L’esprit d’escalier

Okay, now that I’m done navel-gazing, how about some things I’ve found helpful and not-so-helpful during NaNos of the past for those of you who are gearing up to participate for the first time?

Before November 1st:

• Set time aside every day to write. Budget it now.  Take a look at your calendar for November and figure out where you’re putting your NaNo time.  You might have some days where you’re so full that you don’t think you have time to write.  In that case, budget a little more into other days that have more free time, but also look for places where you might be able to snatch ten or fifteen minutes to keep your momentum going on the days that are packed.  Can you write during your commute?  While you’re waiting for class to begin? Can you spare a few minutes of your lunch break?  Get up fifteen minutes earlier?
• Set goals. 50,000 words in 30 days averages out to a minimum of 1667 words a day.  But if there are days where you just don’t make that goal, understand that you can make that up on other days.  Is it better to think about it in terms of weekly goals?  50,000 divided by four weeks gives you 12,500 words/week.  Again, take another look at your calendar and see what’s realistic for you.  Maybe you want to be halfway done by November 12th so you can feel a bit of breathing room.  That’s 2083 words/day for the first 12 days, but that means the last 18 days, your daily goal drops to 1389.
• Do some story prep. You don’t have to know every little thing that happens, or the nuances of every character.  Hell, with less than two days to go, there’s not a lot of time left for worldbuilding.  But there’s still time to think about the arc of your story and get acquainted with your characters.
• Stock up on what you need. If you’re doing any of your NaNo longhand, do you have something to write in yet?  What about pens?  For me, the pen is more important than the paper I’m writing on.  I’ve tried writing in nice looking journals and found myself feeling guilty at marring the aesthetic quality when I scratch out words.  So, regular cheap college-lined notebooks work for me, but the pen had better a pleasure to hold.
• Set your playlists now. If you need music playing while you write, weed through your music folders before November 1st.  Otherwise you’re going to spend time that you could be writing trying to find the perfect songs for your project, and then spend time getting those songs in the right order, and then oh, I totally forgot I had this song and then before you know it, where’d that hour go?  Yeah.  Playlists now, so you’re not procrastinating later.
• Get your writing space ready. Go to the place you plan to do the majority of your writing (provided you’re not doing all of it in coffee shops, that is.)  Look at your desktop/kitchen table/blanket fort.  Is something nearby going to distract you?  Are you going to sit down on November 1st and say “I really should sort through this pile of junk mail?”  Get rid of it now.

November 1st and onward

• Sit down and write. I know.  No shit, right?  But it’s way too easy, if you’re inclined towards procrastination, to say “I don’t really have to write today.  I have 29 more days!  I’ll just write an extra 57 words a day, and I’ll be set.”
• That said, it’s okay to take breaks. If you read the NaNo forums (oh god stay away from the forums, you cat vacuumers) you’ll see people talking about marathon writing sessions, where they sat at their computers for six straight hours and churned out a third of their word count.  You don’t have to do that. Sometimes you’re going to find yourself staring at the screen.  Sometimes you’re going to feel your mind wandering.  If you can’t pull your concentration back to writing, take five minutes and do something else.  Go say hello to your significant other or your kids.  Get up, stretch, sort through five minutes’ worth of that junk mail, tweet about how your writing’s coming along.  But once those five minutes are up, sit your ass back down and go back to writing.
• Don’t give up if you fall behind. It happens.  Keep writing.  Even if you fall so far behind you don’t think you’ll hit 50,000 by the 31st, keep writing. So you’ve missed a few days, through life intervening or succumbing to cat-vacuuming.  Don’t beat yourself up over it.  Suck it up, acknowledge that you’ve fallen behind, then pick up your pen or open up your gdoc and press the hell on.
• Check in with other writers. NaNo doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  Ask other people how their writing’s going.  Tell them about your own.  Commiserate together.  Applaud one another.  Be willing to be on both the giving and receiving end of pep talks.  Be ready to kick someone else in the ass should they need it, and if you think you need a kick of your own, ask for it.
• Get rid of distractions. If you find yourself tabbing out to do things that aren’t writing during your writing time, unplug the gorram internet. This doesn’t mean checking thesaurus.com for help finding a different word, or googling the date of a battle for research.  But if you’re tabbing out to twitter or youtube or icanhascheezburger or your RSS reader, you’re not writing.  Stop it.  Same thing if the TV’s on and you’re paying more attention to Castle than your screen.  Shut it off, or, if someone else is watching, move to another room.  Set your Gtalk/IM/MSN/<insert messenger here> status to “Do Not Disturb: Writing.”
• Reward yourself. You’ve hit your word count goals for five days running?  Buy yourself a song on iTunes.  Make it to the halfway point?  Victory ice cream sundae!  But remember to keep those goals (and therefore their rewards) attainable.
  

It Burns Us, Precious: “Padding Techniques” and Other Things That Hurt More Than Help. I’ll go into the reason that padding techniques drive me batshit afterwards, but let’s see if you can suss it out as you read the list.

• SO MANY ADJECTIVES OMG. Description is good, don’t get me wrong.  But some NaNo-ers live by the creed “the more adjectives and adverbs, the better.”  If a noun or a verb goes without a modifier, they’ll tack one on.  Or two, or three.  And throw in a prepositional phrase while they’re at it.  Reading back a bit and looking for places you can add useful description, that’s fine.  But if you find yourself describing the exact shade of yellow just to stretch your word count, it’s pretty ridiculous.
• “When in doubt, dream sequence!” Yes, some dream sequences are useful.  They advance the plot or aid character development.  If that’s what your dream sequence does, that’s fine.  But if you’re having Bob dream about purple sparkly dinosaurs and it’s not in any way connected to your plot, don’t do it.
• Micromanaging your characters. Does anything important happen between the time Bob wakes up at 8:00 AM and when he gets the call at 2PM that there’s been a murder?  No?  Then why are you telling me about the color of his cereal bowl and the expiration date on the milk?
• Backstory that goes nowhere.  Again, if it matters to the plot or to the character, hell, if you’re not sure if it matters, but it might, then yes, by all means, backstory away!  But if you’re writing about Bob’s third grade teacher just to add another thousand words, I probably want to smite you.

There are so very many more.  There’s a whole thread dedicated to “Cheats” in the Reaching 50,000! forum.  It’s six pages long, and it’s only going to get longer as November progresses.  They make me grit my teeth for two reasons: first, it’s exactly what it says it is: cheating.  Now, honestly, the only thing you get for winning NaNo is the pride that you, y’know, won NaNo.  So no, it doesn’t hurt my story if someone else does it.  But I know that if I employed those cheats, I’d feel pretty hollow about the “victory” in the end.

Secondly, once November’s over and I got back and re-read what I’ve done, all that padding will get edited right the fuck out. Not only that, but while I’m hacking them out of my work-in-progress, all I’ll be thinking is “God, this sucks so much.  I’m such a shitty writer.  UGH.”

Okay, yes, I do that to myself by default, but let me tell you this: now and then, I open the file with my 2003 NaNo — a story whose original premise I was really excited about (remember the angel story, Hill?) — and it’s so full of extra bullshit that I just close it again, disappointed.  I wasn’t intentionally padding, no, but I got so mired in backstory for the sake of word count (I kid you not, it was actually backstory-within-backstory-within-backstory), that if I ever do decide to go back to it, I’m going to have to scrap nearly the whole thing.

It was probably around 20,000 words.   Not quite halfway, but the actual plot got lost somewhere around the 10,000 mark.  The second half is useless.

NaNoing means silencing your inner editor.  You’re not supposed to agonize over every word because it can slow you down, make you second-guess yourself.  That’s for the other eleven months of the year.  I can agree with that.  NaNo is for letting your ideas flow and damn the consequences.  Only, I’d argue that you have to let your inner editor see a few glimpses of sunlight, here and there.  Sure, the stated goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in a month.  What I want to do is get 50,000 words into a novel that I’ll want to finish come December.

(This post, by the way, is 1667 words on the nose.)

Two days now — less — until the start of NaNoWriMo 2009.  If you’re signed up on the NaNo site, you can find my profile here, though I can’t promise I’ll be very good at updating it.

I’m still trying to decide which story I want to go with — Night Owls, which has been languishing at, what, 2000 words over on the sidebar since forever, or Grailchild, which I’ve started and stopped a hojillion times, but finally had a kind of epiphany about how to tell the damned thing.

My 2004 NaNo still calls to me now and then, but it requires a metric fuckton of worldbuilding.  I think that’s what bogged me down last time, trying to build the world while I wrote the story.  The other two require a good chunk of it as well, but since they’re both set in worlds that are analogous to our own, it’s not too great a stretch.

Anyway, enough of the “Oh pity me, I have three worlds I could play in” and on to more productive things.

I’m sure those of you participating have seen the math before: 50,000 words in 30 days averages out to 1667 words a day.  Now, I’m work-travelling for five of those days, and factor in a probable trip to New Hampshire for Thanksgiving, that cuts me down to 24 days of writing.  While ideally I’ll still get writing done on those days — my laptop will be with me for the work trip — I’m going to try to budget my word count a bit, aiming for 2000 words a day, just in case.

It’s a lot, I know, but there are two great values to NaNo:  getting participants into the habit of writing, and getting us to, y’know, actually write something. So even if I don’t hit 2000 words a day, or even 1667, in theory I’ll be producing some number that is greater than zero.  That’s nothing to sneeze at.

Now, here’s the funny thing — Nin’s almost done.  Either Hill’s finishing it on her current go, or it’ll come back to me for the final scene.  We have, between the two of us, churned out what will probably hit 105,000 words over the last year.  On top of that, I’m sure if I counted up blog posts and ficlets and things I’ve written for WoW, I’d find my total output for the last year to be somewhere near another hundred thousand.

Taking that into consideration, it becomes slightly less daunting — I do write nearly every day.

I also have this grand new ambition.  Greg no longer works in Boston, which means he leaves at 6:30 or so to head out.  I take a different train now, and have the option of sleeping for another 30-45 minutes or… I can get my ass out of bed when he leaves and dedicate that time to writing.

It’s going to take discipline, I realize. I’m a world-champion sleeper, especially when I’m nestled all snug in bed with a cat or two curled up beside (okay, on top of) me.  However, hopefully this weekend we’ll be picking up a new incentive to lure me out of bed at oh-early-thirty:  a single-cup coffeemaker.  We are the proud owners of a pretty badass coffeemaker as it is, with all kinds of neat bells and whistles and the ability to make 12 cups at a whack.

Which is all well and good and fine on a Sunday morning, when I can brew a pot and we can refill our cups throughout the day, but on a weekday morning, it seems like too much effort for a cup we won’t even have the chance to enjoy.  (And then of course, there’s the whole washing of the coffee pot when we get home…)

But one cup at a time?  This will actually get used, and probably save us a ton of counter space, since the 12-cup maker is kind of a monster.  It can be relegated to a storage shelf until it gets dragged out on holidays.

So, coffee, a bit of an I-can-do-this pep talk… hrm.

This was supposed to be a post about things that have worked for me during NaNo and things that have been full of colossal failures.  Instead I’ve been all “me me me” on you guys.

Actual useful post coming later today, I promise!

The short version, if you haven’t been reading up on it:

Wal-Mart slashes prices on bestsellers that will be out for the holidays.  Books that have a cover price of $25-$30 will be sold for $10.  Amazon, not to be outdone, drops their prices on those titles to $9.  Wal-Mart thumbs their nose and goes to $8.99.  Target joins the $8.99 party.  Wal-Mart goes “Oh, no you don’t” and drops to $8.98.

That’s where they’re holding at the moment.

Looks awesome for people buying books for Christmas gifts, doesn’t it?

Let’s talk a little about bookstore and publishers and discounts (oh my.)

Say a book has a cover price of $27.99.  Depending on the publisher, bookstores will receive a discount between 44 and 46% on those books.  Let’s go in the middle, and say that Books That Don’t Suck ordered some copies of Huge Bestseller at a 45% discount.  They pay $15.39 per book to the publisher, which means that if they sell it for any less than $15.39, they’re selling it at a loss.

Bookstores simply can’t afford to “break even” on these books.  Sure, they usually pass on some sort of discount — in my bookstore days, the top ten New York Times bestsellers were 30% off (“35% if you’re a member of our Frequent Buyer Club!”).  But 45%?  More?  No way, not if we wanted to, y’know, stay in business and keep selling books.

The sad thing is, most customers don’t know that.  Joe Shopper sees that Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target are selling Huge Bestseller for $8.99, so he goes into his local bookstore and says “I can get it from the big guys for cheaper. Can you match it?”  When he’s told no, he says thanks but no thanks and orders online.  This was happening even when I worked at the bookstore, when Amazon was just starting out.

Here’s the other thing: that $8.99 price is $6.40 lower than what the publishers are charging the bookstores.  Publishers really can’t match that themselves, so some booksellers are cancelling their bestseller orders from publishers and ordering them direct from Amazon/Wal-Mart/Target.  (Though it seems from a couple of Mr. Kashkashian’s updates, Amazon’s putting a 3-book limit on orders.

It’s a kick in the teeth to independent bookstores, and could have a frightening affect on authors as well.  Amazon has already forcefully set e-book prices at $9.99, making other e-book retailers follow suit or lose sales.  By deeply discounting the bestsellers, they are harming other, lesser known books.  As David Gernert, John Grisham’s literary agent, said to the New York Times,

“If readers come to believe that the value of a new book is $10, publishing as we know it is over,” said David Gernert, Mr. Grisham’s literary agent. “If you can buy Stephen King’s new novel or John Grisham’s ‘Ford County’ for $10, why would you buy a brilliant first novel for $25? I think we underestimate the effect to which extremely discounted best sellers take the consumer’s attention away from emerging writers.”

Remember, once upon a time, John Grisham was one of those debut authors.

What’s heartening, at least a bit, is that some of the heavy-hitting publishers and authors get it.  David Young, CEO of Hachette Book Group, told the Wall Street Journal, “”I’m worried about the major book-selling chains, and I’m concerned about the implications for publishers and the public alike.”

The e-book version of Stephen King’s Under the Dome won’t be released until more than a month after the hardcover comes out on November 10th.  King wanted the delayed release so that bookstores could have a chance to sell it in hardcover first and make some money.  The price wars (yes, Under the Dome is on the list) surprised him.  From his interview in the Wall Street Journal (via the Christian Science Monitor) : “I never thought we’d see people preordering a copy for $8.98,” he said. “My thinking was to give bookstores a chance to make some money.”

James Patterson, whose I, Alex Cross is also on the $8.99 list, had this observation in the New York Times article:

“Imagine if somebody was selling DVDs of this week’s new movies for $5,” Mr. Patterson said. “You wouldn’t be able to make movies.” He added, “I can guarantee you that the movie studios would not take this kind of thing sitting down.”

It’s true, the movie studios wouldn’t.  Someone, somewhere, has to take a stand against this.  The ABA made a move yesterday, filing a suit with the Department of Justice.  They declare that Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target’s actions constitute illegal predatory pricing.    They point out the danger to independent bookstores from this practice, saying

For our members — locally owned, independent bookstores — the effect will be devastating. There is simply no way for ABA members to compete. The net result will be the closing of many independent bookstores, and a concentration of power in the book industry in very few hands.

They also go one further, pointing out the danger of having the decisions of what books are readily available in so few hands — books are ideas, remember, and the beauty of independent bookstores is that there’s always someone out there thinking differently.  They’re going to support smaller, local presses.  They’re going to carry books by local authors that mean nothing to Amazon’s bottom line.  They’re going to champion books because they love books, not because of the bottom line.  And when those independents are gone, when there’s no competition left?  What do the people controlling the market do with their prices then?  The ABA has an idea:

We would find these practices questionable were they taking place in the market for widgets. That they are taking place in the market for books is catastrophic. If left unchecked, these predatory pricing policies will devastate not only the book industry, but our collective ability to maintain a society where the widest range of ideas are always made available to the public, and will allow the few remaining mega booksellers to raise prices to consumers unchecked.

There are a ton of great articles and blog posts out there.  I’m going to link to several of them, most who say all of this far, far better than I have.  But before you click away, I’m begging you again as I have before many, many times:  support your local independent bookseller. Telling me “I don’t have any nearby” is no excuse. You don’t physically walk into Amazon when you buy from them, do you?  You can order online from an independent bookstore just as easily as you can order from Amazon.  So hie thee to IndieBound and find yourself a bookstore.  If you need some suggestions, there are a few in my profile.  And one in Marty’s.

The ABA is taking a stand.  Independent booksellers are taking a stand.  Publishers and authors are voicing their concerns over what this price war means for the future of books and bookselling.  You can help all of them take a stand, too.  It’s as simple as buying your books from independent bookstores.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin Journal Sentinel Online, “Some fear giant book retailers’ deep discounts will hurt stores”

New York Times, “Book Association Challenges Retailers’ Price Plan”

TG Daily, “Booksellers Accuse Amazon of Illegal Price War”

Skylight Books, “This Microwave Would Go Great With That Copy of Infinite Jest You Just Bought!”

Bear Pond Books, “Race to the Bottom”

The Dallas Morning News, “Will $10 bestsellers doom independent bookstores?”

Shelf Awareness, “Wal-Mart vs. Amazon: ‘Let’s Start an Industry Conversation’”

These are just a start.  If you find other great posts, feel free to link them in the comments!

Oh, sweet zombie baby Jesus, what have I done?

Martin: I’m going to try and do nano this year.
me:Ooooh.
Martin: if I can work it, I’ll do blog posts so i can kill two nanos with one setting
me: All right. If you’re doing it, I’ll participate for moral support, if you want.
Martin: YEAH!

I’ve mused a bit about Nano before.  I skipped it altogether last year, and the three projects I mentioned way back in 2007 still remain largely untouched.  I’m going to come up against business travel, as I have every November for the last seven years, and unless Hill and I finish our YA book in the next week and a half (which is actually possible, come to think of it), Nin’s going to take priority over Nano when I have it in my inbox.

However.

It gets me writing.  One thing I’ve learned in the last year of working on Nin with Hill is that I’m more productive when I’m writing with someone.  I’ve noticed it, too, with the WoW writings — if someone’s waiting on me to respond, I’m far better about putting nose to grindstone and getting it done.  Self-imposed deadlines are easy to break, and the only person I’m letting down in that case is myself.

While the Nano forums help participants find “writing buddies” — people in your genre, people in your local area, people with similar interests — I’ve never really made any connections through there.  It’s great to be part of the community, absolutely, but it’s so much more effective when the person cheering you on is someone you know, someone whose feedback and opinions you value, and someone who’s making the same effort.

So, all right.  Nano it is.

Now I just need to go back to square one and choose a project, so I know what kind of world/character building I have to revisit.

Let me start with this:  I loved the original Stargate. I saw it in theatres (thus beginning my crush on James Spader).  I bought it when it came out on VHS — something I rarely do.  I’ll spend far more money than I ought to on books without batting an eyelash, but buy a movie?  That’s a rarity.  So much did I enjoy the movie that when they released the special edition on DVD, I acquired that, too.

When Stargate: SG-1 started airing on Showtime, I devoured the first few seasons, even though I wasn’t sure about Michael Shanks taking over the part of Daniel (don’t worry, I warmed to him right quick.)

I lost touch with it after a while.  Something shifted, not with the show but with me, though I couldn’t tell you what it was precisely.  My guess is that it started airing on a different night or time.  It first aired in July of 1997, which was the first summer Greg and I were dating.   It was also that summer that I started gaming with Greg and his friends.  After the bookstore closed, we’d all gather and save the world from Technocs and Nephandi, and I was notoriously bad about setting the VCR to record.

So, y’know, I know I’ve missed a ton of story.  I knew SGU was coming, because the awesome John Scalzi was brought on as a creative consultant and has talked it up on his blog.   Greg watched the pilot before I did, and to demonstrate just how much story I’ve missed, when he started talking about the characters encoding nine chevrons I asked if he was sure of that.  Since we all know from the movie that the Stargate takes seven symbols to create a wormhole.

Yes, he told me, but we’ve learned it can take eight symbols, too.  I boggled.

That’s how behind I am on my Stargate lore.

So I’ve queued up the Stargate Universe pilot on Hulu and watched it in bits and pieces over the last week or two and finally finished it today.

I really dug it.

It’s darker so far than SG-1 was in those first few seasons, but I’m fine with that.  I’m a fan of dark.  The pilot does very well with catching newcomers to the story (and lapsed viewers) up to speed without infodumping all over us.

Gamer geek, Eli, is a perfect choice for a guide:  we follow his introduction to the Stargate program and learn the things we need to know right along with him.  It’s a nice way to avoid excessive exposition.  He asks a question, someone gives him the nutshell-sized answer, and it’s just enough.  Late in the pilot, for example, Dr. Rush (who we’ll come back to in a minute) mentions that the Ancients who built the Stargates and the ship they’ve found themselves trapped on had discovered “ascension.”  Eli, of course, has no idea what he’s talking about.  Rush lays down in about three sentences, even though I’m guessing its reveal must have been the plot point of at least one SG-1 arc.

Dr. Rush is, so far, my favorite character.  Shut up, it’s not just the accent.  I get the sense he’s going to be a bit Baltar-like, though with less  selfishness (or at least, not manifesting in the same way.)  I believed his speech to Chloe begging for her trust more than I ever would have believed it coming from the mouth of Gaius Baltar.  Is he manipulative?  Oh, I’m pretty sure he is, and I know I might be buying into exactly what the writers want me to, but during that plea, I was convinced that he meant every word he said.

There were some bits that felt a bit cookie-cutter for me, but I was engaged enough in the story that I’ll trust the writers to challenge those perceptions before long.  Eli’s a perfect example:  we meet him playing a video game and solving a puzzle he’s been working at in the game for two months.  He’s pudgy, which I’m unsure whether to cheer on (“Hey look!  Not everyone on TV has to have perfect abs to be a likeable character!”) or groan about (“LOL gamers are fat! He probably survives on Cheetos and Mountain Dew har har har”).  So far, they’ve played up his geekiness as awkward and a bit naive, but he’s not a complete dumbass.  I think he’s going to prove one to be of the characters that keeps the others (Dr. Rush, the soldiers) grounded and reminds them that they’re human beings before they’re scientists or military men.

Most of the characters they’ve focused on so far are male, which I’m not terribly happy about, but I’m also willing to give the writers a bit more time on that, too.  I’m hoping that Chloe Armstrong and Tamara Johansen play bigger roles in upcoming episdoes.  It seems to be where they’re heading with Chloe, at least, and since Tamara’s the only medic they have, she’s going to be needed a lot more before the season’s out.

I won’t go so far as to say it’s my new BSG; that’s going to take a lot to top.  However, I admit that I was a bit pouty when my lunch hour ended.  I wanted to go straight into the second episode.  This has potential.

First, via Neil Gaiman, one librarian’s excellent reply to someone requesting a book be removed.

Second, from the Chicago Tribune, Julia Keller reflects on her first experience with a book banner (her mom)!

I know, didn’t think I’d be giving you homework, did you?  Don’t worry, I’m doing mine, too.  Musings to follow.