This year is speeding by… and for once, it’s been quite a productive one in terms of my personal writing. (And just as productive at work, but that’s a whole other story/blog.)

I started out on January 1st with the intention of writing 100,000 words by the end of March. That deadline has passed, obviously, but long before I got there I realised there was no way I was going to make it. So I extended it. And extended it again. And my current challenge is now 120,ooo words by the end of May (since that’s how many I recalculated I was going to need to get to the end of this first draft).

Some of the writing has been going slowly – I had a very slow January, with only a few thousand words written, and those mostly on my outline and character sheets (which I’m including in my word count total but not in the progress bar over there on the right). But lately I’ve been doing much better. The Novel in Progress course I’ve been doing at the Big Smoke Writing Factory has definitely been helping! Not just with my writing, but also with my motivation (which really is the more important thing for a first draft).

Anyway, today is my 101st day on this project, and I’m at a total of 38,017 words as of a few minutes ago. For the novel in total, because I had a lot of existing material to include and/or revise, it’s at about 47.5k, and Part 1 has been sent off to some trusted readers for comments.

To some of you, this might not sound a lot… But I’ve also written 1 and a half short stories (I really need to get the second half done soon), and more to the point, I usually can’t manage to write anything much at all outside of November & NaNoWriMo!

So I actually feel I might have a finished first draft by the end of May…. No, scratch that. I will have a finished first draft by the end of May. And you can all hold me to that.

The muses of poetry love me a bit too much at the moment, and keep throwing ideas at me even though I’d rather be writing prose. Four poems and counting so far this year… and this is one.

The Things We Keep

My grandparents held onto things.
Tatty things, scraps and rags:
elastic bands, buttons, newspaper,
bottles, string, spare screws and nails.
Useful things, purposeful things,
stashed away in biscuit boxes,
old coffee jars and plastic bags.

The things we keep just take up space.
We fill our house with sentimental clutter,
tat and souvenirs and unwanted gifts:
clothes which no longer fit right,
magazines never read, candles never lit.
Things that look whole and meaningful
but which will never be useful or used.

© 2012 C Sharp

No, not the first day – clearly not, since it’s the 5th already. 2012 is speeding by already, it seems…

But I couldn’t get to sleep last night. I was mulling over my poems (since I’ve submitted some to a competition) and I realised how melancholy many of them are. That rather annoyed me, and my brain started throwing up lines for an ode to joy, of sorts.

And for once, I didn’t ignore my brain and let myself go to sleep. I actually put on the light, found my notebook, and wrote the poem that was clamouring to be heard. I’m not going to share it right now (if ever) for a number of reasons, but I’m delighted to have written the first poem of the year so early in the year. I already have some images floating round my head for #2, as well…

Two Words: “The End”

No, not of the world as we know it, but of the novel I wrote this year for NaNoWriMo. I actually finished it 11 days ago, on Tuesday 20th, during a determined and beer-fuelled writing session in the Library Bar in Dublin’s Central Hotel, which is the usual haunt of the Dublin WriMos. It came to about 85,500 words eventually, give or take a few. I could have made it a bit longer by adding in a chapter from another character’s PoV, but I’ve decided to drop that character’s sections – probably – so there didn’t seem much point.

Writing ‘The End’ for a novel is something I had only done once before, and it’s a very sweet feeling.

Of course, I immediately started to hate what I had written. And it’s taken me until today to finish the minor changes I wanted to make before sending it to a couple of readers (namely, taking out some of the more obvious and annoying word count padding). There’s an awful lot that is wrong with it… but I’d like to hope that there’s a lot right with it as well. (I keep wanting to type ‘write’ as the opposite of ‘wrong’.)

After all, a novel that contains caves and treehouses, griffons and unicorns, miniature cart-pulling mammoths, a clockwork zoo, and homing flamingos can’t be all bad. Can it?

Three Words: “Happy New Year!”

I have a lot of writing goals for 2012 – the first being to complete another novel, about 100,000 words’ worth, by the end of March. I’m also planning to take my first ever creative writing class, at the Big Smoke Writing Factory in Dublin. And I want to finish the set of poems I started this year, based on an unusual tarot deck that I’ve had for years (and is my preferred deck for readings).

But I’ll maybe write more about those once 2012 actually starts…

Picture of fireworks used under Creative Commons license; some rights reserved by barron.

I’m sure there are more ironically named bridges elsewhere in the world, but this one caught my eye on a traffic report a couple of months ago.

So it’s a “High” bridge… but not high enough to avoid being flooded.

Also the one above it is pretty aptly named – a “Crooket” (crooked) bridge which has collapsed.

It’s December. National Novel Writing Month is over for another year, but my novel – as usual – isn’t yet finished.

Every year at about this point, I run completely out of steam. I’ve given so much of myself during November that I just don’t want to bother committing any more time to writing. Even if I like my novel enough to want to finish it (which doesn’t always happen), I generally look at the work needed to do so, and run in the other direction. Metaphorically, of course.

Oh, I don’t always run straight away… I often have an idea that I’ll keep writing, maybe a few hundred words a day, and eventually I will have a finished first draft that I can put to one side for a while and then come back to for revisions and edits and a second draft and a third and hopefully, someday, something that I could consider sending to an agent.

But within a week or so of November finishing, I give up on my novel. It stays on my hard drive (and in Google Docs of course, everyone needs a backup) until such time as I fancy reading it again – sometimes years later. Generally I can see the kernels of a decent story, interesting characters, not-bad writing… But I still do nothing very much despite grandiose plans.

This year though… This year will be different.

No, honest, it will!

One thing that’s heavily in my favour this year is that I’m probably only 6 or 7 thousand words away from actually finishing the story. I have only once, in 9 years of NaNoWriMo, actually written ‘The End’ on a novel. And that was one I wrote mostly as an experiment and out of my normal genres. But this year, I am close enough to the end that I can almost see it. I certainly know what’s going to happen next in the story; I had a decent outline for this one, which allows me to know what I’m writing about next without being so proscriptive that the story can’t take unexpected turns if they happen.
So I only need about another 3 hours of writing time to finish. That’s 3 hour of actual time, mind you, which translates into 6 or 7 hours where I write for 10 minutes, take a 10 minute break, then write again. I have a short attention span.

Another thing in my favour is that I am managing to keep the writing momentum going this year. I’ve only contributed an additional 493 words to my novel so far in December, but I have written something every day on 750words.com (including this blog entry). I’m on a 35-day streak, which is the longest I’ve ever managed, and it feels good to know I’m working towards more badges on the site. (Another example of the game-ification of life, but there you go. It works for me.)

And then there’s the fact that I have promised to let people read the first draft of this novel, once I finish it and then go through and strip out some of the word count padding I did for NaNoWriMo. (All the ‘he said’, ‘she said’, mostly, plus I need to put some contractions back in, where they fit more naturally into dialogue.) This is the first novel I’ve written that I’ve felt comfortable about giving to other people without trying to spend forever trying to fix its flaws. I know it has flaws, and I know I can fix them, and I’d like my readers to point out additional flaws so I can fix them too.

I actually like my novel. And that’s a very powerful motivator for making me want to finish it.

Wish me luck?