We had our first big snow of the year this past weekend. I kept looking out the windows to see how much accumulated, but it never seemed to be a great deal. Monday morning rolled around and I was hit with the realization that we had close to 20″ of snow. My plan to just plow through it looked less likely all of a sudden.
I tried anyway, and got the car stuck about 1/3 of the way down our 100′ driveway. Cody trudged off to work on foot and I stayed behind to free the car and then attempt to clear the driveway.
Some quick math: 100′ of snow, 8′ wide driveway, at 20″ deep works out to about 12 tons of snow. Suffice it to say, my back and hips are not pleased with me today. Took several hours to clear it all with the little, dinky, collapsible shovel I was using.
Next time, I’m going make sure I have a proper shovel or two and lay down rock salt in advance, so it keeps the snow from even accumulating. Not sure if that’ll work or not, but I can hope.
For the second year in a row, I have “won”1 NaNoWriMo. What’s more, I even have this last day of November to relax. Last year, I was frantically writing right up until just a few minutes before midnight. Though I did a fair amount of writing last night2, none of it was frantic. It all simply happened.
I walk away from this NaNo feeling proud of what I’ve written. It’s unpolished as hell, with several large inconsistencies that need to be massaged away, but that’s perfectly acceptable for a “zeroth” draft3. I’ve turned it over to Cody for her first review of it while I take the next week or so to decompress. Once she has a read through and tells me what she thinks, I’ll start working on the next draft. One of the first things I’ll do is draw myself a map of the area in which the story takes place. There’s a fair amount of traveling in this story and I want to make sure I have consistent timescales for that travel.
There are five central characters, drawn together through circumstance over the course of the story. Three of these characters make up the central triumvirate4, one of whom is the point-of-view character for the entire duration of the story. He also happens to be dead5. The real joy of these characters is that they’re all fun. The protagonist is a man discovering a world he never knew. His “id” counterpart dashes head-long into any situation and isn’t afraid to call a spade a spade. His “superego” counterpart engages him in philosophical discussion. There’s also a Crowning Moment of Awesome for one of the characters. I burst out laughing when I wrote it. A good sign.
Once I finish the next draft and Cody gives it the nod of approval, I’ll distribute it to some friends for a wider review. The draft resulting from this collective critique will find its way to agents. With a little luck, it will then find its way onto bookstore shelves and into your hands. A guy can hope, anyway.
NaNo, to me, is about pushing yourself to see what you’re capable of. Last year, I learned that I was capable of writing a novel. This year, I learned that I was capable of writing a novel that entertained me. I think this is important: you should write to entertain yourself. If you like it, odds are someone else out there will too. Trust to that, rather than trying to fill some artificial quota.
- Yes, it is called “winning”.
- Over 6,000 words in one sitting.
- This is a term Justine Larbalestier uses to describe the absolutely raw first output of a story. I’ve also stolen her idea to use superscript footnotes in blog posts.
- I realized last night that this triumvirate mimicked the ego-superego-id triumvirate of Kirk-Spock-McCoy, or Harry-Hermione-Ron, or any number of other famous fictional triumvirates. I didn’t intend to set it up that way, but it sort of fell into place all the same.
- No, he’s not a vampire—sparkly or otherwise.
I love and hate Halloween.
One of my ambitions in life is to get to a point where I can make awesome costumes. Darth Vader, a stormtrooper, Iron Man, and Night Owl (with Cody as Silk Spectre) are all on my list. Halloween gives me a great excuse to make these costumes without the expense of having to go to a con to show them off.
Now that Cody and I have a house, I have a place where I could actually make some of these. Unfortunately, we’re not quite settled-in enough yet to start doing that.
This is why I hate Halloween. Every year, I get excited about making costumes. Every year, I end up with a costume I’m disappointed in—if I end up with a costume at all. The last Halloween costume I was somewhat proud of was my Kosh costume—10 years ago (which reminds me, I should put Kosh on the costume list and take a crack at doing it with fiberglass instead of paper-mâché).
Perhaps some day, I’ll start making good on these unfulfilled ambitions. I can only hope that I can provide my kids with awesome costumes so that they never have to feel this perpetual disappointment.
So, yeah. Halloween is not the most uplifting time of year for me.
I’ve been trying to write a short story every other night or so for the past few weeks, with moderate success. However, the urge to build something more concrete has crescendoed. Thus, tonight, I’m going to start writing my second novel.
The first novel, written last year for NaNoWriMo, is not something that I would ever dream of publishing in its current form. The story is far too linear, the protagonist too inconsistent, and the ultimate theme not something I’m happy with. I might revisit the premise at some point in the future. The objective of that novel was not getting published, anyway, but rather to prove to myself that I had it in me to write a novel. I did, so it achieved its purpose.
The novel I start tonight is the result of a story that has been percolating in my head for about 13 years, in various forms. It’s a sci-fi epic in the best tradition of sci-fi epics.
We’ll see where it takes me.
I haven’t posted at my RPG-focused blog in over a year, so it seemed prudent to close it down and move all of its posts over here. In order to help organize things, I’ve obliterated the existing categories I had set up here and moved all articles into the “Uncategorized” category, which shall henceforth hold the normal blog posts. Anything in the Role-Playing Games category will hold material that would have previously been posted to RPG-at-McC3D. I’ve moved all the users and comments over, as well.