10,000 Words!

I just hit a major milestone tonight. 10,250 words as of 9:45pm. With my end goal of 70,000 words, this means I’m likely around 1/7th of the way through my novel. Even though, I’m probably actually NOT 1/7th of the way through my novel, it feels like it, and so that’s what I’m sticking with for the time being.

But still. 10,000 words. I haven’t written 10,000 words worth of anything. Ever. This is big for me. But it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Dive back in. Several more 10,000 word milestones to go.

And miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep.

Moving the goal posts

I’m doing it again. I’m moving the goal posts. This time, it has nothing to do with being distracted by something new and shiny. This time, it has everything to do with being caught up in a lot of stuff every week, and needing a bit more time to breathe than I currently offer myself.

My first weekly goal of 4,000 words was unthinkable. The second goal I set for myself of 3,000 words a week was attainable, but only if other things on my plate suffered for it. Things such as my dedication to my local church teen program, my family, my devotion to David Letterman, etc. So, I’ve set myself a brand new weekly goal. One that will end up making the novel project take far longer than I had originally intended, but I think will end up creating more quality content in the long run.

So, from now on, it’s 1,750 words per week. This is an easily attainable goal, one that I’ve hit almost consistently since day one; but each week, only barely. That says to me that this is a reasonable goal. One that I can hit with the right amount of effort, and still continue to be involved in other matters of life. With the exception of video games — I’m still not playing any of those these days, which, for the moment at least, is just fine with me.

I know that moving the goal posts isn’t the best way to ensure that tasks are eventually completed. My projected completion date is now nestled comfortably somewhere deep within the recesses of the spring-summery month of June. That far exceeds the original date of the end of 2008. However, to be perfectly honest, it’s probably much more realistic.

This whole exercise is completely new. I had absolutely no guidelines going into it that could give me an idea of how much I could reasonably write in a given week. Now that I am several weeks into this experiment, I have a much better understanding of what I can accomplish. Hopefully this new word count will work better for me, give me attainable goals, and with each new milestone, push me to further succeed at this whole writing business.

The novel itself is going swimmingly. It’s flowing very well from chapter to chapter, and I feel like I’m getting a firm grasp on my characters’ motivations and inner voices. I can already see areas that will definitely need improving once I’m done, and it’s taking an enormous amount of effort not to go back over those sections now, before it’s all written. But I know that if I go back and start editing sections before the new ground work is laid, I will only end up having more editing work to do later as the story progresses, grows, and improves upon itself.

All in all, it’s a fantastic process, and I’m happy with myself that I am finally through talking about writing a novel “someday”, and am actually knee-deep in the process of getting it written. It’s exciting seeing it come from nothing into being, and I will certainly feel the stab of pain once it’s completed and I quickly discover that no publisher will touch it.

Because, that’s what’s going to happen, you know. Just in case you were wondering.

Hashimoto’s REVENGE!

Well, it’s official. I’m finally a full-fledged member of my family. I now have a legitimate thyroid disease. It’s a mainstay trademark of the Payne family, at least on my mother’s side. You just can’t go very long without some sort of thyroid problem. But for me, it’s a particularly appropriate disease.

I have been diagnosed with something called Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis. It’s a great ailment for a scifi writer. Essentially, my body has decided that my thyroid is a foreign object. It has therefore seen fit to create anti-thyroid specific anti-bodies. These anti-bodies have been specially designed to carry out one order: kill the thyroid. And, I’m proud to say, they have been entirely successful. My thyroid has been utterly defeated! Yay anti-bodies! You’ve shown that thyroid menace that he doesn’t belong in my personal ecosystem. Let that be a lesson for any thyroid rebellion that may attempt an organized uprising in the future: you will be quelled.

Now, it’s on to a lifetime of thyroxine replacement drugs. This is in addition to my existing high-blood pressure medication (which was a result of the anti-thyroid anti-body infestation). Along with the horse pills I’ve been taking for my recent sinus infection, I scarcely feel 31 anymore (almost 32, I suppose). These are the degenerative symptoms of a 60-year-old. I’m beginning to already feel like a broken old man.

Of course, all told, as far as inherited genetic disorders go, thyroid problem is on the low end of the scary family medical history spectrum, right down there with sciatica and male-pattern baldness. I could have done worse. There’s very little by way of cancer or heart disease in my family, either side. And I have relatives on every branch of the family tree that have lived past 100. So, all in all, things are looking cheery for a long, productive life, which I’m sure makes all of my friends and family very happy, indeed.

Speaking of which, I’m sure you’re all very concerned about where I am in regards to my novel. I will update everyone shortly.

The re-colonization of like-minded gamers

Yeah, I know, blogging moratorium, interrupting my writing flow, yadda yadda — but this is important.

I fled the Evil Avatar community a long time ago. Quietly, and under my own terms. There were a few reasons for this, not the least of which was the venom and disgust with which some members regarded any Nintendo fan, rational or otherwise. Other reasons include the more marketable answer of “the site is blocked at work”, which it IS, but is a minuscule fact that sidesteps the more anti-Nintendo community sentiment issue with a gait that is every bit as troubling as it is WIDE.

The other problem was the fact that visiting the site sank me into a deep timehole from which minutes and hours would never be regained, regardless of the amount of quantum math tossed at the equation. I couldn’t function. Hitting refresh was just too accessible a drug.

I was happy I left, but I missed some of the community terribly.

Then, sometime this summer, there was a strange bit of drama on the boards that I caught wind of through various channels. Evil Avatar (I’m referring to Philip Hansen, the site owner here, not the site itself) began a rampage of bans and thread deletions, all surrounding something to do with “magic PCs”. You can read a bit about it on PlayItReviewIt. I don’t fully understand all the details, but from what I DO understand, the fallout from that caused a few people to leave and take up permanent residence at any number of sites started by previous Evil Avatar members: PlayItReviewIt, Immortal Machines, and Co-optimus. Not a huge deal, but some feelings were hurt, some relationships changed, and I had reasoned that things might never fully recover from that ordeal.

Turns out I might have been right. I received a message this morning from the Evil Avatar Facebook group with a link to a website, saying that this was where everyone I know and love ended up. The link went to a new site called Colony of Gamers.

I would come to discover pretty quickly why Colony of Gamers was created. In essence, everyone was sick of Philip’s idea of what a “community” was. For Philip, it was his way, or the highway. And truly, since it WAS his site (as he was wont to remind everyone, many, many times), this much was technically true. But an authoritarian dictatorship does not a thriving community make. People understood this, and began to reject his governance on principle.

The “magic PCs” incident was apparently just a starting point (or, for many, and ending point). A more recent situation occured that I have exactly zero details on that culminated in long-time Evil Avatar editors Nick Puleo (bapenguin) and James Young (fitbabits) to tender resignations and permanently leave the site, helping to start up Colony of Gamers.

These are intelligent, level-headed people that have been deeply involved with day-to-day operations within Evil Avatar for years. Their departure was not only surprising, it was substantial.

Not only that, but Scott Benton (Psykoboy2)–the power and voice behind the excellent Evil Avatar Radio podcast–also left the site, taking his program with him, and dropping it down at Colony of Gamers as the newly-christened In-Game Chat. Also substantial.

And most of that just happened yesterday.

So, today, things aren’t terribly different from yesterday, as far as my perspective, except that a lot of the people from Evil Avatar that I enjoyed conversing with are now over at Colony of Gamers, which is a site that is not (yet) blocked by my work. I obediently setup my account, though I don’t expect I’ll be spending an extraordinary amount of time there. The timehole issue still manifests itself menacingly. I just don’t need the added pressure of maintaining an online presence on a gaming forum. It’s there, for the times when I see a conversation that looks interesting, and I find I can add some small morsel of value. The site and community there, I can already tell, will be fantastic. I can practically guarantee that. But essentially, things will be mostly unchanged for me.

As for the Evil Avatar “community” that once existed, I don’t think it will ever be the same again. And I don’t know that that’s necessarily a bad thing.

Derailed!

My word count on my novel will be pathetically miniscule this week, as I have suffered a major setback. That setback was not medical, mental, or spiritual. It was merely a side-effect of my inability to focus on anything for any extended period of time.

Sometime this past weekend, I caught on a great (or so I thought) idea for a short story. And it wouldn’t leave my head, no matter how hard I shook it. It was bad enough, that I couldn’t concentrate on the novel, since the genres for the two concepts were diametrically opposed to each other. So, I told myself that I would take a day away from the novel to hammer out the short story, get it out of my head, and then carry on with the novel.

You can probably guess how that brilliant plan worked out.

Here I am, I haven’t touched the novel in three days, and I’ve been struggling to pull this threadbare short story concept together. I’ve pulled too much mental capacity away from the novel, and now even thinking about it makes me cringe.

Yep. I derailed myself.

All this situation does is serve as a gentle reminder to several great truths.

1) Writing is work. Let no one ever tell you any different.

2) Stopping one sort of writing to do another, different sort of writing does indeed kill motivation. Now I don’t just have someone’s word on it, I have personal experience to back me up.

3) The wife was right.

So, tomorrow I pull myself back up by the bootstraps and attempt to salvage this derailment before it becomes a full-blown train wreck. The short story gets shelved. The novel gets my full attention again. And I go back to work.

Right after the presidential debates. D’oh!

Novel progress: week 1

I’m not going to make this a habit because I don’t want to attempt to switch too often between “blog writer” and “fiction writer” hats. It doesn’t hurt, but it kills my motivation.

But I had to mark this occasion. Yesterday, I hit 4,300 words, which is just 50 words over my first week goal. It was slow going at first, but I punched out a ton of words Thursday and Friday evenings, and managed to make my goal this first week. I’m rewarding myself at 10,000 words by purchasing Mega Man 9 off the WiiWare channel. But I’ll likely hold the game hostage from myself until after I finish the novel. We’ll see how that goes.

I’ve also finished the first two chapters of the novel. So far, I’m really happy with what I’ve created so far. I can see some spots already that I want to polish up, but I’m forcing myself to wait until after it’s all written to go back and edit.

Only fifteen weeks to go. Fifteen weeks which include holidays such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, and my birthday. Yikes.

I’ve moved my novel progress information to my new novel page. You can look it up there. The chart will be updated there, as it was in the previous post before.

Okay. Today includes a birthday party for my son, but then this evening it’s back to writing. Another week, another 4,250 word goal.

Track the progress of my novel

The outline is complete. I’ve now bolted down the first words in my second attempt at writing a novel (first attempt was for NaNoWriMo, and as far as I’m concerned, doesn’t actually count).

So now, I need to be held accountable for actually getting this sorry scrap-heap of nonsense into an actual, honest-to-goodness palatable work of fiction. And you can help! Or just sit there on the sidelines and watch as I go down in an all too-unremarkable blaze of pain and suffering.

If it worked correctly, there should be a chart embedded below. My goal is to write approximately 68-70K words in 16 weeks (roughly a full novel by the end of the year). This puts me at a weekly goal of about 4,250 words. I will update my count daily, and as each week passes, I hope to keep the blue line (my word count) at least marginally above the red line (my weekly goal). Fun, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Chart moved to novel page

If at the end of any week (for reference, my weeks are measured as Sunday through Saturday) I’m not at my goal for the week, shoot me an email (in the sidebar on the right), or leave a comment telling me to get off my sorry ass and get to writing. I swear I won’t get mad. Maybe.

See you in December!

John Scalzi is a genius and I hate him for it

(I’m still on my blogging moratorium – but I needed to get this out while it was still swimming around in my head)

I don’t really hate John Scalzi, but I do.

I just finished The Last Colony the other night, and it was – as expected – completely excellent in every conceivable way. Indeed, the entire Old Man’s War series has been nothing short of a marvelous masterwork of literary perfection. Scalzi has created an imaginative universe, with a truly original concept, and told the story with the skill of an accomplished narrative voice.

And that’s why I hate him.

Here I am, a wanna-be author. I’ve written several short stories, and I’m now attempting to begin work on my first novel. The outline is (mostly) complete, the notes are sufficiently scribbled, and the concept of the thing is nearly implacable in my mind. But I stare at it, unwilling to even write one single word. Why? Because nothing I will be able to write will match what other writers – especially John Scalzi – have been able to create.

I know, I know, I shouldn’t allow the quality of existing works or authors to influence whether or not I write myself. Who knows how many hundreds or thousands of great novels might never have been written if the author wearily claimed that they would never be able to create something as magnanimous or influential as “The Great Gatsby” or “Brave New World” or “Slaughterhouse Five”. But knowing that there is so much quality content on bookshelves these days makes me realize that the bar for entry into this business is set very, very high.

I’m not exactly looking for fame and fortune here. I don’t necessarily want to be a household name. I just have ideas that I want to see made into a book and set on shelves next to the works that I enjoy. I want to be in the company of giants, not necessarily one of the giants. Is that asking too much? Or is that asking too little?

If I strive for mediocrity, I likely won’t be able to achieve anything at all. But if I strive for genius, maybe I can at least attain mediocrity.

Okay. I don’t hate John Scalzi anymore. Back to the silence!

Don’t mind me, just hanging up the “gone writin'” sign

I would love to able to say that I’ve been “busy” lately, but that just isn’t the right word. Distracted is probably more appropriate. Between being glued to the Democratic National Convention speeches and pretending to write a novel, I just haven’t found the time to do much else besides surf and not blog. I know I shouldn’t apologize for not blogging, and I’m actually not. I’m just hanging up the “gone writin'” sign to let everyone know that I probably won’t be around here very much.

I’ve been saying that I was going to write more for a long time now; far too long, to tell the truth. Now is the time to just sit and do it. Wil Wheaton had some great advice on his blog yesterday that was timed perfectly.

1. Blog less. It’s incredibly hard to blog and write a book at the same time, because you’re using different muscles. Think of it like trying to run the 100 meter dash and do a marathon at the same time.

2. Make a deadline for yourself, then work backwards to have milestones every day or week, whichever works better for you.

3. Give yourself little rewards when you make a big milestone (5K words, 10K words, 20K words, first draft completed, etc.)

4. Don’t show your work to anyone until the first draft is done. Don’t even excerpt little bits and put them on your blog. I put about 30 words from House of Cards online, and I lost all of my momentum as a result. I’m not sure why this happens, but it really sucks when it does.

5. Find an editor who you trust to work with you. Good editors do more than just edit the draft you give them, and I know this because I have a great editor.

The first three items are the absolute best advice. I’ve been blogging less already, not because I’ve been writing, but because my mind has been focused on building the characters and the world that I plan to write within. He’s completely correct when he says that it’s difficult to shift gears and make your mind think in a blog format. As far as distractions go, I’ve finally forced myself away from Twitter, but the siren’s call of FriendFeed has been too lovely to ignore. So I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately, but very little actual writing (besides note taking and outline crafting).

Of course, to add a significant layer of complexity to this, the wife and I have also decided to seriously put the house up for sale (again – I think this is the third time) and attempt to purchase another property. So, I’ll actually either be writing or deep cleaning/organizing/packing. In any case, I won’t be here.

So there are plenty of things that I’d LOVE to talk about. FriendFeed’s new beta. Square Enix making a move to buy Tecmo. The DNC convention and excellent speeches. McCain’s abysmal choice of a VP candidate with even less experience than Obama, and twice the (alleged) corruption. But I’m not going to talk about any of that here. You can find that information elsewhere, I’m sure.

I’ve gone writin’.