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Category: inspiration

NaNoWriMo: the Wrap-Up

Published by Crawford on December 3, 2024

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was going to attempt the NaNoWriMo Full Meal Deal. That is, I was going engage in the National Novel Writing Month challenge of writing 50,000 of a novel during the month of November. This breaks down to 1,667 words per day. This was pretty intimidating to me; I usually only crank out ~500 words per day in my usual laid-back style of writing. This was going to take courage! This was going to take discipline! Did I have what it takes? I wasn’t sure, and it was only at the last moment (literally, Halloween) did I toss my hat in the ring and commit myself to the NaNoWriMo challenge.

On November 1, I wrote 2,187 words. It didn’t seem that hard. On the 2nd, I wrote 2,031 words, just to prove to myself that it wasn’t just a fluke. After a few more days of 2000+ words per day, I decided to shoot for an overall goal of 60,000 words by the end of the month. And I did!

I had a work-in-progress: the sequel to Fester, which is currently using the working title of Descent. The manuscript had been off to a sluggish start, with a little under 25K words written in 5 months. NaNoWriMo seemed like it would be a great opportunity to give the project a boost.

And it did – but it was not without its challenges. I am a pantser when it comes to my writing. That is, I don’t do a lot of planning or outlining – I just fly by the seat of my pants. This typically isn’t a problem when I’m writing at my normally glacial pace, but it got to be an issue for NaNoWriMo.

One of the fun things about pantsing is that the story and characters will take off in directions I’d never conceived. It can be fun, but also frustrating. Cranking out 2,000 words a day in this mode can be a problem, however. I liken it to driving fast at night. The headlights can only illuminate so much of the road ahead; the faster you go, the less time you have to react. And I was going pretty fast, especially towards the end of the month. It felt like I was running out of road. Up until then, I’d had a pretty good idea what was going to happen over the next three or so chapters. Not so for the last week, where I was pantsing it to the max. The verbiage became verbose: I was shoveling adjectives and adverbs as much as I could.

In the end it was a good thing, though. Having to write something, even when I had no idea what it might be, definitely introduced some interesting elements into the story. My characters really had to bear the brunt of my word count goal!

At the end, it was a good thing. Tapping into my long-dormant overachiever tendencies, I kept going even when I’d met the 50K goal. I needed to collect all of the badges (see image above). And I did, just because I’m a Lisa Simpson-type geek.

More than that, it really helped me as a writer. First, it helped move my latest project along by getting 10 or 12 months’ worth of writing done in just one month. It also allowed me to understand how to deal with some serious production. I intend to keep moving Descent along sharply – but I’m taking a week off just to let things percolate in my subconscious. I have a lot of loose ends to tie up in the story now!

Laughingstock
Buy this book! Buy it right now!

Covid, Comedy and the Summertime Blues

Published by Crawford on August 20, 2022
Mitch Hedberg on Conan O’Brien

Okay, first of all, I have Covid. This is crummy; I feel crummy. Not a small part of that crummy feeling is knowing that I have been as cautious as I could possibly be for the last two and a half(!) years of this plague. Fortunately, part of that caution has been getting any vaccination I could as soon as it became available, so the effects of the infection haven’t been nearly as bad as they might have been. Still crummy, though.

A big part of the crumminess is the isolation; not even being able to hug my sweet wife or squiggle the ferret (down to one now; another crummy part of the summer). You might have thought that the Covid-imposed isolation would be a boon for my writing activities. You would have thought wrong in that case. Hell, it’s a titanic struggle just getting this post committed to the page.

I have definitely hit a wall with the second draft of Laughingstock. I was jazzed when I finished up the first draft earlier this year; sat down and wrote a bunch of notes for how to improve it for the second draft; and promptly did next to nothing.

Part of the reason for that is I’m trying a new piece of writing software called Scrivener, after having used boring ol’ MS Word for umpteen years. The problem is that Scrivener is just too cool for school. It’s got all sorts of neat little authorial bells and whistles and features and stuff, and as a techno-geek of the old school, I can’t resist playing with them all – even if I’m certain that I will only use these features for a short time if at all. Scrivener has a lot of rabbit holes to go down.

Of course, that’s really only an excuse – and not a particularly good one at that. Not nearly as good as, say, getting a disease.

To lift my diseased spirits and try to provide some inspiration for continuation of Laughingstock, I’ve been listening to a lot of comedy. I’ve been a comedy geek for nearly as long as I’ve been a techno-geek (I’m into a lot of geekery; I’m somewhat of a Renaissance geek).

Last week, I was listening to Mitch Hedberg. If you’ve never done so, I’d recommend it. His was a unique voice, and it still makes me sad that a drug overdose cut that voice back in 2005. His comedy is not for everyone – he employs a lot of nonsequiturs and unexpected wordplay. That’s what I find so appealing.

As I learned from Mitch’s Wikipedia entry, he also employs a figure of speech called a paraprosdokian. According to Merriam-Webster, this is “a figure of speech in which the end of the sentence is surprising, or causes the reader to reinterpret the first part.” This is a useful tool in the comedian’s toolbox, as evidenced by Henny Youngman’s famous line “Take my wife – please!”

I was pleased to learn the word paraprosokian, because I had encountered on in the form of a bumper-sticker about a year ago. I was taking a walk in the neighborhood and my eyes glanced over a bumper-sticker on a parked minivan. I took two more steps while my brain processed what I had read, then I doubled over laughing. Here it is:

I suppose you have to get a laugh wherever you can these days; it’s good to know they’re all around if you have the right eye. Meanwhile, I’m back to the recuperation lounge with a huge freakin’ Ken Follett novel about cathedrals.

Fester
A perfect late-summer read!

Unlikely Inspiration

Published by Crawford on September 18, 2021
George C. Flavel House in Astoria, OR

Sometimes, inspiration for a story can come from unexpected places. This happened to me last weekend. In my case, the inspiration was a “welcome” binder in a rental property.

I am a compulsive reader and all-around nerd, so I always read the guest book whenever we check into a hotel room or whatnot. I want to see the local map, find out what good bars and restaurants are nearby, and know the best way to make a speedy exit if necessary.

When we checked into a 2-bedroom rental for a long weekend in Astoria, Oregon, I immediately thumbed through the binder that had been left on the kitchen table. Tucked in the back pocket of the binder was a number of newspaper pages from the Daily Astorian from 2012. I expected a review of the place we were staying (the “Painted Lady”), or a rehash of a long-past local festival. The first page I saw carried the banner headline “Mary Louise Flavel found.” This piqued my interest right away – who was Mary Louise Flavel and why were people looking for her? As I continued to read through the newspaper articles, it soon became evident as to why, and I soon became amazed at the story that led up to Mary Louise’s discovery.

First, a bit about Astoria. Located at the mouth of the Columbia River, Astoria was the first American settlement west of the Rockies. The town was founded in 1811, by John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company as a fortress trading post. Given the strategic location as the Pacific connection to one of the continent’s main inland waterways, it soon began to thrive.

Captain George E. Flavel was one of the first licensed sea pilots in Oregon. As the only bar pilot at the mouth of the Columbia, he had a virtual monopoly on sea traffic moving in and out of the river. He charged accordingly, and one contemporary editorial described him as “the bloodsucker at the mouth of the river.”

The Flavel family fortune grew, as Captain George expanded into shipping, banking, coal, commercial real estate and other business ventures. The fortunes of the town grew with the fortunes of the Flavel family. Captain George built a fine house in the Queen Anne style a few blocks from the waterfront. The family eventually donated it to the county historical society, and it is operated as a museum today.

George E. Flavel House, now a museum in Astoria, OR

Flavel’s son, George C., also became a bar pilot, and built himself a grand house a few blocks away from his father’s. After the original house was donated, George C.’s became the family seat.

As I continued to read about the fate of the house and the Flavels that lived there, I was amazed. It was an incredible story of the decline and fall of a prominent family, and a town who turned on them. I read through the newspaper articles twice, then grabbed a notebook and filled four and a half pages with notes. The next day, we went to the Flavel House Museum, and I picked up a book in the gift shop that offered some more details on the rise and fall of the Flavel family.

That evening, as I was watching the ships laying at anchor in the river, I had an epiphany: “Astoria is Fester.” Even the geography is similar (although the Columbia is much wider than the Black River flowing through Fester). With that realization, I began plotting how to fit the story of the Flavels into the context of Fester. I grabbed my notebook again, and soon had the outline for about 75% of the story that may serve as a sequel to Fester.

Which leaves me with a nice conundrum: should I pursue this new inspiration, or should I continue with the story on which I had been working, a story about stand-up comedians, tentatively titled Laughingstock? It’s a nice problem to have, for a writer.

At this point, I’m only a chapter or two away from finishing the equivalent of Act 1 from Laughingstock, so I owe it to the story to get at least that far. Then I’ll take a stab at the Fester followup. We’ll see what inspires after that.