Ah, well. Failed NaNo. Failed in my promise to finish the manuscript by Christmas. Going very, very slowly on the forever-rewrite. 

I figured out some of the reasons why it's going so slowly. The main problem is that I've had a terrible time committing to a revision plan. I've started three or four rewrites of this novel. All are wonderful in different ways. All have brilliant points and idiotic mistakes. All are incompatible with each other. 

And as Chesterton says, to make a choice--any choice--is to reject forever all other choices. I've been trying to choose among four different novels, and I love them all too much to reject any of them. 

But I think I've finally picked one. It's not perfect, but I like it. There are pieces of it I'm not willing to give up for anything, even though they're overly ambitious and difficult and I'll probably regret them. I'm committing to it--or trying to, and my rewrite is finally progressing again. 

And yesterday I wrote an article on the cognitive differences between typing and writing by hand, and I remembered how much I love writing by hand. It's so much slower--as if I weren't already going slowly enough!--but I write so much better, and I spend much less time staring at the blank page. So I'm attempting to finish this rewrite by hand. I have no doubt that I'll regret that more than once, and at some point I'll probably return to typing. But for now, my notebook and pen are progressing much faster than my fancy software and expensive computer. And when your writing gets stuck in a rut, you have to move forward with whatever works, right? 
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NaNoWriMo, Day 9 11/09/2010
 
Today is the ninth day of NaNoWriMo, and I'm 6,484 words behind. 


What? You don't know what NaNoWriMo is? Check out the website. They call it a competition, but really it's just a big online cheering group for writers--a bunch of writers encouraging each other to write. Specifically, to finish a short novel--50,000 words. All of them written during the month of November. 


I've "won" NaNoWriMo twice, which means that for two Novembers in a row (2007 and 2008) I wrote 50,000 words during the month. Actually, the book I'm revising now started out as my first NaNoWriMo novel (although the new version of it has morphed so much as to be utterly unrecognizable as its original version). But I wasn't revising either of those novels--I was writing first draft, and I knew it, and I was okay with it. I was willing to throw words on the page without thinking, without revising, without trying to make them good. I never hit the delete button. And that's a great way to finish a lot of words, but, well, I know I can do that now. I don't just want to write a lot of words. I want to write a good novel. 


But I do need to get something down on paper first, and even though this is technically a revision, I'm changing so much that I'm also rewriting from the beginning. So I'm going to try to NaNo it. I'm going to try to catch up. In any case, I'm going to try to meet high word counts every day in November--and in December too, until this thing is done. 


If nothing else, I promised my sister I'd give her this manuscript as a Christmas present! 
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snowflake method 10/07/2010
 
I'm trying something different for reworking my revision. It seems silly to call it revision when you're rewriting an entire novel from scratch, but I figure I'm keeping some of the characters, most of the themes, and a few of the plot points, so that qualifies it as a second draft. In any case, I'm discovering, rather to my surprise, that I prefer planning ahead to seat-of-the-pants writing. Armed with that knowledge, I'm really trying to do the snowflake method for the first time. It's not much help for coming up with ideas--Holly Lisle's wonderful methods are much more useful for that--but it's good for organizing, and for getting ideas and choices down on paper gradually. So far it seems to be working. I think. 
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Over the past week or so I've been researching more than rewriting. The setting of my novel was a recent addition in the revision process, and putting a fantasy novel into a real place and time in history necessitates some research--even if it is a place where I've lived before. It's not like I lived in Romania under Ceausescu, and a lot had changed when I was there. 


So I've been reading some great books (my favorite right now is The Hole in the Flag by Andrei Codrescu), learning about the history of Romania in 1989 and the events of the real revolution. I'm trying to get as much as I can into the mindset of Romanians of the time. And, of course, that will also mean getting into the mindset of a communist--because not all of my characters are good guys. 


So today, when I saw some men handing out propaganda fliers for the American Communist Party at the East Atlanta Strut festival, I actually wanted one. Of course, getting one wasn't hard, since they were handing them to everyone. All my friends were obviously uncomfortable, not sure how to politely refuse the paper but reluctant even to touch it. As though the words might make their hands dirty. I, on the other hand, accepted it eagerly and immediately started reading it. 


One of my friends looked at me sidelong, a bit discomfited by my eagerness. "This will be great for my novel," I told her, and she looked relieved. I skimmed through it eagerly, looking for catch phrases and ideas that might help my story. 


Later, I was still reading it when I saw a police officer walk by. He looked at me suspiciously as he passed, and for a minute I felt afraid. But no, this is America, not Romania in 1989. We have free speech here. Nobody's going to arrest me or even start spying on me for reading anything I want. I didn't even need to defend myself, to explain to him that my interest was purely academic. 


But I'll probably get a bit more defensive and explanatory about my research if I ever start writing crime thrillers. 
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