Tag: Notegraphy

NaNoWriMo Day 27 – I am not thankful for this novel

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Authority changes hands. | Kenneth Lowe via Notegraphy

Okay, I won’t bitch any further about hating writing this thing. After an evening where I lost my lead again because I dicked around, had a friend over, and couldn’t be bothered to remain conscious long enough to write more than 1,000 or so words, I was finally able to power through and produce a good day’s writing today.

Part of that was circling back and adding in a clarifying scene in the past, one which should pay off here in the future in a little bit. While what I am writing now seems scattershot, it really is clarifying the whole book to me. These 50,000 words, you’ll notice, are going to be somewhat more than a quarter of what I’ve written over the past several years so far, and they’re solidifying the imagery, some of the characters and their relationships, and really setting up the bad guys, who don’t get much detail in the first chunk of the book. All told, while I worry that I may have created a jagged mess. I’ve also dumped on a lot of raw material that I am totally willing to rework.

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NaNoWriMo Day 25 – In which I can’t believe it is Day 25

One of the few lines I can remember verbatim from my own damn book. | Kenneth Lowe, via Notegraphy

I keep composing these on my phone instead of when I have my manuscript in front me, so the result is I haven’t posted excerpts lately. Last night was the perfect exemplar of how stunningly tired I am of the whole enterprise – I wrote maybe 1,000 words, just enough to be over the Day 24 goal, and then called it a night.

It did not help that the heat in my apartment is out and that I could barely think straight it was so cold. I am resolutely sick of Chicago, sick of a winter that hasn’t even properly begun yet, and sick of hearing of the awful violence in the wake of the Ferguson grand jury as I simultaneously get grief from family members about the possibility of going back to Colombia after this is all over. Which country is more dangerous, I have to wonder?

As I compose this, I am on my way to an official function where the president will be speaking. I am excited, but also exhausted, and an ice-cold apartment and this relentless novel await me when I do finally get home from this thing that is only going to start at 4:30. (Update: Turned away at the door… it was so packed they were declining VIPs.)

Fatigue, I have been assured, is a real thing when it comes to writing. More and more lately, I have come to appreciate that writing is work and not solely diversion. I am fiercely determined to finish though, so tonight I am going to push back ahead.

And then tomorrow I’m going to my fucking mom’s house, where the godshitting heat works, possibly until this tedious fucking return to my blighted homeland is blessedly over with.