Tag Archives: novels

NaNoWriMo ’09 Journal: T-minus 14 Days

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The start of a NaNoWriMo journal.

Yesterday, I spent a lot of time reading old blog entries as part of the process of adding excerpts that would appear in search results.

And now I must go off on a tangent to explain why….

On Tags and Excerpts

A few weeks ago, I added a feature to this blog that would list related posts at the end of each post when viewed in single page view. (If you don’t see what I’m talking about at the end of this post, click the title of this post to switch to single page view and you’ll see it.) This feature uses the tag feature of WordPress to match the current post’s tags to other posts in this blog. The posts with the most tag matches are listed as related. Makes sense to me and it actually works pretty well if all the posts are properly tagged. I set this up so it displays an excerpt after the post title. I tend to use vague titles in many of my posts — a blogging no-no, I know — so the excerpt helps readers get a better idea of what the post is about.

The trouble is, if I don’t create a custom excerpt, WordPress uses the first bunch of words — 50, I think — as the excerpt. This is not satisfactory. So I need to go through all those old posts and update them so they have excerpts. While I’m at it, I’m also updating the tags.

And, of course, I’m reading a lot of those old posts.

Why This Blog Exists

This blog has been around since October 2003 — six years this month. As I’ve explained elsewhere on this blog, I embraced the idea of blogging early on. I’d always wanted to keep a journal of the things going on in my life and blogging seemed the way to do it. Rather than rely on myself to keep a diary or journal that only I read, I could put a lot of my thoughts and experiences on the Web where others could read about them. Their comments and other means of interaction could help me understand other points of view and grow as an individual.

Sounds silly and idealistic? I don’t think so. I’ve met a lot of people through blogging — people I’ve become friends with. Miraz, for example, co-authored a book about WordPress with me a few years back after we met on my blog. Ann flew with me once and has introduced me to other people after finding me on another site I manage, wickenburg-az.com. There are other folks who have connected with me through my blog. They’ve all made my life richer and have given me good reason to continue blogging.

So, with 1,910 blog posts on this site and another 100 or so in the archives still waiting to be imported (long story), I’ve built quite a journal with plenty to look back on.

I do want to mention here that I’ve had a personal Web site since 1994. This blog is simply the current incarnation of it.

Back to My Original Train of Thought

So, as I was saying, yesterday I spent a lot of time reading old blog entries. It reminded me why I started this blog — as a journal of my life. So it makes sense to journalize my NaNoWriMo ’09 experience as it happens.

I announced that I was thinking of participating in NaNoWriMo this year in a blog post yesterday. I’d actually written the post the night before, but the Internet went down (as it often does in Wickenburg) and I wound up posting it the next day. That was a big step for me. Although I didn’t say for sure that I was going to participate, publicly suggesting that I might was enough to get me thinking very seriously about it.

And if I move forward — which I expect I will — I thought I’d journalize the process for future reference.

Just Say No to Forums

I don’t think the digital ink had dried on that blog post when I got my first query from a Twitter friend:

so whats your userid on NanoWriMo ? you can probably guess mine ;)

I could guess his, but I won’t share it here. My response was this:

I will not be participating on the NaNoWriMo Web site or forums. I don’t see any benefit.

My advice: When you’re ready to start writing, stop goofing off on the NaNoWriMo site. You can’t get work done there.

Indeed, I’d checked out the NaNoWriMo site back in 2005 when I’d first heard of NaNoWriMo. I was appalled. The site seemed to exist primarily to raise money — $110,000 — to build libraries in Laos. It was heavy on the NaNoWriMo-branded merchandise and requests for donations. Someone was obviously making money — possibly lots of it. It really irks me when I see people or organizations preying on wannabe writers.

The forums were full of NaNoWriMo participants chatting about writing or not writing. It seemed to be an extraordinary waste of time. Why would you spend any time participating in a forum when you could be spending that time actually writing?

Remember, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel-length work. I think the number of words tossed around is 50,000. With 30 days in November, that’s nearly 1,700 words a day every day for an entire month. Miss a few days and that number rises dramatically.

It seems to me that a serious author should be more focused on the writing task, not the socialization aspects of yet another writer’s forum.

Another Twitter follower had this to say about the forums:

lol maybe not but its addicting – as is twitter this year for me. :p It’s good advice though :)

I replied:

I haven’t checked it out this year. I was turned off last time I was there. Lots of people chatting, no one writing.

She replied:

Hmm… well that’s what the forums are for. You write the novel in your own time. For me the forums are a break during writing.

I’m afraid I let my cynicism get the best of me in my response to that:

If I need a break from writing, the last thing I want to do is visit a forum full of people whining about writing. IMHO.

I later pointed out the fact that I’m a cynic and linked to my first blog post about NaNoWriMo back in 2005.

What I also should have linked to is one of my more popular posts, “Why Forums Suck.” I think it pretty much covers my opinions on forums in general. Although a well-moderated forum can be an incredibly useful tool for getting and sharing information, the vast majority of forums have a signal to noise ratio that’s just too low to be worth wasting time on.

And I’ll go back to my original point: why participate in a forum if you can spend your energy writing the actual novel?

The way I see it, the NaNoWriMo forums may have value now, before the month begins. But come November 1, the serious writers should pretty much abandon it and get to work.

100 Monkeys?

I’ll step out on the line one more time here to remind folks that the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a complete novel. That means it needs a beginning, middle, and end. It needs character development. It needs plot and subplots and underlying themes. It needs dialog and description. It needs to create loose ends and tie them all up before the last page. It needs to be compelling so someone will want to read it and written in good English (or whatever language you prefer) so someone can read it.

When you write a novel, you’re telling a story.

What I took away from my NaNoWriMo non-experience back in 2005 was that people seemed to think it was more important to get the 50,000 words out than to actually write a coherent piece of literature. Even one of my Twitter friends this year gave me this impression when he wrote:

Doubt I’ll make anywhere near the 50,000 words.. real life will get in the way ;)

It’s not the word count that matters as much as whether the entire work holds together as a novel.

100 monkeys with typewriters can churn out 50,000 words of text in a month. If you’re participating in NaNoWriMo, don’t be a monkey.

On Life Getting in the Way

The above quote brings up another topic for consideration: the responsibilities of life preventing you from completing a NaNoWriMo project.

The main reason I’ve never participated in NaNoWriMo is because of work and related responsibilities. I write for a living. The last thing I want to do at the end of a day full of writing step-by-step instructions for completing a mail merge with Word (for example) is spend any more time in front of a computer, writing.

I also travel extensively and, when I do, I have numerous responsibilities for either getting work done or seeing to the safety and comfort of passengers. Clearly, NaNoWriMo would interfere with my ability to perform while on the road.

Notice that I said that NaNoWriMo would interfere — not that my work would interfere with NaNoWriMo. That’s because if I participate in NaNoWriMo, it will become a priority in my life. That’s not to say I won’t do anything else — I do have other priorities. It just means that I won’t let life get in the way (if I can help it).

Isn’t that the point of NaNoWriMo? To force you to finish the novel in a month? To make time for it? To make it happen?

And this goes back to something I said back in 2005: You cannot write a novel without the complete support of your significant other or family. Fortunately, NaNoWriMo makes this easy. After all, you only need their support for a month.

More Coming

I think I’ve written enough about this for today, so I’ll stop here. Tomorrow, I’ll get specific about what I’m doing to prepare for NaNoWriMo.

Are you participating in NaNoWriMo? Let us know by sharing your comments — and perhaps a link to your own journal — here.

NaNoWriMo ’09

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Is this the year for me?

As I finish up a crazed month and a half that included of two 6-day helicopter excursions and a week-long trip to Ventura, CA to record a new video training course for Lynda.com, I find myself with an almost empty schedule — right before the start of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

The idea behind NaNoWriMo is to write a novel in a month. The quality or marketabilty of the novel doesn’t seem to matter. Apparently, it’s more important to get the words out, preferably to complete a story, than to write something that might one day be published.

Whatever.

I commented extensively on NaNoWriMo back in 2005. I didn’t have much to say about it that was nice. I expanded on my thoughts in a post a few days later. You might want to read those two posts before you continue. My opinions haven’t changed.

In fact, my opinions were confirmed just today. I happened to be in a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Flagstaff, AZ. On a little table near the coffee shop area was an arrangement of books for and about NaNoWriMo. Despite the fact that November is still two weeks off, publishers and bookstores are cashing in on the needs of wannabe writers, offering them guidance for writing a novel in a month. I counted eight titles, from a small paperback to a shrinkwrapped “kit.”

I didn’t buy any of those books. I’ll never pay for anything branded as NaNoWriMo merchandise or in support of NaNoWriMo or even designed to help writers succeed in their NaNoWriMo efforts. I detest the very idea that organizations and individuals are trying to cash in on NaNoWriMo.

I’ve never participated in NaNoWriMo. My excuse is that I’ve just been too busy. When you spend all day writing about computers or something equally dull, you don’t want to spend your evenings writing.

I don’t have to prove I can write a book in a month — I’ve already done it. More than once. And my books have been published. And I’ve even made money on them.

But this year, I’m thinking I might use the ticking clock of NaNoWriMo to write the novel I started and lost. Maybe NaNoWriMo can motivate me to finish it.

So this week, I’ll pull out my notes and look them over. I’ll track down my outline and blow the digital dust off it. I’ll remember all the loose ends and how I planned to tie them up. And maybe — just maybe — I’ll be a NaNoWriMo author this year.

Anyone else out there thinking about giving it a try?

Revenge

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A book review.

Way back when, I subscribed to Bookmarks magazine. It’s a magazine of book reviews for readers of fiction and non-fiction. The subscription was expensive and the content was primarily a regurgitation of reviews in other magazines and newspapers with a summary rating system. There would also be articles about specific reader groups and a featured author or genre or both. Based on what I read in the magazine, I’d choose books I wanted to read. But more often than not, a glowing book review would point me to a hard-to-find book or a book that simply wasn’t up to par.

Product ImageProduct ImageRevenge by Stephen Fry is both of these things. What attracted me to the book was the claim that it was a “modern-day Count of Monte Cristo.” The Count of Monte Cristo is a classic story of revenge, written by Alexandre Dumas in 1844. Dumas, the French author of The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and Man in the Iron Mask, weaves incredible, well written and thought out tales of intrigue, adventure, and even love. The movie and television adaptations of his work offer shallow hints of his complex story lines. The recent Man in the Iron Mask movie staring Leonardo DiCaprio is an example that made me cringe, from the moment Leo uttered the word “Huh?” in his role as King Louis XIV to the revealing of the king’s true father at the end. (Readers of The Man in the Iron Mask know that the story has quite a different ending and is, in fact, the final book of the musketeers trilogy.)

In any case, The Count of Monte Cristo is one of my very favorite books. I’ve read it two or three times, which is no small chore, considering its length and the writing style. So when a modern day version of the same tale appeared in Bookmarks with good reviews, I immediately put it on my reading list.

It took about two years to track down a copy of Revenge. (Remember, there’s no real book store here in Wickenburg and the local library doesn’t read Bookmarks. It wasn’t very high on my Amazon.com wish list, either.) I finished it on Saturday.

To understand how I rate books, you need to understand my “can’t put it down” test. These days, I read before bedtime. In most cases, I’m horizontal, propped up with a pillow with reading glasses perched on my nose. One light is on. I’m tired; it’s the end of a long day and I’ve been up since 5 or 6 AM. Most books I read these days can engage me for a dozen or so pages before I’m ready to pass out. But a good book can actually keep me awake and reading long after Mike has shut off the television, come to bed, and begun to snore. (For the record, he doesn’t snore all the time or any more than I do.)

Revenge started out a bit worse than usual. It was one of the books that I start and then put aside while I work on another one. It was well-written, but not very entertaining. The “setup” — which is where the author introduces a protagonist that you can feel real sympathy for as well as antagonists you really want to hate — was too long and drawn out. I put it down for about two weeks.

I finally got back to it when I took it to Howard Mesa. The wind was howling up there all weekend, making it very unpleasant to be outside. There’s no television there and Mike had a lot of work to do that I couldn’t help him with. So I picked up Revenge and finished it up.

I found Fry’s writing style perfectly fine. In my mind, when you can read a book without frowning at the way sentences are written or dialog is composed, the writer has pulled you in. In those books, the author has stepped back, out of the picture, and you’re just reading an account of what happened to his characters. Stephen Fry did a great job of stepping back, letting the reader get the story without interference from awkward constructions, idiotic dialog, etc. (One of my main complaints about The DaVinci Code was Dan Brown’s awful writing skills.)

That’s not to say that the story didn’t have its faults. My main problem with the book was the way it finished up — far too quickly. In The Count of Monte Cristo, main character Edmond orchestrates a complex revenge scheme that gives his betrayers what they deserve. It almost goes exactly according to plan — in other words, there was still some suspense near the end of the book. In Revenge, main character Ned begins to plot his revenge 2/3 of the way through the book, leaving only 1/3 of the book’s pages to complete it. There’s no complex scheming; he’s simply put himself into a position to extract revenge at his leisure. While I don’t want to spoil the ending for those who may want to read the book, I will say that it’s too quick and easy. While Ned doesn’t get everything he wanted, he also loses the sympathy of the reader by the cruelness of his revenge on some characters. In contrast, at no point in The Count of Monte Cristo do I feel that Edmond has stepped over the line. And while I don’t have the book in front of me now to consult, I’m pretty sure that at least half the book’s pages are devoted to his plotting and the manipulation of his characters before the final “gotchas.”

Revenge, of course, is one several age-old plot basics that can be found in books, movies, and television dramas. Dumas did it best. Fry tried and, in doing so, may have exposed a few people to Dumas’s work. But if you have to choose between the two to take along on a journey or relaxing weekend, leave Fry behind and take the classic. It’s a far better work.

As for Bookmarks — I let my subscription slide. Frankly, its self-promotional content urging readers to buy subscriptions for their local libraries was annoying me. I had also begun to suspect that many of the lesser-known titles the magazine highly recommended were planted there by the books’ publishers. (If I wanted to read advertisements for books, I’d browse the New York Times Book Review.) Coupled with the high subscription price, I decided it just wasn’t worth it.

Besides, I already have a pile of books to get through. I don’t need anymore recommendations!

Copy Editing – Part I: What Is Copy Editing?

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Copy editing — an important part of the publishing process.

Prepare yourself for the usual author rant — but with a difference. This one is coming from an author who just completed her 69th book. An author who has worked with about eight different publishers and dozens of copy editors over the course of 15 years.

So no, this isn’t a newbie writer griping about a heavy-handed editor on her first or second book. It’s coming from someone who has been doing this for a long time and feels as if she’s “seen it all.”

I’ve taken this topic and split it into three parts. In this part, I’ll start off with an introduction to the topic of copy editing and tell you what I believe it should be.

Stet!What is Copy Editing?

The purpose of copy editing should be to ensure that the original text is:

  • Free of spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Note the use of the word “error” here; that’ll be important later in this discussion.
  • Consistent with a publisher style guide. A style guide, in the world of publishing, is a document that sets forth usage in those gray areas. I’m talking about capitalization issues such as web vs. Web, hyphenation issues such as email vs. e-mail, and design issues such as boldfacing figure references.
  • Clear and easy to understand. This usually involves breaking up long or complex sentences or possibly rearranging sentence components.
  • Unlikely to be misinterpreted. For example, when you say the “Color in pop-up menu,” do you mean a pop-up menu named “Color in” or are you talking about color in a pop-up menu?
  • Consistent with the writing style of the established book or series. This only comes into play when you’re writing for a series that has a predefined format and style. For example, Visual QuickStart Guides (VQSes) tend to be short and to the point, so I don’t have room for personal stories, as I do in other books. VQSes also have level 2 headings that begin with the word “To” and are followed by numbered steps, each of which presents a single task. (I could list about a dozen style issues specific to a VQS, but you get the idea.)

Flowers for AlgernonOf course, what you’re writing should determine how much of the above is required. If you’re writing a novel much of this may not apply at all. Consider the book, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. The book’s first person narrator is a retarded man. The book is in journal format and the first few chapters are so full of spelling and punctuation errors (or omissions) that the book is difficult to read. But that’s because of the author’s choices and the method he uses to communicate. Would you expect a retarded man to have perfect spelling, grammar, and punctuation? Of course not. The author is using the character’s shortcomings as a writer to make his character more real — as well a to drive home the changes in the character as the story progresses. This technique was used again more recently in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which featured an autistic first-person narrator. If a copy editor had done a thorough job on the grammar or punctuation in either of these two books, he would have altered the characters. The same can be said for dialog in most novels, since few people speak using perfect grammar.

So copy editing of fiction is a different subject — one I’m not addressing here. I’m discussing copy editing of non-fiction, primarily technical or how-to books, since that’s where my experience is.

More to Come…

This is the first part of my discussion of copy editing. There are at least two more parts to go. In the next part, I’ll rant a bit about my experiences with one particular book over the ten-year course of its life (so far). You’d think that after 10 years, the process would be trouble-free…

Why not take a moment to tell us what you think copy editing should be. How do you expect it to change or improve your writing? Use the comments link or form to share your thoughts.

Death of a Manuscript

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Dealing with the loss of my own unpublished words.

Last week, I discovered that a file containing the manuscript for a novel I was working on was gone.

The file lived in my laptop, which is what I was using to write it. It was backed up on my main computer’s hard disk. I had decided two or three months ago to keep working copies of all my fiction on my iDisk space. (iDisk is part of the .Mac services available for Macintosh users. It gives you 1 GB of storage space on an Apple server that can be shared among all of your computers.) The idea was that by keeping the files there, I could work on them from any computer and always have the most recent version.

Somewhere along the line, while copying the folder containing this file to my iDisk space, the file was lost. I’m not sure how it happened, but I do recall getting an error message when I made the copy. I should have investigated more closely, but I didn’t. The file was gone and because I didn’t work on it for months, I didn’t realize it was gone.

The backup copy, of course, was lost in my February hard disk crash.

I spent most of a day playing with file recovery software to get the file back. I managed to retrieve about 2 of the 97 pages I’d written.

Obviously, I’m not very happy about this. I’d been working on this project on and off for about four years. There was a lot of me in it. I’d written a lot of good dialog and some pretty strong scenes. It wasn’t perfect — the characterization on a few of the characters was just not good enough — but what was good was very good. A lot of “keeper” stuff in there.

And now its gone.

I find the task of recreating this work daunting. Lately, I just don’t feel that I have the writing skills I need to write fiction. I have my outline, my index cards for scenes, my character notes. I can clearly remember lots of the scenes and even some of the dialog. But I don’t feel confident that I can rewrite what I lost. I know that when it comes time to sit down and type it all back into my word processor, there will be something lacking. It just won’t be as good or as complete.

Fortunately, this was the only manuscript I lost (other than the partially completed Chapter 6 of my Excel for Windows book, which was easy, if not tedious, to recreate). My other fiction manuscripts remain safe, now backed up to three places. But although I’ve been toying with them for far longer — one of them originates back in my teenage years when I wrote longhand in spiral bound, college ruled notebooks — the loss of this one seems to hurt more. It was a more mature work, a more marketable work. It, unlike my other fiction scribbling, had a future, possibly in print.

Time is now my main obstacle to picking up this work and recreating it. I’m juggling two jobs: as a technical writer and a helicopter pilot. I’m having a hard enough time getting both of those jobs done. At the end of a working day, I’m mentally exhausted and not prepared to tackle a recreational writing assignment. (That’s one of the reasons I do 90% of my blogging first thing in the morning.) So who knows when this work might be resurrected?

Perhaps it’s something to look forward to in my retirement years.