It’s also, obviously, the most important thing. Especially if you’re not done with your story, as I am (err… not).
I suppose that the problem arises from that end-of-the-month, oh-my-god-it’s-over-lets-celebrate release:
You take a day off.
The day after that, a new game release comes out.
The day after that, you need to hit the gym to work off some Thanksgiving goodness.
… and whenever you think about the WIP, your mind automatically associates it with the binge-writing you sometimes had to do during November. That’s not an association that makes you want to sit back down.
I approach this downshift by easing into what is (for me) a more sustainable, remember-I-have-a-day-job-that-is-also-writing pattern: one solid scene a day, or a couple pages, whichever’s less.
If I write more than that, fine; it’s the pattern I’m after, not the picture. I owe it to myself — in part because I really think this Adrift thing has some serious legs.
How about you guys? I wanna hear about what you’re working on.
Getting a better handle on my mic, so to speak. Also, a couple nice exchanges with Jon and Finn, and a little revelation about Bilabil. Fun stuff, if somewhat transitional.
I’m planning on doing something with these nanowrimo pieces next year; I’m just not sure what, exactly. They’ll get reposted, yes. Might also make a free ebook out of them, just for the hell of it and for practice with making ebooks in various formats.
So over the course of the month, I got 50,128 words in on Adrift. Also, 22,508 words worth of NaNoWriMo Essays in on the blog, for 72,636 total (and actually a bit more, cuz I kept writing today, but whatever).
A pretty good month.
There are sort of two stories going on in Adrift. One is the scifi thing, and the other is the slightly more episodic series of fairytales that Finn told his daughter back when she was little and Everything Was Good.
These are the last two things I wrote in those stories, before I hit the NaNoWriMo End.
Adrift
“Thank you,” he murmured, then stepped back and clapped me on my shoulder. “Go.”
I went.
And the Princess stories:
That was how the princess learned about the Spring Tree, and started on her greatest adventure yet.
I’m not done, but those a pretty good ‘end of section one’ lines.
Roughly speaking, I’m about halfway in, so I’ll keep writing in December and January (at a slightly lower daily wordcount), and I’m going to keep recording and posting podcasts until I’m done with that also, but November has been a good start, and I’m enjoying the hell out of the way it’s all unpacking from the spare little frame I built on Twitter.
I need to thank my wife Kate. She’s heard more excerpts from this book than anyone, but she’s heard them all in the wrong order and didn’t complain (much); she kept my distractions to a minimum, and she drove about nine hours of our 12 hour drive yesterday, just so that I could write and finish a day early.
And she’s awesome, just in general.
I also want to thank Chuck, Jennifer, Greg, Meera, Nicole, the Colorado MLs, ***Dave, Nick, Laura, Paige, Tina, Stephanie, Lise, De, Linley, Evf, Linda, Yi Shun, Ptocheia, Rebecca, Cynthia, Michelle, Ann Marie, Maggie, Frankie, Kaelin (Hyetal), Megan, Elysabeth, Danielle, Robert M, Eve, Velvet, Trev, Mur, Brian, Cat, Jamie, and the absolutely insane number of people who retweeted links to these posts around Twitter and the rest of the Internetverse. I started these posts for me, but I finished them because of you guys, and I’m really kind of proud of them.
You make me think about writing, and think better about writing. Thank you.
Tim White’s helped me so much with the podcast stuff. He gets a line all to himself.
And the story? This crazy story about a father trying to find and help his daughter?
The story is for Kaylee, which should surprise no one at all.
The NaNoWriMo boat is sinking. Some folks saw the writing on the wall early on and got off the ship when they could. That’s fine: they’re safe, but they didn’t get to see some of the cool things we did.
And we’ve seen some mighty fine things, haven’t we?
Speaking just for myself, I saw ships exploding and squirrels talking; I saw my wife laugh aloud at lines from the science fiction part of my story, the fairytale part, and my essays. I got to read one of the “Forest of Anything” fairytales to my family’s kids for bedtime on Saturday night. The kids liked it, and the adults listened in and seemed to like it too.
I got a text from my mom the next day:
“Your dad said to me today: ‘Doyce really can write. Isn’t that something?'”
That felt pretty good to read. Good feelings.
And that’s all nice, but… not to repeat myself, the boat is sinking. It’s time to get off.
Here’s what you need to do.
Note: this is not a series of tips on what to do with your story now that it’s done. Chuck Wendig has already written that post for you today. It is exactly what I would tell you, with the added bonus that it is (I suspect) better said than I’d have said it. If you want to see those tips, go read his post.
No, this is just a post about what you do to wrap up NaNoWriMo. I’m basically writing advice for myself most of the time anyway, and as I’m not done with my story, I can’t really write about what to do with it when it’s done.
1. Pack up your most precious belongings.
Make copies of your story. Multiple copies. Put them in several locations. I’ve recommended Dropbox in the past, but you can simply email a copy to yourself, or upload it to google docs, or just put it on two different computers. Me? I’m doing several of those things.
2. Make sure you get your seat on the lifeboat.
Go to nanrowrimo.org and verify your word count. There are instructions on the site, but the basic idea is you copy all the text from your story, paste it into a box on your profile page, save the profile, and it verifies that you’re awesome.
3. Help others.
Not everyone is done yet. For some folks, it is going to be down to the wire, and I’ve been there, so let me reassure you: encouragement help. If you’re on Twitter, watch the #nanowrimo thread and throw a quite “you can do it” at people who think they can’t make it. Pull those stragglers out of the water and into the lifeboat. Dive down into the water if you have to. We are nothing if we can’t both survive and help others survive as well.
I will come in after you, if necessary.
4. Don’t look back.
I do not recommend that you go back and read the story right now. Wait until January first at the earliest.
5. Once on the shore, celebrate.
Are you kidding me? You just wrote fifty THOUSAND WORDS (or more). Buy yourself something pretty. Dance on the roof. Take an entire day to get caught up on all the DVR’d shows you missed. Have End-of-NaNoWriMo sex. SOMETHING. You’re done writing the story, so it’s ENTIRELY OKAY to break your arm patting yourself on the back.
A moderate amount of celebration is encouraged.
6. Thank the crew that got you there.
Go back to nanrowrimo.org. Donate. Give back. They do some good things, these people, some of them for you, so say thanks. If you don’t have the funds for it, check out their helpful page on ‘how to donate if you don’t have money’.
Also, go around to those people in your life or out on the internets who helped you get through this thing. Your spouse. Your kids. Your family. Your friends.
7. If necessary, book another cruise.
I’m not done with my story. Roughly speaking, I’m halfway in. So I’ll keep writing in December and January (at a slightly lower daily wordcount), and I’ll keep recording and posting podcasts until I’m done.
And then I’ll see where I am.
If you’re not done with your story, keep writing. Make it as consistent and regular as you can — every day if at all possible, even if it’s only a page. It’s a page more than you had.
And read. Lordy lordy, I can’t tell you how happy I’ll be to have more time to read again.
That’s it. The ship is sunk. We’re rowing away, headed for shore, but the story isn’t over. The journey isn’t over. (It never is, til we’re dead, and maybe not even then.)
There is always more work to do. There is always more fun to have. There is always another adventure.
I almost never tell my daughter she’s smart. (I do, sometimes, when I forget not to and it just pops out in response to something unexpected she came up with.)1
That’s not because she isn’t – by all accounts and early testing, she’s a bona fide smarty pants and will no doubt excel at her chosen profession (a profession that probably doesn’t even exist today, and which she’ll have to patiently re-explain to me and my doddering old friends every time she drops in for a visit) – it’s because ‘smart’ isn’t the thing I want to reinforce/reward during her formative years.
So what do I reward with praise?
Hard work. Attention. Focus. Bottom line, that’s where success comes from. Smart is nice, but I know a lot of smart people who can’t hold down a job or pay their bills or even take care of their kids; a lot of pretty people too.
There were better writers than Zelazny back in the day; he was successful due to a solid work ethic. (And talent, sure, but talent honed with practice.) There are more talented writers than Stephen King, but some work of his is more likely to survive to 2200 simply because there’s more of it (ignoring the fact that I think he’s an as-yet unrecognized laureate of American literature). Again, the guy works.
It was not always fun, but they did it anyway.
This lesson was a hard one for me to learn, because I had a lot of smarts and talent in high school and college – never really had to work at anything. Then I got out into the real world and people actually wanted me to… you know… hit deadlines. Show up to work on time. Stay until quitting time. I couldn’t hold down any part-time job in college simply because I didn’t know how to work, and learning that took me almost ten years.
I’m better now, and when I praise Kaylee I praise her for the thing I think is most valuable:
“You worked really hard on that, and you did a good job. You should be proud of yourself.”
That’s what NaNoWriMo is really about. Finding the time. Sitting down. Finishing something big. Slogging when it’s not fun, and not losing control when it is. In short, doing the work.
So, let me be the first to say it:
You’ve worked really hard.
You did a good job.
You should be proud of yourself.
(Now get back to work. Have fun.)
1 – I try not to tell her she’s pretty all the time, also, but at that I utterly fail, due to this.
When I’m in the doctor’s office filling out those first-visit forms, and I get to the section that asks if I have any history of mental illness in my family, I check “Other” and write in “My sister runs marathons.”
She tells a story about one of her fellow marathoners who ran most of the way with her on her first marathon. He was either in his late fifties or early sixties, and he was a vet: dude had run a half-dozen marathons or more. He stuck with Bonnie pretty much from about the fourth or fifth mile on, because little sister was unsure of herself — she just didn’t know if she was going to be able to do it — she’d never tried anything even half so long in the past, and she was struggling more with her own mind at that point than the run.
So he stayed with her. He coached her through the miles. Told her what to expect. Told her when the walls would come, and when the second winds would be there, and what each cramp meant, and how to deal with it and get through it and keep going.
About the 17th mile, he said, “Bonnie, I’m going to slow up now, and I want you to keep going. You’re strong, and you can do it. You get through the 18th mile and listen to the people cheering, and you’ll get there.”
She said she wanted to make sure he finished. They ran little bit longer before he answered.
“I’m not sure I’m going to finish, Bonnie. Maybe not this time. I don’t want you to slow down, because it’s hard to speed back up when you’re this far in, so you have to keep going. You finish for me, in case I can’t.”
So she said she would, and she ran, and she finished.
Less than 10% of the people who start NaNoWriMo actually finish. It’s not a fact anyone really publicizes, but it’s there. We are in rare air, here, and we have to make some promises today.
We have to finish, even if the other people who’d been running with you might not.
We keep going, because other people couldn’t, and we’re finishing for them, to prove that it can be done.
We have to finish because we’re the ones who can.
I’m behind right now. I had a rough day yesterday where I needed to be a dad a lot more than I needed to be writer, and just couldn’t get to the keyboard until late, at which point I was too tired to write sense. So I’m short on days and short on words. I think I’ll finish, but I dunno for sure.
But I’ll keep running if you do.
All right? Let’s do this.
Get back to work.
Have fun.
My sister tells me that she saw her running partner in the mass of people at the finish line; that he made it after all. Don’t count yourself out, even if you start slowing down. Nothing’s over yet.
