I did promise you all, about three weeks ago (less than a month, which I consider a positive thing), that I would shortly be submitting either or both of my novels to agents (not both at once, of course), and that I would be getting queries out within the month.

Well, I have made a serious attempt at getting a list of agents together, only to be a tad disheartened to find how few there are in Australia (I’d rather look here first … I think there’s something a little Australia-centric about my novels) and then to let life and its other joys overtake my priorities once again.

However, this morning I woke up to an email with the subject line “Your novels” (of course that got my attention), and when I opened it, I realised I had to get a serious move on. It came from someone who I taught in my blogging course the other week (and, it should be said, is also a dear old friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in something like decades). It said:

OK sunshine

If I can manage to blog then I reckon you can send those novels to lots and lots of agents!!! I am sure they are brilliant and you will only die wondering otherwise.

If you just read the second paragraph, then that’s quite a fair exchange. It’s the “OK sunshine” that makes me feel like her foot is dangerously near my bottom. But so it should be because as a master procrastinator I do need a few good kicks sometimes!

So, I WILL make progress TODAY. Funnily enough, NaNoWriMo just started yesterday (National Novel Writing Month for the uninitiated, and the way I got my first novel drafted a few years ago) and I crazily put it on my to do list (with a lot of question marks and exclamation marks) for yesterday, just in case I decided that I would have enough time to squeeze in writing another novel just now. Obviously that’s impossible (I can’t give up what little sleep I have) but I have decided to create my own NaNoSuMo – National Novel Submitting Month – which does sound a little like a scary Japanese wrestling tournament, so I will just imagine that if I don’t get my novels off to agents soon then there will be oversized, less-polite-than-usual Japanese guys ready to punish me.

I think we can all safely assume that I’m not going to come up with 32,931 words in the next twelve hours or so. So this year, rather than being a NaNoWriMo winner as I was last year, I guess you’d have to call me a NaNoWriMo loser!

So where’s your list of excuses for failing NaNoWriMo?

I guess the traditional post here should include a long list of reasons (also known as excuses) for why I wasn’t able to achieve this goal this time round. And trust me, I have a really long list of excuses in my head. But I’ll spare them from you and look to the future instead.

First of all, there’s not law that says you have to finish your NaNoWriMo novel during November. Well, I don’t get any pretty badges for my website, but I still have a third of a novel and lots of ideas on how to continue writing it. I did a few calculations and found out that if I continued writing it at the same rate, I would reach 50,000 words in another 39 days. That’s not so terrible, really, but since the next 39 days includes a two-week holiday over east I’ll be generous with myself and set a new goal: to finish this draft by 31 January, 2009. That still gives me four months to edit and revise it if I decide to enter it in the Australian/Vogel award in May next year.

Second, it should be said that I’m happier with the quality of this draft than with last year’s NaNoWriMo draft. There are a lot more passages of “beautiful writing” in it (well, at least half way to being beautiful) and I felt a lot more creative while writing it. In fact, I think this had a spin-off effect into many other areas of my writing and I’ve got new and creative ideas running all over the place for different kinds of writing that I’d like to get stuck into soon.

Maybe there are no NaNoWriMo losers

Everyone’s a winner! There are just different kinds of winners. Some people are winners because they completed their 50,000 words during November. Others are winners because they found friends on the NaNoWriMo forums who they can talk to about their writing. And others are winners because they’ve got a good start to a novel and tonnes of other creative ideas. (Yeah, that last one’s me).

PS: Last week Dustin at The Writer’s Technology Companion posted an interview he did with me about NaNoWriMo. One of my answers in this interview probably gives another good reason for falling short on NaNot his year, when he asked me how I managed my time during November and I answered – “badly”! Still true this year too.

What can I say? The big problem is I broke my promise to myself about writing my novel before I wrote my paid writing. When push comes to shove, and I have just a little time, then I just have to do the paid writing first or my editors will get mad and (importantly) I won’t get paid.

However, I’ve been so organised this week that I’m way ahead of schedule on my paid writing and now I really have time to continue my novel. There are no excuses. Just the usual procrastination.

This week a friend of mine asked me, when I’m writing fiction, how much of the time I actually enjoy the process. I thought this was a really interesting question. I think the answer is that nearly all of the time I’m enjoying it, or I wouldn’t be doing it. Even when I’m feeling a bit under pressure for word count and the race of NaNoWriMo, I still enjoy it. Heck, I enjoy nearly all of the writing I get paid to do, too. I even like reading what I write (most of the time). It’s a funny thing, and impossible to explain, though I guess most writers feel the same way. My husband described me yesterday as a “real” writer because, from what he’s heard from me and my family, I’ve always written. I just have to write. And it’s true, there’s been barely a time in my life when I didn’t have some kind of writing project on the go, even though I can’t even really give a reason for it. I just enjoy writing, both for the process of it, putting words together in ways that sound good, and having a finished product.

Perhaps this argument is convincing me to get back to my NaNoWriMo draft. One more thing – I’ve been wanting to make it all “better” writing than last year’s NaNo draft – “beautiful writing”, so to speak – but one of the main points of NaNo is just to “get it all out”, as fast as possible, and then work with it later. In a way I’ve been trying to make my life easier later by writing it “better” now, but that might be holding me up. So back to the NaNo draft it is to write things however they come out and to focus on reaching the finishing line with some semblance of a novel draft in place. I know this works well for me because otherwise it’ll take me a decade to finish a first draft. Here goes.

Excuses for not writing this week? Let me count the ways … or at least give you the abbreviated collection of bad reasons I gave myself for not writing. Starting with going back to teaching after nearly a month off (hey, more exhausting than I remembered) and leading through various dramas up to spending a fair whack of time helping out a friend with a problem, I didn’t even get back to my NaNoWriMo novel draft on Saturday when I probably did have time.

But because all of you out there in internet land know that I’m trying to do NaNoWriMo, I can’t fail. At least not yet. One of the “pep talk” emails that the NaNo people sent this week mentioned that this year we’re lucky that there are actually five weekends in November, so we have an even better chance of finishing. That gave me some extra inspiration, and since I know I can write fast when I have to, I started out again this afternoon.

The interesting thing is that everything I’ve written so far is kind of the back story to the real story I plan to write. Or, it’s the part of the character that I hadn’t imagined yet. The story I have for Agnetha, my main character, really starts when she’s around thirty, but I started the novel in her childhood and right now, she’s in her mid-20s and about to marry. The story is twisting around in directions I never dreamed. I’m seriously hoping it will twist the right way to get me into the story I actually want to tell once she hits thirty, which should be next chapter.

I know I talked a lot about having a good plan for this novel before I wrote it, but really, I don’t. This first few chapters are coming out completely unplanned, simply following chronological order, and otherwise everything that seems to be building the main character’s personality and everything that will have a bearing on how she behaves in the future, when I get to the “real” story, is coming out from some completely subconscious part of my brain. It’s an interesting process.

To reiterate the plan thing, I still would, someday, like to write a novel that is superbly planned before I begin to write. One of two things could happen: I could confidently write the novel, knowing where it’s going and therefore planting all the seeds I need in advance; or alternatively, I might discover that whatever I planned has no way of really working out on paper and my characters take me all over the place, to completely uncharted waters. I have a feeling it might be the latter, but I’d still like to try it, just in case having a detailed plan actually does make everything flow better. But I guess that’ll have to be next NaNoWriMo. For now, I’m going to struggle to get this one done: current required word count is 2,900 words per day. Do-able, especially with two more weekends after this one, but I wouldn’t want to get any further behind. Please send me good writing vibees …

The relatives are safely back in Switzerland. I’ve nearly caught up on all the work I got behind on while they were here. November is rapidly ticking by. All this can only mean one thing: it’s absolutely, undeniably time that I got started on my novel draft for this year’s NaNoWriMo.

While other writers have been tapping away at their keyboard since November 1, I’m starting today. Since NaNoWriMo winners have to write 50,000 words before November 30, that leaves me with a daily target of 2,380 words (if you start on time it’s 1,667). Since in the past I’ve done such ridiculous things as write 15,000 words in one day, this doesn’t scare me too much, and I’ve decided I’ll make my daily goal 2,500 words to give me a bit of an emergency buffer.

What’s more, my solemn promise is to write these 2,500 words before I write anything else – before I write all the stuff I have to write to earn a dollar. There are two good reasons for this – one, that my mind will be fresher for the novel writing, which is the most creative writing I’ll do; two, if I know I have deadlines to keep with my paid writing and can’t do that until I’ve done my NaNoWriMo target, the procrastination problem should be less. Fingers crossed.

One of the things I struggle with most in fiction writing is finding my voice and having a good style, one that I think is appropriate for the story being told. Last week I heard yet another writer say that while they’re writing a novel, they don’t read other fiction, or at least no fiction that’s anywhere near the same genre, because then they have more trouble with voice and style.

Of course, other writers think otherwise, and me – I’m just not quite sure what I think yet. What I do know is at the moment I’m reading Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, and if a little bit of her style rubbed off onto mine, I wouldn’t be complaining. She writes so beautifully that I can even remember some of the lines the next morning, that’s how much they impress me. This morning when I woke up I was still thinking about this line which opened the last chapter I read:

Summer left Wellington  abruptly and slammed the door on the way out. The shudder sent the leaves to the ground all at once, …

What a great image. If you haven’t read any of Zadie Smith’s novels (I also love her first two, wholly and equally – White Teeth and The Autograph Man) then you should. And with that thought, I’m off to begin the terrifying process of NaNoWriMoing.

But I’m excited about it. After last year’s NaNoWriMo “win” (that’s the term they use if you successfully complete a novel of at least 50,000 words during November) I know that I can do it. I’ve also got a list of four ways to make NaNoWriMo easier this time round and I’ll be able to do most of these, especially planning better before I write and writing dialogue better; unfortunately, after vowing not to be behind on word count from Week 2 like I was last year, I’m going to be even further behind because I won’t be seriously starting until November 8. But that’s life.

As for what my NaNoWriMo novel will be about, I’m scarily (and probably stupidly) still oscillating between two ideas. The first is to write what I always call my “Bratislava novel”; I have a first chapter of this, and a good plan as well. The second idea is something I’ve been brainstorming about for a few months now (but not confidently enough to mention much about it here); I’ll call it the Agnetha novel, because she’s the main character. If I was starting right now I’d write the Agnetha novel and I’m guessing that’s what will happen. But things can change in a week.

Anyone out there who’s already NaNoWriMo-ing – I wish you lots of good luck and good word counts. Let me know how you’re going. I’m still limbering up and will be trying to get some start made during this week, but the serious word-count writing will definitely not start until next week. But I’m determined to be a NaNoWriMo winner for the second time!

Recently I’ve really enjoyed reading a bunch of novels I’ve got from the “Humour” section of the fiction books in my local library. In theory, I dislike the way my library divides up all the fiction into weird categories including “Family Sagas” and “Romance” because most of the time I really have trouble figuring out where a book I’m looking for will be found. Yes, I check the catalogue then and find it, but I don’t see why it would be so bad to just have all the novels together in alphabetical order. However, having the “Humour” section separately has led me to indulge in a few great books, with my favourites being several by Mil Millington, like Love and Other Near-Death Experiences and Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About.

These experiences have left me wondering: could I write a funny book? Could I write a fluffy, funny novel that is simply fun to write, for NaNoWriMo this year, without having to worry too much about whether it’s actually a good novel or not? I’m not even sure yet if it’s a good idea, but I rather love the camaraderie of NaNoWriMo and the badges I get to put on my blog, and that general flurry of craziness. So it’s something to think about – I still have almost three months before I have to decide for sure.

But I also learned a lot from the experience and come November 1 next year, I’ll be doing some things differently. In case I forget these personal pearls of wisdom, I thought I’d make a list:

1. Plan my novel more. This year, especially because of the spontaneous, last-minute decision to do NaNoWriMo, I just followed the plan in my head. That means that lots of events are skipping all over the place and there’ll be a lot of work to restructure stuff. Plus I finished the story at about 45,000 words and then wrote some extra scenes that had occurred to me later.
2. Include a chapter outline in this plan. My current novel draft has no chapter breaks. Help!
3. Pay more attention to using dialogue. Hopefully by this time next year I’ll be much better at writing dialogue, and thus be able to include more of it. I wrote a number of scenes in this novel that I’m sure would be stronger with more dialogue and less narrative.
4. Be better prepared and scheduled. It was more luck than good management that got me enough time to finish my novel draft this year. Whether it’s setting aside blocks of time, whole weekends, or a little time each day, I’d be much happier if I was continuously above the target words per day rather than struggling to catch it from week two.

Yay me! There’s a lot more work to be done on this manuscript before even my closest critics can lay eyes on it, but the substance is there. Plus I’ve learned that I’m not as skilled at procrastinating as I thought.

Thanks to everyone who’s been cheering for me to keep writing throughout November, including my husband (who jeopardised my finish by coming home early), my Mum (who now owes me a serve of gyoza) and Milt, Jules, Katrina and Claire (who now owes me a pressie from KL!). It definitely made a difference to know you were keeping an eye on me.

So to sum up, it’ll be a little while yet before you can buy my first novel in a bookshop, but I’ve certainly made a huge step towards that being possible. Now I’m going to stop typing before I develop RSI (sorry, it’s called OOS these days, right?). Novel writer extraordinaire signing off …

But there are always a few tricks thrown in. My husband surprised me by coming home early tonight, instead of Friday, which is lovely (“great to see you darling!”) but bad for my novel. On Friday after work we’ll be heading down south with some friends for the weekend, so that just leaves Thursday. Tomorrow. To write 9643 more words. Plus all my regular paid blogging gigs for Thursday AND Friday.

It’s going to be a tough day at the keyboard tomorrow.