It's holding me back, man.

It's been almost two months since SSWriMo ended, and I think it is fair to say that my writing progress since then has been less than stellar. Partly that's the season, sure, and partly it's finishing up a job and preparing to move cities. Mostly, though, I think it's the need to edit the stories I wrote last November that's stopped me from carrying on. Whenever I think I'd like to do some writing, I think that first I need to edit those stories. Since I'm not super excited about doing that, I end up picking up a book or watching some television instead.

I've decided, therefore, to give myself permission to leave those stories unedited for now. I will come back to them, but at the moment I think it is more important to just keep putting words on the page.

I am very keen for feedback on what I wrote, though. If you're at all interested in reading my SSWriMo stories -- "Beacons", "Arteries" and "Dreams of Flying" -- drop me an email or leave a comment on this post. I'd sure appreciate it!

My old foe

I'm attempting to edit the first of my SSWriMo stories, "Beacons", and an old enemy of mine has once again reared its infuriating head: tense. I have this horrible habit of switching tense without realising I'm doing it. This used to be a problem when I was writing history essays at university, and it has enthusiastically carried itself over to my short stories.

It's frustrating, because I seem incapable of getting it right the first time, and have to read pretty closely to pick it up in editing. And then a whole lot of verbs end up changing.

Grumble, grumbled, grumble. 

Final score

It's November 30th. Pencils down, everyone. Here's my SSWriMo final score:

30 days
3 stories (2 sci-fi, 1 fantasy)
20,084 words

I made it (just)!

Later this week, hopefully, a debrief post. Then I think I want to say a few words about The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi.

Single villain seeks devious plan

12,939 words written (target: 16,000)

Good day today. I wrote 1756 words on a fantasy story that currently has no name. It seems to be flowing well, but I've already identified a problem that I'm going to need to fix when I come back to edit: I don't know what the villain is doing. Or, I suppose, I know what he's doing but I don't know why he's doing it.

It's not a problem that is stopping me from writing the story, but I'm guessing that when the whole thing is done the villain is probably not going to be very compelling. 

Hero (anguished): why are you doing this, you dastardly fiendishly evil monster?!

Villain (smug): because I'm dastardly, fiendish and evil! Also, a monster! Also, behold my death trap!

Yeah, not ideal.

As you can tell by the word count above, I'm still behind. It's going to be a crunch to get this done by the end of November -- 1267 words a day, for the next 6 days -- but I'm going to give it my best. You probably won't hear from me again until it is done and dusted.

And then, hopefully, I'll have some time for some more interesting content!

I finished a story!

8203 words written (target: 12,000)

I just now finished the first of my SSWriMo stories. It's called 'Beacons'. I'm pretty pleased with how it ended. When I first came up with this story idea, I had the ending pretty clear in my head. I didn't plan how to get there, just wrote, and I finished up basically where I hoped I'd be. That's cool.

It feels alright, finishing one of these stories. Better than alright, actually. Now it gets shelved, at least until the end of the month, and I go on to something else. I've got 11,797 words to write if I'm going to meet my goal, so that means my new daily target is 983 words.
 
You know what? This is pretty fun!

(Probably boring to anyone reading this blog, though. Sorry about that!)

SSWriMo Day 12

5801 words written (target: 8000)

Has it really been nine days since I last posted here? Sorry about that.

I'm behind. About three and a half days worth of words behind. I'm beginning to suspect that November isn't the best time of the year for us southern hemisphere-types to do something like NaNoWriMo. It's Spring here, and Spring is busy. Mostly because there's sunshine again. If this were a northern hemisphere Autumn, I'm sure my social life would be getting ready to hibernate, rather than exploding. 

That isn't an excuse, though. It's about making time, and I haven't given up yet. I've had a bit of success writing in my lunch hours; the last three days I've managed to hit my targets using that time and a few stolen minutes before bed. I'm confident that when I can find a few days with nothing else on, I'll be able to catch up those missing 2199 words.

The not-a-neutron-star story is still rolling along. I'm working my way towards a conclusion. I suspect by the time it's done it will be novelette length (more than 7500 words, less than 17500), but there's a lot of fat that will need to be trimmed. A whole lot. The discovery writing has been fun, but I suspect the tone isn't particularly consistent, and there are probably characters wandering in and out without much underlying logic. I've only just now got an inkling of how to work my way from the middle bit to the end bit.

I said last time that I was looking forward to the prospect of editing, and I still feel that way. I'm taking that as a good sign, but I'm not letting myself stop and do any of that this month. The goal remains to get 20,000 words worth of stories finished, no matter how crappy they are. Fixing them up can come later.

Anyway, enough about me. What have you been doing?

(Also, I'm saving up some content for non-SSWriMo blog posts for when I've got more time. Remind me to talk to you about Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief, Jay Lake's Green (a fantasy novel -- ooooh!) and the TV show Stargate Universe.)

SSWriMo Day 3

2093 words written (target: 2000)

It's day three of my SSWriMo challenge, and I feel like I've already learned some things. I've started with a hard SF story, about the first expedition to see a neutron star up close. The 'crew' of this mission are a bunch of uploaded astrophysicists, their brains running on the computer hardware crammed into an otherwise fully-automated coke can-sized probe. When they get to their goal, they're in for a surprise.

I picked this one because it's the idea closest to the oft-repeated piece of advice: write what you know. I haven't had a whole lot of time to sit in front of the keyboard over the last few days, but I've had no difficulty reaching the target number of words (666 a day). The quality of the words, sadly, is pretty low. It's not that they're all that bad, they're just meandering. Laser-focused this story is not.

The folks on the Writing Excuses podcast split writers into two (non-exclusive) categories. Outliners write detailed story outlines. Discovery writers start with characters, a situation, and maybe an idea about the ending, and just start writing. I figured I was probably from the first category, so I thought I'd start by trying to discovery-write a story.

On the one hand, I think the meandering suggests that I was right; I should be spending some time coming up with story outlines. On the other hand, I'm actually quite excited by the idea of revising. It feels like by the time I've written the whole wandering mess out, I'll be much clearer on what the story is about, and I can get down to tearing it apart and making it better.

For now, though, I'm just going to push through. This whole SSWriMo thing is about turning off my internal editor for a little while, and getting something down on paper. Onward!

SSWriMo

Maybe you know that November is NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. The NaNoWriMo goal is to write a 50,000 word novel, from scratch, in a month. The idea, as I understand it, is to encourage people to write without worrying about what they're writing. It's for all those people who don't finish things because they spend too long tweaking, or too much time worrying that their writing is crap. The only way that 50,000 words in a month is even remotely possible, I gather, is if you don't stop to think about it.

I'm not going to take part in NaNoWriMo. I don't want to write a novel at the moment, and I think that 50,000 words in a month is an impossible target for me. But I like the idea; I've lost count of the number of times I've started to write something, and ended up stopping because I'm afraid I'm writing rubbish. I'm sick of doing that. I want to finish something. It will be rubbish, but hopefully I'll gain some insight into why.

So, I give you SSWriMo: Short Story Writing Month. My goal is to write 20,000 words worth of short stories in the month of November. That's probably something like four stories, at a very satisfying rate of 666 words a day. 

Now 20,000 words is probably just as unreachable as 50,000. It's job season for astronomers, so I've got about a million job applications to write. They're obviously going to take priority. But I'm going to give it a shot. I'll try to keep you updated on my progress here, although there's a good chance it'll devolve into posts about word count and not much else. Every word written for this blog is a word that isn't going into a short story, after all!

Some ideas that are currently percolating in my brain: the first close-up look at a neutron star, a dangerous criminal loose aboard the World Train, and a dream I had that co-starred William Shatner.

Seriously, William Shatner. Awesome.