I laugh at your puny NaNoWriMo!

[elfs]

Look what I hit this morning on Sterlings:

27618	06119_AAA_Reservations_The_Free_Worlds.txt
6374	06119_AAA_Reservations_The_Free_Worlds_2.txt
4229	06119_AAC_Reservations_Polly.txt
519	06119_AAD1_Reservations_Expose1.txt
5443	06119_AAD_Reservations_Polly_And_Tau.txt
1628	06119_AAE1_Press_Release.txt
2621	06119_AAE_Reservations_Polly_and_Tau_Conscience.txt
2863	06119_AAF_Reservations_Polly_and_Tau_Height.txt
2451	06119_AAG_Reservations_Polly_and_Tau_Dove.txt
5289	06119_AAH_Reservations_Word_Gets_Out.txt
2781	06119_AAI_Reservations_Provocation.txt
6795	06119_AAJ_Seductrice.txt
4495	06119_AAK_Politics.txt
6795	06119_AAL_Midpoint.txt
6758	06119_AAM_Dove_And_The_Twins.txt
4349	06119_AAN_New_Worlds.txt
3676	06119_AAO_Senatorial_Decisions.txt
4793	06119_AAP_Risky_Invitations.txt
565	06119_DAA_Polestar_Exodus.txt
107	06119_XXX_Reservations_Seed.txt
100149	total

Whee! Oh, and I had a new story idea for Rhiane & Illonca and... Ng'Reff!

Comments

[mousewrites.livejournal.com]

DAMN YOU, ELF!

:: shakes tiny impotent fist::

I'm boggled by both your prolificacy and your talent. I managed 12,000 words in my first week of NaNoWriMo, but then did NOTHING.

At least I finished my monster novel. Monster, of course, being a relative term, considering you wrote half as much as the WHOLE novel just this month.

Man, how do you do it?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

"That's not writing, that's just typing." -- William F. Buckley Junior.

My main rule about writing is that you have nothing to edit until the words are down on the page. What I wrote today was a drag, a boat anchor of an infodump in the middle of the story. There's a lot that's been building between Dove and Ash & Arwen, and Dove finally had it out with them. It doesn't help that she's in a new city, with new sights and sounds and even smells to experience, so there's a lot of description.

I just sit and write. I give myself permission to write crap. See that top one? It was 30,000 words at one point; if I hadn't cut out 3000 words or so I would have hit this number three days ago. The scene where the Sterlings meet the Pendorians was and is a big deal to the story, but it's really just a MacGuffin^{[?] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin)} to get Rhiane and Illonca into the same room. The same is true later: There's a huge political brouhaha going on around all of my characters, but the point of each story is how each character offers or fails to offer, or accepts or rejects, the outreach of another for friendship, love, or raw desire. (Or, in Dove's case, angst terribly about why she accepted when she knows 'her' whole universe will reject her for doing so.) The Pendorian's presence is a catalyst, but not a major event in these charater's personal lives. So that whole scene got boiled down to a single paragraph.

I can't speak to someone else's word per minute rate. Mine's pretty low, about 18. But if you can manage that, just do that for an hour every day, and skip watching TV (or in my case, reading usenet). Give yourself permission to write crap. For the period you do, don't give yourself permission to do anything else but write. That's really the basic rule of writing.

[mousewrites.livejournal.com]

Indeed.

I've gotten better about writing without editing... to break myself of that habit, I learned to write with the text color set to white on a white background. Can't edit what you can't see...

Of course, that was an issue the day I switched to an ergonomic keyboard and didn't realize all my fingers were shifted to the left one letter.

I do have to say reading your fiction years ago helped me give myself permision to write erotica. Thanks for that. :)