NaNoRetRo: Write-ins (AKA BICHOK)

For those of you who don't know, I have a very active region for NaNoWriMo.  Very active -- every day but Thanksgiving had a planned event, and probably half of the days had more than one planned event.  Most of those events were write-ins.

I gather that the way my region does write-ins is different than many others.  We have a regimen that varies in details but is generally the same every time.  A number of writing sprints are performed during the write-in, during which everyone is supposed to be actively writing, and not talking or disturbing others.  These are broken by 5-20 minute breaks, followed by another sprint.  These sprints are usually between 15 and 30 minutes long and often have a word count goal for people to shoot for, though of course there's no recriminations for missing the goal, nor extra rewards for making it.

They also provide a live-stream for nearly all of the write-ins, with a chat window available for people to virtually discuss during the breaks, and we all write (and report back our word counts) even if we aren't there in person.

When I write on my own, I tend to sit in front of the computer and get distracted for a few minutes (read: couple hours) by Facebook, email, Twitter, and various other easily-found shiny things.  I don't tend to set time limits, nor goals, nor do I have the peer pressure keeping me writing.

How does it compare?  For approximately the same amounts of time allocated for writing, the weeknight write-ins that I attended virtually had me producing an average of 1730 words, while writing by myself I averaged about 1060.  That's 60% more words for the write-in days, and mostly (IMO) due to one main cause, and the acronym I used: BICHOK.

Butt in Chair, Hands on Keyboard.

That seems to be the secret to the success.  By actually having my hands ready to write, and using peer pressure to keep me from being distracted, I wrote many more words than I would otherwise.  It's a secret I've known for a while, though this year was the first I thought to quantify it.

Also interesting to note: the second-most productive time for me (or maybe first, since it was shorter time periods)? Writing in the car while my wife drove us somewhere.  Apparently having no wifi and also knowing that she could tell when I was typing and when I wasn't also kept me productively engaged.

So there you have it, one of the biggest secrets to writing success (or so I've heard).  Actually writing.  Who would have thunk, indeed.

Reviewing September's Goals

Here's what I wrote then:
Write at least 250 words each day.
Finish and submit a short story.
Critique at least 6 stories.
Write NaNoWriMo newsletter articles.
Revise 1 short story for critique.
1: Done.  In fact, I think I made it through the month with at least 400 words each day, but that all still counts.

2: Done.  This was a close one, because I got some more insightful feedback on the story I had been working on, and almost didn't submit it.  However, I got a round of revisions in, and out it went.  I can only do so much, and now it's time to move on to the next one.

3: I didn't count to be sure, but I'm counting this as done.  I can recall off the top of my head at least three, and given the way things have been in my life lately, if I can even remember last week that's pretty good.

4: Done, mostly.  I have to revise them slightly, but they are indeed written.  I'll transition the next part into next month's goals.

5: Done. I have revised a story two times, once for more critique and once for submission after that critique.  I also revised another story to prep for critique, one that I've been enjoying lately.

So, overall, mission accomplished on my September goals.  I think keeping the shorter list helped, though I nearly didn't submit my newly revised piece after the gut-check of a really useful critique.  I'll try to keep October's goals similarly constrained.

Hugo Results and Thoughts

So, the Hugo awards were announced this past weekend, and I thought it would be amusing to look back at how I ranked things, and how they ended up in the voting.

First up, short stories:

	My Choice	Award Order
1	Mono no Aware	Mono no Aware
2	Immersion	Immersion
3	Mantis Wives	Mantis Wives

Interestingly, I pegged this category. I have a feeling Mantis Wives struck others the same way it struck me, and hten that leaves a 50/50 chance for the order.


Novellettes:

	My Choice	Award Order
1	The Girl Thing Who Went Out for Sushi	The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi
2	Fade to White	In Sea-Salt Tears
3	In Sea-Salt Tears	Fade To White
4	The Boy Who Cast No Shadow	Rat-Catcher
5	Rat-Catcher	The Boy Who Cast No Shadow

This one was pretty good as well, with me getting the correct winner, but flipping around a couple of places below it.


Novellas:

	My Choice	Award Order
1	After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall	The Emperor's Soul
2	San Diego 2014	After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall
3	The Emperor's Soul	The Stars Do Not Lie
4	On a Red Station, Drifting	On a Red Station, Drifting
5	The Stars Do Not Lie	San Diego 2014

I would talk about getting it completely wrong, here, except that I correctly placed the #4 story. Not much of an accomplishment, that. Interestingly, except for Stars, I personally enjoyed all of these and don't feel like the voting is out of line as much as reflecting a different overall enjoyment factor for the stories. I know I'm supposed to gripe about politics or the poor taste of the voters, but I can't bring up the bile right now.


Novels:

	My Choice	Award Order
1	Redshirts	Redshirts
2	Blackout	Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance
3	Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance	2312
4	Throne of the Crescent Moon	Throne of the Crescent Moon
5	2312	Blackout

Again, I somehow managed to call 4th place (and first). I've talked to enough people to figure out that apparently Redshirts can be polarizing -- some love it, and some don't. Some people, of course, gripe about it winning (or blame it on political factions and the fix being in). But my review stated my reasons for the vote; I won't repeat all of them here.

I will say that it is interesting how different the rest of the order was. I'd truly like to know what those who loved 2312 and voted for it to be first place saw in the novel, as I apparently missed it.


Graphic Novels:

	My Choice	Award Order
1	Grandville	Saga
2	Schlock Mercenary	Locke & Key
3	Locke & Key	Schlock Mercenary
4	Saga	Saucer Country
5	Saucer Country	Grandville

Does this count as completely wrong? I think so. I share no special insights into the category.

I'm skipping my rankings of pro and fan artists, since there is little I can learn from them to apply to writing... at least at this point in time, for me. Also, I think the overall point has been proven that I don't necessarily align with the general fandom's rankings when it comes to these stories. This is something I've known, but it then reinforces the point made in Million Dollar Outlines that I should be studying the other, well-ranked stories to look for things I might want to include in my own.

August Goals Retrospective

At the beginning of last month, I said my goals were:

1. Read at least one book on writing.
2. Continue to write every day (at least 250 words)
3. Summarize my notes from a writing book (this month's or last)
4. Critique at least 6 submissions
5. Apply lessons from a writing book to at least 2 stories
6. Get at least 2 submissions critiqued
7. Revise two stories
8. Do a title exercise on at least 1 short story

How did I do?

1. I read Story Engineering by Larry Brooks and loved it.  I'll have a review written sometime (cue goal for this month).
   
2. I wrote every day, using the Magic Spreadsheet, which continues to be magic and full of spreadsheet-y goodness.
   
3. Half marks here.  I did do a review of Million Dollar Outlines, and I finished my notes from the book, but I didn't summarize it yet.  Soon!
   
4. I easily beat this one out of the water.  This was one of the things I ended up emphasizing this month, and I believe I critiqued 3 a week, on average.  Many was the day I felt like I didn't have the mental energy to write (or edit *shudder*), but finding the problems in other people's works... that doesn't seem to be so hard.  Now if only I'd be able to translate that to my own works more easily.
   
5. I've applied some of the lessons to 1 story.  In this case, I'm going to give myself a fail.  I'm sure I'm internalizing some of the lessons, but not as many as I'd like.
   
6. Oh, look, another fail.  I might give myself half-credit for 1 story critiqued 2 times, but I'm not sure.  The good news is that I'm starting to feel pretty good about the story again.  (This probably means it's time for somebody to tear it apart again, but I'm enjoying the feeling while I can.)
   
7. There is a theme here, and that theme is that I've been working on one story.  I need to improve that, and soon.
   
8. Complete fail.

So how did I do?  3 succeeds, 2 halfsies, and 3 fails.  That's not the way to get my goals met, is it?

My take-away from this is actually to dial back on the goals for a bit.  I felt kind of pushed for this past month (the daily writing is part of that, I know, and I shouldn't be leaving it for so late at night, but I'm not ready to give that up yet).  I also don't like seeing the halves and the fails.  So, I'm going to trim the list and really focus on meeting those goals.

July Goal Retrospective

I initially typoed the headline as "gaol", and while that may sometimes be an accurate indication of my feelings toward goals I set up for myself, in this case I don't think so.  As Freud would no doubt say, sometimes a typo is just a typo.

• 250 words written a day -- Done!
• Revise 3 stories -- 1 revised twice, and 1 finished.
• Clean up email -- nowhere close
• Critique >= 6 short stories or submissions -- Done!
• Get >= 2 stories critiqued -- 2 stories, but one of them again after revision.
• Renaming exercises for story titles -- 0.
• Submit >= 1 story -- 0.

Regarding submitting, I had big plans and had the story picked out (the one I revised, got critiqued, revised, and got critiqued?  Yeah, that one).  Fortunately (or not, depending on your point of view) when I returned from vacation, it was to an evisceration of how I used a given profession in a modern setting, but somebody who obviously knows more about that profession than I do.  It was great, and it gave me much to think about, but in the meantime I don't feel I can submit something that I know has flaws that I can fix.  It will just need a bit of time, that's all.

Story-A-Day Retrospective: Final Thoughts

My last thoughts on the Story-A-Day challenge are mostly about how I accomplished it, and what helped me do so.  In particular, I gave myself more accountability than I often do, and I think that helped force my way through it.  Without the built-in support and accountability of NaNoWriMo, I felt I had to do something to help myself out.

The main outlet for this was posting my goal and occasional progress on the goal to G+, to the survivors (at the time) of Mary Robinette Kowal's online writing class.  In particular, I think staking the goal out early and publicly helped, and I've continued the tradition for July.

The other tool for online accountability was using the Magic Spreadsheet, which a local writing friend introduced me to.  The idea there is to build up the chain of writing (at least a small amount) every day, and it gives you points -- more based on the chain you develop than on the amount of words that you write.  Since I had already decided I wanted to end up with 30 stories in 30 days, and mostly write them one a day, it was a natural fit.  So I started at the beginning of June, and was encouraged to see my words and points pile up through the month.

I've continued the habit as well, allowing my points to pile higher in the spreadsheet.

In conclusion, it was a great exercise, and I'll probably do it or something like it again -- but not too soon.  I've much enjoyed not having as much pressure when I've been writing for these past few days.

Story-A-Day Retrospective: Names and Titles

On character names: if you had seen the first couple of stories I wrote, you might have seen names like Bran SelfPossessednamehere or even Sir Eugene McNamehere.  I wasn't taking the time to find good names, and it was showing all over the place.  After a couple days of this, I decided I was tired of this and that, while the names could always be changed later, I wanted to have real names involved.  Thus, I took refuge in Scrivener's suggested names list.  I had already set it up to provide a decent variety of mostly English-ish names, and I would just scan the list for a name I liked.  If I was particularly taken by a first name but didn't like the last, or vice versa, I'd take the one and combine it with another on the list.  If I didn't see any I liked, a new list of 30 was a button-click away.

Surprisingly, this allowed me to connect with my characters more than I thought I would.  Having a name for them that I didn't come up with directly out of my head (even if I chose it from a list), gave them a bit more identity in my brain, I think.  I would usually come up with one or two traits about the character that I didn't have before, just from free-associating with the sound of the name.  It was a fascinating process, and one I think I'll keep around.

I also named every story I wrote, but many of them had very business-like working names; names like "The Test" or "The Slayer" or "The Choice" (ugh) or "The Quarry".  Many of those were either put on right away when I figured out what the story was going to be about, or at the very end when I needed to name it and wanted to be done with the story so I could go to bed.

On the other hand, many of the titles I really like came to me as I was writing the story.  Somewhere in the middle, I would have an idea for a title, and if it stuck around for a paragraph or two, I'd stop for a bit to officially name the story before continuing.  Of those titles, the ones I like the most are "The Sharp Edge of Opportunity", "Mary Brune as Cheetah", "Angels, Multiplying", and most of all, "The Stone Weight of the Survivor".

To pick out a couple of others, I came up with the name "Elephantine vs. The Stoat" first, but I had an idea that I wanted to do a superhero/supervillain story, and so first chose appropriate hero/villain names before filling in the title, and then writing it.  The title does well enough for the story.  "The Neo-Cheo Hunt" and "A Catgirl Adrift", "Birth of the Engineer", and "Ruby and the Dragon Slayer" fit in the passable-but-not-great category.

I may have to add to my goals going through some of the stories that I like but don't really go for the title, and making a list of possible titles for the story.  Hopefully I can come up with some better ones that way.  I may also want to study the ones I like to see if there's something about them in particular that I like and that I could then emulate for the others.

In conclusion on the titles, however, I have to say that sometimes an inspired title strikes me, and sometimes none does.  I need to practice if I'm going to get better at naming, and I know from my reading experience that a good name can really help pique interest in a story.

Story-A-Day Retrospective: Times and Word Counts

Continuing my retrospective:

During the work week, I always wrote in the evening.  Mornings for Saturdays, and Sundays were a crapshoot, with me writing anywhere in the day (but usually not first thing in the morning).  Looking back, I felt better about most of my Saturday writing, but maybe that was because I wasn't under a time crunch, nor did I constrain myself as much for word-count (due to not having the time crunch).

Because of that, I'd expected my Saturday pieces in particular to be both longer and better, and somewhat for Sunday as well.  However, when I choose my current favorite stories (detailed later), only only half of them were written during the weekend.  That's a higher output per number of days, but less than I had expected.  Also, my two favorites (so far) were written on a worknight.

Word count also tells an interesting tale.  It turns out that Thursday nights were my best for number of words, with an average of 1956.  That was followed closely by Saturday with 1839, then Sunday (1645), Wednesday (1635), Friday (1549), Tuesday (1512), and finally Monday (1477).  Obviously some variability, but I showed I can regularly crunch out an average of over 1650 words a day for a month when writing shorter pieces, which is just a hair less than a winning NaNoWriMo pace.

Continuing to look at word counts, my longest (fully completed) story was 3693 words, on the first day.  My shortest was on the fourth day, with 771.  (Neither what I expected when I started reviewing, though I knew both were in the mix).  On only three days did I have less than 1k words for a story.

The reason I mentioned (fully completed) above was that three times, in the middle of the story, I decided that it was going too long and that I had to resort to summarizing the rest of the story in order to get to an "ending".  Currently, those sit at 2494 words, 2725 words, and 1409 words.  By the last one, I obviously decided faster that I had to summarize.  I'll declare that an improvement for this month's exercise, calling it better knowledge of the short story effort, rather than me being lazier.  It might have been both.

Story-A-Day Retrospective: Ideas

Ideas!  Where do they come from?  What are the characteristics of the ideas I had?  Let's look back.

One of my fears going into the effort, and one of the reasons I made myself do the 30 short stories in 30 days, was that I'd run out of story ideas on about, oh, the third day.  Happily, that didn't happen.  I did feel I was running lower on story ideas toward the end of the month.  Perhaps I was pickier, but I think I was running lower.

On the other hand, there were a couple of dud days early in the month as well -- I'm thinking in particular of the day I had my shortest story, but then again I just looked it up and it was a few days later.  I suppose if I can forget work-related things over just one weekend, I can easily forget the difficulties I had getting an idea to write about early in the month by now.

Many of the ideas I had were too big for short stories.  (Thanks, Mary, for your rules-of-thumb on story size, and more importantly the emphasis on keeping the story focus tight.)  Having ideas that were too big was tough, especially on the days I was struggling to find any ideas for a short story, but kept having nice novella- or novel-length ideas.

I did write the bigger ideas down, and many setting- and character-related ideas that hadn't quite hit the write accumulation to become a story.  A number of my jotted-down ideas are actually just cool background or setting ideas, without the conflict I was looking for to be able to generate a short story.  I'll be revisiting all of these, possibly in the near future.

By the time I got to the middle of the month, I could see certain themes for these stories.  In no particular order: uplifted species, fantasy creatures in the modern world, and superhero/supervillain.  I don't think I'd previously written a story with any of these elements, which was interesting.  I wonder if they'll stick around, or if I'll look back and recognize a phase I was going through.

Judging by how interesting I find the story ideas right now, I'll be keeping those themes.

Sources of inspiration:

• Early on, a web search for "story prompts" helped, though not as much after I had run through all that I found interesting in the early results list.  Those were pretty hit-and-miss, but a few good ideas came from them.
• Mythology, in various forms: skimming through my encyclopedia of mythology book looking for interesting characters, facts, themes, or even wholesale plots was the most common.  Second most common was reading descriptions of mythological beasts I had previously not known about, and what they were known for, and putting something in that situation.
• Just thinking about cool things in stories and how I could make a story with that cool thing in it.
• Other stories, when I felt I understood the underlying idea enough translate it into an entirely different setting.

As for MICE, I found I didn't use it as much as I thought I would to generate ideas; in fact, I hardly used it at all that way during the month -- possibly for 3, maybe 4 stories.  I think part of that is due to the time constraints not allowing me to generate a bunch of story ideas and fleshing them out before picking one.  I hope part is due to better internalizing the ideas behind the technique.

Story-A-Day Retrospective: Intro

I'll be doing a series of blog posts for the next few days doing a retrospective on the past month of writing, in which I successfully wrote a short story each day for the 30 days in the month.

Initially, let me take a moment to point out the obvious achievement, so that it isn't missed: I set out a writing goal at the beginning of the month, and I met it.  Though it was difficult at times, the goal (and specific time frame) gave me extra motivation to get it done, which is important when I'm writing on my extra time right now, with no external deadlines.  I'll be doing a post with July goals later in the month, but rest assured I have some and already have them recorded.

First up in the retrospective: ideas.