Whimsical.nu

Welcome to “Seasonal writer”

Writing is my first love, and also my greatest fear: so here I write about coming to terms with my limitations and working around them, about musings on writing creatively or otherwise.

Morning writing

Since the start of NaNoWriMo, I’ve been building the habit of writing for thirty minutes in the morning. I’d wake up, and sit in front of the computer and either type away, or hem and haw and be annoyed at not being able to write. I stick with it, though, to “train” myself to “expect” that I will write for thirty minutes when I wake up.

Wake upThe nice thing about writing in the morning is that my inner editor is still half-asleep too. So I just pound out crappy words and typographical errors and I don’t really care: I’m just writing and getting the story (or whatever it is I’m writing) out. Editing can come later.

The result? More words. (Cough.)

It’s not without its challenges, though. Sometimes, I wake up late and I just need to rush! Sometimes, I wake up to a text message and get distracted and everything else just goes down the drain. And even more often: sometimes, I just really need to pee.

There are a couple of things that help with the habit-forming, though:

  1. I open my writing application (Scrivener) and leave the computer open as I go to bed. In the morning, I just get up, sit on my desk, type in my screensaver password, and start writing directly.
  2. I think about what I want to write about before I go to sleep and repeat it to myself a couple of times. This way, the chances are good that I will write about it in the morning!
  3. I type with my eyes closed. (This obviously won’t work if you’re not very comfortable with typing without looking at the keyboard!) I type worse when I’m not looking at the screen, but it actually helps! (Of course, I’m also half-asleep, so it’s just easier to let my eyes just close up of their own accord…) Once I’m fully awake, or sometime during the day, I do go over what I’ve written to correct the typos–if I leave it for too long, I won’t remember! (This has happened to me before with my morning freewriting.)
  4. I usually do well to write emotional, vivid, and/or “dreamy” and evocative scenes while in this half-asleep state, and not action-oriented, “exciting” scenes. This is pretty much an observation of my writing style while I’m in my half-asleep state, so your mileage may vary, but to make use of this, I try to plan to write appropriate scenes in the morning.

This is something I’ll definitely continue to do moving forward, and maybe improve on it by actually giving myself a word count target for this morning writing, even outside the bounds of NaNoWriMo.

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NaNoWriMo week 2 recap

NaNoWriMo week two: started out horribly, but it worked out in the end. Still have quite a bit to go!

I decided I’d post the NaNoWriMo weekly recap video up on Mondays instead of Wednesdays, because a half week from when I made the video is too long and loses its “timeliness” factor.

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NaNoWriMo week 1 recap

Gasp! A video blog post!

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Nine ways to not write a novel in November

PaperBecause it is November and it is NaNoWriMo, it is also the time of year when procrastination from writing becomes so fun and so…exciting! Procrastinating now feels so…rebellious.

Here are my top nine nifty ways to not write a novel in November!

  1. Play games. This is pretty bad for me this month. I only have roughly a month to go before Cataclysm (the next expansion of World of Warcraft) hits, I recently bought a PlayStation 3. Ohh the joys of killing pixelly things on a screen.
  2. Clean the house. What’s worse, it needs to be done. It is a valid excuse, is it not? And there is a certain sense of calm in the normalcy of house-cleaning, in how ordered it is, how everything has a process…which can’t really be said of my writing “process”.
  3. Watch movies. Outside with others, or at home, it doesn’t matter. I have DVDs to watch! TV movies to rent! I have fifteen free a month, I must not let it go to waste! (Or so I say.)
  4. Internet hopping. I am sadly really prone to this. I look up something quick in Wikipedia, and unless I’m dreadfully needed elsewhere, I will end up with 10 opened tabs with topics in Wikipedia. The worst sites for this is Wikipedia and Youtube, I find. I have ended up doing it a lot over the past days: I have a lot of research to go through!
  5. Write on my journal. Of course, sometimes, writing anything but my novel is just impossible to resist.
  6. Talk or write about NaNoWriMo. *cough* Hence, this post. Talk about writing the novel! Talk about how to write the novel! Talk about not writing the novel!
  7. Come up with a website or a book cover for the novel. Well, it’s still novel-related, right? So that’s part of NaNoWriMo, right? Right?
  8. Sleep. Writing can sometimes produce headaches, when the words just don’t come. Of which the only cure is not writing and sleeping.
  9. Have an online social life. Be it NaNoWriMo boards, sudden activity in journals and other communities–being active in online communities suddenly makes a lot of sense. “I’m on the computer anyway, so why not peek in at the forums?” 50 topics later, 0 words in novel.

What are your favorite non-novel-writing activities during NaNoWriMo?

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Pre-NaNo post, plus a calendar!

NaNoWriMo starts in only a few days more!! OMG. I have not done any significant planning the past few weeks due to a couple of personal on-goings, so I’m just barreling head-on this year’s NaNo in much the same way as I did in previous years. D:

Good luck to me, and all of us!

I did make my own wallpaper calendar. I meant to make more sizes, but as with the rest of my planning, I never got around to it; so with much less pomp and blare as I initially planned, here is my NaNo calendar, free for download and use, in wide and regular format.

(Base image is this lovely notebook and pen.)

NaNoWriMo 2010 calendar, regular version NaNoWriMo 2010 calendar, wide version

Hope you like it!

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Progress, or lack thereof: list o’ links instead

I wish I could say that I’ve seen some progress with my NaNoWriMo research, but I haven’t been able to look into it again. Shameful, I know. But I’ve bookmarked a couple of sites to read through/study in preparation for NaNo, and I thought I’d share some of them in case it’s useful to someone else.

The most research I will likely be doing that may be relevant to others are on language creation and world building, hence the list of links is geared towards that.

On making languages

On Philippine history/legends

General worldbuilding

If you know of other websites, please share!

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The 2010 NaNoWriMo Novel plans

I'm talking about: plans for NaNoWriMo 2010

This year’s NaNoWriMo undertaking will be a story idea I’ve had for the longest time, but I’ve never started because it wasn’t the “right time”, whatever that is.

You see, I’ve been plagued with “not-the-right-time-itis”, as well as “I-think-I’m-the-best-thing-since-sliced-bread-itis”. I will always feel like I need more research and practice before I write “my masterpiece”.

Uh, wake up, Angela. It’s not even done yet. How in the world will it be anywhere near a masterpiece?! You don’t even know if the idea is interesting!

So I decided I’d whack myself over the head, laugh heartily at my stupidity and ignorance, and sit down and write the damn thing badly. At least, at the end of NaNo, I will have 50,000+ words of crap and I can either finally trash the idea, or if it’s actually usable (:O!!), start the manuscript massacre.

The premise

It’s an almost-alternate-reality slightly-historical fiction novel, based on an event in early Philippine history: Ferdinand Magellan’s arrival in the Philippines, and Lapu-lapu’s battle against him. Lapu-lapu is hailed as the first hero of the country, that Magellan was the enemy, that Humabon was a traitor. But were they really what they seemed to be? We know of Magellan, Lapu-lapu, Humabon, Pigafetta. But there are so many other people then. Did all of them think the same?

Hence my story was born. Slightly historical, but I don’t want it to be: I don’t have enough research, I don’t even speak Cebuano (though my mother is an Ilongga). Since I like reading and writing fantasy, I’ll weave some elements in, give it a sense of magical realism. Something with the feel of Arlene J. Chai’s Eating Fire and Drinking Water, which I think is brilliant, chilling, amazing.

Too many things to do, so little time.

Yes, there are far too many things to do to prefer for NaNo. I’ll have to wing most of it, but some things I want to look into:

  1. Create a language – I want to further remove the setting from strict historical fiction to a looser one, hence the differing language. It will remain similar to Filipino (Tagalog dialect, although theoretically this should be Cebuano), with some similar words.
  2. Re-read Eating Fire and Drinking Water for a refresh, as well as other magical realism novels, depending on time. My “writing voice” is easily swayed by books I am currently reading, so I should be very careful if I read other books with differing styles.
  3. Flesh out the characters a bit more, put down some notes in writing.
  4. Sort through older research work on folk tales – I did a fair bit of research earlier on some folk tales, but have dumped all of these into flat files with no real organization to them. I need to pinpoint ones that I need to look into, again.

I have my work cut out for me, but I should just barrel ahead, whatever preparation (or lack of preparation) I’ve had.

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A month with the editorial calendar

It’s been a month since I’ve started using an editorial calendar on Whimsical.nu to help me stay organized and motivated with blogging. It’s been four weeks, enough time for Firefox to know that I want my editorial calendar whenever I type “cal” into the address field. Enough time to get into the swing of things.

And we are definitely swinging.

I wouldn’t call it the best thing since sliced bread, but it’s quite close. Anyone who’s known me for a while online can probably tell: I’ve never blogged this regularly before. Using the editorial calendar for a month has helped me develop a (public-) writing habit, which I’ve not done for many years now. It may not be creative writing, but just having the habit back again is a good enough start.

The setup

I’ve stuck to my weekly plan: each weekday, at 10am, a post goes up on a certain category.

  1. Mondays are for personal, life-related entries;
  2. Tuesdays are for geeky and tech stuff;
  3. Wednesdays are for posts on writing;
  4. Thursdays are for books;
  5. and Fridays are for gaming-related articles.

How soon a post is ready for scheduling really depends. I’ve had posts ready almost a week before, but I’ve also written a post right the same morning it was supposed to go up (call it an epiphany: I suddenly thought of a better topic to post about than the one I had scheduled).

For the calendar itself, I use the Editorial Calendar WordPress plugin. I’ve modified it slightly to change the colors of the table cells, to give me a visual cue of which days are for which categories (shown below).

I move posts around in the calendar by dragging them between weeks, but always never by too much. I keep post ideas as blank posts in the calendar, and keep them in the next week’s category-day for later perusal. It’s fairly quick to type in a topic for a title, add a couple notes in bullet and plain text (that’s how this entry started!), and return to it at a later date.

Two weeks onward in the Editorial Calendar

Two weeks onward in the Editorial Calendar

The photo above is a good example of what two weeks forward in the calendar looks like, for me. I have fairly set posts planned for the Geek, Writer, and Gamer categories in the October 4-8 week, and most of the other post ideas have been moved to the next weeks for those categories. I still have not decided on which post ideas to develop for the Girl and Reader categories here, so I have a couple of choices still up for those days.

The good things

The visual prompt of the WordPress plugin is certainly helping me focus on blogging. With a glance, I can see problem points: oh no, I still don’t have a post for the next Writer category! (which is an all-too-often occurrence here, sigh). I can see a quick overview of what topics I’ve already thought of, and pick one to write in when I have time and the inspiration to write about it.

Scheduling posts, instead of quickly posting them after they’re written, is also putting me in a less stressed-out frame of mind. (I hear planning can do that for you.) They also go out at 10am every day, which is a plus (although, well, my 10am is not the whole world’s 10am!).

Things to work on

As with any system, I still need to work out a couple of things. The most significant one would probably be a way to balance light and heavy posts easily. With the way I’ve set things up, there’s no easy way for me to quickly gauge a post’s “weight”. Always writing heavy, content-rich posts can be rather tiring, and honestly it should also be fairly monotonous to readers. Fun, lighter posts would definitely be a good way to break things up a little.

But I suppose that’s also one thing I need to work on: the art of making short, light posts. They sometimes seem to be the most challenging to write! After all, a content-rich post is usually something I feel relatively strongly about, enabling me to talk about it at some length (the usual challenge is: what to not-say in a post!). Lighter posts make me sometimes feel that I’m being a cop-out, or boring. A photo as a post? How interesting is that? A list of links? But how do I choose good links?

I would also like to eventually be able to post on weekends, although currently I don’t think I can handle such a rigorous blogging schedule. Just this weekend was spent writing/finishing a couple of posts–set for the whole week, and a few more days onward. An additional 2 posts/week would be a bit on the heavy side.

A new habit that’s here to stay

I’m pretty pleased that I’ve been able to integrate blogging, and the editorial calendar, into my life: this is something that’s definitely here to stay. I may tweak a couple more things about it as I work with the process: it’s a living process, something that needs to evolve: and it’s flexible enough to evolve with me.

Is this style of blogging for everyone? Probably not. More personal blogs will likely not need this kind of setup. One-man blogs might not need such a system, as well. But the organization and focus an editorial calendar provides–any editorial calendar system, whichever tool you use–certainly has its perks, and is worth a month’s look-see.

Useful resources

To end, here are a couple useful blog posts and resources regarding using editorial calendars for blogging–not details may be applicable but I’ve picked up ideas here and there from these:

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The Impossible Dream

I'm talking about: dreams

I originally wrote this last night, for a journal entry. But after finishing it, I decided I would post it as today’s entry, instead, under both Writer and Girl, because it is something very personal to me in addition to being about writing.

I think I just had an inkling of what a full-time writer (blogger? contributor? author?) must be like.

I have just come up for air from nonstop writing. Okay, that’s not technically true, because I’m still writing. That sounds kind of fail, but well, here I am writing in my journal. I wrote the whole day yesterday: broken by two meals, and intermittently to dump clothes in the washing machine and hang them up to dry. I wrote ’til 1AM, after which I (foolishly) played Final Fantasy I (it is on the iPhone omg!) until around 3AM (I had to stop because my iPhone power ran out). Today, I stayed in and wrote again, broken by Mass, one meal (I have yet to eat dinner!), and a thorough scrubbing of the bathroom. In a bit, I will make dinner, turn on the TV and iron my clothes. Ah, the calls of domestic life.

I’ve been writing almost nonstop. Some online researching, as well. The result of all of this is, I have blog entries scheduled and ready to go for the whole coming week, and the next two Fridays. That is almost crazy. I have around five more drafts that need working on, in various degrees, but very doable drafts.

I was talking to my friend Jaydee for a bit today, when I went on WoW to do some screen capping for some of these articles. I told him I was just capping for blog entries, and that I was back to blogging again, and that what I meant for just one entry has ended up to be three entries in one series. He said (translated), “that’s because you like writing, so you write a lot.”

And you know what…he’s right. He’s absolutely right.

I don’t know if this feeling of an epiphany is a phase or not–but it’s a good feeling. It’s a good feeling to be writing again, dealing with words again. Words have never been alien from my life–I’ve always journaled–but writing for public consumption is a different feeling, whether it’s creative or otherwise. I haven’t felt this in a while (the last time was high school, in fact). I’m not saying I’m a good writer: I’m still finding (re-finding?) my voice. I’m certain my blog posts are all over the place in terms of writing tone and style and voice. With my mercuriality, I may never have just one voice, and I may never be able to correctly harness and organize these multiple voices. I don’t know. But it’s wonderful to just write, anyway. It’s wonderful to see the number of visitors rise ever so slowly over the weeks. It is a small, cozy number, but I’m happy just the same–maybe even inordinately happy.

Creative writing might be a different story. I haven’t gotten back to creative writing yet, although I’m gearing up for it by signing up for NaNoWriMo this year. But I’m willing to give it a shot, again. If a month’s daily blogging placed me where I am now, another month of daily blogging should help me with NaNoWriMo, fail plot and all.

A whole weekend of writing. Sitting here looking back at it (with a growling tummy, I might add–I should go have dinner soon, but soon soon soon when I’m done with this entry) I am amazed, abashed, and so very grateful. A month ago, this would never have been possible. But I’m here now, and I can almost see the progress I’m making right before my eyes. Quantity is a poor indicator, but quantity is better than nothing.

Suddenly, it feels like my dreams of writing for a living–and enjoying it, in the same way I’ve enjoyed making websites for a living, that is to say, it has its highs and lows but I enjoy it all the same–is not so impossible after all. The possibility is faint, and fragile, and I may yet bungle things up…but it’s not some unattainable dream that I have lost somewhere along the way, now.

It’s there, so faint, so far away. But it’s actually there.

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NaNoWriMo Twenty Ten

This has been on and off in my head for a while now. October is just around the corner, and November soon after that. The time to decide is now: Do I set myself up for another failed NaNoWriMo?

November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. Every November, writers and aspiring writers go for a mad dash to 50,000 words–a novel–by the end of the month. That’s around 1,667 words a day. There is no entrance fee, there are no prizes. None except the exhilaration of accomplishment and a first draft of a novel.

Or not. (As in my case.)

The earliest NaNo “manuscript” I have is 2002. I haven’t joined every year, because some years I feel kinder to myself and opt not to fail again by not even starting.

The sprint to 50,000, but ending in around 21,000

So what went wrong all those times? I’m not entirely sure. Everyone loses steam at some point in November, but not everyone who loses steam fails to turn in the 50,000. At some point, I’ve just always ended up not finishing.

  1. Story 1 (plus at least one more): a story I don’t know anymore. It’s been that long. An “original” story, one I haven’t worked on before. A failure. I have notes scattered here and there, but it never got very far.
  2. Story 2: a rewrite of Chimerage, the story I wrote back in high school for the school newspaper. It spawned a trilogy after the initial, standalone story, which of course was not as good as the original. I thought to get down and dirty, and rewrite it. Uh, failure.
  3. Story 3: a semi-autobiographical story of a certain portion of my life. Almost strictly for personal perusal, I got the idea from the fact that I do a lot of journal writing. A journal-writing-style novel would be easy to do, right? Uh, no. Too close for comfort. Emotional upheaval. Fail.

So, um. Out of ideas. Why is 50,000 words of substandard frenzied writing so difficult to do when I can write 2,000 word journal entries without blinking an eye? (Not really, but you know what I mean.)

Proof that I am crazy

Yes, I am crazy. I must be a masochistic this year, as well, because I’ve decided to give it a shot. 50,000 words in 30 days. 1,700 words a day.

What story? A completely new one. One that I’ve wanted to write for some time now, but I kept putting it off because I didn’t have enough research done. It’s semi-historical in nature, so while I know I could never make every single detail just right, I didn’t want to rush in blindly. Sadly, the research I needed was research I could only really do in the Philippines. There are likely some texts and information I can get online, but very little, and not all reliable. I can sense that most, if not all, of whatever I write for this story would be useless.

Then why even bother?

Because if I don’t bother now, when? I’ll never have the luxury of time to do enough research. And once I get into research mode, I’ll just do that–research. There won’t be enough, because it will always be vague, as histories go. So my story won’t be strictly historical. Well, maybe that’s all right. Maybe I can rectify things later on. Maybe.

But for now, it’s time to try again.

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