JulNoWriMo: The Midterm Report

Here's my progress, or lack thereof, this month so far:

• Bad Company (for JulNoWriMo): 14,014 words written
• Spanner (second draft): 2 pages rewritten; difficult plotting of first part of opening begun; however, no drawing done yet
• Songs (for 50 Songs in 90 Days): The first batch of song titles chosen, including the title tracks to my planned albums: Enter the Fist (the Sonic Disruptors) and Mind Virus (the Memetic Terrorists); however, I haven't resumed my guitar lessons yet

Needless to say, I need to pick up the pace again if I want to meet my goals this month:

1. at least 50,000 words of the BadCo second draft (I now know I'll have to carry it over into AugNoWriMo, delaying Black Science for yet another month)
2. the second draft of at least the first issue of Spanner
3. write at least 10 songs

Now what will I have to do to get myself back on track?

In the case of the songs I'm planning to write, I've started collecting titles I'm considering using. That's the first step: get more usable titles than just "Mind Virus" and "Enter the Fist". The next step is to start writing lyrics to match the titles.

The opening to Spanner is proving more difficult than I thought. The climax to that scene has already proved easy: it is, in large part, a homage to the original Macintosh commercial from 1984, which ended with the giant screen of Big Brother was shattered by a sledgehammer. I replace the burly decathlete with a teenage rebel on a hoverboard and the sledgehammer with a big pipe wrench (the literal spanner, or monkeywrench, of the title). The leadup is the hard part. I'm taking the inspiration from the 1999 Seattle WTO riots, but I don't yet know exactly how I'm going to use it. (Spanner, remember, is set starting in 2014.) But once I get out of the opening, the rest will come easy.

That leaves Bad Company. I'm certain I'll pull off my customary come-from-behind wrimo victory. However, my more important goal was not simply to write 50,000 words of the second draft, but to finish it altogether, which means writing at least 100,000 words including rewrites of scenes and chapters I've already written. Interestingly, I'm still adding new scenes to fill in plot holes, of which too many still remain even after 8 months and a NaNoEdMo victory. The synopsis, to which I made a minor revision today (clearing up some of the details), helps greatly, as will the still unwritten plot outline based on it. The opening to BadCo proved difficult, too; I still haven't yet finished the Intro (prologue). I'll complete the opening scene, of the massacre of protesters at the gate to Dictel headquarters, today, easily.

I'm doing one more thing to make sure I get more work done. It's not the obvious thing. I'm reading my books a lot faster than I normally do. I get through books much faster that way. That allows me to go through more books faster, including novels and nonfiction sources; and speed reading gives me more time to plot and write (and draw and play).

Another thing I'm doing is going to places (the community center computer lab, the local library) where I have broadband access. The problem I have with dialup Internet service, which forces me to wait for webpages to load, is that it slows down my mind. A quick broadband connection eliminates the load time for webpages in general and the save time for Blogger and Google Docs, which allows me to think at least as fast as I type. I find it much harder to type fast with the dialup connection. So I need to spend more time at the computer lab and the library so I can get more stuff written. (This doesn't count for the Spanner script, which I'm writing using a special template for Microsoft Word.)

So I have to restate my goals this month so I can actually achieve them all. Stay tuned...

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