NaNoNire

A blog completely dedicated to Nire's yearly attempts at NaNoWriMo. Watch the insanity unfold.

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Location: Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Ten years and more than a hundred additional pounds later, I'm back riding again.

In addition to my weekly riding lesson, I spend a lot of time surfing the internet, reading books, and writing my own.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Curse You Blogger!

Well, I had a post answering the question that I posed myself at the end of one of my previous posts. But I'll be damned if Blogger didn't decide it would be wonderful to eat it as a late-night snack.

Curses!

Guess I'll be rewriting it next time I have a chance...

Monday, October 10, 2005

Some Things are Important

I just realized that my main character doesn't have a real name. I know what he's called after his descent into evil, but I'll be damned if I know who he was before that.

This? Is not good.

Friday, October 07, 2005

Helpful Links, Anyone?

Here's a couple writing links that I've dug up from various places that I'm sure people will find helpful.

Copyright
What are the copyright laws? How can you use copyrighted material? How could you be breaking the copyright laws? Holly at NaNoNuts2005 givs us the low-down.

Previously Published?
What sort of rights are there? What happens when you post things somewhere on the internet? What is considered previously published and what isn't? Holly provides a simple explanation of publishing rights.

Publishing
Here's a writer's look into what happens between signing the contracts and actually seeing your book on the shelves. Maybe not relevent at the moment, but hopefully for some by the end of NaNoEdMo.

A Writer's Toolkit
This link takes you to a PDF file that guides you through the writing process. It's an part of a class assignment, I would assume, so some of the parts are less than 100% necessary. Give it a look-see.

Method Writing
How many times have you read a book and said "What the hell? Real people wouldn't do that!"? Mike Shea believes that this is caused by excessively plot-focused writing, by outlining and forcing your characters to do what they want. He proposes a solution: the writing equivalent of method acting.

Don't Suck!
While this article seems to be aimed at journalists, a lot of Gareth's tips on how NOT to suck apply to novel-writing, too. I recommend at least skimming the article for the relevent parts.

That's it for today. Enjoy.

Thursday, October 06, 2005

It Just Keeps Getting Bigger

Nanowrimo started in 1999 with a paltry 21 people participating (6 of whom reached the 50K word goal). By 2004, it had grown to 42,000 participants, of whom nearly six thousand wrote 50,000 words or more1. This yeah, 2005, it's continuing to grow. The NaNoWriMo and 2005NaNoWriMo communities on LiveJournal are filled with "Hi, this is my first NaNo, one of my friends convinced me to join" posts. On October 1, when the website reopened for sign-ups and NaNoPrepMo2, the amount of people accessing the site and signing up was so great that it crashed the servers in a major way. That had never happened before; the servers had always been able to withstand the strain of the two months. On October 4, the site reopened with new (more) servers.

As I stated earlier, I'm not sure how I feel about this. Sure, I'm not required to feel anything, but I know that I do. I just keep waffling between being pretty pleased (occaisonally) and slightly annoyed and concerned (most of the time).

On the pleasing side, it's good to see so many writers, young and old, learning to force their inner editors to stuff a sock in it and just write. As much as I prefer writing in complete solitude, being surrounded by a group of writers doing the same thing as me is inspiring. More people participating guarantees that there will be people in my area interested in doing write-ins.

However, the other hand, the much larger hand, is not pleased. At all.3

A portion of this is, of course, the discomfort felt by a minor niche of the population when the mainstream decide what they are doing is "cool". I have the same issue with NaNoWriMo becoming so popular as I did with gaming platforms becoming the "in" thing, punk and goth becoming the looks to have, playing multiple instruments wasn't just for band geeks. Those traits used to be things I used to indentify myself, to set myself apart from the mainstream population. The groups who identified with me were often closeknit, providing a sense of family and belonging.

As NaNoWriMo becomes more mainstream, that sense is lost. In the beginning, it allowed the winners4 into two subsets of the population: the first being those people who are participating in NaNoWriMo, the second being novel writers themselves. That first subset has grown so large that it's potentially considered (at least within the subset itself) not to be much of a subset anymore. In my own opinion, it's reached mainstream: most people have heard of it and many participate. The second subset has also grown larger as NaNoWriMo grows larger, thus somehow seeming to cheapen the glory of having a novel to call your own.

There's also the issue of what is being produced. The more people who participate, the more potential for there to be, to put it bluntly, utter crap produced. I'm talking about crap that can not be improved by that writer no matter how many times he or she edits and fixes it.

This was seen with the world of fanfiction a while back. There was a time (which I admit that I barely remember) when writing fanfiction was something that almost no one did. Back when it was solely 'zines, a fanfic'er had to work hard to get a story in one of the fanzines. When fanfic first started appearing on the internet and FanFiction.Net was created, writing fanfic still was not a popular hobby. Most of the people who did write and post online made sure their work followed canon and that it was written well. Now? You go to FFN and 90% of it is crap written by a 13-year-old on a sugar high who's only seen one episode of the TV show, read one chapter of the book, seen half an hour of the movie.

Of course, this isn't likely to happen with publishing novels. There's some sort of a guarantee that what gets published will at least have some semblence of quality. Or so you would think.

Have you read Eragon? Or Digital Fortress? No one could claim that those books were any good upon truly looking at them. And yet, they still sell many copies, they're still being produced, and the authors are still receiving royalties. Crap is still marketable.

It worries me that the increase in writers will cause in increase in bad novels being produced. And this will, in turn, create an increase in bad novels being published by legit5 publishers. Nevermind how many inexperienced NaNo'ers will take their babies to a vanity press (assuming they can afford to do so), not realizing how much of a bad idea that is.

Every year, a NaNoWriMo newbie seems to find an article by Alma A. Hromic and posts it to the main community on LiveJournal, causing yet another mini hissyfit by some participants.6

"Last year, the NaNoWriMo phenomenon gathered over 5000 hopefuls, of whom 700 succeeded in producing their 50,000 words by the midnight deadline. "They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists," the NaNoWriMo website says.

I'm deeply sorry to wreck this comfortable illusion, but this is self-delusional at best, a flat out lie at worst."
On the one hand, I understand where the responders on the two sites are coming from. The tone of the article is (more than) a bit holier-than-thou. Hromic really does seem to be overreacting to something that's more "just a bit of fun" than "serious business" to most people.

"So you want to write? Write. If you don't have it in you, that thing that drives you, the thing that needs to be said - then find another dream. Make the bourbon for the tortured artists to drink. Bake them a cake. Build them a house.

Don't diminish their accomplishments by calling yourself "a novelist." If writing is your hobby and your interest, that's perfectly fine. For many of us, it's a living. For some of us, it's a vocation. There are people who want to "be writers," and people who want to write. Find out which you are. If it's the latter, you don't need NaNoWriMo - you will not be scared away by the necessary time and effort, you will not be scared away by the bourbon and the coffee and the leftovers. You WILL write, because you cannot not write. If it's the former... find a real writer somewhere and cure yourself of the romantic ideas of what a writer's life is like. And then go and sin no more."
On the other hand, I understand where she's coming from. It has been my plan to become a "writer" since I was a youngling. Everything I've done in life has been to further my goal to be able to support myself on writing alone. Hell, I even have English-with-a-focus-in-Creative-Writing as one of my majors. I can't quite claim to be "a real writer" yet. Yes, I've won short story contests. Yes, I wrote a 80K novel before I discovered NaNoWriMo, but it was typical of a determined young teenager and not something that will ever be pubished. However, I'm working there on my own time, not just during November. Not even mostly during November.

I would agree that NaNoWriMo "cheapens" the non-NaNo-writer's career. Now that everyone feels that writing a novel is accesible to them, now that it's no longer a someday thing, but a thismonth event, writers are nolonger people to be idolized. A large part of my childhood involved looking up to authors. I wanted to be one of those people. I wanted to be up there with Terry Pratchet, not with 14-year-old Jessie from down the street.

NaNoWriMo makes it so that everyone can call themselves novelists, this is true. The more people who participate, the more people who win, the more people who are "novelists", the less special it is for me to be a writer. In a way, I'm watching the dreams of my childhood fall into the toilet. In a way, this is probably an over-reaction and I'm taking NaNoWriMo "far too seriously". But as long as there are people who view it the way I do, it's an issue.

So I suppose that raises the question, why do I even participate in NaNoWriMo then? I'll save that one for a later post.
___________________________________
1data found in the NaNoWriMo General FAQ
2unofficial title of October, according to me
3Forgive me for any disjointedness in this piece of my post. I "wrote" all of my major points while walking to class this morning and, well, five hours later, I've forgotten the majority of them.
4I'll admit that I've never won. However, I've come damn close and "won" in off months when I completely both novels I started during November.
5I, personally, do not count vanity presses as legit. When you have to
pay someone to publish your book? That's pretty sketchy.
6Emailed responses here and here. Scroll down a bit to find them.

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

October's Here

The NaNoWriMo site is finally open.

So many people attempted to sign up on the first day that the server(s?), well, broke.

I have mixed feelings about that. Alas, for I can't detail them at the moment, as class is starting in a few minutes. More later.