Posts published in “Challenges”

National Novel Writing Month, Camp Nano, and similar challenges.

Script Frenzy 2012: THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE

Published April 11, 2012 by centaur

I'm so busy I can't see straight, so that must mean it's time to take on another project. I'm doing Script Frenzy this month, a challenge to write 100 pages of a script in 30 days, much like National Novel Writing Month, only for film.

I'm adapting my recently completed novel JEREMIAH WILLSTONE THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE to film. I'm using Scrivener. It's great. Here's a sample of the screenplay:

EXT. NEWFOUNDLAND - CONSERVATORY. NIGHT

A mammoth complex looms in the night, an airship hangar made of glass attached to a hulking Victorian palace.

Lightning reflects off the glass of the hangar --- then flashes of light appear inside the windows of the palace.

INT. STAIRCASE. NIGHT

More flashes illuminate a long, narrow Victorian staircase with wainscoting and elaborate rails. A figure hurls herself backwards down the stairs, firing electric pistols from both hands as she bumps down the steps on her rear, sliding on her tailcoat.

JEREMIAH slams into the base of the stair, gritting her teeth, keeping both guns trained back the way she came. She wears a long tailcoat, an black corset vest filigreed with gold wire, and a pair of airman's goggles on her forehead.

At the top of the stairs, crackling green foxfire ripples over the metal bands of the stout wooden door. Holes are blasted in it, and light shifts behind them, but JEREMIAH has no clear shot.

She sees sparks coming from her left gun, and tosses it aside with a curse. She glances at her right gun, seeing the indicator bead hover between three and four notches. A creak upstairs refocuses her attention. Jeremiah murmurs to herself as she focuses on the holes in the door.

JEREMIAH

Very well, sir, show yourself. Three shots? I'll get you in one.

Here I mumble "J Michael Straczynski's the Complete Book of Scriptwriting," "The Empire Strikes Back Fascimile Script," "other writing resources I'm too tired to mention". What? I'm only 9 pages in when I should be around 33. Back to work!

That is all.

-the Centaur

“Stranded” Away

Published February 6, 2012 by centaur

"Stranded", the novelette which is the first third of the first book of my new young adult space pirates trilogy, is away to the editor! It came in somewhat over the desired length, so I hope she doesn't hurt me, but it is the first third of the first book of a planned trilogy, so some of that length is unavoidable. (My awesome beta and gamma readers liked it. :-)

"Stranded" tells the story of Serendipity, a young centauress explorer who must come to the aid of a shipload of children who've crashlanded on a world she wanted to claim as her own. It's got aliens and fungi, spaceships and rayguns, and plush robots and kung fu, but it's really about how people should be treated and learning to stand up for what's right.

Here's a teaser, illustrated thanks to my work on 24 Hour Comics Day:

Sirius flinched as sizzling grey bullets tumbled around him in zero-gee. The grey dented veligen pellets rattled through the cramped innards of Independence’s life support plant, stinging his nose with the scent of bitter almonds as his hands strained at the yellow-striped master fuse. The girls shouted, their guns fired, more bullets twanged around him, ricocheting off the ancient, battered equipment, striking closer with every shot—but Sirius just gripped the hot, humming tube harder, braced both booted feet, and pulled.

Andromeda and Artemyst screamed for him to stop. Dijo, the engineer, screamed for the shooting to stop. Even the air screamed, out a bullet hole in a vacuum duct near his feet. But with every second, Independence shot a half million clicks farther into the deep, flying away from the Beacon that was their only hope of survival, so Sirius didn’t stop: he just screamed too, pulling, pulling, jerking—until the master fuse popped out and he shot free, bursting the hatch open.

Sirius flew out of the life support service chamber into Independence’s cavernous cargo hold. His head clanged off a handrail, knocking him into a dizzy spin in zero-gee. He smacked into the tumbling brassfiber grille of the hatch he’d knocked free, halving his spin—and leaving him right in the crosshairs of Dijo, Artemyst and Andromeda, all clipped to orange handrails far out of his reach. All had their guns on him, red laser sights on, green safety lights off.

Then the ship’s lighting flickered, and the whine of the air cycler slowly spun down.

“Halfway Boy!” Andromeda said, staring at the yellow and black striped master fuse in Sirius’s hands, her eyes as wild as the spray of feathers sticking out of her snakeskin cowl. She motioned to Dijo, who kicked off towards the life support plant. “What have you done?”

“Saved all our lives,” Sirius said, still dizzy, still spinning. “You can thank me later.”

Assuming the editor doesn't put me in the hospital over the length issue, we hope the story will be out in an anthology later this year. "Stranded's" parent novel, MAROONED, will hopefully be out mid 2012. So I guess the above is really a teaser. Sorry about that. Well, not really. I hope you enjoy!

-the Centaur

(No) More Procrastination

Published February 2, 2012 by centaur

Finally finished my "From Nano to Novel" pep talk for the National Novel Writing Month site ... should be coming out later this month to the donors list. (What? You're not a Nanowrimo donor? You can fix that here: https://store.lettersandlight.org/donations). But I've posted that to Facebook and to Google+. Posting it again here is, I think, a good idea to make sure people know what I'm up to, but in another way it's just procrastination ... I've got the gamma comments on "Stranded" to work on and this is not that. Back to work! -the Centaur

Last gamma comments for STRANDED in…

Published February 2, 2012 by centaur

Alright, the last gamma reader comments for "Stranded" are in. (Gamma, because this is actually the second round of beta readers. :-) "Stranded" is the first novelette of three in a planned YA space adventure novel with the working title MAROONED. This will be part of a trilogy including MAROONED, PURSUED, BESIEGED, SHANGIAIED, COMMANDEERED ... oh damnit I've done it again, haven't I? "Stranded" is also the novelette I adapted for 24 Hour Comics Day. Don't know if I'll get back to that as I have already 3 books plotted out in this series and parts of the next two outlined. Hope to get "Stranded" the novelette out to the editor in the next two weeks for inclusion in an anthology maybe later this year (with MAROONED coming out next year we hope). When "Stranded" is away, then it's back to LIQUID FIRE (finishing the draft) and THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE (polishing the draft to send to beta readers). -the Centaur

It’s Better to Be Done

Published January 26, 2012 by centaur

I am very interested in promoting creation. I think the world would be a better place if more people wrote, drew, painted, sculpted, danced, programmed, philosophized, or just came up with ideas. Not all ideas are great, and it's important to throw away the bad and keep the good - but the more ideas we can generate, the more we can test.

One of the biggest problems I see in unprofessional, unpublished or just unhappy creators is not finishing. It's very easy to start work on an idea - a painting, a novel, a sculpture, a program, a philosophy of life. But no matter how much you love what you do, there's always a point in creating a work where the act of creating transforms from play to work.

Whether you stall out because the work gets hard or because you get distracted by a new idea, it's important to realize the value of finishing. An unfinished idea can be scooped, or become stale, or disconnected from your inspiration. If you don't finish something, the work you did on it is wasted. More half finished ideas pile up. Your studio or notebook becomes a mess.

If you don't finish, you never learn to finish. You're learning to fail repeatedly. The act of finishing teaches you how to finish. You learn valuable skills you can apply to new works - or even to a new drafts. I know an author who was perpetually stalled out on a problematic story - until one day she made herself hit the end. Now it's on it's fourth draft and is really becoming something.

The tricky thing is you have got to put the cart before the horse: you've got to finish before you know whether it was worth finishing. This does not apply to experienced authors in a given genre, but if you're new to a genre, you have to finish something before you worry about whether you can sell it or even if it is any good.

You don't need for something to be perfect to finish it. I know too many amateurs who don't want to put out the effort to finish things because they don't know whether they can sell it. No. You've got a hundred bad programs in you, a thousand bad paintings, a million bad words, before you get to the good stuff. Suck it up, finish it, and move on.

Procrastination is a danger. This is the point in the article that I got distracted and wrote a quick email to a few other creators about ideas this (unfinished) article had inspired. Then I got back to it. Then I got distracted again doing the bullet list below and went back and injected this paragraph. The point is, it's OK to get distracted - just use that time wisely, then get back to it.

Finally, sometimes you just need help to finish the first time. The biggest thing is to find a tool which can help you over that hump when it stops being fun and starts being work - some challenge or group or idea that helps you get that much closer to done. To help people finish, I'm involved with or follow a variety of challenges and resources to help people finish:

Write to the End: It's not a critique group; it's a writing group. We meet almost every Tuesday at a local coffee house and write for 20 minutes, read what we wrote, and repeat until they kick us out. We normally hit three sessions, so I usually get an hour of writing in every night - and hear a half dozen to a dozen other writers. Inspirational. Our web site contains articles on writing, including my new column The Centaur's Pen.
National Novel Writing Month: A challenge to write 50,000 words of a new novel in the month of November. This seems daunting, but Nanowrimo has a truly spectacular support group and social system which really helps people succeed at the challenge. Even if you don't "win" the first time, keep at it, you will succeed eventually!
Script Frenzy: Write 100 pages of a script (play, screenplay, or comic script) in the month of April - another event sponsored by the creators of Nanowrimo. This is an event I haven't yet tried, but am planning to tackle this year to get back into screenwriting (as part of my 20-year plan to get into directing movies).
24 Hour Comics Day: It's a challenge to produce a 24 page comic in 24 hours, usually held the first weekend of October. I've tried this 3 times and succeeded once. It's taught me immense amounts about comic structure and general story structure and even improved my prose writing.
Blitz Comics: Because I failed at 24 Hour Comics Day, me and my buddy Nathan Vargas decided to "fake it until we make it" and to put on a boot camp about how to succeed at 24 Hour Comics Day. We produced a Boot Camp tutorial, a 24 Hour Comics Day Survival Kit - and along the way taught ourselves how to succeed at 24 Hour Comics Day.
Other Challenges: There are a couple of events out there to create graphic novels in a month - NaGraNoWriMo and NaCoWriMo - though both of these are 2010 and I don't know if either one is live. (If they're not active, maybe I'll start one). There's also a 30 Character Challenge for graphic artists to create 30 new characters in a month.

Finally, I want to finish with what inspired this post: the Cult of Done. I won't go too deeply into the Done Manifesto, but from my perspective it can be summed up in two ideas: posting an idea on the Internet counts as a ghost of done, and done is the engine of more. Get your stuff done, finish it, and if it's still half baked, post it to force yourself to move on to newer and better things.

The plane is landing. Time to get it done.

-the Centaur

Credits: The BlitzComics guy is penciled, inked and colored by me and post-processed by Nathan Vargas. Joshua Rothass did the Cult of Done poster and distributed it under a Creative Commons license. This blog post was uploaded by Ecto, which is doing well (other than an upload problem) and is probably going to get my money.

The Centaur’s Pen at Write to the End

Published January 21, 2012 by centaur

I'm part of a fantabulous writing group called Write to the End that meets at Mission City Coffee. This group, which started at Barnes and Noble at Steven's Creek before the economy and contracting book market convinced B&N to cut back on their community programs, has been the best thing for my writing productivity since ... well, ever. I'd even stopped doing National Novel Writing Month until I started attending the WTTE, but now I do Nano every year ... and go to the writing group almost every Tuesday. SO ... it's now time to give back. I'll be doing a monthly column on the WTTE blog titled "The Centaur's Pen." In it, I will write about writing: about why to write, what to write, how to write, how to edit, how to get published --- and how to behave AFTER you get published. Now, I am not a great writer, but I'm trying very hard, I think about writing almost all the time, and I've spent a lot of time talking to other aspiring writers and learning about the art, craft and business of writing. So I hope my insights will be of use to you!

January's inaugural article is on "Learning from Publication:" how seeing your work in print can be an opportunity to improve your craft, even though you can no longer change it. An excerpt follows:

Recently I wrote a short story called “Steampunk Fairy Chick” for the UnCONventional anthology. Even though the story went through many revisions, lots of beta readers, two editors and a copyeditor, when I read through my author’s copy I found there were still things I wanted to change. Nothing major—just line edit stuff, a selection of different choices of sentence structure that I think would have made the story more readable. I can’t react to this the way I would with a draft; the story’s in print. And I don’t want to just throw these insights on the floor. Instead, I want to analyze the story and find general ideas I could have applied that would have improved the story before it hit the stands—ideas I could use in the future on new stories.

To read more, click through to Write to the End and "Learning from Publication." If you want to read the story the article is talking about, click through to Amazon and buy the UnCONventional anthology (in print or ebook). Enjoy! -the Centaur

Victory, Official

Published November 25, 2011 by centaur

Well, the team at Nano are handing out winner's certificates now, so it's official: I've won Nano, with an official word count of 55,492 words. I'm still writing more of the story, but am switching to work on STRANDED tonight. I didn't get much done over Thanksgiving, but I did get this chunk written either Wednesday night or this afternoon (don't remember):

I shoves the monster back, between 5 and 6, dinosaur legs scrabbling, towards the loading dock shared with 7 and 8, hurling it backwards through the pedestrian rail which snaps with a tong as Mister Gargoyle falls on his fanny into a Dumpster of yesterday’s garbage. I’m about to leap down on it and rub his face in it, yes I am, when one of those clawed extra-thick raptor legs flies out and connects with my tiger chin. I yelp, shake it off, but when I’m back to snarlin, the monster’s runnin, holdin’ its shoulder, limpin’ off into the night. I stands on the loading dock and lets out my best bloodcurdlin’ roar. I mean, I knows he’s a gargoyle, but I hopes it gives him blood just so it can curdle. But the tiger doesn’t want to give chase, and neither does I. The two of us are of one mind: we gotta go save All Hours Todd.

I've captured almost all of my notes on the story, so it's hopefully safe to shift gears. Though I have to admit it's hard to shake the momentum.

But I have deadlines ... in this case, Tuesday of next week, to get a draft of STRANDED to beta readers in time to get a final to my editors by January 31, 2012. Onward! -the Centaur

Chuggin’ Chuggin’ Chuggin’

Published November 23, 2011 by centaur

Well, Instant Upload is weirdly busted so you get my smilin' mug instead of coffee. HEX CODE is now at 55,000 words:

I'm taking it a little easier now than I was before I hit 50,000 words ... taking more time to read and catch up on email, even taking time to review notes on STRANDED.

But I do want to dump the rest of my floating ideas for HEX CODE into the document while they're fresh, so I don't lose them. From tonight:

I saw this thing earlier, out of the corner of my eye. It easily kept up with me, lopin’ along, twice as fast now that I think about the angles, using its superior speed to keep good cover between it and my line of sight. My only hope is to sit tight and hope it leaves. Then the dragging noise I thought was a trashcan crackles right up behind me. I’m on quadruple frozen now, concentrating on not even moving my tail—harder than you might think if you’re not a cat and don’t got one. I gotta breathe now, but I’m taking it in slow-like, through the mouth, in and out, so that my gut hurts from clenching.

Onward! -the Centaur

Viiiiictory for the Paper Tiger

Published November 22, 2011 by centaur

Once again I've completed National Novel Writing Month. This year, I finished 8 days early. Or, put another way, THIS is what happens if you turn off the Internet during Nano:

I've had a number of interruptions in Nano in the past and this year was no exception. I know I can finish 38,000 words in 10 days and I was initially trying to push to finish at twice the rate, or perhaps finish two books. Well, that didn't happen because of the Galaxy Nexus launch and you can see that in my progress here:

That chasm was the Galaxy Nexus launch (and a few other things tossed in there). But I made it through that, and ultimately succeeded today, sitting in a Starbucks at Santana Row here in San Jose (actually pictured is Michael's Gelato in Palo Alto because the pic from Santana Row hasn't uploaded).

Normally I survive Nano by taking the whole of Thanksgiving week off for a nine day writing intensive. But this time, I've finished early. I still have more to write on HEX CODE, of course, but I now have the luxury of leaning back and thinking through a few twists to the plot, with 50,000 words under my belt making the story solid. So ... I can actually take this vacation ... as a vacation.

So without further ado I present a snippet of the story that was written today ... raw Nano, unfiltered except for a little reformatting and removing some author's notes.

When I found out that Ben was human, or more accurately that elf meant human with special sauce, blabbermouth old me just had to go tell Mom. Then blabbermouth old me had to make up a story of how I found out, which involved a clever lie about school. Not so clever. That just called Mom’s attention to the fact that she now had two underage wards in need of schooling. Getting me into the Clairmont Academy was a pain in the ass, but now they all love us, so getting Ben in was as simple as selecting a school uniform. And boy, does he look hot in it. Hot hot hot. The points to his ears and the green in his skin and the red in the sweater, it’s like Christmas, and that poofy green helmet makes him look like a school uniform tree—when girls aren’t comin up to tousle it. They’re all lookin’ at him. I was sure he had a glamour, but now I’m thinkin it made him look scary. Now he just looks like a boy, a hot boy with funky green hair the girls can’t resist. A passing one does it again and darts off, and I feels for him! He winces, but he clearly likes it. “So, Cinnamon,” Surrey says, setting her tray down, “will you—oh, hello.” “Hello,” Ben says, and there would be a dotted line in the air between their elfin eyes. Surrey’s too frozen to sit down, so Ben stands up, takes her hand, and kisses it with a flourish. “Greetings from the halls of Appalachia, oh princess of Scandinavia.” “Oh, siddown,” I says, and Ben sits down with a plop. He glares at me, but I ignores him. “Ben, this is Surrey Eddington, one of my best friends. Surrey Eddington, this is Benjamin Damon.” My smile grows mean. “He’s my house elf.” “I swear, Cinnamon Frost,” Ben growls, “by the gleaming halls of elfland—” “By the power of Greyskull,” Megan says, sitting down next to the still-smitten Surrey. “Oh, hey, what are you?” she says, and Ben near jumps out of his seat—then plops back down again as Megan scratches her head and says, “Wait … I’m doing it again, aren’t I?”

Next up I plan on ... chilling out, having a nice dinner, and joining my writing group for the evening to review my outstanding projects. First up is probably finishing the edit of STRANDED for my beta readers ... and then finishing Dakota Frost 3, LIQUID FIRE. Or perhaps I'll just chill out and clean up my library for Thanksgiving, and thank God I have it. Good luck in Nano, all! -the Centaur

Why You Need to Turn off the Internet in Nano

Published November 19, 2011 by centaur

HEX CODE has an epigraph, a quote by Cicero. I'm not sure whether it will stay in the final book, but it sums up the theme of the book for me perfectly:

Nature urges Man to wish that human society existed and to wish to enter it. —Marcus Tullius Cicero, first historically verified werewolf.

The quote is my own tweak of a couple of different translations of this quote by Cicero - and of course Cicero wasn't really a werewolf. But I wanted to look up something about him, some damn thing about his tomb or whatever (not knowing at the time he'd been assassinated by the state and probably has no tomb) and made the stupid mistake of checking on Wikipedia. The sorry result, 30 minutes later, is what you see above. I'm turning off the Internet now, and I hope if you're doing Nano you do too. Because I think XKCD put the problem with Wikipedia best:

Wikipedia is a wonderful thing ... but browsing it isn't writing. Get back to work, nanoers! Onward! -the Centaur

Back on Track

Published November 19, 2011 by centaur

So, now that the Galaxy Nexus site with its snazzy 3D viewer has launched, now that I'm on my long lonely but highly productive 9-day Thanksgiving vacation, now ... I'm back on track. I hit 40,068 words in HEX CODE today, 38,524 added this month in Nano. So I've got 11,476 words left to go for HEX CODE. Since it's early in the day and I have two more writing sessions to go, I hope to actually finish that this weekend, or at least by Monday. Then, unless I'm going gangbusters on HEX CODE, I plan to go back to STRANDED to send to my beta readers, and after that try to finish LIQUID FIRE. Doubt all of that will happen in November, but I want to go from juggling 4 novels in my head to having 4 novels with beta readers! Oh, I almost forgot ... a snippet of HEX CODE:

The three will-o-the-wisps comes together, their colors merging as they swirls around each other into one big ball. The sphere brightens, shimmers, intensifies within its formless shield of mist—the light coming together with a ring and a dark spot, which whirls to face me. O.M.G. The three will-o-the-wisps have formed together into a giant eye. “Remember!” the Huntswoman cries. “You can hurt it with your sword, but not enough. It has a shield. You can defend yourself with your shield, but not enough. It has teeth. But it has one more thing, and that is the key. Find that, and you will find your victory.” “Oh, great,” I says, hefting my dumb little wooden plank blade. “Thanks. Even Yoda sent Luke after dreams before Vader.”

Actually make that 40,092 words ... I wrote some more when I went to grab the excerpt. Enjoy. -the Centaur

It’s ALIIIIIVE….

Published November 17, 2011 by centaur

I avoid talking about work on my blog as a matter of principle - even to the point of never directly referring to The Search Engine That Starts With A G by name, unless I'm talking about a product - but in this case I think I have to make an exception. The Galaxy Nexus phone from Samsung and Google has launched, and the marketing site contains a 3D model of the phone developed by my team (pictured above). Guys, great job. I'm proud to have worked on it with you.

I have a lot more I want to say about it, but at this point (2am) after an 14 hour day ironing out all the wrinkles in this launch I look about how I feel. Time to GO HOME and tackle this again tomorrow, make sure no fires are going ... and then, celebrate! Oh, and please enjoy the phone and all its Androidy goodness! -the Centaur P.S. My opinions are my own and are not that of my employer, even if I do think my employer is awesome. And I don't speak for my employer, though I did run this by them first to make sure they were cool with it. Some restrictions may apply to your limitations. Do not taunt happy fun ball.

Life Intervenes

Published November 12, 2011 by centaur

So I was going gangbusters on Nanowrimo ... until life intervened. I work at the Search Engine That Starts With A G. It's a fun but tough job that nonetheless leaves me with a great work life balance. I have time to work, time to write, and time to spend with my wife and cats (friends tend to get short shrift though :-P). But we have a software release coming up, and as usual for software development schedules (but unusual for The G) everything was under-resourced, the project was late, and no time was left for integration. This was a last minute project, a great opportunity for my team that came up at the last minute, so this is a bit understandable. But it's still been a bear. I was still writing though. Half my team's out sick, on trips, whatever, and I'm still writing. I'm doing the lion's share of the integration, the rest of the team doing the lion's share of the coding, and I'm still writing. Then we get down to the wire ... and still have showstopper bugs. At this point this week we were supposed to finish, attend a research symposium, and then join our research colleagues on an offsite. My boss was reluctant to bail on this, but I told him I was planning to skip the symposium and the offsite, to work on Saturday if I have to ... because there just wasn't enough time for me to finish my work otherwise. Not even if I temporarily dropped Nano.

Nano got dropped anyway. My bosses agreed with me, we mostly bailed on the symposium and almost all of us bailed on the offsite. For the time of this last push, my Nano tracking sheet lists zero, though I'm sure I got a couple of hundred words in that day (just didn't track them). We worked long into Friday night ... and nailed all our P0 bugs. But actually I didn't get any words done that day - I'd forgotten to charge my laptop. I do a lot of writing at breakfast, but without the laptop I had to break out my notebook and plan the story. It's become much more elaborate recently, and this gave me a chance to think. We came back and tackled the project again today Saturday, nailing all our P1 bugs and some of the P2s. I packed up my computer for the office move and prepared to leave, when my boss had a brainflash about fixing the first of our customer requests. He asked me for pointers on how to fix it ... but I knew how, my laptop was already open in my lap, and I could do it before I could explain it. So I did. My boss pushed the code to the site ... and lo and behold we'd nailed the first of the customer's requests, transitioning from bugfixes to pre-launch polishing in a 40-minute last-minute push that was faster than everything that came before it. Boo-yah. So when I went to dinner tonight, I gave myself permission to have a great meal, go get some great coffee, to chill out, and not to Nano. I'm ahead, and can get back to it tomorrow, which is completely free thanks to our hard work and my previous time getting ahead at Nano. But I'd forgotten to charge my laptop Friday. I'd written notes; I'd ruminated on them all night. Not even meaning to. And so, when I sat down for coffee ... the words, they just started spilling out. And I easily made today's word count. Double boo-yah. Here's a sample:

“Sinny and Tully, sittin’ in a tree,” Mom says. “K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” I finishes. I turns red as a beet, looking over at Tully and Ben. Tully’s just leaning against the rail, watching Ben fume as he scrubs the floor on his hands and knees. “But while we’re there in the orchard, this fae comes by, offers us some fruit—” “I swear,” Mom says, “I will slap you through this phone if you ate that fruit.” I holds the phone an arms length away again. I don’t know all of Mom’s powers. For a moment I’m scared she can do it.

Never eat the fruit of elfland ... unless you're a smart little spellpunk who specializes in tricky logic problems. So, back to HEX CODE, and here's hoping life continues to stop intervening. Onward! -the Centaur

20,039 Added Words (4,344 of Them Today)

Published November 6, 2011 by centaur

This post should be titled "wheew". I've now just reached the point where I've caught up with my crazy goal of writing at twice the normal rate. I've written just a notch over the required 3,333 words a day, churning out 20,000+ words in HEX CODE (and that's NOT counting the 1500 word seed I started with).

I had hoped to be this caught up last night, but I erred and went to one of my favorite coffee houses and found it closed an hour earlier than I thought, cutting in to my writing time. I could swear these hours are new, but maybe I'm just hallucinating.

And when I got home I had to play with the cats, such as the cute little monster above, a feral, stray or perhaps just terribly surly cat that just might be our orange cat's father (or mother - I didn't get close enough to enquire). Regrettably, since we already have too many cats, they mark, and feral cats have been trying to get into our home, I had to shoo Mister Orange Cat away, gently touching him with my flashlight, which freaked him out as he didn't know what it was - no matter how much he whapped at it, it didn't react. He actually looked OFFENDED as he scrabbled away atop the fence. I'm sad to have to do that, but his possible son below is more than enough trouble - we can't take in any more cats.

The point being, I was exhausted, but by the time I did all my cat triage, I just fricking collapsed into blissful unconsciousness. Today, however, I had no plans. While I overslept for church, as I irritatingly often do, I still got up reasonably early thanks to Daylight Saving's Time. So I had an extra hour to get out, get to a Panera ... and get caught up. I got my day's writing done pretty quickly, got a notch more ahead, and then went home, fed the cats, cleaned the pee left when the rains discouraged one of them from going outside :-P and resumed writing with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in the background. A friend called, I hopped in the car while talking with him, and by the time we were done I was standing outside Chipotle with only 250 words to go. Short story, by taking the laptop out first and turning the internet off, I made it to 20039 words.

Now I'm freezing my ass off in a surprisingly chilly Barnes and Noble, sipping on a Frappucino (yeah, I know, cold drinks on a cold day, shut up, there's a reason my Top Gun name is Iceman) and taking a short break. Soon I'm going to dive back to it and try to finish another thousand words or so to give me a comfortable buffer. If all goes well, if I can keep up a bit less than the pace I've done so far, I should be able to coast through the second half of November. Maybe, just maybe, if I get done early enough ... I can go see The Thing again. Onward! -the Centaur

Ahead of where I need to be, behind where I want to be

Published November 5, 2011 by centaur

Well, I'm ahead of schedule for Nanowrimo ... or am I? I've been determined and lucky enough to complete at least 1667 words every day, so I'm ahead of where I have to be. But I'm trying to be crazy this year. At first I thought I would do TWO books, but now I'm thinking I want to do ONE book at twice the rate. Why do this to myself? Well, one reason would be to finish early. I could start a second book if I wanted to, or finish the first book, or, God forbid, actually use the week of vacation I've taken Thanksgiving week as a fricking vacation rather than a writing marathon. Or maybe it's because it takes Nanowrimo out of a safe place. Unlike 24 Hour Comics Day, I've succeeded every time I'd tried at Nanowrimo. Trying to write twice as fast takes me out of that comfort zone. If I fail, well, I'll still almost certainly succeed at the Nano challenge. If I succeed, well ... then maybe I can write 100,000 words in a month. And the most important thing about writing is writing. The more you write, the better you get. (The second most important thing is getting prompt, high quality feedback; the third most important thing is taking the feedback seriously and acting on it. But I digress). I've finished today's quota of 1,667 words. But yesterday I slacked, also only writing about 1,667 words. To keep up the accelerated pace, I need to catch up, to write almost 3000 more words today. But it's only 3:52 in the afternoon, and I have the whole day ahead of me. So here's seeing what I can do ... and I don't think I can lose, either way. -teh Centaur

9027 Added Words

Published November 3, 2011 by centaur

Still not making any progress on STRANDED, but HEX CODE is flying along - I'm getting about 3,000 words a day! The Writing Allies group tonight made many great suggestions and I've gotten whole scenes out of it, but the coffeehouse is about to close so time to be done for the day and go home and noogie a cat. Doing my best to keep it up ... excelsior! -the Centaur UPDATE: Make that 10,004 added words. I'm writing at double the normal rate, in the hope I can finish early and have some time off at the end to work on STRANDED ... or, heck, maybe even take some of the vacation days I set aside at the end of the month as VACATION! Whoda thunk it? Onward!

UPDATE UPDATE: Make that 10,350 added words. Had a brainflash while brushing my teeth. Now I really am going to bed - it's 2:18 AM. Excelziiszoorzzzzzzz...

5836 Added Words

Published November 3, 2011 by centaur

So ... HEX CODE is at 7380 words, which is 5836 more than the 1544 word seed I started with. I'm 12 percent done, a little bit ahead. Onward! -the Centaur

Nano Rules That Lead to Progress

Published November 1, 2011 by centaur

Mocha Freeze at Cafe Borrone, With Laptop Reflection

This is my sixth year attempting Nanowrimo and my sixth (and seventh) Nano book, and I've learned to adopt a few rules to help make the thing progress.

Nanowrimo comes first. All existing writing projects should be scheduled for before or after Nano. One of the worst experiences I had was trying to finish 38000 words of Nano in 10 days after having lost almost half of it to editing FROST MOON.
The Internet stays off until 1,667 words are done. There are a dozen reasons to use the Internet - to look something up, to check your email, to blog on Facebook. DON'T. Not even if you're ahead. Get a whole day's writing in before you log on. In particular, NO BLOGGING, Tweeting or Facebooking until you're caught up. Turn your Internet off if you have to - that's what I do, writing on a laptop.
Don't read+eat, then write; write+eat, then read. This one may not apply to you. I have a day job at The Search Engine That Starts With A G, so to get writing done, 3-5 days a week as wife, cats and friends permit, I go to dinner by myself, read something to feed my head, and then go out for coffee and write. But sometimes writing gets the short shrift when you do that, if you're reading something interesting or get lost in email. Normally that's OK; you should read more that you put out in writing. In Nano, I have to upend this and write first, come hell or high water.
Look things up later - use <angle brackets> if you have to. Even if you don't have the Internet, there are ways to look things up when you're writing. Don't. If you don't know Marcus Tullius Cicero's name, just write <cicero's name> in angle brackets and go back later, searching for angle brackets and looking things up. Your writing will thank you.
If you know the plot, write all the beats down, then expand them later. My process involves thinking about stories long before I write them. I think of a dozen, a hundred, a thousand ideas for every one I write down. I've been thinking about HEX CODE, for example, for a few years, and my head's full of ideas. So sometimes, even when your writing juice is gone, you can quickly bang down the beats of the plot - "Cinnamon leaves for the Rogue. She gets paranoid by the park. She thinks she sees somebody. Then Tully surprises her and gives her grief." There's 500 words tomorrow, all planned out today.
Use the Nano community. There's a South Bay Nanowrimo community and while I haven't had time to go to their events this year I did have time to learn from their wisdom. In particular, they had a suggestion to get a head start by going to a Denny's on Halloween and starting writing at midnight to get an entire day's writing in before the first day had really started. I was too wiped to do that, but ...
Get a head start. ... but I was not too wiped to set my alarm for thirty minutes past midnight and to get up and write at home. I stayed up from about 12:45 to 3AM, alternating between writing and puttering with the cats. I got a lot written - 1129 words. Then I took my laptop to lunch and finished out my day. Then I took my laptop to dinner and started work on the next day. Then I took my laptop to Cafe Borrone's and finished out the SECOND day. The result? I wrote 3500 words today. If I can keep up 1667 words a day, then I'll finish a day early. Woot!
Track your progress. I use a spreadsheet which I'm going to detail in a later post, but the long and the short of it is that you need to do 1667 words a day to finish 50,000 words by the end of November. Track your progress and hold your feet to the fire.
Write, write, WRITE! Enough said? No. There's a lot of planning you may need to do to finish Nano. WRITE FIRST. Get yourself a day or two ahead. THEN PLAN. Some of your best work will come from winging it.

Finally, one more word of wisdom. Don't start work on your second Nano book until you've finished your daily quota for the first. It's better to finish one book than it is to have two half finished books in the month. Remember, it's better to be done! In fact, I'll go further and say you should take a little break between the two of them, to say, for example, blog your Nano writing rules, just so you'll tackle the second book fresh. This advice only applies to insane people trying to do 2 novels in Nano. So, the result of me following these rules? 3500 words done today on HEX CODE:

And seriously, I'm only 96 extra words into STRANDED. Instead of trying to complete two Nano books, I'm going to try to make progress on completing my beta reader draft of STRANDED during my Nano downtime, as long as I'm making ahead-of-schedule progress on HEX CODE. And if I finish that ... THEN I can think of tackling STRANDED as a second Nano. -the Centaur

Nanowrimo 2011 Begins

Published November 1, 2011 by centaur

So it's another year, another National Novel Writing Month. This year, what was supposed to be my first YA (young adult) novel, HEX CODE. Actually, I've already started one called STRANDED, which makes me feel even better about tacking this new genre. A sneak preview of the first young adult novel featuring the mathemagical weretiger Cinnamon Frost, adopted daughter of the magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost:

It sucks trying to do your homework when you’ve turned into a tiger. It’s not that your body turns two sizes too big for your chair, that your balance goes so you can’t stand, or even that your claws are so sharp that you could punch straight through a keyboard. It’s the little things. Big cats are nearsighted, so you need big old dorky “tiger” glasses you can barely get on once your hands have gone to claws. And we’re predators, reflexes tied to movement, so I has to fight smashing the screen every time my mouse pointer moves. And turning into a tiger hurts like getting pummeled with a thousand bars of soap in socks, so the only thing I really want to do after the Change is gnaw on someone, regardless of whether I have three papers all due tomorrow morning.

The material above is actually from the 1500 words of "seed" material I started prior to National Novel Writing Month. I always start with a seed, be it 500 words or 10,000, but commit to fulfilling the Nano challenge by doing 50,000 additional words. This year my final target, counting the seed, is 51544 words. Time to climb that mountain!

Already 1129 words into the challenge (not counting the seed). Go Team Centaur! -the Centaur

24 Hour Comics Day, Redux

Published October 2, 2011 by centaur

No, I'm not doing 24 Hour Comics Day 2 weekends in a row ... but my buddy Nathan Vargas is. He's the other half of Blitz Comics and through an odd set of circumstances involving the Alternative Press Expo we ended up signing up for a 24 Hour Comics event at Mission Comics 1 week before today, the official 24 Hour Comic Day. (And I completed mine!)

I owe too many people too many things (fixing my wife's computer, finishing edits of "Steampunk Fairy Chick", finishing a draft of STRANDED, doing an interview, scanning last week's comic, etc) to do 24HCD again, but after tonight's Doctor Who finale I did drop by around midnight tonight with donuts and good cheer.

We hung out, gave donuts to the security guards, and watched some Batman fan film. Then, while the toiling artists toiled, I spent some time cleaning up the images from last week's 24 Hour Comic Day (which I had scanned while watching Doctor Who). I just finished, it's only been two hours, but it already feels like another 24HCD!

However, I'm happy with the results, and will do 24HCD again next year. I particularly like the dual page spread from Stranded, but I'll hold it back until I get the whole comic uploaded to Dresan.com and will instead tease you with the first page of the novella:

The first page of the adapted STRANDED novella.

Onward! Upward! Homeward, for me! And best of luck to the toiling comickers here in Sunnyvale! -the Centaur