Posts tagged nanowrimo

Yup - I’m a winner!

Naturally, everyone who even writes even a few words can be considered a winner. Then again, the goal was to reach 50,000 and I can now proudly tell you that I did! Afterimage clocked in at a proud 50,009 words and I can now consider myself an author!

Well… not quite an author. What I have created - and what I am very proud of - is a very sketchy first draft of what will eventually become a book. One day. Sometime in the future.

During November, I learned a couple of things about myself. First off, I’m a slacker and I love procrastinating. If I can push my writing till tomorrow, odds are I’ll do it. This is not a very good thing. Second, I write extremely nonsensically, going from thought to thought without thinking much about the places inbetween those thoughts. This leads to a very disjointed and confused narrative where plot points are introduced and then dropped, only to resurface for no reason when I remember them.

I’m not saying I should plan my books better, because I don’t think that’s the answer either. I, myself, love to feel the story grow as I write it. If anything, I think Afterimage might have been just a tad overplanned; I knew where I was going with it, and that sort of ruined the surprise for me. It caused the first draft to feel like me rushing towards a conclusion without really focusing on the oh-so-important middle bits.

For those who have been asking me: No, I will not be making this draft available to you. The only one who will read it is my fiance, and then, after rewriting it once or twice, I might let someone else look at it. Right now, it’s just way too unfinished.

Anyway! On to new stuff!

Here’s another thing I don’t get.

We have a specified “window” of time during which it’s okay to hand in an assignment. This in and of itself isn’t hard to understand; it could be due to bandwidth issues, teachers monitoring hand-ins to make sure students do what they’re supposed to and various other reasons.

What I don’t get is that it’s possible to hand in stuff way before the “window”. I was able to hand in my assignment yesterday, which makes absolutely no sense. Why even have a window if you’re not restricting hand-ins to that specific time frame?

I’m beginning to wonder if the option to hand this in as an attachment will magically appear in an hour when the window opens. Perhaps this is a test to weed out the weaker, can’t-wait-to-finish-my-assignment-and-screw-the-designated-hand-in-time students. Perhaps this is the way they pick the really hardcore game developers. I don’t know.

What I do know is that it’s time for me to eat something and then I’m going to work on other stuff.

Also - NaNoWriMo time this evening! My fiancé will apparently make Thomas’ Biscuits to celebrate, and we’ll be waiting together for midnight. Then it’s writin’ time, baby! … For a day or so, and then I’m losing about four days because I’m going to Gamex. It’ll be lots of fun, as well as a lot of pressure (gotta be ready for elevator pitches!), but still. I kinda wish I could’ve spent the time writing. Oh, well.