The Annual Goalpost

I love and hate making these posts.

On one hand, I love dreaming up all the possibilities. But on the other hand, I hate trying to guess what kind of goals are reasonable and what aren't. After probably close to seven years of making these annual posts, I still feel that I don't know what I'm doing.

Anyway, here goes. It might look a little different this year.

- At least two new dance films.

I think I know which two. I just have to DO them (this includes memorising!).

- Create a long-ish (15+ minute) dance show.

- Audition for three shows.

- Make a plan of attack to rewrite Kyrie again.

First step is to reread the thing and make lots of notes. I already know Act I has severe pacing issues. I might try adding a subplot or something... I'm actually not quite sure how to fix it.

- Start pitching to magazines.

- Write at least four articles/stories a week.

- Enter a writing contest.

- At least one date night every two weeks.

- Read more (soft goal of nine books in 2024).

- More watercolour painting. I am deliberately not putting a number here.

- Sustainably cut back hours at the day job.

I am so burnt out with my current job it is not even funny. The management has been restructured, and now the workplace culture is so bad that I would literally rather die than work one more day there. I'm also not making nearly enough money there to cover our living expenses so every day I work there I feel I get farther behind. I'm really trying to grow my dance/writing network so maybe I can at least freelance enough to cut my hours at my current job even if I can't quit outright.

- Save $1000 for a house.

STRETCH GOALS:

- Apply for at least one festival (ideally with above longer dance show).

- Take at least three dance classes (or courses of some kind).

- Crochet myself a sweater.

- Make a third dance film.

This year's list is deliberately much shorter than previous years. It turns out it's just not possible to sustain the kind of creative output I was expecting from myself while also holding down an extremely emotionally draining full time job and being married.

The other thing is, the projects I'm undertaking now are a step up from the things I used to do. Ten years ago I was building a portfolio. I was making dances and honing my creative voice on small projects. But now I'm building on that experience to make bigger things. My goals used to be 'choreograph X amount of dances' -- small things that I could easily knock out in a week if I wanted to. But now the goals are more like 'make two dance films.' And learning, shooting, and editing a dance film is a lot more time-intensive than simply choreographing one on paper. Sottovoce took me 58 days -- nearly two months (granted, I am including the choreography time in this), and that was very much a speedrun. Inside Of You -- a much shorter and smaller-scale piece -- was still a solid month of editing even though I only filmed for an hour, and I'm not even counting the astronomical amount of time it takes me to memorise a dance piece nowadays. I'm looking to take some serious steps in this coming year -- bigger, more time-intensive steps, and those take up less space on the page.

This is exactly what I've spent the last ten years or so working towards. Last year I took some big steps. This year I'm looking to build on those steps and take bigger ones.

Novel Achievement Unlocked!

 I have completed my first-ever novel rewrite.

I literally never thought this would happen. This is a bigger rush than I’ve EVER had finishing NaNoWriMo. I have completed a second draft of a book. It’s just over 85,000 words. Is it perfect? No. But it stands up better than its predecessor and gives me something coherent to send to beta readers.

After nine years of my brain melting every time I thought about rewriting, I did it. I seriously just did it. I wrote a coherent novel before I turned thirty. After nine years of putting ‘revise Kyrie’ on my annual goal list, I did it.

I only wish M was here to share my excitement.

Rewrite Update

I'm currently rewriting the MC's death scene.

It's a weird experience. I first wrote this novel, this scene, in November 2014. Even then, I was no stranger to writing death scenes, but that's not what's weird.

What's weird is all the losses, the deaths that happened to me in real life -- all happened after I wrote that rough draft. This character dies of asthma. I wrote this scene in November and lost my best friend to lung failure three months later. My cousin died of asthma five months after I first wrote this scene. I didn't even know she had asthma until the night she died.

It's also weird that this doesn't really trigger me or raise my anxiety levels (I don't have an anxiety disorder -- one of the few mental illnesses I've managed to dodge so far. My fear levels are normal, but my sadness and self-hatred levels are off the charts). Maybe I've accepted defeat and am just assuming bad things will always happen no matter what and there are absolutely zero ways to get out of it. Maybe I've been successful as separating fact from fiction. Maybe not really remembering writing the initial scenes in the first place is helping me be more objective -- there's not much emotional connection as far as 'I wrote this scene on this day while sitting in this place at this time of day' so I haven't had the 'I wrote this and then it happened' thought. Maybe the writing and the real life happened far enough apart that I was able to keep them separate.

Maybe I just knew that this is what had to happen for this book to work, and I have to do what I have to do. This book has no point if she survives. She's already had a near-death experience and the character's lives just continued on for the most part (as it does at college -- if you're not actively dead, you aren't sick enough. At least not at my college). For the MMC to learn what he needs to learn, he has to lose her. And it has to be severe and sudden, with absolutely no recourse. She's not the type of person to willy-nilly end a friendship, especially not one as precious as what they have.

Honestly, her leaving this particular friend character was the initial seed of the idea. At first the scene in my head was her driving away, never to return, but somewhere between initial idea and NaNoWriMo that year it morphed into what it is now, and I think that's a much stronger climax with more interesting repercussions. If she doesn't die, he never gets mad enough to stand up to the villain character -- at the cost of everything he's worked for. If she doesn't die, he never learns to live, really live, and to value people and experiences over money and 'proving people wrong.'

I guess this novel is kind of a synthesis of what was going in my own life at the time -- I was still very much dealing with implications of my own near-death experience several years before and I was in the beginning stages of learning those very same lessons. The main character was who I was striving to become, and the MMC was me in that moment, trying to figure out how to get from here to there.

In some ways I think I've regressed in my goals there. And that's what making this rewrite in general so hard -- because I shut down hard when my cousin died. Suddenly life was not beautiful and life was not worth living. I never fully had the chance to learn those lessons. They have never taken root in my own life. And because this character doesn't die until very near the end of book, that means I spend 97% of the book building her up into this Mary Poppins sort of magical figure (while somehow not being a Mary Sue) with which I am very unfamiliar, and only the final 3% of the book is MMC consciously learning the lessons (which I actually am familiar with). Since the novel is 'written' by him after her death, there are elements of him picking up threads that he missed while he was living them... but that's a tough line to toe, though, because I very much want a 'no spoilers' approach. He, our narrator, doesn't mention that she dies until she does, right in front of him, barely a year after he meets her.

I do intend to send this draft out to a couple of beta readers, though I can think of a couple of things I might need to rewrite after this. This time I did a straight-through, top to bottom rewrite with absolutely no jumping around (partly so I wouldn't forget to write 'smaller' scenes, partly so I wouldn't have to completely reassemble the book potentially multiple times only to find parts still missing -- in short, to stave off mind-melting, brain-burning overwhelm). I started in April 2022 and I am on pace to finish this month. I'm currently at 77,000 words. I've never written anything this long before (you'd better believe I'm backing this thing up on an external drive every other day).

I'm just so proud that I've gotten this far. Even if nobody pays money for this book, I'm proud that I have given it a fair shot at life.

One Year - Novel Rewrite Update

One year ago today, I officially started rewriting Kyrie.

I'm well into the 'midpoint' section now. This is the part where the villain begins to show his true colours. This villain is based on some of the villains of my own story, and that, coupled with (yet another) domestic spat and my worsening asthma, is causing a lot of havoc in my body.

I tend to approach my writing as an actress. I place myself in the scene and act out all the characters in the scene. I think this is why people often say that reading my writing reminds them of watching films -- I write what I see in 'real time.' This means that I share in every character's emotions and reactions, and having mined some of the darkest times in my life for this midpoint, those can be very intense, very visceral reactions.

I had planned to write two scenes today. I've written one and my heart rate is already 92 (my resting rate is around 70 and I've been sitting all morning) and I needed my rescue inhaler. I don't know if I'm physically capable of writing the other scene, as it will hit even more of those 'triggers' for me.

On one hand, I'm hoping that the audience will feel the same anger I'm feeling at this character. But on the other hand, it's forcing me to unpack some stuff that I haven't yet regarding some of the people in my own life who treated me this way. I don't really know how to deal with these things in a way that won't ruin my life now. A lot of those villains are no longer a part of my life... but they're now in my head. And I don't know how to get them out of my head.

I am very proud of the progress I'm making in the novel, though. This midpoint scared me a lot and now I would say I'm over the hump and running downhill from here. I've already faced and worked through a lot of blockages and fears in (re)creating this work and I'm so proud of being able to look back on such a substantial document. I would say I'm just past the halfway point of the story, and most of the plot points that scared/overwhelmed me the most have already been written. I have forty-some scenes left in this novel. If I wrote one per day, I could finish before July. If (more realistically) I wrote one scene every day off of work, I will be done before September. Of this year.

I never, EVER even dreamed I would actually experience being so close to finishing a full rewrite/revision of any of my novels, even my best ones.

Two big things that have helped me get this far are: 1. framing it as a 'rewrite' rather than a 'revision,' and 2. making a timeline.

As long as I thought about it as 'revision,' I thought I had to completely restructure the book. 'Revision' implies 'moving stuff around,' but I couldn't find stuff to move around. I liked the structure and timing of the book exactly the way it was and couldn't find another way I thought was better. It was like trying to make a puzzle when the pieces were two different sizes. But as I soon as I started calling it a 'rewrite,' I didn't have to re-order anything. I could keep the general idea exactly the same and simply make it stronger.

This was where the timeline came in. I already had a pretty strong idea of the timeline in my head, but I pulled up a calendar from the year in which the story was set, and wrote out a day-to-day timeline of every single thing that happens to the two main characters of the book. Some of the things don't make it in the book at all but are referenced as things that happened off-screen, or are simply there for my own orientation (grad weekend, for instance -- I don't mention grad at all in the story, but it lets me know that I can't have the characters going to classes or doing homework anymore). Some events did get rearranged here, but not nearly on the level I thought they would have to be.
I colour-coded certain recurring themes and printed off this timeline (all six pages of it) and have had it at my desk ever since. It's been my lifeline and has done wonders for my poor overtaxed brain. The acid-melting-my-brain-whenever-I-try-to-revise feeling completely disappeared once I did this.

I'm so close and so proud and so happy and so relieved and I'm feeling so accomplished. Here's to the second half of the story.

Novel Update

And it's not even November.

Last month I made a timeline of events for Kyrie as I remembered it. However, I vaguely remembered deep questions/conversations about art being rather important to the story. I couldn't for the life of me remember these questions, so I went back to the original rough draft to find them so I could insert them into the timeline.

I haven't read the original unedited NaNoWriMo rough draft since probably 2018, if not before. I had read it many times before then, however, and since I tend to memorise things in writing easily, I thought I basically had it down pat.

I was shocked, then, to find that the story sketched out on the timeline and the story I was reading were two completely different stories.

The one in my timeline was about a seasoned performer, a cynic hardened by years of experience and a litany of tragedies. The one in the binder holding the printed rough draft was about a humble, gifted, passionate creature naught more than a child. If the main character was based on me, the rough draft is me in 2013, before everything happened, and the timeline is me now. And they are two very different people.

The problem is -- I like the rough draft better.

The literal only thing I dislike about it is the amount of exposition. And even then, I sort of feel like it fits the narrative voice of the character. It can't be because I'm attached to it -- I had completely forgotten many major scenes in the rough draft. Maybe this is why I've been having SO much trouble revising it -- because my soul knew that what I was coming up with was garbage in comparison to the original.

So now what? I can't possibly expect to publish a literal rough draft with a couple of dabs of paint here and there -- can I?

I really don't know where to go from here. Do I stop the rewrite altogether? Do I scrap the rewrite? If so, what do I replace it with? Is the rough draft really that good?

Have I mentioned I really, really hate novel revision?

Lockdown, Day 2

I've been officially house-bound for almost two days now (though I was severely limiting interactions before that, but I can't say I was in lockdown yet because I was still working until the middle of this week).

Ordinarily I would have jumped at the chance to have so much free time -- all the dancing! all the writing! all the music! all the choreography! But after the past year or so, burnout talked louder than the joy of opportunity.

I knew the lockdown was coming, though, and slowly I came to terms with the idea of creating things again. I started with a crochet project -- no-one's ever told me I was worthless for crocheting, so it was a safe but still creative option that at least kept me from scrolling Facebook 24/7.

After two days of planning to do it, today I officially started the rewrite of Kyrie. Not 'adding scenes,' not 'revising,' rewriting. Top-to-bottom rewriting the novel. I'll insert the newly polished scenes as I come to them, but I need to write the entire story out in chronological order again. Doing it out of order does not make sense in my brain and I have accepted defeat on that front. (Also it's much harder to see where the holes are if you're piecing it together anyway.) I have a month-by-month timeline of the novel's events that I'm referring to, and let me tell you, that's been a massive help so far -- knowing at a glance what to plant and what to foreshadow and where to do it. There are almost no flashbacks in this entire novel, so this should work fairly well.

I was telling my fiancé about it over FaceTime today while on a writing break. As I was talking, I realised I had never really verbalised the core of this particular story before. I've done that with some of my other novels, but this one I kept very close to my heart. I rarely -- if ever -- refer to it in real life (though I talk about it almost incessantly on this blog). I warned him at first that he might find it sad (because 99% of what I create is sad and this is starting to bug him), then plunged into it.

After I'd explained the general idea, he said, "That actually doesn't sound very sad."

I was surprised. Two of the characters suffer depression and one dies. "Really?"

"Yeah," he said. "It sounds like something a lot of people could relate to. I'd buy it." He went on to say that he liked how the main character changes for the better because of the story's events and how he eventually stands up to the villain. He seemed quite excited about the whole thing. And for the first time in a very long time, I began to think this might be a story worth telling.

After five and a half years of tweaking and changing and half-living-in the same story, I was starting to think my concept was unoriginal, if not overdone. I wanted it to sound like a story that really could happen in real life, but with that comes the risk of writing something unremarkable. But even the subtle change in the protagonist excited my fiancé, which in turn excited me. Maybe this isn't a dumb story. Maybe people would enjoy it.

And maybe this is the year I actually get a complete second draft of this thing done.

Emotional Tourist - A Retrospective (2018)

This year, I lived.

Not as in 'survived,' I lived. From February-August I was either rehearsing or performing at least one show (An Ideal Husband, Pygmalion, Anne of Green Gables, Oklahoma!, and Mary Poppins), and then in mid-October I started rehearsing the next show -- hopefully the first of another good long stretch again. I have never known joy and excitement and the thrill of being alive like I did during the Mary Poppins run -- to actually be a part of a story I'd loved since I was three years old was truly special.

And I traveled. Quite a lot. I've never really thought of myself as much of a traveler, but I actually quite enjoyed it. I went back and forth between my parents' place and mine many times, I went to the city and explored a few times, I went up north for a wedding, I went to southern Alberta for an audition... and I took pictures of most of it on film, which somehow makes the experience richer even though 90% of the pictures suck.

I made friends with other performers. I stayed up till one in the morning talking and eating and dancing with these friends -- these people I might never have met. I watched them all grow and succeed and laugh and cry and look out for each other and stick together.

I made more impulsive decisions. Like driving seven hours to an audition in a city I have literally only seen twice in my entire life and then crashing on my dad's cousin's couch for the night. Or like going for coffee with one of the musicians I'd literally never spoken to before at 10.30pm after a two-show day. Or going to the city and shooting a whole bunch of film because I was bored. Or going to see local theatre productions because I wanted a night out. Or skipping two days of school to drive out to my dear friend's funeral. Or attending NaNoWriMo write-ins, for the first time EVER in my ten years of NaNoWriMo. Or doing a ten-hour round-trip to a three-hour wedding and only getting back in at 1.30am, surviving the dark, late, relatively boring drive only by the grace of God and loud driving music.

I began seriously rewriting Kyrie, and I actually got a bit of a system going. I've written some additional scenes, and rewritten a handful of pre-existing ones. I'm starting to figure out a more detailed timeline of events.

 I began writing original fiction again, for the first time since my cousin died in April 2015.

I began fighting for myself more. I began to realise (mostly through my experience with Mary Poppins) that I AM talented, darn it, and not one of you is going to tell me I'm not. I will prove you wrong. I've done it before and I'll do it again, with or without your support. I began enjoying life and giving less of a crap what people think I should be doing or can do.

I started learning Thai, mostly for the heck of it. I took a college class outside of my program for the first time since 2016 and I met some really great people there. I started learning piano and found that I love it.

Life is rich, and full, and sweet, and I tasted just the edge of it this year.

Summer of Artistic Maintenance

It's been quiet on here lately. It's not that I don't want to post, it's just that I'm exhausted -- I've been falling asleep around 11.30 every night (a far cry from the days of three and four am just a few months ago).

Things are happening though. I've been back to working full-time in Alberta (which is the reason for being exhausted), in an attempt to somehow pull the money together for college again this fall. My course load will be significantly smaller, hopefully allowing time for work (assuming anybody actually hires me this year -- they sure as heck didn't last year).

Despite work eating most of my days and bringing night to me early, I'm actually feeling like I'm making (some) creative headway. For the past two weeks, work has been taking us a forty-minute (one-way) drive away. Because I'm not the one driving, I've been bringing Lila (my portable word processor), and writing missing scenes from Kyrie during the commute. At night I transfer the scenes to my Scrivener document and make a list of two or three scenes to work on the next day.

I'm beginning to develop some of the characters more and I may have even managed to introduce a subplot or two. I'm still writing these scenes in a fairly NaNoWriMo-ish style (put your head down and type like the wind), but having a structure to fit these scenes in is actually helping a lot. It's like building a puzzle (only this one is actually kind of fun... I hate real jigsaw puzzles). One thing I'm really noticing is that there's more conflict in these scenes -- more actual tension. Usually my books severely lack conflict because my characters are all far too nice and everyone always tells the truth right away. Over the past school year I had done a lot of character development work, and I can definitely see the difference in the new scenes.

In addition, I've (more or less) managed to keep my five-day-a-week dance practice routine up. I made a playlist called Tap Shuffle (what can I say? I'm just that clever), made of songs that are good tap songs in terms of rhythm, and almost every day I've been putting on my headphones, setting the playlist to shuffle, and doing improv for five songs. This has multiple benefits:
1. Improves my stamina (you try tap dancing for five songs in a row without stopping),
2. Works my improv/transition skills (which are nil),
3. Ensures that I don't wimp out/get distracted before about twenty minutes (the rule is I can't pause the music),
4. It maintains my skills (if not growing them... see below).

I haven't been working on any tap choreography this summer, as I don't have enough space to really dream anything out, so this summer I've been focusing on cleaning my basic, Grade 1 technique. I realised recently that my shuffles -- the foundation of basically everything else in tap -- are crap, so I've basically devoted the summer to getting my shuffles decent. (They're still not.)

I also sort-of-accidentally started doing a stretching routine after practice sessions. For years I have been trying and failing to get splits. Despite being a dancer since age six, I have never in my life had splits down, ever, in any form. I'm also doing a lot of rises to keep my calf muscles in shape. I haven't done any actual pointe work since Beauty and the Beast ended in June, so I'm trying to make sure I don't lose too much muscle before I can really get back into the studio in September.

So there's an update on my creative life. I'm hoping I can be back in Saskatchewan for school again this year. The college was a real place of refuge for me last year, and due to everything I'm working through now from my past, it would be lovely to be there in that place of refuge again this year. My support network in Alberta has almost entirely disintegrated, so I might as well be in Saskatchewan where people still care about me anyway.

Mirror

6 July 2017; 11.19pm.

I've been trying (again) to get somewhere on revising Kyrie -- my best (and favourite) novel to date. I'm beginning to feel a tiny bit like I'm actually progressing, but it's been emotionally difficult.

It's not much of a secret that the character Kyrie is heavily drawn from my own experience, from me. She is, in many ways, the person I wish I was. She is also, however, the person I perceive myself to be within the family unit -- rejected, despised, ignored, abused. She starts the novel as the quintessential Barbie character -- full of life and energy and quickly becoming a favourite in the local social circles. But as the novel progresses, we begin to see that the way her family treats her is smothering her, draining her... killing her.

This novel was tricky enough to write when I first drafted it. But now, to revise it while also dealing with my own (very similar) issues in counselling -- including emotional abuse from immediate family and the church -- is threatening to smother me too.

I know exactly what Kyrie was writing in her journals, feeling in her heart, when she went off her medication. Because I'm writing it and feeling it too.

Summer Update

We'll see if I can write a blog post without complaining (that's why I haven't been posting lately -- literally every post I try to write has been a huge gripefest and I'm pretty sure none of you want to read that). Life is still very difficult though. Now it's that endless parade of little things that make you go, 'really? Really? There just had to be one more thing, didn't there?'

Dance is over for the season now and it's killing me. I used to be either at work or at dance. Now I get to go to work, but I don't even get the reprieve of dance afterwards. There's another month and a half left before the season starts again (it only ended two and a half weeks ago...), but in dance years that's a long time (in deciding-to-do-with-my-autumn years, however... it equals about two OVERWHELMINGLY STRESSFUL seconds).

I've established a couple of personal goals for the summer though, mostly involving tap dancing. I'm still very uninspired on the ballet front. While my technique improved a lot this past dance season, my brain is still not really latching onto the choreographic possibilities. So I've been focusing on my tap dancing because it's still dancing, but it's different enough that my brain is still willing to work in it -- at least a tiny bit. Also, it takes much less space to practice tap than it does to practice ballet, and I have exactly zero practice space in my life right now. So I've worked out a daily tap practice plan and I'm already seeing improvement in some technical things I struggle with.

One other thing is I want to get another one of my dances staged and filmed, both for my own experience, but also so I can start building a bit of a portfolio. There was supposed to be another piece staged this summer, but the venue backed out (rather rudely and without explanation) well into the process. This venue had previously been very supportive and to be shut down like that without cause (at least not any cause they're willing to name) was completely unprecedented. It's left me floundering because without them, I actually have nowhere to stage my dances right now -- I haven't gotten in anywhere else yet. This was quite a severe blow and I'm still reeling from it. Practice space is again a huge issue though, as I have nowhere to rehearse my other dancers -- as longtime readers know, I don't typically choreograph solos.

On the writing front -- I'm actually sort of trying to revise Kyrie. I'm not sure how it's going. I'm doing character development right now on the secondary characters and it is actually flipping hard. I used to be the queen of character development, but apparently not anymore. My three main characters are fantastic, but everyone else feels like they're made of air and if you look at them too long they'll disappear like phantoms. I think part of my problem right now is that character development keeps bleeding into plot structure, but I'm trying (unsuccessfully) to keep them separate right now until I get the stupid characters figured out.

I've also found myself writing short stories, of all things. I never thought I could. My brain doesn't make stories short enough usually -- it's generally either novel-or-nothing around here (and lately it's just been nothing). But I've written two half-decent rough drafts of short stories in the past couple of weeks and have plotted a third. They're kind of fun actually.

All this fills in the time between work. I'm considering going back to college, but in order for that to happen, I need minimum ten grand by the middle of August. The year I took off from schooling should have more than covered that, except the province's entire economy tanked and even now, jobs are hard to come by. I'm technically still employed (which is more than a lot of people have right now), but I'm getting very few hours. I don't know what will happen. I really don't know. And I hate not knowing. Tap practice is one of the very few things saving me right now.

And hey... I think I kind of managed to write an entire blog post without going on a rant! Now as long as nobody mentions Hillsong in the comments, we should be good.

Snippets Of Now

I've been trying for a week to complete the last forty seconds of Sing Your Freedom. Today I finally got it down to 31 seconds remaining.

I was hoping to have You Are The One half-finished by now. I've only got the first four or five bars and those I composed back in January.

There's a Canada-wide publishing contest looming -- it closes 15 June. The winner gets their novel published and marketed for free. My mother has convinced me to try to speed-revise Reuben (August 2010). I've done the first three pages. I figure if I don't get it done by this June, I can keep working at it and have it ready for next June, as it's an annual contest.

I'm almost completely out of money. Today I doubled the inventory of the Etsy shop, but so far no-one's bought anything. At the moment I don't even have enough money to cover the cost of developing the film I shot yesterday.

I made up a daily schedule the other day that I plan to implement starting this Monday (9 April). I carefully scheduled in time for revising Reuben and time for composing choreography. I was rather surprised to find I had nine and a half hours three days out of the week that I wasn't really making the most of. I had no idea I spent that much time on the Internet.

Under terms of my new schedule, I will have at most an hour a day on the Internet (excluding Etsy shop upkeep -- I have forty-five minutes for that). I'd better learn to write blog posts faster and/or lower my impossible standards or I'm not going to post much...

I've recently become fascinated with buttons -- the little pin-back type. I searched for old Christian band buttons (Petra, White Heart, etc.) on eBay and Etsy, but yielded nothing. (However, I did find a lovely leather jacket from Petra's On Fire! tour in 1988.)

I hope to finish Sing Your Freedom tonight. I'm midway through page twenty-nine of notation.

The Doubleheader -- Post-Event Update

Yes, I've been neglecting the blog a bit. 3,334 words a day was a little bit more difficult than I expected.

I also didn't expect the crash at the end of November. It felt like every energy reserve I had was sucked dry. (Coming down with a full-blown cold -- which I still have -- in Week Two didn't help though.)

It wasn't so much the fact that I was writing three thousand words a day -- it was switching between two entirely different plots that slowed me down. Within the first week and a half of the contest I'd started to put in three thousand words on one novel one day and three thousand words on the other novel the next day (I had started out writing 1,667 words per novel per day). I'd pick whichever novel I was most excited about and work on that one for the day, giving it a big enough lead that I could let it simmer for the next day while I worked on the other.

But though I was able to make it work this past month, I'm not trying that again anytime soon.

Writing 100,000 words in a month is a good challenge, and I'm willing to repeat it sometime, but I'm not spreading it across two books again. The stopping and starting of separate plots all the time really slowed me down. Often I ended up starting my writing session at 11pm and speed-typing anything, anything I could possibly think of to come reasonably close to three thousand words by midnight so I could update my word count accurately on the website. (And, incredibly, I actually managed three thousand words an hour a few times. I'm not exactly looking forward to rewriting those passages though.)

The end result?

Well, my perception is probably slightly warped from exhaustion, exhilaration, and diminished air supply through my plugged nose, but I think it was mostly worth it. Novel Two especially has some serious potential. I adore the characters in Novel One, but the plot, well... wasn't. I didn't actually wrap up the story, I just brought it past 50,000 words and dropped in favour of writing the ending to Novel Two.

My final count according to the website was 109,064, but taking the total of Novel One and adding it to the total of Novel Two gives me 108,670 words. Not too bad really, considering that I closed Day 29 at 98,506 with hardly any ideas for either novel.

Novel One ultimately ended up being (so far) 50,572 words. But like I mentioned, it's not technically finished.

Novel Two, thanks to a rather formidable burst of mad typing as I desperately tried to get my fingers to hurry up and keep pace with my idea for a (hopefully spectacular) final twist, reached the end at 58,098 words less than an hour before December.

This does break some personal records though (and that's always something to aim for). I broke my record for most words written in a month (previous record was 74,450 words, set November 2010), most words written in one day with 10,558 (previous record was 6,137 or something of that sort, also November 2010), fastest 50k (14 days 5 minutes; previous record was 20 days, November 2010), and, of course, most novels written in one month.

Something I found rather effective this time around was to structure my writing time around music.

I've always listened to music when I write, but this time I got into the habit of finding an album on iTunes and putting it on, then making myself write (no Facebook or blog) until the album finished. Then I could spend a few minutes checking Facebook and the blog and email and everything else before picking another album and doing it again.

And just when I was starting to get tired of most of the albums I already had, I was introduced to this Internet radio station.

Because I know a good third of the stuff they play on there, it was so easy just to sit down and say, 'Okay, I'm going to write until the next Petra song.' And if I wanted to narrow it down a little (because they play a lot of Petra), I would make it any Petra song from the album Back To The Street.

It worked beautifully. I was amazed.

I've always heard that in NaNoWriMo it's preferable to structure your writing time around blocks of time rather than word count (less distracting), but I'd never been able to do that -- I would spend the entire writing session glancing up at the clock and was never really able to settle into the story. Using the playtime of a complete album in iTunes really helped because then I knew when I was done and I was better able to tell myself 'no, you haven't actually been writing that long because this album's only forty-five minutes long and it isn't done yet. You can't go to Facebook yet.'

So that's what I learnt in this contest. Hopefully it helps some fellow writing music nerd.

Suffice to say I am now the author of eight novels -- even if they're all still rough drafts because I fail miserably at the rather-crucial big-picture aspect of rewriting. (But they all have impeccable spelling!)

The Golden Rule Of Novel Revision For Music Nerds

The Golden Rule of novel revision for music nerds who have just discovered buried musical treasure is this:

Never, never, never, never, never succumb to the temptation to Google song lyrics, paste them into iTunes' Info > Lyrics feature, and then read them the next three times you listen to the song so you learn them.
Not only does this halt all eating, Facebooking, and similar novel-revision-related tasks while you are learning the lyrics; this dramatically slows down all future productivity once you have them memorised and want to sing them while writing about deadly plagues and Y2K-like computer viruses. This is very difficult when you are listening to a rock song with an odd lyrical rhythm that demands your complete concentration to get the timing right.

Heed this advice and your novel is far more likely to survive the harsh uncharted territory of revision.
You're welcome.