Seeking Ferret

I hit 50K in NaNoWriMo on Friday, shortly before sundown. I was not really racing the clock, since I had Saturday evening as my backup, but it was nice to have that secondary deadline as a safekeeping. I am unlikely to ever touch This Novel Takes Place Entirely in the Kitchen again, but I am glad for the writing exercise. On to Yuletide, which is a lot of fun.

I spent Saturday night at a last minute NaNo marathon, watching several people fight their way over 50K, which was a lot of fun. I started doing NaNo because of the writing exercise, because I wanted an excuse to force myself to write a lot of words and to tell stories that I'd been keeping inside. But I keep doing NaNo because of my local community of amateur writers. It is so much fun to hang out at write-ins, and to anyone who has ever considered doing NaNo, I want to make you aware of the support network available to help push you off the fence. They've kept me laughing and smiling through the month of November.


I also want to make people aware of this, because Amazon sent me a promo about it and I literally ordered it thirty seconds after I got the promo: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001NBS5NE

It's the complete Haydn symphonies for less than 25 dollars. That is a mindboggling deal. I once paid fifty bucks for a box set with about thirty of the Haydn symphonies, recorded by Neville Marriner and his Academy of St. Martin in the Fields orchestra, and accounted myself as having gotten a bargain. Even though I ordered the set a couple days ago, I keep going back to the page and pinching myself to make sure I didn't make a decimal place error. Reviews of the performances on amazon are a little mixed, but the opportunity to hear symphonies I'm not familiar with and just get a sense of the parts of Haydn's catalog that I have overlooked is exciting even if these are not the finest interpretations of these pieces.

Haydn wrote more than a hundred symphonies, and I count at least a dozen of them among my favorite pieces of classical music to return to again and again. The variety, the humor, the emotional feeling, and above the power of an orchestra to sing together in a Haydn symphony is rivaled by only a very few things in the classical canon.

(Other music purchases taking advantage of amazon discounting for the holiday weekend included Kanye's newest album and a Norah Jones album I'd missed. Sometimes I look at my music collection and wonder how all of it ended up in the same collection)

I fell behind on NaNo because of Philcon, and in point of fact I'm still behind, but I did three consecutive days with word counts above 3000 to make up a lot of ground. Last night I exceeded 20,000 words. I am supposed to be at 25,000 by the end of today, but that won't happen.

I'm pretty sure that as a story it is not very good, but I am enjoying writing it anyway. A fellow NaNoer (I will use the official nomenclature 'WriMo' only when I am in company I am certain will comprehend it) keeps asking me if I think the kitchen is the main character of my story, but though I definitely do like writing the kind of crazy things where the kitchen the main character, I keep demurring to his question. This is a novel about three friends who share an apartment, not a novel about the kitchen, even though the kitchen is the setting that drives the novel.

Nonetheless, there is a lot of terrible food writing littering these pages. If I ever were to try editing this into something I would let other people read, the first order of business would be to actually research reasonable recipes to replace the shit I'm making up off the top of my head as I frantically try to reach wordcount. The recipes I am writing have the look of real recipes, but none of the logic.


The mechanics of writing for NaNoWriMo are not like the mechanics of other writing projects. Word count is king, and quality is your last concern. The trick is to keep forward motion by any means possible, letting momentum keep you from running out of inspiration. So any time you're stuck, you don't stop to think about the best way out of your problem, you write around it. Some people do this by skipping ahead to a part where they're not stuck, and I've sometimes used this technique, but mostly I do it by plowing straight ahead with stalling dialogue until something breaks the logjam.

You fill your writing with redundant adverbs and you repeat things as often as you can get away with. The very odd feeling I have when doing NaNo is that I know what I am writing is terrible, and I am constantly making little mental notes in my head not to use the technique I am using in NaNo for other things.

Despite this, I don't feel like I get many bad writing habits from NaNo. When I wrote "He Was a Beautiful Fiction," the comments keyed in on the way I switched narrative modes seamlessly twice, and I realized that I'd done this because it felt right, because I had experimented with such stylistic jumps in my 2010 NaNo "The Great American Metanovel" and even though it had been ridiculous and over the top and terrible there, the result was that I felt natural writing a much more muted version in "He Was a Beautiful Fiction".

NaNo is great for this kind of experimentation. Knowing that the result is bad is a fantastic license to try new things, things that probably won't work well. I very often deliberately attempt to write things in NaNo that I know I am bad at. I know that I'm reasonably competent at writing dialogue between two people, but when a crowd of people is having a conversation it gets tougher for me to manage all of the dynamics. In "This Novel Takes Place Entirely in the Kitchen" I am slowly having guests to the dinner party show up, so that almost like juggling practice I can transition from writing two people having a conversation to writing three people having a conversation to writing four people having a conversation to writing five people having a conversation. And hopefully this will build up a comfort so that the next time I am writing a story that has a big group conversation, I can just jump in at the deep end with the ten person conversation, having an arsenal of tricks and tools at my disposal learned in this practice session.

I flamed out on NaNo pretty spectacularly this year. Just over 16,000 words, none written in the last week and a half. Considering I was trying to write excruciatingly dense fanfiction for an extraordinarily complicated postmodern novel I only finished reading in October while work exploded around me, I don't feel terrible about my failure. Also, I've stopped caring about NaNo as an excuse to write novels and pretty much only regard the writing of the novel as the buy-in for getting to hang out with interesting people and write and talk about writing. So there's that.

Given that, I went to November 30th's last-minute write-in despite not wanting to work on my NaNo novel. It was a nice crowd, I got to cheer on a thirteen year old as he worked his way from 48,500 to 50,000, and I poked at Yuletide for a while (net increase in wordcount of 300 words over two and a half hours, though I wrote and deleted another thousand words) and then we went out to eat cake and celebrate the successes of this year's NaNo.


Whilst eating cake, we kept checking on cyannas's NaNo profile. Despite giving birth in the first week of November, despite not having any words written until the midway point of the month, she rallied and as we refreshed the NaNo site we watched as her wordcount for the day climbed above 17,000 words and she hit 50,000 six minutes before midnight. It was really exciting.

HOLY SHIT I'D FORGOTTEN HOW COOL NANO IS. I'D FORGOTTEN HOW YOU ENTER WITH THESE VAGUE IDEAS AND THEY BECOME CONCRETE AND IT SURPRISES YOU.

I've written 400 words and um... I have narrative threads to follow! I have storylines! Character rivalries! I'm foreshadowing events that I don't have planned! Where did it come from? Apparently there are rumors that John Shade wrote "Pale Fire" prophetically???? WTF???


SOOO FUCKING COOL.

Hi guys... I'm experimenting with ideas for NaNoWriMo, my Pale Fire megafic. And yeah, by the way I finished Pale Fire last night and I'm about 65% convinced that writing Pale Fire fanfic for NaNo is actually going to be a rewarding and fruitful idea.

Pale Fire is a weird and confusing novel that I don't feel like I have a grasp on at all. I think the thing that's got me stumbling is that it's a parody of an academic critique of a poem, but if I were to find this book for real, if some real half-baked academic had really written Kinbote's criticism of John Shade's "Pale Fire", I would totally read it: Because it's so bad it's funny, I would say. I might stop and mull some of the theory of poetics, but ultimately I'd feel they were compromised by the critic's clear lunacy. So the question is kind of: Does the fact that it was intentional change anything? Does the fact that 'nix's friend Nabokov clearly knows that "Yankees Win On Chapman's Homer" is not a printer's error change the fact that Kinbote doesn't?

Basically, Nabokov breaks all kinds of critical theories about authorial intentionality here, and that's the only thing that emerges untainted from the glorious, hilarious mess.




But since I'm playing around in my head with writing styles and plot ideas, I'd like to ask you fine people to help me with a writing exercise by generating prompts.

Suggest a famous line from a book, any book. Suggest some sort of technical specialty of any sort (Bio-ethicist, basketweaver, I don't care).

I will write a footnote on that line in the voice of someone with that speciality

Word count for NaNo is at 47,500. I have today and tomorrow to write the remaining 2500 words. I'm not really worried. I wrote 4400 words yesterday and I have a pretty clear vision of where the next bit of story is going. Of course, I have plans to go out both tonight and tomorrow night, but if I have to, I'll skip out on the FreeDarko reading tomorrow to finish. I hope that doesn't happen, though.

Opening line of Chapter 144 is the silly "Reader, this chapter is gross." Jane Eyre allusion and a pun! Um... yes, it's going to be added to the list of reasons why I'm a bad person.

I've been thinking about editing. The original plan, when I entered the month, was to put this text in a drawer after NaNo and forget about it. This novel was an experiment in styles and characterizations and I would take what lessons I learned from it and move on. Part of me wants to continue with the original plan. This is a very bad novel, and sections of it are bad enough and out of place enough that editing would consist of deleting the whole section. But there is a skeleton here, which I've been sensing more and more as I progress, that might be worth holding onto. The meta-plot that developed, totally unplanned at the beginning of the month, is interesting enough that if I thoughtfully worked with it I might be able to get somewhere. I may try picking this up after Yuletide is over and seeing what I make of it then.

Finally got around to grabbing El Madmo's debut album from a couple years back. El Madmo being Norah Jones's "punk rock" band. Apparently Norah Jones regularly does this thing where she dresses up in a costume and plays music you'd never expect her 'brand name' AC albums to have. I saw her last January as "Avril Lavigne", wearing a black wig and playing classic country covers with her all-girl trio Puss 'n Boots. And let me tell you, Norah Jones singing Johnny Cash while strumming along on a guitar is a wondrous and surprising thing.

El Madmo's songwriting is haphazard and lazy, rather than the tight, carefully considered construction you expect in a Norah Jones song. They seek to make up for it in buoyant enthusiasm and a lot of the time, it works. This is music determined to pretend it's not gimmicky. It is so much fracking fun. They seem at times to be intentionally trying to break every rule a good musician follows, just for the hell of it. Jones howls, screams, and shouts her way through songs. They go for the obvious rhyme always, like a mantra, especially in the opening number "Carlo." Songs are overproduced, underproduced, misproduced. The last track, if you listen through a minute or so of silence, gives you a 'hidden track' of ridiculous outtakes. It's these three phenomenally talented musicians whose usual show act is polished to mirror-finish, taking off the polish and just having fun. The last song is called "Rock Yer Balls Off".

Um... in any case, I cannot recommend it highly enough, and I'm sorry I didn't listen to it earlier.

Last night was packed, with a NaNo write-in followed by a late night D&D makeup session that pitted half the party against the other half in the quest to find magically-laced Drakes and harvest their magical energies for fun and profit. NaNo wordcount is up to 27,000. I was saying at the writein that 26,000 is an important milestone because it's where Ferret and Florence and the The Da Vinci Code Code crashed and burned two years ago. I feel like if I can pass 26,000, there's nothing between me and 50,000.

My novel... it is fucking weird, even for me. And I haven't even gotten to the part where I use LaTeX tabular mode to do a scene in two columns.


Tonight, going to see Strauss's "Intermezzo" at New York City Opera with Talia. Looking forward to it!

Evil pondering...

a)Post-Modernists are rip-off artists. They steal/borrow from anywhere they can, from other books, from movies, from advertisements, from boring philosophical tomes, from real life... It's the repurposing, rearranging, and reinventing that makes it art.

b)I need to fill 50,000 words.

c)It would not be out of place to fill many of those words with someone else's words, that is to say. This is probably outside the spirit of NaNo, but then again, I'm never sure I know what the spirit of NaNo is.

or

a)Post-Modernists are playful with the written page. They recognize that the novel is a structure full of conventions and they enjoy breaking those conventions.

b)My character is wrestling with the fact that she cannot stop talking without the story ending and consequently without her life ending. I want to work with this.

c)I need to fill 50,000 words.

d)I am going to have to figure out how to count meaningful blank space toward my wordcount.