Yesterday was a frustrating day. I got about 1,000 words done on my NaNo project, and while transferring the file from my flash drive to my computer, the file got corrupted. I had a back-up, of course (too many years of losing research papers in college taught me the value of back-ups), so all I really lost was those 1,000 words, but still...it's frustrating.

After the corrupted file, I was too annoyed to work on NaNo anymore, so I did some tinkering around with a bit of poetry and watched a fun movie: Titus, with Anthony Hopkins, Alan Cumming, and Jessica Lange...a sort of stylized version of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.

Day 9
Today was better. I rewrote the scenes I'd lost last night, and I guess they're better written this time around than last. Not really sure. I just sort of need to push through these scenes before I can get to the next major step in the story. I ended up writing about 1,500 words total, and just broke 19,000 words.

Write Or Die
Many NaNo writers already know about this wonderful tool, but Dr. Wicked's Write Or Die is a wonderful application, available in both browser-based and desktop versions. Basically, you set a word goal and a time limit, tweak a few settings, and then you write. If you start slacking off, the program nags you -- first by changing the background to progressively angrier colors, and then by bombarding you with annoying sounds. I've found it to be a good jump-start tool when I'm being lazy and don't want to write.

By the time I finished writing yesterday, I was so exhausted I didn't get a chance to slap up a status report, so consider this a joint post for Days 6 & 7.

Day 6
Yesterday was relatively unproductive. My wordcount went from 13,813 to 14,714, slightly less than 1,000 words, which is, in my opinion, pretty weak considering I had an entire day to do nothing but write. Granted, I did write a 800 word zombie-romance short-story, We Put the Eat Back In Death, but I can't really justify counting those words towards my NaNo goal.

I blame my dwindling word counts on Days 5 and 6 on getting over the honeymoon. A lot of NaNo participants will know what I'm talking about: where you exhaust the initial high of starting a new story and have to start actively managing the various story arcs you've instigated.

Day 7
I started the day with a relatively blasé attitude about my NaNo project. I didn't want to work on it, I wasn't even sure it was worth reading, I didn't know where the characters were going, and I vented my frustation about it with this tweet:

Gabriel Gadfly: Guys, my #NaNo project is floundering. :( I dunno where the story's supposed to go next.

I got a number of responses. Anna Harte suggested I insert one of my weird ex-girlfriends into the story somehow. G. L. Drummond suggested a rabid dog might do my story good. Irk, one of few people that I've let read pieces of my NaNo work, suggested that my protagonist "seems used to misery. You should figure out what would really be awful - like starting to enjoy life."

But really, it was this tweet by Velvet Verbosity that got me going again:

velvetverbosity: @GabrielGadfly Did you read Neil Gaiman's pep talk? Sounds like this is a good time. #nano http://bit.ly/jvSNO

Neil Gaiman's long been a favorite writer of mine and while another friend had mentioned his pep talk to me a day or two ago, I hadn't had a chance to take a look at it. If you're hitting the slow-down point of your NaNo project, I highly suggest you take a look. It made me realize that if Neil Fucking Gaiman feels the same way I did this morning every time he writes a novel, then I'm probably okay.

Ahem. This Writerly Public Service Announcement brought to you by the Gabriel-Needs-To-Stop-Being-Dramatic Society. After Velvet passed that link on to me, I sat down and spent the bulk of the day writing and came out of it with a new word count of 17,563 words -- a good day's work, if I don't say so myself.

I'm still behind Sharon T. Rose by a little over 1,000 words, but I'm not too worried -- the month is still young.

Well, I've fallen behind again. Not in the grand scheme of things -- at Day 5's final wordcount of 13,813, I'm still several days ahead of schedule for NaNo -- but my relative modest 1,500 words today put me well behind the ever-productive Sharon T. Rose. As Sharon's latest tweet attests, she's written some 5,000 words today, putting her total at 17,126 words.

Why is my wordcount so low today compared to my recent results? All I can say is that life happens. A dozen minor distractions and interjections left me finding it difficult to concentrate on my manuscript and Thursdays are my longest (and sometimes busiest, as students scramble to finish projects before the weekend) shift at work every week.

If there's something to take from this, I think it's that writing has its ebbs and flows. When I sat down to write this morning, I wasn't really sure where my story was going and I only managed a few hundred words before I gave up on it. When I came back to the manuscript after work, I fired off 1,500 words of pure magic in a handful of scenes that I think is some of my best writing yet.

The race isn't over. Sharon has the lead, but I've got a whole weekend ahead of me with nothing better to do than type word after glorious word until I knock her out of the running. Let's do this.

Edit: I'm feeling epic. In light of this development, might I present the following, with apologies to Mr. Shakespeare.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close up the wall with our Weblit dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a writer
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of NaNo blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the best-seller;
Stiffen the fingers, summon up the coffee,
Disguise fair tweets with hard-favour'd trashtalk;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled Gabriel
O'erhang and jutty his confounded fan base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful Interwebs.
Now set the keys and stretch the fingers wide,
Hold hard the breath and type up every spirit
To his full height. On, you noblest Weblitarians.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of NaNo-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Lord Likelys,
Have in these parts from morn till even written
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call'd fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to (wo)men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to write. And you, good yeo(wo)man,
Whose limbs were made in Weblit, show us here
The mettle of your literature; let us swear
That you are worth your overpriced English degree; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base (except Sharon),
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes (except Sharon).
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge,
Cry "God for NaNo, WriMo, and Weblit!"

As of an hour and forty-two minutes ago, it's technically Day 5, but I'm still up and I'm sure you're dying to know the latest in my insane trek towards literary Nirvana.

As you may remember, yesterday I threw down the gauntlet and challenged Sharon T. Rose to NaNo War. I went into it as an underdog, and by the time Sharon went offline last night, I was some 3,000 words behind.

Thanks to my wonderful friend Insomnia, I made up a lot of that and started this morning's writing at 7,765 words, just a hop, skip, and a jump away from Sharon's 9,420. Of course, Sharon was busy working on her own manuscript, but I was catching up. Around 10,000 words, the gap really started shrinking and in fact, I passed Sharon for a while.

The Race
What followed was something akin to two racehorses neck-and-neck with each other. Sharon would jump a few hundred words ahead. Then I'd throw some Literary Rock Star SuperWriter Juice™ on the keyboard and pull ahead again. We went back and forth like that again and again, but alas, life often interferes. By the end of the day, I'd slowed down some, and right now, Sharon has a lead of roughly 1,300 words.

What does that mean for total wordcounts? Right now, I'm sitting at 12,394. Sharon has 13,757. Of course, a little birdie just told me that Sharon has gone to bed, and I'm still awake. Will I push through and try to sneak ahead while my opponent is sleeping? Would I be so heinous? You bet your britches, but I do have some other projects to work on, so we'll see what I get done before I sleep tonight.

The Trash Talk
Twitter has become something of a battleground, with Sharon (sharontherose) and I (gabrielgadfly) flinging good-natured insults at each other across the lines. For example:

sharontherose: @gabrielgadfly You should look @proseofsharon. You are so getting eaten.

gabrielgadfly: @sharontherose Eaten, am I? My wordcount of 9,856 says otherwise. And I'm just warming up.

sharontherose: @gabrielgadfly Well, I haven't started yet today. Just you wait. Just you wait. :P

gabrielgadfly: @sharontherose Wait? Honey, I'm not waiting. I've got better things to do, like stomp your wordcount into the ground. :P

And later...

sharontherose: It's so easy to blow past @gabrielgadfly, it's not worth laughing about ...

gabrielgadfly: @sharontherose Really? I think if you'll look again, you'll see I'm ahead of you.

sharontherose: @gabrielgadfly Maybe yes, maybe no. We'll see how the night do go.

And even later...

sharontherose: @gabrielgadfly Ho hum. Your efforts are slightly amusing.

gabrielgadfly: @sharontherose And yet you're still behind. :P Maybe you should spend less time tweeting and more time writing.

sharontherose: @gabrielgadfly I can afford to tweet and write, since it doesn't take me 3 hours to write 1k words like some people.

gabrielgadfly: @sharontherose Bah. 3 hours? I've been busy. Beating you is so easy it's at the bottom of my to-do list, and I'm still winning. :P

sharontherose: @gabrielgadfly Beating you isn't even on my to-do list. Letting you think you're winning is too much fun!

gabrielgadfly: @sharontherose Ha. Letting me think I'm winning, are you?

sharontherose: Since this #nanowrimo challenge offered by @gabrielgadfly is so leisurely, I think I'll go get some tea.

What's Next?
Day 5 of NaNo is just beginning, and 50,000 words is still a good way off, so I expect there will be a good deal more mudslinging between Sharon and I. If you want to keep up with the play-by-play, be sure to follow us both on Twitter.

In all seriousness, I want to go ahead and offer a huge congratulations to Sharon and to all the other people on my Writing Buddies list. Whether you've written 20,000 words or 200, you're still writing, and that's what NaNo is all about: producing creative works and functioning with the literary community. Keep it up!

It's Day Three of National Novel Writing Month. For the uninitiated, every year, hundreds of writers all over the world use the month of November -- 30 days -- to hash out the first draft of a 50,000 word novel. Give or take a few, it means writing about 1,600 words a day. NaNoWriMo is simultaneously harder than it looks and easier than some people think it is.

Here's a run down of my last three days.

Day One
I didn't plan on participating in NaNoWriMo this year. I told myself I had other, more important, things to do, like work on this website and my poetry and all the umpteen-billion other projects I've got going on. But about 7:30 p.m. on the 1st, I got the urge to write, and sat down and slammed out some 500 words in half an hour. By the end of the night, I had 1200 words, and I figured, what the hell, we'll do NaNo this year.

Day Two
I started Day Two behind schedule, but the story was just picking up and I had most of the day to work on it. My protagonist is really starting to show his colors, and some interesting supporting characters were cropping up. Not only did I catch up, but I even ended up exceeding Day 2's goal of 3333 words -- my final count for the night was 3,789.

Day Three
I woke up this morning ready to go. I had a few moments where I wasn't sure where the story needed to go, but I tooled around with it enough that something came to me and I pushed on through. Even while juggling a few conversations on IM and Twitter, I hit Day 3's goal of 5,000 words around 3 p.m. It's only 7:30 right now, so I'll probably knock out a few hundred more words sometime this evening.

Observations
I'm a whore for statistics.
NaNo's site provides you with a bar graph showing all 30 days, with a blue bar on each day to show where you should be at and an orange bar to show your current word count. Just seeing my orange bar go up as I write is turning out to be a big motivator: I like to see how far over the blue goal bar I can get it, because I like to see my little orange wordcount bar lording over and gloating over the mere amounts the blue bar represents. Ahem. What I mean to say is that statistics, at least for me, help me motivate myself to write.

Writing buddies rawk.
NaNo lets you add buddies, and you can watch their progress throughout the month. This helps me in a number of ways: if I start falling behind, I can see that some other people that I know to be talented writers are falling behind too, and I don't get as discouraged. If I'm feeling competitive, I can see who has the highest word count and do my best to unseat them.

Right now, the target of that jovial ire is Sharon T. Rose, author of the weblit Space & Time. This chick slammed out 6,000+ words on Day 2, making her some sort of word-spewing MACHINE, and while I've caught up some, she's still a good 2,000 3,000 words ahead of me. Sharon, it's on. I'm throwing down the gauntlet.

Twittering As Your Write
Sort of a strange experiment I'm playing with is tweeting pieces of my NaNo project as I write it. This started on my main account, and while that wasn't a great idea (I started losing followers for making so many tweets in a row), I adapted it by making a second twitter account called ggnote, which I'm using as a sort of digital notebook. Limiting yourself to 140 characters makes you think about your writing in a different light, and I'm finding it a useful tool for jumpstarting my writing when it starts to slow. You're welcome to follow that account if you want to catch glimpses of my NaNo project from time to time, but be aware it may lead to a flood of tweets in your feed.