Whimsical.nu

Welcome to a Whimsical Blog~

Hi, I'm Angela, a girl with a blog on five different psyches:
girl, geek, reader, writer, gamer
Choose your poison ♥

NaNoWriMo Day 8: Trudging along

I hadn’t written more than 700 words the two previous days, but as Singapore is on a holiday today, I tried to catch up. I did pretty well, I think:

[pfmeter id=3 target=50000 progress=20299]

That’s almost half of the goal by the eighth day, which isn’t bad at all (this might still grow within the day, as it’s only 9pm). Unfortunately, I’m still not half into the 2.5 years that my memoir is supposed to cover. Granted, there shouldn’t be too much after the first year, but I’m unearthing a lot of things from my journals as I go along that I never really know.

There are two things that are bogging me down from going through the events:

  1. Research. There’s a lot of journal entries to wade through, both relevant and irrelevant to the memoir, but things I need to go through anyway.
  2. Processing. This does chronicle a trying time in my life, and going through my journals is painful and troublesome.

I’ve come to the conclusion that creation itself is also scary. It’s not just the pain that going further in the memoir is going to give me, but also the general reluctance and fear that comes packaged into translating something into writing. Already I’m running into decisions that I’m putting off until the second draft: decisions and questions like, should I be as faithful as possible to what really happened or can I combine certain conversations together in order to conserve space? and how do I filter out effectively all that’s not needed, or how do I compact these into shorter, more concise scenes?

Already, I see that whatever my output for this month is, by the second draft, it’s going to be cut by half. I’m going to have to wade in with a highlighter and highlight important scenes and ideas and emotions, and find out how to make it more concise (see Questions Number One, above) and cut off the rest. I also see that I am going to need a printer, and lots of scrap paper. Oh joy.

2 Comments

Thoughts on the Memoir (Day 4)

So today I think I overreached myself a bit; my Excel report card told me I would finish by November 13 if I kept this speed up. That’s because I’m now at:

[pfmeter id=3 target=50000 progress=10466]

I stopped myself from writing more this afternoon mostly because I don’t want to suddenly inexplicably burn out, and because while things are getting “interesting”, I want to think about things a bit more. The first painful part of the story is “over”, although I feel that I wasn’t able to treat it correctly: not objective enough, not emotional enough. That sounds rather contradictory, but I’ve yet to find that balance.

I’m writing the memoir mostly in chronological order, although I’m ending up going back to a few previous scenes again and again to add/modify a few things as I remember them. I currently don’t have any chapters whatsoever, and sadly I’ve also needed to combine a few conversations or jump a few events just for the sake of moving the memoir along. Even so, I feel that I haven’t given things proper focus. As the writing progresses, I feel that I’m going to go back to the start and tweak with things, as well as add a few more things here and there, to minimize the sudden jumps (i.e., “The next week…”) and to provide a bit more insight into feelings. I’m going through it so quickly that I think it reads almost like an adventure story, although it really should be more about emotions, motivations, and the like.

The challenge here is the source. I’m basically going through my journals to grasp how the events moved along, but as I had not written about it for the longest time, I’ve had to rely on a few chance mentions and memory, both of which aren’t very detailed or clear. I do write at length about it once I had started, but right now my memoir is dealing with that point in time when I’m not writing much about the situation.

I feel that once November is over and the actual draft is done, I’ll be spending December editing the hell out of the memoir, and removing whole chunks of text, rewriting a few things, and rearranging how the story is told. At the moment I feel that a lot of the start is dragging, and that I should find a better way to “show” how things are without going on and on about things practically a day at a time. 10,000 words and I’m only at the third month in a timespan of almost three years. That’s not really easy reading. (Not that it’s meant to be easy reading.)

2 Comments

What’s in a Name Reading Challenge

Courtney posted on her reading blog a few days ago about What’s in a Name?, an interesting reading challenge that spans one year, and requires one to read at least six books in that span of time. Seeing as this merges well with my 50 book challenge practice, I’ve decided I’ll join.

Basically, one has to read six books whose title match a certain, predefined criteria (see the challenge post for more information), and post the list somewhere. And then one just has to read the six (or more, I suppose!) books between January 1, 2008 and December 31, 2008.

Sounds interesting. I took a bit from my to-read list, since that makes a lot of sense!

Last updated: 11 August 2008
Note: books read are emphasized!

My Challenge List

I listed a few possible books for each criteria, and some still don’t have a set book for them. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to comment! :)

  1. A book with a color in its title.

    The Golden Bowl by Henry James
    Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller
    Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt
    Red Azalea by Anchee Min

  2. A book with an animal in its title.

    The Kestrel by Lloyd Alexander
    And Condors Danced by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
    Zorro by Isabel Allende

  3. A book with a first name in its title.

    Guenevere, Queen of the Summer Country by Rosalind Miles
    Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
    Katherine by Anya Seton
    Empress Orchid by Anchee Min

  4. A book with a place in its title.

    The Knight of the Sacred Lake by Rosalind Miles
    Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
    Petersburg by Andrei Bely
    Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
    Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho
    Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

  5. A book with a weather event in its title.

    The Silent Storm by Sherri Garland

  6. A book with a plant in its title.

    Juniper by Monica Furlong
    Frangipani by Celestine Hitiura Vaite

6 Comments

Day 2: Changing POVs

The second day of NanoWriMo has come and gone. I’m off to retire, but I wanted to write a bit before I did. I’m going along rather splendidly in terms of the word count goal. I stopped as I hit some faintly problematic stuff in memoir-writing: that is, research into the exact sequence of events and things. It’s still a little slow going.

[pfmeter id=3 target=50000 progress=4278]

One thing to note, however, was that I changed the point of view of my story in the middle of writing it. Since this is a memoir, I’ve been writing it in first-person perspective. Unfortunately, a few problems came up, namely:

  • limited knowledge; or, inability to provide a bigger perspective of each scene, and
  • it increasingly felt a little too close for comfort.

The second issue is due largely to the fact that I am writing about a certain time in my life: it’s currently a bit too “close” to me. Since the point of this exercise is also to do some post-processing of that situation, I decided a more objective, distant voice would better suit this scenario.

Hence, now I am writing in third-person omniscient, and I have a chunk of text greyed out in my text that needs to be converted over to that POV in time, as well as expanded. I kept it in since it’s really part of the story, I just need to do a rewrite.

The Wikipedia entry for Point of View actually has the exact same scenario that I am using (although it’s an advantage in my case):

The disadvantage of this mode is that it creates more distance between the reader and the story. A variation is where the narrator is a character in the story; a small amount of the story might be told in first person.

I kept the first part of the memoir in first-person; the introduction/prologue, if you will. I will probably expand this in time, but for now it will have to do — I don’t want to go in and edit it since that might bog me down.

2 Comments

NaNoWriMo Day One, and Wallpapers

So NaNoWriMo has officially started. Well, it’s technically the second day of NaNo for me, as it’s 12:05 AM at this very moment. I started a bit after midnight last night, as I couldn’t sleep, and wrote for an hour. Not bad for the first session:

[pfmeter id=3 target=50000 progress=919]

Sadly, I haven’t written more today, mostly due to getting home late and other sundry duties, along with a reprise of the wallpapers I did for NaNo last year. I hadn’t redone them this year, as I didn’t know there were others who would like to use them again this year–but I was wrong! I feel quite fulfilled that others remembered my wallpaper and liked it. :3

Again, the wallpapers come in both large and small versions, and with black/white backgrounds:

Wallpaper with a large calendar Wallpaper with a small calendar

Feel free to grab the wallpapers from wallpapers.indisguise.org :)

Now I’m off to do a bit more writing. This really isn’t too healthy, I should try to start writing earlier and sleep earlier…

4 Comments