Average Joe and the Beauty: The Sisters That Defy Fate is out now!

You can find it on Amazon.com/ajb2.  Here's the blurb below: 


This direct sequel to Average Joe and the Beauty: Shadow Spinner takes you on a thrill ride of colossal proportions as Joe and the gang face both mystical and technological terrors in order to find and rescue Melissa's missing sister from an unexpected place, a place that haunts Joe's nightmares even today. Witness a dangerous magical battle unfold before your own and Joe's very eyes as the teen and his guardian, Liandra try to protect his friends. And follow along as Joe learns something new and vital about himself, something that could change his very life and the lives of those around him.

When backed into a corner with nowhere else to go, can even an average guy do extraordinary things?

Liandra walks a slippery line between trying to unearth clues about her past and future destiny versus protecting the boy she's accidentally involved in her mess. Now, on top of that she's dedicated herself to helping those suffering under Grabas' tyranny including Melissa and her sisters. To that end, she'll do whatever it takes to save them ... but, Grabas, her old friend has the answers she needs to ignite the most profound change in her, greater than what she can accomplish with her shapeshifting abilities.

Average Joe and the Beauty: Shadow Spinner is out now!

You can find it on Amazon.com/ajb.  Here's the blurb below:

After wishing for a more interesting life, average teen Joe Black now simply wishes for a return to normalcy. He lives a life of fear and stress after his principal tries to kill him. Liandra, whose mystical artifact is keeping Joe protected, seeks out information about her past through clues gained from investigating her old friend, Robert Grabas. During these investigations of his research facilities, she uncovers cruel experimentations with low survival rates performed on people who haven't the means to decline them. Liandra uses her mystical abilities to help those who can't help themselves and to uncover the truth about her past, which is tied intricately to Robert Grabas.

Grabas himself is seeking power by all means at his disposal. He seeks to kill Joe by using his old friend, Principal William Patrias to do the deed since the boy saw vital aspects of his trafficking operation. He also exploits his political clout, construction company, and personal relationships to empower himself and carry out his ever evolving goals. He wants Liandra at his side, but since she is nowhere near ready, he will help her unravel her past, the hard way.

My NaNoWriMo 2014, The Phoenix Rises and the Phoenix Dies

I know that a lot of you out there are participating in the National Novel Writing Month and some of you don’t even know what it is.  I’ll give a shorthand explanation below.  But this is the tale of my early successes, ultimate failure, and the insights I’ve gained from it that I feel can prove useful to others such as yourselves.  So here goes.

The Goal: Write 50,000 Words of a Novel in a Month (November)

The Book: Average Joe and the Beauty (ending), Average Joe and the Side Story

The Plan: Pre-Write (Brainstorm, General Outline, Chapter-by-Chapter Outline, Research) For The Month of October, Start Contest On Time, Daily Incremental Word Increases During Work Days, Large Production Hikes On Off Days, Finish AJB, and Make Great Progress Into AJSS.

The Reality:

Soooo, things didn’t quite go as planned.  I started my prewriting late into October but still managed to make a nice amount of chapter outlines in a style that I was experimenting with.  My chapter outlines are typically vague when it comes to details regarding the setting and place in time.  I typically flow through a story and hit a point where it becomes important to know what time of day it is or what part of the month the characters are in for silly stuff like weather patterns, lunar cycles, and all the other continuity that we real life air breathers take for granted.  This new style of outline helped me keep track of all that with ease and made setting up scenes a breeze.  While more time consuming than my standard methods, this new style of outline has proven much more comfortable to me than I expected and has proven to be just as flexible as my previous outlining style.  As always, things changed once I started writing scenes for the contest so that flexibility in my outline was paramount.

The Phoenix Rises…

I only had about ten days of actual prewriting done for the contest, which is probably a generous number but those ten days worth of notes gave me a strong start for the contest.  What can I say, I’ve always been a last minute homework, project, and test crammer.  Hell, I completed last year’s NaNo only through some last minute miracle cramming so I shouldn’t be surprised.  I started the contest on day one and started writing early before I had to do whatever the task of that day was.  I opted not to do a midnight start for reasons I don’t remember.  I also don’t remember how each and every one of those first ten days went but I remember producing fairly well and then getting a huge mega boost on the sixth or seventh day from writing all night.  The site was down the first night so I was also behind on posting my actual word count by about a day.

…The Phoenix Burns and Learns…

I hit a snag when I ran out of outline.  I was also on a slow part of my story that required more setup and detail than I’d prepared.  It was here that I learned the awesome and crazy skill of “living in the scene”.  My general outline had character motivations, events, and outcomes.  The chapter outline I made up detailed the time, which characters were in the scene, who the chapter revolved around, where the scene was taking place, where the scene would end up, in addition to the character motivations, events, and outcomes of that scene.  What I didn’t have was what “living in the scene” gave me.  Living in the scene is an extra way of imagining your scene.  It can be accomplished through intense imagining of a scene which requires unwavering concentration.  I had to close my eyes at times and interact with the characters to see how they moved and interacted with the environment around them.  Acting out the scene (as quietly as I could or mentally) also became necessary during the intense final struggle of the book.  There was a lot of emotion and a lot at stake and I really had to dig into all that which slowed the typical breakneck writing process of the month.  I also had a unique creature at the end that I could only vaguely describe.  I had words to describe it but they weren’t visceral enough so I took time out to draw the creature.  It came out pretty good and all the words I needed came easily after.  

So I guess what I didn’t account for was the importance of the setting and how it affected everything in the scene.  The environment is a huge character and requires a huge amount of imagination.  Conjuring that much detail is tiring and should be a part of the prewriting if possible, I think.  If not you certainly can’t rush through building them, I know I couldn’t.  Anyways I kept writing but my daily word count plunged significantly and then came the days that I didn’t write at all.  Strangely though I didn’t feel guilty about my lack of writing like I normally did.  I only sat back and played videogames, particularly Dark Souls.  I didn’t even fret about it.  I kept on like that for a week before I picked up my pen and paper or touched the Average Joe files on my computer.  When I started writing again it flowed pretty well and I wrapped up the chapter I was working on much better than I expected.  But my word count wasn’t anywhere close to where it needed to be.  I felt that the story was definitely getting what it needed though and my ruminations felt natural.  I didn’t feel the need to rush that process to finish the contest.  NaNoWriMo was secondary and soon lost its significance altogether for me.  I still had a desire in me to “win” but my desire to be at peace and enjoy life was much stronger for the month.  So by the 20^th of the month I knew I could pull another miracle like last year if I really tried but I had no desire to do so.  I kept working on the book at a slow rate and by the end only mustered a little under 15,000 words.  Utter failure for the contest.

The Phoenix Fails and But Considers What He’s Gained

So I knew it was over by the 20^th day and my production had almost halted completely.  After a ton of heavy research I managed to complete this difficult chapter I’d been working on that was a huge departure from the rest in terms of setting and characters.  Now today on the 30^th I am officially tapping out and preparing to post my final paltry word count before the contest even ends.  But you know what—I’m okay with that.  Like last year, I have gained a tremendous about of insight into what makes me tick as a writer.  I’ve gained some invaluable tools in my writing process: like being able to live in a scene, using drawing to flesh out ideas and characters, and using (bad) acting to understand the physicality of the characters.  These techniques were born out of desperation, coffee, and lack of sleep but they’re better than the alternatives.  I plan to enter into next year’s NaNo but this time with much more powerful mental tools at my disposal.  As for now I will continue to pluck away at my projects.

NaNoWriMo Tips:

+Pick your NaNoWriMo project early.  I was going to write a completely original novel for the contest but changed my mind at the last minute because I thought what I chose would be easier and would align with my business goals.

+Outline your ass off!  Do it all year if you can.  If you have separate projects just for NaNo do it as early as possible.  Don’t just make a general outline, make a chapter outline as well.  Make it as detailed as possible, you can always change it if you need to but those details help the writing flow a lot easier than coming up with them on the fly.  October is a great month to outline as all of that research and those notes are fresh in your mind for November.  Just be consistent with it.

+Remember that editing is its own step, its own process.  Do your BEST to ensure that you’re not editing too much, you don’t want it to take too much time away from your writing.

+Try different techniques to visualize your novel, to see the action in your mind as you write.  Practice early, preferably during the outlining process.  Doing this can cut down on the changes you make mid-chapter.  Most of my issues arose because I had no idea how something looked or how a “crafte” (magic) felt, sounded, or how it affected the environment.

+Write out a detailed description of your environment beforehand along with a list words to describe it.  Admittedly I can’t even see myself doing this but I wish I did.  If you can’t tell already I have the tendencies of both a “prepper” and a “pantser”.

-Don’t play lots of videogames.  As a matter of fact, If you want to win unplug your XCubeStation 9 and have a loved one hide it.  If you have self-control, hide it yourself and then hire a mentalist to make you forget where you put it because we all know that you don’t really have as much self-control as you think.

-Don’t wait for a muse.  The act of writing itself helps get the creative juices flowing.  I am always surprised at how quickly I can get going even when I reaaaaaaaaally don’t feel like writing.

-Don’t do anything I did this year.  Basically all of my above tips amount to this.

So that’s my NaNoWriMo story this year, what’s yours?  Comment and link to your blog if you have one so that I can read your NaNoWriMo stories.  Thanks again for the browse and good luck next year!

My NaNoWriMo 2013

Part 1

http://belartscorner.blogspot.com/2013/12/my-nanowrimo-story-part-1.html

Part 2

http://belartscorner.blogspot.com/2013/12/my-nanowrimo-story-part-2.html

Part 2 ½

http://belartscorner.blogspot.com/2013/12/my-nanowrimo-story-part-2_11.html

Part 3

http://belartscorner.blogspot.com/2013/12/my-nanowrimo-story-part-3.html

Part 4

http://belartscorner.blogspot.com/2013/12/my-nanowrimo-story-part-4.html

Part 5

http://belartscorner.blogspot.com/2013/12/my-nanowrimo-story.html

My NaNoWriMo Story Part 5

The Win

Sooooo…I won.  I submitted my story, Average Joe and the Beauty, a whole day ahead of the deadline of November 30th.  I cranked out some crazy production in the last six days thanks to coffee, excitement, and a pure “fuck this I’m winning” attitude.  My chapter outlines kept me focused and on track throughout the story.  I’m so glad that I had wrote them out ahead of time but at the end I had surpassed them and had no time to write new ones so I just wrote from the seat of my pants like many other NaNo “Pantsers” out there.  Admittedly most of this huge production of words was complete crap, stuff I should have erased as I was writing it and I know that later I’ll groan when I have to go back and read this stuff.  The point is that it got done and I did something I thought impossible.

As I was writing this portion of my NaNo story I wondered if I should be more suspenseful.  I obviously decided against it (XD) so I’ll just tell you how the whole submitting process went.  So I arrived at work really early, hours before even the early morning cooks, and opened up NaNoWriMo.org.  On the website I searched the FAQ section.  I had seen that there was a way to “scramble” the words of a submission before it’s submitted for validation.  I followed the steps which was really just using Find and Replace on MS Word to replace all letters with capital and lowercase A’s.  I did this because I am way too paranoid.  Now I will admit here that I cheated in validating my novel.  I hadn’t kept up with transferring my written words into virtual text and had given up before even the halfway point to focus strictly on writing the story out.  Knowing this I simply used my previous novel, Average Joe and the Extraordinaires , to validate this one.  Underhanded I agree but I assure you that I kept very accurate word counts in my notebook.  I took a count after every page and wrote the number at the top of that particular page.  I only validated what I had written.

After submitting my novel for validation I got my official word count (51,816).   I watched the awkward-ish (though charming) video of the NaNo crew and could do nothing but smile.  I felt so damn good.  I downloaded all of the cool winner’s graphics that they put up on the page and marveled at my wonderfully inaccurate word count.  The website shaved off 16 words but what’s 16 words between friends—a lot if my novel was 50,015 words.  After I sat there a while and quickly pondered over the month I couldn’t help but feel sad.  It was all over and I knew what I would do next but also knew that I would have to come out of this intoxicating bubble—this solitary private party—and join all of you back in the real world.  Life demands balance and I desperately needed to get back to mine.

So I was now done and I had won and won big.  What did I win?  A headache I suppose.  A 51,816 word labyrinth that I had to search through to find something worthwhile.  NaNoWriMo doesn’t really give it’s winners a prize but I believe that it does reward winners with something very useful.  The contest rewarded me with the ability to silence my inner editor whenever I want and helped bolster the production of my writing.  I can now put myself in a “NaNo state” at any given time in order to shut all the distractions out and get serious production going.  Towards the end I honestly did see a glaring weakness in the way that I wrote.  I wrote mainly to satisfy my plot with all other elements coming in second to that.  Now I don’t think that this is the proper way to write.  The character should always come first and not just the main character but every character in the book.  Your mains should have an arc and your supporting characters should all have interests and fully developed lives outside of the plot.  If you can find the time you should fully flesh out every character even if you use them once.  Character growth and themes have always been important to me but now they’ll be at the forefront of my works instead of at the background like before.

Now that I’ve won this year’s NaNoWriMo will I participate next year?

I really, really want to!  I can only see myself participating if I have the proper time, workspace, and no other projects looming.  It’s tough to dedicate a whole month to just one thing and NaNo 2013 demanded that I dedicate any and all hours of my life that weren’t already spent at my job.  I can’t do that again.  There has to be a balance.  I can’t run around like I was forced to do this year.  I must start building a proper workspace well in advance of the contest.  I also won’t participate if I’m working on any video or board game projects with FlubberKnuckle Studios.  It’s just way too much work for me and way too much stress.  I’ll know for sure later on, most likely in the middle of next year.

So I won, what’s next?

The next step for me is actually a backstep.  I want to return to my first book and boost the content there and make the transition from Average Joe and the Extraordinaires to Average Joe and the Beauty much smoother.  I want to make sure that the first book is also a much smoother read overall by tuning up the prose a bit, adding more detailed character descriptions (since I seemed to have nailed them in the sequel), and foreshadowing some of the outlandish concepts that I have in the second book.  I think these changes will strengthen the first book a great deal.  The primary goal is to perfect that first book and get it out ASAP.  I’ll most likely learn some HTML too in order to start perfecting the book for Kindle release.

So all in all I love this contest; the pep talks from real authors, the goals, the preparation month leading into the contest, the local writing events, the fervor, and just the basic aspect of man, imagination, pencil, and paper (or Word Processor) all coming together to complete a seemingly impossible monthly goal.  If you haven’t tried a NaNoWriMo yet then I suggest you do.  You just might learn something new about yourself and about your project.

My NaNoWriMo Story Part 4

Overcoming the Obstacles

At this point many of you are wondering what my plan for productivity entailed.  It must’ve been something crazy right?  Not really.  The only crazy part was getting me to leave the house and wait for hours in the cold Michigan air for a bus to get me where I was going.  And where was I going?  Some magical refuge for down on their luck NaNoWriMo writers?  A place where said writer can do intense training in mountainous solitude to improve word count, word quality, and plotting?  Well, kinda sorta.  I just went to the library all the way downtown.  It provided me with some much needed quiet time.  I went to the most boring looking part of the library, the sociology room I think it was.­­­­­

In the library I had no choice but to write, write, write.  I did this for hours on end.  I sat at a table away from mostly everyone.  It took a while to warm up and get back into the world but it did happen and when it did the words were flowing.  It was still crap, I thought anyway but I figured I could change it all when the contest was over.  I settled for changing my whole writing/editing process up just for this book, just for this contest.  I knew that there was plenty of gold buried under all the crappy words I was writing and I figured that later I’d just mine that gold for ideas and improve the structure around it.  It was the most obvious way to do this and quite a few of the NaNo pep talks even said this so I can’t even tell you why it took me so long to actually adopt this process.  It’s most likely because I’m a creature of habit especially concerning my writing.

Slowly I worked on releasing myself from the shackles of my process.  It was mostly psychological.  I’d leave sentences and word choices that I didn’t like in, even though they bugged me.  Soon I was telling myself that I would change it later when I copied it into the computer.  Eventually this encompassed even whole ideas that took up most of a chapter.  I now felt that I could definitely change it later or even pull from each and every wretched idea that I left on the paper and wanted to change.  I was now able to write crap and move on which is a very powerful talent or in my case, becoming a powerful learned skill.

The library helped rejuvenate me and really boosted my word count.  The first day I didn’t get as much as I wanted (a lofty 10,000 words).  I never managed to hit my target on my trips but was steadily adding large increments to my overall word count and the truth was that a lot of the writing was really good.  I knew I was too hard on myself after I’d copy a chapter down into my computer and read through it.  My inner editor had almost killed the contest for me with all this slow methodical nonsense.  Though I couldn’t get rid of the bastard it did feel good to shut him up every so often so that I could unleash the full fury of rapid production.  Now I was in it to win it – hell – I knew I was going to win it.  I had just a week left and had only just hit the halfway mark but I felt that I could really do this with one more push especially with all I had learned.  It’s crazy how much had changed in just a week.

Maybe my confidence was misplaced.  I still wasn’t finished and though I had boosted my word count, that 50,000 mark was still a long ways away.  Why the heck was I so confident?  And what if—just what if—I had somehow reverted back to my production levels of weeks previous.  There was still a lot to be uncertain of with a week left.

My NaNoWriMo Story Part 3

The Downward Slope

This is a period of time that I’m very ashamed of.  It’s a period of time when I felt that I would not complete the contest and would just settle for the headstart that the contest provided me.  This was the point when the writing was unforgivable and my inner editor just wouldn’t let me feel confident about what I was doing.  Not only was my inner editor making me feel like less of a writer but this was also the period I had the most distractions.

I was working long days, in some cases going over my shift or working someone else’s hours.  My initial plan of working through my lunch hour was thwarted by hunger and fatigue.  I sat and ate lunch with my coworkers for most of the month.  I wrote with them around about 10% of the time and by myself about 15%.  When at home my mom wouldn’t really relent on asking me questions that I didn’t think were relevant and soon my nephew was coming over nightly thanks to his new job.  Seeing my nephew is usually a joyous occasion for me.  This time was no different but marked with tremendous trepidation because I knew I would be distracted with him around and lose precious contest time.  I’m not tough enough for this I suppose.  I have trouble just shutting people out.  I can do it for a decent period of time before I start to feel bad because I’m so good at it…which makes me bad at it I suppose.

My writing productivity dwindled embarrassingly low.  I wasn’t even hitting 300-400 words a day and then began skipping days entirely.  The combination and long work days and long bus waits and rides wore me down to the point of not even wanting to write anymore.  It didn’t help that when I did write I thought I was writing absolute shit.  I wasn’t going to win the contest but at least I had a decent start.  At that point I had roughly 15,000 words but I was roughly 2-3 weeks in and now I was just about ready to give up.

I began playing videogames again and watching anime.  I managed to start Skyrim and finish a few quest lines.  I watched all of Gundam 08^th MS team and while both those distractions offered up a ton of inspiration I still was severely lagging behind in word count.  My nephew was also coming over daily with tales of his new job and to play a few games.  He had begun Skyrim (which led to me playing it) and had even bought Grand Theft Auto V just to play on my Xbox.  I was very entertained by his playthrough and we had shared a lot of laughs but again I wasn’t getting anything done.  I liked seeing my nephew because I rarely got a chance to but this contest was really important to me.  I needed to do my best at the very least, nothing else would serve.  So I killed two birds with one stone.  I gave my nephew my Xbox to take home with him and with that made it more convenient for him to play games and increased my word count thanks to the increased focus.

So although I was pretty lousy on production for nearly two straight weeks I still managed to produce at least something.  At that point I wasn’t even halfway done but those small increments kept me in the game.  With my time quickly dwindling down and my production levels so very far from goal, I finally had enough and put my plan for productivity into play.

Special thanks to the wicked awesome distractions of Man of Steel, We’re the Millers, Identity Thief, The Wire, Binding of Isaac, Borderlands 2, and Devil Survivor, along with Skyrim, GTA V, and Gundam 08^th MS Team.  All you fictional entertainment pieces have kept my head out of my own worlds and into yours.  Thanks for helping to make me a lazy bastard!

My NaNoWriMo Story Part 2 ½

The Trials

Obligations

The first week of NaNoWriMo brought plenty of excitement but it also brought its fair share of trials.  I had sworn off all forms of communication with others unless it was an emergency or near emergency but not everyone knew this and I’m a sucker for not wanting to make people feel unwanted for lack of a better word.  I also had a few obligations going into the month that I didn’t or forgot to cancel.  The first of which was a date.  I hadn’t had a date in quite some time so I wasn’t ready to cancel this one.  I also really wanted to reconnect with this person so canceling was out of the question.  It was a fine distraction though and I did actually get a lot of writing done before the date so in hindsight, I had no cause to worry.

Other obligations I had were to my family (my niece in particular), and the videogame studio I’m a part of, FlubberKnuckle studios, not to mention work obligations like a friend REALLY needing me to work a day for them so they could interview for a much needed extra job.

I don’t get to see my young niece a lot so when I do I like to do things for her.  She usually invites me on field trips and other school events with her so if I have time I like to go.  I couldn’t say no this month even with NaNoWriMo looming over my head.  The NaNo gods must have looked over me for the month though because her event (along with a lot of school days) was cancelled multiple times until the next month.

My game group, FlubberKnuckle Studios, is restructuring and focusing on further building our designing skills and so everyone is hard at work learning new software and creating new deadlines for various projects.  Every week we check in with Wednesday conferences updating everyone on our progress with whatever we’re doing.  My goal before the month was to learn the Blender and Unity software.  I started a few tutorials and played with the software but didn’t accomplish much.  With everyone in the group working so hard and taking our deadlines so seriously I felt that I couldn’t entirely shut out my FlubberKnuckle productivity so I continued to build my knowledge of the software and participate in conferences, though I missed two.  What I learned is that I don’t like juggling important tasks like that without a dedicated workspace.  Unless I have a desk and a quiet space to work—in my home next year—I will only participate in NaNoWriMo if I have no other obligations and vice versa.

Life Doesn’t Pause

Distractions, distractions everywhere!  Time I find is such an easy resource to waste especially for myself.  I take life slowly most of the time and like to just stop and think about things, everything really.  I don’t have a space of my own and I don’t own a car so finding that precious quiet time that writers crave is like mining for gold and precious gems.  It’s a task it really is.  I stay in a one bedroom apartment with my mother in an impromptu (what I thought temporary) move to save money.  I stay in the living/dining/now bedroom and my mom likes to watch T.V…a lot.  When I write, I typically write for a stretch and then pause to think about what I wrote and what I’ll write next.  Problem is whenever I pause and the sounds of the T.V. travel over to my ears and my eyes begin to wander in a search for something newer or fresher than the bright whites of my notebook or laptop screen.  It’s astounding how much time I actually wasted absentmindedly watching the crap she was watching at the time.  When I realized how little work I had gotten done it started to piss me off.  My mom is wondrously considerate like myself and I knew if I had asked her that she’d go quietly to her room but that shit wouldn’t have been fair of me so I kept my crabby attitude and tried to work through it.  I knew then that I needed some other work space but it was cold and the buses really ran like shit and I couldn’t think of any decent places to go where there weren’t many distractions around.  There aren’t any nearby coffee shops where I stay, at least any that didn’t require an hour and a half bus wait.

The buses were where I wasted the bulk of my time for the month.  Mostly during my travels to work.  Don’t get me wrong, I still crammed as much work into my bus ride as I could and actually did some of my best work on the coach.  But even writing on the bus proved to be inconsistent.  Getting a seat on the bus (especially the one I catch) is never guaranteed and about 70% of the time I stood up on a crowded coach.  Waiting for the buses alone wasted about 2 to 6 hours out of my day depending on how late they were.  But on the good bus rides I could easily write between 400 and 1000 words because of the lack of distractions (when other people weren’t acting crazy).

The writing itself was a whole other trial.  My plot, I now saw, was not fully fleshed out.  I wrote from the outline but added new details, locations, and characters as I did.  The outline kept changing and the chapters filled out more.  The writing came slowly and I found that I was truly a slow and methodical writer.  I had to pause to figure out every little detail about what I was writing even words and word arrangement in a sentence.  I was entirely too slow. 

So now I saw that if I wanted to win this contest I needed to change where I wrote and how I wrote.  So I brooded on that for a while whilst continuing to try to blot out the distractions at home with earbuds and music which proved only marginally effective.  I knew my next step but it would take a large setback to make me implement it.

Up next, the pitfalls that nearly destroyed my resolve.

My NaNoWriMo Story Part 2

The Month Begins

It was November 1^st and NaNoWriMo was well underway.  I stayed up late the previous night to get a midnight start on the writing and wrote a few paragraphs whilst following my outline fairly closely.  The writing was a bit slow and clunky and I hated the way I phrased a few of my sentences.  I sat and deeply thought about what would sound better like I usually did.  I kept doing that until I remembered what the contest was about and so I stopped editing myself so much and just ran with it leaving sentences I didn’t like behind…unless I really hated them.  My notebook is a battleground of scratched out sentences.

I forsook all distractions the night before.  I unplugged my Xbox 360 and logged out of all my social networking sites aside from email clients.  My iPod was unplugged, drained of battery, and left in the corner of my table because I knew with it that I’d waste valuable writing time on the bus listening to music and staring out the window.  I told my friends via Facebook and a few texts that I wouldn’t be around for the month of November because the contest.  I had a plan and I wanted to stick to it for a few reasons.  My first reason was because I’d never stuck to a plan, schedule, or routine and I really really wanted to break that cycle.  I want to be a much more productive person and I saw this as a major step for that.  My second reason is because I really really wanted to get some traction on this second book while the events of the first one were still in my head and the ideas were flowing.  There was no better time to do it.  So no distractions meant getting things done.

I left out of my house before the sun was even up, around 6:00am.  I wrote a lot on the bus which helped me finish that first chapter which I felt a little better about because of how I ended it.  I made it to work around 7-ish and continued writing.  I wrote in the dark and empty café.  I had my notebook out and was ready to start typing the first chapter up on NaNoWriMo.org.  I browsed the site and learned that you didn’t type out anything on the site itself but instead posted your word count.  You could take your own count or “validate” your novel early which counted the words for you and promised not to be a portal for novel theft.  Eh, I trusted it.  So anyway, armed with this new knowledge I opted to continue my early morning work visits so I would continue to treat this noveling business as legitimate business.  I updated my word count and checked my phone to see if I could do it from there and to my surprise I could.  What a thoughtful team of visionaries, these NaNo people.

I moved my show from the café and the distraction of WiFi to the signal deathtrap of the basement breakroom where it was hot and stuffy from all the machinery and steam pipes.  I began working on my second chapter, writing it down in my notebook.  More inspiration found me in the form of a visit from a cute older lady named Myra.  She asked if I was doing homework and I told her about NaNoWriMo.  She seemed pleasantly shocked and said what I was doing was cool.  She herself likes to write and had been working on something off and on.  I told her that she should just go for it and soon.  If not for the month then just whenever.  She said that she should, smiled, said that she didn’t want to be a bother, and walked off down the hall.  I went back to writing and maybe 10 minutes later Kurt the pastor comes in and asks me what I’m working on and I tell him what I told Myra.  He asks if he could read it when I’m done and I asked him if he had a Kindle or Kindle software so I could send him a free sample.  He didn’t but he gave me his card and well wishes.  That was pretty much how my conversation went with anyone who caught me writing for the next month.

So all in all I was off to a good start.  I had an outline that stretched far ahead of me.  I had a decent place to get my writing done, updating my word count was much easier than expected, and my book was rolling along at a decent though somewhat slow pace.  With a start like that I had no clue that my challenges to come would have me questioning if I should even waste my time trying to finish the contest.