This morning I flailed, but I made it! The previous night, I went to bed much later than usual, almost midnight (as opposed to 9 p.m.) due to putting in a few serious hours on my Japanese history paper and watching several fabulous episodes of the fabulous anime about American football, Eyeshield 21 (Deimon vs. Shinryuuji game). I set my alarm and woke up with it at 4:20 a.m., but with so little sleep, I was far too tired, and yes, wasted, to apply myself to writing. Plus I hadn't finished the Deimon vs. Shinryuuji game yet and had had dreams about how Deimon could pull off a 20-point touchdown, so I ended up watching the last three episodes of the game. Which worked to wake me up because I have never fallen asleep while watching anime. Then I took a shower, and then I forced myself past my reluctance to write and my uncertainty about where to take the story. And I wrote. And I somehow produced a page with plot progression that I can build on. Thank goodness. Sometimes you just really have to power through.

It was a bit risky to watch anime first thing in the morning instead of writing or showering, but it worked out. Day 12 of NaNo and still going strong.

Also, arrangements have been made for my visit to Purdue in a bit over a week! People there sound very nice, and I am quite looking forward to it!

Day 10, and I am keeping up. Although to make a confession, today I spent my hour today deleting instead of writing. It's because I've moved on to a part of the story where the plotting and everything is still up in the air. I had about 25 pages of old stuff for this chapter, but having made some decisions as to where the story is headed, I had to sort out stuff that I wouldn't need anymore, and stuff I wanted to keep but needed to figure out how to incorporate still.

This is usually the point in my writing where I become deathly afraid and unsure of where to take my story, and then it languishes for a year. I suspect this is why, from college graduation until now, I've averaged a bit more than one new good chapter a year. It's a really sad pace at which to make progress on a novel. That being said, I must find a way to plow through this. Thinking is involved, yes, and planning, and plotting, but I can't let myself stop writing either. It's too easy to stop under the pretext of needing more time to think, and then suddenly half a year has passed and not a word written.

Thinking on it this afternoon, I realized that thus far, my characters have faced no great obstacles. Sure, there's the obvious one around which the story is centered, but there's nothing that throws a wrench in the works when they decide to do something. Perhaps that is why my story is languishing at this stage. Throwing obstacles in front of my characters would be a good thing to revive the pace of the story, introduce new things in interesting ways, and just keep the story going. My characters have had it too easy. But vacation is over! It's time for them to start working.

What is this, Day 6? Writing is still going well and I am keeping up. I finished Chapter 5 yesterday/today and today wrote the first page or so of Chapter 6. Chapter 6 goes back to the other character's side of the story, which is good because I need more time to think about how I want Hinako's story to progress. It's nice to finally be making progress, even if the quality is not so great.

Thursday at dinner a girl from my program asked me how my writing was going. I told her how I had not written anything for well over a month and then recently started writing an hour a day. She said, "Oh, that's good, to take a break and then start writing again when you're inspired." Maybe it's okay to take a break sometimes, but I think a one month break is just awful and lazy. There's nothing good about it. And I didn't start writing again because I was inspired. Inspiration happens in the early stages as a story idea is still fresh with endless possibilities. At this point, maybe a fourth of the way through the story, it's all about discipline. Forcing yourself to write and slugging through it no matter how you feel that day. There's no inspiration, except that which you create if you desperately need to delude yourself into believing that there is inspiration. Inspiration, if there is such a thing, only comes when you stick your butt in the chair, open up that story file, and start typing out the shaky ideas that you don't think will work but type anyway because you've got nothing else. That is my kind of inspiration.

Day 1 of NaNoWriMo off to a good start. One hour, one page. And a few great ideas, big and small.

One big idea was to change Kyoshi's name to just Kyou. That way it might better follow the conventions of female names in the given setting, and also it contains a delightful pun in Japanese that is particularly relevant to the story itself. You wonder why I didn't think of this earlier. Well, I still need time to consider it, but I like it, particularly in terms of the historical aspect and the pun.

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.

NaNo is not going wonderfully. I'm deleting about as much as I'm writing, and I'm just not writing very much because I'm busy trying to figure out where to take the plot, for the umpteenth time, and I'm doing a lot of cutting and pasting of old scene snippets that I've written in the past. Gah.

I reread my novella, and aside from being completely appalled by the writing (although the end was still touching, in my very biased opinion), I noticed two stylistic habits that are still present in my writing today, and that I need to cut down on. One is that I use ellipses too much...Waaaay too much. Go away, ellipses... And the other is attaching two similar-meaning words or phrases together with a comma, such as in, "'Drink,' she urged, pleaded." I guess it adds emphasis and shades of meaning, but it also stands out if overused, and that's bad, if you're trying not to stand out as the narrator.

It's NaNoWriMo month! I'm participating in my own version--50,000 net words for my work in progress is the goal for this month (net words meaning the things I delete and then write in don't count. So if my total word count for my novel at the beginning of this month is 59,365 words, I'm aiming for 109,365 words at the end of this month. Almost double what I have. If it goes well, it should be a very productive month).

Also looking into MFA programs in creative writing and MA programs in East Asian Studies. Should aim to get apps done and ready to send by the end of this month too, somehow...=_= Well, okay. Taking into account the traveling I will be doing in the latter third of the month, within the first couple days of December should be more realistic. I just need to remember things take longer to send from here.