Ian M Rountree

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One Third of NaNo

November 10, 2008 by Ian Leave a Comment

So we’re pretty much a third of the way through National Novel Writing Month, and I’m at about a third of where I need to be. It’s annoying, but it happens. Writers have this issue – it amounts to the same thing retail workers call “Stockroom Syndrome” where you enter the stock room and completely forget what you were going there for. Sort of the same thing every time I fire up Office and get ready – I open OneNote for all my world notes, Excel for all my plotlining, and Word for my document itself and – BLAM – there goes my next scene. It doesn’t matter how well planned it is, I just completely fail at writing it.

However, I’m on day one of three consecutive days off, so somewhere in that time I hope to get up to the 15k words I’m aiming for by this point, even if I should be closer to 20k or 25k by the end of the week. I’m only just over 6k now. If there are any beta readers still hiding out there, please do let me know by email. You’ve got mine, I assume? Good.

On a completely bump-related note, go on and stop by http://www.khrystallee.com/ and check out her stuff. I had the privilage of talking to Khrystallee about her stuff today, and Jaz has a necklace of hers. It’s some of the best work out there, and incredibly well priced.

Following is a bit of a personal rant, feel free to avoid it.

It’s been a very slow week, chronologically speaking. I feel like the last ten days have just slumped by at an alarmingly slow rate. Waiting for Christmas is always hard, but I seriously feel stuck in an infinite recursion of the same few minutes. I’ve tried re-reading some of my old writing to encourage myself, and happened upon a piece I did in Alamak way back in the day called Lonely Universe – it hit me kind of hard. It was a very simple, less-than-two-page death scene for a character that didn’t even have any flesh, but it’s still some of the most powerful stuff I’ve written. Kind of tossed me off my high horse, thinking I’ve progressed so far. Got me thinking about etah and Lucian, Moloch, the whole Cellar crowd. Spektur. chewingonagun. Daybreaker. A lot of these personas and people have drifted off, and for that I admit I’m somewhat thankful – they did not do good things for me.

But at the same time, I worry that all my best work is behind me, filed away in game logs I’ll never get back. The Apostles of Darkness, the second Elite on mak, most of the original Maredran game from LiveJournal and eventhe Seven Sons game I ran for all of three weeks on Rondak’s Portal. The Pax Tai’Char is lost, as is most of the original path_roleplay log. That alone was more than a thousand pages.

In 2005, I suffered a hard drive crash that obliterated a lot of my records, more than three thousand pages worth of work, and it’s been more than three years getting back into the game. Even now, I feel I owe a lot of my hesitancy toward NaNo to that hdd failure, even though my feable 6600 words are backed up in four places. It’s frustrating, even if there’s nothing to be done for it. The only option is to give up, or move on and keep going. I’m yearning for the latter, even if I’m leaning toward the former.

More later. I’m going to try to write now.

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Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: archive, nanowrimo

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