KJToo

The write-in at the International House of Johnson was… small. I would say “intimate”, but I’m trying to avoid any inappropriate connotations. Only Charley, Lord of the Sprint, attended. Over the course of four and a half hours and at least four cups of coffee each, we completed ten ten-minute sprints.

At this point, Charley writes because he wants to finish his story, not because he’s worried about making his daily word count. In 100 minutes, he wrote more than 5,500 words, which brought his total for the month to roughly 66,000. Charley is a writing machine.

I, on the other hand, am mere flesh and blood. Over the course of the evening I added just over 2,400 words to my total, averaging roughly 240 words per sprint. I’m gaining ground, and Laura and I plan to do a lot of writing this weekend. With a little determination, I may be able to catch up by Sunday night, especially if the Lord of the Sprint stops by again for a rematch.

Posted November 11, 2006 Comments(1)

As an alternative to kicking puppies, yesterday I decided to give my story a new point of view. The problem I had run into earlier in the week was simple: my protagonist was locked in a room with no hope of escaping. I knew that a certain leggy blonde nurse with a 1950’s hairstyle would be instrumental in gaining Bannister his freedom, but I had no idea what to do until she decided to bust him out of the joint, nor even what would motivate her to do so.

The solution: switch to a new perspective so I could see what the other characters — Doctor Gordon, a pipe-smoking fellow who looks a lot like Dennis the Menace’s father, Nurse Watson, the aforementioned leggy blonde, and Manley, who’s just this guy who runs the computron and wonders if he’ll be arrested for inadvertently uttering a Class 2 Vulgarity — were up to while Bannister was trying to find a way out of his predicament.

The tricky bit with the perspective shift is that I don’t really want to go third-person omniscient and I have to be careful about crawling into the heads of characters other than Bannister Proulx or risk giving away too much too soon.

I’m roughly 12,000 words behind at the moment, but there’s a write-in at the International House of Johnson tonight and I know that Charley will be there. Charley is the reigning king of word sprints. I have absolutely no hope of dethroning him, but his presence will push me to crank out those precious, precious words.

Posted November 10, 2006 Comments(0)

Singer-songwriter Jonathan Coulton — who is responsible for songs like “Code Monkey”, “Skullcrusher Mountain”, “First of May” and “Soft Rocked By Me” — will be playing Wilbert’s in Cleveland, Ohio on Thursday, 30 November.

Also playing that night are Paul and Storm, formerly of the excellent a cappella group, Da Vinci’s Notebook (”Title of the Song”, “Another Irish Drinking Song”, “Enormous Penis”1).

If you are in the Cleveland vicinity on 30 November, have dollars numbering ten at your disposal, and enjoy music with a humorous twist, you may want to get yourself to Wilbert’s.

1. Here come the Google hits! [back]

Posted November 9, 2006 Comments(9)

Boy, I sure could stand to follow my own advice right about now. On the NanoMonkeys podcast I’m telling people that they shouldn’t spend a lot of time trying to get through obstacles, but should simply write around them or ignore them and move to a new scene. So what have I done with my story? Written myself into a situation that I can’t get out of, and now I’m just staring at the page trying to will myself through it.

As a result I’ve gotten next to no writing done this evening (I’m not even going to bother uploading the file to get a new total) and I’m feeling very unmotivated. I’m nearly 10,000 words behind, and when the minute hand swings around to the 12 again, the ever-moving target will go up by another 1,667 words.

I’m going to sleep on it, and tomorrow I’ll probably kick a puppy.

Posted November 8, 2006 Comments(1)

It’s not a big gain, but it’s a gain. I’m still way behind, but I managed to crank out just shy of 500 words in two ten-minute sprints at the write-in tonight. It’s nice to know that I can follow my own advice and write around trouble spots. I’ll see if I can’t crank out at least a few hundred more after the Daily Show/Colbert Report election coverage has concluded.

We’ve got another write-in scheduled for Friday evening, perhaps at the International House of Johnson.

Posted November 7, 2006 Comments(1)