Tag Archives: nanowrimo

NaNoCruft

I’m sure I’m not the first person to come up with this term. I like to think that I am, though, so I’m going to claim that I am. “NaNoCruft”. It’s the term I use to refer to the bits of prose that you used to fatten up your word count when writing your National Novel Writing Month (or, NaNoWriMo) novel. It’s the stuff that, even two revisions later, causes one of the members of your writers’ group to say, “Huh. You wrote this during NaNoWriMo, didn’t you?”

NaNoWriMo is, for the uninitiated, all about writing a novel in one month. For the purposes of the project, a novel is defined as a work of fiction 50,000 words or more in length. It’s a pretty arbitrary target, but it seems to work for many thousands of people worldwide every November. The number of participants worldwide has been steadily increasing since it was started by Chris Baty in 1999; and the number of “winners” — people who actually make it to the 50,000 word mark and beyond — has also increased. A few published novels, including the bestselling Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, started out life as NaNoWriMo novels, and I think that the majority of the participants in NaNoWriMo share the dream of publishing their novel, having it become a bestseller, be optioned for a film, and so on. It’s why so many of us go on after November to either finish up the novel (it’s common for participants to complain that even though they reached the 50,000 word mark, their story is still far from complete), or to edit it. Some have even gone on to designate every February as NaNoEdMo, and there are usually at least a couple thousands participants in that as well.

Because the emphasis of NaNoWriMo is on quantity and not quality, there are a number of tricks that participants use to pad out their word count, and it’s this padding that ends up being “NaNoCruft” when it isn’t removed during subsequent edits. In my own novel, The Solitude of the Tentacled Space Monster, which started out as my 2005 NaNoWriMo novel (and I’m still working on it nearly four years novel? Ouch), readers in my novelists’ group have identified several habits that count as “NaNoCruft”. Excessive ruminating, for example; my characters frequently ruminate on events that have already transpired. This ends up with the same events being told two or more times. An attack by monsters is not just shown, but the characters involved talk about it amongst themselves, think about it, and whenever a point of view is shifted, the characters ruminate about it again. And again. And again. I’ve tried to eliminate most of this rumination, but some still remains, and that’s NaNoCruft. Characters of mine also make long speeches about irrelevant topics. This, too, is NaNoCruft. Extraneous characters show up and do things that aren’t relevant to the action of the novel. More NaNoCruft.

NaNoCruft is difficult to eliminate. Plenty of writers fall deeply in love with their own words, with their own clever turns of phrases, with their own characters, and so on; so to eliminate any of them can feel like amputation without any sort of anesthesia. It hurts, so they try to avoid it. And because writers are so deeply entrenched in their work, they have blind spots to their own faults. I certainly do, and that makes it hard for me to track down and eliminate my own NaNoCruft. I’m always surprised when a member of my novelists’ group points out a passage in a draft of STSM and say, “This shows me you wrote it during NaNoWriMo.”

Thus, with its focus on just getting 50,000 words written, regardless of whether or not they’re good words, NaNoWriMo can encourage bad habits for writers that are difficult for the writer to see, much less get rid of. This is not to say that NaNoWriMo is a bad idea. I’ve participated every year since 2001 (skipping 2002), and each year I’ve hit that 50,000 word mark. I fully intend to participate this year. For the last two years I’ve served as the co-municipal liaison for our area, and I plan on doing it again.

NaNoWriMo is great for writers who need a boost getting their project started, or who just want to get some words down. Or who just want to say, “Hey! I wrote a book!” But finding and eliminating the NaNoCruft that creeps into my own novels can more difficult than imagined. So I think that for 2009, the main challenge I’ll set for myself in NaNoWriMo is to avoid as much NaNoCruft as possible during the actual writing, so that when I set to the task of editing the project later on, there will be that much less work for me to do.

Time Sinks

…Being evidence that my blog can indeed consist of more than just Twitter updates.

It’s November, which is always a month full of time sinks for me.  I mean, everyone’s busy during November what with the holidays and Thanksgiving (well, everyone in America who celebrates Thanksgiving at least).   But for about 100,000 people around the world, November is also, of course, National Novel Writing Month, and the pressure of churning out 50,000 words in a single month can get to some people.  I passed the 50K mark yesterday, with 50,007 words total (according to the official NaNoWriMo word count verifier), so technically I’m done with that, even though the story itself is still incomplete.  It’s part two of the novel that I wrote last year, and I realize there’s at least one more part to come.  I’m really hoping, actually, that I can get this third part written in a very short span of time (maybe December through January), so that I can leave Deacon Dread and the Lord of Nightmares behind and get back to work on The Solitude of the Tentacled Space Monster, which has been languishing since late October.  I have ideas for other novels I want to work on in future NaNoWriMo’s, too.

I also chose to be a Municipal Liaison for our area in NaNoWriMo this year, meaning that in addition to writing my own novel I was helping to plan events and gatherings to help other people in Sacramento who are participating get their own novels written as well.  I had a helper in this, which was great, but the point is that NaNoWriMo kept me even busier this November than it usually does.

There’s that whole Thanksgiving thing, too, and I love Thanksgiving.  But since we don’t host Thanksgiving at our house, and since everything I bake always ends up tasting like soap, no matter how closely I stick to the recipe, my role in planning Thanksgiving is calling my parents (if it’s a year at my parents’ house) and asking them what time we should arrive.  That’s pretty much it.  So while I love going to the family for Thanksgiving, it just isn’t that big a time sink for me.  More on Thanksgiving in general in a future entry.

Another big time sink for me this past month has been, I confess, Second Life.  I signed up for an account just before the start of November, just to see what it was like, and was kind of hooked right away.  I decided to create a female avatar for myself for several reasons.  First, I know that even though I enjoy writing about female protagonists, they tend to be pretty passive, which frankly irks me, so I thought that maybe having a female avatar in Second Life would be the closest thing I’d get to having a female me in First Life that I could experiment with (no, not like that, you morally turpitudinous leches!).  I don’t know how accurate the experience has been, though I’m assured that even stating pretty obviously in your profile that you’re married (sort of the Second Life version of wearing a wedding ring) and that you’re not interested in sex of any sort, cyber or otherwise, is no deterrence to the guys who will come up and say something like, "Hey baby, nice breasts, wanna get it on?"  Of course, their language is usually not quite so refined.

Second Life has surprised me, though.  The brand new residents and the ones who are mostly interested in sex and guns mostly hang out in the newbie areas, and I’ve learned to avoid those.  Once you get past those areas you can find some truly remarkable simulations that have been built up by very dedicated people.  I’ve found a recreation of the city of Dublin; a couple of really amazing garden sims (my favorite is the SL Botanical Gardens, which was built by some botanists who wanted to recreate as many real world plants in SL as they could); some impressive music venues; a sim called "October Country" that’s dedicated to Halloween and the works of Ray Bradbury and other horror writers (Lovecraft’s Cthulhu makes a regular appearance); a recreation of the Globe Theater from Shakespeare’s days; and tons more.

Another reason I chose to have a female avatar in Second Life was that I originally thought my chances of meeting people who weren’t interested in just sex and guns would be increased if I made it clear that I wasn’t as well, and my impression was that simply having a male avatar in Second Life was an implicit announcement that you were after such things, no matter how many times you said you weren’t.  I’ve since learned that this isn’t automatically true, but my avatar’s gender had already been assigned, and even though I could change it simply by clicking a radio button in my "Edit Appearance" screen, her name — Zoe Compton — isn’t very unisex.  Besides, I’ve gotten used to her.  Plus, there are a lot more ways to customize your avatar’s appearance and dress it up if it’s female than if it’s male; if your avatar is male, your choices are pretty much limited to looking like a soldier with lots of guns, or a beefed up muscle man, or a hip hop gangster, or a super powerful corporate executive.  And besides, I’m a straight, non-transgendered, non-transvestite guy who enjoys watching "What Not to Wear"; how else am I going to express that side of me that desperately needs to shop for nice clothes?

It should come as no surprise that there are a number of men that play women in Second Life.  A lot of these men are gay (though I don’t see why they don’t just play gay male avatars); a lot of them are transgendered individuals who have no medical options for various reasons in real life, so this is their only way to express it; a sizable number of them are in it for the lesbian sex scenes because they now have a little porn star that they can control themselves on the screen; and, believe it or not, there are quite a few like me who are just in it for the heck of it.

So Second Life really has been a time sink.  In fact, I was falling behind in NaNoWriMo because of Second Life until I discovered that there is a surprisingly large contingent of NaNoWriMo participants who also participate in Second Life.  Hanging out with them, exchanging encouragement and participating in word wars really helped push me, which is why I was able to actually reach 50,000 words.

In case you’re interested, I’ve set up an in-character blog for Zoe.  You can find at it Zoe in Second Life.  I’ve run each entry through the Gender Genie to try to make them sound more genuinely female than male, and I’ve done a pretty decent job of at least fooling that website, though sometimes I end up with sentence constructions and word choices that don’t really make a whole lot of sense and that definitely don’t sound like me.  I’ve gotten several favorable emails about the entry called "Second Life: Not Just About Detachable Penises".

Another big time sink has been my lungs.  I seem to be fighting a permanent upper respiratory infection, and while I don’t focus on my lungs to the point of exclusion even when I’m sucking down on my nebulizer for the fifth time in a day, it sure feels like I have been.  Right now I’m on horse pill antibiotics and more steroids than I’ve taken in years, which means that my biochemicals are all screwed up.  I have not, strangely, gotten that magical side effect from Prednisone where everything in the world sucks including you, but I’m definitely getting the voracious and insatiable appetite which gets very consuming when I sit down to eat, crowding out any thoughts of "Hey, I shouldn’t have this huge hamburger" until, unfortunately, after I’ve alr
eady eaten.

Some day I hope to get my lungs under control.  They told me I would grow out of my asthma.  They lied.  And my doctor and I were discussing airway remodeling last week, a process where a long term asthmatic develops so much scar tissue in their lungs that the airways actually get altered and moved around.  This can show up in X-rays as blotches or white areas around the lungs, particularly near the heart, and it has freaked out at least one emergency room doctor who thought I might have some horrible heart condition until I mentioned the airway remodeling to her.  Of course, the airway remodeling has also left little pockets in my lungs which don’t get a lot of airflow, but do get some, and thus prove wonderful incubators for some of these infections once they show up.  This is why a cold which gives you a sore throat and a cough for a couple of days turns into a Cecil B. DeMille production for me lasting for weeks at a time.  My doctor tells me that I’m doing as much as I can, using top of the line drugs, for my asthma and there isn’t much more we can do without getting into areas of treatment that would simply be too risky and that my insurance probably wouldn’t cover anyway.

And, finally, there’s work.  I still love my job, but I feel like I’m reaching the top end of my skill set.  We’ve spent two years customizing Moodle to work with our department’s business model (because we’re a University governed by traditions of bureaucracy that go back to roughly 1100 BC, changing the software is a lot less painful and complicated than changing our business model), and we recently decided to rebuild our site using a newer version of Moodle.  Unfortunately for me, the internals of Moodle have changed so much since we first started working with it that it’s like learning the product all over again and has proven much more difficult than I had first anticipated.  This is the first time since my first few months with this job that I’ve come across a challenge at work that has really made me question my programming abilities.  It’s a new feeling, and one that I don’t particularly enjoy.  I’ve always been able to hack my way through any challenge at work, and in pretty short order; but this one is just grinding me down.  I know that I will get through it and that I’ll succeed, there’s little doubt in my mind about that; unfortunately, I’m just not going to succeed as soon as I would like to.

So, anyway, that’s where I’ve been this month.  Writing, Second Life, lung joy, and work.  See, I do, indeed, do more than just post to Twitter.

Soon, the fun will begin!

If you know me at all, you know that every year I participate in National Novel Writing Month.  This year, instead of just writing a novel, I’m going to increase the insanity by acting as one of the two Municipal Liaisons for the Sacramento area, which means helping to herd all the crazy participants in the area and helping to make the experience fun and exciting and memorable for them as well.

But on top of that, I’m also going to participate in this year’s Write-a-Thon — the Night of Writing Dangerously.  This is a charity event, and donations will go to the Office of Letters and Light, which sponsors NaNoWriMo and similar programs.  I really like that the OoL&L puts an emphasis on young writers: kids in high school and younger.  Kids who are sitting at their computers writing novels may be kids who are not getting their homework done, but they’re also kids who are exercising their creativity, their imaginations, and not playing MegaBloodDeathFist2007 on the XBoxes (not that that isn’t a fun game).  It’s a cause I believe in.

So how do you participate in this charity you ask?  Glad you did.  No, seriously.  I am.  Simply go to my donation page (at http://www.firstgiving.org/richardscrawford), where you can find out how to donate, and do so securely.  And since the Office of Letters and Light is a 503(c) non-profit, you donation is (I’m about 90% sure of this) tax deductible.

And what does donating get you?  Well, nothing tangible, I suppose.  A good feeling about yourself: that warm, fuzzy glow you get whenever you know you’ve done something that gives you Instant Good Karma.  Oh, and what the heck: if you donate any amount whatsoever (as small as one cent, as much as the full $200 I’m looking for), I’ll put your name in the novel somewhere, thus guaranteeing you immortality and fame and fortune should I ever manage to finish the novel and sell it.  Usually, I simply name a character after you and kill them off in a manner of your choosing, and I am happy to do this (it’s turned out to be pretty popular in the past; for some reason, people enjoy dying vicariously this way).  I understand, though, if this is a gift not particularly to your taste, so I’ll figure out something else if you like.

Seriously, though, I’m hoping to make it to $200, and I’m hoping for more than one cent donations.  I’m not sure I’d like coming up with 20,000 unique and interesting ways to kill off minor characters.

To keep me honest, you can follow my progress on the NaNoWriMo site here.  There’s also a link off the front page of my site (http://www.mossroot.com, if you’re reading this through some sort of feed aggregator or through LiveJournal, MySpace, or FaceBook).  And I will be certain to keep you all updated on my progress through this blog.

Okay, I think that’s it for now.  So long, and thank you for your continued support.