Nick Bryan

writing

NaNoWriMo 2012: The Halfway Point

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You may remember my blog post of a fortnight ago, where I unveiled my plans for NaNoWriMo 2012. Well, I’ve done some writing today, so have time to post a midway update. As I slap this up on the blog, at nearly-midnight on the fifteenth, NaNo is exactly halfway over.

So, how am I doing? How are you doing? How are our friends and families doing?

Quality Over Quantity – The Reality

As I said in the previous entry, I’ve been promising myself I’d slow my NaNo pace, accept a lower word count in exchange for a more considered plot, better prose and, y’know, actual themes and shit. Most previous years, I have made this vow and failed, allowing myself to be caught up in the competitive rush to 50K, and “won”.

Well readers, I’m proud to announce this sickening run of success and achievement is definitely over now. Unless I completely lock myself indoors for the remainder of the month, I’m not going to hit fifty thousand. But I am fairly pleased with what I’ve written so far, a mere fifteen thousand.

As the properly NaNo-brained of you already know, that is a fair way below the proper midway target of twenty-five thousand. But the writing itself doesn’t suck, I’m pleased. Still hoping to finish the first major segment of my novel, too.

How To Fail Gloriously

So, have I learnt anything, aside from accepting non-success?

To be honest, my main lesson was one I’d suspected from the start: for me at least, planning is key. I’m trying to produce something with themes, threads and an interesting plot, mostly to avoid having to ram them in later. These do not tend to appear by themselves.

Not that making it up as you go along, then going back and editing heavily once you’ve worked out what the book’s actually about, isn’t a valid approach – it’s just I’m a little tired of having to rewrite NaNo novels basically from scratch before I can read them without wanting to cry in a bin.

Maybe finishing that Creative Writing MA has left me with a new sense of quality control, who knows. Or I just spent enough time sobbing in skips whilst finishing my thesis. One or the other. (I got a merit in the MA, by the way. Which means graduation! Party time.)

Anyway, based on boring multiplication, I should finish out the month at around thirty thousand. Check back in early December to see whether I got anywhere near it.

Script Frenzy 2011 – Postamble

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Tonight, I finished Script Frenzy. As I did with NaNoWriMo, I think it’s time for some kind of blog in which I look back on the experience, before I forget about it forever and move on to a new writing project, like the cheap no-attention-spanner that I probably am.

To keep this structured, I have once again broken my learnings down to three points, which I’m going to number…

1) Script Frenzy is easier than NaNoWriMo

I’ve done NaNo a few times now, and it has always been a huge, life-consuming experience. Every time I’ve missed doing my NaNo words for a given day, it’s with the knowledge that the next two or three days are going to be crap as a result.

Script Frenzy, I did 25% of the page count on the last two days, and it wasn’t particularly hard work. This isn’t because scripting is easier than prose, I stress, just that 100 pages of script in a month isn’t as hard a target as 50,000 words.

Not sure what we can learn from this going forward. I could try 200 pages next year?

2) I rather miss comic-scripting

I wrote a lot of comic scripts in my early twenties, and then kinda stopped, mostly because I didn’t have enough money to pay someone to draw them, and the networking and praying involved in getting someone half-decent to draw them for free was a bit much.

Of course, I now have savings, although I was perhaps going to save them for buying a house or something, rather than vanity comic publishing. But I did still enjoy doing it again, so I might look into whether it can be made to go somewhere.

3) My new netbook works just fine

In that NaNo post-game blog, I mentioned that it was time to pension off my huge elderly laptop, and I did indeed manage to upgrade it to a nice netbook, that was donated to me for free by someone from Twitter. Score.

So I’ll mention here that a reasonable chunk of my Script Frenzy was written on it, the battery runs for a good two hours, and I am quite happy with that. Hoorah.

Script Frenzy 2011 – Preamble

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Yes, it’s time for a non-story blog post. I am (probably) going to be doing Script Frenzy in April, so I thought I would do a nice intro to it. After all, Script Frenzy is the scripting equivalent of NaNoWriMo, and I did a preamble blog for them.

Script Frenzy requires I produce 100 pages of script in a month, which doesn’t sound too hard. After all, I wrote a sitcom script a couple of months back, and ended up producing 35 pages in less than three days, so I’m going into this primarily with the attitude that it’ll be a fun aside that won’t dominate my life.

If it does take over my writing time completely, I will probably ditch it and focus on the novel, but I have found a scripting project I actually want to do, so hopefully this won’t be too futile. I have a novel I wrote for NaNo a few years back which I thought might make a decent comic book. (Or “graphic novel” if you’re unwilling to admit you read comics.)

Thus I’ll be attempting the adaptation process. This carries the added bonus of not requiring a new idea, only a bit of re-planning.

Fans of this website will be sad to hear it may stop me producing Friday stories during the month of April, sorry about that. I may attempt some blog posts about Script Frenzy; if not, there will definitely be updates on my Twitter. Oh, and if you too are doing Script Frenzy, feel free to add me as a “Writing Buddy” or whatever people do.

NaNoWriMo – Afterthoughts

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A while ago now, I wrote a post saying I was considering doing NaNoWriMo in November. As you’ll probably know if you read my Facebook/Twitter updates in that period, or even spoke to me in real life (gasp), I ended up doing it. And then, I “won” it.

Not just based on the criteria outlined in that original post, no, I ended up doing the full fifty thousand. Why? Do I regret it? Did I learn anything? Well, in order to make my post understandable in an increasingly short-spanned world, I have broken this down into three points.

1) I need a better laptop.

Not the most interesting of discoveries, but probably the most important. My laptop, for those who haven’t encountered it, is massive, old and was bought on eBay for less than a hundred pounds about five years ago, so could well be approaching its tenth birthday. Here’s a picture of said laptop compared to a lovely modern MacBook Air.

Performance-wise, it does suffice, since it can run Word as long as I don’t use anything else at the same time. In terms of concentrating on my writing, this could be a good thing.

The reason it may get pensioned off anyway is the battery-life, which is non-existent. Once removed from power, we’re talking minutes. This was tolerable most of the time, as when I went to these communal writing events, other people had power extensions, but sometimes, major inconvenience to myself or others was caused. If I’m going to continue going to such things post-NaNo (and I might), it’s time to upgrade.

2) Other NaNo people are, it turns out, pleasant

So, yeah, I actually went to those meet-ups and it turns out other people who do NaNo in London are friendly. I’ve done the challenge a few times before, but usually as an exercise in typing away in isolation, with slight encouragement from my friend up the road.

Well, said friend dropped out of any kind of competition after about a week this year, and has also moved to Oxford, so I thought it might be interesting to go and encounter others. Not to mention, at the time I was still entirely unemployed and looking for any encouragement to stop procrastinating.

And yes, everyone was welcoming, I eventually learnt people’s names and have a few new people to talk to on Twitter, and what more could you want from anything? (If you’re me and have a skewed sense of priorities.) Oh, and one of them ended up getting a job in my office. See, if I hadn’t socialised during NaNo, an aspiring author in London might still be unemployed.

3) I also did some actual writing

Yeah, the part where I wrote fifty thousand words. As I muttered in the previous blog post, I was going to try some kind of quality-over-quantity drive, in which I produce less at a more focused speed. That obviously went out the window in the latter days, especially the final few in which I wrote approximately five thousand words each day.

Does this mean the last 15K or so will just be deleted? Very possibly. I have shown a range of earlier chapters to people and had varying feedback (ranging from “this is really good” to “this is awful, just start again”), so there will be extensive re-writes. But I am aiming to try and keep a more ongoing rewrite process going, and end up with something that doesn’t need as many years of edits to become worthwhile.

Having said all that, I have been utterly fatigued since finishing. This and the last three or four Dork Adore reviews have been the only writing I’ve really done. I’m hoping to get back into it soon, though. We’ll see. It was definitely a positive experience, anyway.

And congrats to anyone who stuck with the whole of this blog post. More to the point, congrats to anyone who took part in NaNo, win or lose. It was a good time.

NaNoWriMO – Vascillation Continues

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I’ve been back and forth on doing NaNoWriMo in 2010 for some time now. It is always fun, but also stressful, life-consuming and tends to leave me with manuscripts that are based on decent ideas, but not really well written enough to do anything with. At least, not without ridiculously extensive editing.

Around two weeks ago, I concluded I’d probably try and get a chunk of words done on a new novel in November, but would have to play somewhat fast and loose with the official NaNo rules. I’ve always done this anyway, as I never actually finish the stories in the allotted 50,000 words.

So, I have made up some ridiculously complex personalised rules for myself. I won’t bore you with them, but it involves trying to do about 1,000 words a day, then read over them to make the writing less clunky. And if I miss a day, so be it. No cumulative backlog power-dumps.

This means I’m likely to end up writing… maybe 25 – 30,000 words at an absolute maximum? Which, by NaNo standards, is crap, but is a decent chunk on a new novel and might help me decide if this story idea is working. And hopefully they will be words I don’t venomously hate.

So, yeah, I’m doing NaNoWriMo very badly. Good luck to those of you doing it properly and if you wish to add me on the official NaNoWriMo site, feel free.

(Also, I’m so busy tomorrow with regular blogging/MA stuff that I may not even get my words done. On the first day. This hardly bodes well.)

The Lonely Altar

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Last week, I wrote this story about ducks. It was oddly well-received, and thanks very much to everyone who got in touch through various mediums to tell me they enjoyed it.

So, since it seems rude to only do stories for the prompts that are helpfully based on my dreams, I have done one for this week’s prompt as well. Click below to read it. If you like.

The Lonely Altar

By Nick Bryan

The church had been on the coast. Water eroded the base of its cliff, until rocks began to shift. Never a strong construction to begin with, it struggled to survive the dissolution of its very foundations. Beams tumbled over one another, doors hit the ceiling, but the altar stayed whole.

It was only a wooden table, still. Not one of your stone altars. No-one had been in the church at the time of collapse, so there were no bodies to pray to it with their dying breath. Not one person even saw it go. The nearest town was a mile away. It was alone, without worship or attention.

In short, it was bitter. But there was precious little that a slightly scratched piece of carpentry could do about it.

Years passed.

A teenager, urinating behind some rocks whilst bunking off school, spotted a golden chalice on the ground. He attempted to sell it at a local second hand shop, to fund a huge bottle of cheap cider. Fortunately, the owner recognised it as an artefact of interest and alerted… Eleanor and Edward, wife-and-husband archaeologists.

They prided themselves on the unbiased uncovering of the past, whilst maintaining an air of reckless adventure. So into the rocks they went, armed only with trowels, small plastic bags and some dynamite. They also took the teenager, a shaven-headed miscreant named Lee, to show them the scene of the find.

‘Er, it wos round there.’ Lee gesticulated at the sand. A pile of mishaped stones clung together all around them, and they were well inside a cave by now.

Eleanor and Edward exchanged annoyed glances. This was not useful so far.

‘That’s really useful, darling,’ Eleanor was definitely the people person of the team, ‘but could you be more specific? Did it have roll out from anywhere? Was it a particular time of day? Was it damp?’

This required a mental exertion most reserve for marriage proposals or long division, but their informant finally concluded that it was by the big rock on the left, and might have fallen from beneath. Edward raced over to begin investigating, whilst Eleanor congratulated Lee.

‘Very much appreciate your help, my dear. Here’s your reward as promised.’

A pink purse appeared from one of her twenty-seven pockets and she produced a crisp fifty pound note. He snatched it, grunted something inaudible and raced away, no doubt to buy penny sweets and marbles.

‘What a nice boy.’ Eleanor seemed pleased. Edward refrained from commenting.

Instead, he focused on the chips of paint on these rocks, which not even the tide had washed off. He glanced behind them, kicked the rock a few times and appeared to be reaching for his trowel.

At the last moment, he changed his mind and went for the dynamite. He used only a single stick, and set a short fuse. Then, with a high yell of ‘Fire in the hole, my dear!’, Edward and his wife raced for the cave entrance.

The resultant bang rippled through the cave, practically disintegrating the rock which had been indicated to them. Beneath three or four layers of shaken stone, the altar metaphorically trembled with anticipation as its tomb fell away.

Luckily, few sunbathers used this stretchline of coast, as it was largely cliffs and harsh terrain. So none were drawn to the loud bang, except for its instigators. Edward leapt gleefully into the hole he’d created, and his eyes fell immediately on the altar.

Well, it was more of a sturdy table, thick legs with some carved pattern at the top of each. It was hardly ornate though, merely decorated. There was water damage around its feet, sometimes splitting into cracks, but it seemed that the rocks had protected it from being soaked through. And after many months, it was a touch attention starved.

‘What do you think, darling?’ Eleanor called back from the opening. ‘Is there anything?’

‘Oh…’ He paused, trying to accurately describe the glory before him. ‘I think I’ve found an altar, Eleanor. It’s lovely.’

A simpler mind might think that a particular altar wants you to worship a specific God, or belief system, or eviscerated goat carcass, but they don’t actually make much of a distinction. Like a cat, they just want to be adored.

‘Really?’ Excited, she took a few paces into the gap, still glancing nervously at the shifting noises around her.

‘Oh yes.’ Edward ran a hand along the edge of the altar, impressed at how shiny it remained, even though he wasn’t sure varnish had existed in the relevant period.

Breathless, his wife finally scrambled into sight, and exhaled sharply when she laid eyes on the wooden worship-fodder. It swelled with joy.

‘Get your phone out, darling.’ She grinned. ‘We need to take some photos now and start finding a good home for this one.’

Nodding in profound agreement, he grabbed inside his jacket, expecting his hand to close around a mightily mega-pixeled cameraphone. It didn’t, and his eyes widened.

‘That little turd!’ Spinning on his heel rather too fast, Edward faced Eleanor. ‘Lee, the kid from earlier! He took my phone!’

She merely tutted, but he was incensed.

‘No! This won’t do! Doesn’t he remember we know his name and where he lives? I refuse to be robbed by someone that stupid! I quite simply refuse!’

Crunching up dust as he went, the enraged archeologist stormed away. ‘More importantly, he’s stopping us putting the word out about the altar, and that won’t do! I’m going to see him! And I’m taking the baseball bat.’

‘But, Edward…’ Eleanor called wearily after him, before dashing out of the cave in his wake, wishing she’d a phone with a decent camera. Behind them, the altar was almost orgasmic with glee.

This story copyright 2010 Nick Bryan and so forth. If you wish to somehow use it, let me know and I imagine we can come to some arrangement.