So, the last of my steroid treatments for this round went off without a hitch. No need for JS to come save the day, Tall Girl wasn't there. Instead I saw Not So Tall Girl and someone I'll refer to today as New Girl. New girl came in and threw the hep-lock in there and slapped the IV line onto it, no muss no fuss, no bubbles no troubles. I even got to write for a while in there, since she used the crook of my arm rather than the back of my hand.
Huzzah!
Now, what was I writing about? Obviously not this blog, or it would have been posted hours ago! No, I was doing something called 'pre-writing'. For those of you who are not writers, I'll explain. Say you are going to write a novel. There is all kinds of stuff that you might want to know about the backstory, the stuff that happened before your current story is taking place. How the characters interact, how some things came about, how people feel about that, etc.
Now, this stuff probably doesn't need to be in your book, it just needs to be in your head. You can skip all this part and just kind of wing it, and I tend to do that with my short stories. In fact, with my shorts I seem to be reading them as I write them, and am taken by surprise by some things that my characters do even though they are coming out of my head! I've done that with longer things, and while it's fun, it doesn't make a story that hangs together well for me. So, for my next NaNoWriMo I'm trying some pre-writing.
What the hell is a NaNoWriMo, you ask?
Go ahead. Ask. I'll wait.
Done?
Okay. NaNoWriMo, or NaNo for short, stands for National Novel Writer's Month. Thousands of us word-geeks sit down for the month of November and we each try to bang out a 50,000 first draft of a novel in 30 days. From scratch. Everything that is to go in the book written within that 30 days. Sound like fun? It is. Sound like an insane amount of work? It is. The idea is to just sit and write, even if you think you're writing crap. Last year, that's exactly what I did. I wrote crap.
Well, it's not crap, exactly. Most of it is actually pretty good, if I do say so myself. And I do. But what happened was that I wound up with lots of really great parts to a story, that don't all hang together as a whole story. Bummer. But I didn't even find out about NaNo until the 3rd of the month, and I sat down with a short story idea I had that was just way too big for a short story. That was all the pre-thought I had put into it. None.
So. This year I'm giving myself a loose outline to follow, or, more likely wander from, and doing some pre-writing. The pre-writing is fun, since no one's ever meant to see it but me. It's just writing stuff down as it occurs to me with no thought of revision or anything. This is the kind of writing that can tell you about yourself as well as the characters you are writing about.
For instance. In the story I am writing for this Novembers NaNo, there has been a murder. It doesn't take place within the NaNo story, it happened before, but they find out about it. So that I have something in my head when they find out about the murder, I'm writing the murder scene. Will it be in the story? Nope. But it will be in my head, so that will make writing about it later on easier.
Here's the funny part.
So there I was, sitting in the doctor's office, happy as a pig in a poke, writing a first person account of breaking into someone's house to kill them. Off the top of my head, with no forethought or planning. And I was having no problem with it at all. I had method of entry, restraint, killing, clean-up, disposal and escape, all just rolling out of my head like I had done it all before. When I look back at it, it's pretty damn good.
Now, I'm not sure who actually reads this blog. I know of a few people, like 5 or 6, but there are about 2 dozen people occasionally reading this, as far as I can make out by reading the hit stats. I'm kind of thinking that, once it gets out that I get such a charge out of writing murder scenes, fairly brutal ones, that I'll have even fewer people out there willing to hang out with me than I do now.
So, what are you doing Friday? Wanna hang out?
No?
... See what I mean?
they're not real, right? Yeah ... fictitious ...
...yeah...
Talk to you later!
P.S. - Yes, last year I beat the deadline set by NaNo. I had 52,000 words by the 30th. I didn't stop working on it until it was 64,000 words, and 176 pages, but hey, I was having fun. I'll go back and fix it, someday. I think I've figured out how. Now all I need is unlimited time...
Anyone out there want to fund a hard-working unpublished writer?
No?
I guess I'll sit at home and plan out how to kill fictitious people. Yeah ... fictitious ...
ttyl!
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