Wrote another hour this morning, yay! Probably got somewhere around half a page, or a bit more, but more than yesterday, I think. I really want to try writing without obsessively going back and editing, because now I realize that that approach gets me one new, really good chapter about every year. Which is sad. So we're going to try to power through and not worry about details, even big ones, which I will need to change later.

Tomorrow the real (well, my version) NaNoWriMo starts!

I've failed pretty spectacularly at writing for the past month and a half. With NaNoWriMo coming up, I feel like I should get back on track. Even though November is perhaps a terrible time to do this, particularly as the semester wraps up and heads towards finals and papers in December. But you could say that about life, and never get around to writing.

So what I want to do in November is just one hour a day on my story. It's pretty impossible to do NaNoWriMo with classes, and I thought about doing a sort of half-NaNoWriMo where I halve the word count, but then, thinking how word counts have never done much for me in terms of productivity, I decided a timed goal would be more effective. One hour a day is manageable. I did one this morning to warm up, and yes, I think I can do it. I even resisted the temptation to open a mindless game, which is the usual bane of my writerly productivity.

Just finished reading the latest book of Orson Scott Card's Ender series, Ender in Exile, which is a midquel between Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. Excellent as always, and it does the tricky job of linking events and timelines between Ender's Game and all the Shadow books quite well.

Of the lessons in writing I picked up along the way, the one that comes first to mind is omission of scenes and information. There are some scenes that, while you'd like to see as a reader, don't need to be shown, i.e. Valentine and Ender's reunion. You can pretty much guess how that goes, based on what you know of them, what their feelings are going into it, and then how it is with them afterwards. So sometimes omitting key scenes due to their predictability can help improve the pacing. But of course you have to keep the reader engaged enough with everything else that they're willing to forgive the omitted scene.

There is also omission of information, such as the thoughts and plans of various characters. This can be pretty obvious, but there is the pleasure of surprise or confirmation when you don't know exactly what the characters are plotting until they go through with it.

Along those lines, OSC also makes free use of POV, switching from chapter to chapter or even scene to scene. It works not only to remove you from (and thereby hide) a central character's thoughts and plans, but also to place you in someone else's head so that you can see the story from their POV, with their different set of expectations in mind. Switching to Morgan's POV as their ship arrives on the colony works with entertaining results, as the reader is both laughing at Morgan's delusions of grandeur and relishing his eventual defeat. There are even many cases of using a certain character's POV just for one scene, or one chapter. Whatever works. There's no reason to be tied down simply for the sake of uniformity in narrative structure or whatnot.

One other thing that stands out upon reflection are scenes of primarily dialogue, with very little physical setting described to ground them in. Oftentimes I'm concerned with grounding everything in a physical setting--describing exactly where the characters are, what they're doing, how they're sitting or standing or feeling, as they talk. Perhaps this is because physical descriptions were once one of my greatest weaknesses, at least in writing a scene. Of course it's important to ground things in a physical setting and to describe things clearly. But only if it's important. That is, when the key point of a certain scene is the content of the dialogue, perhaps the setting is not so important then. Quick, back-and-forth dialogue without awkward insertions of, "He looked at the ground," or "She bit her lip," (although those kinds of lines have their place, if used correctly) can be far more effective and entertaining, as the pace picks up with the reader concentrating on the words exchanged. Also, while a description of a physical setting can be minimized, it can still be mentioned within the dialogue--a quick, clever way to set a cursory image within the reader's mind.

Next on the reading list are some of Ursula LeGuin's books, Wicked, and Poe's tales.

Okay, as of this morning I have a brand new rough story outline. The last things are completely disjointed and will probably see great change, but having this really helps for where I am now. Which is, Chapter 5. Chapters 1, 2, and 4 are more or less fine for this draft, Chapter 3 needs a ton of revision but I'm leaving that for later, and so now I'm working on Chapter 5.

Still have trouble pinning down K's voice. Is she taciturn and clipped or freely sarcastic? I want both, but I haven't figured out how to balance it.

Back home in Ohio! It's so green, and the sky is so blue, and the windows are not gray with pollution. Wow. No sound of traffic or neighbors' voices, no more crazy humidity and high temperatures, no more cockroaches anywhere, and very few mosquitoes, thank goodness. On the downside, there are still bugs--a large black ant was crawling on my leg while I lay in bed reading manga, and I proceeded to flick it from my leg and whack it with an LSAT book, to little avail since it was on my bed, and then I took some tissue and killed it. Yay. I vacuumed up a bunch of dead bugs in the upstairs rooms and felt relieved.

Drinking directly from a faucet again. It feels strange. Super absorbent toilet paper, three squares of which are the equal of four thin sheets of toilet paper in Taiwan.

I went running outside yesterday morning while the sky was still black outside. It was 3 a.m., I was jetlagged and out of shape, and the electricity had gone out, so I decided it was time to do some exercise. I ran a mile really slowly. 11 minutes and 45 seconds. =_= Today I waited until there was some daylight, around 6:30 a.m., and ran the same distance in 11 minutes and 8 seconds. I'm getting back into shape!

Today I did laundry. Oh, the dryer is wonderful. In Taiwan, we hung up the laundry outside to dry, since we didn't have a dryer, and the clothes would feel all stiff and crinkly afterwards, and you'd have to iron it if you didn't want it to look wrinkled. Today I pulled the clothes out of the dryer--soft clothes!--and folded them, and that was that. Bliss.

To end, an article that perfectly details my unproductiveness in writing: "What Took You So Long? The quiet hell of 10 years of novel-writing."

Feeling sick again, but hopefully I won't actually get sick, seeing that I was just sick last week (for all of 2-3 days).

Grad school news is finalized: I'm going to Yale next year for my MA in East Asian Studies, and then Purdue the year after that for my MFA in Creative Writing (Purdue is a three-year program). I can still hardly believe my good fortune in Purdue agreeing to let me defer. They must really like me, right? In sum, my application results have ended in a best-case scenario, somehow. (And I have full funding on both programs, did I mention that? I'll have to teach at Purdue, but that will be a good experience, or so I'd like to believe.)

My nose isn't just a leaky faucet. It's a freaking waterfall. Gaaaaaaah. I am sick as a dog, sick like a log stuck in a bog lost in the fog.

In other news, nice blog post on willpower here. BIC. Butt In Chair. I like that.