Lots to say, but I just can’t right now. I’ll try again next week.
pages upon pages
It’s kind of random, but I just wanted to let you know that you’re helping me not lose my drive for writing. I’m doing nanowrimo and I’m already worried about making the 50k word count, but then I look at your posts about your novella and how even your word count varies and it’s totally normal to not write the same amount of words every day. Anyways, I hope you have a great weekend and thanks for unknowingly helping me de-stress about my writing.
This ask made some stuff wake up in my brain, and I wanted to repost it here for easy reference in the future, when I need to be reminded. I said:
So first off, I’m really proud of you for doing something you love, even (especially) when it’s hard.
If it makes a difference, I advise you not to worry about making the 50K word count, because the important thing is to be creative, to tell your story, and to push through the challenging parts so you can get to the parts that are fun. I’m relearning this almost daily, while I work on the short story that wanted to be a novella that is trying to be a novel.
It sounds like you’re on your way to enjoying the journey and telling the story, but you inspired me to share some thoughts about my current process and progress:
I have to constantly remind myself that it isn’t about the word count or the number of days in a row that I write (I realize NaNoWriMo is set up to make those things important, but stay with me for a sec). I have to constantly remind myself that this is the first draft! This is the puke draft. This is the draft where all the ideas come out, all the bits fall onto the page, and I just go until it’s finished. We have to remember that this draft is going to have big holes in it. We’re going to come back to it in a month or so and realize that we wrote the same scene twice, or that we had something in our brains that we forgot to tell the reader, so this scene doesn’t make sense. But all of that is okay! We can fix it when we do our second draft, and the second draft is so much easier than the first draft, and almost always more fun.
But! We’re never going to get to the end of our story if we worry about how close to finished the first draft is. We’re never going to get to the end of our story if we judge ourselves the whole time we’re writing the first draft. We’re never going to get to the excitement and satisfaction of doing the rewrites if we don’t let ourselves just WRITE.
So try not to worry – wait, there is no try, only do and do not – DO NOT WORRY about the word count. Some days are going to be epic word dumps (Scalzi does 10K words in a day from time to time, for crap’s sake) and some days are going to be epic struggles to finish with 290 words that we aren’t that crazy about but at least it’s something.
Maybe you’ll get to 50K by the end of the month, and maybe you won’t, but if you focus – wait. WHEN you focus on telling the story and listening to your characters, when you test and challenge and reward them, the total word count is a bonus. But the story, as they say, is the thing.
Keep writing!
If anyone cares, I’m currently at 37970 words on the short story that wanted to become a novella that’s trying to be a novel and still needs a good title. I wrote a thing two days ago that I like. It sounds like this:
“Are you okay? You seem weird today.”
I didn’t seem weird. I was weird. And hormones and pre-teen angst and my general level of constant anxiety were all just wrecking me.
Those two lines capture precisely who I was when I was 12 so perfectly, it’s almost embarrassing and maybe even a little painful to read them.
I’m somewhere in the third act of this thing that refuses to cough up a title. I have two main story things that I need to wrap up, one character thing that I want to put in but don’t need to put in, and then I leave it alone for a day or two before the rewriting begins. It’s equally frustrating and exciting and scary to be this close to finishing the first draft, and that’s okay. It’s a good place to be, practically and emotionally, because it’s what I have to do before I can get into the part where it starts coming together into one whole story, instead of a bunch of things that may or may not hang together.
But, anyway, for everyone out there who is writing a story and feels like they’re never going to get to the end, or that it’s no good, or any of those things our brains tell us to protect us from taking the creative risk of finishing something: you’re not the only one. Hell, I bet even Neil Gaiman feels stuck and frustrated from time to time, and I’m pretty sure that he’s an actual, living god.
So just keep writing until the words pile up around you, because that’s when you take the words and rearrange them into something beautiful.
Tabletop Season 4: LANTERNS
Well, we had to wait an infuriatingly long time, but it’s finally here! Season Four of Tabletop kicks off with Lanterns, a delightful tile-laying game that’s super easy to teach and learn, and a great infection vector for introducing new people to our hobby.
For those who aren’t familiar with Ivan and Becca’s great show, Game the Game, it’s sort of a sister show of Tabletop. They play games every week, live on Twitch*, with interesting people. I remember when we were in production on Titansgrave, I saw Ivan during lunch and asked him if he’d ever played Lanterns, because I thought it was a great fit for his show. He told me that he thought it was a great game, but that he didn’t want to play it because he didn’t want to take something away from Tabletop.
I reminded Ivan that I don’t believe we’re in competition, and that I thought it would be awesome to see him play it on his show, even if I was going to play it on Tabletop at some point. They also do a really cool thing on Game the Game where they talk about strategy in front of each other, because it isn’t about winning, it’s about the experience of playing the game.
“Do you want to come play it with us?” He asked me.
“Yeah, I’d love that,” I said.
So I did, and Becca cheated because that’s what she does.
During that episode, I realized that I could invite them, and their Twitch overlord, Zac (who worked his ass off to get the Twitch channel up and running and was instrumental in helping it grow to the amazing thing it is) to come play Lanterns on Tabletop, as a rematch, and a fun way to launch the season.
All of that was nearly a year ago, and today you can finally watch us play.
Here’s an embed:
And if you can’t see it, just click this link to watch Lanterns.
*or they did, at least. I don’t know if Legendary has moved or canceled it since Alpha happened.
Tabletop News: season four starts on November second
Hey look, Legendary decided to release Season 4 of Tabletop tomorrow … sort of.
The first two episodes of the season will be on YouTube as usual, then Legendary’s moving the show to their Alpha subscription service.
The show will continue to stream on Alpha, and then, on January 30, 2017, the Alpha exclusivity window will end, and show will pick back up on YouTube with episode 3. So if you choose not to sign up for Legendary’s streaming subscription service, that’s when you’ll be able to find our show where it’s always been.
At the moment, I can’t really share my personal feelings on this whole thing, but I’m pretty sure that I can say this: however and whenever and wherever you choose to watch our show, I hope you enjoy it. It’s a good season, and I’m really proud of it.
Here’s the trailer for S04:
busy busy busy
“Busy, busy, busy” – what a Bokononist whispers whenever he thinks about how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
I’ve traveled over 10,000 miles in the last two weeks, which sounds like a lot, but to be honest I mostly sat in a seat while it happened so it isn’t that impressive.
If you follow me on social media, which I’ve told you not to do, you know that I have been doing some campaigning for Hillary Clinton, part of operation Do Whatever It Takes To Prevent The Worst Human Being Ever To Run For Public Office Yes That Includes Joe Arpaio And David Duke From Being Elected.
I have so much to say about that, but I feel like I can’t do it in less than an hour, and we’re past the point where anyone is going to change their mind so it’s not really worth the time and effort, and I really want to get to work on today’s writing, so I’ll just say this: there are hundreds of reasons to vote against Donald Trump, but I have some very good reasons to vote for Secretary Clinton. Everyone has their primary reason, from equal pay for women, to family leave, to college debt relief, to electing a massively qualified woman, to simply keeping Donald Trump out of the White House. My primary reasons are The Supreme Court, and Hillary and Tim Kaine’s support for mental health care. As most of you know, I live with chronic depression and generalized anxiety disorder. I suffered for at least ten years longer than I should have, because I was ashamed and embarrassed about it, and I felt like it was something I should just get over. I felt weak, and I was afraid that getting medication would change who I was at a fundamental level. But when I heard people who I respected, who were successful and amazing, talk about how they lived with their own mental illness, it gave me the courage to seek help for myself.
It’s a really big deal that people in positions of power and influence, like Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine, talk about removing the stigma associated with mental illness that prevents people from seeking help. It’s a really big deal that she has made mental health treatment and access to affordable mental health medication a part of her plan for her presidency. It’s a really big deal that they look at people like us who live with mental illness and say, “We see you. You matter. We’re going to do what we can to help you help yourself.”
So I could go on and on, but l’ll wrap up with this: you all know that I was a massive supporter of Bernie Sanders in the primary. I’m proud of what we did to help him, and I still believe in his mission and his revolution. I can’t vote for him, but because Hillary listened to Bernie and to people like me who voted for him, I can vote for nearly all of the policies he promised to fight for. And if Democrats take a majority in the Senate, he’ll be in charge of the Budget Committee which is a really big fucking deal to borrow a phrase from Joe Biden.
Also, what scalzi said.
Anyway, I’m home now, and working really hard to finish a short supernatural horror story before Halloween, so I can get back into the short story that turned into a novella that is creeping up on becoming a novel.