Tangled Mind

Actually about another 5K to go. But still.

How I wish I had a functional camera*: it's such a glorious frosty morning here. Red-leaved hedgerows under frost, smoke drifting from chimneys like blue chiffon, syrupy sunshine.

Nanowrimo is going well. It's halfway through the month and I should be halfway through the 50K: in fact I'm a couple of thousand words ahead of that, though it feels like much more because of losing 4 days to migraine.

I do think my writing habits are especially well-suited to a project like this. In the past I've had difficulty writing short stories, because I prefer to write a 'block' of fiction start to finish without interruptions. Quite a few of my stories consist of a single block that's thousands of words long -- requiring hours of uninterrupted writing time.

Longer pieces, novellas and novels or even multi-part, multi-POV stories,are easier. I tend to write in scenes rather than in chapters, and my basic unedited scene is usually about a thousand words long. I can (and do) write a thousand words in under an hour (though I may eventually spend more than an hour editing it) which means I can produce a building-block of plot before I get out of bed, and another (theoretically) at lunchtime, and another between getting home and heading for the pool ...

Yesterday evening I felt very lethargic, so shelved plans to write and to swim and curled up by the fire with a notebook, scribbling chapter notes. This was almost as good as Morning Pages for getting the creative flow going again. When I write a scene I have a pretty good idea of what happens in it: when I scribble outlines I'm playing, and last night I came up with some pretty good ideas about what happens in the next 10K.

So -- fellow Nano writers, how're you doing? what works for you? and is there a better word than 'block' for 'unit of writing output'?

* still waiting for Fuji to send the copy of the original 'we're giving you an upgrade' letter so I can exchange my current camera, filled with Barcelona sand, for a new shiny one.

(since the official Nano progress meter hasn't yet picked up latest wordcount update).

I do have another scene, or even two, ready to write, and it's funny how not writing them feels like not trying hard enough. But I take my inner swot rather less seriously than I did at 20, and it's not as though I have spent my day slacking: a walk, a swim, some housework, 4806 words and multiple LJ posts. Oh, and cat-wrangling.

I have caught up with myself.

I am going to have a glass of wine and go to bed, with pusscats, Dead Serious Academic Text and the knowledge that the next 2K should be pretty easy going, even on a Monday.

this makes me happy

In other news: ( mostly Nano and Builder-Evil Displacement )

And finally, an LJ enhancement that I like a lot -- tag autocompletion (= no more misspelt variants). Yay!

- book reviews written today: 2 (Dream Angus, The Virtu -- over here)
- favourite fantasy novels reread today: 0
- words of Nanowrimo written today: 4255
- time spent online without agonising headache: over an hour and counting.

In November I shall:
- write 2K a day
- catch up on my non-fiction reading (this is Research) and not wallow in rereads, even the source text for my Yuletide challenge
- catch up while I should be werking on my fiction reviews: Dream Angus, The Virtu, The Mirador ...
- read that darned Hawthorne book for the Penguin blog-a-classic thing
- not spend money I don't have in the book room at Novacon
- create a Nanowrimo character who is sekritly my solicitor (you know, like in dreams) and give her a painful and undignified death
- get fit again now that I'm off the pills that made me devour every carbohydrate in sight.