Week One and Still on Track *knock on wood*

If you’ve been reading this blog (or even my other one) for any length of time you’ll know my usual strategy for NaNo is this:
Day one: Try to talk myself out of it
Day two: Cave in and scrounge around for an idea
Day three: realize I’m already three days behind and start scrambling to catch up
Remaining days: catch up, fall behind, catch up, fall behind, pull ahead, fall behind, cross the finish line with a handful of words to spare

But this year’s NaNo is pretty much like the rest of 2020 has been – surreal. Give or take a few words, I’ve been right on target. FOR SEVEN DAYS IN A ROW! *knock on wood*

Is it because I’m older and wiser and know how to pace myself? Is the idea I settled on conducive to a steady pace? Is it because I finished Blood Ties in a flurry of words and I’m still in high gear? I don’t know, and frankly I don’t care as long as it keeps up.

Now, a lot of people talk about play lists of music to accompany their writing. I never much thought about it before. The first NaNo I won was basically accompanied by all things Star Trek. I’d sit in front of the TV late at night and watch various Star Trek marathons as I wrote.

Lucky Dog I listened to mostly Celtic music – specifically a lot of Loreena McKennitt, but a lot of miscellaneous recordings as well. Blood Ties, however, especially the last 30,000 words or so, was written mostly to the Sounds of Nature we get on our TV, which is just what it sounds like. It’s birds or rain or crickets (or whatever), sometimes with music in the background, sometimes on their own. Don’t ask me why, but listening to the sounds of nature never failed to put me in the right mindset for working on Blood Ties.

The sounds of nature does not work, however, for Firestorm. I did try in the beginning, thinking because it was also a fantasy story it would be appropriate, but it wasn’t. What I have found works well is Two Steps From Hell. I don’t know how many CDs they’ve put out, but I have a lot of them. They’re mostly instrumental – think epic soundtrack – but it just seems to go with my story.

This is one of the reasons I’ve been spending a lot of time writing in the living room – it has a CD player that holds five CDs at a time, whereas in my office I have to get up every time the CD ends (unless I want to listen to it over again).

Anyway, the story is moving along nicely, even if it’s starting out in a different direction than I anticipated. But that’s just one of the joys of being a pantser (someone who writes by the seat of their pants instead of using an outline). My main character (who needs renaming badly) is a little different than I expected. He’s not as angry for one, although that may change. Or it might change during editing. You know, a few years from now. ;-)

Meanwhile, the story started meandering down a side path I didn’t like, so it being NaNo and all I just stopped and started the next scene back a few pages and sent it where it should have been. It’s still not perfect, but it got the story moving again, and that’s what counts.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

Wordage Report

As I mentioned above, I’m pretty much on track to where I should be. As of the typing of this, I’m at 13,322, which is only 11 words shy of where I should be by the end of the day. And I think it’s important to note that during this time we’re having our kitchen renovated, so I spent a good part of last week unloading the cupboards so they can be ripped out. Who knew such a tiny kitchen had such a lot of stuff in it??

Goals From Last Week

1. Edits on Blood Ties – I actually did get some editing done, not as much as I’d hoped to, but you have to start somewhere.
2. Blog posts – even though this one is kind of late (I spent yesterday afternoon up in Peterborough so the evening was spent on Firestorm instead of this post) I still got all my posts done last week.
3. NaNo – so far I’m feeling really good about this year’s NaNo (*knock on wood*)

Goals For This Week

1. Continue working on edits for Blood Ties
2. Get all my blog posts done
3. Try and pull ahead with words on Firestorm

Two Steps From Hell - Never Give Up On Your Dreams

The Best Laid Schemes ...

... o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
from To a Mouse, by Robert Burns

Procrastination is the name of the game folks. Of course there are a lot of other names that apply to me these days, but that's the one I'm picking. ;-)

A few weeks ago I finished reading a book and if it hadn't been on my Kindle I would have pitched it across the room. And if you know me at all, you know it would take a lot to make me treat any book so badly. However, this one ended on a cliff hanger, one of my pet peeves. Normally I'm pretty good at ferreting these offensive tomes out and just not downloading them, but this one managed to slip through. At any rate, I sat down and started a nice, rant-worthy post about it, and ... it's still not done. I just keep putting it off.

I've also been putting off the edits for An Elemental Earth. No idea why; I just can't seem to get in the right head space. It's done, it just needs to be edited. And because it was serialized the editing shouldn't be all that difficult - no major changes or anything.

And as far as other writing goes ... yeah, I've pretty much been putting that off too. The Toronto Star runs a short story contest every year and I actually have a story that's close to being done for it, but I keep putting off finishing it. Why? Who knows. I even started to rewrite it completely in an effort to not finish it. Maybe I'm waiting for Wednesday when I'll finish it in a flurry and then overnight it so it gets there in time. No electronic submissions allowed, it has to be physically in their hands on February 29.

I'll open up one of the things I should/could be working on but then I'll figure I've got a big block of time coming up later, so I'll do it then. Or I really need to beat the devil at solitaire, otherwise I'll have bad luck. Or maybe I should write that email I've also been putting off. Or ... you get the idea.

I've got all kinds of other things I could be working on as well, but ... It's not like I'm not coming up with ideas, I've got oodles of ideas. I've got one that's been marinating in my brain for a while now and I keep refining it. But that's as far as it goes. The words in my head just don't seem to make it onto the paper. It's like they're being diverted somewhere - I just have to figure out where.

Another word that might be applicable here is distraction. I remember when I used to be able to focus (usually on a book) on something and nothing in the universe would distract me. In fact, family members would think it rather amusing (okay, more often they found it annoying) that World War III could be going off around me and my attention would never waver from the book I was reading.

However, as I've grown older I find I'm losing the ability to focus with that kind of intensity. That's not to say I've lost it entirely, sometimes my husband will be talking away to me and I just won't be aware of it. Then five minutes later something will click and I'll look up from my book or my lap top with a, "What?" Drives him crazy.

When I started writing this post, I put some CDs on to listen to and suddenly my attention wavered from what I was doing to what I was listening to. It was Two Steps From Hell, Battleborne from their newest CD Battlecry. This is one of the few songs of theirs that have lyrics and I love the story it tells so much that I decided to look it up to see if it was from a movie or something. That led to finding it on YouTube, then posting it to Facebook for others to enjoy, and then ... then I remembered I was actually working on a blog post.

And so it goes.

Some people call it writer's block, I call it procrastination and distraction.