Final WooWriMo post!

Unfortunately, I did not make much progress at all since my last post (January 9th) and wrote nothing January 10th, 11th, and 12th. Although I designated January 12th as my last day for WooWriMo, I decided to count the 298 words I wrote on January 13th because I was technically still on break and I honestly don’t care about going over my writing time for WooWriMo. 🙂

 

In total, I wrote 26,628 words or approximately 58 Word document pages for my story. Although that did not reach my goal of 50,000 words, I am still proud of myself. That is the most writing I have ever done in such a short period of time!

 

Looking back, I will admit that doing WooWriMo was, at times, painful. Even though writing is fun, it can also be really tiresome. I especially didn’t consider the stressful aspect of it– I had to be mindful of other obligations while trying to do WooWriMo. But all in all this was a satisfying project for me. I enjoyed the writing and I got so much farther along in my story than I would have without it. Next year, I will definitely be doing WooWriMo over break! And just recently I heard about Camp NaNoWriMo, which hopefully I will do over Wooster’s summer break. Until then, happy writing!

January 9th: Happy New Year!

My goodness, it is 2013 already! And it is the 9th! Man, I have not posted since last year! 😉  Sorry about that, I just couldn’t resist.

Anyway back to business. This past week I have had days of success as well as … days-of-not success. On January 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 6th, I unfortunately wrote nothing at all. However, on January 4th I wrote 2,632 words, on January 7th I wrote 1,742 words, and on January 8th (today) I wrote 2,192 words. I have several poor excuses for why I did not write, which range from a terrible headache (okay excuse) to traveling on a bus for most of the day (good excuse) and having terrifying nightmares about physics next semester (bad excuse). I’m sure you finding this detail fascinating, but let me move on.

Today’s writing actually went horrendously slowly…. which is really only because I HATE the section I had to write today. I  tried to get myself into a good “writing mood” by writing a short little other section before I returned to the terrible transition section I needed… but that did not really help. I eventually slogged through it… but I already pity myself, thinking about how I will have to edit it later. That is the one great thing about my WooWriMo/NaNoWriMo: once you write something, you are free of it. You do not have to worry about the past terrible sections you wrote. Well, you do, but you can push it off your plate for now. No reason to waste time agonizing over your own insecurity. Because obviously, with WooWriMo/NaNoWroMo, you have to just forget it and move on and write. Right now, I am quite happy because that I don’t have to look at that past transition section I wrote today for a long, long time. 😀

Unfortunately, I am busy tomorrow afternoon and evening, so I will have to write in the morning. And although I am an early riser, I don’t like writing in the morning for some strange reason. Hopefully this will not turn out to be too big of a problem because I really enjoy the section that I am currently writing. But still, wish me luck!

 

December 30th (and 27th-29th): Stupid Pet Tricks cause Stupidity

Good news or bad news?

Bad news, I wrote nothing  for WooWriMo on December 27th and 28th (no excuse). But good news, I wrote 1,715 words for December 29th and 1,722 words for December 30th.

Today I got distracted by something stupid– literally. I got distracted while googling (yep I’m so creative) stupid pet tricks. Essentially, I needed one of my character’s dogs to do some stupid/useless trick so I got quite sidetracked watching lots of “stupid pet tricks” videos on David Letterman. In the end, it was useful, because I did get inspiration. However, I got my inspiration in the second video I watched, and considering I probably watched 8 to 10 videos… you can see the problem. Wow. All of this posting for WooWriMo shows me that Youtube is a big distraction from my writing! I honestly wouldn’t have guessed, I would have thought it would be Facebook. I guess it is because I can rationalize that I am on Youtube to do “research.”

Also, I do not think I have mentioned this yet, but I am actually keeping track of my “WooWriMo progress” through a word document on my computer. I am just mentioning this for posterity– I found this really useful because I can “go back in time” and see exactly what sections I wrote (I daily copy/paste what I wrote into that document under a date header) as well as see the exact word count for that day. But perhaps this is really only relevant someone like me (a perfectionist who started WooWriMo with a 30,000 word novel-in-progress).

p.s. sorry for the insane amount of parenthesis (ironically, I didn’t use a single set of parenthesis in my WooWriMo writing today)

December 26th (24th, and 25th): Happy Holidays!

Despite the holidays, I manged to complete my goal on December 24th by writing 1,679 words. Unfortunately due to the holidays, I wrote nothing at all on December 25th. Not very consistent. But like I said in one of my previous posts, I’m just trying to take it day by day and not feel bad when I miss day, because I want this to be a positive, fun experience!

Today I wrote 1,724 words. Yay I reached my goal! While I was writing today I got a little stuck. I just felt no motivation to write a little boring transition section between two different parts of my story. So after a while of just sitting there wasting time, I decided to move on to write the next interesting section and come back to the boring transition section. Afterwards, I found it easy to return to the boring transition section of my story. Although in retrospect this seems not that revolutionary, I think this will help get me into a proper “writing mood” faster.

During this whole experience thus far, I have found that I write best in the late hours, from 11pm to 2am. This is weird because I am an early riser. But on the other hand, it makes sense. I feel a real sense of pressure because I need to go to bed, yet I’m also super focused because there really is no other reason I should be up late alone in my room on my computer.

p.s. it’s SNOWING. 😀

December 23rd (and the 20th-22nd): Uncontrolled Self-editing Sucks

Although I failed to post to the Writing Club website, I did write both on December 20th (1,256 words) and December 21st (1,688). Unfortunately, although I did write on December 22nd, I got stuck in a rut editing a past section of my writing! Because this is not the point of WooWriMo–I should be just writing, not editing– I will not add that to my word count.

Today was a very busy day (my family hosted an early Christmas dinner for 1 set of relatives) so I wrote only 1,115 words. And that is all I am going to say about that because I need to go to bed!

Wish me luck! Without a doubt these two next days will be the hardest of all WooWriMo for me to try and complete my daily word count!

December 19th: A unintentional salute to 2012

Today I wrote 2,012 words! Which is a record, so hooray, and also cool because the year is 2012 (I didn’t intentional write 2012 words). Once again I found myself delving a little too deep into research… I was worse then yesterday and got quite distracted researching mold, believe it or not. Like before, I’m trying to keep my research to a minimum for my WooWriMo challenge. I know I use research a way to procrastinate, so we’ll see if I can stop myself as WooWriMo continues. Unfortunately, I know that it’s just going to get harder from here on out– as I continue writing my story, I will progressively get into more detailed settings. On a related note, I’m a little worried that in the future of WooWriMo I’ll soon turn to outlinging/planing as a way of procrastination. This is because as I get farther along in writing my story I have a less and less detailed plot outline to guide me. I’m not sure how I’ll combat that exactly, but I’ll keep you informed.

Also, I wrote so much today because I was hoping that I was going to be able to make up for my lost word count yesterday (by writing 2,667 words today). Obviously, I did not reach that mark. However, I have decided that I’m not going to stress about it (this is supposed to be fun, after all) and mentally just move on and focus on daily goals. I think this a key learning experience–by doing this, I will feel less of that overwhelming feeling of “ugh I have to make up for all those days,” that insurmountable-workload feel that makes you procrastinate even more. Oh, and another good reason I have decided to do this is because of the certain holidays arriving in next two weeks…  😉

December 18th: Sleepy

I was only somewhat successful today; I wrote 658 words. I stopped because I’m getting terribly sleepy, and I don’t think there is a point to writing when I’m this tired. I know that tomorrow I’ll have plenty of time to write during the day., rather than at night as I am doing now.

Besides that, there isn’t much to go over about my writing today. Perhaps I should block Youtube from myself whenever I begin to start writing… today I got distracted probably for a whole hour on Youtube, and I can’t even remember why I went on to Youtube originally! Ugh.

 

Nicole’s Reading List

Over winter break, I really want to get back into reading. I didn’t have much time to read anything for fun for about the last three weeks of the semester, so I figured I would keep track of what I’ve read since I’ve been home. Also, I always think it’s interesting to see how various authors influence your own writing. I wonder if the following books are inspiring what I’ve written, even subconsciously.

The Liar by Stephen Fry

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

I also intend to finally get around to reading the Lord of the Rings series (I know, I’ve only seen the movies and read The Hobbit! How embarrassing!) as well as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.

Also, I’ve been listening to the following songs on repeat for inspiration, all of which I highly recommend:

“Gun” – Emiliana Torrini

“Dirty Paws” – Of Monsters and Men

“The Lobster Quadrille” – Franz Ferdinand

“Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death from Above” – CSS

“Radioactive” – Imagine Dragons

Nicole enters the fray

Writing dialogue is always difficult, especially for someone who more prefers introspective writing like me. There’s the problem of making it sound like everyday speech (made more difficult when you’re writing something set in a different time period), and then there’s the problem of keeping individual characters’ voices distinct and interesting.

That said, I’ve completed one conversation (!) for a novel that I’m thinking of turning into an eventual graduate thesis. I would say I’d make it my IS, but it requires a LOT of research, and I don’t think I can finish it in one school year. If you’re wondering, the conversation is about the concept of an outsider within society–who decides who is outside and who is inside and why. It also touches on class and race in 1919, the year my novel is set in.

On top of that, I’ve written a couple random essays (I don’t know what else to call them) that are really more like a stream of thoughts from my head on various subjects. I don’t know what I’ll do with them, or even if I’ll ever use them in my future writings, but it always feels good to get these things out on paper (or rather, on Microsoft Word) so they aren’t cluttering up my brain.

I haven’t really set a word count goal, because once it’s out there, I would feel pressured to meet it, and I know I never would. I don’t want to disappoint myself–or anybody else who might be reading this.

December 17th: Throwing Daggers is sort of awesome

So today I achieved my goal by reaching 1,751 words. Hurray!

I continued writing my novel-in-progress, and it is going well so far. The new section I specifically wrote today was interesting in that I probably should have done more research before writing it. To clarify, one of my characters was being taught how to throw daggers. Which is sort of awesome for her, but terrible for me, because I have no experience throwing daggers (though it’d be sort of awesome if I did).

But, I’m writing for WooWriMo and the mentality is to just type it out no matter so you don’t get stuck. So that’s what I did.

I found that I can at least pretend I know some stuff about how to throw daggers. But I also found that research wasn’t entirely necessary; I was able to write a whole section about how the character needed to loosen up in order to properly throw a dagger. I don’t know if that’s true, but judging from past experiences, it’s almost always necessary for athletes to be relaxed in order to perform well. So, today was good because I showed myself I can just write rather than spend all my time intensely preparing in order to write. Note that I just wrote “intensely” preparing. Yep, you got me, I did a little research *gasp* Yeah it was a distraction and probably a form  procrastination, but even still it was an improvement for me: I spent less than 20 minutes doing research. Take it from me, that’s an improvement.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it for summing up my writing experience today. Hooray for dagger throwing! Hopefully I’ll learn how to do it someday, it’d be a wicked cool (and useless) parlor trick.

Lauren

p.s. I can’t decide if I should sign my name at the end of posts. Feels weird not to, yet clearly it’s redundant if I do, considering I’m the author of this post. Hmmm.

Are Your Hands Wet?