Prose and Kaa

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

December was a fairly decent month. In spite of a somewhat major holiday and spending quite a bit of time with my mother both at her house and on a vacation trip to south Georgia, I managed to write at least the minimum number of words every day, even when I had Internet speeds that reminded me of 110-Baud modems.

I had some interesting revelations about a couple of my characters and made copious notes to go back and add some conflict between my two main characters to set up something that happens about halfway through the novel.

I also finally managed to figure out exactly what my antagonist is doing and why. Like, the details of it. I know that seems silly that I have an outline and am writing on the novel and only just now figured that out. I had the gist of it — with the understanding that it would probably come to me during the writing, which it did — but not the reasoning behind it or the exact order of events. Once I figured out some stuff about the magic in my universe and how it’s used by different mages (and therefore what my antagonist is doing), I was able to make that leap. My notes are in-line in the document itself, so it’s not like I’m going to lose it. :)

The whole Safari issue is really frustrating. My self-control has never been good, so knowing that I can get to Facebook on Safari means I might as well not block it on my other browsers. I hope they fix that issue (which is a feature they added). Many is the night I’ve gotten my writing for the day done at 3:00 AM because I procrastinated.

Maybe I can make that part of the ‘game.’ If I go to Facebook after 8 PM, it’s some sort of penalty. Hmm. I’ll work on it.

For December, 2018, my stats are

• Words: 27,492
  • Daily average words: 887
• Time: 1461 minutes (24 hours, 21 minutes)
  • Daily average time: 47:08 min
• Average words/hour: 1129
• Chain: 92 days
• Level: 4 as of 18 December
• Quota: 350 words per day until 18 December, then 400 words/day

Yearly Wrap-Up

For 2018, my stats are

• Words: 127,701. That’s well over a novel’s worth.
  • Daily average words: 946
• Time: 9356 minutes (6 days, 11 hours, 56 minutes)
  • Daily average time: 58:29 min
• Average words/hour: 819
• Longest Chain: 92 days
  • Number of chains: 2
  • Total Writing Days: 160
• Level: 4 as of 31 December
• Points: 5472 as of 31 December

There were days prior to August that I wrote and recorded my time, but not the number of words (Really, past me?), so the totals above include that writing time, which is why the words per hour are probably a bit off. In 2019, I will count words and time each time I write, so those numbers won’t get “off” by too much.

My best (most productive) month was September, with a grand total of 37,243 words written. My worst month was August with only 15,649, but I was only writing for 13 days in August, so that could probably be prorated, but I’ll let it stand. :)

The most time I spent writing was in September, as well, with 2048 minutes, total, but a surprise is that January was second with 1546 minutes, total, but I didn’t record the number of words I wrote. I suspect a good bit of it was while Weekend Warrior was going on. This was well before I rediscovered the magic writing spreadsheet and started using it daily, but I was using the time-tracking app and kept track of how long I wrote, because that makes sense.

I plan to keep this going for 2019. I have a good chunk of a rough draft of a novel that I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to write since 2008. It has gone through a number of massive changes as I’ve learned things about writing and revised my characters and my world and figured out a plot that I hope makes sense. Well over half of the total 127,701 words were on short stories, blog posts, the outline, and free-writing to get to something outline-like. Right now, the ‘novel’ is a hopeless mess that needs a lot of help before I would consider letting eyes other than mine see it. I hope that by . . . let’s say April? . . . I might have something resembling a rough draft. <crosses fingers>

Oh, and you bet your sweet bippy this blog post is going towards my words for 1/1/2019. :) Let’s get the new year off to a decent start with some extra words!

As a final bonus, if you’re at all interested in what the spreadsheet looks like, here is a screen shot of the 2018 worksheet. You can’t read it as is, but if you click on the image, then click on it again to get the magnified version, you can see every cell, should you feel the desire to do so. :)

If anyone is interested in obtaining a copy of the sheet . . . well, I could be persuaded to share a blanked-out version. Probably. ;) Alternatively, you could use the one I link to way back in another post, the truly shared one that exists as a Google Doc where you can see everyone else’s progress as well.

Just know that I found and corrected a major bug in it today as I was preparing the 2019 sheet for the first entry (this blog post), and that extended to the 2020 sheet. If I give you a copy, you’d be on your own for fixing stuff like that.

Mirrored from WriteWright.

Full disclosure: I’ve written this post after-the-fact. In December, 2018, but later than it looks like it was posted. But I decided to take a cue from podcaster Chris Lester and sort of do a ‘writing update’ thing. And why let a little thing like ‘it was a month ago’ stand in my way?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

Disaster struck! Apple, in its wisdom, updated Safari, and they broke the extension that kills Facebook after a certain time. <shakes fist at sky> Why? Why?

There were two days when I had to write a bunch of documentation at work, and it sapped my desire to write fun words, and so I counted that as my writing for the day. Not emails, mind you: actual documentation for QA so they could test my code and know what to expect. So I count it. It’s not creative (although QA might take an opposing view on that . . .), but it was words on ‘paper,’ and I counted it. So there.

I did not do NaNoWriMo this year. I added the capability to my spreadsheet, because it was there and needed to be done (for certain values of ‘needed’). So in 2019 or 2020 (or going forward), if I decide to do NaNoWriMo, I have a mechanism in place to calculate, for each day of November, how many words per day I must achieve to meet the 50,000 word goal, and a switch to flip to turn NaNoWriMo Mode on or off. If it’s off, it just goes with the number of words required for the current level. And, even though I drove a grand total of sixteen hours over Thanksgiving weekend and visited friends and family in four different towns in Alabama, I by-God still managed to write some words every day. Yes, I did just pat myself on the back, because I freakin’ deserve it. :)

As a note: I have completed NaNoWriMo a number of times, and don’t need to prove to myself that I can write 50,000 words in 30 days. I wrote 122,400+ words one November. I think I deserve a pass if I choose not to participate. :)

For November, 2018, my stats are

• Words: 27,142
  • Daily average words: 905
• Time: 1443 minutes (24 hours, 3 minutes)
  • Daily average time: 48:06 min
• Average words/hour: 1,128
• Chain: 61 days
• Level: 3, on the 10th
• Quota: 350 words/day beginning on the 10th

Mirrored from WriteWright.

Full disclosure: I’ve written this post very after-the-fact. In December, 2018. But I decided to take a cue from podcaster Chris Lester and sort of do a ‘writing update’ thing. And why let a little thing like ‘it was three months ago’ stand in my way?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

I missed a day, and broke my chain. :( I had 43 days of straight writing — the most I’ve ever managed — and I visited my mother for her birthday at the end of the month and got sick, and then got home so late from that weekend that I was just exhausted and could literally not stay up long enough to write even 300 words unless it had been “All work and no play make Gary a dull boy” 30 times. Which was tempting, but no. :) I hated to break the chain, but it was unavoidable. So, I start over in October with a fresh new chain at 1, and it’ll take me a lot longer to get to level 3. Bummer, but I’m not going to beat myself up over it.

I also hit a milestone! On the first, I realized that I’d free-written enough material to start organizing it into a bona-fide outline! So on the 1st through the 7th, I broke down my brain-dump into chunks and created a scene-by-scene rough outline of the entire novel, from start to finish. Very rough. :) On the 8th, I actually started writing the novel itself. Chapter 1, scene 1. And immediately had to start adding scenes to the outline! :)

For September, 2018, my stats are

• Words: 37,243
  • Daily average words: 1284
• Time: 2048 minutes (34 hours, 8 minutes)
  • Daily average time: 70:37 min
• Average words/hour: 1,091
• Chain: 43 days
• Level: 2 on the 16th
• Quota: 300 words/day as of the 16th

Mirrored from WriteWright.

So, yeah.

I’m not what you’d call great at scheduling and planning. I’m pretty god-awful at it, in fact. I go through my time and make nice little charts (I’m great at charts) showing my work time, commute time, sleep time, etc., and color-code for when I can write . . .

And then, generally speaking, I waste that time on Facebook, YouTube, or listening to podcasts. And to be frank, I don’t consider those complete wastes of time, per-sé. They are entertainment, and entertainment is important to me. But I tend to let them take up time that I should be spending doing . . . more productive things. Like writing.

In mid-August, I’d finally had enough of it. I’d had The Idea™ earlier that week. The one that made all the pieces in my novel fall together, and tie loose ends in a bow, and make my characters make sense and fit in the world . . . it was mind-blowin’, I tells ya. I’d come home from work every day planning that tonight, by gum, I’d get that down on ‘paper’!

And then it would be midnight or 1 AM and I would have nothing to show for the evening. As usual. But hey, I’d get it tomorrow

One of my problems is perseverance. I have firefly enthusiasm for a project for a few nights . . . and then a favorite creator on YouTube releases a new video, or there’s a new Steven Universe episode . . . And then, of course, I’ve broken the chain. So the next night, it’s easier to say, “Well, I’ll just start again fresh next week.”

Only next week comes . . . and I don’t start.

Another problem is lack of accountability. I may write anywhere from 250 to 5000 words in a session, but I don’t keep track. Nor do I keep track of how much time I spend writing. It would be nice to have that information. But no one was making me do that, and, sure, it’s information that’s nice to have, but is it really required? Nnnoooo . . .

The only two things that have ever worked for me, in fact, are NaNoWriMo and Weekend Warrior.

Why do those work? Analysis time! (Charts may be my favorite, but lists are easily #2!)

NaNoWriMo

• has a strict start and end time (November 1 – 30)
• has a strict word-count (50,000+)
• has a daily component (1666 words per day)
• is self-reported until the final day
• is uploaded for verification on the final day
• is during the second worst month possible because of the holiday at the end (in the US)
• requires extensive planning beforehand if there’s any hope of getting anything that resembles a coherent story at the end

Weekend Warrior

• has a strict start and end time (Friday 9 pm to midnight Sunday)
• has a participation requirement of reading and flash-critiquing anywhere from a dozen to two-dozen 750-word stories each week for five weeks
• stories are rated on a (totally subjective) 1-10 scale and there’s a ‘winner’ per team each week and for each team for the entire contest
• has a strict word-count (750 words or less per weekend)
• is anonymously uploaded for word-count verification and distribution to other participants
• has prompts that are given on Friday night
• stories “must” spring forth from one or more prompts, even if they’ve been edited out of the final version
• stories should be a story — beginning, middle, end, character, conflict, resolution — in 750 words
• stories are expected to be (very broadly) science fiction, fantasy, or horror

And boy, can I do it when I get into that mindset. I’ve gotten anywhere from 53,000 to over 122,000 words written in November for NaNoWriMo. I’ve completed a story for almost every week of Weekend Warrior for four or five years running. I can do it. I just don’t

In short, I need structure. Deadline. Planning. Mindset. Goal. Accountability. Statistics.

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There’s a Google Doc spreadsheet that Tony Pisculli created a few years ago, called the Magic Spreadsheet. He came up with many formulae to gamify writing. You write words each day, and you get extra points for longer chains and consistency. You level up based on those points, and each level requires that you write a higher base number of words per day in order to count it as part of the chain.

I thought this was what I wanted: the game aspect. Competing against other people and myself.

But I hated having to go to the site and find my lines and put the info in. And it was, frankly, disheartening to go there on a day when I’d written 250 words and struggled to get them out, only to see others with 6000, 7000, 8000 words for that same day.

So I did what any Excel-groupie would do: I downloaded a copy of the sheet for my private use. I studied it in detail so I could figure out what he did. And I tweaked it and made it my own in a few ways that he either didn’t think of or didn’t want to do. I added a time component to it. I added calculations for average words per hour and such. I even had a couple of friends ask me for their very own copy of the spreadsheet, which I happily provided.

That would work for about a week, maybe two . . . and then I noticed that I was writing at 1 AM or 2 AM, right before bed, as a “Oh, right, I need to write something before bed or I’ll break my chain!” thing.

Not ideal.

So I took a suggestion from . . . I think it must have been either Mur Lafferty or some other writer who podcasts: if my problem is podcasts, Facebook, and YouTube, the obvious answer is: those have to go.

But I have zero self-control. I think this post proves that beyond any shadow of a doubt. :)

I needed a third party to impose that self-control. Short of deleting my account off Facebook, unsubscribing from every channel I subscribe to on YouTube, and forsaking all my podcasts, I didn’t see a way through.

And again, words of wisdom from someone on some podcast, probably again with Mur Lafferty because she’s awesome: there are apps that cut off your Internet. Or limit your use of it in very specific ways.

I located browser extensions for all my computers (Windows 10 work, Windows 10 home, Macbook Pro) for each browser (I know me: if there’s a browser that has the extension and one that doesn’t, I’ll use the one that doesn’t) that turns off my access to certain sites during a range of time. And for my phone (iPhone 7 Plus), it conveniently just updated to iOS 12 with Screen Time, which permits me to shut off apps during a time span. Now, at 10 pm, if I’m still watching YouTube, using Facebook, or listening to podcasts, it abruptly kicks me off and says, “Shouldn’t you be working?” (I had to tell it my workday starts at 10 pm and runs until 7 AM in order to get this to work.)

I’m happy to report that this has actually worked. Quite well, in fact. I’m typing this slightly before 10 PM, in fact. In the next week or two, I might edge that time from 10 PM down to 9 PM, or even 8 PM. I’ve unsubscribed from some YouTube channels that I deemed to actually be a waste of my time and not very entertaining.

Since August 18th, when I randomly decided to start this, I’ve written nearly 50,000 (48,633, not counting this post) words. Most of these have been for the novel I’ve been trying to find my way through for a long time. I plowed through almost two weeks of world-building, just typing away as fast as I could think. Ignoring spelling and grammar errors. What I wrote is an atrocious mess of stream of consciousness, but it forced me to confront the issues that I kept avoiding before. My characters’ flaws. Their backgrounds. Their motivations. How magic actually works in my universe. What the antagonist is up to and why. Side characters. Societal implications of the sudden appearance of magic.

And then, after all that, I wrote an 11,000(ish)-word outline for the novel. From cover to cover, mostly in order. Took me seven days.

And I don’t hate it. I can’t emphasize this enough. I have written things out before, but I hated them, because I couldn’t figure out some stuff, and I’d give up in frustration. But without the shiny-shiny lure of Facebook and YouTube and podcasts . . . I basically had to write or go to bed, and who wants to do that at 10 PM? (The last time I went to bed at 10 PM regularly I was in grade school and being forced to do so by my parents.) Have I mentioned I’m a creature of the night?

As soon as the outline was done, I took a two-night break to write a flash piece, then jumped right into the book and started fleshing out the outline. I use Scrivener, so this was fairly easy.

I’m deep in Chapter 2 of my novel, and paused again to write a short story that popped into my head one night after I went up to bed, because it was knocking on the inside of my skull wanting out.

Tonight, this blog post is my words. You’ll see the edited version, but the unedited version will probably be something around 2,400 words, and that definitely puts me over my Level 2 limit of 300 required words for the day on the Magic Spreadsheet.

For the first time in a long, long while, I feel like I’m enjoying writing. It doesn’t hurt that I got The Idea™ just before deciding to embark on this little adventure. It also doesn’t hurt that a friend of mine gave me an awesome idea at dinner the other night which I will unabashedly incorporate into my world and make it my own. (Thanks, Steve!)

I’m also using an app on my phone to track my writing time. It’s for freelancers / contractors, so I defined a job called “Writing” and set the pay to minimum wage for the US. The final step of this was to actually set up a bank account and transfer money from my main checking account into it for any time I spend writing. Thirty minutes? Sure. Three hours? Better. My eventual goal for this is to use this money and only this money to attend writing-related events, such as WorldCon or Paradise Lost or anything else that comes up. If I haven’t written enough to “afford” it, then I have no business doing it.

Yes, this is going to severely curtail fun things like WorldCon. But after a year in which I traveled to Texas, Massachusetts, and freakin’ Finland for writing-related events and had to fork out a lot for car issues . . . not going to WorldCon in San José this year, or Dublin next year, or New Zealand the year after that should leave me with a surplus for whatever comes up in 2021. And I’m (mostly) okay with that. (Mostly.) It’s time, as they say, to shit or get off the pot. And this includes submitting stuff. But I’ll get to that in another post. I have some more goal-setting to do.

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I’m fully aware that this post makes me sound like something of a Loony Toon, having to trick myself into doing a thing I supposedly like instead of other things I apparently like more, but maybe there are other people out there for whom this is also a problem. And maybe those people will see this and feel motivated by it. Weirder things have happened. The single most-visited page on my blog is the one where I reviewed a tiny little site called 750Words, which was another in a long line of attempts to find that magic something that worked to make me write daily.

This blog post was written on my fortieth uninterrupted day of writing at least 250 (Level 1) or 300 (Level 2) words — new words — every single night. I do not think I have ever written consistently for forty days straight. I’ve even begun to start writing early and not waiting until I’m kicked off sites or have my phone’s apps go dark.

They say that if you do anything for 21 days it becomes a habit. For me, that’s not true. It’s more like 60 days. :) So give me another month at this and maybe I’ll only use Facebook and YouTube after I get my words down for the day. Weirder things have happened!

1. Weekend Warrior is an annual contest that takes place over five consecutive weekends beginning in January of each new year. I explain it a little in the text after this footnote. It’s on CodexWriters.com, but you have to be a member of Codex to get to it, and to get into Codex, there are requirements.
2. It is called WasteNoTime.
3. Right now, it’s set to Facebook and YouTube. I may include others if I start to notice myself hanging out on something else too much.
4. Edited it — the most time-consuming part, thanks to formatting and links and dealing with WordPress’s new damned editor — and am finishing up at right around 12:15 AM.
5. It’s called HoursTracker.
6. Writers tend to think in terms of cents-per-word. A professional level market will pay $0.06/word and up for stories of Novelette length and below, often with a reduced rate or wordcount limit for novellas. Semi-pro and fanzines are below that. Novels will get — on average — around $2500 to $5000 for a beginner, and going up — or down, alas — from there. Expect to sell around 250 copies if you’re lucky; more if you’re a fantastic marketer. You don’t go into traditional publishing to get rich. You can do better selling independently if you write very fast, publish ebooks only, put out multiple novels per year, and have avid fans who like your writing and will buy whatever you put out and demand more. People are making hundreds of thousands per year doing this. More power to them. I’m not there, yet. :) Not sure I ever will be.

Mirrored from WriteWright.

So this meme is going around. You're presented with these eight buttons of various colors, and I assume you can pick one to press and it bestows upon you the power described thereunder.

I saw it and thought that rather than give a one-word + one-sentence answer, I'd blather on for several paragraphs and treat it seriously. Because apparently I have nothing better to do right this second. :) And I'm going to tag it 'writing' because one of my characters has a couple of these abilities, and quite of bit of who he is is based on the ability and the problems it causes in his life.

( But I will hide it so you don't have to scroll if you're reading this on your friends page. Because that's the kind of great person I am. )
Yeah, I'mma go with Blue. Because flying. But my hand would hover over Green for a long time before pressing Blue. :)

Not just any word. A specific word to describe a type of distortion I hear in podcasts from time to time.

It typically happens during an interview, when, say, two or more people are recording a podcast and at least one of them is using Skype. When the computer gets a little busy, the audio processing can't seem to keep up, so there's a momentary "stretching" of the syllable the person is saying and it comes out sounding like the audio equivalent of a pixellated image.

The person might be saying "I visited Spain as a high school senior," but the processor gets a little overburdened during 'Spain' and it comes through as "I visited Spaaaaaaaaain as a high school senior."

Another time I hear it is when watching satellite TV and there's weather, the same thing happens in video as well as audio. The image will freeze on one kind of pixellated image and the sound will do that same thing.

It's so hard to find an audio clip to give you an example when I don't know the stupid word to use to look up said clip to get said word.

This, however, is what I was able to find because it's the one case I remember from a movie where the effect was used on purpose. This is a clip from The Matrix just as Neo starts to fall down the rabbit hole.



I have it cued up right to the point where the voice distortion happens. Stupid thing. It claimed to be cued up at the point. Fast forward to 54 seconds, or just before that.

So. What do you call that? Is there jargon for it?

I’m charting my daily progress on NaNoWriMo. Since you may or may not care, I’ll kindly hide it. Thanks for taking the time. :) ( Read more by clicking here! )

Originally published at WriteWright. You can comment here or there.

I’m charting my daily progress on NaNoWriMo. Since you may or may not care, I’ll kindly hide it. Thanks for taking the time. :) ( Read more by clicking here! )

Originally published at WriteWright. You can comment here or there.

<more crickets chirping>

In truth, I can’t seem to write while at my mother’s house, this year. I’m falling way behind what I wanted, but . . . honestly, why do they put NaNoWriMo in November, anyway? there are five days when you can’t do jack.

Originally published at WriteWright. You can comment here or there.

I’m charting my daily progress on NaNoWriMo. Since you may or may not care, I’ll kindly hide it. Thanks for taking the time. :) ( Read more by clicking here! )

Originally published at WriteWright. You can comment here or there.