Intervention - reading

Finished "Intervention" by Robin Cook. My first experience with Robin Cook was Coma, which I read when I was in high school. I loved it. Intervention, on the other hand...

*possible spoilers ahead*

The first third of this story was a waste of time since it never really went anywhere. I get what it was trying to do - establish the main character's beliefs - but it was really done poorly, not to mention I didn't like many of the characters. The middle was good when it got rolling. The ending was a let-down, though. The premise of the story was interesting enough, which I think is why the middle was decent. It just didn't hold up throughout.

2 out of 5 stars.

NaNoWriMo 2011 - The Rest of the Story

In week 3 I nearly doubled my word count from 12,160 words to 23,410 words. My words-per-day for the week was 1,607.1, meaning I was just a shade behind par for NaNoWriMo pace. In reality, I had three good writing days where most of my words happened, and several non-writing or low-writing days.

I nearly doubled my word count from 23,410 to 45,036 in week four, and then finished with 50,115 on day 29. While I did end up winning, I would certainly not recommend an exponential approach to anyone (doubling words week over week). It's too stressful! My best day of writing this year was when I had the house to myself all day and I did word sprint after word sprint on Facebook, netting 8,447 words in one day.

Now that it's done I can look back on it and make a few observations. The first is that going into the month with nothing of a story and no outline makes the writing process much more difficult. I didn't paint myself into a corner too often, but there were enough times where I just didn't know what was going to happen next and the story ended up sitting still for days at a time until I became inspired again.

And here for historical purposes is my graph from this year. It's a little inaccurate because there was a problem with it on the 15th or so. I actually reached 15,000 a day before it shows here. When word count is everything, things like that can be very distracting!

2011 NaNoWriMo Word Count by Day for theicemage

I am not crazy about the ending and am likely to change what I came up with during November in favor of something that gives a lot more closure and more of a full life cycle for the characters. And I say that meaning the story I tell in this should cover the birth to death cycle of the characters. They're fairies, and they basically live one year at a time. For more details than that, you'd have to read my story (when I make it available).

And now to get back to other projects that were put on hold to make time for writing, like translating the Visual Basic simulation for OrcSports.com into C# so I can get the site running again.

NaNoWriMo 2011 week 2

Week two seems to be when I started actually writing this year. At the end of week 1, I had 2,329 words, averaging 332.7 words per day. After the second week I was sitting at 12,160, averaging 1,737.1 words per day for the second week. With NaNoWriMo's par of 1,666 words per day, week two looked pretty good.

The trouble I'm having now is: I have no idea where my story is going. Yeah, things are happening, and yeah, I like my characters - well, some of them, anyway - but there's no overarching plot and no strong direction this year. I have no outline and no real idea of what is going to happen next.

One thing that has helped beginning in week two has been hanging around on Facebook in the NaNoWriMo group. There are a lot of other people hanging out there, and you can usually find a word war, word sprint or something along that line. I have enjoyed two types of word sprints. The first is a timed sprint. Someone would say, for example, :00 for 15, meaning 15 minutes of furious writing starting at (whatever hour your clock says):00. The other type was a sprint to a specified number of words starting at a given time. The one I did like this was a sprint to 1,000 words. I came in second on that one, but really, I won because I had 1,000 new words in my story.

One drawback I've had this year has been the lack of a laptop. I still have the laptop from work, but its battery doesn't hold a charge and it's super-slow. Not that I need a powerful computer for writing, but it would be nice if it booted up in something less than 15 minutes. Talk about unproductive use of time at a write-in!

Par for day 14 was 23,333 words, meaning at the end of week two, I was 11,173 words behind. I hope I can keep pushing on it in week three!

State of Fear - reading

Finished "State of Fear" by Michael Crichton. I really didn't like the characters, especially the stupid lawyer main character (Mr. "I don't know") and thought the plot needed, well, something more. It's not that I'm a huge advocate for global warming and offended that he's put it in a bad light, either. I'm not, and that had nothing to do with the problems I had with the book. I just thought the characters were perhaps two-dimensional, perhaps too focused on some aspect of the story, and that the main character was an idiot.

NaNoWriMo 2011 week 1

2011's NaNoWriMo has thus far been disastrous. In the first week, I was only able to get 2,329 words. The only bright spot is that I learned how to use Scrivener, and found it to be very good for writing.

The distractions have been numerous, including the fact that my OrcSports server needs a pretty major part of it (the simulation) translated from VB to C# in order to continue working with the new web host, and I'd really like it to continue working so I don't lose all my players. I've also admittedly been playing Everquest II instead of writing, and need to spend far less time doing that. There are other distractions and excuses, but really if I want to reach 50,000 words by the end of the month, I have to change some habits and get to writing.

Heaven's Shadow - reading

Finished "Heaven's Shadow" by David S. Goyer & Michael Cassutt. I give it 2 of 5 stars ("it was okay"), mostly because I grew disinterested when the story moved into Dean Koontz territory of weirdness. Yeah, they justified it in the end, but I was hoping for a different story than I got. To the authors: it's not you, it's me.

Paul is Undead - reading

Finished "Paul is Undead" by Alan Goldsher. Laugh-out-loud funny in places. A fun, quick story! (And I don't read much zombie fiction.)