The Final Stretch

Here it comes. I'm currently running about 40,113 words. I'm actually slightly ahead of quota today, but I'll fall under quota today if I don't write. I'm going to get settled into the writing in just a few moments.

During the holiday, I spent time with my brother and we played Lord of the Rings: the Third Age on the PlayStation 2. I got to enjoy spending time with family, plenty of turkey loaded with good taste and tryptophan. I got loaded with comfort food, Amish friendship bread, sugary cookies, home cooking, and good times.

My brother and I also broke through a tough boss battle with the Orcs in the Lord of the Rings game. We were at the level in Osgiliath, fighting to defend the bridge. It took us five tries before we had our tactics down right and got to beat the boss: Gothmog the Orc General. His minions attacked us and nearly wiped us out.

So, now it's time to hit that novel and put some mileage on it.

Rounding The Turn

I've gotten a nice lead on my quota leading into Thanksgiving. Unlike my last post, I got ahead of quota for real. I've been building it in units, about twice the normal quota per day. I'll be able to spend time with relatives, instead of with my novel. It's nice to have that word count "cushion" to fall back on. I'll be a little under quota at the end of the holiday, but not enough to ruin my project.

Gathering Momentum

The story is still cranking away, complete with strange ideas injected as characters discuss the history of the far future, the last recorded years of several planets, and what the archaeologists just dug up.

Ancient data storage devices may one day be used as an archaeological source, in much the same way that shards of pottery, arrowheads, bits of preserved clothing, and mummies do in the present. Imagine a future society digging through the ruins of America, what would they did up?

Maybe a stack of "floppy diskettes," or better "records." The archival properties of plastic or vinyl may not be the same as clay or stone, however. I wonder if any data about our culture would be able to survive centuries or millennia required to become an archaeological find. Will the Earth as we know it even survive that long?

My word count has topped 18,250. I'm actually over quota (despite that nasty loss the Buckeyes suffered against the Fighting Illini), so I could decide not to write for a day and still meet my deadline. I'm quite proud of that. Usually my creative juices start to run down as winter approaches, so I'm quite happy that I'm still producing this far into November.

Confounded Flaming Pants!

As in "liar, liar, pants on fire!"

...I got my spreadsheet to calculate my quotas for me. But I found out something was wrong somewhere in the middle of my writing: I'm behind by about 4,000 words! It got stuck on the 9th and wasn't adding how many days I had been writing since the 9th.

So I've managed to put in twice the normal number of words, but I'm still fighting to keep ahead of my quota. It'll take a bit longer to figure up the problem, but I'll get back on top.

Kicking It Up!

NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writer's Month) has initiated, so I have been plugging away at 1600+ word quotas each day and faring pretty well. I practiced back in June and July, but this is for real.

I hope to keep ahead of quota and finish, since I succeeded back in the summer. The goal is to produce a 50,000 word work of fiction. This can be classified as a "novel" but the main point is to hit the quota mark in thirty days. It was fun to do this back in the summer, and I am beginning to have fun with the story I'm writing right now.

It's science fiction, and there's a whole community at NaNoWriMo.org devoted to science fiction. I've read some of the forums and posted a few of my thoughts there. All in all, it's been a major distraction from more important things, but I could see how the forums could be interesting and useful. The part where I call it a distraction is mainly the amount of replies a post can get even after I feel like it should've ended.

There are some forum posts that look very interesting that I won't read, just because there's more than twenty or thirty replies posted on just that one thread. To me, that's information overload.

Anyway, I'll try to post semi-regularly this month, under the NaNoWriMo label so people can see.

What's my current word count? 7200 even. Wow.

Just One Day...

I heard of National Novel Writer's Month a year or two ago, but I didn't have the guts to try writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. This year, a friend and I tried to practice in April. Her practice in April succeeded, but my practice story broke down in April. As I described it to another friend, my story didn't break down in April because of "writer's block," it broke down because of "writer's asteroid."

But I have overcome writer's block this past month by launching a practice story on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007. I also set up a spreadsheet on my computer and set up calculations to tally up all my word counts and tell me how much progress I had made. My deadline to finish a 50,000 word novel was this Wednesday, July 4th, 2007.

I spent last week consistently behind the recommended quota of 1,670 words per day. Then on Thursday night last week, I overcame a 4,000 word deficit and stopped in the wee hours of the morning over quota.

This week, I consistently remained above quota. Last night I finished the story with more than 50,000 words. Today, though I applied a few finishing touches, I remained above quota the whole time. I have reached my goal.

Blasting Off

Anybody remember the old Texas Instruments 82 (TI-82) Graphics Calculator? Back when I used one in High School, I had a friend who developed a calculator program involving the buying and selling of drugs in randomly generated cities. The program, "prgmDRUGLORD" included a subroutine where the drug dealer encountered the police and had to fight them off.

I borrowed the program back in 1996 because I saw potential. I renamed the program "prgmSPACER" and like a true science fiction afficionado, I changed the story. Instead of illegal drugs, I changed the products to science fiction-related items: a fictional alloy called "Plasteel," a mundane cargo "Food," and the essential fusion power source "Deuterium."

The program underwent several changes. I changed the police that the player fights to "Space Pirates," and changed the randomly generated cities to randomly generated planets. So the program underwent a makeover.

In late 1996, I rewrote the source for the program, converting it from a derivative work into an original work, including original solutions to problems posed by the idiosyncrasies of programming on a calculator, and tried to add extra subroutines. As the player earned money (called "trade notes"), he or she could "promote" from the rank of Intern, to Commander, to Captain. At the rank of Captain, the player gained access to weapon upgrades--powerful plasma torpedos, and enhanced laser turrets.

The pirates also grew more ferocious, boarding your ship, ramming you toward planets, smashing you between asteroids, blasting you with pulsed neutrino emissions that could even send you reeling back in time (and cause you to lose a level of rank!)

I even went as far as introducing different subroutines for saving the game, and I even wrote a sequel. In the sequel, the player is forced to deal with a group of five ultra high powered pirate ships.

And for the past few years, I have had no need for "prgmSPACER" or my old TI-82. So now, in my spare time, I've begun an ambitious new project--converting SPACER into a database. Microsoft Access will never be the same.

Possible Starting Places...

If I generate any fiction about hurricane relief, I just saw an article about a book that might give me ideas.

Firestorm.

I'll have to brainstorm some more ideas if this is to take off. Maybe I'll see where it leads.

World Building

I have strayed from the beaten path of my typical science fiction stories. I have two ideas competing for space in my brain right now.

One idea comes from recent experiences. I've thought of writing short realistic fiction pieces, or possibly a longer piece focusing on hurricane relief efforts, or volunteers, or hurricane victims and survivors. Not that I wish to capitalize on an experiece that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies, but there are ideas bouncing around inside my head, and I wonder if any of them would develop if I gave it a chance.

The other idea comes from the past. I thought of a few characters and science fiction ideas and sketched out an idea in early September, 2001. I called it "Allied Space Rescue," a sort of relief organization for planetary disasters that might strike other colonized worlds. Shortly after I hatched the idea, the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks happened. I was also taking courses at college at that time, so I got busy enough that ASR got shoved to a back burner.

The question I have is this: where can I get the information I need to make a realistic story seem real enough to readers, or to make a science fiction disaster sound like a real event?

Spl@t!

I was just thinking about how I added a chapter in the beginning of my manuscript because it seemed odd to jump straight from one thing to another. As I thought of it, I wondered "what if that doesn't belong there at all." Not just belonging in that position, but whether the additional chapter belongs in the manuscript at all.

And a thought came to me about something that I will call "splat." Here is my definition of "splat."

Splat: (noun) 1. A thing that is "thrown" into a story the way a lump of mashed potatoes hits the wall in a food fight. A haphazard addition that only marks that a thing was added and not necessarily that any improvement was made. 2. Any thing that is haphazardly added to another thing in such a way that suggests slipshod, inefficient work or similar lack of quality.

The idea applies not just to stories, but also to computer programs, movies, etc. I think the thing that made me want to log on and write down this thought is another important thought: "Splat" is avoidable.

Manuscript!

First conceived in 1993, a science fiction story I was writing began to gather momentum as I sketched out a basic plotline in January 1994. By February 1994, I was writing the story and inserting elements from previous years' ideas. It was the second semester of my Freshman year of high school, and the urge to be creative was also bringing my grades up.

The story lost momentum in June 1994, though, and writing stopped. And then the manuscript became less of a priority. I devoted my life to Christ that summer. As classes began in the fall, I began to produce "idea books," my 9 inch by 4 inch college-ruled notebooks. Each idea book covered a semester of time and contained sketches, story segments, character breakdowns, and other notes. By the end of my Sophomore year of high school, I had 2 idea books completely filled.

Throughout my Junior year of high school, I continued to use my idea books and filled another pair of them with story components. I worked with a fellow classmate to generate a "crossover" story which included both his characters and mine. Still, the urge to finish the original story demanded attention. I purchased an 8 inch by 11 inch notebook and began writing again. This time, it was an affort to collate my original 1994 draft with segments of story from the idea books. But by the summer after my Junior year of high school, that stopped also.

I graduated high school in 1997. I had six idea books from my years in high school. By the end of summer, I had typed about five chapters of the story and was working on Chapter 6. Thinking somewhat critically of idea books, I decided to determine if they were a crutch that inhibited my writing, or whether they were a useful tool. By the end of Freshman year at Ohio State, I realized that idea books were a worthwhile tool--I kept on developing ideas whether I wrote them down or not.

By August 2001, I had 6 idea books from my years in college. I also had a finished manuscript in my folders on disk and on the hard drive. But the holes in the plot, in the characters, and the rest of the information suggested that it needed a revision. By the middle of March 2002, the idea behind the story received a major overhaul. Characters, concepts, even the appearance of key places were considered "open grounds" for revision. The world of the story grew and changed.

By August 2002, I was writing story segments during my lunch break, transmitting them home by e-mail messages. By February 2003, I was producing idea book story segments worthy of inclusion in the new story, and I had an idea for the story's conclusion. By July 2003, on the pages of my next idea books, I had nailed down key plot events in story segments. 2004 saw continuation of the story in typed form, and 2005 saw the finish of a major event. After a computer crash, my electronic copy of the story was off-limits for six months in the first half of 2006. I persisted, having prepared by taking notes and keeping a backup copy. I hand wrote chapters beginning in March, and by May, I had my final handwritten page. The story itself was over, but the "manuscript" was in two places.

To remedy this, in the summer of 2006, I began typing the preliminary chapters to tie down the loose ends of the manuscript's beginning. By December 2006, I was beginning to revise the manuscript for continuity. By January of 2007, I had revised my way to the very end of all my electronic manuscript. This February, I pulled out my handwritten final chapters. This past week, I pulled some late-nighters doing typing to get the story done.

I finished the manuscript early on Saturday morning.

And now, the fun's just begun. Something has to be done with a completed manuscript, so the road to publication begins now.

D@tabasics Part 2

I decided I'd have a go at creating another database in Microsoft Access. I wanted to practice setting up relationships and see what would happen. I've also had an idea about how a relief organization might track who is assigned to doing what task, how far along is it, and other questions.

This has led down a rabbit hole with a variety of expansions to the original concept. First of all, where is our organization? Where are we housing volunteers? Where do those volunteers come from?

These questions had to be answered first, and for the first time, I realized that it might help if I wrote down a few notes. It looked something like this:

One vs. Many:
1.) One building has many zones,
one zone has many rooms,
one room has many volunteers.

2.) One organization has many buildings.

3.) One volunteer team has many volunteers.

4.) One building has many staff members...

And so I went on, building tables as I went. Not all of the tables are fully constructed, but there are still some questions that I want answered first.

These relationships helped me construct a series of tables that I felt comfortable with. I then went to the "relationships" display and constructed the joins as I felt they should appear between tables. I do not typically construct relationships because the database workarounds that I use at work have never needed them before. This is interesting practice. There might be more to this appearing in later posts.

Seeing Both Sides

After examining the revision work from the early chapters, then moving on to later chapters, I've caught up with an interesting situation. The earliest chapters are written in "limited-omniscient" narration. That means I focus on only one character most of the time. His or her thoughts and experiences are made accessible to the reader, but only those thoughts and experiences.

Somewhere in the middle, the limit is dropped for "omniscient" narration. The story skips between characters and exposes their thoughts.

Toward the end, the limit is enforced again for "limited-omniscient" narration. The story returns to the original "main character" and only focuses his or her thoughts and experiences.

This may jolt the reader to encounter something like this, but I am going to flag that problem as "handle later" in the interest of producing a manuscript. I will "post-revise" after the whole thing is typed, backed-up, and printed. The easier solution to this mess might be to open up to omniscient narration throughout, or to slowly expand which characters the reader is allowed to fully access.

Once I see the pattern in the chapters, and how much work is involved (and how much the story loses by losing the other perspectives) I will decide how to handle this recent development.

I'll get to see where this leads also.

Revision Theme

I'm all the way through to the equivalent of Chapter 14 on my novel now, and still feeling a heady rush of excitement as I go. I've noticed how the earliest chapters in the story seem to need more revision than the later ones. I think that's because the later ones were written less than a year ago, while some of the earlier ones were written back in 2002. Does this sound familiar to anybody?

Anyway, as I revise, I keep playing the same music CD: Burlap to Cashmere's 1998 album, Anybody Out There?. There's just something about the music that I like to have playing in the background as I revise.

I've thought of changing gears, switching CDs or something, but the same one keeps winding up in the player. It's all good though, because I'm on Chapter 14, after all.