particularly helpful or useful. I know that part of my sister’s reaction to the other writers’ views (and the way they express those views) is because they believe that plotting is superior to pantsing, that their way of plotting is the right way, and everyone else isn’t as good at writing. I’ve certainly met plenty of writers who hold similar views, in my time. It’s a position I believe is artificially supported by the weight of words about writing and how to write which have been published (I include blogging as publishing, here), in that the plotters and the planners, the ones who have a formula, a method, or a list of rules or guidelines they follow, are the ones who can most easily document those ideas about “how to write” – whereas the pantsers, especially the real pansters like I sometimes am, when they try to tell you (or write down) “how to write” have nothing to say, or only something vague, quasi-mystical, and often poorly understood (both by the one trying to share and those trying to learn). So the plotters write more and write more often about “how to write”, and what they write is easier to simply follow/obey, and over time it is this disparity in documentation which has given the plotters the veneer of being “right”. And which has, thus, created an us/them mentality and needless strife amongst authors who feel they aren’t really authors, or aren’t doing things “right” or don’t belong, somehow.

Here’s what I think is a better way of looking at it, a better question to address what is basically the same idea, but which I hope paints a more full picture and which paints different ways of storytelling as equally valid. This is not the complete picture, but consider: Are you engineering a story, or are you growing a story?

When I write, I’m growing a story. Sometimes I’ll build a lattice (an outline) to give the story the support it needs to grow in a particular direction, but the real shape of the story is not something under my direct/conscious control. I usually get to pick the seeds from which the story grows, but the stories then grow and change and thrive (or wither) according to their own designs. My job is to give the story a healthy environment in which to grow, to give it the characters and settings (and conflicts, et cetera) it requires, to prune it here and there, and mostly to stay out of its way and enjoy watching it unfold and expand according to its natural beauty.

Other writers, especially toward the more precise end of the plotting spectrum, prefer to engineer a story. Before they begin writing they create a detailed schematic (outlines, chapter details and synopses, notes, and more), a parts list (characters, usually with full biographies, settings, props and gadgets, et cetera), planning committee approval (careful, detailed world-building, sometimes writing/researching centuries of history and family lineages and architectural details of buildings and drawing/finding maps), and on and on so that, when the time comes to finally begin writing, nothing will be left to question. Often these writers are carefully engineering their stories to fit a very specific set of guidelines, ranging from economic viability in traditional publishing markets and established genre conventions to trying to express a particular political point of view or express a theme which is important to them.

When growing a story from the seeds of the theme and genre and characters and settings of your choice, there’s always the possibility that things won’t go as planned: That the book will be too long, or too short, to be considered by traditional publishers. That it won’t strictly adhere to the established conventions of a single genre, and will have trouble finding an audience because of it. That the characters will do unexpected things, take the story in unexpected directions, introduce new themes and come up with an ending you never imagined. Sometimes it turns out wonderful, sometimes you can get a publishing deal, or find an audience, or express a theme you didn’t even realize you cared so much about, in spite of all the randomness and unpredictability of growing a story. Other times you wish you were a story-engineer, because they at least seem to have some real control over their stories.

I can’t write as much, or as well, or as accurately, about those who engineer their stories, since I usually don’t. As I said earlier, my most-planned books have had little more than a lattice pointing the right direction and a few sketches guiding the placement of the seeds; when I try to engineer a story, or really even consider engineering a story, I get a little sick. (Nowhere near as bad as when I try to engage in Marketing; just a little … unwell.) Planning out every little thing, every scene in every chapter, every action, interaction, motivation and development, knowing it all in advance… just doesn’t work for me. (It occurs to me that the same is true, generally, of my life.) So I’ll not attempt it. There are already a lot of words out there about how to engineer a story, and what you’ll get when you do.

I’m just suggesting that the pantser/plotter division doesn’t really fit as well as that between engineering a story and growing a story. (Though there are positions even beyond those two, in this shape; the real pantser is probably more exploring a story; wandering around sniffing wildflowers, observing the shape of wild stories in their natural habitat, not really gardening or growing, and certainly not designing and constructing, but discovering and observing.) Every method of getting to your stories is a good one, as long as the result is a story told by you in the way which was right for you. Don’t let anyone try to get you down about being a grower of stories, or an engineer, or a wandering explorer. Embrace who you are and get good at it.

Remember, you won’t get any better at gardening by practicing drafting engineering schematics, and you won’t get any better at requisitioning parts and getting past the planning committee by wandering in a field of wildflowers. Try different things out, figure out what fits, and commit.

With all these projects and ideas and such burning to the fore of my mind, keeping me continuously busy for the first quarter of 2011 (and beyond), my initial plan for the year nearly faded from my thoughts. If you’ve also managed to forget it, it went something like this: My general goal is to write/publish 2 to 4 books per year and I’ve already done that much (with the Untrue Tales series), so there’s no real pressure (from my own goals) to try to finish any new books this year. This gives me the freedom to spend more time reading, to make progress on my “reading list,” as it were, not just books for pleasure but books for research (for several upcoming books I’ve got in mind, but don’t want to write without a lot of appropriate reading first). I’d also like to get some time invested in working again on my art, in taking it in a new direction, and in trying to produce beautiful artwork free from commercial concerns.

This last thought is perhaps the central one; to move to a place where the work I’m doing is no longer driven by commercial concerns. I think I’ve got our finances structured now in a way which will allow me to fully realize that mindset before the end of 2011. …though not if I continue to allow myself to obsess over things like getting funding, like promoting & marketing my creations, and/or like trying to learn how to write commercial/normal/formulaic books (or screenplays).

Anyway, I’ve been having some trouble keeping my mind focused, lately. I’m pretty sure the proliferation of projects preceded the present peripatetic propensity of my thoughts. Either way, it’s too many things, within and without. All things I want to accomplish, but I’m not confident a hurry in any way enhances or improves those accomplishments, so I’m going to try to slow down and take things one at a time. Try to focus on each thing in turn, if I can, instead of focusing on none of them at all. I’m significantly less stressed than I ever was working for someone else, or working for money, but those things are like infectious splinters, wedging their way into everything and poisoning even the good in life – and I am more stressed than I’d prefer to be because of them.

If my Kickstarter project gets funded, I’ll try to focus on that. If not, maybe I’ll try to focus on screenwriting for a month. Otherwise, I’m just going to focus on reading and on gradually developing the ideas, structure, and meaning of my upcoming vampire duology… while I try to adjust my frame of mind.

I “cheated” for NaNoWriMo this year. You’re “supposed” to start a new project from scratch and finish it during the month…

Though the focus has certainly shifted significantly in the direction of paying more attention to reaching 50,000 words than to finishing a novel. For a lot of pro- and aspiring- authors, there is much derision of the ideas that 1) 50k words constitutes a novel or 2) 50k words is a lot to write in a month. Still, none of the writers I know who have made such comments have come close to keeping pace with NaNoWriMo this year, and quite a few people I know who have no intention of ever seeking publication (or worse: becoming a professional writer) have kept up or outdone themselves, and while carefully following the rules. Others are struggling, even while including all the words they write for school, their blogs, short stories, grocery lists, anything they write all month.

Of course, a struggle I see every year (my sister & wife, included) is in reaching the 50k word goal but not getting near the end of the story. My sister thought she was about 1/4 of the way through her story at ~30,000 words. She’s revised her plot since then, to reign it in to a reachable target. My wife is about to hit 50k tonight (the 27th), but is planning on continuing to write for the next week or more until she gets to the end of the story. And because the focus of the people in charge at the OLL, and thus of the participants, is on the 50k instead of the finished book… They’re both going to be winners. As a 9-year veteran of NaNoWriMo I have no disagreement with this assessment; anyone who sets themselves an ambitious goal like this and succeeds is certainly a winner. 50k words in a month, a book in a month, a screenplay (Script Frenzy is in April, I think), a long reading list… Set yourself a challenge that you never thought you could beat, then beat it, and you’ll certainly feel like a winner.

Within three or four years of discovering NaNoWriMo, I’d already ruined myself of the idea of writing a book / 50k words in a month being a challenge. Certainly not one I don’t think I can beat: the first year I tried, after setting aside 2 partial manuscripts, I wrote a 50k-word novel in under 8 days. The next year I wrote Dragons’ Truth on a manual typewriter in (I think) 26 days. For my third try, I wrote Untrue Tales… Book One in 14 days. (I intended to write Book Two in the 2nd half of the month, but when my writing stalled, I instead edited Book One, designed its cover, wrote its copy, did its layout, and got it printed & available for sale by Nov. 30th. Because I was already teaching myself to be a publisher by 2004.) Book Two came out of me a couple months later, within about 2 weeks. In September, 2005, I wrote the first 48k words of Book Three in a “single sitting” 60 hours long. So writing a book in a month is… Not a challenge, as far as getting the words down, for me. It makes it so NaNoWriMo isn’t much more of a good/winner feeling over simply finishing a new book, which is something I do 2-4 times a year, most years.

This year, I’d intended/hoped to get the entire Untrue Tales series finished (at least first drafts) by the end of November/NaNoWriMo. I started Book Four in July, didn’t write much in August or the first half of September, then buckled down and finished it by … October 14th, I think. Started Book Five a few days later, hoping to get it done before November, but only wrote 20k words by the end of the month. So the first 30k I wrote was the end of Book Five. Which is “cheating” unless I also wrote the whole of Book Six by the end of the month (which had been my plan), right? Sorta. But not really. Last Thursday night, around 10PM, I began working on Book Six. On a manual typewriter (my ‘new’ Royal Futura, which I wrote the bulk of Book Five on), so these word counts are estimates: I wrote the first 14k words in the next 18 hours, took a 6 hour break for my nephews’ birthday party, then wrote another 6k words by ~7AM Saturday morning. Which put me at 50k total new words in November. Yay!

Then … I’m thinking something in my brain chemistry must have shifted, dopamine levels dropping or something, because my writing speed and quality dropped precipitously. In the next 3.5 hours I wrote one page, in which one of my characters was suddenly and unexpectedly suicidally depressed. Probably a reflection of what was going on in my own head at the time. I knew I probably ought to give up writing, but I was already committed to going to an all-night write-in Saturday night, so I just kept trying to write, all day Saturday, not calling it quits until around 4:30AM Sunday morning. I managed to write about 4k words in around 20 hours trying. Which is slow. And I think a lot of them are repetition of things I’d already written. Or out of character. Or wrong in other ways. So probably that 4k words will be deleted. But… I still wrote 50k words in November, right?

This week I thought I’d try re-reading Book Five and what I’ve written of Book Six before trying to write any more. To try to get a handle on what was repetition, where the story was going, et cetera, and get the rest of Book Six well in hand. Alas, whatever was going wrong with my brain, which began Saturday morning, continued at least until Thursday morning. I couldn’t read my book for very long, I couldn’t stay awake, I felt terrible, I couldn’t concentrate. All reasonably normal symptoms of depression. Not being able to work is a key problem of real mental illness. I managed to get through a day and a half of baking and cooking, getting Thanksgiving ready, and everything turned out good enough. (I still need to work on my pie crusts…) But I’ve decided that, as long as I actually have several months to get all this completed and still be on schedule (a schedule I invented), there’s not really any reason to be stressed out or trying very hard to struggle through to the end of Book Six by the end of the month. I’ll probably get it done in December. After my mind has a chance to recuperate/repair/recover from whatever this is.

Thursday they turned on the NaNoWriMo word count validator. I took Book Five and a few extra words to get what I uploaded to equal my actual (estimated) word count and threw it in. So I’m officially a “winner” again this year, at 54,150 words. I didn’t start a book from scratch & finish it during the month, but I worked on a book I was 40% of the way through, finishing it, and I got another one started and worked on it until it was 40%-48% done, which is mathematically very similar to writing one book from start to finish, right? Once again, I don’t like this year’s shirts. Mandy, who did win while I was writing this post, says she would like the winner T-Shirt if it didn’t have the arrow pointing up at her face. I definitely agree that the arrow makes the shirt less wearable. The only shirt design they have in stock right now that I really like is … only for women? Sigh. Mandy wants me to order it for her, instead. I’ll check finances, but I think the bill for eating at Denny’s tonight (at the write-in, where she passed 50k) ate the money we would/might have spent on that shirt.

Anyway, that’s that. My ninth year, fifth definite win (finished my 14th book & started my 15th). Mandy’s second attempt, second win. My sister’s first real attempt, and it looks like she’s going to win, too. I think I’ve decided not to try to take over the ML duties for Phoenix for next year, but my sister thinks she will, so that’ll be better than either: 1) the main ML they’ve had the last few years, or 2) no one, since both MLs are talking about quitting. We mostly participated in the East Valley region, this year, even though it meant several long drives back and forth from North Phoenix to Tempe and Mesa. The events were awesome, though, even when my writing was going badly last weekend, so it was a good decision. I’ll keep my eye on the situation, next year. It’ll be my tenth year doing NaNoWriMo. The books I’ve been working on this year will certainly be published by then; I don’t know which of the many ideas I have waiting to be worked on will be at the front of my mind when November rolls around again, but I know I’ll work on something. I think the challenge, for me, isn’t in hitting 50k words but in having my mind in the right state with an idea properly matured & ready to go when November hits. Last year I wrote Cheating, Death 6 weeks early, and wasn’t ready with anything else in time for NaNoWriMo. Always a crapshoot, but I don’t think I’ve ever been able to just do 1667 words/day, all month long: Like every other attempt I make at writing, it comes in fits and starts, bursts of writing 5k, 10k, 20k in a day, sometimes several such days in a row, and then days or weeks or months with nothing. …and 1k- to 2k- word blog posts every week or two, too, eh?

I started work on Untrue Tales… Book Five on Thursday, and when Starbucks closed & kicked me out last night (Friday), I’d already passed 10k words. My current goal is to finish Book Five before the end of October so I can go into NaNoWriMo with a blank slate & have a more relaxed schedule (a whole month?) for Untrue Tales… Book Six. Which will be the end of the series. Two trilogies. I’m making good progress toward my goals of getting them done, one right after the other, so I can get the entire second trilogy out in paperback in the Spring of 2011.

Depending on time availability I’m planning to start podcasting Book Four on the Modern Evil Podcast starting Friday November 5th, which puts Book Five’s start in mid-January, so I’ll probably hold off on the Book Five eBook release until January as well. Then I can aim to release the Book Six eBook and the 2nd-trilogy paperback around the end of March / beginning of April (April Fool’s day?), 2011… That sounds good.  Gives me time to edit & get feedback, lets me do the audiobook versions before the print version (recording the audio version always catches a few more flaws, trust me), but doesn’t make my audience wait too much longer to get the rest of the story. People who can’t afford to buy the eBooks (they’re just $5.99 each!) or the paperbacks ($24.99/trilogy retail, $50/trilogy signed & author-direct) will be able to hear the whole thing for free on the podcast before summer. (Or read the free eBooks not long after that.)

After I finish writing the end of the Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction – Recollections of an Alternate Past series (fingers crossed; by November 30th!), I can maybe get back to doing research for that alternate/zombie history series I was talking about this time last year. I have at least 10k more pages to read before I’ll be comfortable tackling that one. Lots of histories, biographies, and philosophy books, plus probably another stack of zombie books, and almost certainly a stack of steampunk (since I intend to invent the ‘solarpunk’ genre with the series). But that’s later. Right now, I’m writing about Trevor. Last night I wrote Trevor’s first confrontation with God. It was neat. Trevor and Toni got to go to Heaven, then God took them for a walk in the midst of the Garden. I think you’ll like it.

Here are the eBook and Podiobook download numbers, as usual giving the total of eBook downloads, the total of Podiobook downloads, and the more-accurate (re: # of people who dl’d a full book) total downloads of the final episodes of each Podiobook, as: eBook/total-PB/final-PB

• Lost and Not Found: 49 / 457 / 18
• Dragons’ Truth: 98 / 572 / 55
• Forget What You Can’t Remember: 104 / 1,765 / 51
• Untrue Tales… Book One: 69 / 1,594 / 134
• Untrue Tales… Book Two: 76 / 1,852 / 122
• Untrue Tales… Book Three: 55 / 877 / 94
• Cheating, Death: 6 / 2,988 / 197
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 2 / 260 / 37
• More Lost Memories (full): 2 / 362 / 39
• More Lost Memories (ind. stories, eBook only): 0
• Time, emiT, and Time Again (full): 1 / 943 / N/A
• Time, emiT, and Time Again (ind. stories, eBook only): 1
• Total for all titles: 463 / 11,670 / 747
• Total YTD: 4552 / 174,653 / 12,031
• Total all-time: 12,974 / 354,754 / 23,150

Free eBook downloads have remained relatively flat all year, much more stable than during either 2008 or 2009. eBook sales, actual paid sales, are still small enough that a shift from selling four or five to selling three in a month is not statistically relevant. I sold 3 eBooks in September, one copy of Untrue Tales… Book Three on kindle, one copy of Cheating, Death at Smashwords, and one copy of the TeaTA short story Oracular Offspring at Smashwords. (I also had 10 free/coupon eBook downloads at Smashwords, half of them Cheating, Death.) That makes for $8.78 from my cut of eBooks sales in September. Wheee, the kindle 70% royalty makes a big difference – & is now also coming to me from UK sales (none of which I’ve ever/yet made).

I forgot to mention it last month, but since it’s happened 2 months in a row: I also sold 2 paperback copies of Cheating, Death via wholesale/LSI in each of August and September. I net $2.44/copy, so that’s $4.88/month or $9.76 for all four. While looking that up, I noticed that in June I sold 2 copies of Forget What You Can’t Remember via wholesale/LSI, earning $4.50. Not sure where these sold, exactly, but probably not Amazon, where their sales ranks are in the multi-millions (and could drop into the hundreds of thousands with just a couple copies moving per month, from what I hear); maybe book stores I’ve never heard of (or a certain horror book store I have) are shelving/selling them.

I should ask. *scoots off, sends a DM* If an actual bookstore is shelving/selling my zombie book, I’ll keep the discount at 50% indefinitely, rather than follow my new plan of dropping the discount to 20% after the book has been out a year. *twiddles thumbs* *waits for DM reply* Because really, yes, it’s still cool that a bookstore ever voluntarily shelved my book. The ~$3 more/copy I’d get from online stores doesn’t seem worth the cost of removing it from a physical bookstore, especially if it’s actually selling there. Plus, as an author, a reader, and a publisher, I’d rather do something nice for an indie bookstore who was willing to do business with me than to do something that was only intended to bring in more money from online bookstore sales. As you may have noticed, I almost always prefer doing something nice over making money.

In other news, I just finished writing Untrue Tales… Book Four. Now I just need to read, edit, re-read & copyedit, share with my Beta Readers & incorporate their feedback, design a cover, write copy, and do eBook layout & conversion for it. While writing Book Five. Before the end of the month. So I can write Book Six for NaNoWriMo. (because I’m crazy)

Among the many features that make NaNoWriMo what it is, some of the most important are the online forums and the in-person gatherings of participants.  On the forums, writers can connect with people from all over the world – usually to procrastinate, but sometimes for writing prompts, factual details, help with character, setting, theme, whatever can get them from zero to novel in a month.  For anyone living far from other participants, the forums are the community.  For people in large urban areas, there are usually hundreds or thousands of other participants they have the opportunity to meet and write with in person.  There are, traditionally, write-ins scheduled throughout the month; ostensibly to get together and write (esp. including group “word wars” to spur bursts of high-word-count activity), but also importantly to chat and connect with a community of like-minded people.  Like-minded only in that they also wanted to write a novel & had the audacity to try to do it in a month: NaNoWriMo participants come from all walks of life, which is why it’s such a great way to meet new people.  People who love books & writing & words…

Back in 2002, my first year doing NaNoWriMo (the 4th year of its existence), the Phoenix area had never yet been organized, had never had a Municipal Liaison, and I wanted to interact with other writers in person -I’ve never been a fan of online “forums” and that was the only alternative- so I volunteered.  I organized.  I scheduled write-ins.  I contacted local writers.  I contacted the press & got articles in both the East Valley Tribune and the Arizona Republic (the latter featuring a photo of our group at a write-in, which I thought was pretty cool).  I started novels that I was having trouble with, tossing them out and starting form scratch over and over and ended up writing an entire novel in 8 days, finishing at 10PM on November 30th, not long before the deadline.  It was a great experience.

Then, within months, my whole life situation changed and I was living in the tiny Northern Arizona town of Pine when NaNoWriMo 2003 rolled around.  The nearest meetings were 100 miles away in each of three directions, and … and I still didn’t much like forums.  I took a couple of days during the month to drive down to Phoenix, and got a fair amount of writing done at the same coffee shop I’d written my first novel at (though I don’t think I ever managed to connect with other participants, that year)…  and it wasn’t the same.  I very nearly didn’t finish, and I think the result is my least favorite of my novels, and I put a lot of that on how it felt to be doing NaNoWriMo by myself.  It’s one thing to be an author working on a novel and to do that singly; it’s something else to be doing a worldwide challenge in parallel with tens of thousands (now over 100,000 every year) of other people, none of whom you ever see or speak with.

Then, by NaNoWriMo 2004, I was back in Phoenix.  The Phoenix area had two co-ML’s who did a great job finding great places to write, getting people motivated both on the forums and in person and a lot of people were showing up to the write-ins.  It was great, again.  A lot of the participants continued meeting, and writing, and editing &c. for months and months after November ended.  [details removed] and when NaNoWriMo 2005 hit, I wasn’t welcome at the write-ins and other community gatherings, nor to post on the forums.  I felt like shit, rejected, threatened and emotionally abused by a few members of the group, and I think I ended up writing about 1200 words that year.  (Or maybe it was 5k that year and 1200 the next?)  It was basically the same thing in 2006.  If you look at my blog posts for November, 2006, you see I only made 1 post, on November 30th, about how much not being able to participate in the NaNoWriMo community was tearing me apart.

So, in 2007, I’d decided that I was going to participate anyway, and if the few people who’d had a problem with me were still participating & still had beef with me, that was their problem, not mine.  I wasn’t going to let it be my problem, any more.  And I had a good time, again.  One of the great ML’s from when 2004 had been so good was still ML, and the group dynamic was pretty good (though smaller), and there were write-ins all over the valley.  I wrote a story, I finished the story, and it wasn’t anywhere near the 50k words minimum to “win” but that didn’t bother me too much.  About half-way through the month, Mandy and I decided to get married.  On December 1st, we did.  Which is to say that, rather than starting a new novel attempt and easily finishing before the deadline (which I could have done), I instead planned a wedding & honeymoon in under two weeks.  Now December 1st will always be a happy day for me, whether I’ve just finished a novel by November 30th, or not.

Then in 2008 the ML that had done such a great job for years moved to the East Valley, and for the first year, Phoenix NaNoWriMo participants got split into two groups.  Phoenix, and East Valley.  Another person wanted to split off North Phoenix (where I live) as well, but the new ML-in-charge-of-Phoenix said no – so she scheduled her own “unofficial” write-ins in North Phoenix anyway.  I only went to a couple of the East Valley meetings (because I live 30-60 minutes away from where they were), but when I did I had a good time and saw a great group.  All the “official” Phoenix write-ins were scheduled in the new ML’s neighborhood, the forums were nearly dead, and few bothered to show up to the write-ins.  Mandy and I both participated in 2008, and we went to a couple of these “official” write-ins, and they were deadly dull.  It was frustrating as heck, and I barely got any writing done in their stifling silence.  Alternatively, we also attended some of the “unofficial” write-ins in our neighborhood and found that not only was attendance equal or greater than the “official” ones, but the attitude and atmosphere were much more cordial, friendly, and conducive to writing.  After about mid-month the new ML stopped showing up to her own events, failed to plan anything for a non-writing gathering that she’d put on the schedule, failed to organize a TGIO party…  Mandy and I continued attending the North Phoenix write-ins, and both finished our 50k words before the month was out.

Looking forward to NaNoWriMo 2009, I’d been thinking, a couple months ago, that the ML who had totally dropped out of NaNoWriMo in mid-month last year wouldn’t be back.  I’d been thinking I might even volunteer.  I’ve been ML before, I’ve done NaNoWriMo 7 times before and have 10+ books published, plus I don’t have a day job other than being an author and artist, and working with the writing community in the Phoenix area is certainly something I’ve been wanting to at least try to do more of.  Except that when I went over to the NaNoWriMo site to see what it said about Phoenix’s ML situation, I found that last-year’s failure of an ML was apparently gung-ho to get started and excited to try again.  She’s put together a (sparse) “PhoeNoWriMo” website, and created a PhoeNoWriMo Twitter account (with 3 tweets), and… uhh… yeah. Said she’s planning fewer write-ins, more non-writing gatherings, and putting an emphasis on doing things online, online chat, forums, et cetera, and minimizing in-person interaction.  Plus, she hates dislikes me, and doesn’t mind saying so to my face.  I don’t like her either, and say so right back to her.

On the other end of town, there’s the East Valley, with two great MLs who I know I can count on to host lively events and encourage everyone effectively to reach their writing goals.  It’s only the minimum 30-minute-each-way drives to the East Valley events that makes that difficult; money is tight, and that could add up to a lot of gas… though if the Phoenix ML schedules all the events in her neighborhood again, it’s still a 20-25 minute drive.  Or perhaps a few of us North Valley participants can “unofficially” write together again, this year.  In the “official” NaNoWriMo-is-only-a-month-away email, the Phoenix ML specifically told us not to schedule any “conflicting” events, and implied that us North-Phoenix writers better not be having a good time at unapproved events.  The whole thing is making me want to contact the real NaNoWriMo staff & ask about officially creating a North Valley region, if not for this year then for next.

Oh, and what am I planning on writing?  I don’t know.  Depends on what other writing I’m able to get done between now and then.  Cheating, Death seems to be paused temporarily in the middle of Chapter 8, though if I can get my momentum back, I should be able to finish it this week.  If that happens, I may be able to start work on the next zombie novel, and then I could either work on a totally new & random project for NaNoWriMo 2009 or I could write the Self Publishing book I’ve been thinking of.  And then there’s the question of whether I try to podcast excerpts from my NaNoWriMo novel as I’m writing it, like I did last year.  The podcast version of Untrue Tales… Book Three runs out mid-November, and I think I run out of pre-recorded poetry at the end of October, so … probably, yes.  Lots to do.  Always lots to do.  I may not be earning much money doing it, but I’m going to continue working, writing, painting, podcasting, and otherwise creating as long as I’m able.

Yesterday, I finally started work on my new novel, Cheating, Death.  As I’ve been working toward, as soon as the first chapter was done, I got to work getting it set up on Smashwords.  My idea is to write the book “live” on Smashwords; to make the rough draft available to readers as it unfolds.  The first few chapters will be free, and after a certain point I’ll gradually start increasing the price so that by the time the book is fully written, the eBook will cost full price.  Because of the way Smashwords handles versioning and rights, once you’ve paid for an eBook you have access to it no matter what the price gets updated to or how many times the text is modified – in fact, you actually get to choose which version of the book to download, if it’s been updated since you purchased it.  So whatever price you pay, whenever you purchase it, you don’t have to pay again and you get access to all future updates, including the final one.

I plan to update the book on Smashwords every time I finish a chapter (or if I’m on a roll, at the end of each writing session with any completed chapters).  I expect to finish the book by Halloween at the latest (because NaNoWriMo starts at midnight on Halloween), and perhaps as soon as the end of next week, if the story really flows out.  (One time I wrote a book over a long weekend, so there’s no telling, maybe I’ll be done by Monday.)  Your feedback on the novel-in-progress is appreciated.  Feedback on the content, the grammar, spelling, the unlikable characters, whatever – anything is welcome.  I’d like to get the thing in as good a shape as possible while I’m writing it.

I plan on doing as much of the back-end work as possible while writing it (plus I’ve already got the cover almost finished, and I’ve just put together several pages on modernevil.com for it) so that within a couple of weeks of finishing the first draft, I should have the paperback in hand.  Then, with any luck, I’ll start podcasting the audio version of the novel on November 13th – one week after Untrue Tales… Book Three is finished on the Modern Evil Podcast… which should give me podcast content until around mid-January, 2010.

Now, semi-secretly, I’ve got at least two other (perhaps 3 other) zombie books in me, and I think 2009 is the “Year of the Zombie” so I was thinking I’d try to get them all out (& preferably in print) by the end of the year.  I’ve been working on thoughts for how those will develop, playing around with some ideas, and trying to figure out a timeline for working on them.  Back before it took me 3 weeks longer to start writing Cheating, Death than I’d suspected (and I still haven’t finished all my ‘research’), I was thinking maybe I could write Cheating, Death in September, the [idea deleted] one in October, and the [idea deleted] one (which would probably be my first Christian fiction) for NaNoWriMo.  But now I’m thinking maybe try to finish this one as fast as I can, try to finish the next one before November, write a non-fiction book (my book on Self-Publishing I’ve been talking about and thinking of all year) for NaNoWriMo, and the third (Christian) one in December (or just start it as soon as I have time).  The fourth one also has something like werewolves in it and I’m told that 2010 will be the “Year of the Werewolf”, so perhaps I’ll save that idea for then.  Or throw it out.  I hear rumor it might be derivative of some TV show I never watched.

Anyway, lots of new fiction on the horizon, most of it with zombies of one sort or another.  The first one is available starting now.  Hurry, go get it while it’s free on Smashwords, and watch how my ideas turn into a novel:

Go read Cheating, Death now.

Anyway, so as I said, I was lying awake in bed a bit ago, thinking about maybe setting up to live stream writing Cheating, Death via USTREAM or some such, thinking about how I’d set up the camera or cameras, maybe see if I could use BoinxTV to do a split-screen with one video of my face and another of my typewriter, how to do lighting, angles, and be able to reach both the typewriter & the computer keyboard to interact with anyone watching and … and for a second it occurred to me that people watching might prefer/expect me to be writing in software and streaming the computer screen itself … but that passed, and I got to thinking about how I’d have to set up another table in front of my computer desk and wondering whether it would take the force of my energetic keystrokes on a manual typewriter…  Which actually led me to thinking about the idea that … I’m not sure the Olivetti is the right machine for writing this novel.

I mean sure, I used my Olivetti TROPICAL (looks like this one) to write the entirety of Forget What You Can’t Remember (among other things), it’s a good machine.  Reliable.  Comfortable.  I’m used to it.  It’s also the lightest and most portable of my working typewriters.  But I don’t think it’s the right machine for Cheating, Death.  This is a zombie novel.  Grittier, dirtier, more painful than FWYCR.  Still not a thriller, no, but the Olivetti is clearly for lighter fare.  So what else could I use?  Certainly not my Olympia!  (She’s a great typewriter, never had a mechanical problem with her, but every word that comes out of her is in script.  Cursive!  Far too feminine for this book.)  Perhaps the Underwood I wrote Dragons’ Truth on, or one of my Smith Coronas or Remingtons.  A friend gave me a President that needs a little work; maybe I could get it in working order… but even though it’s masculine, it has an even smaller profile than my Olivetti.  The President is for more lightweight work.  Maybe I’ll try it for some short stories.  It feels like it would be good at terse writing.

Just writing this post is making me want to go out to the storage room where most of them are sitting, waiting, on shelves, for the chance to be used.  Not all of them are fully functional.  A few of them need totally new ribbons, a couple of them I’ve never written more than a sentence with; I’m not even sure they’d survive a novel without serious repair.  I think my favorite Underwood is about to need a repair I’m not qualified to give it, and I don’t have any money to hire a pro right now.  (Have you considered buying a subscription to me?) I believe (though I recall offering to give one away in the last couple of years, so it may be one less) I currently have nine manual typewriters in my collection.  Each one has a different feel to it, a different character.  I don’t think the Olivetti is the right machine for this novel.  Maybe none of them are; maybe I should write it on my iBook.  I’ll definitely be doing my NaNoWriMo novel on it – I bought that iBook for NaNoWriMo, received it November 1st, 2004, and have been using it ever since… right up until I bought the iMac I’m writing this post on.  I bought that iBook for writing.  Perhaps it’s still the right tool for the job.  Certainly lighter and more portable than even the President.  Perhaps I’ll load it up with Scrivener and take it to town and see what comes out.  But I’m definitely going to get out all my typewriters this weekend & consider the matter thoroughly.

What about you?  What do you write with?  What would you use to write a zombie novel, to write Cheating, Death?

Update: I’ve just uploaded photos of all my typewriters to this flickr set.  I’m thinking about doing a post (or eight) detailing them, as well.

Some writers include everything – from my thousand-word blog posts down to my 140-character (or less) Tweets, and grocery lists besides, but that always seemed disingenuous to me.  Until I take the time to put together a book or two from my blog posts (that pot is still boiling away at the back of my mind, believe me), writing blog posts isn’t the sort of writing that I consider Writing.  Using Twitter more mostly improves my ability to use Twitter more.  Most of the time the write-every-day writers seem to be doing so in the hopes that it is like playing an instrument & they just need daily practice to get better and better.  Which is an interesting idea.  Have fun with that.

I just choose to think every day, instead.  A lot of the day, every day.  Thinking.

One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is my audiobooks.  The audio version of Forget What You Can’t Remember was completed this week, both on my feed and on Podiobooks.com.  I began podcasting the audio version of UTFBF-RoaAP, Book One on my own feed yesterday (it goes live at Podiobooks.com April 27th).  Book One will be 10 episodes, after that I’ll start Book Two, then probably Book Three – each of them about 10 episodes, since the books are all about the same length…  And then, in about 30 weeks, I’ll be out of novels to podcast.  According to the Google Calendar, where I just mapped out those 30 episodes to Fridays, I’ll run out in mid-November.

So one of the things I’ve been thinking about is that, between now and then, I’d better write something new.  Maybe the Self-Publishing book I’ve been thinking about writing will be podcast-able, but in addition to that I’d better write some new fiction.  There’s a good chance that, reading UTFBF over and over again for the next six months will get me to a place where I can write Book Four (and maybe continue from there with the series).  And I realize that since I can certainly write a book in a month (and have produced various first drafts in: 3 weeks, 2 weeks, and even 3 days, once  upon a time) that six months is plenty of time, but … I also know that for me, a big part of writing is thinking and I’d better get to thinking.  Thinking I’m going to write more books.

One of the other things I’ve been thinking, along these lines, is maybe I’ll not do that cards/book thing I was thinking about.  I dunno.  Thinking about the packaging/marketing/sales side of it has been making me queasy.  Writing the book is one thing, painting/creating the cards is another, each difficult in its own way, but then … I can’t just set it up with Lightning Source and know that anyone can walk into a book store and order it, or get it on Amazon/etc..  I can’t have it set up for Wholesale/POD at all, really, since I need the cards to be packaged with the book – I’ll have to order a huge amount of books, order the same number of decks of cards, package them together all by hand, and then … frankly, sell them by hand.  Which … I, ugh… I mean, in person sales at Art Walks and Art Fairs and even via social media is all fine, but … going to stores and trying to get them to carry my product, dealing with consignment and/or other even-more-bizarre methods everyone apparently uses for accounting for business transactions… the thought of it makes me sick.  I really like the idea of the product, but dealing with getting it to market makes me feel like shit.

Which has a lot to do with why I haven’t moved forward with the research and/or the art for that project.  At all.  bleh.  (Overwhelming depression is also a factor, but one that I’m at least able to grind some productivity from.)

I’ve got to go get ready for an Art Fair today.  Maybe I’ll get a chance to think more, in between customers.

It isn’t necessarily going faster, or easier, during the actual writing. But especially as I’ve been deep in the midst of writing a spinoff novel to Lost and Not Found and my immediate flow into a spinoff of that while recording the audio version of Lost and Not Found, I’ve been able to see how my writing has changed. Or, at the least, to see how much my writing could be improved from what was in Lost and Not Found. Hopefully by seeing that I’m able to steer away from it in my new writing. Even just little things like maintaining tense consistently, or using the same version of a word throughout a book (ie: either the British or the American version, but not switching back and forth between the two), which I thought I’d corrected in the Second Edition of Lost and Not Found, are very frustrating. I don’t know how much time I want to keep sinking into that book, but it isn’t up to my current standards.

I’m writing something very strange, right now. I’m not sure anyone will understand it. I’m not sure what to do with it, this collection of stories. The strangeness, the expected failure to understand, are iterative. I see them in individual sentences & paragraphs, in each story, and in the collection as a whole. I’m not sure it’ll be book length when it’s complete. Maybe, but book length feels very far away, right now, and my list of stories yet to be written for it feels like it’s dwindling. Perhaps I will write a series of stories even further removed from Forget What You Can’t Remember, which are spinoffs of these spinoff stories and which show the stories of characters who are incidental to the stories of the incidental characters in that novel. I already have one in mind, actually. If it’s just the one, I’ll pretend it’s relevant. If I can come up with more, perhaps I’ll divide More Lost Memories into chunks.

I discovered in the last few days that NaNoWriMo doesn’t really matter to me, any more. Not in a giving up way, not in an apathetic way, but in the following way: This is my job. It doesn’t matter whether I hit your word count goal, as long as I reach a length that I, as the publisher, feel is ‘book length’. It doesn’t matter whether I hit your time goal, because if I finish early then great, get to work on writing the next thing sooner and if I don’t finish on time I still have to keep writing. This is my job. This is what I do. I write. I make publishing decisions. When one book is done, I work on another (I’ve got at least four books either partially written or entirely written and partially edited right now, with at least a couple more ready to be worked on, and an endless supply of imagination) and when that’s done this will still be my job. So it doesn’t matter. Not practically. Although: we did buy Little Big Planet as NaNo-bait, and we aren’t allowed to open it until both Mandy and I finish our books. So, there’s that.

Alright. It’s 5AM. This isn’t an early post, it’s a late one. Been up all night. Barely written anything. Even more fun, I need to be up on Saturday, during the day, for North Valley Art Walk, followed by an Iron-Chef-type battle (Pumpkin), followed by the NaNoWriMo all-nighter, followed by church, then probably the Scottsdale Art Fair, and then my Nephews’ birthday party. No, seriously, if I don’t get to bed on time tomorrow night I’ll be running from early Saturday morning until late Sunday evening on almost no sleep at all. Because my life is awesome. Time for bed. Whenever it is I get up, I’ll record an intro for the Modern Evil Podcast, mix the episode, and get it online, ASAP. I’m going to aim for …9AM? Someone call me at 9AM.

In other news, I stayed up all night last night. Some time after 2AM, when the house had been quiet for over an hour, I managed to start writing, working on my NaNoWriMo thing. I wrote until 5:30AM, when Heath walked back in (he delivers newspapers), adding roughly 2500 words to my word count. Which is pretty wonderful. I think that’s better than almost every other day I’ve been writing. Wonderful.

According to all those widgets I put in the last post, my daily goal for the rest of the month is apparently higher than 2500 words, so that puts a little perspective on it, a little tragedy, but I expect to be able to write more tonight, between the write in and the I-just-slept-all-day-and-expect-to-be-up-again-all-night, so hopefully I’ll have an even more wonderful word count tomorrow.

In other news, I still don’t hate the theme I chose, so that’s good. Perhaps not quite wonderful, but far from tragic. Alright. Now: grocery shopping. Later: more writing.

And you can see from the two calendars below that while I apparently only hit the “goal” for daily word counts on Saturdays, Mandy has had good success with weekends, overall:

vs. 

Ooh, and here’s a strange set of graphs, showing daily word counts vs. goals, scaled to our highest daily wordcounts.  I think that the goal (red) scales automatically to what you would need to be doing daily at each point to still reach 50k by the end, which is neat, and also why mine is creeping up and Mandy’s has been fairly steady:

vs.

And then we get into the regional numbers:

This year, “Easy Valley” broke off from “Phoenix”, taking 220+ writers (100+ of whom have actually put up word counts as of right now) out of the official Phoenix community for the first time.  A full third of Phoenix’s active writers, broken off – they think they’re so different, so “East Valley”, but look at them, right now they’re performing within 1% of Phoenix on a words per person basis!  We should have stayed one region and just had dual write-ins.  One Central PHX ML, one East PHX ML, and lots of opportunities for everyone to get together!  Heck, there’s been a further split, with “North Valley” people breaking off and having their own write-ins on my side of town!  This disintigration cannot be good for the “community” – we must stick together!

And then there’s the rest of Arizona, with Tucson (as always) leading in words/person, Flagstaff not far behind them, and both ahead of Phoenix and East Valley regions.  And then there’s that guy in Patagonia:

I think I’ve run out of things to say.  Time to go make dinner, I guess.  Happy novelling, everyone!

Theoretically it’s all working okay, though, now.

In other news, switching themes on my blog has assisted me with procrastinating an extra hour or more tonight that I ought to have been working on my NaNoWriMo project. Passed 15k words at Starbucks tonight (while Mandy was busy passing 23k words), which feels pretty good. Wrote almost double my average for most of the month so far, actually, which is good. Writing action, and a scene I’m particularly interested in and excited by seems to help. I’m almost to the point where the 5500 words I’ve written of this short story so far tie directly into an interesting sequence in Chapter 20 of Forget What You Can’t Remember, and reveal that all is not what it seems. All is, in fact, much more interesting than it seems.

Except then that story will be over and I’ll have to write a new one. And/or some sort of depressing resolution to this one.

Oh, and did I mention that it’s past halfway through the month, so I’m supposed to be halfway to 50k? Note: 15k != 25k sigh.

((Ooh, maybe I’ll do a painting from the word ‘sigh’…))