Hangin’ Out the Van at High Speed

Yesterday . . . what can I say?  Well, I could say it sucked, but that would be unfair.  The day didn’t suck, but I sure felt like I sucked.

It was a day of big-time headaches, and there were a few times when I was almost yelling due to the pain.  I mean, remember Tony Dogs gettin’ his head put in a vice in the movie Casino?  I felt a little like that, only my eye didn’t pop out of my head.

Brutal, I’ll tell you.

But, just like the time I was turned into a newt, I got better.  By night time I didn’t feel that bad.  If anything, by the time I went to bed, I felt like I was doing pretty well.  But during the day–no.  Not feeling good.

However . . . I kept writing.

I wasn’t blazing through the story as I have been.  In fact, it was a real struggle.  I think some of the headaches are coming from having to copy street names found in Makassar.  Here is my document notes for the chapter I finished last night:

From the square at Jalan Pasar Cidu and Jalan Tinumbu, down Jalan Lamuru to Jalan Mesjid Raya, to Jalan Jenderal Urip Sumoharjo, on to Jalan Perintis Kemerdekaan, to a road past Rumah Sakit Bersalin Daya Grasia Hospital.

Ya got that?  You spend part of the day typing “Sumoharjo”, and your head is gonna hurt, too.

It was an interesting chapter, though.  I had my main character chasing another van that was being driven by . . . no one.  Ooooooh, spooky.  Really, they not only chased it, but they managed to get next to it, and one of the characters decided she needed really good video of no one driving a van, so I had her hanging out of her window for about a half a kilometer.

I liked the scene.  I could see everything in my head, and the flowed nicely.  The chapter ended up running four thousand, three hundred fifty words, which was a good run, and my biggest chapter yet.  I know I’ll have a few more that will be this big, and a couple will even be larger.  When I run the numbers, Nate Silver Style, I find that the story is inching toward fifty-nine thousand words, which is the goal I’m aiming towards.

Thing are going according to plan–yessssss.

I’m actually a bit surprised that the story is going well.  There was some concern before NaNo that I wasn’t going to have enough of a story to fill out sixty thousand words.  But that doesn’t seem to be the case now.  I know where I have ahead of me, and when I look at the places where the novel is going to stretch out a bit, I see that sixty thousand isn’t going to be a problem.  I’m actually thinking that sixty-five thousand isn’t out of the possibility of reality, either.  But I’m not going to count my words before they are written.

Just let them come, one at a time, and the story will end when it’s time.

The Quiet of the Roaring City

Oh, so as I go, so goes NaNo.  I figured out the cause of the headaches I’ve had the last couple of days:  coffee.  More likely, the caffeine within the coffee.  Stress + NaNo Novel + three thousand words a day = huge stress headache.

I said I’m having fun, right?  Just checking.

I’ve also noticed something else with this novel in progress:  having to check things, like your note, like a location in a city eight thousand kilometers away, is more time consuming than I could imagine.  Last year was just write, write, write.  I had terms for magic, and an idea for my Modern Stempunk Chicago.  No big deal; just crank words.

This year, I have a real city.  I have things that I need to look up.  I have hotel rooms to check.  I’m still adding a few notes here and there while writing.

Yeah, it keeps me busy.

This is the thing about setting up your story in a real location.  You want to try and get things right.  I think I have as much right in the story now as it’s ever going to get, and I’m noticing that there is now more writing than checking.  Oh, sure, I know I’m going to have to get into my timeline at one point and recheck something before writing up one chapter, but that’s not going to happen for a week, or more, so I have time to crank out the words.

I had one curious moment last night.  I was writing about how the city seemed to grow quiet around one character, and another who was speaking with them was thinking about how the first character came from a city that was much bigger than the one they were in.  Well, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t talking out my posterior, because someone would fact check that information at some point in the future, and . . .

Oops.  I was wrong.  The home city of the character talking about how quiet things had become, it was smaller than the city she was investigating.  Much smaller.  Maybe by a third.

It’s little things of that nature that will kill you.  Sure, I could have checked that in my edit, but I’m not like that.  Also, there was the possibility that had I left that incorrect reference in, it would have snowballed had I used it again.  And again.  And another time . . .

You see the problem:  try to get it as right the first time.  Do the editing you need, but keep writing.  Keep pushing forward.

That’s what I’m doing today.  I’ve almost finished Part One of my NaNo Novel 2012, and getting three or four thousand word in today will likely do just that.  I’m not quite at the same levels for production I had last year, but I’m doing well.  I’m doing a few checks on word count versus the number of chapters in the novel, and I see that I’m coming up short on the count, but I know there are going to be a few chapters that are going to run long, and a couple that could hit eight thousand words each.  Once those are in place, I won’t have to worry about making my counts–either for the NaNo Fifty Thousand, or getting the story over the sixty thousand I need.

Right now it’s quiet in the city.  Give it time; that’s going to end.  Oh, and I have the perfect music today:  The Who–Thirty Years of Maximum R&B.  The full box set, five hours of music.

That should keep me and my green demons busy for a while.

Death and the Fiction

Oh, did yesterday turn into the greatest of days–or strangest, if you like your literary feelings that way.

Lots of writing yesterday, nearly all of it taking place in Chapter Two.  It seems to take forever to get out, probably because I haven’t utilized my writing muscles in some time.  Editing–oh, yeah.  I’ve been an editing fool.  I’ve been look at what’s come, and thought about what must be, and turned that into what is.  But cranking out the unseen from my mind?  Not so much.  Not since I finished Diners at the Memory’s End.  Yes, I had a couple of slammer works in there, but that was almost a . . . I don’t know.  Maybe you could call them a bit of a warm up on the jogging track.

Now I’m in the race, and it was making my head hurt.

I was writing about the scene of a death, and why old friends who haven’t seen each other in a couple of years are suddenly together, at the scene of a death, in a city that neither would have expected to find the other.  I had to bring up names and streets, talk of locals that really do exist, but whose names I’m not used to saying, much less write.

This is probably why my head was hurting, because my mind was getting its workout.  Or maybe it was my mind’s way of saying, “You shouldn’t be doing this.  You should be off doing something else, but you should try leaving the writing to professionals.”

So where am I after all this?  According to my NaNo Stats Page, I’m and 6,517 words.  That’s because I stopped writing at some point about 8 PM, and told people I wouldn’t write more that evening–then, about 10 PM, I started working on Chapter Three, because . . . space?  Or would that be . . . airport?  Which is where Chapter Three takes place, by the way.  At the Sultan Hasanuddin International Airport, actually, because my research told me so.

The head hurting things probably came about because of all the flipping about I had to do.  Write in Scrivener, flip to a map, look at a time line, write, get a name, write, check this . . . yeah, I’m stumbling into the first part of the story, where I’m getting everything set up.  It’s been necessary for me to kill off two people already–something I’ve not done a great deal, though if I think about it, there were a lot of deaths in the last story with these two characters–and that means trying to get my set up down right.

It’s work.  It’s a lot of work.  It’s still fun, in a way, when I’m not dealing in death, and my head is hurting, but it’s still fun.

No one will die today, or so I think.  It’s mostly begging and getting facts straight, and a few other things.  In fact, I’m wondering if a chapter I have set up is even going to be necessary.  Oh, wait:  I know what I’ll use it for.  That’s called thinking on your feet, though at the moment I’m sitting on the floor at the local Y, listening to Caribou, by Elton John.  No on your feet for this girl.

Enough talk-talk.

I got words to pen.

The Makassar Shuffle

So Day One of NaNo is over, and Day Two is upon us.  Day Two of more writing, more head scratching and aching, more of a feeling that you might panic at any moment.

Relax.  It’s just a novel.

I did a lot of prep, getting maps of Makassar (the location of my story) and getting the names of streets–and I still came down with a headache from having to look for things while I was writing.  I still managed almost three thousand words yesterday, but the amount of real-time checking I performed was somewhat mind boggling.

This is a complected story, mostly because I’m right in the middle of a real city that I’ve never seen, and my imagination–and a few well-placed pictures–are all I have to help me along.

But that was mostly due to the Prologue and Chapter One being a bit like travelogues, showing the reader around the city.  The next two chapters should be the main characters sitting and chatting, getting acquainted while having something to eat, and less about the local.  In fact, much of what remains of Part One will be that way.

Part Two . . . well, there will be a car chase.  No, really.  Though I wouldn’t put it up there with Bullet or The French Connection.  Probably more like the original Gone in 60 Seconds.

It’s an interesting thing, getting into the writing as I did yesterday, and found myself floundering about just a touch.  Then again, I did the same thing last year.  I found myself hesitating on the first chapter, and I didn’t find my stride until I was well into the third or fourth chapter.  It’s as if I’m looking for my writing groove, trying to find it while laying down words, and then, boom!  There is it.

Time to get writin’, or time to get to hair pulling.

Oh, and don’t do this:

Using a line from a story where only one person will have the odds ever in their favor, and the other eleven people are going to be found with their bodies cooling to room temperature, isn’t really the best way to encourage people to write like there’s no tomorrow.

Contrary to popular belief, writing a novel isn’t easy.  Even if you’ve done this a few times, there’s something very intimidating about taking all this information about people, places, and things, and putting it down inside the medium of your choice in something approaching a coherent form for all to see.  It’s not quite the same at trying to fly to the moon–or even trying to pilot a Cessna to the next town–but it can leave you with your mind, and hair, in tatters.

Get comfortable.  Get set.  Get easy.  You have twenty-nine more days–including this one–ahead of you, and if you’re flipping out now, how do you think you’re going to be come the 15^th of the month?  If you’re playing with a make believe world, as many are, try looking up street names located in a city on the other side of the world.  Yeah, that’ll get your brain cooked in short order.

It’s time to start writing:  I mean really writing.  This blog post?  It’s just a warm up for the fingers.  The real work is coming.

Time to jump into the insanity.