50,000 words down, 510,000 words to go…

Five hours.

In five hours, both NaNoW­riMo and the Max­i­mum Geek Ulti­mate Writ­ing Chal­lenge begin. I’m going to a NaNoW­riMo kick­off party tonight here in Den­ver, and I’ll start writ­ing at the stroke of mid­night. Bet­ter yet, since I’ll likely still be writ­ing at 2am when the clocks fall back, I get an extra hour. Not to sleep as most peo­ple use this odd autumn bounty, but an extra hour to write.

And I’m gonna need it.

Right now, I’m writ­ing this in my friendly neigh­bor­hood Chipo­tle, where I plan to do a lot of writ­ing over the next year. It’s either a hor­ri­ble or oddly aus­pi­cious night to do this, as the place is likely well above the legal occu­pancy limit because of their annual “dress as a bur­rito and get a free bur­rito pro­mo­tion.” Nearly every one of the hun­dred peo­ple in here have at least some alu­minum foil wrapped around some­thing. Some, like the ones who just have a lit­tle crimped over an ear, aren’t really try­ing, but the cashier is being pretty gen­er­ous. The point is that if I can write in this din, with the end of the line con­stantly bump­ing past my table — the only one in the place with access to an AC out­let — then I can write any­where, anywhen.

And I’m gonna need that too.

On the sur­face, what I’m about to do — rather, what I’m about to start, this is a marathon, not a sprint — isn’t all that unusual as pro­fes­sional grade writ­ing goes. Stephen King does two thou­sand words a day, every day, when in the com­po­si­tion phase, and there’s a lot of writ­ers who work even faster than he does. But the dif­fer­ence is that I’m not tak­ing a leave of absence to do this. I’m not get­ting paid to do this. I don’t even have a spouse who can sup­port me for a year while I chase my dream.

In the next year, I’m going to tran­si­tion into a new job. I’m going to file bank­ruptcy, some­thing I know very lit­tle about and that scares the heck out of most peo­ple. I’m going to move out of my par­ents house into a place of my own. I may end up buy­ing a new car or buy­ing and learn­ing how to ride a motor­cy­cle. Despite what my friends seem to think, I’m going to main­tain an active social life, though I prob­a­bly won’t date more than I do now, which is to say I won’t date at all. I’m going to keep blog­ging and tweet­ing. I’m going to have a full life.

And I’m going to write some­where between a half and three quar­ters of a mil­lion words of fiction.

And now, as I sit in this cacoph­o­nous Chipo­tle, that’s start­ing to sound… real. That’s start­ing to sound daunt­ing. The enor­mity of my task looms before me and I feel small.

Tonight, I get to do that.

Because in five hours, every­thing changes. In five hours, I start writ­ing. And I don’t stop until I get to the end of book seven. I don’t give up. I don’t despair. I don’t get to run to any­one to take this bur­den from me. This is my dream. This is why I’m here on this planet and this is what I’ve spent the last twenty years run­ning from.

In five hours, the run­ning stops. And the writ­ing begins.

I gave Script Frenzy a solid shot this year. I plot­ted out my movie in advance, fixed all the plot holes, had some block­buster cin­e­matic moments planned. I started writ­ing the script, got about five pages into it, and real­ized some­thing. I’m not a screen­writer any­more. I’m a novelist.

I used to joke that I was a screen­writer trapped in novelist’s body, a nod to my very visual, very action-​oriented style of prose. And I used to really enjoy screen­writ­ing. I read movie scripts the way other peo­ple read nov­els. I watched movies con­stantly, see­ing prob­a­bly close to 100 films a year and rewatch­ing lots of favorites.

The prob­lem is I don’t do that any­more. I see maybe 20 movies a year, prob­a­bly closer to a dozen. For my leisure time, I’m usu­ally read­ing a book (well, an ebook). I just don’t have time to devote a cou­ple hours at a time to sit­ting in one place and watch­ing a story from begin­ning to end.

I got into screen­writ­ing in the first place because I didn’t think I had the patience for nov­els. I’d just fin­ished Between Heaven and Hell and hadn’t been able to make any seri­ous head­way on the sequel. Screen­plays were shorter, sim­pler, and more active. They cap­i­tal­ized on what were my strengths at the time, action and dia­logue. And I had a blast learn­ing how to write screenplays.

But that was over 10 years ago. In the inter­ven­ing decade, I’ve writ­ten hun­dreds of thou­sands of words, and all in either nar­ra­tive (nov­els) or essay (arti­cles) style. And in the process, I’ve lost the eye of my inner screen­writer. I don’t see sto­ries through a cam­era any­more. I see them from the omni­scient view­point of a novel’s narrator.

The work I did get­ting the story put together isn’t going to be wasted, though. The more I wrote on the screen­play ver­sion of Titanus, the more I wanted to write it as a novel. My favorite books when I was younger were Michael Crichton’s Congo and Juras­sic Park (long before either became a movie). More recently I’ve dis­cov­ered writ­ers like James Rollins (Ama­zo­nia, Sub­ter­ranean) and Jeff Rovin (Fatalis, Ves­pers) who also man­aged to find that mix of sci­ence and adven­ture that made Crichton’s best work so good. Titanus is my shot at join­ing their ranks with a science-​oriented thriller, and I think it will work just as well, if not bet­ter, as a novel as a movie.

If, for no other rea­son, that I’m a nov­el­ist now.

So NaNoW­riMo was a bust for me this year, as I’ve given up only ten days in. Why did I wash out this year when fin­ished in 2006?

No one to race against. One of the big moti­va­tors for me in 2006 was rac­ing against my writ­ing part­ner, Josh Curry of Max­i­mum Geek. Josh sat out this year, pre­fer­ring to spend his time doing school­work for his degree, like higher edu­ca­tion is impor­tant or some­thing. So I was pretty much going it alone, and couldn’t rely on any­one else to push me.

Lack of incen­tives. Other than keep­ing the blog going, I didn’t really have any­thing to reward me when I did well, nor any neg­a­tive con­se­quences if I didn’t make my quota. Again, this is where self-​discipline should have kicked in, but if I had strong self-​discipline, I might be fun­da­men­tally unqual­i­fied to be a writer.

And there’s one rea­son I thought might be fac­tor, but I won’t use: lack of time. I’ve had time if I’d really wanted to write. In the past week, I’ve installed OneCare on both my desk­top and lap­top, cloned and then recon­sid­ered the Win­dows 7 user inter­face on XP (I’ll do a writeup of this later), how to blog in OneNote, rebuilt my phone around Kinoma instead of Beyond­Pod and Audi­ble­Player, then back to Beyond­Pod again, watched nearly all three sea­sons of “How I Met Your Mother” and found lots of other ways to waste time I could have spent writing.

Too afraid to screw up a book I care about. This is the big one. I know now why Chris Baty makes it a rule not to use pre-​existing mate­r­ial for NaNoW­riMo. I was rules-​lawyering my way around that pro­hi­bi­tion by start­ing an entirely new draft of Ghost Ronin, but I’ve had this story devel­op­ing in my mind for damn near two decades now. I’ve done years of research for it, have the 17 chap­ters of the book planned out in some detail, and oddly, that very prepa­ra­tion is what killed me.

NaNoW­riMo is based on what Anne Lam­ott calls “shitty first drafts,” some­thing that no mat­ter how much I under­stand the con­cept intel­lec­tu­ally I can’t man­age to inter­nal­ize. I kept freez­ing up, not want­ing to get any­thing “wrong”. While I know I have to work through this even­tu­ally if I want to ever fin­ish any­thing, I doubt it’s going to hap­pen this month. Ghost Ronin’s firm struc­ture and abun­dant research and back­story will make it great for writ­ing at my own pace, but they also served as con­stant road­blocks for the silly aban­don that is sup­posed to char­ac­ter­ize NaNoWriMo.

I’ll try again next year, and I have ten­ta­tive com­mit­ment from Josh that both he and his girl­friend will be join­ing me. I’ll pick a story con­cept that I don’t already have much invest­ment in, but one that seems excit­ing enough to carry me through 50,000 words. I’ll set up a sys­tem of rewards for hit­ting cer­tain mile­stones, and try to really enjoy the ride. For now, though, I’ll keep plug­ging away at Ghost Ronin at my own pace and try to get it fin­ished before Script Frenzy next spring.

I fig­ured somet­ing out today. The rea­son I’m hav­ing so much trou­ble keep­ing any momen­tum going on Ghost Ronin is that I’m try­ing so hard to do it right. So I don’t know how an ambush by ter­ror­ists on a cou­ple of Army rangers in Basra would really go down. So what? This is NaNoW­riMo! Make it up, fix it in rewrites!

Why is it so frick­ing hard to remem­ber that every sin­gle November?

I’m start­ing to ques­tion my com­mit­ment to the cause. Haven’t got­ten any writ­ing done today, just haven’t had the time. Part of that is being so very tired from last night and need­ing a nap, but I could have gone home to write after work instead of going over to a friend’s to help him reflash his phone.

It’s a self-​discipline prob­lem, pure and sim­ple. With­out Josh to race against for the month, there’s really no con­se­quence I care about if I blow off a day. I’m only hurt­ing myself, because every day I don’t write is a day with­out my book, but there’s so much more to do (tomor­row is both Max­i­mum Geek and a Bron­cos game, then Fri­day is gam­ing and I des­per­ately need to get my Rock Band on after miss­ing it last week). Right now the ten­ta­tive plan is to make it up over the week­end with some 5000 – 7000 word marathons, but what are the odds noth­ing is going to pop up unex­pect­edly over the weekend?

And in another sense, the heat is off. I’ve been hold­ing off on start­ing Ghost Ronin for months, wait­ing for NaNoW­riMo to begin. Now that it has and I’ve started the book, why not write it at my own pace? The begin­ning, with Mike and Chris in Iraq, was the hard, intim­i­dat­ing part. Once I get get my main char­ac­ter blown up, I’m back into more famil­iar plot ter­ri­tory, vari­a­tions on a theme I’ve been work­ing on for two decades. I have a lot of new sur­prises in store for this (final?) ver­sion, but still not as scary for me as a writer as try­ing to write con­vinc­ingly about being on the ground in Basra.

Even though I only need 774 words to stay on pace, I’m not sure I’m going to get it. The elec­tion cov­er­age is going to be pretty much all-​encompassing, unless things wrap up early.

849 words so far today, for 5,923 total. I can see what Chris Baty, founder and over­lord of NaNoW­riMo means about steal­ing time to write. I’m crazy busy today, and had to choose to sit down and write when I could eas­ily have been doing other things on my to do list. I’m also being care­ful to keep writ­ing, even if I’m rushed, until I get to a “hook” that will help me get mov­ing the next day.

Okay, up to 5,118 words today, but mostly by cheat­ing. Ghost Ronin is orga­nized as a playlist. Each chap­ter starts with the lyrics for the song it’s based around. So today I pasted in the lyrics for each song. I also write 28 whole words of new mate­r­ial so I’m not a com­plete weasel.

Okay, I’m a com­plete weasel.

But I learned some amaz­ing stuff while I was avoid­ing writ­ing. I found out how to cre­ate a mas­ter doc­u­ment and link sub doc­u­ments to it (like each chap­ter in say, a book), I found out why this doesn’t actu­ally work (seemed to work at first, then some­how just turned into a hyper­link), I moved all the story notes I’d been keep­ing in Word into OneNote.

So tomor­row, real writ­ing. Hope­fully, I’ll even fin­ish chap­ter one and kill off my main character.

So here we are, day one of NaNoW­riMo, and I’m already hav­ing moti­va­tion prob­lems. I know I need to buckle down and start writ­ing, but frankly I’m scared out of my mind. Well, tech­ni­cally, I’ve writ­ten 28 words so far today, so I have started. But the fear to really dive into it and start pound­ing out the words is daunt­ing to say the least.

So, I’m going to have to get dis­ci­plined, and fast. In the process of writ­ing this blog post, I’ve switched my blog-​writing soft­ware from Win­dows Live Writer to OneNote/​Word, researched how to use OneNote for blog­ging, switched my pri­mary web browser from Fire­fox to IE8, ver­i­fied that IE7pro will work with IE8…

It’s time to start writ­ing. Writ­ing fic­tion. Writ­ing my book.

So here’s the deal. I’ve been blog­ging every day since relaunch­ing JeffKirvin.net, haven’t missed one yet. I intend to keep that streak going, but for the month of Novem­ber I’m going to make a lit­tle deal with myself. I will still post to the blog every day, but only after I write some­thing for NaNoW­riMo. I’m not going to hold myself to spe­cific min­i­mum word count, at least not yet. Just some­thing. Even one sen­tence if I’m really blocked. As we get into the final two weeks, I might have to impose a word count min­i­mum to keep me on pace to finish.

But for now, just write. It doesn’t have to be per­fect, it doesn’t even have to be good. But I have to write some­thing before I post again.

Yikes.