And thus a singularly unproductive day can be transformed into an incredibly productive one…

I am tired, so tired, my brain is just a little broken and one of my characters just developed a new lover interest (dude, seriously, did you need more?) which surprised me but explained so very much.

A very good character is turning villainous, and I have villains to redeem, and a touch more backstory to unpeel and then quite frankly I can just type random smut for the rest of the month because I will have achieved what I needed to this November.

Also I continue to feel wistful at the distinct lack of smut in this book. It’s as if the characters are busy worrying about their plot or something, and that’s just ridiculous. The secret steampunk subplot has yet to reveal itself but I think it’s still simmering (ha) just below the surface.

Can you tell I’m punchy? It’s so past my bedtime, and I had two desserts tonight. Woo!

Hee C who is handwriting her novel in an exercise book made it to 4 pages and got so excited at the best daily amount she’s written all month that she then made it to 5 and had to be forcibly removed from the exercise book and sent home to put herself to bed. Yes my dear, writing is an addiction, what do you think I’ve been up to all these years?

(her eyes are kind of Bright and Shiny oh yeah she’s got it bad, officially no longer a civilian I think)

Sleepy now zzzzzzzz oh and now the baby wakes up, no zzzz for me, lalalalala

I was so busy blogging last night, I forgot to mention a couple of milestones.

First, Jem rolled over for the first time, yesterday. And thanks to me being so pushy about ‘look at how cute she’s being,’ both parents got to see it in real time. We then whipped out the new video camera (the other pre-Christmas present, one each, only fair) and got an awful lot of footage of her not repeating the trick, despite a great deal of emotional blackmail and peer pressure from big sister. Go, Jem!

The other milestone is that I passed the 30K mark of Saturnalia, aka NaNo-Book. When I’m writing up a storm the rest of the year around, this is usually my monthly quota, and I’ve reached it in 18 days. The good news is what I have been writing is good stuff – not, you know, GREAT stuff, it is NaNo after all – but I’m getting down the backstory that is to be revealed in book 3 (but would be awfully nice to know the details of before I return to rewrite book 2) and the structure of the third book is blossoming nicely.

There was always the possibility that choosing to do NaNo this year was a personal indulgence, with Book 2 due at the publisher’s in February. But it is such a relief to know so much more about Book 3 than I did 18 days ago, and it will hugely help my confidence in preparing Book 2 for the eyes of La Voyager. I have only written one scene worthy of being struck from the record forever (strikethrough means it’s technically deleted but we can keep our words for the final wordcount because after all we did write em) and that was when I was apparently channelling the Bold and the Beautiful or something equally subtle.

The rest of it is good, trooly. It’s not getting thrown away, in any case. Even if characters who are supposed to be busy turning over new leaves keep doing Bad Things. And I’m criminally short of sex scenes, as none of my characters are in the mood – which I have to say is very unlike them.

12 days, 20,000 words to go!

… or NaNoWriMo has driven me around the bend. It’s one of the two.

So here’s the thing: I’ve had a deadline this week, culminating in this weekend, to finish editing the glossary and calendar meta-documents that have to go into my actual published book. And I’ve been struggling because there were tricky parts, and my brain kept bouncing off those tricky parts, and to cut a long story short, I’ve been doing my NaNo words every day but somehow not getting to the glossary. Which left me with two days.

After hyperventilating, I came up with plan for the weekend. Saturday was for glossarising (morning) all the bits without calendar references, and if I got that done in time, I could go to  wagem007‘s place for the NaNo write in, in the afternoon. Then Sunday, which also features a birthday party, could be for finishing off the calendar stuff and maybe I could not get my words done that day and still not be too far behind. So of course, secretly I wanted to do EXTRA words today to make up for pre-emptively blowing off tomorrow.

Okay. So I did the first part, hooray, finally, thanks to the Wiggles who had the good sense to have a concert on this morning that we bought tickets to months ago. Two tickets. For Raeli and her Daddy. Glossarising – tick.

Feeling all accomplished, I drove down to the docks to pick up L (who lives on a BOAT) and then across the bridge (for the first time since I got my licence, I think?) to find Em’s place, which is in Howrah. I’ve never been to Howrah before, but it turned out to exist with a minimum of effort. The three of us then settled down to a lively and reasonably productive afternoon.

Um. Except for the part where I let myself doodle aimlessly, rereading some scenes, fiddling a little, just to warm up, and then suddenly realised at least half an hour into the session that I had 600 words less than I should have. No, I hadn’t edited them out. No, I hadn’t lost any scenes between yesterday and today. The word count was just – different. I finally came to the conclusion that I was so desperate to reach my word count yesterday that I had hallucinated the extra 600 words, and duly noted them in my spreadsheet.

Well, that was a blow. I kept working, but it was a struggle after all that, and by the end of the afternoon I’d barely made up to yesterday’s word count.

I had promised to be home in time to cook tea for the family – really at this point I should have made noises to leave. Instead, I wrote my brains out. I cranked the music up high, I tore into my two sets of square brackets, turning them into the violent fight scenes they were supposed to be, and I achieved another plane of consciousness. Finally it was late, the baby was looking dazed from too much rock-until-you-stop-crying, and I had written about 1500 words in under an hour. Also my brain was slowly leaking out my ears.

I haven’t got to the best part yet. I dropped L back at the docks, came home, started (late) to cook tea, and in between chopping and stir-frying, I opened up the version of my doc that I had backed up by emailing to myself before I left. Huh. Looked like the 600 words were there, all right. No obvious extra scenes that had been accidentally deleted. I opened the version I’d been working on in Howrah and slowly started paging through both, looking for what was different between them.

At this point I realised that the 600 missing words from the word count was back in the working document too. No new scenes. Just… a recount.

Yep. So… remember how I wanted to get ahead today? I did. By 600 words. Because apparently being in a different postcode makes a difference to Word.

Either that, or I’m still hallucinating.

It has been a day of frazzle, from beginning to end. Waking up is HARD when you were awake at 4am. For some reason Jem has an unconscionable attachment to that hour. Whether she goes to sleep at 7pm, 10pm or midnight, she’s always wide awake at four.

Thursdays are put aside as an open house for Nano-ers to come work on my big table, which is lovely in theory. It was squashed today by the Sports Carnival smack bang in the middle of the morning – I only had an hour or two to myself before I had to leave, and I mostly spent that time cleaning up for guests and clearing said big table.

It was okay not getting any words written in the morning, cos I would have all afternoon with my Nano chums. (ha) I was also on tenterhooks because it was raining, and if the carnival was cancelled, I would have time to do actual stuff.

It was not cancelled. It got fine. I left the house. It started to rain again. I had the pram in the car, but not the plastic rain cover. I had an umbrella, but not the baby pouch. The wrong pairs of things! We managed to get to the sports field without drowning the baby. An hour of watching other people’s children line up and run around, with occasional flashes of interest as our own child participated in the shenanigans. Yes, Raeli still spends more time checking out what everyone else is doing than concentrating on the finish line. Just like last year. Only we did it in the rain.

A quick but satisfying sushi lunch, made more entertaining by the fact that the sushi chef and his partner spent the whole time trying to make Jem smile adoringly at them, which she did. She is so good like that.

Then an afternoon of chaos. I love my Nano chums, I do, and we all really did need a chance to catch up, chat about writing, and boost each other’s spirits. But it would have been nice if we managed to do some actual writing, too. We just had a few too many exciting things to talk about, and a few too many children in the other room (six, at one point, plus Jem) causing mayhem and making each other cry.

All pretty good kids. But there’s a certain number that you reach, and they become a horde. That number starts long before you get to six.

To make things worse, my writing wasn’t working. I’m normally pretty good at working through distractions, but every time I got pulled away, the scene fragmented just a little more. It didn’t help that it was a fight scene, and I find those the hardest. FInally I wrote something loud and judgemental in capital letters and square brackets (check out Justine Larbalestier on the value of square brackets, followed by the dangers of square brackets. I also enjoyed Maggie Stiefvater on the square bracket technique and how it works for her) and just moved on to the next scene, and the next. Also I found some actual earbuds and played some actual music instead of pretending I didn’t need to. I really need to. Glee soundtrack played super loud means that the sound of burst balloons and broken hearts does not get through.

The Nano afternoon segued into our normal evening of socialising, Battlestar Galactica etc, and I only had 300 words written. PANIC. I have not so far dropped below a day’s target (though I have often completed less than a day’s words), and I was convinced that if I did so, the whole thing would fall apart. I managed another 400 or so before actually having to socialise. Then, after all had departed and our girls were in bed, I started on the mammoth task of actually writing at night, an essential feature of last year’s nano, but something I have found impossible this year, due to the fact that I have seen nearly every 4am since August.

None of them are nice.

It hurt, but I got it written, and I am now a whole two words above the minumum word count. Frabjous day! I also got this blog post written 3 minutes before the time I promised I would get it written or come to bed and leave it unposted.

Thus: it is posted.

I had an attack of the plots today, and accidentally figured out the structure and events of three quarters of Saturnalia, Book III of the Creature Court. Can I hear a woohoo? Yes, I did sell a trilogy without a great deal of idea of what happened in Book III. How could I know, when I had no idea of the surprises Book II would throw at me?

So yes, plot. Part of the reason I wanted to NaNo up the first 50K of this ms before I go back to my rewrite of Book 2 was because it involves a reveal of backstory previously only hinted at, and I wouldn’t know exactly what that backstory WAS until I wrote it. I am not a pre-plotter. I used to be, but it didn’t work for me. I generally have one or two future events in my head, and I try to work towards them, but usually end up taking the scenic route.

This makes meta-documents, as discussed in Scott Westerfeld’s post as part of the Westerbalestier Nano-tips series particularly important to me. I’m not one of those fantasy writers who has their worldbuilding beautifully laid out before they start working (though my cartographer informs me that this would be a Much Better Idea), I wait until the world turns up in crumbs and tidbits in my sentences.

Then I write it down somewhere important and memorable, because if I’m writing fast, chances are that some other worldbuilding that is Entirely Contradictory will turn up later, and that is the road to insanity and tears.

So, my current meta-documents, ie the docs used to keep track of the stuff I need to, include:

Map [hard copy, biro scrawl in notebook, now an ever expanding series of nicely inked sketches drawn by my mother]

Fasti/Calendar of Festivals [Excel, loosely based on the Roman calendar but with some extreme Tansyfication]

Glossary [a latecomer to the party, only constructed after the 3rd draft of Power & Majesty, housed in Zulupad, a platform so awesome it deserves a post of its own - it also now exists in a word doc cos editors want a less spoilery version included at the back of the book]

Playlist! [itunes, one for the whole series, separate ones for each book, mini-playlists for characters who deserve it, and a Make Write Good super playlist for writing fastly and brilliantly]

Saturnalia page [Excel, a list of important stuff the third book has to address or include, and my day by day projected & actual Nano wordcount]

Keeping Track page [Excel, used for wordcount goals for first two books, notes to self for next edits of first two books]

Character Timelines [Excel, column for each major character, keeping track of intersecting points of backstory and ages]

Courtesi and Alliances page [Excel, more backstory info, this time showing names and details minor characters and who are allied to whom, etc. Also includes all the words/descriptors I've used for my skybattles, and which animal everyone turns into]

Power and Majesty timeline [Excel, this listed every scene & chapter in book 1 and kept track of what day they happened on - now out of date because I suck and didn't update it when adding new scenes with recent edit]

Okay, that’s enough to make my head hurt. The important thing is that apart from the Fasti/Calendar of Festivals (well, four months worth of it), all of this was constructed during or after the writing process, not before. The downside of this is that I haven’t done it all that efficiently – I only started a real glossary late in the day, and probably wouldn’t have started or needed half of those Excel worksheets if I’d had it running from the start. In fact this is a problem because I have several times edited or added information in only one place, and had conflicting dates in backstory, etc. Aaargh!

On the other hand, if I’d realised how much STUFF there was to keep track of in these books (which honestly are not as complicated to read as they are to write and edit), I might have been too freaked out to even get started. So on the whole not having a plan is still the best plan for me.

However, next time I may draw the map first. To keep my Mum happy.

Oh, who am I kidding? I totally won’t do that.

The horrible, horrible thing about being a writer is that sometimes you can work for an hour and get 200 words, and sometimes you can work for an hour and get 1000 words. When you’re working to a deadline, you can’t just hang around waiting for the speedy words to come, you have to plug away to reach your goal even on the days when it’s just not happening.

Well, you don’t have to. But it’s usually a pretty good idea, because it could be weeks before the speedy, brilliant, easy words turn up.

Nano has been hard for me so far. I like what I’m writing, but it’s been sloooow. I don’t know if it’s because I’m at the start of a new book, or because a substantial percentage of my brain is working on milk-production, or because 1667 is just not a reasonable daily wordcount for me right now.

I’m sure I was writing faster last month when I was trying for 1000 words a day. On the other hand, that was the end of a book. The end of a book goes faster! Why do I never remember this.

So I just plod patiently along, enjoying the company. Today I got more ahead of my overall wordcount than I have all week. 600 words, woo!

But the important thing, the really important thing, is that today I got to use ‘milksop’ in a sentence. And  godiyeva brought gingerbread cakes, and M brought almond tea. And holy crap, I wrote nearly 2200 words. That’s kind of good.

Also, the baby is sleeping and thus far has managed to not explode her nappy open. Hooray!

That’s right, I am rocking the minimum. Go, minimum!

New music added to writing playlist: the Glee soundtrack. Awesome writing music, I have to say. It’s so peppy. But then I’m the girl who likes to write to Lily Allen turned up Way Loud, so possibly my suggestions won’t work for others.

Writing was harder today because the baby was just a bit squeakier, and being somewhere other than home ceased to be a novelty for her. I have to suck it up and start TAKING THE BOUNCY CHAIR anywhere I intend to write. She does love the bouncy chair. Still, minimum achieved. And the day isn’t over yet…

In other news, I just found out that Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels was the co-winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. It’s always awesome when Australian writers get recognised at an international level, but I’m particularly excited because I think this is one of the most interesting and important fantasy novels of the last decade. Tender Morsels has so much depth to it, and so much to say about the nature of fantasy, reality and fairy tales. It’s not an easy book by any means, but it is a true classic of the genre. I’ve never formally reviewed TM because I felt too close to it to appear unbiased (I am in a critiquing group with Margo and critiqued an early version of the manuscript), but I would love to write an academic paper on it some day. There’s plenty of crunch there to work with.

Had a satisfyingly successful Nano writing session with the girls at Mures (large fish and chippery, very supportive of writers with laptops) on the docks – I managed most of my day’s wordcount with the baby strapped to my chest. It’s exciting to finally be letting myself loose on Book 3, which has decided it is called Saturnalia.

Google searches for the day: oyster season italy, theatre history, Commedia_dell’Arte, backstage theatre terms, Bill Oddie.

Okay, maybe the Bill Oddie part wasn’t relevant to the book.

I’m deep in backstory because yes, even by book three, it’s all about the backstory. The scene I’m writing is one I first started thinking my way through more than five years ago, and it’s awesome that I am so much a better writer than I was then. Sometimes it’s good to wait it out.