Day 24, or as I like to call it, Jack Bauer Day.
Not much to report today. Just going clickity-click on my laptop and getting the words out. A short post doesn't necessarily mean that not much is going on. It just means that nothing especially earth-shattering happened.
And yes, I am writing while watching author interviews on Youtube; Max Brooks, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, and a few with Chuck Wendig even. It's a bit like music for me. Or maybe a constant pep talk as I hear these guys discussing the early days of their writing careers.
Hey, folks! Taking a quick break to update you all on the novel.
So far, I've added about 2,500 words to the novel, about the same amount as I wrote yesterday. I've noticed that, little by little, I'm getting more written each day, and I'm taking that as a good sign. I'm also just shy of fifty thousand words, or half of the first draft. Or a third of the way through it, if I'm going to go for 150,000 words in the end.
Either way - half, a third - it's a big ol' chunk of book flesh that I've bitten off, so I'm happy. Not only that, but getting it done in just a few weeks is a pretty nice feeling. If it were November, I'd be kicking NaNoWriMo ass.
Yesterday, I wrote in my back yard. Today, I wrote in my living room right across from my fire place. I didn't have the fire going, but, meh, who cares? I don't know if that's why I'm a little more productive, but who knows?
Now that the new school year is starting and I'm going back to tutoring, I've got this feeling that it might be wiser to do my writing at home. I don't know why. It's just what my gut is telling me. Maybe because I'm in an academic environment at work, I don't want to OD by being at the library for long stretches of time. Maybe I just want to save a few bucks on gas.
Or it might have something to do with the hours. Most libraries don't open until ten, and if I want to get the most out of my day, I have to start earlier. Taking a break to switch locations could result in an unnecessary interruption if I'm writing through a particularly juicy part. That's just my theory, of course. My hypothesis. Perhaps writing at home and the library won't be so bad. I'll try it out tomorrow.
Today, I got the bright idea to write outside. It was a nice, sunny day, so it seemed like a good thing to do. Ah, but it backfired. It was such a relaxing day that I found myself relaxing more than writing half the time. Still got a solid 1,600 words out of it. Unfortunately, I still have at least another two thousand to go.
Aw, crap. It never seems like I'm getting enough words written in the day.
No Tomorrow is covering just a week of story time right now. That is, in the universe of the story, only a week has gone by since the first page. I don't have a specific time scale in mind. It could be a month, a year, a decade. Still, I'm well over a hundred pages into it. I would have thought that more time would have gone by. Joke's on me, I guess.
The word count I'm aiming for is still a hundred thousand words, but that I've covered just a week of story time, I think I might have to add another fifty thousand on top of that. That's nothing set in stone. It's just a possibility at the moment.
On top of everything, I'm going back to my day job of tutoring tomorrow, which, of course, means I've got a few hours less each day for writing. Having the whole summer to myself was nice while it lasted. This was really why I wanted to get the first draft done by the end of July, so that I wouldn't have to worry about it alongside getting my tutoring work done.
But hey, shit happens, you know?
Anyone who's followed my blog for a while knows how much I hate having to do this...
*Sigh*
Yay! Time for shameless self-promotion!
God, can I sound like any more of a douchebag? Well, I did this for Twitter and Facebook, so I might as well carry on the proud tradition.
Yes, I just launched a new website for my writing called heavenshaker.com. And sure, I am going to give myself a little pat on the back because I had no idea what to expect. I've never actually tried running a website before. I thought I would have to be some massive computer nerd to get it right, but it was a surprisingly user-friendly experience. And as long as I remember to pay the regular maintenance fee, long may it live.
I was also hesitant to launch the sight because of a bad experience with the project not too long ago. I originally wanted to register the name mariopiumetti.com through a service called Slam Dunk Domains. My friend Marina uses it for her photography site and spoke highly of it, but it just didn't click for me. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. The project collapsed after just a few hours. The customer service reps at Slam Dunk were understanding and I did get my money credited back to me, but the domain was no longer available.
Enter Intuit. They're known for financial software, but they develop websites as well. My family's construction company used to have a website with them, and I remember how nice it looked. The cost of the service is pretty reasonable, about $100 for the domain registration and monthly maintenance.
Why did I pick the name Heaven Shaker? Off the top of my head, I remember hearing about a manned torpedo the Japanese used during World War II. They called it Kaiten, but its nickname the Heaven Shaker sounded cooler.
But as LeVar Burton used to say on Reading Rainbow, don't take my word for it. Check it out.
The title of my zombie novel has officially become No Tomorrow. I had a few other candidates in mind and ran a survey among my friends. Most of them sided with Infected as a title, but too many apocalyptic stories have used it over the last few years, so I discarded that.
I was at the library today and got quite a bit of work done; two thousand words! I still got another 1,500 to go for tonight, but it's still a lot closer to my daily quota than I've been able to get in a few days.
I was dwelling earlier on the fact that I'm still twenty thousand words short of where I should be, but then I realized that it's best not to fixate on that. I'll save the big push for the weekend. During the weekdays, all I can ask for myself is to strive for 3,500 words.
Still, working out of a library has helped quite a bit. It's quiet and I don't enjoy Internet access, which means I've got nothing to distract me except for the occasional kid running down the aisles of books. With long works of fiction, I'm starting to think that maybe a library is the best place for me to work on the first draft. Subsequent drafts are different because I've already got something down in front of me, but when I have to come up with fresh material, I find that it's best to cut out all the bullshit; as much of it as possible.
I've crunched the numbers. I need to put in five thousand words a day for the next week in order to catch up on Zombies. That's the bad news.
The good news is that today hasn't been too bad. True, I do need to catch up for yesterday as well, and that puts today's quota at ten thousand words, but I've managed to get down a quarter of that with a nice degree of ease. It got me thinking of something Stephen King said in On Writing:
"With the door shut, downloading what's in my head directly to the page, I write as fast as I can and still remain comfortable. If I write rapidly, putting down my story exactly as it comes into my mind, only looking back to check the names of my characters and the relevant parts of their back stories, I find that I can keep up with my original enthusiasm and at the same time outrun the self-doubt that's always waiting to settle in."
That's what if feels like. It feels today like I'm jacked in and downloading the story from my brain. I like that. In the past, I've found that the freeway between my brain and my hands on the keyboard are often gummed up with enough traffic to make the roads of Los Angeles look like a quiet countryside. On days like today when it comes out nice and naturally, it's a good thing.
On a side note, I've got about a dozen candidates down for the book's official title. I'm hoping to narrow that down to maybe a field of four or five by the end of the night.
Another slow day. I'm trying to get a little more done before going out to an event tonight. Waking up late (again) didn't help, and I've also been thinking a lot about a proper title for the novel. Zombies just isn't going to cut it for me. The title ought to be something cool, something catchy, something that doesn't sound like a devotional for teen. I'll see what I can come up with and maybe run a poll on which one sounds the best. Until then, I'll be banging my head against a wall.
