K-Squared Ramblings

Double Meanings

A pair of spam subjects that recently came across the spam traps:

Looking to become a published author?

Give her climax after climax

Hmm, that sounds like writing advice when you take them together.

Nanowrimo: Back for a Rematch

After completing last year’s Nanowrimo* challenge (National Novel Writing Month: write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November), I figured I’d wait a month or two, then start revising my story into shape so I could at least show it to Katie to beta. Then, 11 months later, I’d come back for another round.

I never got around to making more than a few minor changes in last year’s novel, so as November approached, I began thinking: do I really want to do this again? I’ve proven to myself that I can, but I haven’t done anything with last year’s, and I’m going to be busy enough without trying to write 1,667 words a day. So I decided to skip it, but take the time I would have spent writing and use it to revise last year’s.

Then I stumbled across something that reminded me of an idea I had several years ago. I started thinking about it, and while I’m not sure the concept can fill a 50K story, I’m going to give it a shot. Heck, I’m already ahead of where I was last year, when I started 2 days in with no idea what I was going to write.

I guess I’ll have to make an effort to finish a bunch of things before the end of October, since I’m not going to have much free time next month.

Nanowrimo Completed!

You may have noticed the National Novel Writing Month banner in the sidebar this month. I’ve been participating in it, starting from literally no idea what the heck I was going to write on November 2 and working towards 50,000 words by the end of the month.

It turned into a fantasy novel with elements of time travel, though over time I moved away from the initial experiments in non-linear storytelling.

This past Sunday afternoon, I finished the story at about 47,000 words. So I’ve been going back, looking at areas that needed more development (and there were some significant character changes that I had glossed over initially) to fill in the remaining 3K.

About 15 minutes before tonight’s Veronica Mars, I finished a scene and checked my word count. It was 50,145. On Sunday, I had compared the OpenOffice and NaNoWriMo word counters and calculated the difference at 50K would be 144 words. I figured, what the heck. I saved it to a text file, scrambled the letters as directed, and uploaded it.

50,000 exactly. I have officially completed National Novel Writing Month.

I have no illusions as to the quality of those 50,000 words. But it’s only a first draft. I’ve never written a first draft of a novel before, so that’s pretty cool!

The main things I’ve learned are:

1. I actually can sit down with no idea of what I’m going to write and come up with characters and a story.
2. Discussing writing issues with another writer, even in vague terms, can help solve problems and crystallize ideas.
3. When I really get going, I can write about 800 words an hour (at least on the computer).
4. I can actually sustain a story over ~110 pages.
5. I need to do a lot more research on medieval Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and snow.
6. Writing follows a bell curve: it’s hard to come up with ideas when you’re starting out, gets easier in the middle as you start running with things, and when you get near the end, it’s hard to pull everything together and wrap it up. (added)

Next step: sleep. After that, start revising, and figure out how soon I’m willing to let beta readers see it.

I’ve been making regular posts on the Nano writing process over in my LiveJournal, if anyone’s interested. (And if no-one’s interested, they’re still there.)

Missing Links

Slashdot posted a story about a new web browser called Flock. The source was an article at BusinessWeek. Now here’s the interesting part:

It’s a fairly long article about a web browser, and it mentions a few other web browsers including Firefox, Opera and IE. It also mentions websites Amazon.com and del.icio.us. But the only links in the article are to stock quotes and an earlier article.

I understand that it’s Business Week, and I’m not saying they should have linked to every website that was even tangentially mentioned—but you’d think they could have at least linked to the browser company they just profiled! I had to get that link from Slashdot! (Unfortunately, so did everyone else, so I won’t be able to look at the page until tomorrow.)

Edit: Compare the BusinessWeek article to Wired’s take from last month. Even taking into account that they’re written for different audiences, BusinessWeek still looks like a print article that’s been thrown up on the web.

Mission Statements are utter BS

The member benefits section in the latest Golden Key newsletter features an announcement of a business partnership. Take a look at the first paragraph and see if you can figure out what the company does:

Owens Corning is a company with an unwavering commitment to delivering solutions, transforming markets and enhancing lives. It’s who we are. It’s why we are here. We do it by fully engaging our employees in support of growing our customer’s businesses. And when we do, we grow ours as well.

The second paragraph explains that they manufacture building supplies and provide construction services. The third contains a brief summary of the company’s history.

Now, tell me, what that hell is the point of the first paragraph? As best as I can tell its purpose is to make readers tune out before they actually get to the informative stuff.

Follow that car

On the way to work, Kelson and I often end up pacing a red Mustang with license plate letters ZAR. This would be very cool if I could find something to go with it, but so far I’ve had no luck. This is partly because there are so few choices of matching plates and partly because commuter traffic tends to have the same cars going to the same place at the same time every day. It’s also partly because the black generic small car with letters TMN that takes our route is in the batch of cars on the road about 15 minutes before the Mustang.

There is hope, though. Until yesterday, I’d never seen ZAR on the way home. Now I know that it’s on the road again between 5:30 and 6 pm, and it follows the same route we do for about half our trip. This could be cool…..though it remains to be seen whether I’ll be able to get the camera out in time should the need arise.